Read the entire thing here:

Last week, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey lambasted the United Auto Workers (UAW) in a social media post on X (formerly Twitter) ahead of a union vote at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Vance, Alabama, set for mid-May. Ivey has been campaigning for months against autoworker unionization in the state.

Ivey’s post referenced an anti-union op-ed by Nathaniel Ledbetter, speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, to which Ivey added: “The UAW is NOT the good guy here. Thank you, Mr. Speaker, for calling out the UAW for what it is — corrupt, shifty and a dangerous leech.” Her post went semi-viral, garnering over 400,000 views, and it was reposted by her close political ally in resistance to autoworker unionization, the Business Council of Alabama (BCA).

While Ivey’s fierce opposition to the UAW is no secret, what was noteworthy about her post was the so-called media outlet she cited: Yellowhammer News.

Yellowhammer is no ordinary “news” site. It is co-owned by a longtime political consultant, Paul Shashy, who has deep ties to the Alabama political and business establishment, which is driving the opposition to the UAW. Indeed, in March 2023, the Business Council of Alabama, which is coordinating a statewide anti-union campaign, announced its hiring of Shashy as a political strategist.

None of this appears to be disclosed in Yellowhammer’s day-to-day coverage of topics, like the autoworker union drive, despite the owner’s apparent conflict of interest. Moreover, while Shashy purchased Yellowhammer in late 2023, its past owners have been lobbyists and consultants for major state politicians and executive directors of the Alabama GOP.

All told, the relationships between Yellowhammer’s ownership and Alabama’s anti-union politicians and business groups shed more light on what unionizing autoworkers are up against. Essentially, Alabama’s anti-union corporate forces have at their service one of the state’s biggest “media” networks, which is owned by someone who directly works for the BCA. As it churns out coverage and op-eds hostile to the UAW, those same corporate forces and their political allies can then invoke all this as “news.”

“A Partisan Site”: The Rise of Yellowhammer

On its website, Yellowhammer News claims to be “Alabama’s second-largest media outlet.” It tells advertisers that its news site has 57 million annual pageviews, 35,000 email subscribers, 25 radio affiliates and TV broadcasting to over 800,000 households. It has 107,000 followers on Facebook.

Yellowhammer describes itself as “Alabama’s preeminent outlet for news, analysis and much more.” It says it is “committed to delivering the news in a manner that reflects the state of Alabama, its people and their values.” Its catchphrase is “We know Alabama.”

But Yellowhammer is far from a regular news site. It has a documented history as a conservative operation owned and run by GOP political consultants and lobbyists with deep ties to corporate interests in Alabama.

According to a 2019 Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) story, Yellowhammer was founded in 2011 by a political consultant named Cliff Sims, who also served as the site’s CEO. Later revelations showed that two extremely well-connected lobbyists, Tim Howe and John Ross, were co-owners of Yellowhammer.

In January 2011, Howe and Ross became principals of an influential new lobbying firm, Swatek, Azbell, Howe & Ross. At the time, Ross was the executive director of the Alabama Republican Party, a position Howe also previously held. Their firm disclosed numerous clients that included prominent Alabama corporations, trade associations and advocacy groups.

It wasn’t known until 2014 that Howe and Ross were — in the words of the CJR story — the “benefactors” of Yellowhammer. This revelation came after Eddie Curran, an Alabama-based independent investigative journalist, published a leaked email with Yellowhammer CEO Sims seeking guidance from lobbyist Howe — referred to by Sims in the email as “Ghost Writer” — around a video that Sims was working on.

Yellowhammer’s ties to corporate power and the GOP were documented in the CJR story, which reported that Yellowhammer had received over $185,000 from advertising and in-kind donations from Republican PACs and political campaigns. Later investigations from NPR and Floodlight suggested links between Alabama Power, the state’s powerful electric utility, and Yellowhammer.

Yellowhammer has long been conservative in its orientation, but Curran told Truthout the site’s politics is not its main driver. “The issue with Yellowhammer is not its ideology, agree with it or not,” said Curran. “Think of the conservative politics as the bait. Yellowhammer’s true raison d’etre, so to speak — and for that matter, its business model — is as a pay-for-play operation.”

New Yellowhammer Owner Is a Republican and Business Consultant

In 2017, Yellowhammer’s founder, Sims, stepped down as CEO to join the Trump administration as assistant communications director for White House message strategy. In 2018, Sims was reassigned as senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Yellowhammer changed ownership in 2017 — Allison Ross, the wife of John Ross, became a co-owner — and then, in August 2023, another important new ownership change was announced.

Paul Shashy, a prominent Alabama political consultant, purchased the Yellowhammer media network, along with Thomas Harris, the former president and CEO of Merchant Capital. They moved Yellowhammer’s outlets into a new umbrella entity, YHN Media Group LLC.

Shashy was the campaign manager for both of Alabama’s sitting U.S. senators, Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville. A 2018 Yellowhammer profile noted that Shashy had the “trust” of “the state’s biggest businesses and top-tier Republican candidates” and stated that “Shashy is going to be shaping Alabama elections and influencing the entire political scene for the next half-century.”

Shashy is a principal of the consulting firm SR Communications, which counts the Alabama Senate Republican Caucus among its clients. Alabama public records, which list Shashy as an “LLC member” of the firm, show that SR Communications has a $60,000 contract through December 2024 to provide “communications services” for the Senate president pro tempore, who is currently Alabama State Sen. Greg Reed. In August 2023, Tim Howe, the former lobbyist who was Yellowhammer’s former owner and editor, was appointed as Reed’s chief of staff.

Public records reveal that numerous other Alabama Republican political candidates and judges have paid tens of thousands of dollars to SR Communications, Shashy’s firm, over the past year alone, and over $350,000 since 2021.

For example, 13 filings from December 2021 through January 2024 show Alabama Lt. Gov. Will Ainsworth paid SR Communications a total of $21,100. In March 2024, Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh, Republican president of the Alabama Public Service Commission, filed a $10,000 payment to SR Communications for polling services. In November 2023, ProgressPAC, the Business Council of Alabama’s PAC, reimbursed SR Communications for a total of $2,089 as an “Expense Paid For GOTV In-Kind Contribution for HD16 Bryan Brinyark,” who was running for the Alabama House.

Filings show payments to SR Communications from numerous other candidates, ranging from state school board candidates to judges to members of the Alabama House of Representatives.

Shashy’s Yellowhammer co-owner, Thomas Harris, is also no minor figure. While leading Merchant Capital, it long ranked as Alabama’s top investment bank, managing over a billion dollars’ worth of government bonds, and was among the top financial underwriters in the nation.

Shashy, Yellowhammer and the Business Council of Alabama

A few months before Shashy purchased Yellowhammer, he was hired by the Business Council of Alabama.

“The Business Council of Alabama (BCA) is proud to announce the hiring of… Paul Shashy with SR Communications as political strategist,” said a March 2023 statement. Yellowhammer also wrote up the news.

As Truthout previously reported, the BCA is a statewide business association whose core 15-member governing leadership is composed of some of Alabama’s most powerful corporations, including the state’s biggest bank, electric utility and health care company. The BCA’s larger 135-member board includes representatives from automakers Toyota, Honda and Mercedes.

The BCA is a key player coordinating the statewide campaign against the UAW and autoworker unionization in Alabama. It started an anti-UAW website and has published anti-union op-eds. The BCA is also closely allied with Governor Ivey in resisting autoworker unionization. The BCA is one of Ivey’s top donors, and key corporations within the BCA governing leadership are also top Ivey donors. Top staffers of the Ivey administration formerly worked for the BCA.

Alabama’s Katie Britt was the CEO and president of the BCA from 2019 to 2021, after which she successfully ran for the U.S. Senate in a campaign managed by Shashy.

Yellowhammer coverage of the UAW has been hostile, using language that frames the union as villainous. For example, a March 4 op-ed by Clay Scofield, who stepped down last year as the majority leader in the Alabama Senate to work for the BCA, was titled “Even a small dose of labor union snake oil could prove poisonous to Alabama’s economy.”

An April 3 story by a staff writer on UAW President Shawn Fain was titled “Union boss escalates attacks on Governor Kay Ivey in tirade at North Carolina rally,” and referred to Fain’s “assault” on “Alabama’s Mercedes-Benz leadership, Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama.”

An April 9 story uncritically recited Alabama House Majority Leader Scott Stadthagen’s message that the “UAW’s Alabama expansion is an attempt to hijack state’s success.” The April 25 op-ed by Speaker Nathaniel Ledbetter that Kay Ivey cited warned about “the UAW’s trail of destruction” and its “legacy of corruption, destruction and usury.”

The list could go on. None of these articles appear to disclose that they were published while Yellowhammer’s owner is, according to the most recent publicly available records, working for the BCA, the group that is coordinating the statewide campaign, in close alliance with Kay Ivey, against autoworker unionization in the state.

In contrast, Yellowhammer’s coverage of the BCA is much rosier, with uncritical staff write-ups on BCA events and initiatives that essentially parrot the subjects they cover, whether that be the BCA members or BCA-allied politicians.

Truthout reached out over email to Yellowhammer News, Paul Shashy and the Business Council for Alabama for comment but did not receive responses from them.

“Corrupt” and “Shifty”?

All this brings us back to Kay Ivey invoking Yellowhammer in her campaign against autoworker unionization and the BCA reposting Ivey’s quip about the UAW being “corrupt, shifty and a dangerous leech.”

What this Truthout analysis reveals is that this well-known Alabama “media” outlet publishing anti-union content referenced by politicians and business groups resisting the UAW is, in fact, owned by a prominent consultant who works for these same anti-union forces and who is deeply embedded within their wider political operation.

These conflicts surrounding Yellowhammer as a new source offer a window into the wider influence machine of Alabama conservatives and business groups. Nor should the irony be lost that Governor Ivey calls the UAW “corrupt” while invoking such news sources.

Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.

Read the entire article. It's great and relevant.

Glad the UAW and several other unions are supporting the protests.

Nicely condensed history, i think (mainly support for foreign interventions)

These people interviewed are definitely Marxists!

Shawn Fain does give me hope.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2425897

Well, then, a lot of Marxism and social movement stuff in this live-stream.

Nice!

Give it a listen.

Hey! 1. May is coming up and that means marches and chanting!

So, what are some good radical bloc chants? Anything radical goes, workers rights(including sex work!), queer rights, pro-palestine, anti-capitalist, anti cop, etc.

Finally, some good fucking news!

At the beginning of the 20th century, Chilean workers had no social or labor legislation that favored or protected them. It was they themselves, through mutual benefit societies, resistance societies and mancomunales, who organized themselves to protect their associates and promote proletarian solidarity.

The Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCH) began as a grouping of railroad workers with a mutualist orientation linked to the Democratic Party. In the mid-1910s, saltpeter workers began to join and it acquired a national character. Likewise, the Democratic Party lost influence when the revolutionary ideas of the Socialist Workers Party led by Luis Emilio Recabarren, who later became the Communist Party, were imposed on the organization, and the Federation assumed an anti-capitalist and revolutionary attitude that was strongly manifested in the social mobilizations that characterized the 1920s.

However, the enactment of the social laws and the Labor Code, between 1925 and 1931, radically changed the conformation of the labor movement and workers' organizations. From then on, the unions and their federations debated whether to accept the new legislation and submit to its rules, as was the case of workers and employees in the state sector and large companies, or to continue with the classist and revolutionary discourse. The leadership of the workers' movement, which adhered to the latter line, was divided between three large organizations: the FOCH, linked to the Communist Party, the CGT (National Confederation of Workers), of anarchist inspiration, and the CNS (National Confederation of Trade Unions), of socialist origin.

In 1934, the violent repression by Arturo Alessandri's government of a national railroad strike was reacted by the unity of the different workers' organizations. Thus, the Unified Command that emerged from the strike was transformed into a Trade Union Unity Front, which organized a Trade Union Unity Congress in December 1936, giving rise to the Confederation of Chilean Workers (CTCH).

The strength acquired by the new workers' organization allowed them to form part of the political alliance that supported the candidacy of the radical Pedro Aguirre Cerda in the 1938 presidential election. The triumph of the Popular Front gave the CTCH a direct link with the new government, which, although it allowed it to grow as an organization, would later be the cause of its division and loss of prominence.

Indeed, at the end of the 1940s, the workers' movement, which was strongly linked to the Communist Party through the Confederation of Workers of Chile, was strongly repressed and weakened by the government of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla when he enacted the Law for the Defense of Democracy or "Damned Law". Consequently, the leadership of the workers' movement was taken over by employee organizations, especially in the public sector, which through the leadership of Clotario Blest managed to organize a new workers' confederation in 1953: the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores (CUT).

1872-1995: Anarchism in Chile

Chile: anarchism, the IWW and the workers movement

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(see my last post for context)

But now they have all my personal information, yay! /sarcasm

In a bid to claw back $2.15 billion, the struggling pharmaceutical giant Bayer CEO is doing away with middle managers and 99% of the company’s 1,362-page corporate handbook, allowing nearly 100,000 employees to self-manage.

the company is going boss-less, or as he calls it, moving to “dynamic shared ownership.”

This fucking sucks.

On this day in 1912, the Paint Creek Mine War began when West Virginia miners struck, demanding formal union recognition and fairer labor practices. The incident quickly escalated into one of the worst labor conflicts in U.S. history.

The event, also known as the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Strike, centered on the area enclosed by two streams, Paint Creek and Cabin Creek. It is considered part of the "Coal Wars", a series of armed conflicts between workers and coal companies from the 1890s - 1930s in the United States.

The strike lasted for fourteen months, and over 5,000 workers participated. Notable labor organizer Mother Jones (shown) came to West Virginia to support the workers, organizing a secret march of 3,000 armed miners to the steps of the state capitol in Charleston to read a declaration of war to Governor William E. Glasscock.

The confrontation directly caused approximately fifty violent deaths from armed conflicts between miners and strike-breaking forces, as well as many more deaths indirectly caused by starvation and malnutrition among the striking miners. In terms of casualties, it was among the worst conflicts in American labor history.

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They're still in Kurian's office, still streaming, and starting to get major media coverage: WaPo Wired

In my opinion this is one of the most important labor developments in the US in a while. Internationally politicized worker organization in the belly of the beast by traditionally un-unionizable PMCs.

e: finally arrested after 10 hours

I work for a small-ish company of laborers. We have ~100 full-time employees who work in labour, a small team of administrative employees, and very few managers all things considered. The reasons for this are part of the reason I need to be vague in public talking about this, because the details make the company very identifiable to anyone who knows anything about the industry.

Some previous employees tried and failed to unionize over a decade ago, but the vote was very close. Since then, wages have stagnated to a degree that make me laugh and cry, we are being pushed to work more and more overtime, and in general morale is very low. I am in contact with a small group of very well-connected employees who are 100% on board with unionizing, and I believe that we can successfully get the required signatures this time if we play our cards right.

1. How does one go about choosing a union to work with? I have done some Googling but the results are useless. I need some kind of leftist search engine, please! I know of the major Canadian unions like Unifor and Teamsters, as well as the IWW, and then the very specific ones like the postal union or the teachers' union.

• Does the IWW even do workplace organizing? I was under the impression that it was more of a thing you joined solo.
• Are any of the bigger unions in Canada actually useful? We need a hard wage correction upfront and then guaranteed cost of living increases after that, and I don't want to do all this work to have some centrist 'union' let us down in negotiations.
• Do you know of any trade-specific unions for things in the realm of carpentry and space finishing? (Again sorry for being vague in public about industry) I know that my industry is largely unionized in the US, but here it rarely is. I have not found any info from my Google searches as to which unions those other companies work with.
• If we can't find anything that's a good fit, is it advisable to start an industry-specific union for us and others? Is that doomed to fail?

2. I've found a few different groups that say "contact us if you want to organize your workplace" but basically

• Most of them seem US-centric and we are in Canada
• I worry that they're ops lol
• Not sure if this is the IWW's wheelhouse or not. I don't want to take help from them and then form a union under Teamsters or something, kind of feels like wasting their resources idk maybe this is fine??
• So uhhhh please recommend a good group to talk to about this in Canada! Or I mean a US group is fine so long as they have the knowledge about local rules and can help us.

3. There is some complex stuff to explain about the company structure that make it hard to know how many people we'd have to get to sign cards and I would really appreciate someone knowledgeable messaging me privately so I can explain a bit, or point me to a good group where I can ask this question

Gosh sorry I am rather at a loss of where to start here so I'm someone could just give me a stick and point me in the right direction I would be exceptionally pleased, thank you!!

Edit: as a bonus I may have slam-dunk proof of wage theft by the company not paying certain employees overtime, would be great if we could also get some resources on how to retaliate for that in as big of a blow as possible. ✌️

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2254138

Hell yeah.

The wealthiest people in this country have never had it so good. While income and wealth inequality in the United States is soaring, more than 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, we have one of the highest rates of childhood poverty among major countries on Earth, and more than 650,000 people are homeless.

According to a study by the Rand Corporation, since 1975, there has been a nearly $50 trillion transfer of wealth in America from the bottom 90% to those at the top. Meanwhile, since 1973, weekly wages for the average American worker have actually gone down after adjusting for inflation.

It’s time for a change — real change. As more Americans are giving up on government and democracy, the time is long overdue for Congress to stand up for the hard-pressed working families of our country. And an important step in that direction would be implementing a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay.

As far back as 1866, one of the central planks of the trade union movement in America was to establish an eight-hour workday with a simple and straightforward demand: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what you will.”

Americans of that era were sick and tired of working 12-hour days for six or seven days a week with very little time for rest, relaxation or quality time with their families. They went out on strike, they organized, they petitioned the government and business leaders, and they achieved real results after decades of struggle.

Finally, in 1916, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation into law to establish an eight-hour workday for railroad workers. Ten years later, the Ford Motor Company became one of the first major employers in America to establish a five-day work week for autoworkers.

By 1933, the US Senate had overwhelmingly passed legislation to establish a 30-hour work week. And, just a few years later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act into law and the standard 40-hour work week was created. That is the good news.

The bad news is that despite massive growth in technology and skyrocketing worker productivity, millions of Americans are working longer hours for lower wages. In fact, nearly 40% of employees in the United States are working at least 50 hours a week, and 18% are working at least 60 hours.

What this means is that the American people now have the dubious distinction of working far more hours per year as the people of most other wealthy nations.

On average, Americans work 470 more hours on the job per year than people in Germany, 300 hours more than people in France, 279 hours more than people in the United Kingdom, 204 hours more than people in Japan, and 125 hours more than people in Canada.

As a result of the extraordinary technological revolution that has taken place in recent years and decades, American workers are more than 400% more productive than they were in the 1940s. And yet, almost all of the economic gains from these technological achievements have been going straight to the top.

For example, in 1965, the CEO of a large corporation in America made about 20 times more than their average worker. Today, CEOs of large corporations make nearly 350 times more than their average workers.

At a moment in history when artificial intelligence and robotics will radically transform our economy, it is time to make sure that working people benefit from this increased productivity, not just corporate CEOs and the billionaire class.

It’s time to reduce the stress level in our country and allow Americans to enjoy a better quality of life. It’s time for a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay.

This is not a radical idea.

In fact, movement in that direction is already taking place in other developed countries.

France, the seventh-largest economy in the world, has a 35-hour work week and is considering reducing it to 32. As a result of strong unions, the standard workweek for most employees in Denmark is about 37 hours, and Belgium has already adopted a four-day work week.

In 2023, the trade union movement in Germany won a 32-hour work week for metalworkers, while autoworkers at Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz have 35-hour work weeks. In December, Lamborghini announced that it would be moving to a four-day work week after union workers established a guiding principle: “Work less and work better.”

Pilot programs in the UK and South Africa have found that worker productivity and business revenue both go up with a four-day work week. In other words, a 32-hour work week with no loss in pay is good for workers and good for business.

In the US and Canada, more than two-thirds of workers showed less job burnout; anxiety and fatigue declined for roughly 40%; and 60% reported more success achieving a work-family balance. Almost every participant wanted to continue the program, company turnover fell by more than 20% and absenteeism by 39%. And when Microsoft tested a four-day work week in Japan, it reported a 40% increase in productivity.

Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, and Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, both said last year that the advancements in technology would lead to a three- or three-and-a-half-day work week in the coming years.

As much as technology and worker productivity has exploded in recent years, there is no debate that new breakthroughs in artificial intelligence and robotics will only accelerate the transformation of our economy. Major industries like auto manufacturers are undergoing once-in-a-generation transformations, and our jobs are changing with them.

The question is: Who will benefit from this transformation? Will it be the billionaire class, or workers?

In my view, the choice is obvious.

Eighty-six years after Roosevelt signed a 40-hour work week into law, it’s time for us to move to a 32-hour work week at no loss of pay.