Scott Jennings Hammers Randi Weingarten on Pandemic School Closures -- on CNN! (VIDEO)

This exchange received pretty big news coverage last week. 

WATCH:

The Great Teacher Resignation

Interesting article, though it downplays leftist indoctrination in the schools. Otherwise, do doubt America's teachers are fucked.

See, "Empty Classrooms, Abandoned Kids: Inside America’s Great Teacher Resignation."

Good video at the link.

TikTok Influencers Push to Unionize Amazon

These people are kids with millions of followers on social media.  And they're demanding Amazon pay its workers $30.00 an hour. Right. Fucking brats. 

At WaPo, "Gen Z TikTok creators are turning against Amazon":

A coalition of top TikTok stars is pledging to cease all work with Amazon — including shutting down storefronts and halting new partnerships with the e-commerce platform — until the company meets the demands of the Amazon Labor Union.

Boasting a combined following of over 51 million, the group of 70 TikTok creators says that the campaign, called the “People Over Prime Pledge,” is designed to pressure Amazon to meet the requests of its workers, which include a $30 minimum wage, increased paid time off and halting activities the group considers “union busting.”

“Amazon’s widespread mistreatment of their workers and blatant use of union busting tactics will no longer be tolerated by the TikTok Community,” reads a statement from Gen Z For Change, an advocacy group that coordinated the pledge and works frequently with creators.

Amazon Labor Union, which did not help organize the People Over Prime Pledge, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The campaign is a public setback for Amazon, which has sought to develop tighter relationships with young influencers in recent years. In 2017, the company launched the Amazon Influencer Program, allowing creators to earn revenue by recommending products in personalized Amazon storefronts. Earlier this year, Amazon flew more than a dozen Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok stars to a luxurious retreat in Mexico to encourage influencers to grow their presence on the platform. In June, Amazon built a massive VIP lounge at VidCon, an annual conference for online video stars, where influencers could learn about ways to work more closely with the company.

Instagram knows you don't like its changes. It doesn't care.

“I think their method of offering influencers life-changing payouts to make them feel as if they need to work with them while also refusing to pay their workers behind the scenes is extremely wrong,” said Emily Rayna Shaw, 24, a TikTok creator with 5.4 million followers who has partnered with Amazon in the past. “I want to feel comfortable recommending Amazon products to my community because it is so reliable, but I can’t do so until I know that they are treating their workers fairly.”

Many of the creators behind the People over Prime Pledge have done promotional deals with the company but plan to shut down their storefronts and decline future partnerships because of concerns over worker treatment. Creators who have worked with Amazon say that the company requires them to sign nondisparagement agreements, so that they can’t speak negatively about the platform even when the deals are over.

Amazon — which is the second-largest private employer in the U.S., where it has a higher rate of worker injuries than its competitors — has increasingly become a target for organized labor. In April, the independent Amazon Labor Union won an election at a large fulfillment center in Staten Island, marking a major union victory. Amazon workers are also organizing facilities in Bessemer, Ala.; Garner, N.C.; Albany, N.Y.; Campbellsville, Ky., and San Bernardino, Calif.

But the company has cracked down on these efforts, disciplining, firing, and even calling the police on some workers who show support for unions. The National Labor Relations Board has said some of the company’s conduct violates labor law, but the agency has limited resources to police a company of Amazon’s size. Even at the warehouse where Amazon Labor Union won the election, the company has successfully delayed the start of the contract-bargaining process, which itself could take months or years to complete.

[Amazon could stymie unions for years by going to the courts.]

Jackie James, 19, a TikTok creator with 3.4 million followers said that she will not be doing deals with Amazon until they change their ways. “As an influencer, it’s important to choose the right companies to work with,” she said. “I don’t think that workers should be treated the way they are under Amazon.”

Yet as labor organizing efforts within Amazon have hit speed bumps — Amazon Labor Union lost a second election in Staten Island in May — the movement has remained high profile, attracting support from Sen. Bernie Sanders and President Biden. Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls appeared on a prominent Twitch stream last week, and the hashtag #hotlaborsummer has popped up on Twitter.

Amazon has previously denied discontent among its workers, arguing turnover is a function of the company’s flexibility. “A large percentage of people we hire are re-hires, showing that they will choose to work for us when they want to,” Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokeswoman, told The Post in June. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.

“We’re demanding that Amazon listen to their workers and make changes to provide a healthy workplace environment,” said Aidan Kohn-Murphy, founder of Gen Z For Change, who also posts on TikTok. “Until Amazon institutes these changes, we as creators will block Amazon from monetizing one of the largest social media platforms in the world.” ...

College-Educated Workers Head to Amazon, Starbucks, Looking for Jobs

And REI as well.

Hey, "creative destruction," and all that!

The makings of a new American college-educated proletariat!

At the New York Times, "The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class":

Over the past decade-and-a-half, many young, college-educated workers have faced a disturbing reality: that it was harder for them to reach the middle class than for previous generations. The change has had profound effects — driving shifts in the country’s politics and mobilizing employees to demand fairer treatment at work. It may also be giving the labor movement its biggest lift in decades.

Members of this college-educated working class typically earn less money than they envisioned when they went off to school. “It’s not like anyone is expecting to make six figures,” said Tyler Mulholland, who earns about $23 an hour as a sales lead at REI, the outdoor equipment retailer, and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education. “But when it’s snow storming at 11:30 at night, I don’t want to have to think, ‘Is the Uber home going to make a difference in my weekly budget?’”

In many cases, the workers have endured bouts of unemployment. After Clint Shiflett, who holds an associate degree in computer science, lost his job installing satellite dishes in early 2020, he found a cheaper place to live and survived on unemployment insurance for months. He was eventually hired at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama, where he initially made about $17.50 an hour working the overnight shift.

And they complain of being trapped in jobs that don’t make good use of their skills. Liz Alanna, who holds a bachelor’s in music education and a master’s in opera performance, began working at Starbucks while auditioning for music productions in the early 2010s. She stayed with the company to preserve her health insurance after getting married and having children.

“I don’t think I should have to have a certain job just so I can have health care,” Ms. Alanna said. “I could be doing other types of jobs that might fall better in my wheelhouse.”

These experiences, which economic research shows became more common after the Great Recession, appear to have united many young college-educated workers around two core beliefs: They have a sense that the economic grand bargain available to their parents — go to college, work hard, enjoy a comfortable lifestyle — has broken down. And they see unionizing as a way to resurrect it.

Support for labor unions among college graduates has increased from 55 percent in the late 1990s to around 70 percent in the last few years, and is even higher among younger college graduates, according to data provided by Gallup. “I think a union was really kind of my only option to make this a viable choice for myself and other people,” said Mr. Mulholland, 32, who helped lead the campaign to unionize his Manhattan REI store in March. Mr. Shiflett and Ms. Alanna have also been active in the campaigns to unionize their workplaces.

And those efforts, in turn, may help explain an upsurge for organized labor, with filings for union elections up more than 50 percent over a similar period one year ago.

Though a minority at most nonprofessional workplaces, college-educated workers are playing a key role in propelling them toward unionization, experts say, because the college-educated often feel empowered in ways that others don’t. “There’s a class confidence, I would call it,” said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist of labor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “A broader worldview that encompasses more than getting through the day.”

While other workers at companies like Starbucks and Amazon are also supportive of unions and sometimes take the initiative in forming them, the presence of the college-educated in these jobs means there is a “layer of people who particularly have their antennae up,” Ms. Milkman added. “There is an additional layer of leadership.”

That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising. Over the past decade, the companies’ appetite for workers has grown substantially. Starbucks increased its global work force to nearly 385,000 last year from about 135,000 in 2010. Amazon’s work force swelled to 1.6 million from 35,000 during that period.

The companies appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers. And they offer solid wages and benefits for their industries — even, for that matter, compared with some other industries that employ the college-educated...

Still more.

 

Union Head Randi Weingarten Says Parents Are Stoking the Flames of War (VIDEO)

At Red State, "Randi Weingarten is the President of the American Federation of Teachers and perhaps the person who is most to blame for the horrific abuse our children have suffered in the public education system over the last two years ... On a recent podcast, the AFT President suggested the current trend of parental interest and parental rights activism is “propaganda” and intimated that parents fighting for their liberties is akin to stoking warfare."

WATCH: 

What Students With Disabilities Lost to COVID.

From Glenn Reynolds, at Instapundit, "THEY DIDN’T LOSE IT TO COVID, THEY LOST IT TO THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE TEACHERS’ UNIONS."

Fallout From the Pandemic: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading

If last November's elections are any guide, next to gas prices inflation, K-12 education will be the most volatile electoral issue facing congressional Democrats in this years midterms.

At the New York,Times, "It’s ‘Alarming’: Children Are Severely Behind in Reading":

BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — The kindergarten crisis of last year, when millions of 5-year-olds spent months outside of classrooms, has become this year’s reading emergency.

As the pandemic enters its third year, a cluster of new studies now show that about a third of children in the youngest grades are missing reading benchmarks, up significantly from before the pandemic.

In Virginia, one study found that early reading skills were at a 20-year low this fall, which the researchers described as “alarming.”

In the Boston region, 60 percent of students at some high-poverty schools have been identified as at high risk for reading problems — twice the number of students as before the pandemic, according to Tiffany P. Hogan, director of the Speech and Language Literacy Lab at the MGH Institute of Health Professions in Boston.

Children in every demographic group have been affected, but Black and Hispanic children, as well as those from low-income families, those with disabilities and those who are not fluent in English, have fallen the furthest behind.

“We’re in new territory,” Dr. Hogan said about the pandemic’s toll on reading. If children do not become competent readers by the end of elementary school, the risks are “pretty dramatic,” she said. Poor readers are more likely to drop out of high school, earn less money as adults and become involved in the criminal justice system.

The literacy crisis did not start with the pandemic. In 2019, results on national and international exams showed stagnant or declining American performance in reading, and widening gaps between high and low performers. The causes are multifaceted, but many experts point to a shortage of educators trained in phonics and phonemic awareness — the foundational skills of linking the sounds of spoken English to the letters that appear on the page. The pandemic has compounded those issues. Children spent months out of the classroom, where they were supposed to learn the basics of reading — the ABCs, what sound a “b” or “ch” makes. Many first and second graders returned to classrooms needing to review parts of the kindergarten curriculum. But nearly half of public schools have teaching vacancies, especially in special education and the elementary grades, according to a federal survey conducted in December and January.

Even students with well-trained teachers have had far fewer hands-on hours with them than before the pandemic, which has been defined by closures, uneven access to online instruction, quarantine periods and — even on the best days — virus-related interruptions to regular classroom routines. Now, schools are under pressure to boost literacy as quickly as possible so students gain the reading skills they need to learn the rest of the curriculum, from math word problems to civics lessons. Billions of federal stimulus dollars are flowing to districts for tutoring and other supports, but their effect may be limited if schools cannot find quality staff members to hire...

 

The Left's Culture War as Class War (VIDEO)

It's Batya Ungar-Sargon, at the Hill-TV:

And check out her book, at Amazon, Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy.

The C.R.T. Scam

 From Jason Riley, at WSJ, "Critical Race Theory Is a Hustle":

Ultimately, Critical Race Theory is about blaming your problems on other people—based on their race—which might be the last thing we should be teaching our children, writes @jasonrileywsj https://t.co/RGzagC1qOv

— WSJ Editorial Page (@WSJopinion) July 14, 2021

A majority of American fourth- and eighth-graders can’t read or do math at grade level, according to the Education Department. And that assessment is from 2019, before the learning losses from pandemic school closures. Whenever someone asks me about critical race theory, that statistic comes to mind. What’s the priority, teaching math and reading, or turning elementary schools into social-justice boot camps?

Given that black and Hispanic students are more likely to be lagging academically, it’s a question that anyone professing to care deeply about social inequality might consider. Learning gaps manifest themselves in all kinds of ways later in life, from unemployment rates and income levels to the likelihood of teenage pregnancy, substance abuse and involvement with the criminal-justice system. Our jails and prisons already have too many woke illiterates.

Wealthier parents will make sure their kids receive a decent education, even if it means using private schools or hiring tutors. But the majority of children are relegated to the traditional public-school system, where progressives now want to prioritize the teaching of critical race theory. In addition to being a horrible idea, the timing couldn’t be worse. As the country rapidly diversifies—for more than a decade, U.S. population growth has been driven primarily by Asians and Hispanics—liberals want to teach children to obsess over racial and ethnic differences. What could go wrong?

Recently, the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, announced that they had jumped on the bandwagon. At its annual meeting earlier this month, the NEA adopted a proposal stating that it is “reasonable and appropriate for curriculum to be informed by academic frameworks for understanding and interpreting the impact of the past on current society, including critical race theory.” More, the organization pledged to “fight back against anti-CRT rhetoric” and issue a study that “critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society.” There was no proposal vowing to improve math and reading test scores, alas.

Meanwhile, the NEA’s sister outfit, the American Federation of Teachers, has joined forces with Ibram X. Kendi, an activist-scholar who openly embraces racial discrimination against whites. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” Mr. Kendi asserted in “How to Be an Anti-Racist.” Sadly, that sort of circular drivel is what passes for deep thinking on race today. Mr. Kendi spoke at an AFT conference last week, and the union announced that it will donate copies of his writings to schools, AFT members, educators and youth mentors.

Critical-race ideology is also entering the classroom via the New York Times “1619 Project,” which claims that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery and earned its creator, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize. In a forthcoming book, “Woke Racism,” the humanities professor John McWhorter argues that proponents like Mr. Kendi and Ms. Hannah-Jones have mostly been given a pass because they’re racial minorities, they’re on the left, and criticizing them is politically incorrect.

“On the issue of the Revolutionary War, Hannah-Jones’s claim is simply false, but our current cultural etiquette requires pretending that isn’t true—because she’s black,” Mr. McWhorter writes. “Someone has received a Pulitzer Prize for a mistaken interpretation of historical documents about which legions of actual scholars are expert. Meanwhile, the claim is being broadcast, unquestioned, in educational materials being distributed across the nation.”

Mr. McWhorter is right to point out the racial double standards at work in elevating shoddy pseudoscholarship...

A lot could go wrong, apparently.

Still more. 

L.A. Teachers' Union Demands Vaccinations Before School Reopenings

Well, I can't say I'm surprised. 

This whole state is completely messed up. Well, actually, Newhall schools, up by Santa Clarita, announced they'll open up for in-person instruction, but they're obviously an outlier from the leftist insanity.

At LAT, "No quick path to reopening L.A. Unified is emerging as school year slips away":

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s new plan to vaccinate school staff more quickly does little to move campuses toward reopening in Los Angeles, where the teachers union remains opposed until community infection rates drop further and vaccines take full effect for returning workers — calling into question whether a robust return to in-person instruction is possible before the end of the school year.

The union’s posture — similar to that of school employee unions in San Francisco and of the California Teachers Assn. — comes as union leaders in the nation’s second-largest school district continue protracted negotiations with officials over what a return to school will look like and as parents in diverse areas of the city express passionate and opposing views over reopening.

United Teachers Los Angeles President Cecily Myart-Cruz said the union is holding firm to protect the health of students and their families as well as its members, who include teachers, librarians, counselors and nurses.

“Now more than ever we are feeling the pressure to return to physical schools before we have the necessary conditions and measures in place to ensure the safety of everyone. And the pressure is coming from all sides,” Myart-Cruz said in a Friday broadcast to members and the public. “Local and state officials did not help create the right conditions to reopen schools for in-person instruction and educators are being targeted for trying to protect our students and our communities.”

Myart-Cruz also left open the possibility that union members would refuse to return to work if their safety concerns are not fully addressed. Union members will vote internally to clarify their position in early March, she said.

Schools Supt. Austin Beutner has not announced any firm plans for reopening campuses — and has also echoed concerns that vaccinated school employees and lower coronavirus rates are critical elements to the safe reopening of campuses for the 465,000 students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

The stances of both the union and Beutner are more cautious than the latest guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which endorses the immediate reopening of elementary campuses, provided they follow strict safety procedures.

Students and parents allied with the union expressed their fears about reopening too quickly during a downtown car caravan rally and news conference Saturday. Parents emphasized that Black and Latino families have been devastated by the virus and said they do not believe community conditions are safe enough to reopen...

"Black and Latino" students? Are there any others attending L.A.U.S.D.? 

Well, in fact, the district has a small number, 8.8 percent, of white students, stuck in the circus, and those kids are being held hostage by "woke" teachers, and especially "woke" and lazy parents, whose kids are no doubt eating up all the free food supplied by the district, while lounging around all day, with their parents letting those kids' minds "go to waste," and terribly so.  

School Reopenings in California: Whiter, Wealthier Communities More Likely to Bring Back Students

Well, if poorer minority communities are less likely to open schools for in-person instruction, who's fault is that? Certainly not the kids'. 

I don't think California's as bad as Chicago, Illinois, but our state could certainly be doing a better job, and the blame can certainly be placed right at Governor Newsom's feet, who's likely to be facing recall, if those signature petitions, now circulating statewide, gain enough valid signatures. 

We'll see. We'll see.

Meanwhile, at LAT, "Schools in more affluent areas move faster to reopen than those in low-income communities":

South Whittier schools Supt. Gary Gonzales works seven days a week to move his elementary schools closer to reopening. But the barriers are significant: He’s looking for ways to get vaccines to teachers, negotiating with the union and closely monitoring coronavirus case numbers that show that the virus is still ravaging his community, even as case numbers fall countywide.

Gonzales knows his district’s students, almost all of whom are Latinos from low-income families, are struggling under remote learning. And he knows his community is hurting — the pandemic has claimed 118 lives in tiny South Whittier. A date for bringing students back to the classroom is unclear.

“It’s all kind of wait and see,” he said.

Thirty miles away, Supt. Wendy Sinnette of the La Cañada Unified School District, which has among the lowest coronavirus rates in the county and few students from low-income families, has been focused on reopening as many classrooms as possible since November, when students in transitional kindergarten through second grade returned to campus. Third-graders will be welcomed back on Tuesday.

Sinnette spends her days ensuring desks are socially distanced, teachers have KN-95 masks and acrylic plastic dividers are installed.

“When I go on campus and see the in-person instruction that’s happening, it really makes you understand why you’re doing all of this,” she said. “Kids need the structure, to be in school.”

A Times survey of more than 20 school districts throughout Los Angeles County in the past two weeks has found that districts in wealthier, whiter communities such as La Cañada are more likely to be moving full steam ahead to reopen elementary schools and have plans in place to welcome students back as soon as permitted — within as little as two weeks if coronavirus infection rates continue to decline.

They were among the first to bring back their youngest students under waivers and guidelines allowing in-person instruction for high-needs students. These districts are building on that momentum to quickly expand their reopening.

Districts serving less affluent Latino and Black communities — some of the hardest hit by the pandemic — are further behind. Their leaders spoke of the suffering and fears of their families in the darkest months of the pandemic. School officials, measuring the hardships within their communities, largely did not use waivers to bring back young students.

Their teachers and staff, too, harbor ongoing worries about the trajectory of the virus in the neighborhoods they serve. Although they want to bring students back to school, many said their reopening date was uncertain...

Well, maybe if we change some of the names of schools around the state that will make everything all better? 

Still more, in any case.

 

We're All in This Together!

At Blazing Cat Fur.

'Higher levels of drug abuse and overdoses, massive increases in mental health hospital visits, along with surging suicide rates among children have been cited by the Centers for Disease Control as stemming from pandemic school closures...'

At Issues & Insights, "The Real Reason Why Your Kids Can’t Go Back to School (Hint: It’s Not COVID-19)."

A New Social Movement in Los Angeles?

This is interesting.

At the Los Angeles Times, "How L.A. teachers scored a decisive political victory with strike":

Los Angeles is often criticized for its lack of public engagement and low voter turnout, and as a place where neighborhoods have a sense of community but the city overall feels fragmented.

But the nation saw a different side of L.A. when last week’s teachers’ strike galvanized the city. Thousands of red-clad teachers marched and rallied on the streets, drawing vocal support not just from residents and parents but from politicians and celebrities eager to back their cause.

By keeping a tight message and engaging parents, the United Teachers Los Angeles union and its president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, were able to highlight issues of inequality and L.A.’s struggling school system in a way that supporters hope has lasting significance.

Over the six-day walkout, teachers made the strike less about their salaries than about class sizes, services for children and the future of public education. Many parents in Los Angeles have fled traditional public schools in favor of charter schools, which are expanding rapidly across the city.

The strike may not have hurt the allure of charters to parents frustrated with the Los Angeles Unified School District. But it brought attention to the financial toll that defections are having on the school system and the difficult learning conditions, especially for students from lower-income families, in L.A. Unified.

The union’s message was that “public education is rooted in democracy and in the tradition of the school district,” said Charles Kerchner, a labor relations historian and professor emeritus at Claremont Graduate University. “They were actively selling this idea to parents, to the public.

“UTLA and Alex handled this brilliantly,” he added. “It almost became a movement.”

The long-term implications of the strike are unclear. The teachers union remains in an uncertain position, with half the current members of the L.A. Board of Education having been elected with backing from charter advocates. That could change in March with a special election for the board’s seventh seat.

Moreover, it’s hard to know whether other labor movements would have similar success without the issue of childhood education in the forefront.

Some see the teachers’ strike as a larger increase in political engagement that began with the election of President Trump in 2016 and the many protests that came with the blue “resistance” in California. That continued in 2018, when Democrats took several key House seats across the state in areas once considered safely Republican.

“You’re having a consecutive number of events where people are in the streets or supporting people in the streets,” said Jaime Regalado, professor emeritus of political science at Cal State L.A., adding that there’s a “spirit of resistance, a spirit of support” in California in the Trump era.

Time will tell how long this shift will last. Los Angeles has become notorious for its low voter turnout in local elections, which hit an all-time low of about 18% in the 2009 mayor’s race and was only 20% when Eric Garcetti was reelected.

Union leaders said preliminary counts show the agreement was approved by a large majority, but the contract between L.A. Unified and the teachers union wasn’t universally embraced by educators, and UTLA’s Facebook page was flooded with complaints Tuesday about the agreement. Some teachers complained it was vague on details and watered down. Also, gains were modest on reducing class sizes compared with what union leaders said publicly.

Still, the union achieved its goal, at least temporarily, of uniting parents, educators and their supporters. Downtown rallies backing educators over the last week followed several other recent marches in Los Angeles focused on gun violence and women’s rights.

The strike gained momentum as images of marching teachers spread, but parents also played a key role as they picketed alongside their children’s teachers or had their kids stay home...

More.

I don't like teachers' unions, but I like school administrators even less. Thus I'm giving it up for UTLA, and especially for the families which might indeed see some improved services.

The school district's student population is more than 75 percent Latino. A lot of these students are the first in their families to get a grade school education, if not a majority of them. If these same students go on to college and graduate, their levels of education are light years away from their parents and grandparents, most of whom came to the U.S. as scrub-poor migrant laborers.

Do something for the people, the regular people, in this state for once. The Bay Area elites, with the Sacramento Democrat cronies, are killing California. And don't even get me going about the stupid Eric Garcetti Democrat-Party machine in Los Angeles. Ugh, the evil is through the roof with these ghouls.

About the Los Angeles Teachers' Strike

At Theo Spark's, "About that 'teacher's strike'..................from Rico."

Vivian Malauulu Beats Incumbent Irma Archuleta in Race for LBCC District Board Election

This is good news for my faculty union, which has been campaigning hard to elect a pro-faculty majority to the college's elected board of trustees. With Malauulu's election, the college will now have two strongly pro-faculty members of the board

At the Long Beach Press-Telegram, "Long Beach election: Doug Otto, Vivian Malauulu win LBCC races."

Cal State Faculty Agree to Tentative Contract

Perhaps the threat of the strike brought about some concessions from the CSU negotiators.

I hope so, because my union's in contract negotiations with my college, and it's time to bring the heat on the administration.

At LAT, "Cal State faculty union postpones planned strike after tentative salary agreement is reached."

As Investors Circle, Organized Labor Moves Into Digital Media

This is interesting.

At WSJ, "Vice Media’s recent move is part of a broader unionization push at outlets as the industry also seeks investments":

Earlier this month, when writers at Vice Media were emailing about the potential benefits of unionizing, one employee brought up company co-founder Shane Smith’s purchase of a $23 million mansion in Santa Monica, Calif., a house featured in “Beverly Hills Cop” and the HBO show “Entourage.”

“For next time [management] says they can’t afford to give us raises,” the employee wrote, posting a link to an article about the real-estate deal.

Two days later, on Aug. 7, the writers voted to join the Writers Guild of America, East.

The move at Vice is part of a broader unionization push in the digital media world. This summer, the WGA and another union, News Guild-CWA, have also signed up writers at Gawker Media and Salon.com, and say they’re actively trying to make inroads elsewhere.

As online media outlets grow in heft—generating significant revenue and earning eye-popping valuations in investment rounds—their workers are beginning to argue they deserve better compensation and employment protections. Vice, whose edgy brand of online content and TV has caught on with young audiences, is a new-media powerhouse that was valued at $2.5 billion in its last investment round.

But the labor organizing movement is happening at what is arguably the most inopportune moment for the industry, just as it is attracting attention from strategic investors who can inject a huge amount of capital into their fledgling businesses. Big media companies are scouting the space aggressively as they chase young audiences, and while unions won’t necessarily be a hang-up in deals, they won’t be a selling point.

Skeptics say collective bargaining may not make sense for these companies, and could counter some of the advantages they have over traditional newsrooms, such as nimble decision-making, flexible work roles, and, in some cases, a lower wage scale.

“It raises questions about the extent to which a union contract might encumber a company from being able to make rapid decisions,” said Iliya Rybchin, the director of the media and entertainment practice at venture capital firm Highnote Foundry, which isn’t an investor in any of the unionized companies. “With unions you also often have strong delineations about roles, and in young companies you usually want a lot of fluidity.”

Management at all of the new-media companies that have voted to unionize have recognized and accepted the decisions of their workers.

One investor who has been on the board of several digital media companies—none that have unionized—said the collective bargaining movement is a bad idea. “For a fast-changing, dynamic, tech-led industry the last thing you want are barriers to growth,” he said, adding that unions have “been a weight” on traditional newsrooms...

I suspect unionization's a really bad idea. But then, most of these outlets are on the far-left. We'll see.

But keep reading.

Scott Walker at Iowa State Fair: 'I am not intimidated...' (VIDEO)

Here's the headline at Politico, via Memeorandum, "Scott Walker tries to make hay out of heckling incident."

Watch, "Scott Walker to Protester: 'I Am Not Intimidated'."

Also at Legal Insurrection. "Scott Walker Confronts Union Protesters at Iowa State Fair."

Jeremy Corbyn to 'Bring Back Clause IV' of Labour Party Constitution, Which Would Take Public Ownship of British Industry

Corbyn's a communist.

At the Independent UK, "Jeremy Corbyn to 'bring back Clause IV': Contender pledges to bury New Labour with commitment to public ownership of industry":

Jeremy Corbyn has risked provoking a damaging row at the heart of the Labour Party by pledging to restore Clause Four if he is elected leader next month.

In an interview with The Independent on Sunday, the man who has set alight the leadership race says the party needs to reinstate a clear commitment to public ownership of industry in a move which would reverse one of the defining moments in Labour’s history.

Mr Corbyn’s pledge will enrage many MPs and party members who see Tony Blair’s abolition of the old Clause Four two decades ago as a symbolic and essential move which recognised the importance of markets and made Labour electable.

However, the MP for Islington North, who believes he has captured a changing public mood, said voters, including the thousands who are signing up to Labour to vote for him, wanted to see a better return on public investment in railways and other infrastructure.

Asked if he wanted to restore the clause to the party’s constitution, Mr Corbyn said: “I think we should talk about what the objectives of the party are, whether that’s restoring Clause Four as it was originally written or it’s a different one. But we shouldn’t shy away from public participation, public investment in industry and public control of the railways.”

But his leadership rival Liz Kendall told the IoS: “This shows there is nothing new about Corbyn’s politics. It is just a throwback to the past, not the change we need for our party or our country. We are a party of the future not a preservation society.”

Keep reading.

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