Dear friends,
You might have missed this exciting union news from last Friday: the tenth Starbucks shop to unionize is the giant Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Chelsea. This is a powerful reminder that once one shop unionizes against a behemoth, the momentum only builds.
The first Amazon warehouse workers have unionized! The man who forged the new union and the strategy, Chris Smalls, is gearing up for the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) to negotiate a contract and organize a second Staten Island warehouse.
“We had over 20 barbecues, giving out food every single week, every single day, whether it was pizza, chicken, pasta, home-cooked. We all contributed giving out books, literature, giving out free weed because it’s legal,” he said, laughing, on Friday outside the National Labor Relations Board office. “We did whatever it took to connect with those workers to make their daily lives just a little bit easier, a little bit less stressful.”
Smalls was a Teamster before being hired by Amazon in 2015. After a co-worker at the JFK8 warehouse tested positive for the coronavirus in March 2020, Smalls organized a strike to demand that the company take precautions to protect its workers. He was fired, ostensibly for violating COVID-safety distancing rules.
Smalls believed that the best chance of winning against Amazon would come from an independent, worker-led union. He was right.
The birth of the ALU is promising AND Amazon remains too powerful. Last week, the Department of Justice wrote a letter in support of legislation before both houses to strengthen anti-trust protections against big tech firms.
"The Department views the rise of dominant platforms as presenting a threat to open markets and competition, with risks for consumers, businesses, innovation, resiliency, global competitiveness, and our democracy," says a letter to bipartisan leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, signed by Peter Hyun, the Justice Department’s acting assistant attorney general for legislative affairs.
Sign this petition to Congress from Demand Progress to call on legislators to break up big tech companies that abuse their monopoly power. This will take 15 seconds!
This should not be a surprise, given Judge Jackson’s qualifications, but since Mitch McConnell has been leaning on Republicans to oppose her nomination, it involves a tiny bit of courage that I feel compelled to celebrate.
A racial equity settlement will require the DOE and the Public Schools Athletic League (PSAL) to provide fair access to sports fields and indoor courts and create hundreds of new teams. When people use the phrase ‘to level the playing field’, they probably don’t realize that, all too often, Black and Brown students must play sports in auditoriums with slanted floors because they don’t have proper gymnasiums.
Metaphorically speaking, nothing levels the playing field like access to information. It’s Library Week. I have no idea what that means, since I go to the library at least once every week. These special days and weeks and months to celebrate things that matter every day always wear me out. However, we should take the opportunity to advocate for full funding of the public libraries.
Tell City Hall: Libraries provide essential services. This 30-second action is from NYPL.
Tomorrow is my last day with my favorite group of sixth graders. I started with class 6J in the fall and they have been working hard to educate themselves and others about the history of racist policing and why it’s so difficult to get racist cops off the streets.
My plan, which came from a suggestion from one of the students, was to have them make a presentation to officers from the local precinct about what they learned and to engage in a dialogue about the problem of racist policing.
Except the young people were too frightened to invite police officers into the classroom. So, they are making a video that they will present at a school town meeting.
Two teenage boys around the same age, Kye and Joseph, had a small physical fight in a mall. The kid in the black hoodie came up to the kid of color and got in his face. When it started to get more heated, the police showed up. The two officers arrested a Black kid for fighting in self-defense. The white boy put his hands together, expecting to be cuffed, yet the police officer left him. The police ended up only arresting the 14-year-old, who happened to be Black, but not the 15-year-old, who appeared white, but identifies as Colombian and/or Pakistani.
Racist police are scared of Black people and think all Black people are harmful. Because of their race or color, the police think that they started it. Racist police think that white people are more advanced than Black people and feel the need to treat them differently.
This is not supposed to happen.
Yesterday, Trevor Noah posted this powerful video about the ‘talk’ that Black families have with their children about how to survive an encounter with the police. I want to note that Noah concludes, as some of my students did, that it’s the police who need a talk about their behavior.
Join the Vera Institute of Justice to demand that police chiefs and prosecutors eliminate traffic stops for minor violations. This is a 15-second action.
Another group of sixth graders that I’m working with practiced their song in class this morning; they are meeting with their principal next week to persuade him that they need to be permitted a snack time between breakfast and lunch.
Songs are a great way to make a powerful appeal, and Randy Rainbow has come through again with a critique of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill.
Finish laughing and then sign the petition to Congress in support of the Equality Act. This 30-second action is from the Human Rights Campaign.
The NYS budget is not likely to be done until the end of the week. This gives us time for a little more action. I used the action below to put in a good word for home care along with child care.
Use this ready-made action by the Alliance for Quality Education to contact the Governor and legislators in Albany. Tell them we need real economic development, not a stadium. This will take a minute (a little more if you personalize it!).
It turns out that Speaker of the Assembly, Carl Heastie, is standing in the way of the very popular All-Electric Building Act. It seems he is beholden to fossil fuel interests.
The policy is essential if New York plans to meet its climate goals, which call for "an 85% emissions reduction by 2050 and 40% in emissions reductions by 2030." (Meeting those goals will also require New York to generate a larger percentage of its electricity from clean sources.) In addition to the climate benefits, moving to all-electric buildings "will improve air quality, boosting public health."
Call Assemblyman Heastie today at 518-455-3791 to let him know that you support the All-Electric Building Act.
Have a great day!
with love,
L