Labor Notes

Because of being so immersed in the horribleness of daily politics, I haven’t really been doing enough labor blogging of late. This is bad on my part and I need to get back to it. Here’s a few stories to help catch everyone up.

1) With so much tech work being outsourced to India, it’s really promising for all tech workers that Indians are starting to demand unions.

2) Trump may have friends in Bangkok as the Thai prime minister is forced to backtrack on a huge deportation campaign based on a new migrant labor law.

3) When we think about undocumented workers from Latin America, we almost reflexively assume they are Latinos who speak Spanish. But that is very often not the case. They are frequently indigenous people who do not speak Spanish. This leads to a whole set of unique issues, some of which replicate racism within Latin America and others that stem from the white American assumption that everyone must speak Spanish. Around these intertwined issues of race, indigeneity, and labor exploitation, indigenous Oaxacan migrants in Washington have started their own union in the agricultural industry.

4) Despite successful Republican and corporate kidnapping of the word “freedom,” unions are what provide workers freedom, not employers.

5) The run of the Iron Stache, Randy Bryce, a member of the Ironworkers, against Paul Ryan could be interesting and will get a lot of grassroots support.

6) Would you go see a play written by Mark Rylance about the Homestead Strike? I know I would!