Canada climate goals set high hurdle for Suncor oil sands mine extension

April 19, 2022 

EnergyNow Media

CALGARY, Alberta, April 19 (Reuters) – Canada is favouring oil projects with lower carbon emissions per barrel to help meet its climate targets, a strategy that may block Suncor Energy’s (SU.TO) plan to expand bitumen mining to feed its key oil sands operations.

On April 6, Canadian environment minister Steven Guilbeault warned Suncor in a letter that its proposed 225,000 barrel per day (bpd) extension to its oil sands Base Mine in northern Alberta would not, in current form, pass a federal environmental review due to high carbon emissions.

The same day, Guilbeault approved Equinor’s (EQNR.OL) huge Bay du Nord offshore drilling project in the north Atlantic Ocean, expected to produce crude with an emissions intensity of eight kilograms of carbon per a barrel. Suncor’s existing Base Mine emits 42 kilograms a barrel of carbon.

The contrast underlines how Canada, the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, is distinguishing between higher and lower-carbon fossil fuel production as it aims to slash emissions over the next three decades.

Canada will also require new oil and gas projects to show their emissions are “best in class”, without defining what exactly that class would be, and able to hit net-zero by 2050.

“It’s a big challenge for an oil sands project, and I’m not convinced they’ll even be able to do it,” said Chris Severson-Baker, Alberta regional director at the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think tank.

Guilbeault’s letter, published on the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada website, was sent in response to a request from Suncor to extend the Base Mine extension regulatory process by nine months. Company spokeswoman Sneh Seetal said Suncor was taking time to improve the project.

The company is part of the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance, a group of firms aiming for net-zero by 2050 using technologies like carbon capture and storage.

DECLINING RESERVES

Suncor needs the Base Mine extension because the existing open pit bitumen mines that feed two upgraders at its Base Plant oil sands facility are expected to run out in the mid-2030s.

The company produces around 750,000 barrels of oil equivalent per year. The Base Plant upgraders have a combined capacity of 350,000 bpd and process bitumen into higher-value synthetic crude.

The proposed mine extension is adjacent to Base Plant, just north of Fort McMurray. It would cost around C$4.4 billion ($3.5 billion), according to the Alberta government’s major projects website, and produce for 25 years.

Alternatives include developing a different oil sands lease or transporting bitumen to Base Plant from operations elsewhere owned either by Suncor or third parties, Suncor said in regulatory documents.

But moving bitumen from other sites further away would be more expensive and a developing a new lease would also come with tough emissions standards, said Tudor Pickering Holt analyst Matt Murphy.

“The best return on capital is certainly to extend the life of the mine rather than finding other bitumen sources,” he said.

Suncor’s new application for the mine extension will shed light on how the company intends to meet its climate target of net-zero emissions by 2050, said Jamie Bonham, director of corporate engagement at NEI Investments, a Suncor shareholder.

Oil and gas is Canada’s highest polluting sector, accounting for 26% of emissions.

Many climate analysts question the government’s strategy of encouraging “cleaner” oil production, when most of the emissions from a barrel of oil are released during end-use combustion, rather than production.

“It’s like being on a diet and getting an ice cream with a low-calorie cone or a regular cone,” said Dan Woynillowicz, principal at climate advisory firm Polaris Strategy + Insight. “You’re still eating the ice cream.”

USA
Cows, coal, and climate change: 

A Q&A with the new BLM director

Tracy Stone-Manning discusses how the federal agency sees conservation, the climate crisis, and the Indigenous history of public lands.

Melissa Lyttle / High Country News

Kylie Mohr
Published Apr 19, 2022
This story was originally published by High Country News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tracy Stone-Manning, the Biden administration’s director of the Bureau of Land Management, got her start in conservation at the confluence of the Clark Fork and Bitterroot rivers in Montana.

As the executive director of the Missoula-based restoration nonprofit Clark Fork Coalition in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Stone-Manning pushed for the removal of a Superfund site dam, then, as a field director for U.S. Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, through 2012, she worked to build support for legislation balancing recreation and forestry. She’s held a variety of leadership positions since then: director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, chief of staff for former Montana Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, and, most recently, senior advisor for conservation policy at the National Wildlife Federation.

Now, as the director of the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, Stone-Manning is tasked with overseeing one out of every 10 acres of land in the U.S. She leads an agency that hasn’t had a permanent director since 2017 and that’s struggled with staff recruitment and diversity following a botched headquarters relocation to Grand Junction, Colorado, during the Trump administration. Through it all, Stone-Manning must balance the desires of ranchers, energy developers, and recreationalists who all want different things from public lands.

High Country News recently caught up with Stone-Manning as she was traveling from Albuquerque to Farmington, New Mexico, to ask about how the BLM will achieve its conservation goals, the role the agency might play in addressing the climate crisis, and more.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: How will your experience as someone who has lived and worked in the West, rather than D.C., influence your approach to leading the BLM?

A: There really is something to sitting around the table, rolling up your sleeves, and listening and hearing the concerns of the person across from you. I have seen people over and over get through really intractable issues by talking to each other. That is going to help inform how I approach the work, and I do think it’s a really Western sensibility. These are tough places to live in physically, so people have to work together. That sort of ethic is imbued in the West. There have certainly been well-known fights across time, but the way through those fights, and the way to settle them, is to work together. 

Q: You lead an agency that leases land for oil and gas development, which causes climate change, yet you work for an administration that says it’s trying to fight climate change. How do you reconcile those two things? 

A: The president has asked us to pivot our economy to a clean energy future; he is asking us to find that solution that this country and the planet need for our long-term well-being. And that transition, although we all want it to happen overnight, isn’t going to happen overnight. We have to be really, really smart about the choices we make on how we power this country, and efficiently, effectively, and quickly transition to clean energy. Our job (at the BLM) is to make that shift and use the processes that are in place, the laws that are given to us by Congress, to help guide that transition.

Q: What role will the BLM under your leadership play in addressing the climate crisis? Can you give readers a specific example? 

A: Sure. We’re ramping up our renewable energy development. Congress passed the Energy Act of 2020 that calls for public lands to supply 25 gigawatts of clean energy by 2025. We (the BLM) are on the path to achieving that number. It’s transformational.

Q: Since Biden took office, the BLM has reduced the royalty rates companies mining coal on public land pay to the federal government. Will you continue this policy? Do you support it?

A: I don’t want to be pre-decisional. There are some pending requests I’m taking a hard look at. 

Q: You said in a statement in September that “our public lands are one of America’s finest ideas, and I am ready to get to work alongside a remarkable team to ensure future generations benefit from them like we have.” How does the history of dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples that led to the creation of public lands influence your thinking on how they should be managed today?

A: The administration has been really, really clear about how, historically, we have not done all we can to incorporate tribal voices into our management practices. We are taking that on in a truly deep sense. I’m literally driving to Farmington to meet with Navajo allottees about the Chaco mineral withdrawal, and yesterday met with the All Pueblo Council of Governors to hear their thoughts on how we move forward on a broader landscape effort around Chaco, how we respond to a recent desecration of a petroglyph site. I use these examples to say we understand the history of how we came to be stewards of these lands. And we are going to honor our obligations and our government-to-government tribal responsibilities in as deep a way as possible. 

Q: Senior BLM officials have said that public lands leased for grazing livestock should count toward the Biden administration’s 30×30 conservation plan to protect 30 percent of U.S. land and water by 2030. Do you think grazing lands should be included? (Editor’s note: As HCN reported in a story published after this conversation took place, grazing is the primary culprit behind the degradation of approximately 40 million acres of BLM land.)

A: A pilot effort we have called “outcomes-based grazing” can really help inform how grazing lands can be used in the America the Beautiful initiative (the 30×30 plan’s formal name). Cattle grazing can be used as a tool on the landscape to help restoration practices. I think that there’s a way to look at landscapes in a before-and-after sense, and say, does this achieve conservation?

Our overall work is to pass on lands better than we found them. That’s what conservation is to me. 

Q: Our magazine recently reported that grazing fees are the lowest they can be, according to the 1978 Public Rangelands Improvement Act and a 1986 executive order from President Ronald Reagan, and aren’t keeping up with inflation. Does that system need to be updated? 

A: That’s a question for Congress. 

Grazing fees are set through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and guided by a congressional mandate that they can’t be raised by more than 20 percent a year, and they can’t go over $5 an AUM (animal unit month — the amount of forage one cow and calf, one horse or five sheep need per month).

Q: What do you see as the role of BLM in upholding federal law? How should the agency go ahead with enforcing federal laws, like grazing regulations, despite threats of armed conflict?

A: It’s what we do. Our job is to implement the laws that Congress gives us, and we use science and public participation to implement those laws.

Q: You seem really matter of fact about it.

A: I found this when I was the director of the DEQ in Montana. People would say, ‘Well, why don’t you do X?’ And I would say, ‘Well, because that’s against the law. If you want us to do X, go to the legislature and change the law.’ The 1872 mining law is a really great example. People get really frustrated about how hardrock mining is implemented in this country, because it’s implemented by a law that was written in 1872 to help settle the West.

Q: Keeping sage grouse off the Endangered Species Act list is a perennial issue in the West. What, in your mind, would be a tipping point for listing sage grouse? 

A: The reason that we’re asking the public to work with us on amending the sage grouse plans is because we don’t want them listed. Too much work has gone into protecting that bird — and the 350 species that that bird shares the landscape with — to get to a point of saying we have failed and we need to list. Our job is to follow the science on this, and to do everything in our power to get to a place where the science says these are appropriate management plans to keep this species around.

It is a little bit of a canary in the coal mine. We’re not just solving for sage grouse when we do this kind of work, we’re solving for an entire intricate landscape — the landscape that people see on their movie screens and celebrate as the West. It’s our job to ensure that we do everything in our power to make sure that that intricate, ecological balance stays intact.

Q: Is there anything else you’d like our readers to consider?

A: I want to make sure that we touch on the power of restoration, and how when we restore a landscape, we do a lot of things. We put people to work. We leave plants better than we found them. And we solve for some of these really intractable issues that we’ve just been talking about, like with sage grouse. Nature is the best engineering we have on the planet, and we should do all we can to get things back to as natural a condition as possible and then let nature take over.

The reason that some of these issues are so tough comes down to a really lovely thing, which is this shared value around the landscape. We all have opinions about it, because we all love it. And that’s it. That is the force that binds us together and what I hope people can hold on to as we tackle these tough issues.

Koch-funded analyst raises doubts about Russian attacks on Ukrainian civilians

Judd Legum
Apr 18,2022

Professor John Mearsheimer speaking about Ukraine on April 7, 2022

A foreign policy analyst with extensive ties to the non-profit network operated by Charles Koch publicly cast doubt about whether Russian forces are attacking civilians in Ukraine. The analyst, Professor John Mearsheimer, also suggested that, if Russian forces have attacked civilians, such attacks would be justified. While offering excuses for Russia, Mearsheimer appeared to pin the blame for civilian deaths on the actions of the American government.

Mearsheimer's claims — which mirror those from the Russian Defense Ministry — are contradicted by photographic, videographic, and testimonial evidence of what has occurred in Bucha and other areas of Ukraine.

Mearsheimer statements about Ukrainian civilians came during an April 7 discussion hosted by Katrina vanden Heuvel, the publisher of The Nation. Toward the end of the hour-long event Mearsheimer said the following as part of his closing remarks (emphasis added):

You talked about Putin targeting civilians, or the Russians targeting civilians. It’s obviously very hard to tell what’s exactly happened here. But with that caveat in mind, you want to remember that the Americans have been pushing to arm civilians in Ukraine and to tell those civilians to fight against the Russians. So by definition, in lots of the firefights that have taken place and will take place. Russians are going to be fighting against civilians because those civilians are fighting against the Russians. So just remember, this is a very complicated business.

Mearsheimer was responding to French historian Marlene Laruelle who, much earlier in the event, had described the Russian operation as "a full-scale invasion targeting civilians." At no point did Mearsheimer acknowledge that unarmed Ukrainian civilians were being targeted and killed by Russian forces. (You can watch Mearsheimer's comments, and the full event, here.)

Mearsheimer's comments on Ukrainian civilians are consistent with his broader views on the war, blaming the United States while excusing or justifying Russian aggression. Writing in The Economist on March 11, Mearsheimer asserted that "The West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis." A similar article, published by Mearsheimer after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, was promoted on February 28, by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

In an television appearance on April 14, Mearsheimer said the United States should end assistance to the Ukranians and work to create "some sort of alliance with the Russians." He made a similar argument in a March 1 interview with the New Yorker: "[W]e should be working overtime to create friendly relations with the Russians." In the same interview, Mearsheimer said that it was "not feasible" for the Ukranians "to choose their own political system and to choose their own foreign policy." Instead, Mearsheimer says, Ukraine must "accommodate the Russians."

Mearsheimer has been an outspoken opponent of economic sanctions against Russia, suggesting in a recent interview that economic sanctions against Russia increase the chances of a nuclear war.

How Charles Koch supports John Mearsheimer

Mearsheimer is supported by Stand Together, the non-profit network run by right-wing billionaire Charles Koch, in numerous ways. Mearsheimer received direct funding from the Koch network for his latest book, The Great Delusion, which was published in 2018. "I want to thank the Charles Koch Foundation for helping to fund my research and book workshop," Mearsheimer writes in the acknowledgements section.

Mearsheimer also currently holds positions at two institutions that receive substantial support from the Koch network. He is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute, which was started with $500,000 donations from both the Charles Koch Institute and the Open Societies Foundation, the non-profit vehicle of liberal billionaire George Soros. Mearsheimer is also on the advisory board of The National Interest, which received a $900,000, two-year grant from the Charles Koch Institute in 2020.

Mearsheimer is featured regularly at Koch network events. In November 2021, he was billed at a Stand Together foreign policy event as one "of the sharpest thinkers in foreign policy." He was a featured speaker at the 2021 John Quincy Adams Society conference, another Stand Together event. Mearsheimer has been speaking at Koch network events since at least 2016.

At an "emergency" conference on Ukraine, held on March 31, 2022, Dan Caldwell, the Vice President for Foreign Policy at Stand Together, reportedly "denounced the fierceness of the ongoing attacks on Mearsheimer."

Caldwell did not respond to a request for comment about what attacks on Mearsheimer he believed were unwarranted. Caldwell and Stand Together also did not respond to inquiries about whether the organizations had any objections to Mearsheimer's recent comments about Ukraine, including Ukrainian civilians.

Mearsheimer's ongoing affiliation with the Koch network raises further questions about the network's positions on Russia and its relationship to Charles Koch's for-profit business, Koch Industries, one of a handful of American companies that continues full operations in Russia.

The overwhelming evidence that Russian forces are committing atrocities against Ukrainian civilians

Mearsheimer's claims belie extensive evidence of Russian atrocities against Ukrainian civilians. On April 4, for example, the New York Times published satellite photographs showing "the bodies of dead civilians lying on the streets of Bucha — some with their hands bound, some with gunshot wounds to the head." The Associated Press "published images of at least six dead men lying together in the rear of an office building, some with hands tied behind their backs." The fact that some of the dead were found with their hands bound is not consistent with the notion that these civilians were killed in battle. A video published April 5 by the New York Times shows a Russian armored vehicle gunning down a civilian in Bucha walking alongside his bicycle.

Jake Sullivan, the White House National Security advisor, said on April 4, that the images from Bucha constitute evidence of "atrocities" and "war crimes."

The issues are not limited to Bucha. On April 4, Amnesty International said it "has gathered evidence of civilians in Ukraine killed by indiscriminate attacks in Kharkiv and Sumy Oblast, documented an airstrike that killed civilians queueing for food in Chernihiv, and gathered evidence from civilians living under siege in Kharkiv, Izium and Mariupol." The group published extensive testimonial and photographic evidence on April 1.

Mearsheimer's views are consistent with those of the Russian Ministry of Defense, which claimed that "not a single local resident has suffered from any violent action" in Bucha. Russia said that the photographs and videos were "another hoax, a staged production and provocation by the Kiev regime for the Western media." Russia claimed that the bodies emerged only after Russian forces left Bucha, a timeline that has been conclusively debunked.

 
Mearsheimer and the denial of historical atrocities

In 2011, Mearsheimer provided an effusive blurb for a book by Gilad Atzmon, who has questioned the reality of the Holocaust. "Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world… The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike," Mearsheimer wrote.

In a 2010 article, Atzmon raised doubts about the Holocaust, saying that people should "ask for some conclusive historical evidence and arguments" rather than "follow a religious narrative that is sustained by political pressure and laws." In the same article, Atzmon asserted that the "Holocaust became the new Western religion… it is the most sinister religion known to man." Neither the content of the book nor Atzmon's prior comments stopped Mearsheimer from endorsing Atzmon's work.

Popular Information asked Mearsheimer if he was aware of Atzmon's questioning of the Holocaust prior to endorsing his book. Mearsheimer did not respond to that inquiry or questions about his recent comments on Ukraine.

Inflation profiteering

Judd Legum

Apr 18,2022


There is no single cause for inflation, which reached an annual rate of 8.5% in March. That's the fastest increase in prices since 1981. There are continuing problems with supply chains, rising prices for raw materials, and limited supply. There is a tight job market, which increases costs for labor. And, in many sectors, there is pent-up demand from the pandemic.

But there is also corporate profits. Faced with rising prices, corporations had three options:

1. Corporations could absorb some or all of the costs, reducing profits

2. Corporations could pass on the increased costs to consumers, keep profits relatively flat

3. Corporations could raise prices beyond their increased costs, increasing profits

Most corporations have enthusiastically selected option 3. In 2021, "[c]orporate pretax profits surged 25% year over year to $2.81 trillion." This was "the largest annual increase since 1976." After-tax profits increased even more dramatically, rising "37% year over year, more than any other time since the Fed began tracking profits in 1948." Prior to 2021, corporate profits have reached 13% in a quarter once in 70 years. In 2021, corporate profits exceeded 13% in every quarter.

The extraordinary increase in profits is evidence that "outsize price hikes are at least partially responsible for rising inflation." Isabella Weber, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told NPR in February that "companies have bragged about how they have managed to be ahead of the inflation curve, how they have managed to jack up prices more than their costs and as a result have delivered these record profits." Weber noted that these profits were achieved by companies that "have increased prices by more than cost."

Since February, inflation has accelerated further. Many of the nation's largest retailers are exploiting the situation to inflate their profits, according to a new report from Accountable.us.
Amazon increases profits by $12 billion in 2021, says it has to increase prices in 2022

In February, Amazon announced that it was raising "the price of its annual Prime subscriptions from $119 to $139 per year in the United States." (Monthly subscriptions increased as well, from $12.99 to $14.99.) The company said this was necessary "to compensate for the rising costs of labor and transportation in its distribution network." The price increase went into effect on March 24.

But Amazon fared extremely well in 2021 with the old pricing structure. Its net income increased by $12 billion — from $21.3 billion in 2020 to $33.4 billion in 2021. Some of that increase was due to Amazon's investment in an electric car company, Rivian Automotive. But net operating income still increased $2 billion — $22.9 billion in 2020 to $24.9 billion in 2021.

In March 2022, Amazon announced it would spend $10 billion to purchase its own stock, a move intended to increase its stock price. New CEO Andrew R. Jassy was also awarded a total compensation package of $212,701,169. The ratio of Jassy's compensation to the average Amazon worker, who makes $32,855, was 6,474-to-one.
Costco raised prices across the board, increased profits by $1 billion

Last May, Costco complained of "inflationary factors," including "higher labor costs, higher freight costs, higher transportation demand… and, in some cases, higher commodity prices." CFO Richard Galanti said that consumers should expect price increases on paper goods, aluminum foil, meat, plastic products, soda, cheese, bottled water, and rotisserie chicken. In December, Costco said prices "have increased between 4.5 to 5%" in its stores. The company plans to increase its membership fees by $5-10 in 2022 or 2023.

The increased prices, however, did not just cover Costco's increased costs. They also fattened Costco's bottom line in its 2021 fiscal year, which ended last August. Costco's performance was "record-breaking" with over $5 billion in profits — $1 billion more in profits than its 2020 fiscal year. Profits have continued to increase. In Costco's last quarter, which ended February 13, 2022, the company recorded profits of $1.3 billion, up from $915 million a year earlier.

Costco also spent $5.75 billion in its 2021 fiscal year on dividends for shareholders, up from $1.48 billion the prior year.

Lowe's "better product pricing" drives massive increase in profits

Lowe's was able to increase its margins in its 2021 fiscal year, which ended in January 2022. The company attributed higher margins to "better product pricing relative to costs." In other words, Lowe's raised prices by more than the increase in costs.

The higher prices drove large increases in profits. Lowe's reported $8.4 billion in profits for its 2021 fiscal year — an increase of $2.6 billion over the prior year. Lowe's also spent $15.1 billion on stock buybacks and dividends in 2021.

Looking ahead to 2022, Lowe's expects to enjoy "the ongoing benefits of our new pricing strategies." While it expects overall sales to be flat, it is predicting "that profit will grow by approximately 8% to 13%."

TJX says inflation is a "major opportunity" to increase prices, enjoyed "record" profits in 2021

TJX, the parent company of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, HomeGoods, and other brands, described "inflationary price increase[s]" as "a major opportunity." In a February 2022 investor call, CEO Ernie Herrman said that despite "freight and wage cost pressures" its "retail pricing strategy is working very well." Herrman said that, as a result, he was confident TJX could keep "improving our profitability when the macro environment normalizes." Herrman bragged that the company had "really healthy margins" that were "really driven by a large part by the pricing strategy."

TJX had $3.28 billion in profit in 2021, up from just $90.4 million in 2020. While the 2020 figure was distorted by the pandemic, the $3.28 billion was a "record" for the company. The company also spent $1.25 billion on dividends and $2.17 billion on stock buybacks, which were also records.
AriZona iced tea is still 99 cents

Not every company has chosen to exploit inflation to increase profits.

Aluminum prices have "doubled in the last 18 months." Over the last two decades, the "price of high fructose corn syrup has tripled." But the cost of a 23-ounce can of AriZona iced tea is still 99 cents. That's the same price as when the product debuted in 1992.

How is that possible? Don Vultaggio, the founder and chairman of AriZona is OK making slightly less money. The 23-ounce cans remain profitable.

"I’m committed to that 99-cent price — when things go against you, you tighten your belt," Vultaggio told the LA Times. "Consumers don’t need another price increase from a guy like me."

Although Vultaggio is not jacking up prices like his competitors, he's still doing quite well for himself. He and his two sons collectively own 100% of the company and have an estimated combined net worth of $4 billion.

As goes Amazon, so goes the nation?
Talking to veteran labor organizer Jane McAlevey about the union victory at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse and how workers can build on it

Anand Giridharadas Blog


It was the Yes heard around the world.

Earlier this month, workers at an Amazon warehouse in Staten Island faced down management in a much-watched vote to form a union. To the shock of one of the largest and most formidably anti-union companies in America, the workers won.

With little help from large, established unions, Amazon workers — led by Chris Smalls — achieved one of the greatest labor victories in a generation. The seemingly impossible feat at the JFK8 warehouse was made possible by the simple yet daunting choice by thousands not to quit, even while working conditions grew more perilous for employees by the day. That’s one of several key factors in transforming an industry built on exploiting workers, according to Jane McAlevey, a veteran labor organizer and a leading voice in the movement for years. She is the author of three books, including A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, and the Fight for Democracy.

I spoke with Jane recently about the significance of the victory at Amazon, the power and ferocity of local unions relative to national ones, how the Democratic Party has failed labor, and how everyday workers can start mobilizing their workplaces today.

The long and short of my conversation with Jane: What happened on Staten Island doesn’t have to stay on Staten Island.

It’s only fitting that this interview was edited by a former organizer of MSNBC’s union, Natalie Johnson, who happens to be The Ink’s new managing editor (and who many moons ago helped me launch this newsletter). Please give her a warm welcome in this new role!

“The only way to confront the degradation of work in this country is not to quit”: 

a conversation with Jane McAlevey

Out of all the companies where a union drive could happen, why does Amazon matter as a target?

Other than taking on Elon Musk, there is no one more important in terms of grotesque representation of arrogance and inequality. Amazon has a record of despicable behavior to human beings, turning human beings into robots. We know that the conditions in these plants are completely outrageous. Jeff Bezos vies for being the first- or second- richest guy in the world, depending on the day. He couldn't give a rat's ass about any human being except himself.

Taking on the corporation that has been transforming the concept of work and beating it is like winning in the auto plants in the 1930s. Taking on an employer who has set out to destroy the very concept of a meaningful workday and showing that workers can do this could not be more critical when inequality, grotesqueness, and arrogance are almost unimaginable.

You've been involved in labor organizing and thinking about labor organizing for a very long time. I'm curious what your initial reaction was to the Amazon victory.

I was surprised, joyously so. They did what we call "filing light," meaning they filed with 30 percent. It's not impossible. Filing with less than a majority isn't a great idea, though. Because of this, there are a lot of young leftists out there saying, "Screw the conventions. File light." That's not helpful because it doesn't often work. But as soon as I began to dive into the media interviews about how they did it, I realized that they had practiced some of the best methods out there.

One of the best interviews I read was with Brima Sylla, a worker from Liberia who helped bring members of the African immigrant base into a yes vote. He speaks six languages. He was a rockstar worker organizer. And what he was doing something I call "whole worker organizing." A worker is not just a worker. They have a whole life outside of work, and the connections they have outside of work can be more powerful than the connections they have at work.

There was also a worker leader running a Spanish-language WhatsApp. They were doing what I call "deep organizing," with an expansive view of how to tap into the organic connections that workers bring.

One of the revelations reported by Jodi Kantor and others at The New York Times last year was that JFK8, the Amazon facility in Staten Island, has a 150 percent annual turnover. This would seem to make it harder to organize. How does it complicate the deep, whole worker organizing approach?

It does complicate it, and I think it's by design. The brilliance of Chris Smalls and the team was understanding that they weren't going to quit their jobs. They were going to stay in their bad jobs. The only way to confront the degradation of work in this country is not to quit.

The Great Resignation is a waste because we need people to stay in their jobs and confront the destruction of a quality job. That's the power behind the decision by these Amazon workers — to stay, fight, and win. It was a very, very, very, brilliant move on their part to say, "We're not leaving. We're staying."

The Amazon workers now have what I call strategic workplace power, meaning that if they can build to a supermajority strike — even for a single day, considering the importance of Prime delivery — they can win a contract. That is very different from many other campaigns right now, where there's less strategic workplace power. There may be other forms of power. There's associational and community power if we do our work right and use it. But Amazon workers have strategic workplace power. If you can shut it down, you can do real damage to the employer.

The Amazon union's goal is to secure things like more money and better conditions on the job. Yet the awful work conditions at Amazon are not bugs in the system; they're features. It’s hard to picture what Amazon looks like if something as central as treating workers like robots were extricated from it. Given that the entire cathedral is built on mechanisms like minimal breaks and second-to-second monitoring and that high attrition, what is possible in changing the nature of the work?

For my most recent book, A Collective Bargain, I examined conditions in the auto plants in the early 1930s. I would argue that today's conditions at Amazon aren't different from what the militant, progressive, and radical workers then had to confront. They decided to stay on the job and fight to transform horrible jobs into one of our most important industries. The most exciting promise to me about this is that it seems daunting.

We can transform an industry built on destroying the quality of life. I do think that many Americans who did not understand how badly workers are abused in this country did have the veil pulled away by the pandemic. Can we build enough pressure that reveals enough disgusting behavior by the Bezoses and Musks to win over the public? Thanks to a grossly mismanaged pandemic, it seems like workers are winning the public over right now. Chris Smalls organized his first walkout over inadequate Covid protocols at the beginning of a pandemic. I think there's been a lot of public sympathy for that.

The strikes that really mattered in the 1930s were the ones that came before the National Labor Relations Act and confronted the Democratic Party. They put pressure on the party and said, "We've got to get some laws in here that are going to protect us, or we're just going to keep dying on the job." I think that's the moment we're in. It's going to take a more militant bunch of workers like the Amazon workers who are not going to accept crap.

If the Amazon workers succeed, should we expect Amazon to look different externally? Not just internally for things like working conditions and pay. Would you expect things like single-day service becoming less available? Would you expect to see Amazon having less market share and less of a monopoly?

Not necessarily. I don't think being compensated well and respected has to mean that there can't be Prime delivery. I think it will be an eight-hour day, not a 12-hour day. There's no reason you can't deliver packages in the greater New York area in a day or two and make it a humane job. I don't think one has to lead to the other. I do think consumers would still expect fast delivery, delivered in a very humane, pro-worker way.

The Amazon win is significant and may be the biggest union victory in a generation. But it does build on other surprising victories in recent years. What are some of the others you have been watching that tell you something broader may be shifting?

I would say that a lot of the "Let's get serious about organizing, making demands, and challenging the neoliberal establishment" push comes from teachers' unions. I do not mean the national ones. I mean the Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Minneapolis unions who went on strike. I think the strikes that began in West Virginia in 2018 inspired some of the work that's taking place now by showing that we don't have to accept these terms and conditions. We can fight back and win.

We saw pent-up frustration in 2018. I've been trying to tell people that this is not just about essential workers getting hammered in the most disgusting, outrageous way — though it is a part of it. It predates the excitement, the militancy, and the willingness to challenge their national unions and their employers. It's been coming from very smart local unions for several years.

There is a distinction you make between local unions and national unions in terms of the boldness we're seeing. Can you explain that contrast and why that is?

I was trained as a young organizer at a militant union that understood the role of strikes and power, and that we don't win without power. I think that the local unions have adhered to the understanding that not being nice to the Democrats when they're not nice to us is essential. National union leadership is far too close to the Democratic Party. They always have been. The consultant-industrial complex goes right between the two of them. You've got all these consultants who work for the national unions who also work for the Democratic Party. There's been this idea coming out of the national unions for the last 25 years that they're too weak to win strong contracts. It led them to the wrong place, where you make corporate deals for the Democratic Party. Last I looked, this hasn't gotten the American working class very far.

When you look at these new local successes, what is working now? What's new that's being tried?

What's different, beautiful, and long overdue is a direct connection to the people they serve. And a more holistic view of what a worker’s problem is. There's a lot of attention now to the idea that we are not just fighting for good contracts from the employer. We are fighting for better schools, better healthcare, better communities, and a direct challenge to the logic of neoliberalism.

When I was young, we took on the Democratic mayor in Stamford, Connecticut, Dan Malloy, who later served as governor of the state. He was very anti-union when I was organizing nursing home workers, child care workers, and janitors in his jurisdiction.

He had been pushing a gentrification plan that was all about “revitalizing downtown.” They were coming right at all the housing the workers that we were organizing lived in. I went to the union leadership, and I said, "This housing fight is our fight." And my leadership said to me, "No, go find a community group, Jane. Let them do that. Your job is to organize the workers and win a contract."

I threatened to quit. I said, "A gigantic gentrification scheme will displace our members or future members. So how is this not our fight?" That became the Stamford Organizing Project. Even there, I was at a very progressive union, and it took me threatening to quit it to get my leadership to understand a more holistic view.

Gig workers and freelancers aren't eligible for the kind of victory we're seeing with Amazon, as improbable as that was. In the American system, are unions ever going to be the path for those kinds of workers?

No. I think the pressure has come from workers who have strategic workplace power, whether it's the public sector or the private sector with Amazon. I think that the gig worker debate is outrageous. We have to use workers who can walk off the job and create a crisis for the employer class. Then, usher in laws that will change the gig economy. To me, that's step two. The gig economy workers do not have the power to do that on their own.

If you're a worker and have problems with your job but you don't know where to start, what is the first step you would urge someone to take?

Step One is to start talking to your coworkers and do it quietly. Step Two is to meet outside of the workplace. Step Three is to decide whether you're going to do what Smalls' team did and go it alone, without help from established unions, which is pretty hard.

A lot of workers will need those outside resources to win. In my third book, I gave recommendations for "shopping for a union" and making demands of them. The Amazon Labor Union got a lawyer and had some experts they were talking to. I'm not giving those experts credit, but labor law is byzantine beyond belief. So you're going to need some advice.

If you want to form a union and you need some help doing it, the first thing you should do is say to any union that you call, "Look, before we agree to do anything with you, you need to put us in touch with some of your elected rank and file leaders in your union, not your staff. We want to have a direct dialogue with other workers in this union. We want to know from those workers, are you a democratic union? Do workers' voices matter in this union? Do we get to make the decisions in this union, or is it all top down?" And if it's top down, walk away and find another union.

Jane McAlevey has been an organizer in the labor movement for more than twenty years. She is the author of three books, including “A Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing and the Fight for Democracy.” This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Will Minimum Wage Increases Improve Family Stability?

by Alan J. Hawkins

Highlights
A 7 to 15% reduction in divorce over a one- to two-year period following a $1 raise in the minimum wage seems too good to be true.

Attacking the problem of family instability systemically and from multiple angles is a better strategy than relying only on economic levers.

Category: PUBLIC POLICY,ECONOMIC MOBILITY,MARRIAGE AND RELATIONSHIP EDUCATION


We haven’t heard much over the past year about a legislative proposal to raise the federal minimum wage. It was a hot topic a year ago when the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office released its report estimating that President Biden’s call for a $15 minimum wage would lift nearly a million poor out of poverty—but would cost nearly 1.5 million jobs over the next four years. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Diamon may have reignited the discussion recently, however, when he called for the federal government to increase the minimum wage to $15 (and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit, too).

As a family scientist, I am keenly interested in the potential of state-by-state or federal minimum wage policies (and other economic policy levers) to increase the economic well-being of poor children and adults and support greater family stability. Which is why a new study in the Journal of Marriage and Family jumped out at me. The study explored the effects of minimum wage increases on marriage and divorce rates. Lead author Ben Karney used two high-quality federal data sets (Current Population Survey, American Community Survey) and a quasi-experimental design that took advantage of the reality that some states have raised their minimum wages over time (2004-2015), and some have not. The researchers compared states that raised the minimum wage to those that did not to see if they could detect a statistical effect on marriage and divorce rates.

They found that a $1 increase in the minimum wage predicted a 3 to 6% decline in marriage entries and a 7 t0 15% decrease in marriage exits one to two years later. They interpret both these findings as positive changes for families. With regards to a lower marriage rate, the researchers speculate that a better financial situation allows poorer young couples to delay marriage to be more in line with the marital-timing decisions of more affluent couples. They connect later marriages to reduced divorce rates, which may be less likely to end in divorce. This could account for the observed reduced divorce rates.

If this straightforward policy proposal would decrease divorce rates by 7 to 15%—or more if raises are higher—I would be an enthusiastic cheerleader, pom-poms and all. But scientists are actually trained to be skeptics. So, please pardon me if I press pause on the celebration.

First, I’m not confident in the authors’ logic that delayed marriages lead to more stable unions. While that was the case at one time, recent research suggests that early marriages are no longer inferior in quality and stability to later marriages. In three recent nationally representative datasets, my team of researchers found that differences in early first marriages (age 20-24) and later marriages (25+) were generally small and usually favored early marrieds. Even marital stability differences were negligible. Those who marry early now are different from those who married early a generation or two ago. With no social pressure to marry early (and even a stigma against it), they marry because they really want to make a strong commitment.

Also, Karney and his colleagues did not present the results of extensive testing for alternative explanations of the changes in marriage and divorce rates that is best practice in these kinds of quasi-experimental policy evaluation studies, especially when taking on such a complex issue. The authors do confess appropriately that their “analyses could not determine whether declines in rates of marriage and divorce represented transitions deferred or decisions to forego these transitions entirely,” but they seem to use the half-full lens—marital decisions are delayed and divorce decisions are deferred.

Moreover, a kind of scientific horse sense also raises an eyebrow at the size of the effects the researchers found, especially for divorce rates. A 7 to 15% reduction in divorce over a one- to two-period following a $1 raise in the minimum wage seems too good to be true. Even social policy mechanisms directly targeted to a specific problem would struggle to achieve such success. Human behavior is highly complex. And it is “multi-systemically” determined, to use a fancy scientific term that means that psychological, relational, contextual, sociological, and economic forces would all be operating and interacting simultaneously on people’s marital-transition decisions. The impact of any single cause—such as an increase in wages—is most likely to be small by itself.

Furthermore, the study’s authors should have wrestled with a recent study that cast doubt on the effects of wage increases on family formation behavior among poorer families. Melissa Kearney and Riley Wilson studied the effect of sudden wage increases from fracking jobs in the 2000s on marriage and childbearing. They found that these large increases in wages for mostly non-college-educated men were not associated with a greater likelihood of marrying—as theory predicted—but they were associated with increases in births (marital and nonmarital). Again, family behavior is complex. Economics certainly are relevant to family behavior, but faith in the notion that economics dominate human decisions in straightforward ways is regularly challenged. Kearney and Wilson conclude that the effects of economic factors on family behavior are highly subject to varying and changing social norms and temporal contexts.

One can hope that further research on the effects of minimum wage increases will indeed show positive effects on family stability, although those effects are likely to be smaller than what Karney and his colleagues found. (I’m not sure yet what to make of the lower marriage rate effect.) And I disagree with the authors’ conclusion that policy efforts to increase family stability should be focused solely on indirect economic policy levers and should abandon “expensive” funding of educational programs that try to help low-income couples form and sustain healthy marriages and relationships. They argue:

government policies that reduce stress on couples and facilitate their access to resources may improve family outcomes, invisibly and without making additional demands on the time of couples who are already strained.

The authors seem bothered by the popularity of these educational programs that draw nearly 200,000 lower-income individuals to their doors every year (and generally are about 12 hours in length over six weeks). They also fail to mention that all of these federally-funded programs now include employment-support program options along with relationship education. Policymakers understand that economic forces operate alongside relational forces. Karney and his colleagues see these programs as a waste of taxpayer dollars ($75 million a year) and cite dated research showing that these couple relationship education programs have had “negligible effects” on family outcomes. More extensive and recent reviews of these programs find that their effects do appear to be small—similar to other social policy programs such as Head Start—but they are statistically significant and appear to be getting stronger over time.

Either-or, one-lever thinking about how to increase family stability seems unmerited. We need all kinds of good ideas in this fight. Attacking the problem of family instability systemically and from multiple angles is a better strategy than relying only on economic levers. We aren’t going to find a magic wand in our efforts to increase family stability, although I am intrigued by the authors’ findings and hope that higher wages will support more stable families. Instead, we need sustained hard work from practitioners, policy makers, and researchers testing multiple direct and indirect approaches to helping families stay together in loving bonds.

Alan J. Hawkins is a professor of family life at Brigham Young University.

How much money do high school graduates make? Indiana digs into the numbers.

By Stephanie Wang  Apr 19, 2022Share this on Facebo

Indiana is starting to track employment outcomes after high school.

 The data is incomplete, but state officials and policy experts agree 

that measuring those outcomes is important to see how well schools prepare students.

 Eli Imadali for Chalkbeat

What happens to students after they graduate from high school?

Schools largely don’t know. At South Bend schools, for example, officials know that fewer than half of graduates went on to college in the past two years. But they don’t follow the other 55%.

“It’s certainly harder to track,” said Rafi Nolan-Abrahamian, assistant superintendent of accountability and innovation. “And there’s less certainty in outcomes and the quality of the information you’re getting.”

That could soon change. For the first time, what students do after high school will contribute to how Indiana gauges school performance, through a new dashboard expected to launch in the fall.

How many students enlist in the military? How many of them hold steady jobs 10 years after graduation? How much money do they make?

All of those outcomes can paint a fuller picture of how well K-12 education prepares students, experts say.

But beyond tracking enrollment in Indiana colleges, finding the data is proving tricky. What state officials know so far is just a small slice of the whole story, and they haven’t yet broached how to use the limited information.

“There’s a philosophical question as well as a data accuracy question here,” said Christy Hovanetz, who focuses on school accountability as a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd. “Should high schools be accountable for what happens to a student six years after they leave high school? … [and] how accurate of information can we gather on students six years out?”

Giving context to the data

The state cast a wide net to look at employment after high school, examining anyone with an employment record reported through unemployment insurance data.

That broad employment rate includes people who could have worked for a brief stint or made little money. But it also excludes Indiana graduates who find jobs in other states.

To attempt to better capture employment, the state also calculated a sustained employment rate and median wage that filters out short-term jobs. It focuses on those who worked for most of the year and made at least minimum wage.

The state recently published the employment outcomes, ahead of the upcoming K-12 dashboard. At first glance, the data seems to indicate that in 2020, students who graduated high school the previous year made a median income of about $22,000.

But that’s missing a lot of students.

The figure doesn’t include anyone who dropped out of high school. It doesn’t include students enrolled in Indiana colleges. It doesn’t include graduates who moved away to other states. It doesn’t include those working part time.

In fact, the median wage calculation only includes roughly 13,000 out of some 75,000 graduates — or about 18% of graduates.

So that $22,000 figure doesn’t truly represent earning prospects. It’s also hard to draw conclusions about who it does represent.

Because of the data caveats, it’s difficult to analyze trends. Do employment rates taper over time because of something happening in the labor market, or because the state can’t keep tabs on as many students?

The state will also eventually need to set goals to help people understand what a $22,000 median wage or, say, a 66% employment rate after 10 years means.

“Is that good or not?” Hovanetz said. “It’s hard for the general public specifically to make a lot of contextual sense out of it.”

Many still support collecting the data, if imperfect. State officials and policy experts say they hope the numbers spark more conversations on how schools can set students up for life after high school and perhaps fuel better data collection moving forward.

Still, Hovanetz says Indiana is ahead of the curve on connecting life outcomes to K-12 education — not just proxy indicators for how prepared a student is to be successful, but what a student actually accomplishes.

How schools can use the data

For now, the after-high school outcomes won’t be tied to the way the state grades schools.

But state officials hope the new information puts the focus on how schools prepare their students. It moves the goalpost beyond high school graduation, said Jason Callahan, Indiana’s assistant secretary of student pathways and opportunities.

“From a policy standpoint, we are really looking to move that terminal end point beyond a high school diploma, thinking about postsecondary and work-based experiences that lead to life-fulfilling careers,” Callahan said.

The numbers could help illustrate how much students could make depending on what paths they pursue after high school, he said. In trying to increase higher education attainment rates, state officials often emphasize that a credential or degree can lead to significantly larger lifetime earnings — on average, about $22,000 more per year.

Some experts caution, however, against pressuring high schools to push all students toward college and say the data needs to show how students can be successful in different ways. It’s also difficult to know whether a student’s success can be directly attributed to something a high school did.

There’s a clearer pipeline between high school and college, said Nolan-Abrahamian, the South Bend administrator. High schools tie many strategies to preparing students for college, like offering dual credit courses. But even though schools teach workforce skills, he said it’s less clear how K-12 education can improve outcomes for students who don’t go to college.

“Postsecondary enrollment is something schools have direct control over, and something they’re actively working students toward,” Nolan-Abrahamian said. But when it comes to employment or enlistment, “it’s harder to say how schools would directly plan toward those outcomes.”

Stephanie Wang covers education in Indiana, including pre-K, K-12 schools, and higher education. Chalkbeat Indiana partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Stephanie at swang@chalkbeat.org.

Kae Petrin contributed to this story.