It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Climate change to blame for megadrought emerging across Western U.S. Geologists walk across Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park, one the many places across the American Southwest that has experienced intense drought conditions over the last two decades. Photo by Kevin Krajick/Earth Institute
April 17 (UPI) -- Across much of the Western United States, a megadrought is underway. And according to a study published this week in the journal Science, anthropogenic climate change is at least partially to blame.
"Global warming has pushed what would have been a moderate drought in southwestern North America into megadrought territory," researchers wrote in the paper.
Scientists used soil and tree-ring analysis, as well as hydrological modeling, to show that the nearly two-decade span from 2000 to 2018 was the driest 19-year period in more than four centuries.
Tree ring data dating back to 800 A.D. helped scientists identify a handful of prolonged droughts, similar in severity to the current megadrought. Soil moisture data allowed scientists to characterize the level of dryness experienced over the last two decades.
The analysis showed only one earlier drought was comparable to the ongoing drought. The period from 1575 to 1603 was the last time the region experienced such a prolonged and intense drought.
The latest megadrought has been most intense across the American Southwest, especially in Southern California and Arizona. But the megadrought is ongoing and continues to expand, with below-average precipitation plaguing a large swath of the country, stretching from Oregon and Montana down through California, New Mexico and portions of northern Mexico.
According to the new study, natural climate patterns play a significant role in the occurrence of megadroughts. Unusually cool weather across the tropical Pacific Ocean -- the so-called La Niña pattern -- tends to push storm tracks farther north, starving the Southwestern U.S. of much-needed precipitation.
Researchers determined the current drought has been exacerbated by human-caused climate change. As a result of global warming, average temperatures in the region have risen some 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last two decades. Because hot air holds more moisture, prolonged heat waves can pull large amounts of moisture from the soil, making drought conditions worse.
The scientific community isn't in agreement on exactly what constitutes a megadrought. Generally speaking, a megadrought is defined as a drought persisting across decades, but the specific parameters are contentious.
But the authors of the latest study suggest a tidy definition of a megadrought isn't needed to determine whether climate change is significantly worsening current drought conditions.
"It doesn't matter if this is exactly the worst drought ever," study co-author Benjamin Cook, climate scientist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in a news release. "What matters is that it has been made much worse than it would have been because of climate change."
Because temperatures are expected to continue rising for the foreseeable future -- and until humans dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions -- Cook suggests the current drought is likely to persist. If the drought does subside, it's likely another will begin soon after.
"Because the background is getting warmer, the dice are increasingly loaded toward longer and more severe droughts," said lead study author Park Williams, a bioclimatologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "We may get lucky, and natural variability will bring more precipitation for a while. But going forward, we'll need more and more good luck to break out of drought, and less and less bad luck to go back into drought."
Machine learning helps scientists distinguish ancient human, dog poop APRIL 17, 2020 / By Brooks Hays Scientists have developed a machine learning algorithm to help archaeologists distinguish between ancient human and dog coprolites, fossilized poop. Photo by Jada Ko/Courtesy of the Anhui Provincial Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology April 17 (UPI) -- Researchers have developed a new machine learning algorithm that can determine whether ancient excrement was deposited by a human or a dog.
Bones and artifacts are great, but ancient poop can offer archaeologists tremendous insights, too -- insights into dietary patterns, parasite evolution and more. The only problem is that it can be hard to identify the owner of really old feces.
Specifically, scientists have trouble differentiating between ancient human and dog feces. Dogs have been hanging out around humans for thousands of years. As a result, droppings from both are often found at archaeological dig sites. The droppings are frustratingly similar in size, shape and composition.
The difficulty of telling dog poop from human poop isn't insurmountable. Over the years, researchers have developed imperfect solutions to the problem.
"It's not a complete black and white story, there was some work done before, especially by one of our co-author Karl Reinhard on identifying the 'host species' using pollen grains and parasites -- some are specific to some species -- but this still remained a challenge," Maxime Borry, researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, told UPI in an email.
For a better way to identify ancient excrement, Borry and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute teamed up with scientists from Harvard University and the University of Oklahoma to develop a machine learning algorithm.
The technology -- dubbed coproID, short for coprolite identification -- works by combining analysis of ancient host DNA with machine learning software trained to differentiate between the bacteria in the gut microbiomes of dogs and humans.
"Our machine learning method was trained using gut microbiome composition of modern human, dog and soil samples," Borry said. "Once the model was giving good results on modern samples, we applied it to our paleofeces to predict their 'host species' -- human or dog."
Scientists hope their new technology will help researchers gain insights into the evolution of the human gut microbiome, including details related to the emergence of food intolerances and changes in human health.
The new technology -- described Friday in the journal PeerJ -- is not only useful, it also doesn't require much extra effort from scientists.
"The key advantage of coproID is that it's using the same data that would anyway need to be generated to ask molecular evolution questions -- shotgun sequencing data -- so in a way, a coproID analysis in this kind of projects comes for free," Borry said.
Borry and her colleagues are currently working on a study of the evolution of the gut microbiome -- with the help of coproID, of course. Luckily for other archaeologists, the technology isn't proprietary.
"Scientists can already start using this technology if they have the data to work with: our method is freely and openly available online," Borry said. "This method is the first line of analysis for any further archaeological question: this helps verify the 'host species' of a sample before drawing any conclusion of the species microbiome with other techniques."
Fog harp can harvest water from even the lightest of fogs Virginia Tech researchers Jonathan Boreyko and Brook Kennedy inspect their fog harp at Kentland Farm, where they pitted the water harvesting device against similar devices. Photo by Peter Means/Virginia Tech DOES IT PLAY CELTIC MUSIC TOO April 17 (UPI) -- Engineers at Virginia Tech University have developed a new, more efficient fog harp capable of harvesting water from even a light fog.
Previous iterations of the technology, first unveiled in 2018, required dense fog to work, but the latest tests suggest the improved harp is viable in a variety of fog conditions.
The improved efficiency could allow the harp to be deployed as a sustainable water harvesting device in new parts of the world.
"Billions of people face water scarcity worldwide," Brook Kennedy, an associate professor of industrial design at Virginia Tech, said in a news release. "We feel that the fog harp is a great example of a relatively simple, low-tech invention that leverages insight from nature to help communities meet their most basic needs."
Water drops are seen on the wires of a fog harp. Photo by Peter Means/Virginia Tech University
The fog harp looks like a harp, with parallel wires that collect the fog's ambient water droplets. Similar devices use screen mesh, but analysis by engineers at Virginia Tech showed parallel wires more efficiently collected water and encourage drainage into the collector.
In dense fog produced in the lab, the parallel wires outperformed mesh screens by a factor of two. In field tests, scientists pitted the fog harp against other fog harvesting devices, some with wires closer together and others with mesh screens. Fog conditions in the field were considerably lighter than the fog in the lab, but the fog harp still outperformed the competitors.
Even when fog was too light to produce water on the wires of the other devices, the fog harp was able to harvest ambient water.
"We already knew that in heavy fog, we can get at least two times as much water," said Jonathan Boreyko, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech. "But realizing in our field tests that we can get up to 20 times more water on average in a moderate fog gives us hope we can dramatically enhance the breadth of regions where fog harvesting is a viable tool for getting decentralized, fresh water."
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Timing of Earth's biggest earthquakes follows a 'devil's staircase' pattern Scientists have found global earthquake sequences tend to occur in clusters -- outbursts of seismic events separated by long but irregular intervals of silence. Photo by Angelo_Giordano/Pixabay April 14 (UPI) -- The timing of large, shallow earthquakes across the globe follows a mathematical pattern known as the devil's staircase, according to a new study of seismic sequences.
Previously, scientists and their models have theorized that earthquake sequences happen periodically or quasi-periodically, following cycles of growing tension and release. Researchers call it the elastic rebound model. In reality, periodic earthquake sequences are surprisingly rare.
Instead, scientists found global earthquake sequences tend to occur in clusters -- outbursts of seismic events separated by long but irregular intervals of silence.
The findings, published this week in the journal Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America, suggest large earthquakes increase the probability of subsequent seismic events.
Previous models failed to account for the interconnected nature of global fault systems. Seismic event don't occur in isolation. Each major quake alters the dynamics of other fault systems.
While the research suggests large quake sequences are "burstier" than previously thought, they remain as unpredictable as ever. The gaps between bursts are irregular, making it exceedingly difficult to anticipate the next cluster.
"Mathematically described as the devil's staircase, such temporal patterns are a fractal property of nonlinear complex systems, in which a change of any part -- e.g., rupture of a fault or fault segment -- could affect the behavior of the whole system," scientists wrote in their paper.
The devil's staircase pattern is also evidence in Earth's sedimentation sequences and reversals of the planet's magnetic field, as well as crustal uplift and erosion rates.
In addition to ignoring the interconnected nature of fault systems, most previous earthquake pattern models focused on too few earthquakes across time frames that were too short and regions that were too small. As a result, earlier models failed to pick up on the staircase pattern.
When models fail to take a wide-angle view of earthquake sequences -- instead, looking at seismic patterns over short periods of time -- it becomes impossible to tell whether a series of seismic events occurred within a single cluster or spanned two clusters and an interval of silence.
"For this same reason, we need to be cautious when assessing an event is 'overdue' just because the time measured from the previous event has passed some 'mean recurrence time' based an incomplete catalog," researchers wrote in their paper.
While scientists still aren't sure of the mechanisms that dictate the irregularity of the gaps between earthquake clusters, they hope that by studying the influence of major earthquakes on other fault systems via stress transfer, they can better predict how outbursts of large, shallow earthquakes will play out -- knowledge that could offer advanced warnings to vulnerable populations.
upi.com/6998117
Navajo Nation positive COVID-19 cases, deaths continue to rise By Jean Lotus More positive COVID-19 cases were reported on the Navajo Nation reservation Thursday, but President Jonathan Nez said the residents would "get through this together." Screenshot courtesy U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva
April 17 (UPI) -- The number of positive tests for COVID-19 continue to climb this week on the Navajo Nation reservation, and the tribal government extended weekend lockdowns for two more weeks to try to stop the spread of the virus.
The number of positive cases rose to 1,042 Thursday with an increase of 121 cases in a single day, the Navajo Epidemiology Center reported. The number of deaths reached 41. Health agencies said 3,440 total negative test results had been tallied as of Thursday.
"Our warriors are on the front lines once again, battling and fighting a monster called COVID-19," Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said Friday at an online tribal roundtable in Indian Country sponsored by U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz.
"A couple of weeks ago, it was stated that COVID-19 would wipe us all out," Nez said. "I want to tell everyone that native people are resilient. We are overcomers and we will get through this together."
The newest figures show the highest numbers of confirmed cases in five counties, with the most, 306, in Navajo County, Ariz. Other high numbers Arizona include 147 cases in Apache County and 199 in Coconino County. In New Mexico, health officials reported 203 cases in McKinley County and 140 in San Juan County.
Along with a weekend curfew, new health rules require that anyone who enters a public facility will be required to wear a protective mask and gloves, Nez said.
Nez and Vice President Myron Lizer urged members of the Navajo Nation to be "prudent with their stimulus funds" and to save money going forward through the uncertain times of the pandemic.
Nez and Lizer have both voluntarily self-quarantined for two weeks after being exposed to a first responder with the virus.
About 175,000 people live on the reservation, which overlaps the state boundaries of Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado.
The tribe's government signed an order in March blocking non-residents from visiting. Tribe-operated casinos also closed in New Mexico and Arizona.
"Please utilize local Navajo businesses as much as possible -- they might not offer all of the products you need, but please consider buying local before traveling to border towns and putting yourselves at greater risk due to greater exposure to others," Lizer said earlier this week.
Saudi princess says she's in prison and poor health Saudi Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud attends a discussion at the Middle East Institute (MEI) in Washington, D.C., on April 12, 2017. Michael Reynolds/EPA
April 17 (UPI) -- A Saudi princess posted on social media this week that she has been held in prison with her daughter and pleaded to be released for medical reasons.
Princess Basmah bint Saud bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, 56, the outspoken daughter of Saudi Arabia's King Abdul Aziz, who ruled the country from 1953-64, appealed to her uncle, King Salman and cousin, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to be freed.
"I am currently being arbitrarily held at Al-Ha'ir prison without criminal, or otherwise any charges against my person," the princess said on her official Twitter account. "My health is deteriorating to an extent that is serve, and that could lead to my death."
A former business partner of the princess confirmed the tweets Thursday and said someone hacked into her account and deleted them.
The princess and her daughter were taken into custody last March when they tried to leave Saudi Arabia for Switzerland. She said at the time she needed urgent medical treatment.
Al-Saud has been known for years to support progressive causes, which were seen as controversial in Saudi Arabia. She called for women's rights, reforms during the Arab Spring and changing how the country is run from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy.
"The arrest of a Saudi princess should come as no surprise," said Rothna Begum, senior women's rights researcher at the humanitarian watchdog Human Rights Watch. "Princess Basmah has been openly critical of the country's women's rights record in the past and her arrest shows that no woman, no matter her background, is untouchable if she is deemed to be a potential threat."
Mushroom sales soar as Americans cook more at home during pandemic By Jessie Higgins Mushroom sales were up 18 percent during the last week of March compared with a year ago, according to the Chicago based analytics firm IRI. Photo courtesy of the Mushroom Council
EVANSVILLE, Ind., April 17 (UPI) -- As produce sales at grocery stores surge during the coronavirus pandemic, one item is selling particularly well -- mushrooms.
During the last week of March, fresh mushroom sales were up 18 percent over the same time last year, compared to an 8 percent rise in overall fresh produce sales, according to the Chicago-based data and analytics firm IRI.
"We take heart in those numbers," said Eric Davis, a spokesman for the Mushroom Council, an industry group based in Redwood Shores, Calif. "We take heart that we're in that group of staple items. You look for bright spots during this time, and that is one for us."
The Mushroom Council believes home cooks might be using mushrooms to stretch meat dishes and make them last longer, Davis said.
"It slots into so many things," Davis said. "If you're making meat loaf, you can add mushrooms. If you're making stew, tacos, spaghetti, or even a packet of ramen, mushrooms bulk it out."
Davis was quick to add, thought, that while retail demand is booming, demand from food service has all but disappeared.
Mushroom growers who supply retail stores are seeing a huge surge in demand. But those who sell predominantly to restaurants are struggling to sell their crops.
"Restaurants comprised about 75 percent of our business," said Amanda Olson, owner of the Maine Mushroom Co., a one-year-old mushroom farm in Augusta, Maine.
"The day the governor of Maine issued an order that restaurants couldn't be opened to the public, they all canceled their orders within 24 hours. It was pretty devastating," Olson said.
Olson said she and her husband, Andy, grow specialty mushrooms for high-end restaurants. After Maine's restaurants were closed March 18, they worried their business would go under.
The couple has worked quickly over the last few weeks to find new customers and have had some success, Olson said. The number of individuals who order mushrooms directly has exploded, and the couple has started to receive new orders from area natural food stores.
"The retail side from individuals just buying mushrooms and from natural food stores is up 300 percent," Olson said. "The pathway to get to the customer has changed."
The new business does not totally replace their lost restaurant customers, she said. But she thinks it will be enough to keep them afloat until stay-at-home rules end.
Other growers have seen similar trends.
In Pennsylvania, mushroom supplier Buona Foods has seen its retail demand increase some 35 percent, while food service contracts have dropped by roughly the same percentage.
"Until a month ago, we were about evenly split, half retail, half food service," said Chris Johansen, a Buona Foods spokesman. "Now, we're about 85-15."
Because Buona Foods already supplied retail stores, it has been able to pivot and meet the new retail demand, Johansen said. Other businesses have been less fortunate.
"Growers that don't have the right machinery to package for retail are in a difficult situation," Johansen said. "There are many tons of mushrooms being dumped into fields because they have nowhere to go."
America Is About to Witness the Biggest Labor Movement It’s Seen in Decades It took 40 years and a pandemic to stir up a worker revolution that’s about to hit corporate America
September 1945, a little-remembered frenzy erupted in the United States. Japan had surrendered, ending World War II, but American meat packers, steelworkers, telephone installers, telegraph operators, and auto assemblers had something different from partying in mind. In rolling actions, they went on strike. After years of patriotic silence on the home front, these workers, along with unhappy roughnecks, lumberjacks, railroad engineers, and elevator operators — some 6 million workers in all — shut down their industries and some entire cities. Mainly they were seeking higher pay — and they got it, averaging 18% increases.
The era of raucous labor is long past, and worker chutzpah along with it. That is, it was — until now. Desperately needed to staff the basic economy while the rest of us remain secluded from Covid-19, ordinarily little-noticed workers are wielding unusual leverage. Across the country, cashiers, truckers, nurses, burger flippers, stock replenishers, meat plant workers, and warehouse hands are suddenly seen as heroic, and they are successfully protesting. For the previous generation of labor, the goal post was the 40-hour week. New labor’s immediate aims are much more prosaic: a sensible face mask, a bottle of sanitizer, and some sick days.
The question is what happens next. Are we watching a startling but fleeting moment for newly muscular labor? Or, once the coronavirus is beaten, do companies face a future of vocal workers aiming to rebuild lost decades of wage increases and regained influence in boardrooms and the halls of power?
For now at least, some of the country’s most powerful CEOs are clearly nervous. Late last month, Apple, faced with reporters asking about a company decision to furlough hundreds of contract workers without pay, did a quick about-face. Those employees, Apple now said, would receive their hourly wages. A few weeks earlier, after Amazon warehouse workers demanded better benefits during the virus pandemic, that company also reversed course, offering paid sick days and unlimited unpaid time off.
The backdrop is a country at a standstill and uncertain over which businesses will survive the current economic shakeout, and in what form. With some notable exceptions, very few companies seem prepared to risk riling their employees, especially given broad popular support for workers at their grocery stores, nurses at their hospitals, and drivers who are keeping supply arteries open.
The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age.
But if companies are responding to those who are protesting, they might also think ahead and preempt festering trouble down the road. “I like to believe people will say, ‘We treat these people as disposable, but they are pretty indispensable. Maybe we should do what we can to recognize their contribution,’” says David Autor, a labor economist at MIT and co-director of the school’s Work of the Future Task Force.
Until the 1980s, layoffs were barely a thing, writes Louis Uchitelle in The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences. Companies tended to avoid large-scale dismissals, because they violated a red line of publicly accepted practice and also could finger the company for blame. The United States was still in the age of company as community and societal patron, and even when workers went on strike, they were generally not replaced, because the optics would be bad.
But in 1981, President Ronald Reagan changed all that. Some 12,000 air traffic controllers went on strike, demanding higher pay and a shorter workweek. In a breathtaking decision, Reagan fired all but a few hundred of them. The Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified the controllers’ union entirely. The era of strong labor was over.
In the subsequent age of the no-excuses layoff, the number of major strikes has plunged. Starting in 1947, when the government began keeping such data, there were almost always anywhere from 200 to more than 400 big strikes every year. But in 1982, the year after the air traffic controllers debacle, the number for the first time fell below 100. In 2017, there were just seven. “There was damage to self-esteem every time there was a layoff. It took the militancy out of organized labor, and I don’t think it ever recovered,” Uchitelle says.
The past four decades have been perhaps labor’s weakest since the Industrial Age. For a half century, those working for hourly wages have won almost no real gains. The real average hourly wage in 2018 dollars adjusted for inflation was $22.65 in 2018, compared with $20.27 in 1964 — just an 11.7% gain, according to Pew Research. Real median hourly wages rose by only another 0.6% last year despite the sharp tightening of the job market and an increase in the minimum wage across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The current revival of worker activism precedes Covid-19 in the unlikeliest of places. In 2018, West Virginia teachers, among the lowest paid in the nation and four years without a raise, went on strike for nine days in a demand for higher pay. That they won a 5% increase was one astonishing thing. But the walkout itself was stunning, specifically because of the state where it occurred — a former bedrock of ultramilitant coal miners who had repeatedly gone to actual war for better pay and safety but more recently were a bastion of worker passivity.
If teachers are an indicator of what is coming, Amazon, fast food restaurants, hospitals, and gig companies have a long, hot few years ahead.
Last year, the West Virginia teachers were on the picket lines again. This time, they stopped the state legislature from funding private schools in what they saw as an attempt to weaken their newly revived strength. Officials buckled after just a day. The strikes meanwhile spread to a dozen red and blue cities and states. Often wearing red shirts as the symbol of the strikes, the teachers were demanding more money — from 2000 to 2017, teachers’ real salaries actually shrunk by 1.6% nationally, according to the National Center for Health Statistics — as well as more supplies and help in the classroom. In Arizona, teachers won a 20% raise, and Los Angeles teachers won a 6% raise. That triggered more strikes through much of 2019, with Chicago teachers, for one, winning a 16% pay raise. Strikes seemed likely this year, too, in Detroit and Philadelphia, for starters.
If teachers are an indicator of what is coming, Amazon, fast food restaurants, hospitals, and gig companies have a long, hot few years ahead. On April 6 alone, the employees of a Los Angeles McDonald’s walked out when a co-worker was diagnosed positive for the coronavirus. For the second time in a month, workers at a Staten Island Amazon warehouse went on strike after 26 co-workers came down with the virus. And outside Chicago, employees of two plants walked out because management failed to immediately announce that co-workers had been diagnosed with Covid-19.
Across the country, workers are on the march over safety, pay, and sick days. The picture is jarring at a time when 16 million people are newly out of work. Companies and CEOs need to prepare for a new post-Covid-19 reality where workers will recognize their power — and use it.
Tragic stories are part of what is giving new labor its resonance, like that of Leilani Jordan, a 27-year-old grocery clerk with cerebral palsy in Largo, Maryland, who kept working despite feeling sick because she felt needed during the crisis and died last week. (Her final paycheck: $20.64.) And of postal workers across the country who keep sorting, transporting, and delivering the mail and packages to every one of our homes, with a toll so far of 12 dead, 600 confirmed with the virus, another 6,000 under quarantine — and very little apparent hope of a government bailout.
Workers are galvanizing and telling their stories through social media, rarely requiring the organizational meticulousness that made Old Labor so formidable. How companies respond to, and get in front of, such post-union employees will largely cement their reputation after Covid-19 passes.
When public relations firm Edelman recently surveyed public opinion in 12 countries on what companies should do in the age of the coronavirus, 89% responded “protect your employees.” If you can get ahead of worker activism and look after your employees now, says CEO Richard Edelman, the public will begin on your side.
“Business models based on ridiculous labor rates plus arbitrage where you foist all your costs onto the employee are coming to an end.”
When the virus struck Hilton Hotels starting in January, its global occupancy plummeted to somewhere between 10% and 15%, and most of its 6,100 managed and franchised properties closed. Executives were convinced that the travel industry would eventually rebound, but from there they faced a conundrum: They did not want to lose a trained workforce, but they also knew they and their franchisees could not afford to keep their approximately 260,000 employees on the payroll. So, on March 24, the decision was announced to, in effect, loan them out.
Staff in Hilton’s human relations unit contacted counterparts at Amazon, Albertson’s, CVS, and Walgreens, says Nigel Glennie, vice president of corporate communications at Hilton. These retailers were experiencing Covid-19 boomlets and, combined, were in the market for hundreds of thousands of workers. Were they interested in some already trained workers, Hilton asked, who are expert specifically in catering to exceedingly particular customers? So an expedited hiring portal was set up, ultimately connecting Hilton’s workforce with 28 retailers that were suddenly responsible for almost the entire working economy.
The outcome was ideal for Hilton: It would not lay off but instead furlough its workers, thus allowing them to collect unemployment checks or work elsewhere. Once the crisis ended, they could return to Hilton. “We have a commercial interest in this decision. We know we have well-trained people who we want back,” Glennie says. “We wanted to make sure they were looked after. We want to do the right thing by our people.”
Jeff Lackey, vice president of talent acquisition for CVS Health, says his company was seeking 50,000 new employees at the time. Albertson’s says it was hiring 30,000. Neither know exactly how many of Hilton’s workforce are now working for their respective companies, but Lackey says the hiring process was being completed in as little as a single day. “I understand what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck,” he says.
Less flattering attention has gone to companies that have violated an unwritten set of rules that have emerged for corporate behavior. Hospital management has been upbraided for suspending nurses who try to protect themselves by buying their own equipment and disciplining those who speak out. Former employees of Bird, the scooter company, described drawn-out hours of uninformed dread prior to an announced Zoom meeting, followed by a short announcement by someone they did not know. And Dig Inn, the fast-casual chain, sprung the news by text.
Sephora, too, has been faulted publicly by recently laid-off employees. At first, the retail beauty chain closed but promised to keep paying everyone for as long as the stores remained shuttered. Then, on March 31, it laid off part-time staff anyway. The decision caught a lot of Sephora employees by surprise. In tweets and online videos, some workers said they had been on calls with their managers that very day discussing the opposite — how they would go ahead in the new environment. Suddenly, though, employees received texts saying that in 15 minutes, they were to participate in a mandatory audio call.
When Lydia Cymone, a Sephora makeup artist in Alpharetta, Georgia, heard the call, she was right in the middle of videotaping a makeup tutorial and posted the tearful video. Brittney Coorpender, who did facial treatments at a Sephora store in San Jose, California, told me in an email exchange that she felt misled. “Women/men who forgot to mute themselves could be heard sobbing right before I ended the call,” Coorpender wrote. “They promised and promised us we were fine and gave zero indication we weren’t, until that call.”
In response to a request for comment, Sephora sent the March 31 statement it posted to its website. Dan Davenport, president of recruiter Randstad RiseSmart, says, “If you’re making a statement that you’re not going to be laying anyone off, you better be right about that.”
Ifcorporate America does face a post-Covid-19 reckoning from workers, the gig economy seems like one of the top probable targets. Jim Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates, a hedge fund that shorts stocks, was made famous in the early 1990s for blowing the whistle on Enron. Today, Chanos is shorting Uber and Grubhub, among other gig companies. In an interview, he said he had already been shorting the two companies but has added to these bets since the virus struck.
What makes them weak, in Chanos’ view, is the optics of their business model, which is based on paying an arguably miserly cut of revenue to their workers and a refusal to make them actual employees. While allowing these companies to avoid a lot of the conventional costs of doing business, the strategy has also always left the gig companies at risk of their workers and the public turning against them. Chanos predicts that’s exactly what’s going to happen in the post-coronavirus era. The public is “going to look askance” at companies that have relied on taxpayers to fully cover their workers’ jobless benefits, since they do not pay into unemployment insurance funds. “Business models based on ridiculous labor rates plus arbitrage where you foist all your costs onto the employee are coming to an end,” he says.
Until the virus, the notion of unionized tech workers was just that — a notion that seemed to violate the very spirit of Silicon Valley. It’s still hard to imagine unionized software engineers. But it’s equally difficult to say where the boundaries of the possible lie.
White-collar tech activism goes back two years, when Google workers around the world walked off the job in a protest against sexual harassment. More workers are griping now. Last month, some Instacart workers walked off the job in a bid for a higher share of the revenue and better safety; in some cities, they are starting to join unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers local in Chicago. In San Francisco, Uber and Lyft drivers protested last month in front of Uber headquarters.
The tremors, though, will be felt not just in the gig economy but also tech at large: In February, employees at Kickstarter, the crowdfunding platform, voted to unionize, becoming the first white-collar tech company staff to do so, according to a database at Cal Berkeley. The Teamsters are making an open run at organizing other Silicon Valley workers. If you put Covid-19 out of your mind, the move is mind-blowing. Until the virus, the notion of unionized tech workers was just that — a notion that seemed to violate the very spirit of Silicon Valley. It’s still hard to imagine unionized software engineers. But it’s equally difficult to say where the boundaries of the possible lie.
The biggest fish of all in terms of tech unionization is Amazon. The e-commerce giant is beset with worker complaints just as it has begun to transcend its barbarian image, repositioning itself as a public good at the very center of the U.S. economy. An issue that has drawn particular heat is its decision on March 30 to fire Chris Smalls, a worker at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island who loudly complained about health safety. On April 8, a group of Democratic U.S. senators wrote a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos raising skeptical questions about Smalls’ dismissal and Covid-19 safety generally at company warehouses. Amazon has seemed generally conflicted: On one hand, it has responded with added pay and off-days for sick employees. But Amazon has also repeatedly fired workers it has deemed disloyal — three employees just over the past week who had criticized health conditions. Whole Foods, too, owned by Amazon and run by John Mackey, the devotee of “conscious capitalism,” faced a sick-out in March. In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said the points raised in the senators’ letter were unfounded and that Smalls was dismissed for violations of social distancing guidelines. “Nothing is more important than the safety of our teams,” the spokesperson said.
Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist at Yale, compares labor’s newfound position to its stature in the Great Depression, when workers also suddenly were conferred with vast public sympathy.
While complaints and denunciation of Amazon abound, no one has gone so far as to try an old-style shutdown of any of the company’s operations — the kind of display of strength that typified unions in their heyday. For that matter, no rabble-rousing worker is known to have recently banged on the desk of a major company executive — or a leading politician — and demanded the production of a plant be kept open and workers on the job. Even if one did, would the public go along? Would large numbers of people stop shopping at Amazon? If they did, Amazon would have to concede quickly, just as railroad workers shut down transportation across the country in labor’s peak. “If you could really shut down a warehouse, that would really shock Amazon and get them to address the worker concerns,” says Steven Greenhouse, author of Beaten Down, Worked Up, a history of American labor.
Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize–winning economist at Yale, compares labor’s newfound position to its stature in the Great Depression, when workers also suddenly were conferred with vast public sympathy. “The narrative was that it wasn’t their fault. There was something in the system,” Shiller told me. “This is another case where obviously it’s not their fault. And there is heroism in how they are delivering to us through this.”
In a way, labor’s resurgence is not all that surprising. The age of Trump and Brexit is, at its crux, an uprising against globalization, the movement that, after Reagan and his contemporaneous British counterpart, Margaret Thatcher, diminished labor and championed worldly capitalism at whatever the local cost. If we are spurning globalization, it stands to reason that the local comes back into focus. And what is more local than the grocery bagger, the postman, the nurse?
Where workers have advantage today has been in keeping their demands modest, drawing the public to their side, and making it very difficult for management to refuse. Worker efforts could be blunted by high unemployment, at least until jobs return. But their pluck, beaten out of them by the years of layoffs, has returned with Covid-19.
WRITTEN BY Steve LeVine I am Editor at Large at Medium with interests in ferreting out the whys for the turbulence all around us. Ex-Axios, ex-Quartz, ex-WSJ, ex-NYT, ex-FT.
FYI — This is not a news report. This is opinion developed from many sources, some of which are included for clarity, transparency, and rebuttal, and is the Free Speech that shares ideas.
Don’t Participate In Your Own Demise….
At the risk of stirring the pot of Establishment sycophants, consider ideas about economic globalism — -
https://socialistproject.ca/2020/04/marx-in-the-era-of-pandemic-capitalism/--The map clearly shows that the Covid-19 is concentrated in the three world poles that dominate the capitalist world system: East Asia, Western Europe and North America. More specifically, a correlation seems to appear between the pandemic and the intensity of flows and mobilities in world metropolises.
American geographer and historian Mike Davis had previously shown the systemic links between globalized capitalism and the swine flu. Today, it is clear that the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrates that the productive forces accumulated on a world scale have become forces of destruction which plunge us into post-modern barbarism. To get out of it, we must reconnect, as many social movements do, with the radical quest for other paths than those of state and capital, to invent the unknown, beyond disaster capitalism. • — end of socialistproject info —
Within these centers in world metropolises, one shouldn’t be surprised to see the indoctrinated public that most compliantly accept the capitalist rhetoric, also being those most inordinately exposed to the diseases.
Many local communities have indeed been struggling for human, environmental, and civil rights violations due to the fracking industry, as can be attested to be grassroots anti-fracking advocates in NYS —
Native communities have been in this struggle for centuries — -http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html---When Christopher Columbus first set foot on the white sands of Guanahani island, he performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land for the king and queen of Spain, acting under the international laws of Western Christendom. Although the story of Columbus’ “discovery” has taken on mythological proportions in most of the Western world, few people are aware that his act of “possession” was based on a religious doctrine now known in history as the Doctrine of Discovery. Even fewer people realize that today — five centuries later — the United States government still uses this archaic Judeo-Christian doctrine to deny the rights of Native American Indians. — -end of nativeweb info —
The man camps that house workers for the Keystone XL pipeline present a clear and present danger to public safety, as they could become viral hubs during the COVID-19 pandemic. This new threat compounds existing tribal concerns about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Tell Montana governor Steve Bullock to halt KXL construction and keep people out of harm’s way. — -https://www.lakotalaw.org/our-actions/kxl-pandemic
— -end of lakotalaw info —
Studies that are not discussed often on state-run/corporate-owned mainstream media will inform people that air pollution contributes to a higher mortality rate if one is afflicted with Covid 19. Some people ignore this fact due to collaboration with the economically-advantaged groups who are too often also predatory Establishment. Hierarchy in capitalism is evidence of this predatory predilection. That those exploited but still compliant to capitalism expose their communities to this increased mortality rate is a troubling conundrum.
Bernie Sanders could conceivably run on the Green Party Presidential ticket, but chooses instead to endorse Joe Biden. Joe Biden is a strong supporter of pay-to-play health insurance rather than universal public health care policies, and Biden supported overwhelmingly, the outsourcing of American jobs that reduced workers to scrambling for jobs with foreign workers and decimated our manufacturing base that destroyed the ability for the USA to efficiently produce goods such as PPE.
Sanders supporters chose Bernie Sanders for their Presidential candidate, Sanders did not choose his supporters. Unlike the Democratic Establishment that surgically chooses their voters, other voters are more inclined to make up their own mind.
Also regarding the come-on by Joe Biden that he will choose a woman as V-P, and possibly a minority woman, what would be the benefit? If he chose a man as V-P, does that mean Jim Clyburn-captured Democrats will vote for Trump? If he did choose a woman V-P, does Biden imagine Green New Deal proponents will thereafter fall into line for a capitalistic hierarchical Establishment Presidential ticket pandering to women? This should be interesting.
So goes the wail of the American leadership class as they endure another year of panic. They know on some level that what has happened in Washington isn’t due to majority rule at all, but to money and gerrymandering and the Electoral College and decades of TV programming decisions. But the anxiety cannot be dislodged; it is beyond the reach of reason. The people are out of control.
“Populism” is the word that comes to the lips of the respectable and the highly educated when they perceive the global system going haywire. Populism is the name they give to the avalanche crashing down on the Alpine wonderland of Davos. Populism is what they call the mutiny that may well turn the supercarrier America into a foundering wreck. Populism, for them, is a one-word evocation of the logic of the mob: it is the people as a great rampaging beast. — end of nationofchange info —
The tools available to the Capitalist Party D&R are quite reminiscent of those of the Former USSR. One prefers a democratic (small d) Constitutional republic with respect for We The People.
Tools available to local community members, to maintain the best chance of good health during this precarious time, is wholesome food, that itself is medicine — -https://us.e-activist.com/page/message?mid=e3e1d6e8c97d4eabb4b5f003760178ea--During these 30-minute webinars, you’ll hear directly from Iowa farmers about how they’re incorporating regenerative agriculture practices into their operations to build soil health, help clean up Iowa’s lakes and rivers, produce nutrient-dense food — all while fighting global warming. — end of organic consumer info —
And, no, this is not an implication that food cures Covid 19. This is to say whole and nutritious food, and general attention to cleanliness and lifestyle, is a factor in over-all good health. One must forestall those who will twist words.
That capitalist hierarchical Establishment wishing to prey upon Native Americans throughout history, as the ubiquitous American community suffers in 2020, used any means possible to impose corruption on a system that is defensive of humanity and nature — --http://ili.nativeweb.org/sdrm_art.html--When Christopher Columbus first set foot on the white sands of Guanahani island, he performed a ceremony to “take possession” of the land for the king and queen of Spain, acting under the international laws of Western Christendom. Although the story of Columbus’ “discovery” has taken on mythological proportions in most of the Western world, few people are aware that his act of “possession” was based on a religious doctrine now known in history as the Doctrine of Discovery. Even fewer people realize that today — five centuries later — the United States government still uses this archaic Judeo-Christian doctrine to deny the rights of Native American Indians.
— end of nativeweb info —
The Democratic Establishment have used their own style of manipulation and control to maintain patriarchy.
The Northeastern governors may have absorbed the intelligence of Native Americans of the region, who may have been the inspiration for the US Constitution — —
Obama endorsed Biden. Obama bailed out Wall St. predators during the Financial Crisis of 2008. Is anyone surprised? Obama then attempted assiduously to further undermine We The People with NAFTA, that would have given multi-national corporations extraordinary control over local communities — -https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/10/obscure-legal-system-lets-corportations-sue-states-ttip-icsid----Investors have used this system not only to sue for compensation for alleged expropriation of land and factories, but also over a huge range of government measures, including environmental and social regulations, which they say infringe on their rights. Multinationals have sued to recover money they have already invested, but also for alleged lost profits and “expected future profits”. The number of suits filed against countries at the ICSID is now around 500 — and that figure is growing at an average rate of one case a week. The sums awarded in damages are so vast that investment funds have taken notice: corporations’ claims against states are now seen as assets that can be invested in or used as leverage to secure multimillion-dollar loans. Increasingly, companies are using the threat of a lawsuit at the ICSID to exert pressure on governments not to challenge investors’ actions. — -end of theguardian info —
Just as choosing a capitalist woman V-P will make little difference to those who won’t vote capitalist Establishment anyway, is an endorsement from capitalist, NAFTA proposing, pay-to-play health insurance Obama endorsement. But the Primary enthusiasm among Democratic Establishment becomes intense.
Aside from Biden’s pay-to-play health industry and outsourcing of American jobs as governmental policy, other issues have remained censored, according to evidence — -aprogressive.com/tara-reade/?utm_source=LA+Progressive+NEW&utm_campaign=645af11416-LAP+News+-+20+April+17+PC_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_61288e16ef-645af11416–286972237&mc_cid=645af11416&mc_eid=e213faa886 — The mainstream media ignored Reade’s allegation for three weeks until this Easter Sunday, when I finally saw this summary on NBC News.
— end of laprogressive info —
A President dedicated to governance of, by and for The People is crucial; one rejects the lightweights who need to bolster personal egos at the expense of others: That is precisely the subtle sexual harrassment from patriarchy .
One doesn’t consider rushing back into the normality of hierarchical Establishment exploitation. We The People are facing a pandemic that is deadly; after this, why bother with the mediocrity and turpitude of Capitalist Party D&R???
Voters can treat the Presidential General election like a team sport in which each of 2 sides choose a team…..or voters can understand the power and veracity of political and public policy and vote for the Green Party Presidential candidate.
These are reasons many people take a more personal responsibility in Presidential choices, rather than depending on self-interested endorsements.
The DNC all ready controlled the Democratic voters, so any discussion today about capturing Bernie Sanders Democratic voters is nonsense. How will the DNC capture the Green Party or Independent Party voters, who view both Republicans and Democrats for what they are….Capitalist Party politicians.
*******
Demand that The League of Women Voters again host political debates. — https://www.lwv.org/
https://www.debates.org/ is the Democratic corporation and Republican corporation collaboration that has monopolized into censorship, 3rd-Party candidates, pertaining to political debate. https://www.debates.org/media/---Demand open discussion by emailing media@debates.org.
For further inquiries, please contact the Commission on Presidential Debates at media@debates.org or by phone at (202) 872–1020.
More information about each of the 2020 general election debates can be found at the following links:
First presidential debate: Tuesday, September 29, 2020 University of Notre Dame https://debate.nd.edu/
Suppression begins with the political debates that exclude 3rd-Party candidates. Included in the Democratic and Republican Presidential Debate, should be Green Party Presidential candidate Howie Hawkins, who actually has public policies to discuss. Excluding one with actual plans in place, will guarantee a Reality-Show Presidential Debate stand-up comedy routine, if the debaters are Biden and Trump.
One has come to realize the extent of the censorship of Speech in the USA pertaining to debate restrictions. This seems to be the reason Independent Party Presidential candidate has attempted to champion the voices of the majority of voters outside of Democratic Party domination, by running for President in the Democratic Party.
However going forward, the key will be to demand Free Speech in Presidential debates, along with other political races across the nation. If we do not demand this freedom of Speech, our elections will remain as laughable as the elections of the Former USSR in which one candidate was presented for whom to vote.
RepublicansIndependentsDemocrats%%%2020 Feb 17–283039292020 Feb 3–163339262020 Jan 16–293042272020 Jan 2–15274527
— — end of party affiliation info — —
And many of the most non-Establishment voters are in the Green Party.
**************************************As a Green Party registered voter routinely, one re-registers every 4 years into the Democratic Party to be able to cast a vote in the Democratic Primary for Bernie Sanders. One is positive one is not alone in doing so.
Lost in the fog of political corruption over several decades, is the fact that the Presidential debates were once in the capable hands of the League of Women Voters — --https://www.lwv.org/newsroom/press-releases/league-refuses-help-perpetrate-fraud----Most objectionable to the League, Neuman said, were conditions in the agreement that gave the campaigns unprecedented control over the proceedings. Neuman called “outrageous” the campaigns’ demands that they control the selection of questioners, the composition of the audience, hall access for the press and other issues.
“The campaigns’ agreement is a closed-door masterpiece,” Neuman said. “Never in the history of the League of Women Voters have two candidates’ organizations come to us with such stringent, unyielding and self-serving demands.”
Neuman said she and the League regretted that the American people have had no real opportunities to judge the presidential nominees outside of campaign-controlled environments.
— — end of lwv info — -
In other words, (paraphrase) patriarchy says, “we’ll handle it from here, little ladies” — -
https://straty.com/controlling-outcomes-controlling-table-stakes/---After studying the election process in 1985, the bipartisan National Commission on Elections recommended “turning over the sponsorship of Presidential debates to the two major parties”. The CPD was established in 1987 by the chairmen of the Democratic and Republican Parties to “take control of the Presidential debates”. The commission was staffed by members from the two parties and chaired by the heads of the Democratic and Republican parties… (wikipedia)
— -end of straty info — -
https://www.debates.org/---The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) was established in 1987 to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates between or among the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States are a permanent part of the electoral process. CPD’s primary purpose is to sponsor and produce the quadrennial general election debates and to undertake research and educational activities relating to the debates. The organization, which is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) corporation, sponsored all of the presidential debates in 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016
— -end of debates info — -The Commission on Presidential Debates, replacing the League of Women Voters, controls who can debate and on which topics. They call this educating the public, others may see this as brainwashing. The CPD would profit by hearing from We The People, as to concerns about censorship. The censorship seems to have become so blatant, that petitions to the CPD have reached into the hundreds of thousands. PETITION — — -https://www.change.org/p/commission-on-presidential-debates-get-joe-rogan-to-moderate-the-2020-presidential-election/u/25040294--------Thank you all for continuing to share and support this petition. Within the last couple of days, I have composed and sent an e-mail to the Commission on Presidential Debates. The message reads as follows: — — end of change.org info — -
This also filters out any other than Democratic Establishment and Republican Establishment views. This means We The People have nothing to say in our own governance.
Consider the large number of voters who do not embrace the policies of either of the Democratic Establishment or Republican Establishment, and the fact that the Democratic Establishment and Republican Establishment have swindled the American electorate out of unbiased information directly from possible Presidential choices; often outside of the Capitalist Party D&R. Since these disgusting events in the ‘80’s, state-run/corporate-owned MSM has consistently indoctrinated We The People into accepting the falsehood that “we are a 2-Party system”. This has had the effect of rending illegitimate, the deeply legitimate tradition of free, clean, and fair elections.
In other words, politicians are now choosing their voters, rather than voters choosing their politicians.
Acting on the human frailty of ignorance combined with arrogance, and using as an example the Democratic Establishment, one recognizes what is called a Democratic Base that believes in their right to dictate to others, their voting choices.
September 1945, a little-remembered frenzy erupted in the United States. Japan had surrendered, ending World War II, but American meat packers, steelworkers, telephone installers, telegraph operators, and auto assemblers had something different from partying in mind. In rolling actions, they went on strike. After years of patriotic silence on the home front, these workers, along with unhappy roughnecks, lumberjacks, railroad engineers, and elevator operators — some 6 million workers in all — shut down their industries and some entire cities. Mainly they were seeking higher pay — and they got it, 
Tragic stories are part of what is giving new labor its resonance, like that of 
Ifcorporate America does face a post-Covid-19 reckoning from workers, the gig economy seems like one of the top probable targets. Jim Chanos, president of Kynikos Associates, a hedge fund that shorts stocks, was made famous in the early 1990s for 
