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E. Palestine LIUNA Member Calls For Meeting With AFL-CIO Pres Liz Schuler & For Stafford Act NOW!
"The Situation Is All Under Control" UAL1992 Loses Engine & Has Emergency Landing In Chicago
Zionists On UC Regents & Police Do Damage Control For Criminal Attack on Peaceful UCLA Encampment
UCLA slammed for ‘chaotic’ response to protest melee in UC independent review
…https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-14/ucla-slammed-for-chaotic-response-to-violent-protest-melee-in-uc-independent-review
A pro-Palestinian protester, right, is punched by a counterprotester at a UCLA encampment.
A pro-Palestinian protester is punched by a counterprotester during a violent melee at UCLA in April. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
By Teresa Watanabe and Jaweed Kaleem
Nov. 14, 2024 Updated 9:31 PM PT
Share
UCLA failed to protect students from protest fallout in spring because of “chaotic” decision making and other shortcomings, an independent review found.
UCLA should develop a detailed incident response plan, designate a commander, improve police coordination.
UCLA failed to protect students from a protest melee this spring because a “highly chaotic” decision-making process, lack of communication among campus leaders and police, and other shortfalls led to institutional paralysis, according to a University of California independent review released Thursday.
The highly anticipated review, conducted by a national law enforcement consulting agency, found myriad failures and breakdowns by UCLA administrators and police after pro-Palestinian students set up a late April encampment, which drew complaints of antisemitic behavior. The encampment came under a violent attack by counterprotesters in early May, fomenting widespread outrage and attention.
The review found that UCLA had no detailed plan for handling major protests, even as problems were “reasonably foreseeable” as encampments springing up at other campuses were drawing at times violent conflict. UCLA leaders had not identified who should control decision-making and at times shut out campus police from meetings.
For their part, campus police had no effective plan to work with external law enforcement and failed to take command on the night of the melee — leading the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol to devise an ad-hoc response, the review said.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – May 1: A pro-Israeli supporter throws a bottle of water at the Pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA early Wednesday morning. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
dified plans existed, UCLA administrators engaged in a chaotic process in which they needed to make difficult decisions … in the midst of ongoing disruption, without clarity on who maintained final decision-making authority, lacking a commonly understood process for reaching decisions, and largely lacking the ability to react quickly to fast-changing events and dynamic circumstances on campus,” the report by 21st Century Policing Solutions concluded.
UCLA, in a response late Thursday, said it was committed to campus safety and would learn from the events of this spring.
“We appreciate the work that went into producing the report, and will continue to implement the recommended reforms — many of which are already underway,” the university statement said.
A call for reforms
The review recommended that UCLA take key actions:
Develop a detailed response plan
Provide better training of civilian staff and police
Increase real-time communications about campus disruptions
Hire more civilians to help mediate conflicts before law enforcement is called in
The report was based on tens of thousands of documents and interviews with current and former UCLA administrators, faculty, staff, students and law enforcement over five months. It comes after two other major reports criticized UCLA for its protest response.
A report to the Los Angeles Police Commission found a confusing breakdown in coordinating actions among UCLA, the LAPD, California Highway Patrol and smaller municipal police agencies that were hastily called to campus in the spring. The Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce also criticized UCLA and other elite universities, including Harvard and Columbia, for “dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism.”
UC President Michael V. Drake said in a statement Thursday that the goal of the UCLA review was to learn what reforms were needed to prevent a recurrence of the shortcomings, while safeguarding campus health and safety, equal access to educational facilities and 1st Amendment rights to free speech.
“Last spring, as conflict spread at universities across the country, we saw the limits of our traditional approach,” Drake said. “We are taking a close, detailed look at where we fell short and how we can do better moving forward. This comprehensive review and these recommendations will help ensure that we have actionable plans and policies in place to prevent similar events from happening again.”
Los Angeles, CA – April 25: Pro-Palestine protesters gather at an encampment on the campus of UCLA at UCLA Thursday, April 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
CALIFORNIA
UC regents: Protests yes, encampments no. Campus rules must be consistently enforced
July 15, 2024
Drake noted that UCLA has started making changes, including launching some of the actions recommended by the consulting group. They include setting up an Office of Campus Safety, with oversight over the UCLA police department and Office of Emergency Management, and hiring an associate vice chancellor to lead it. UCLA hired Rick Braziel, a former Sacramento police chief and expert in law enforcement response reviews, for that role earlier this year on a temporary contract; he has begun to overhaul safety and security operations.
In the long term, the review said, UCLA should convene a campuswide conversation to reach agreement on the proper role of police. Some faculty and students, for instance, want to eliminate police from campus entirely and use trained civilian mediators instead to address problems — using outside law enforcement to handle serious crimes.
“This central tension — whether and how police provide public safety, and for whom — is part of a national conversation about the role of police and the meaning of public safety,” the review said. “UCLA has thus far responded to this tension ineffectively, by functionally excluding police from planning and engagement but then asking law enforcement to engage once tensions have escalated to violence.”
UCLA shortcomings revealed
The review provided a detailed look at UCLA’s failures and recommended how to fix future responses to campus unrest or emergencies.
Two groups of UCLA campus leaders mobilized to meet about the encampment and protests but were ineffective. One group of senior administrators excluded UCLA police and sowed frustration by the ”free-flowing debate, internecine conflict, and a notable lack of decision-making.”
Going forward, UCLA should appoint an “incident commander” with overall management responsibility and follow a well-known national model for emergency response.
Administrators and campus police should coordinate response plans and engage in joint training exercises. The UC systemwide community safety plan calls for “tiered responses” to protests, with law enforcement brought in as a last resort, but police were “almost entirely uninvolved” in decision-making.
Campus police, for instance, were not consulted when UCLA approved a permit for a pro-Israel rally to be set up next to the encampment two days before the melee. Police might have been able to warn about the potential danger of dueling protest groups next to each other; physical skirmishes did break out between them.
UCLA should update its agreements for mutual aid with other law enforcement agencies and specifically develop one with the LAPD to clarify what assistance can be provided.
UCLA should improve communications to both the campus and the public, which were “disjointed” during the spring protests.
The campus should hire a cadre of full-time, unarmed public safety officers empowered to intervene when people are flouting campus rules. That would fill the gap between part-time civilian staff, who mainly observe and report suspicious activity to police, and law enforcement, the review said.
‘Deeply troubling’ reports of antisemitism
The independent review came out after the UC Board of Regents met in San Francisco to discuss UCLA’s “campus climate” and three task force reports released this year that criticized the university response to allegations of antisemitism and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism.
In a 93-page report released last month, a UCLA task force on antisemitism described “broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus” among students, lecturers, faculty, staff and administrators.
The report, which surveyed hundreds of individuals contacted through Jewish organizations, found that 84% believed that antisemitism had “worsened or significantly worsened” since Oct. 7, 2023, and that roughly 70% said the spring encampment was “a source of antisemitism.” Another 40% said they experienced antisemitic discrimination in their time at UCLA.
Los Angeles, CA – April 25: Pro-Israeli protesters with their flags gather near an encampment set up by pro-Palestine protesters on the campus of UCLA at UCLA Thursday, April 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
CALIFORNIA
UCLA students and faculty raise alarm on antisemitic and anti-Palestinian hate amid ongoing protests
Two reports from the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, released in April and June, also decried campus being “less safe than ever” for those groups and said there was “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of them but did not provide survey data.
Regents spent about 40 minutes discussing the reports, with all but a few minutes focused on antisemitism.
“I am just shocked that in 2024 we have a report which alleges extensive antisemitism affecting Jewish students, faculty and staff at really one of the most prestigious universities in the world,” said Regent Rich Leib.
“We have lost our way,” he later added. “This is not a simple problem of enforcing our rules. We need to take stock and do everything in our power to restore our campuses to safe and sane places.”
Leib also criticized faculty leaders in the Academic Senate.
“This report clearly delineates numerous and frequent instances of faculty who violated the rules and joined the encampments or made comments in their classrooms that were not consistent with rules … yet the report indicates that not one faculty member was disciplined by the Academic Senate. That seems intolerable to me and has to change,” he said.
In response, Academic Senate Chair Steven W. Cheung told regents that faculty disciplinary processes were meant to “protect our due diligence rights, our rights to a hearing, and to make sure we are deliberative in our decision-making.” He said the Senate was not interested in “fossilized” processes and would welcome reviewing them with the regents.
Regent Jay Sures grilled UCLA Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt on the campus administration’s progress in investigating allegations of antisemitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents since Oct. 7, 2023, which Hunt said were in the “hundreds” on “both sides.”
Hunt said the investigations were ongoing and that “some of these cases can take up to a year to resolve.”
Drake called the antisemitism report “deeply troubling” and touted the university’s new systemwide office of civil rights that is dealing with discrimination across campuses.
“We can and we must do better,” Drake said.
UCLA failed to stem a violent protest melee last spring, as a “highly chaotic” decision-making process, lack of communication between administrators…
www.latimes.comZionists On UC Regents & Police Do Damage Control For Criminal Attack on Peaceful UCLA Encampment
UCLA slammed for ‘chaotic’ response to protest melee in UC independent review
…https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-11-14/ucla-slammed-for-chaotic-response-to-violent-protest-melee-in-uc-independent-review
A pro-Palestinian protester, right, is punched by a counterprotester at a UCLA encampment.
A pro-Palestinian protester is punched by a counterprotester during a violent melee at UCLA in April. (Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times)
By Teresa Watanabe and Jaweed Kaleem
Nov. 14, 2024 Updated 9:31 PM PT
Share
UCLA failed to protect students from protest fallout in spring because of “chaotic” decision making and other shortcomings, an independent review found.
UCLA should develop a detailed incident response plan, designate a commander, improve police coordination.
UCLA failed to protect students from a protest melee this spring because a “highly chaotic” decision-making process, lack of communication among campus leaders and police, and other shortfalls led to institutional paralysis, according to a University of California independent review released Thursday.
The highly anticipated review, conducted by a national law enforcement consulting agency, found myriad failures and breakdowns by UCLA administrators and police after pro-Palestinian students set up a late April encampment, which drew complaints of antisemitic behavior. The encampment came under a violent attack by counterprotesters in early May, fomenting widespread outrage and attention.
The review found that UCLA had no detailed plan for handling major protests, even as problems were “reasonably foreseeable” as encampments springing up at other campuses were drawing at times violent conflict. UCLA leaders had not identified who should control decision-making and at times shut out campus police from meetings.
For their part, campus police had no effective plan to work with external law enforcement and failed to take command on the night of the melee — leading the LAPD and the California Highway Patrol to devise an ad-hoc response, the review said.
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – May 1: A pro-Israeli supporter throws a bottle of water at the Pro-Palestinian encampment at UCLA early Wednesday morning. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
dified plans existed, UCLA administrators engaged in a chaotic process in which they needed to make difficult decisions … in the midst of ongoing disruption, without clarity on who maintained final decision-making authority, lacking a commonly understood process for reaching decisions, and largely lacking the ability to react quickly to fast-changing events and dynamic circumstances on campus,” the report by 21st Century Policing Solutions concluded.
UCLA, in a response late Thursday, said it was committed to campus safety and would learn from the events of this spring.
“We appreciate the work that went into producing the report, and will continue to implement the recommended reforms — many of which are already underway,” the university statement said.
A call for reforms
The review recommended that UCLA take key actions:
Develop a detailed response plan
Provide better training of civilian staff and police
Increase real-time communications about campus disruptions
Hire more civilians to help mediate conflicts before law enforcement is called in
The report was based on tens of thousands of documents and interviews with current and former UCLA administrators, faculty, staff, students and law enforcement over five months. It comes after two other major reports criticized UCLA for its protest response.
A report to the Los Angeles Police Commission found a confusing breakdown in coordinating actions among UCLA, the LAPD, California Highway Patrol and smaller municipal police agencies that were hastily called to campus in the spring. The Republican-led U.S. House Committee on Education and the Workforce also criticized UCLA and other elite universities, including Harvard and Columbia, for “dramatic failures in confronting antisemitism.”
UC President Michael V. Drake said in a statement Thursday that the goal of the UCLA review was to learn what reforms were needed to prevent a recurrence of the shortcomings, while safeguarding campus health and safety, equal access to educational facilities and 1st Amendment rights to free speech.
“Last spring, as conflict spread at universities across the country, we saw the limits of our traditional approach,” Drake said. “We are taking a close, detailed look at where we fell short and how we can do better moving forward. This comprehensive review and these recommendations will help ensure that we have actionable plans and policies in place to prevent similar events from happening again.”
Los Angeles, CA – April 25: Pro-Palestine protesters gather at an encampment on the campus of UCLA at UCLA Thursday, April 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
CALIFORNIA
UC regents: Protests yes, encampments no. Campus rules must be consistently enforced
July 15, 2024
Drake noted that UCLA has started making changes, including launching some of the actions recommended by the consulting group. They include setting up an Office of Campus Safety, with oversight over the UCLA police department and Office of Emergency Management, and hiring an associate vice chancellor to lead it. UCLA hired Rick Braziel, a former Sacramento police chief and expert in law enforcement response reviews, for that role earlier this year on a temporary contract; he has begun to overhaul safety and security operations.
In the long term, the review said, UCLA should convene a campuswide conversation to reach agreement on the proper role of police. Some faculty and students, for instance, want to eliminate police from campus entirely and use trained civilian mediators instead to address problems — using outside law enforcement to handle serious crimes.
“This central tension — whether and how police provide public safety, and for whom — is part of a national conversation about the role of police and the meaning of public safety,” the review said. “UCLA has thus far responded to this tension ineffectively, by functionally excluding police from planning and engagement but then asking law enforcement to engage once tensions have escalated to violence.”
UCLA shortcomings revealed
The review provided a detailed look at UCLA’s failures and recommended how to fix future responses to campus unrest or emergencies.
Two groups of UCLA campus leaders mobilized to meet about the encampment and protests but were ineffective. One group of senior administrators excluded UCLA police and sowed frustration by the ”free-flowing debate, internecine conflict, and a notable lack of decision-making.”
Going forward, UCLA should appoint an “incident commander” with overall management responsibility and follow a well-known national model for emergency response.
Administrators and campus police should coordinate response plans and engage in joint training exercises. The UC systemwide community safety plan calls for “tiered responses” to protests, with law enforcement brought in as a last resort, but police were “almost entirely uninvolved” in decision-making.
Campus police, for instance, were not consulted when UCLA approved a permit for a pro-Israel rally to be set up next to the encampment two days before the melee. Police might have been able to warn about the potential danger of dueling protest groups next to each other; physical skirmishes did break out between them.
UCLA should update its agreements for mutual aid with other law enforcement agencies and specifically develop one with the LAPD to clarify what assistance can be provided.
UCLA should improve communications to both the campus and the public, which were “disjointed” during the spring protests.
The campus should hire a cadre of full-time, unarmed public safety officers empowered to intervene when people are flouting campus rules. That would fill the gap between part-time civilian staff, who mainly observe and report suspicious activity to police, and law enforcement, the review said.
‘Deeply troubling’ reports of antisemitism
The independent review came out after the UC Board of Regents met in San Francisco to discuss UCLA’s “campus climate” and three task force reports released this year that criticized the university response to allegations of antisemitism and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism.
In a 93-page report released last month, a UCLA task force on antisemitism described “broad-based perceptions of antisemitic and anti-Israeli bias on campus” among students, lecturers, faculty, staff and administrators.
The report, which surveyed hundreds of individuals contacted through Jewish organizations, found that 84% believed that antisemitism had “worsened or significantly worsened” since Oct. 7, 2023, and that roughly 70% said the spring encampment was “a source of antisemitism.” Another 40% said they experienced antisemitic discrimination in their time at UCLA.
Los Angeles, CA – April 25: Pro-Israeli protesters with their flags gather near an encampment set up by pro-Palestine protesters on the campus of UCLA at UCLA Thursday, April 25, 2024 in Los Angeles, CA. (Ringo Chiu / For The Times)
CALIFORNIA
UCLA students and faculty raise alarm on antisemitic and anti-Palestinian hate amid ongoing protests
Two reports from the UCLA Task Force on Anti-Palestinian, Anti-Muslim, and Anti-Arab Racism, released in April and June, also decried campus being “less safe than ever” for those groups and said there was “increased harassment, violence, and targeting” of them but did not provide survey data.
Regents spent about 40 minutes discussing the reports, with all but a few minutes focused on antisemitism.
“I am just shocked that in 2024 we have a report which alleges extensive antisemitism affecting Jewish students, faculty and staff at really one of the most prestigious universities in the world,” said Regent Rich Leib.
“We have lost our way,” he later added. “This is not a simple problem of enforcing our rules. We need to take stock and do everything in our power to restore our campuses to safe and sane places.”
Leib also criticized faculty leaders in the Academic Senate.
“This report clearly delineates numerous and frequent instances of faculty who violated the rules and joined the encampments or made comments in their classrooms that were not consistent with rules … yet the report indicates that not one faculty member was disciplined by the Academic Senate. That seems intolerable to me and has to change,” he said.
In response, Academic Senate Chair Steven W. Cheung told regents that faculty disciplinary processes were meant to “protect our due diligence rights, our rights to a hearing, and to make sure we are deliberative in our decision-making.” He said the Senate was not interested in “fossilized” processes and would welcome reviewing them with the regents.
Regent Jay Sures grilled UCLA Interim Chancellor Darnell Hunt on the campus administration’s progress in investigating allegations of antisemitic, anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim incidents since Oct. 7, 2023, which Hunt said were in the “hundreds” on “both sides.”
Hunt said the investigations were ongoing and that “some of these cases can take up to a year to resolve.”
Drake called the antisemitism report “deeply troubling” and touted the university’s new systemwide office of civil rights that is dealing with discrimination across campuses.
“We can and we must do better,” Drake said.
UCLA failed to stem a violent protest melee last spring, as a “highly chaotic” decision-making process, lack of communication between administrators…
www.latimes.comUC Regents, Unions & The Struggle Against Genocide and Zionism
"Who Are The UC Regents?" UC People's Tribunal On Palestine Report On Who Runs UC and Zionism
Capitalism, Inflation, Trump & The Global Economic Crisis With Michael Roberts
Capitalism, Inflation, Trump & The Global Economic Crisis With Michael Roberts
https://youtu.be/Mtbpohwi8dM
The continuing inflation has in part led to the election of Trump. The growing threat of tariff trade war, inter-imperialist rivalry, massive speculation in crypto currency, a …massive financial crisis, AI and another world war are some of the issues addressed by
Marxist economist Michael Roberts in an interview. Roberts has been studying the capitalist economy for decades and talks about the systemic crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism as a solution to the crisis of capitalism. He also discusses
the role of BRICS and the threat to US imperialism with the growth of China and other countries that are supporting a new economic structure. This interview was done on 11/12/24.
Additional Media:
BRICS, China, Africa & The Crisis In Imperialism With Patrick Bond
https://youtu.be/ivRGKoGyAnc
Additional Information
Michael Roberts J Bloger Page
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com
WorkWeek
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Capitalism, Inflation, Trump & The Global Economic Crisis With Michael Roberts
https://youtu.be/Mtbpohwi8dM
The continuing inflation has in part led to the election of Trump. The growing threat of tariff trade war, inter-imperialist rivalry, massive speculation in crypto currency, a …massive financial crisis, AI and another world war are some of the issues addressed by
Marxist economist Michael Roberts in an interview. Roberts has been studying the capitalist economy for decades and talks about the systemic crisis of capitalism and the rise of fascism as a solution to the crisis of capitalism. He also discusses
the role of BRICS and the threat to US imperialism with the growth of China and other countries that are supporting a new economic structure. This interview was done on 11/12/24.
Additional Media:
BRICS, China, Africa & The Crisis In Imperialism With Patrick Bond
https://youtu.be/ivRGKoGyAnc
Additional Information
Michael Roberts J Bloger Page
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com
WorkWeek
https://soundcloud.com/workweek-radio
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
Fourth work death in week spurs Hong Kong labour rights groups to call for change
They say four fatal work-related accidents a consequence of issues such as substandard safety measures and lenient punishments for offenders, among others
…https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/3286289/fourth-work-death-week-spurs-hong-kong-labour-rights-groups-call-change?module=top_story&pgtype=section
Fourth work death in week spurs Hong Kong labour rights groups to call for change
They say four fatal work-related accidents a consequence of issues such as substandard safety measures and lenient punishments for offenders, among others
A workers’ rights advocate says Hong Kong’s multilayered subcontracting system is also to blame for poor site safety. Photo: Edmond So.jpeg
Emily Hung
Published: 10:54pm, 12 Nov 2024
A fourth fatal work accident in a week has prompted Hong Kong labour rights advocates to call for employers and authorities to fix systemic problems, including substandard safety measures, unreasonably low tender prices, lenient punishments for offenders and a flawed subcontracting system.
At a press conference on Tuesday, four workers’ rights groups and the family of a victim of a fatal industrial accident expressed their grievances and concerns, hours after a 77-year-old male cleaner fell into the sea at the Stonecutters Island public cargo working area and drowned.
Colleagues found the man’s body floating in the sea at 8.45am. He was later certified dead at Princess Margaret Hospital in Kwai Chung. A postmortem examination will be carried out to ascertain the cause of death.
It marked the fourth fatal work accident since last Tuesday. Two victims, aged 44 and 37, died after falling from scaffolding at a factory building and an airport terminal respectively, while a 41-year-old worker was crushed by a falling cage lift at a construction site.
Fay Siu Sin-man, chief executive of the Association for the Rights of Industrial Accident Victims, called the situation “alarming” and the industry had long been plagued by systemic problems, including the process for awarding tenders and lenient punishments for offenders.
“The tender is always awarded to the one offering the lowest price, how much attention and resources are being given to safety?” she said. “Aren’t we prioritising money over safety?”
She also criticised tight work schedules and the practice of conducting multiple operations on the same site, as well as the use of substandard safety devices, which were entrenched in the industry’s culture.
The multilayered subcontracting system was also to blame, she said, as safety messages were severely diluted when projects were outsourced.
“Currently, [the number of] subcontracting tiers could reach four or five. Reducing it to only two or three would be easier for the delivery of safety messages and more effective monitoring,” she said.
Ken Chan, who lost his younger brother to an industrial accident in May 2022, was also present at the briefing. He said the authorities should review lenient punishments for offenders who neglected industrial safety.
Chan said his brother had fallen from height when putting up scaffolding, but it took 1½ years after his death for his employer to be arrested.
The employer was found guilty of three charges under the Occupational Safety and Health Ordinance only last week and fined a meagre HK$90,000 (US$11,600), Chan added.
The employer had told the court he was struggling financially and was allowed to pay the fine in 90 instalments over 7½ years, or HK$1,000 per tranche.
“This is a very generous sentence,” Chan said. “It’s hardly a punishment, it’s meaningless.”
Chan said his father, who was seeking compensation for his son, had died recently and the family was still awaiting justice.
More than 100 people have lost their lives at work this year, including 11 from the construction industry, according to Siu’s association, which organised the briefing.
Representatives from the Federation of Hong Kong and Kowloon Labour Unions, Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee and Hong Kong Dumper Truck Drivers Association also spoke about the urgency of improving workplace safety.
Ho Wing-yip, a veteran electrical and building services engineer, said it was alarming that the city’s fatality rate among construction workers had surged from 0.093 per 1,000 in 2016 to 0.178 last year.
Last Tuesday, a 44-year-old male worker fell from the top of an 11-story factory building at To Kwa Wan while dismantling scaffolding.
Two days later, a 37-year-old male worker fell to his death from the sixth floor of the Terminal 2 concourse of Hong Kong International Airport. He reportedly lost his footing and fell to the fourth floor.
On Saturday, another male worker, 41, died after being crushed by a falling cage lift suspected to have been caused by a machine malfunction at a residential project site in Tai Wai.
The Post has approached the Labour and Welfare Bureau for its response to the groups’ demands.
They say four fatal work-related accidents a consequence of issues such as substandard safety measures and lenient punishments for offenders, among…
www.scmp.comUnion Busting And Privatizing Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges Pushing For Downsizing At CCSF
Leading SF City College vote-getter a fresh face
…https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/politics/2024-sf-election-results-city-college-trustees-almost-set/article_f7da111a-a151-11ef-a4fb-274c4cb5625c.html
By Allyson Aleksey | Examiner staff writer | Nov 12, 2024 Updated
Ohlone College history professor Heather McCarty was the top vote-getter, ahead of three incumbent City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees.
Courtesy of Heather McCarty for City College Board 2024
The leading vote-getter in the race to fill four seats on the City College of San Francisco Board of Trustees is a newcomer to the body, according to the latest set of results.
Ohlone College professor Heather McCarty garnered 19.8% of the counted votes as of Monday afternoon’s tally, ensuring that at least one new trustee will join the board as the community college contends with declining enrollment and what educators characterize as the loss of voter-approved funds that support its free-tuition program.
Incumbents Aliya Chisti (18.3%), Board President Alan Wong (17.1%) and recently appointed trustee Luis Zamora (14.4%) rounded out the remaining spots with 18,200 ballots still outstanding Tuesday afternoon. Public policy analyst Ruth Ferguson (13.9%) trailed Zamora for the fourth and final spot.
Business owner Leanna Louie, college professor and economist Ben Kaplan and former CCSF trustee Julio Ramos were sixth, seventh and eighth, respectively.
The four winners will need to provide steady hands during a critical juncture for the community college, facing threats to its accreditation and reception of sorely needed public financing.
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges’ refused to renew CCSF’s accreditation in January and gave college officials until March 2025 to produce a report showing how it will become fiscally solvent.
Meanwhile, CCSF educators say the school is receiving less money from a voter-approved 2016 tax on The City’s wealthiest homeowners which funds Free City College, a program providing free tuition to San Francisco residents. The City has contended that the program has accrued millions of dollars in unspent funds since 2016. According to last year’s annual report by the Free City College Oversight Committee, roughly 17,000 San Franciscans take credit courses for free each year.
All CCSF Board of Trustee candidates ran on similar platforms to lead the college toward financial stability, address its structural budget deficit and more effectively plan the school’s long-term finances. CCSF Chancellor Mitchell Bailey announced last month that the college would host a series of budget workshops through December to “provide a forum for informing, understanding and pursuing clarity.”
Newcomer McCarty, who served the Ohlone College Budget Committee, stated on her campaign website that she ran “to help stabilize CCSF because it plays such an important role in our community,” adding that her priorities include ensuring fiscal health and increasing enrollment.
“My goal is to ensure that every dollar is used effectively to support student success,” McCarty said.
She did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
McCarty was endorsed by TogetherSF Action, Grow SF and the Alice B Toklas Democratic Club, as well as San Francisco Supervisors Joel Engardio, Hillary Ronen, Myrna Melgar, Catherine Stefani and Rafael Mandelman.
The board will also contend with faculty members’ grievances over losing what they say are essential courses due to budget constraints.
Spencer Jackson, Lead Organizer for AFT Local 2121, the union that represents CCSF’s professors, said the situation is dire. The college’s English as Second Language program, which Jackson called “a cornerstone of San Francisco’s immigrant communities and workforce training,” has turned away 2,000 students this semester.
Chemistry 32, a prerequisite for CCSF’s Nursing and Radiology programs, turned away 200 students this semester and English 1A, a prerequisite for many degree programs, turned away 270 students, according to the union. AFT 2121 endorsed only Wong for one of four open seats.
Community college faces potential loss of accreditation.
www.sfexaminer.comUnions Aren't Prepared For Project 2025 & Trump's Fascist Agena
Unions Bet Big on Harris. Now They’re Bracing for Consequences.
Government unions, service worker unions and industrial unions all face possible repercussions from Donald Trump’s victory, but not necessarily …all the same kind.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/trump-unions.html
Shawn Fain, wearing a blue, short-sleeved collared shirt, stands looking at Kamala Harris to his right as she claps. A U.S. flag is on a stand behind them.
Shawn Fain, right, the president of the United Automobile Workers and a prominent supporter of Kamala Harris, with the vice president in Wayne, Mich., in August.Credit…Brittany Greeson for The New York Times
Jonathan Weisman.pngBenjamin Oreskes.png
By Jonathan Weisman and Benjamin Oreskes
Nov. 10, 2024
Besides the Harris campaign and its affiliated political action committees, few economic or political sectors placed larger bets than organized labor on Vice President Kamala Harris’s winning the presidency.
And few might reap more consequences from the incoming Trump administration. For public-sector unions that represent government workers, the threat is institutional and existential: Top advisers to President-elect Donald J. Trump want to eliminate them outright.
For service industry unions that represent hotel and restaurant workers, the threats may be to the members themselves: vulnerable and low-paid workers, often immigrants, who could be swept up in Mr. Trump’s promised mass deportations.
And for the leadership of the old-line industrial unions, the threat is from their members, many of whom ignored the pleadings of their leadership and voted for Mr. Trump.
“We do understand we have issues that are confronting us, major issues,” said Lee Saunders, chairman of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s political committee and president of the 1.6-million-strong American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “This is going to impact the entire labor movement.”
Unions poured nearly $43 million into the Harris campaign, according to Open Secrets, but that understates the resources they put into phone banks, canvassing operations, education and persuasion efforts with their members and outreach to nonunion working-class households.
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Several people are in a room adorned with many campaign signs supporting Democratic candidates, including Ms. Harris. They are wearing gold-colored T-shirts.
Volunteers with the A.F.L.-C.I.O. preparing to canvass for Democratic candidates in Las Vegas last month. Unions poured nearly $43 million into the Harris campaign.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times
Union leaders insisted in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory that they had done their job: Initial exit polls showed that Ms. Harris had won union households by 55 percent to Mr. Trump’s 43 percent, about the same as President Biden’s margin in 2020. In narrow Democratic Senate victories in Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada, and in the still-uncalled Senate race in Arizona, union households might prove to be the difference makers.
But with unions representing less than 10 percent of the private-sector work force, their true failure was their inability to extend their influence on Ms. Harris’s behalf beyond their memberships to the far larger numbers of working-class Americans who do not belong to any union at all, who came out in force and voted overwhelmingly for the former president.
“Working Americans elected President Trump because they trust him,” said Karoline Leavitt, a Trump-Vance transition spokeswoman.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said voters who felt they had control over their lives — through higher education or union representation — had sided with Democrats.
But, she said, “people who felt like there’s too much change, in the pace of technology, in the cost of living, in the fear of a country being different than they thought it was — they wanted a strongman to fix it,” and that man was Mr. Trump.
The explanations for Ms. Harris’s defeat are myriad, but union leaders have been among the most outspoken in saying she and other Democrats have failed to center the struggles of workers. Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, a strong Harris ally, complained on social media that Ms. Harris had failed to make a strong case for “what immigrant workers bring to our country,” including immigrant workers in his union.
Democrats were too slow to acknowledge the pain of inflation, he said. At the same time, they were ineffective in communicating what the Biden administration had accomplished, in infrastructure jobs, manufacturing and bringing back semiconductor production from offshore — all accomplishments that are now likely to redound to Mr. Trump’s benefit as those projects build out.
“The party did not make a positive case for why workers should vote for them, only that they were not Donald Trump,” Mr. Williams said of the Democrats. “That’s not good enough anymore.”
In Mr. Trump’s first term, he appointed union foes to the National Labor Relations Board who clamped down on organizing and strongly opposed union-backed rules to make it easier for workers to vote for collective bargaining. His secretaries of labor were no more pro-union.
But in his campaign this time around, he openly courted union workers, if not their bosses. He made expensive promises to end income taxation on tips and overtime. More important, though, were his larger promises that by imposing tariffs on almost all imported goods, he would bring manufacturing jobs back from overseas; that by deporting millions of undocumented immigrants, he would free up work for citizens; and that by ending environmental regulations intended to push the U.S. economy toward electric cars and renewable energy, he would bring back a golden age of muscle cars and oil derricks.
It did not help that a scattering of prominent unions declined to endorse Ms. Harris, in large part because their rank and file backed Mr. Trump. Most prominent were the Teamsters, whose president, Sean O’Brien, addressed the Republican convention and wanted to preserve a place at Mr. Trump’s table if he won. But he was not alone.
Donald Trump and several other people walk through a wood-paneled lobby. “Teamsters” is spelled out in gray letters on the wall in front of them.
President-elect Donald J. Trump at the Teamsters headquarters in Washington in January. The prominent union declined to endorse Ms. Harris in the election.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times
The International Association of Fire Fighters, the International Longshoremen’s Association and the United Mine Workers all sat out the election — and if union leadership’s education efforts really did help swing most union households to Ms. Harris, those unions’ decision not to endorse might well have helped Mr. Trump.
Now, with Mr. Trump victorious, leaders like Mr. O’Brien have chits to call in.
“The Teamsters look forward to working with President-elect Donald Trump, and to sharing with his transition team our priorities for how he can best support working Americans and the future of labor,” said Kara Deniz, a Teamsters spokeswoman. “The Republicans, under the leadership of Donald Trump, indicated throughout the campaign that they want to be the party of working people. The campaign is over. It’s time for Republicans to show up.”
Leaders like Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers, who became outspoken surrogates for Ms. Harris, may face the consequences of their decisions.
A defiant Mr. Fain said in a statement: “It’s time for Washington, D.C., to put up or shut up, no matter the party, no matter the candidate. Will our government stand with the working class, or keep doing the bidding of the billionaires?”
While leaders like Mr. Fain brace for Mr. Trump’s famous penchant for retribution, service workers unions are bracing for Mr. Trump’s policy promises. In Nevada, the organizing power of unions like the Culinary Workers had propelled Democratic presidential candidates to success in every election since 2004 — until this one.
Union leaders might say they succeeded in significantly helping Ms. Harris’s support among their members; in Nevada, they didn’t. Recent polling of Nevadans who are registered voters found that Ms. Harris performed only a single point better among union members than Mr. Trump, 48 percent to 47 percent. The same poll in 2020 found President Biden beating Mr. Trump by 22 percentage points among union members in Nevada.
Now, Ted Pappageorge, the head of the immigrant-heavy Culinary Workers Local 226, said he was worried about Mr. Trump’s draconian promises to deport undocumented immigrants en masse and slam closed the U.S.-Mexican border.
Ms. Harris’s “messaging was on point,” he said. But what Mr. Trump was doing was tantamount to the efforts of a manager to undermine an organizing drive, he suggested, and he had significantly more time to do it.
“She had a couple of months to do that, and Trump has been banging away doing what we call ‘a boss campaign’ for years, introducing a massive amount of fear and division,” Mr. Pappageorge said.
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Ted Pappageorge stands amid a large group of people and speaks into a wireless microphone. He is pointing up with his left index finger.
Ted Pappageorge, center, the head of the immigrant-heavy Culinary Workers Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, said he worried about Mr. Trump’s promises for mass deportations.Credit…Jordan Gale for The New York Times
For unions representing government employees, the threat is to the unions themselves. Project 2025, the blueprint for a new Trump administration drawn up by several Trump advisers, suggested eliminating such unions altogether.
“Congress should consider whether public-sector unions are appropriate in the first place,” the document stated.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Ohio entrepreneur now frequently mentioned as a potential official in the incoming administration, made eliminating teachers unions a priority of his campaign for president last year. He said Friday that what he had meant was eliminating collective bargaining protections for public schoolteachers when their contracts come up for renewal.
“It is about the latitude of how employment contracts are written,” he said.
Some Trump advisers, including Mr. Ramaswamy, have also pushed for the elimination of the federal Department of Education, though campaign aides said Friday that Mr. Trump had not taken a position on public-sector unions.
“There’s no doubt it’s an existential threat,” Ms. Weingarten said. “Am I worried? I’m Jewish. I worry about everything.”
The workers themselves may be far less concerned. Brian Ursua, a member of Teamsters Local 631 and a Trump supporter in North Las Vegas, said overtime pay on weekend shifts setting up trade shows was critical to him, and Mr. Trump has promised to end taxation of overtime pay.
“I felt that Donald better understood the middle-class citizens,” he said.
Union leaders are not so sanguine. The Biden administration recently finalized regulations that would expand mandatory overtime pay to workers earning the equivalent of $58,656 a year, beginning Jan. 1, up from $43,888. Advisers to the Trump campaign have proposed rolling the rule back.
Ms. Leavitt said the president-elect had taken no position on the issue.
“President Trump will keep his promise to the hardworking men and women of America,” she said. “He will bring jobs back home, restore American manufacturing, slash inflation and cut taxes.”
Jonathan Weisman is a politics writer, covering campaigns with an emphasis on economic and labor policy. He is based in Chicago. More about Jonathan Weisman
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times. More about Benjamin Oreskes
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 11, 2024, Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Unions Girding For Blowback Of Harris Loss. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, U.S. Politics, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy, Randi Weingarten
Government unions, service worker unions and industrial unions all face possible repercussions from Donald Trump’s victory, but not necessarily all…
www.nytimes.comThousands of Workers Union, United Electric Local 1043 members set to strike at Stanford, hobbling research and grading ahead of finals
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/thousands-set-strike-stanford-hobbling-research-19906927.php
By Nanette Asimov,
Higher Education …Reporter
Nov 11, 2024
More than 2,000 graduate student workers at Stanford say they will suspend teaching and research beginning Tuesday in a labor dispute with the university not long before undergrads prepare for finals.
More than 2,000 graduate student workers at Stanford say they will suspend teaching and research beginning Tuesday in a labor dispute with the university not long before undergrads prepare for finals.
Jessica Christian/The Chronicle
Thousands of graduate student workers at Stanford University — who grade papers, teach classes and do research — say they are prepared to walk off the job Tuesday in a labor dispute just ahead of finals.
The expected walkout echoes a successful strike in 2022 by 36,000 University of California student workers across the state that crippled the UC system for 40 days and resulted in steep pay hikes for those students. Though a far smaller group, Stanford’s unionized student workers say they are aiming for the same result. Finals week for undergraduates begins on Dec. 9.
“A strike will cause massive disruption to the university’s teaching and research missions,” the Stanford Graduate Workers Union said in a statement, noting that many seminars taught by graduate students will be paused indefinitely, as will other essential functions. “Teaching assistants will cancel their review and discussion sessions, office hours and labs. Assignments will not be graded.”
The graduate students unionized a year ago but have yet to sign a contract with the university.
Stanford employs about 5,000 graduate student workers, including about 2,000 on fellowships who can’t join the union but could strike in solidarity, said Thom Chaffee, a doctoral student in geophysics who is also a research assistant looking into magnetic anomalies on the moon’s surface and is his lab’s safety coordinator.
More than 2,300 of the union members authorized a strike last week.
Chaffee, who is on the union’s bargaining committee, pointed to a “living wage” calculator created by MIT that says it takes $68,624 a year for a single person to make ends meet in Santa Clara County and $121,677 for a single adult with a child. Yet Stanford pays all graduates students an average of $51,500 a year, he said, whether they have a family or not.
The union is asking for $58,842, a raise of about 14%.
Other issues in dispute include the right to union representation in gender discrimination cases, which typically fall under Stanford’s sexual harassment-resolution procedures, Chaffee said.
“While we respect the union’s right to call for a strike, we are disappointed that it has chosen to do so, considering the progress we have made at the negotiating table and the very competitive contract offer the university has made,” Stanford spokesperson Dee Mostofi said Monday, noting that the university has proposed a variety of new benefits, from more competitive wages to better transportation subsidies.
Yet the sides are “rather far apart” on finances, Provost Jenny Martinez told the Faculty Senate on Thursday, the Stanford Daily student newspaper reported. The paper quoted Martinez saying: “We don’t think it would be fair or responsible to grant their demands.”
Also on Thursday, Martinez and Vice Provost Stacey Bent posted a statement about the threatened strike and said the university would do its best to “preserve continuity” in teaching and research if a walkout happened.
The provosts called Stanford’s offer of a 12% salary boost over three years — to about $54,000 or $55,000, depending on the job — “fair and competitive” by the university’s own calculations of what it takes to make ends meet. They said the offer would create the highest salaries in the “Ivy Plus,” a reference to top-tier universities that, like Stanford, aren’t among the eight East Coast schools labeled the “Ivy League.”
“Meeting the union’s demand for an above-market pay raise would be unfair to other groups of employees” whose raises have been smaller, said Martinez and Bent, adding that the union’s proposal would also make it more expensive to conduct research and could lead to a “reduction in the number of students we could train.”
Rent increases are another sticking point. The union says the university’s proposed raise of 4.5% in the first year of the contract would be gobbled up by a rent hike for the 70% of graduate student workers who live in Stanford housing.
Stanford offered a more positive spin, noting that its salary offer “would keep pace” with its rent hike.
Mostofi, the university’s spokesperson, also pointed out that Stanford already pays tuition and health insurance for doctoral students, who are the vast majority of union members.
While that’s true, said Chaffee, the geophysics doctoral student, the graduate students still pay “60% of our take-home salary to rent cramped apartments on campus in a food desert.”
Both sides continued negotiating Monday in an effort to reach a pact and avoid a strike.
Reach Nanette Asimov: nasimov@sfchronicle.com; Threads: @NanetteAsimov
More than 2,000 graduate student workers at Stanford say they will suspend teaching and research beginning Tuesday in a labor dispute with the…
www.sfchronicle.comBook on Coit Tower murals offers lessons on contemporary conversations about public art
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/coit-tower-murals-robert-cherny-19844998
Brandon Yu November 4, 2024Updated: November 7, 2024, 11:24 am
S.F. State professor Robert W. Cherny has a new …book, “The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco,” out Tuesday, Nov. 12. Photo: Sarah Cherny/University of Illinois Press
In 2017, the retired historian Robert W. Cherny found himself unwittingly thrust into the maelstrom of a national controversy.
Amid a public battle over whether a series of murals — some of which depicted America’s history of slavery and its genocide of Indigenous peoples — at George Washington High School ought to be removed and destroyed, Cherny had been called to take part in the San Francisco school board’s discussions. He had written a book on Victor Arnautoff, the late artist behind the murals, and could offer perspective on Arnautoff’s intent behind the works. When he did at the meetings, he was met with heated resistance.
“My book came out the same year that that whole thing erupted,” Cherny, a professor emeritus of history at San Francisco State University, told the Chronicle. “And I was absolutely in the middle of it.”
The controversy, which received significant national media attention and ultimately ended with the murals staying intact, still baffles Cherny to this day. But it also, in some ways, led him to and foreshadowed the ideas in his latest book, “The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco.”
Shortly before Arnautoff created the works at George Washington High in the mid-1930s, he had been the technical director of and one of the artists behind the Coit Tower murals, the sprawling works that adorn the inside of the iconic building. Cherny’s book details their creation, and also their own strikingly similar brush with controversy and calls for destruction.
An officially designated San Francisco landmark and part of the National Register of Historic Places, the Coit Tower murals were created over several months in 1933 and 1934 by a group commissioned through the Public Works of Art Project, a Depression-era federal initiative meant to employ artists and help democratize art as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
“It produced just an incredible outpouring of public art,” Cherny said of the initiative. “That’s a key part of it: that the art was supposed to be in places where members of the public could easily see it, and it was supposed to be art that members of the public could easily relate to.”
The Coit Tower murals, in particular, became one of the crowning achievements of New Deal art. Featuring 28 murals created by some two dozen local artists, the project provides an immersive tableau of Depression-era life, depicting everything from agricultural labor to city living, the San Francisco harbor to the Chronicle newsroom.
“Just about anything you can think about, whether it’s work life or recreation life, is depicted there,” said organizer Jon Golinger, a friend of Cherny’s who spearheaded the efforts that resulted in the city’s restoration of the Coit Tower murals in 2014. “And that’s by design. The artists were given a theme of California life.”
Cherny’s book, though, also focuses on the controversy that the murals were plunged into after politicians and the media seized upon small portions of the murals that the artist Clifford Wight had painted. The outcry predominantly circled around a hammer and sickle image that, facing accusations of Communist propaganda, was ultimately removed.
At the time, San Francisco was caught up “in the middle of this enormous waterfront strike and then a general strike with all kinds of allegations that Communists were behind the strikes,” Cherny said. “Without that strike and without the accompanying red scare, some of (the mural’s imagery) would probably have just coasted right through, and nobody would’ve particularly noticed it.”
The uproar, reignited more than once across the years amid subsequent red scares, is just one iteration of an evergreen issue regarding public art, including Arnautoff’s murals at George Washington High School. Cherny noted that seeing the controversy over the Coit Tower murals with a sense of distance can offer a more clear-eyed lesson about contemporary responses to public art.
“Those controversies now seem something that tells us more about the time that the controversy took place than it tells us about the art,” he said. In that sense, Cherny adds, “art has to be understood as this kind of a historic artifact that is going to tell us interesting things about the time in which it was created and perhaps about ourselves today. But if we destroy it, it can never have that function.”
https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/books/coit-tower-murals-robert-cherny-19844998
The Coit Tower Murals: New Deal Art and Political Controversy in San Francisco
By Robert W. Cherny
(University of Illinois Press; 216 pages; $22.95)
If not with Wight’s portions at Coit Tower, it’s a stance that, despite a messy battle in public, ultimately prevailed at George Washington High School, where Arnautoff’s murals remain untouched.
“The best of public art is not designed to make your eyes glaze over,” Golinger said. “It’s designed to make you think, and sometimes that might make you sad, might make you happy or laugh, but also could make you mad. And if it’s making you mad, it’s because it’s showing you reality, at least through the artist’s eyes.”
Brandon Yu is a freelance writer.
Robert W. Cherny’s new book details the history of the Coit Tower murals and its connection to the more recent national controversy at George…
datebook.sfchronicle.comSF Building Trades Teamster Bureaucrat Says "Maybe we need a little shock to our political system" On Election of Billionaire Privatizer Lurie
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/daniel-lurie-mayors-race-win-means-for-sf-19878539.php
Over and over in his winning San Francisco …mayoral campaign, Daniel Lurie repeated a simple message: Political insiders had made a mess of the city and so voters needed to entrust him, an outsider, to clean it up.
Now, after unseating six-year incumbent London Breed, Lurie, a nonprofit founder and Levi Strauss heir, begins the not-so-simple part. He must seek to implement his ambitious list of plans for addressing the city’s complex challenges, while also protecting the city against potential broadsides by the new president.
Included on Lurie’s list is a vow to grow San Francisco’s homeless shelter system by 1,500 beds in six months and to declare a fentanyl state of emergency to cut through red tape in fighting the drug crisis. To make City Hall function more efficiently, he said he would place oversight of city contracts, including those with nonprofits, under the control of a centralized team of experts.
Lurie ran as a moderate whose policies did not sharply diverge from Breed’s. So he shares some of her priorities, such as hiring more police officers, supporting a program that offers homeless people a bus ticket out of town and shutting down open-air drug markets. He wants to build denser housing along major corridors where jobs and transit routes are already concentrated.
Lurie must — as Breed and his other opponents repeatedly underlined — push through this agenda without any experience pulling the levers of San Francisco’s notorious bureaucracy. He is the city’s first mayor since 1912 to have never served in government before his election.
At Tipping Point Community, the antipoverty nonprofit Lurie founded in 2005, he oversaw a staff of dozens and a budget of tens of millions. San Francisco has about 35,000 employees and a budget of $15.9 billion.
Voters did not appear concerned about this learning curve. In the ranked-choice vote count as of Thursday, Lurie led 56.2% to Breed’s 43.8%, with more ballots left to tally. Initial returns showed Lurie doing well across the city, leading in precincts from Telegraph Hill to the outer Richmond and Sunset districts, where he dominated.
Analyzing the election results Wednesday, political consultant and Chinatown power broker David Ho said voters were “still angry” about the state of the city. He had thought that sentiment ran its course after voters recalled three school board members and the district attorney and ousted an incumbent supervisor two years ago.
“I’m a little bit surprised by this,” Ho said.“He’s going to go in with a mandate — this is not going to be close.”
Lurie’s earliest key decisions will come in staffing his administration.
It’s not clear who Lurie will want in key roles such as chief of staff and police chief, or as directors of the departments of public health, public works, emergency management, planning and homelessness. Lurie could keep some incumbents, but given the way he ran as an outsider candidate promising change, some leadership turnover seems highly likely.
“A lot of people want to know who he’s going to hire,” said Christin Evans, a Haight-Ashbury bookstore owner and member of a group of progressive small business leaders who endorsed Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin for mayor. “It’ll be interesting to see if Lurie staffs up from people across the (political) spectrum or from one camp or the other. If it’s a team that hasn’t worked together before, he could have some dysfunction and infighting, especially in that transition period.”
Before the election, Lurie would only say that if he won, he would meet with Breed’s department heads individually to assess “whether or not they want to be there.”
Though he hasn’t revealed anything about his staffing plans, Lurie did shed some light on how he’ll work with his department heads in a previous Chronicle interview. He said he would meet with them regularly and ask what their “priorities are for the week, for six months, for 12 months.” And he said he would require them to work in the office five days a week.
“I am not just someone that talks,” Lurie said. “We’re going to bring people together, I’m going to take input, and I’m going to make the tough decisions. I’m not going to please everybody every time, and I’m OK with that.”
If he ousts Breed’s longtime police chief, Bill Scott, Lurie must then select a replacement from a pool of candidates chosen by the city’s Police Commission. Proposition D, which would have made it easier for the mayor to hire and fire department heads, failed to secure the 50% threshold needed for approval,
Lurie will enter the office with little experience managing relationships with other politicians or organized labor leaders whose support he may need to advance his vision for the city. But San Francisco labor leader Rudy Gonzalez said Lurie had shown a strong “sense of curiosity” that will serve him well as mayor.
Gonzalez said he first met Lurie in person months ago and has had several meetings with him since. Lurie peppered Gonzalez with questions about the inner workings of the city’s labor movement and vowed to communicate with union leaders regularly if he was elected, Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez’s group, the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, endorsed rival mayoral candidates Mark Farrell and Ahsha Safaí. But Gonzalez said he’s optimistic about Lurie’s election, noting that Lurie may benefit as an outsider because he won’t feel beholden to longstanding interest groups.
“Is Lurie who all the different camps and cliques were vying for? No, and maybe that’s going to be what we need,” Gonzalez said. “Maybe we need a little shock to our political system. … I think he’s smart enough to know what he doesn’t know and I think that he’s committed enough to the city that he’s going to try to do the best damn job he can.”
One factor that could help Lurie: the results of several supervisor races. Though some remained too close to call Thursday, at least one seat — and possibly more — appeared to be shifting from progressive to moderate control.
Todd David, a Breed ally who is political director of the advocacy group Abundant SF, said the board appeared to be transitioning from “an obstructionist Board of Supervisors to a more collaborative Board of Supervisors.”
David wrote an opinion piece in the San Francisco Examiner critiquing the way Lurie, on the campaign trail, touted his past work on the development of an affordable housing project.
Now, David said he wishes Lurie “nothing but the best of luck” in accomplishing his ambitious goals.
“Intractable problems,” he said, “can often benefit from a fresh set of eyes looking at them.”
Lurie previously told the Chronicle that he has no aspirations to run for higher office.
“I am not interested in another political office after this. I want to do eight years as mayor, and then I want to get out of politics,” he said. “I just want to turn around the city I love, and that’s going to allow me to make tough decisions and not worry about my political future.”
Reach J.D. Morris: jd.morris@sfchronicle.com; X: @thejdmorris
What Daniel Lurie’s mayoral win means for S.F.: A ‘shock to our political system’
www.sfchronicle.comHow a Refuge on Rails Inspired Jazz Classics For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the railroad, particularly the elegant Pullman sleeping car, provided a “home away from home.”
…https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/travel/armstrong-jazz-singers-trains-pullman.html?searchResultPosition=1
How a Refuge on Rails Inspired Jazz Classics For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the railroad, particularly the elegant Pullman sleeping car, provided a “home away from home.”
By Larry Tye
Oct. 28, 2024
Jazz lovers worldwide know well the passion that Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong had for trains, especially for the elegant Pullman cars that toted them to gigs across the country. Within the velvet-appointed sleeping carriages, African American porters shined the musicians’ shoes, nursed their hangovers, clipped their hair and served them mint juleps and Welsh rarebit — the same service afforded wealthy white passengers.
In return, the maestros composed their now famous songs of homage to trains. There’s Duke’s throbbing “Happy Go Lucky Local,” the Count’s bow to the “Super Chief” and Satchmo’s romantic rendering of But few fans appreciated the real reason these jazz legends worshiped not just the railroad generally, but George Pullman’s sleeper car: It saved them from the threat of terrifying violence.
In that Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms. Just getting out of an automobile or bus to look for a meal and a bed could prove perilous in unfamiliar cities below the Mason-Dixon line. Wrong choices sometimes led to berating, beating or worse, with racial violence reaching new peaks in the early 1900s. Even the music makers’ fame couldn’t fully protect them. Only on the Pullman cars, where they were served by fellow African Americans, could they truly relax while on the road.
“To avoid problems, we used to charter two Pullman sleeping cars and a 70-foot baggage car,” Ellington wrote in his 1973 memoir, “Music Is My Mistress.” “Everywhere we went in the South, we lived in them.”
ImageA man wearing a suit walks down the aisle of a train car. Two mean wearing suits are seated on one side, and another man is sleeping, lying down on a train seat.
Duke Ellington’s band members on a train in 1941. In the Jim Crow era of racial segregation, Black people were relegated to separate and unequal accommodations in everything from schools and parks to water fountains and restrooms.Credit…Otto F. Hess Collection / New York Public Library
The Count Basie Orchestra did, too. Traveling in stylish Pullmans “was my piece of cake,” Basie recalled in his 1985 autobiography, “Good Morning Blues.” “Lots of times, instead of me getting into my bed, I used to sit and look out the window most of the night as we rambled from one place to another. That was music to me.”
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That the Pullman porters loved these jazzmen was a bonus, and the musicians grew to reciprocate that affection, playing their pianos, clarinets and trumpets late into the night in the closed capsule of the club car. The porters saw it as a quiet nod to them each time the Basie band queued up railroad-friendly tunes like “Midnight Freight,” “9:20 Special” and “Night Train.” Or when Armstrong played “Farewell to Storyville,” “Hobo You Can’t Ride This Train” and and the Ellington orchestra set toes tapping with “Choo-Choo,” “The Old Circus Train Turnaround Blues” or the last of which blends blaring saxophones and a singular trumpet to make listeners feel, as well as hear, the train hurtling down the tracks.
(Ellington’s signature song, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” was about the subway, not the railroad, and was composed by his protégé, Billy Strayhorn, not Duke.)
Armstrong said the greeting he got from the trainmen when he was leaving New Orleans for Chicago made him cherish them forever.
“All the Pullman porters and waiters recognized me because they had seen me playing on the tailgate wagons to advertise dances, or ‘balls’ as we used to call them. They all hollered at me saying, ‘Where you goin’, ‘Dipper?’,” Armstrong wrote in “Satchmo,” his second memoir.
He also knew that on return trips to his native Louisiana, unless he was renting his own carriages, he, like other African American people, would likely be banished to what he called the “James Crow cars.” These were the train compartments that were just behind the coal-stoked engine, with noxious fumes, limited seating, and no heaters, wash basins, flush toilets, water coolers, dining options or even a cushion to rest upon.
By contrast, arriving by Pullman — especially when the bands had prearranged to have their coaches park on a sidetrack during their full stay — meant a safe haven to return to after and even between performances. There’d be a warm meal waiting, along with a freshly laundered bed, friendly Black faces eager for the lowdown on that night’s activities and, when the bandsman was accompanied by a lady, the same discretion porters showed the fussy Brahmins of Boston and the fierce Goliaths of Wall Street during their lonely nights crossing the continent.
“On arrival in a city, the cars were parked on a convenient track, and connections were made for water, steam, sanitation and ice. This was our home away from home,” Ellington recalled in “Music is My Mistress.”
“Many observers would say, ‘Why, that’s the way the President travels!’ It automatically gained us respect,” he continued, “and removed the threat and anticipation of trouble.”
Two women dressed in fashionable coats stand on the platform of a train station in front of train car with the words “1st Class Pullman” painted on the side.
In the elegant Pullman sleeping cars, jazz musicians were served by fellow African Americans. They were provided the same service afforded wealthy white passengers and could truly relax while on the road.Credit…Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
To appreciate these jazzmen’s embrace of the Pullman experience, consider what the Armstrong band endured during a private bus tour through the South in 1931. According to a contemporaneous account in the Memphis newspaper The Commercial Appeal, Armstrong and his mates refused the bus company’s reasonable request to change vehicles so theirs could be repaired, and “exhibited” six pistols to make their point, at which time the police carted them to jail. But the actual problem was twofold — the station master had decided the band’s shiny new Greyhound was “too nice” for the musicians, and that the wife of the band’s white manager was riding with them, violating more Southern mores.
“You’re in Memphis now,” one arresting officer said, “and we need some cotton-pickers.” A second, pointing to the Black musician sitting with the white woman, egged on his partner: “Why don’t you shoot him in the leg?” After everyone was booked, a third constable warned, “You ain’t gonna come down to Memphis and try to run Memphis — we’ll kill all you.”
So many were their challenges that, in later years, the bandleaders referred to themselves as the first Freedom Riders, a reference to the Black and white activists who, in 1961, protested the segregation of interstate buses by riding side-by-side through the separate and unjust South, with some nearly dying for their troubles.
By that time World War II had yielded to the Cold War, and big bands switched mostly to air travel for domestic flights and a combination of air and sea for international trips.
But these musical legends held onto their emotional bonds to the railroad. It evoked a warm nostalgia for their early days on the road, and always tied them to the history of Black freedom and locomotion. Trains figured in African-American spirituals, fueled the Great Migration and, in an earlier time, inspired enslaved peoples to dream of escaping north.
Duke would sit next to the window in his private sleeper in what appeared to be a trance, according to a 1944 profile in The New Yorker. He would stare for hours at telephone poles, listening to the metallic rhythm of the wheels, delighting as “the firemen play blues on the engine whistle — big, smeary things like a goddamn woman singing in the night.” All of which, he added, made him “a train freak,” as he demonstrated in his 1950 recording of “Build That Railroad:”
Larry Tye is an author whose latest book, “The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America,” looks at how these three maestros wrote the soundtrack for the civil rights revolution.
For Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, even their fame couldn’t fully protect them from the terrifying violence of Jim Crow. But the…
www.nytimes.comThe White House Will Be Shedding Its Union Label
After gains by organized labor under President Biden, a second Trump administration is likely to change course on regulation and enforcement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/business/economy/trump-biden-labor-unions.html
Noam …Scheiber.png
By Noam Scheiber
Noam Scheiber has covered the labor movement since 2015.
Nov. 10, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised to be the most pro-labor president in history. He embraced unions more overtly than his predecessors in either party, and filled his administration with union supporters.
Labor seemed to respond accordingly. Filings for unionization elections spiked to their highest level in a decade, as did union victories. There were breakthroughs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, and unions prevailed in organizing a major foreign auto plant in the South. A United Automobile Workers walkout yielded substantial contract gains — and images of Mr. Biden joining a picket line.
As Donald J. Trump prepares to retake the White House, labor experts expect the legal landscape for labor to turn sharply in another direction.
Based on Mr. Trump’s first term and his comments during the campaign — including his praise for Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, for what he said was Mr. Musk’s willingness to fire striking workers — these experts say the new administration is likely to bring fewer challenges to employers who fight unions.
“There will be a concerted effort to repeal pro-worker N.L.R.B. precedents,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior Labor Department official during the Obama administration, referring to the National Labor Relations Board.
Experts like Ms. Shierholz, who is now president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said they also expected the Trump administration to ease up on enforcing safety rules, to narrow eligibility for overtime pay and to make it harder for gig workers to gain status as employees.
A Trump transition spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Labor unions generally backed Vice President Kamala Harris in the recent election, but a few prominent ones, like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters, stayed neutral after endorsing Democratic presidential candidates in the past. It is unclear whether that neutrality will yield more influence for these unions in the new administration.
The N.L.R.B. may be the agency that swings sharply most quickly. Its general counsel prosecutes labor law violations, and its five-member board decides questions of legal doctrine, a kind of high court for labor issues.
Mr. Biden fired the agency’s general counsel shortly after taking office and installed a replacement more in sync with his priorities. Mr. Trump is likely to do the same, which would mean ousting Jennifer Abruzzo, who has aggressively wielded the powers of her office on behalf of workers seeking to unionize.
Ms. Abruzzo has sought increased financial remedies for workers who were fired for organizing, and has taken action against companies for holding mandatory meetings that highlight the downsides of unionizing.
If Mr. Trump’s first term is a guide, his appointee as general counsel will probably adopt an approach that makes it harder for union campaigns to succeed. His appointees to the labor board will probably reverse Biden-era rulings on high-profile issues, including one allowing the board to order recognition of a union if the employer makes a fair election impossible, such as by firing workers who seek to unionize.
The Trump labor board will probably also undo a decision that largely struck down the use of gag rules in severance agreements, which generally prevent workers from describing unsafe working conditions or sexual harassment at their former workplace. And it could make it easier for large companies to avoid recognizing and bargaining with unions formed by employees of contractors or franchises — like Amazon and its delivery drivers, some of whom have recently unionized. All would be consistent with Mr. Trump's earlier approach as president.
Image
Jennifer Abruzzo holding open one of two glass doors that together have the etched seal of the National Labor Relations Board.
The National Labor Relations Board’s top prosecutor, Jennifer Abruzzo, has aggressively wielded the powers of her office on behalf of workers seeking to unionize.Credit…Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press
Such changes may also come sooner than usual. Presidents have traditionally left labor board members to serve out their terms — which could mean effective Democratic control of the board until at least August 2026. But several experts predicted that Mr. Trump would move to install a Republican majority shortly after taking office, challenging a generally cited legal standard if necessary.
A new direction is also expected at the Department of Labor, which enforces minimum-wage, overtime and worker-safety rules. Under Mr. Biden, the department substantially increased the number of salaried workers who are eligible for overtime pay by raising the cutoff — to about $59,000 next year, from about $35,500 under Mr. Trump. It issued a rule making it likelier that gig workers would be classified as employees rather than independent contractors, entitling them to the federal minimum wage and overtime pay, and stepped up enforcement of child labor violations.
The new administration may rein in overtime eligibility and undo the Biden rule on independent contractors, reflecting Mr. Trump’s first-term approach. It is also likely to tamp down enforcement of child labor rules by the Labor Department, which last year instructed officials to seek large monetary penalties from violators.
“It’s hard to believe that a Trump D.O.L. would be pursuing child labor as aggressively as this administration has,” said Lee Schreter, a lawyer at the firm Littler Mendelson, which represents employers. She said the department had recently asked some of her clients to pay much larger penalties than employers had paid in the past, including during the first Trump administration.
Safety rules could also be affected. Under Mr. Biden, the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed requiring employers to protect workers from the health risks of heat exposure by providing drinking water, rest breaks and sufficient cooling indoors. It sought penalties against Amazon for exposing warehouse workers to “ergonomic hazards capable of causing serious physical harm.” (Amazon appealed the citations.)
Ann Rosenthal, a longtime OSHA lawyer in Democratic and Republican administrations, said she expected the Trump administration to delay the heat rule, which it can do with little consequence for years. She said she also expected the agency to curtail investigations of employers in cases where the law gives it discretion.
But experts say less sympathetic regulators won’t necessarily mean a large drop in labor activism, because organizing can develop a momentum of its own: Workers who have seen other workers successfully take on employers often follow suit.
“A big part of what’s been going on is a demonstration effect — that this is something you can do — and that is independent of the legal environment,” said Barry Eidlin, a sociologist who studies labor at McGill University in Montreal.
Workers may simply alter their organizing strategies. For example, graduate students at private universities, who have been unionizing in large numbers over the past few years, might stop filing paperwork to hold union elections under Mr. Trump. They could fear that his labor board would rule that they lacked a federally protected right to unionize, as previous Republican labor boards did.
Instead, they might seek voluntary recognition from their universities, then protest and perhaps even strike until the universities grant it. “There are a lot more people who are going to be saying, ‘What do you mean you’re trying to prevent me from having a union?’” Dr. Eidlin said.
Something similar could happen at companies, said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson, an expert on labor relations. He said that unions often pivoted to targeting a company’s reputation when the legal landscape became less favorable, and that these campaigns could be effective.
“A lot of companies make the calculations that we can deal with a union — we can have a strike, negotiations — those are just costs,” Mr. Lotito said. “But reputational risk is what’s gotten their attention. Unions are very good at destroying their reputation.”
Mr. Trump could prompt activism in less direct ways, too. During his first term, his policies seemed to make protest a more mainstream activity, including for tens of thousands of teachers in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma who walked off the job in 2018.
“The Trump presidency increased a sense of the numbers of people on the street that has had knock-on effects for labor,” said Charmaine Chua, a political scientist who studies labor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The red-state strikes felt like kind of a symptom of that.”
After gains by organized labor under President Biden, a second Trump administration is likely to change course on regulation and enforcement.
www.nytimes.comThe White House Will Be Shedding Its Union Label
After gains by organized labor under President Biden, a second Trump administration is likely to change course on regulation and enforcement.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/business/economy/trump-biden-labor-unions.html
Noam …Scheiber.png
By Noam Scheiber
Noam Scheiber has covered the labor movement since 2015.
Nov. 10, 2024, 5:03 a.m. ET
Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised to be the most pro-labor president in history. He embraced unions more overtly than his predecessors in either party, and filled his administration with union supporters.
Labor seemed to respond accordingly. Filings for unionization elections spiked to their highest level in a decade, as did union victories. There were breakthroughs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, and unions prevailed in organizing a major foreign auto plant in the South. A United Automobile Workers walkout yielded substantial contract gains — and images of Mr. Biden joining a picket line.
As Donald J. Trump prepares to retake the White House, labor experts expect the legal landscape for labor to turn sharply in another direction.
Based on Mr. Trump’s first term and his comments during the campaign — including his praise for Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, for what he said was Mr. Musk’s willingness to fire striking workers — these experts say the new administration is likely to bring fewer challenges to employers who fight unions.
“There will be a concerted effort to repeal pro-worker N.L.R.B. precedents,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior Labor Department official during the Obama administration, referring to the National Labor Relations Board.
Experts like Ms. Shierholz, who is now president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said they also expected the Trump administration to ease up on enforcing safety rules, to narrow eligibility for overtime pay and to make it harder for gig workers to gain status as employees.
A Trump transition spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Labor unions generally backed Vice President Kamala Harris in the recent election, but a few prominent ones, like the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the International Association of Fire Fighters, stayed neutral after endorsing Democratic presidential candidates in the past. It is unclear whether that neutrality will yield more influence for these unions in the new administration.
The N.L.R.B. may be the agency that swings sharply most quickly. Its general counsel prosecutes labor law violations, and its five-member board decides questions of legal doctrine, a kind of high court for labor issues.
Mr. Biden fired the agency’s general counsel shortly after taking office and installed a replacement more in sync with his priorities. Mr. Trump is likely to do the same, which would mean ousting Jennifer Abruzzo, who has aggressively wielded the powers of her office on behalf of workers seeking to unionize.
Ms. Abruzzo has sought increased financial remedies for workers who were fired for organizing, and has taken action against companies for holding mandatory meetings that highlight the downsides of unionizing.
If Mr. Trump’s first term is a guide, his appointee as general counsel will probably adopt an approach that makes it harder for union campaigns to succeed. His appointees to the labor board will probably reverse Biden-era rulings on high-profile issues, including one allowing the board to order recognition of a union if the employer makes a fair election impossible, such as by firing workers who seek to unionize.
The Trump labor board will probably also undo a decision that largely struck down the use of gag rules in severance agreements, which generally prevent workers from describing unsafe working conditions or sexual harassment at their former workplace. And it could make it easier for large companies to avoid recognizing and bargaining with unions formed by employees of contractors or franchises — like Amazon and its delivery drivers, some of whom have recently unionized. All would be consistent with Mr. Trump's earlier approach as president.
Image
Jennifer Abruzzo holding open one of two glass doors that together have the etched seal of the National Labor Relations Board.
The National Labor Relations Board’s top prosecutor, Jennifer Abruzzo, has aggressively wielded the powers of her office on behalf of workers seeking to unionize.Credit…Amanda Andrade-Rhoades/Associated Press
Such changes may also come sooner than usual. Presidents have traditionally left labor board members to serve out their terms — which could mean effective Democratic control of the board until at least August 2026. But several experts predicted that Mr. Trump would move to install a Republican majority shortly after taking office, challenging a generally cited legal standard if necessary.
A new direction is also expected at the Department of Labor, which enforces minimum-wage, overtime and worker-safety rules. Under Mr. Biden, the department substantially increased the number of salaried workers who are eligible for overtime pay by raising the cutoff — to about $59,000 next year, from about $35,500 under Mr. Trump. It issued a rule making it likelier that gig workers would be classified as employees rather than independent contractors, entitling them to the federal minimum wage and overtime pay, and stepped up enforcement of child labor violations.
The new administration may rein in overtime eligibility and undo the Biden rule on independent contractors, reflecting Mr. Trump’s first-term approach. It is also likely to tamp down enforcement of child labor rules by the Labor Department, which last year instructed officials to seek large monetary penalties from violators.
“It’s hard to believe that a Trump D.O.L. would be pursuing child labor as aggressively as this administration has,” said Lee Schreter, a lawyer at the firm Littler Mendelson, which represents employers. She said the department had recently asked some of her clients to pay much larger penalties than employers had paid in the past, including during the first Trump administration.
Safety rules could also be affected. Under Mr. Biden, the department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration proposed requiring employers to protect workers from the health risks of heat exposure by providing drinking water, rest breaks and sufficient cooling indoors. It sought penalties against Amazon for exposing warehouse workers to “ergonomic hazards capable of causing serious physical harm.” (Amazon appealed the citations.)
Ann Rosenthal, a longtime OSHA lawyer in Democratic and Republican administrations, said she expected the Trump administration to delay the heat rule, which it can do with little consequence for years. She said she also expected the agency to curtail investigations of employers in cases where the law gives it discretion.
But experts say less sympathetic regulators won’t necessarily mean a large drop in labor activism, because organizing can develop a momentum of its own: Workers who have seen other workers successfully take on employers often follow suit.
“A big part of what’s been going on is a demonstration effect — that this is something you can do — and that is independent of the legal environment,” said Barry Eidlin, a sociologist who studies labor at McGill University in Montreal.
Workers may simply alter their organizing strategies. For example, graduate students at private universities, who have been unionizing in large numbers over the past few years, might stop filing paperwork to hold union elections under Mr. Trump. They could fear that his labor board would rule that they lacked a federally protected right to unionize, as previous Republican labor boards did.
Instead, they might seek voluntary recognition from their universities, then protest and perhaps even strike until the universities grant it. “There are a lot more people who are going to be saying, ‘What do you mean you’re trying to prevent me from having a union?’” Dr. Eidlin said.
Something similar could happen at companies, said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson, an expert on labor relations. He said that unions often pivoted to targeting a company’s reputation when the legal landscape became less favorable, and that these campaigns could be effective.
“A lot of companies make the calculations that we can deal with a union — we can have a strike, negotiations — those are just costs,” Mr. Lotito said. “But reputational risk is what’s gotten their attention. Unions are very good at destroying their reputation.”
Mr. Trump could prompt activism in less direct ways, too. During his first term, his policies seemed to make protest a more mainstream activity, including for tens of thousands of teachers in states like West Virginia and Oklahoma who walked off the job in 2018.
“The Trump presidency increased a sense of the numbers of people on the street that has had knock-on effects for labor,” said Charmaine Chua, a political scientist who studies labor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The red-state strikes felt like kind of a symptom of that.”
After gains by organized labor under President Biden, a second Trump administration is likely to change course on regulation and enforcement.
www.nytimes.com
