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Palestinian terror groups claim the launch was the result of a technical malfunction • Jerusalem retaliated against Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, rather than firing at PIJ.

By JNS

One rocket was fired from the Gaza Strip at the southern city of Ashkelon on Sunday evening, the Israel Defense Forces confirmed.

The rocket struck in an open area, causing no injuries or damages, according to the military.

The Iron Dome air defense system was not activated as the projectile was not headed for a populated area.

Palestinian terror groups said the launch was the result of a technical malfunction.

In response, the IDF struck a Hamas observation post in Gaza.

Israel and the Gaza-based Palestinian Islamic Jihad on Saturday night reached a ceasefire agreement to end five days of conflict.

While Hamas did not participate directly in the hostilities, Jerusalem has a longstanding policy of holding Gaza’s rulers responsible for attacks emanating from the enclave.

Israeli media reported that the defense establishment did not expect the latest rocket attack to reignite the fighting with Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

During “Operation Shield and Arrow,” PIJ fired 1,469 projectiles at Israel, of which 1,139 crossed into the Jewish state (there were also 291 failed launches, or 20% of all PIJ rockets).

Iron Dome intercepted more than 95% of rockets heading for built-up areas. David’s Sling intercepted two rockets, making its operational debut. The IDF struck more than 371 PIJ targets, including command and control apartments, usually located in one- to three-story residential buildings, which the IDF warned so they could be evacuated before it attacked them.

The strikes on military leaders and command and control centers placed PIJ under pressure, ultimately pushing its Beirut-based leader Ziyad al-Nakhalah to accept a truce.

The post Violating ceasefire, Gaza terrorists launch rocket at Israel appeared first on World Israel News.

Gustus Andrew Glen Pennington, a 27 year old man from Oklahoma, has been given six life sentences by a court in Rogers County, Oklahoma this week, due to his involvement in the methamphetamine-induced torture of his partner’s 3-year-old daughter that lasted for several days. The six sentences will be served consecutively.

According to an affidavit from Tulsa-based NBC affiliate KJRH, the child was subjected to abuse using a belt, board, and shock collar by Pennington, which was initially intended to be a disciplinary act but eventually escalated to a worse degree. After being restrained to a table and beaten, Pennington also purchased the shock collar, but it ran out of battery after two days.

The investigators observed a camera in the bedroom where the torture took place, and it was seen that the girl was forced to hold a sign that said “I am a liar.” Reports also revealed that when the victim would go to the bathroom, she was required to use a cinder block. When the police found her, the girl was described to be emotionless with bruises, cuts, and burn marks.

Her mother at first reported the abuse to the police in Collinsville, Oklahoma, and she was also charged with five counts of child abuse and one count of child neglect.
Pennington attempted to claim he was a member of the Creek Indian Tribe, in hopes of his case being transferred to federal or tribal court, however, this effort was unsuccessful.
Law enforcement also found a Nazi tattoo on Pennington and a journal with swastikas and a part of Mein Kampf, revealing his far-right political leanings. Both defendants were additionally given a 10-year sentence for one count of conspiracy.

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On March 29, graduate student workers at the University of Michigan began a strike over what they describe as the university’s refusal to negotiate in good faith. We spoke to striking workers about the walkout, the longest in their union’s 49-year history.

University of Michigan graduate workers picketing, May 10, 2023. (Grad Employees’ Org UMich #OnStrike / Twitter)

Nearly 2,400 graduate student workers at the University of Michigan represented by the Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO) Local 3550 have been on strike for over a month, since March 29, making it the longest strike in the union’s forty-nine-year history.

The graduate student workers walked out after rejecting the university’s original pay-raise offer, which would amount to a pay decrease under inflation. The union is also demanding better protections and support for international students, a reformed campus police (including an unarmed response team), and more help with childcare. Four GEO members sat down with Jacobin’s Peter Lucas to discuss the strike and how the university has responded so far.

Peter Lucas

Why are you all on strike? What are your demands?

Amir Fleischmann

We’ve been on strike since March 29, making this the longest strike in our union’s forty-nine-year history. We’re striking because graduate students at the University of Michigan are facing some pretty serious problems, similar to the problems felt by people across the country.

We’ve seen the gap between our salaries and the cost of living triple over the past three years. At the same time, administrators at the university are raking in gigantic salaries upward of half a million dollars a year and, for the president, actually reaching $1 million a year.

At this university, we’ve also seen a huge problem with sexual harassment, and other forms of harassment and discrimination. Around a quarter of graduate students at the University of Michigan have had an experience with harassment or discrimination. There have been some really high-profile cases of harassment at the university. In the five years I’ve been here, they’ve had to fire both the president and the provost due to sexual misconduct, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

We are building on the work of our 2020 strike by calling for the university to fund a community-based and unarmed police alternative called Coalition for Re-Envisioning Our Safety; we’re fighting for better gender-affirming care for our trans members; we’re also demanding additional support for international students, disabled workers, and parents.

Peter Lucas

What has bargaining been like?

Caroline Leland

Bargaining has been extremely frustrating. We started bargaining with the university officially in mid-November 2022. The university wasted the first couple of months by fighting us on logistics about how bargaining should be set up.

It has been really important that members of our union, graduate students outside of the bargaining team, can listen in to bargaining and be able to participate in caucus, where we are able to vote on issues and make decisions as a group. That’s a more efficient, open, and transparent way to bargain, but the university really fought us on that.

After we finally started bargaining over substantive issues related to the contract, their approach all along has been to stonewall. We came up with fifty-five extremely well-researched and carefully written proposals, which took months of work, and the university has responded with blanket rejections — literally marking through entire proposals — and then forcing us to dig for the reasons why.

We came up with fifty-five extremely well-researched and carefully written proposals, which took months of work, and the university has responded with blanket rejections.

They’ll respond with something generic, like, “We just don’t have an interest in doing this,” or “This would be an administrative burden.” We go back to our working groups, revamp the proposal trying to address their concerns, and then the cycle continues where they reject us all over again. It’s been painstakingly slow.

One of the core issues is the cost-of-living crisis. Our compensation proposal demands that the University of Michigan raise graduate student salaries up to the level of the cost of living in Ann Arbor for a single person with no dependents, which should be the bare minimum to be able to afford to live here. The university’s response was initially to offer a 2 percent raise — amounting to roughly $100 per month — which is laughable. Their current offer is 5 percent, which is still less than the cost of inflation in the last year alone. All this makes clear that they have not been engaging seriously with our proposals.

We started striking to show them how serious we were about these proposals, and with the goal of making them take us and our problems more seriously; they need to recognize the value that we bring to the university. We’ve increased the rate of bargaining to multiple days a week, and we will continue to work tirelessly at the negotiating table to win a fair contract.

Peter Lucas

Can you tell us more about open bargaining? What has that been like?

Yilei Zhang

It is a great way for people outside of the bargaining team to understand what is happening in the bargaining room. With closed-door bargaining, those of us not on the bargaining team wouldn’t be able to understand just how repressive the atmosphere is. It’s one thing to hear about it, but another to see it for yourself. We can see that what the HR reps are saying to our bargaining team is totally ridiculous. They’re gaslighting us and trying to threaten our bargaining team members. It also helps us know how to better support our bargaining team.

Alejo Stark

It’s an important organizing tool as well. You see HR stonewall our bargaining team members, but also, it’s a space where GEO members can come and talk with each other about what we do next, like how we might reframe some of our demands. So it allows the rank-and-file members to be a part of this process, [which is important] especially considering so many of the rank and file helped think about and draft this platform for years.

Open bargaining allows the rank-and-file members to be a part of this process, [which is important] especially considering so many of the rank and file helped think about and draft this platform for years.

I’m part of the abolition caucus [one of of the committees within the union dedicated to organizing to dismantling the university’s policing system and providing just alternatives to safety], and we’ve been thinking about these demands since the 2020 strike. We developed them from deep research, shared them with members, and discussed the rationale for them. It’s not only extremely democratic and open, but it helps people to feel like they’re a part of that process as well. It’s been an extremely powerful experience, not only externally to see how HR shuts us down, but also internally to help sharpen our arguments and sharpen our collective process.

Amir Fleischmann

One moment that really stands out for me was when HR gave us their first salary counteroffer, which was a ridiculous, below-inflation, 2 percent annual raise. They admitted that they didn’t even take into account the cost of living when coming up with that number. For members in the room to hear that was powerful in and of itself, and then for them to be able to go tell all their colleagues what they heard was an order of magnitude more powerful.

Peter Lucas

What was the 2020 strike about?

Alejo Stark

It was during the start of COVID-19, but it was also the fall in the wake of one of the most widespread rebellions against policing in this country. The strike was an articulation of two demands: a safe and just response. It addressed COVID-19 and the university’s disastrous reopening plans. The university had done very little over the summer to make returning to classes in the fall a safe endeavor for GEO members.

The massive uprising against policing in this country was an opportunity for us to continue building on a long tradition within GEO 3550, which has been influenced by abolitionist unionism (part of a broader social justice unionism). We articulated our safety concerns around policing on campus, which has a long and disturbing history at the University of Michigan. It forced the university to talk about policing, even though it didn’t consider policing a subject of bargaining.

Peter Lucas

You’re now on the longest strike in the union’s history. Can you tell me a little bit about what’s changed since the last strike in 2020 and how the union got there?

Amir Fleischmann

When GEO was formed in the mid-1970s, workers went on a monthlong strike, making it the second-longest strike in our history, with the 2020 strike the third longest. So in the entire forty-nine-year history of the union, up until 2020, we hadn’t had a strike last longer than a week.

That history got us a $14,000 gap between our salaries and the cost of living, and a university that has some of the worst sexual harassment cases at any university in the country. What we’ve seen between 2020 and now is a big shift in the way our union understands what a strike is.

In 2020, we negotiated our contract without striking, let alone holding a preliminary strike vote, because COVID-19 began on the eve of when that would have happened. It just didn’t seem possible for us to go on strike at that time. It’s also worth noting that striking for public sector workers is illegal in the state of Michigan.

Then later that year, we decided to go on strike for a safe and just response outside of a contract campaign, which was pretty scary for our members. Not only had we just inked a new contract with a no-strike clause in it, but we would also be violating the public sector strike ban.

After the strike began the university sued us and filed for a preliminary injunction to end the strike. We didn’t really know what to do, and we weren’t getting very solid advice from our parent union. This fostered fear and internal divisions about the strike. And while I don’t think the strike was a failure, we probably ended it earlier than we should have, because of the threat of this injunction.

We have a different organizing approach, where we’re much more focused on empowering every member in the union to have ownership over the campaign, to be an organizer.

This time around, we were expecting another injunction, which was scary for all of us, but we were prepared to fight it. Eventually, we took it to court, and we beat it. The university spent well over six figures on fancy lawyers — the same people who defended Flint during the water crisis — and they still weren’t able to win.

I think this attitude toward striking is what’s really changed in the past three years. We have a different organizing approach, where we’re much more focused on empowering every member in the union to have ownership over the campaign, to be an organizer.

Yilei Zhang

I was remote in 2020, but it’s clear this time that we are more prepared, more organized — even just telling the members that the strike will be illegal due to state law and the no-strike clause in our contract. Our members actually understand this, and they’re still willing to go on strike. We have spent a lot of time educating people about that.

Peter Lucas

Last month, you defeated an injunction, but then another judge ruled in favor of the university. Tell us more about how workers have been able to stay on the picket line in the face of legal threats.

Yilei Zhang

I will start by distinguishing the injunction and then the legal judgments from the court. We didn’t really expect that the first injunction the university filed would be denied. We had to prepare to continue our strike in the face of an injunction, which actually has the power to force us back to work under the threat of heavy fines.

We were really stressed about this and made all sorts of contingency plans to deal with the legal consequences in this worst-case scenario. But then, unexpectedly, the injunction was denied.

This is different from the later decision made by an administrative law judge, who recommended a finding that we repudiated our contract by violating our no-strike clause. This decision is a recommendation from the Michigan Employment Relations Commission (MERC) that GEO members return to work, but this is only a recommendation. MERC ultimately does not have enforcement power, so this is the major difference from the injunction we had defeated a couple weeks prior.

Peter Lucas

University of Michigan president Santa Ono has only been at the university since the fall of last year, just before bargaining started. What are your impressions of President Ono and what his administration has done since taking over?

Caroline Leland

We had high hopes for his being a new leader at a time when the university was coming out of multiple scandals related to harassment and misbehavior by top leaders at the university. We started working to build a relationship with him as soon as he got here. Our members have spoken at regents’ meetings, which he leads, and approached him in person every chance we get, trying to have real conversations with him about these issues that we’re facing as grad students — issues that can be solved in our contract.

It’s been extremely disappointing seeing President Santa Ono’s response to our negotiation process and to the strike in general.

At first, he really seemed to be listening, and I had high hopes that he would act in our favor and help us win a fair contract. But when push has come to shove, he’s been essentially hiding, and he avoids us whenever he can. He hasn’t made any moves to push the HR representatives toward bargaining with us in good faith. It’s been extremely disappointing seeing his response to our negotiation process and to the strike in general.

Peter Lucas

Alejo, you were one of the two people detained outside of a restaurant that President Ono was dining at. Can you describe what happened there?

Alejo Stark

The day graduate student workers had gotten our pay docked [for striking], we ran into one of President Ono’s black SUVs, where he was enjoying a fancy dinner. A few members approached him and asked where our paycheck was. We started picketing outside, and he ran out the back door to his police escort. This wasn’t the first time he’s avoided members trying to talk to him like this either.

Some of us approached the car to block it from leaving, and he called campus police on us. This was not on campus, mind you. Some of the research that we’ve done in the abolition caucus shows that campus police operate well beyond campus, and this is just another demonstration of that.

I was shoved into the ground by one of the cops, and then detained with a fellow comrade, Kathleen Brown. The cop kept saying I was resisting, and he ended up bending my hand and pushing me down. As we were being forced to kneel down for the detainment, a bunch of committee members started gathering outside. All of a sudden, in the middle of one of Ann Arbor’s major intersections, chants erupted: “Let them go! Let them go!”

I was about to be forced into the back of a police car; I was scared. But ultimately, I think in large part because of this community presence and the other GEO numbers that were there, we were let go.

Peter Lucas

The University of Michigan has embraced a diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, approach to address a lot of the issues that workers are striking over.

Amir Fleischmann

The university projects this woke, DEI image, but it does so without any material restitution. If you’re not materially fixing the problem, then you’re just paying lip service to it. That’s been very frustrating to our members.

The issues the administration claims to be concerned about are reflected in every single one of our demands. They can say they want a diverse campus that has first-generation college students, but if you make it so that you have to be independently wealthy to be a grad student here, you’re going to have a much less diverse campus. That’s what the living wage is about: anybody should be able to come to the University of Michigan and thrive here as a grad student, not just people who are independently wealthy.

The university projects this woke, DEI image, but it does so without any material restitution.

If you’re going to say you want trans people to feel safe on your campus, that means you have to pony up the cash to get them the gender-affirming care that they need to survive. Similarly with harassment: they can talk about changing culture all the time, but you need to actually spend money to protect people. That’s why we’re calling for additional funding for workers who’ve experienced harassment.

Ditto with policing. They can set up a task force, but if they’re not actually going to put money into community-based programs that present a real alternative to the systems that have failed and have been disastrous for our communities, then it’s not going to solve the problem.

We’ve mentioned a couple of times the previous president, who was fired for sexual misconduct. The university thought that they could just fire him and the sexual harassment crisis would be over, as if he alone was the problem. They can pretend that it was his fault alone — he certainly contributed to it — but if they don’t address our proposals for sexual harassment, it will be their burden to bear when this continues to happen.

Alejo Stark

In the second week of the strike, President Ono recognized Professor Lilia Cortina for her work on harassment and workplace incivility — the same research that the union’s anti-harassment and discrimination group used to develop its proposals. GEO’s proposals, in line with Professor Cortina’s research, demand that the university offer graduate students a source of funding to give them a way out of discriminatory and abusive relationships. The demand also notes that the program should be independent from the university reporting mechanisms. So on the one hand, the administration lauds this research, while on the other it rejects our demand at the bargaining table by continuing to insist on mandatory reporting.

Peter Lucas

What have been the biggest challenges organizing within your respective departments?

Yilei Zhang

At the department level, we had a hard time getting support from the faculty. In my department, graduate student instructors (GSIs) are teaching assistants, so we teach lab sections, hold office hours, and grade homework, but we’re not the primary instructors of the courses. When we went on strike, instead of pressuring the administration to settle our strike as soon as possible, our department leaders pressured teaching faculty to adjust the courses by canceling homework, changing exams to multiple-choice questions that can be auto-graded, or grading based on completeness, and so on, which compromised the education quality for students.

In some other departments, even though the striking GSIs are primary instructors of their courses, and they are the only ones who have interactions with their students, the administration pressured their department chairs to submit grades for students they did not teach themselves — even explicitly indicating in their emails that submitting full credit for all students is acceptable. It is a clear infringement on academic freedom and integrity.

Most tenured faculty across the university have stayed silent during the strike, or followed the administration’s instructions to adjust their courses in a way that compromises the education quality for students.

Even though faculty in the history department decided to collectively withhold their grades in order to protest the administration’s actions, and some faculty in other departments publicly denounced the administration, most tenured faculty across the university have stayed silent during the strike, or followed the administration’s instructions to adjust their courses in a way that compromises the education quality for students. Lecturers who are sympathetic to the strike also find it difficult to not follow the administration, because the university has implied that it would discontinue their contract in the next year if the grades were not submitted on time.

Amir Fleischmann

Holding the line on grades is going to be a challenge, and there are difficulties with faculty who manage these courses doing the grading while we strike, aka scabbing.

In my department, political science, the faculty have no idea what it’s like for grad students. They don’t understand how expensive it is in Ann Arbor. Things like rent and food are more expensive here than in Chicago. Grad students are not getting paid enough to meet these needs. The faculty are just really detached from what our experience of the University of Michigan campus is.

Also, pretty much every striking worker missed a full month of pay because of the strike. We knew this was a real possibility going in. The university was very clear from the beginning that it would be docking our pay if we went on strike. In the past, we’ve been able to negotiate back pay from the university. But like I mentioned, these were one-to-three-day-long strikes, making it much easier to negotiate back pay.

What’s been incredible about it is that so many workers were willing to forgo their April paychecks, because they knew that the issues that we are struggling for are too important to accept the university’s line that we need to settle for less. If it means that we have to miss our April paychecks, so be it.

The university was very clear from the beginning that it would be docking our pay if we went on strike.

Alejo Stark

In my department, a lot of us are instructors of record. That means that graduate student workers have their own classes, which gives us a lot of leverage. I think it’s the case in other departments as well, where the only way for them to put bullshit grades in is for faculty to manually put in a grade.

In our case, faculty — meaning both lecturers and tenure-track professors — have been unwilling to do this. Some of them have even joined us in a sort of wildcat grade strike by withholding their grades too, which has led to discipline from the dean. As long as they do not enter grades on our behalf, we have leverage.

Caroline Leland

Something that’s unique about the Ford School of Public Policy, where I do most of my organizing, is that most of the grad students there are master’s students, rather than PhDs who make up the majority of our bargaining unit. This is both a challenge and a strength of our union.

The university has been trying to divide master’s students against PhDs by proposing a funding structure for PhD students outside of our contract that would give PhD students summer funding, which results in a higher pay for the year. But master’s students and others on the Dearborn and Flint campuses got left out of that proposal. This has required lots of one-on-one conversations, to help people understand our needs as a collective, rather than as individuals.

It’s also a strength, because before we even started bargaining, the union voted to keep central to our approach the idea that we will not allow the university to pit us against each other based on special interests or specific identities.

Peter Lucas

What challenges do international students face?

Yilei Zhang

We pay hundreds of dollars in international student fees every semester, and the university gets millions of dollars in income from these fees every year. But it is not clear where this money is used.

We are asking for establishing an international student emergency fund that can help international students solve urgent difficulties. For example, during the pandemic, there were Asian students who could not afford the exorbitant flight tickets to visit their family members who were often dealing with serious medical conditions back in their home countries. International students can often face greater risks than domestic students do. We hope these vulnerabilities can be seen, and the fund can provide more support for our international students.

This article was first published by GR in November 2009.

Despite a treasure-trove of new information having emerged over the last forty-six  years, there are many people who still think who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and why are unanswerable …

The post JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters appeared first on Global Research.

The most important task for Brandon Johnson, who will be inaugurated as Chicago’s mayor on Monday, will be to pioneer a new, progressive path to address crime in the city while fending off attacks from a hostile media and the Chicago Police Department.

Then candidate Brandon Johnson speaks after being projected winner as mayor on April 4, 2023 in Chicago, Illinois. (Alex Wroblewski / Getty Images)

This coming Monday, Brandon Johnson will take office as mayor of Chicago with no shortage of urgent priorities, or of forces arrayed against achieving them. Maybe none is more pivotal than the issue of crime and public safety.

Crime was arguably the issue of the city’s 2023 mayoral election, with poll after poll after poll showing it was top of mind for many voters, if not most. You only need to look at Johnson’s campaign itself to get a sense of its centrality: while his campaign launch commercial didn’t mention crime once, the subject was ubiquitous in the candidate’s ads and media appearances by the end.

With a relatively slender mandate — Johnson’s four-point winning margin is the slimmest since Harold Washington’s in 1983 — the pressure is now on to prove to voters that Johnson’s innovative approach to tackling crime, by focusing on its root causes and pouring money into long-neglected human needs, is the right one. It won’t be easy, despite Johnson’s rhetorical shifts on the issue as he tried to strike a balance between speaking to voters’ anxieties about crime and maintaining a commitment to progressive criminal-justice reforms. But if he succeeds, Johnson will blaze a trail for progressive local officials around the country to follow.

Three years ago, Johnson joined calls for “defunding the police,” authoring a nonbinding resolution in 2020 from his position as a Cook County commissioner that called for “redirect[ing] funds from policing and incarceration to public services not administered by law enforcement that promote community health and safety equitably.” Yet during the mayoral campaign, he disavowed “defund” as a political goal, instead vowing to find $150 million worth of “efficiencies” in the Chicago Police Department (CPD) budget and standing as the sole candidate who refused to promise to fill 1,600 police vacancies. By the end of the campaign, he pledged not to cut “one penny” from the police budget and claimed he had always planned to fill those vacancies.

Johnson had planned to find savings in the police budget by closing the city’s notorious Homan Square facility, where CPD has been accused of a wide variety of abuses; ending a wasteful $33 million contract for gunfire-detection sensors called ShotSpotter that many progressive criminal-justice activists claim to be ineffective; and streamlining the number of police supervisors. It’s not yet clear if such “efficiencies” would fall under his rejection of CPD budget cuts.

This careful modulation by candidate Johnson has given mayor-elect Johnson some wiggle room. After inauguration, Johnson will have more political space to avoid or at least minimize a bruising fight over the CPD budget with the city’s police union and an unfriendly political and media establishment, each of which would more likely than not hammer his administration for refusing to hire more cops and would fiercely resist any cuts.

He will need it, because plenty of his other promises are sure to trigger opposition that’s just as bitter. Johnson has vowed to “immediately enact” the federal consent decree imposed on the city’s police after the 2019 officer murder of Laquan Donald, which mandates federal oversight of the CPD and has been chronically delayed at least partly thanks to police opposition. He has promised to implement the spate of legal restrictions on police raids contained in the Anjanette Young Ordinance, including banning no-knock warrants and barring police from pointing guns at children, which had been rejected by the city council’s Committee on Public Safety late last year. And he’s also vowed to fire police officers “with direct ties to extremist organizations” like the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers, a very real problem within the CPD, but an effort that’s faced resistance across the country.

These initiatives will likely be the most controversial — and also the most tempting for an embattled mayoral administration to drag its feet on or even drop.

Less likely to meet resistance are those parts of Johnson’s platform that involve expanding law enforcement’s activities. Johnson’s answer to concerns about police vacancies was to promise the “training and promoting” of two hundred new detectives and, later, to expand hiring of black and brown officers by relaxing rules around who can and can’t become a cop. He also envisioned new mayoral offices for gun-violence prevention and community safety to “serve as the citywide coordinating hub for promoting violence prevention,” and a new CPD missing-persons initiative.

But the cornerstone of Johnson’s crime-fighting vision — the successful enactment of which may well make or break his mayoralty — are his ambitious proposals for sorely needed public investment. Throughout the campaign, Johnson argued that “the safest cities in America have one thing in common. . . . They invest in people.” For Johnson, that means not just doubling the number of youth summer jobs and reopening more than a dozen public mental health centers, but pouring money into public schools, housing programs for the homeless, and a variety of nonviolent, nonpolice first-responder initiatives.

The crux of Johnson’s public-safety strategy is the enactment of his wider economic and social program. And that will depend on the enactment of a suite of new taxes on the wealthy, including a hike on both the hotel tax and the real estate transfer tax on expensive properties, and a 3.5 percent income tax on Chicagoans making six figures, with the sweetener of freezing property taxes. That in itself will entail a fierce political battle, with the specter of capital flight looming above it all.

The stakes are high. If Johnson succeeds and gets this difficult needle-threading agenda over the line — and in the process not just makes material improvements in people’s lives, but even presides over a drop in crime — he won’t just win a second term but will serve as a model for all progressives at the municipal level. If he fails, or the city even sees an uptick in crime, it will be used to shut progressives out of power in the city for the foreseeable future and delegitimize the Left more broadly all over the country.

To carry it through, he’ll need a committed activist movement that’s as mobilized to fight for his political program and fend off the inevitable opposition arrayed against it as they had been to get him elected in the first place. But that movement will also need to hold the incoming mayor to his promises, when the ever-present political temptation to follow the path of least resistance inevitably rears its head. Johnson once emphasized on the campaign trail that “these are not radical ideas.” The task for Chicago’s left now is to make sure he feels the same once he’s sitting on the fifth floor of City Hall.

Far from being a white-collar oasis, architects work under grueling conditions — which is why some are now trying to unionize. We spoke to an architect and union organizer about labor’s new efforts to organize the industry.

Architects often face grueling overtime hours. (Genna Martin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In 2021, workers at SHoP, a New York architecture firm, filed for a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) union election with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. They felt overworked (Curbed reported on a SHoP worker who “was hospitalized with pneumonia after working a 110-hour week and felt pressured to work while his wife was in the middle of childbirth”), and some of them carried a heavy load of student debt. They wanted a collective avenue of redress and a means to stabilize their work lives. The Architecture Lobby, a nonprofit that advocates for reform within the industry, has existed for nearly a decade, but SHoP was poised to become the first private sector architectural firm to unionize since the 1940s.

The backlash was swift. According to the workers, SHoP management launched an anti-union campaign, hiring prime union-busting law firm Proskauer Rose LLP to craft the strategy. Management warned of losing clients and instituted an employee stock-ownership program (ESOP) that, while not providing a seat at the table or say over the direction of the firm, functioned as a wedge, peeling off support for the union by distributing company profits to workers in the form of company shares. It worked: fearing that it would lose the union election were it to go through with it, the SHoP union withdrew its petition in February of 2022.

Andrew Daley was one of the SHoP workers who supported the union. During the campaign, Daley decided to make a change: he quit his job at SHoP and joined the Machinists as a full-time organizer. Since joining, Daley has assisted workers at Bernheimer Architecture, another New York–based firm, in winning voluntary union recognition. Earlier this week, another campaign went public, with employees at Snøhetta, a high-end firm, filing for an NLRB election.

Jacobin’s Alex N. Press spoke to Daley about the SHoP campaign, the biggest issues facing architects, and his hopes for the current organizing efforts. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Alex N. Press

You’re a full-time union organizer for the Machinists now, but you were an architect until recently. How did you decide to go all in on trying to organize the sector?

Andrew Daley

I’m a licensed architect in the state of New York and have practiced in four different states. I’ve been in the profession for twelve years, with experience at big and small firms. I’ve been an independent contractor, I’ve done construction. I’ve worked in lots of different environments. At those places, I’ve tried to agitate for better conditions for myself and people around me, whether that was by talking one-on-one to the owner or through committees or working groups. I had familiarity with unions, particularly from friends who are writers, but I think I had a sort of NIMBY [“not in my backyard”] attitude like, “I love this, it’s great for everybody, but I just can’t see that as a possibility for architecture.”

In the summer of 2020 at the firm that I had then been at for around six years, we were rethinking firm policies on equity and diversity. We met with hesitation, an attitude of, “We’re doing the best that we can.” Then, they laid a bunch of people off in September of 2020. At that point, a few people, not myself, started connecting with organizers and talking about the possibility of unionizing so that even if we couldn’t stop layoffs, we could build a structure for them.

I was brought into that conversation a few months after that, when there were about ten people in the group. We organized for another nine months after that, and I wound up leaving a little bit before the campaign went public right before Christmas of 2021. I was considering a shift to the public sector, but the Machinists asked if I’d be interested in becoming an organizer. I hadn’t thought that was a possibility, but I couldn’t pass it up.

When the SHoP campaign went public, they had about 65 percent of workers supporting the union, and then there was another round of layoffs. Morale was low. But they filed. Ultimately, the firm ran a heavy anti-union campaign, and the workers pulled their petition, because a lot of the tactics started working.

After that, the question was, what do we want to do at this point? We’d had a big push, we had thousands of followers on an Instagram that we hadn’t expected to get that kind of attention. People were interested in what was happening and devastated by the fact that it had failed. But a number of groups had reached out about organizing, and without exception they still felt they needed to unionize. One group in particular was the Bernheimer Architecture group, which included one member from the SHoP campaign who had been laid off and taken a job there afterward.

There are around a dozen more firms where we’ve had some conversations. My point being: there is a lot of interest.

Bernheimer went public in September of 2022 and got voluntary recognition. Now, we have around eight to twelve active campaigns (though of course, some of those might go dark, hit plateaus, and so on). There are around a dozen more firms where we’ve had some conversations. My point being: there is a lot of interest.

Alex N. Press

Are all of these firms in New York?

Andrew Daley

No, but the epicenter is here. A lot of that has to do with the critical mass of architecture in New York. Plus, there’s always been an ethos that the only place to make a decent living in architecture is in New York, which is a backward assumption: most of the architects I know in other cities weren’t making that much less than I was but had a way cheaper cost of living.

So New York has a big concentration of architects and also the worst working conditions, which explains why these efforts took off here. But we’re talking to groups in Los Angeles, San Francisco, one in the Midwest, a firm with offices across the country. That’s exciting, because if this were just in New York, or at one type of profile of work, I’d think we didn’t have as good of a read on the industry as I’d have hoped. But instead, it’s all over the map in terms of location, size, and discipline. These are systemic issues throughout the industry that need to be addressed in a systemic way.

Alex N. Press

For people who might not be familiar with the architecture world, can you explain what you mean when you refer to different types and echelons of work?

Andrew Daley

I don’t want to use the term “starchitect,” but there are famous firms in the field. These aren’t identifying the firms we’re working with, but some famous firms would be Zaha Hadid, the SHoPs of the world, Bjarke Ingles, SOM, and Frank Gehry — high-profile people who a lay person may be familiar with. But the ones we are actually working with: some are doing mega-developments, some are doing high-rise luxury residential, some are small-scale retail interiors, some do really institutional work, some do government work, some do massive governmental and infrastructural planning. It’s not any one kind of work — it’s all kinds.

Alex N. Press

So you went through the SHoP campaign as a worker, and you referred to the anti-union campaign that peeled off enough support that the union ended up withdrawing the NLRB petition. What have you and the Machinists learned from that so it doesn’t end that way going forward?

Andrew Daley

As much as there are similarities in how each industry fights unions, there are also differences in tactics, and now that we’ve seen it in this industry, we know what to expect. We assume firms that don’t want this to happen will follow SHoP’s playbook. We can learn from how it played out. We’re open with every group about what they might expect.

We also tell those groups that they’re going to have to call out their employers. Firms should know that if they’re going to break the law and pressure their employees rather than respect their rights, workers will put it in the press and make what is happening clear to the public. Public perception shifting on the campaign helps make those anti-union tactics stop. We will make things public, we will file unfair labor practice (ULP) charges.

Firms should know that if they’re going to break the law and pressure their employees rather than respect their rights, workers will put it in the press and make what is happening clear to the public.

Another thing we’ve thought a lot about is the path that the Bernheimer group laid of voluntary recognition and a collaborative environment with their owner. We aren’t steering the ship in the negotiations at that firm; we’re a fly on the wall advising, but it’s about what they want in their workplace collectively. Do I think any of the firms that have big corporate structures and an ethos about being a corporation will offer voluntary recognition? No. But do I think that firms that are still owned by founding partners, or even the next generation of partners that may understand that they have something to gain here? Yes, it’s possible.

The Conde Nast group is another model, where they didn’t file for a union election, but they knew they had support and figured out other ways of putting pressure on management. It might be harder to replicate that within an industry where there’s no union density, but it’s an interesting strategy.

Alex N. Press

Do you think what happened at Bernheimer could be replicable at other firms?

Andrew Daley

Yes. In one way, Andy Bernheimer is incredibly unique in how he thinks about himself, how he thinks about his practice, and how he thinks about labor overall compared to a lot of other firm owners. That being said, it’s also not that different from any other firm. It’s a twenty-person firm; there are tons of twenty-person firms throughout the country and definitely in New York. Maybe the Bernheimer playbook doesn’t work when we’re talking about a two thousand–person firm that has offices all around the world, but even up to a hundred and fifty employees, it’s something that we can point to. And Bernheimer is going to set the standard in the industry with its contract; it’s going to be the only contract of a private sector architecture firm, so that’s something to follow too.

Alex N. Press

Some of the shops you’re working with are small, and the first thing an employer will cite to oppose a union is the competitive pressure in the industry. What’s your plan to handle bargaining and winning multiple first contracts when these shops get union recognition?

Andrew Daley

We make it abundantly clear to everybody that their salaries are not going to double overnight. The first contract might only get minimal gains in terms of salary increases. But what we are going to be able to get is a lot of noneconomic things and protections that, frankly, don’t exist right now.

Another thing that we are going to be pushing is policies that in one sense are economic but in another sense are disincentives for working a lot of overtime. The model of the industry is, “I have all exempt workers, so I don’t have to pay them overtime. I’m getting pinched in every direction in terms of my fee, and the only way to make it all back is to require my staff to do excessive amounts of unpaid overtime.” That’s what we’re conditioned to do from day one in architecture school.

What we are going to be able to get is a lot of noneconomic things and protections that, frankly, don’t exist right now.

What that overlooks is the amount of inefficiency that happens within those hours of work that a client never sees and doesn’t care about, from internal miscommunication, to back-and-forth between multiple different partners reviewing a project, to redoing things not necessarily in the name of a better product. If we put in lots of disincentives in contracts (and it might not be time and a half right away, and it might not be forty hours right away), but if we build in structures to guard against it, we’re giving time back to all of the employees, because most firms are going to say, “Well, we can’t afford to pay the overtime.” So then we’re all in agreement: let’s make sure it doesn’t happen. That’s the biggest one to me because it trickles down to everything else.

Alex N. Press

The last time there were private sector architects joining unions in the United States was the 1930s. Unemployment in the sector was a key issue back then. With these recent campaigns, a lot of architects have mentioned overtime as a major issue. Is that what is driving this push now, or are there other problems?

Andrew Daley

A lot of things are driving it. Being an at-will employee itself is soul crushing. I’ve been laid off. I was tapped on the shoulder and asked, “Hey, do you have a minute?” This was at a three-person fabrication studio and it wasn’t like, “Here’s two weeks’ notice.” It was, “Go home now.” That was a unique situation, but it’s not uncommon, not only in architecture of course, but in this field, there’s very little severance, and what you get is not commensurate with the rest of the market. So not only can you be dismissed at will, but you’re not set up to do anything on the flip side of that, which leads you to rush into something new to stay afloat.

If you’re getting paid an okay salary, but then you amortize that out over your hourly rate, which is 25 or 50 percent overtime, all of a sudden that wage doesn’t look so good.

A lot of issues that people talk about come back to uncompensated overtime. Burnout is directly related to hours. Work-life balance is directly related to hours. How much you’re getting paid is directly related to hours: if you’re getting paid an okay salary, but then you amortize that out over your hourly rate, which is 25 or 50 percent overtime, all of a sudden that wage doesn’t look so good.

Alex N. Press

There are some stereotypes about architects, though The Fountainhead may be responsible for that. Are there actual peculiarities to this work or this type of worker, be they ideological or something to do with the job itself?

Andrew Daley

The general public does perceive architects a certain way, as frustrated geniuses toiling away, trying to get the world to understand their singular brilliance. The idea is that it’s an individual pursuit, and if you’re just good enough and work hard enough at it, then everyone will see you for what you are — that’s how people see Frank Lloyd Wright, for example.

But what we miss is that he had hundreds of employees. We never talk about Wright’s workers. And not only that: he started a school so that he could not only have workers, but have people pay to apprentice under him. So even when we think about this romantic time, the stereotype wasn’t true either. We aren’t taught that history, and we are really bad at educating the public about what we do and how much time it actually takes.

Alex N. Press

You changed your life to try to organize a nonunion sector. Is there anything you’d like to say about all of this on a personal level?

Andrew Daley

I might be the only licensed architect who is doing this full time. A lot of people ask me, “Do you miss architecture? Do you miss design?” In a lot of ways, yes. I miss the camaraderie of it. I miss being collaborative with people on a project. I miss seeing projects come to life.

But in a lot of ways, this is similar. All of these different campaigns are different projects, and I’m helping people get rights that they don’t have now. I feel closer and more connected to the industry than I ever have before. In part, that’s because it’s now my job to be able to connect on these things. But personally, I now have a reasonable work-life balance and a healthy working environment. I don’t think I’ve ever had that in the industry before, and that’s what I want to be able to create for everyone else.

For example, I talk to so many people who are parents who find themselves in a situation where they’ll leave work at six, catch their kids for a little bit, and then log back on for three more hours. That’s soul-crushing. I would love to see it not be like that any longer. That’s what I’m fighting for.

The finance minister says in the meantime, deterrence has been reestablished.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich gave good grades Sunday to the just-completed Operation Shield and Arrow while saying that the real solution would only be dismantling its whole terrorist infrastructure.

While only “time will tell if this peace will last,” he said in an interview on Kan Reshet Bet that “It was a very good operation, it sent a clear message to Hamas and the Iranians about our capabilities and deterrence in the face of attempts to raise their heads. I think there is a change of direction; this is a message to everyone who deals with us in the region.”

The IDF had great success in hitting the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization hard over the last five days, he said, damaging it “more significant[ly] than the previous operation.”

Israel struck 170 PIJ targets last August in the 66-hour Operation Breaking Dawn, and killed two of its senior commanders, Tayseer Jabari and Khaled Mansour. In the current operation, the IAF successfully assassinated six of PIJ’s military leaders and hit 422 military targets, including many rocket-launching teams and sites.

However, “we did not solve all the problems,” which he said were caused by having expelled the Jews from Gush Katif in 2005, “and even further back, in Oslo,” where “we created a lot of problematic situations.”

The Oslo Accords of 1993 and 1995 created the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip and sections of Judea and Samaria so that some 97% of the Palestinian population would be governed by their own administration. In 2007, Hamas overthrew the PA in Gaza and has held the coastal enclave in its Islamic grip ever since.

“Gaza is a difficult problem, we’re in a bad ritual,” he said, seemingly referring to the counter-terror operations Israel has to undertake there every year or two to renew its deterrence after it is determined that there have been too many rocket launches and attempted terror attacks against civilians on the ground emanating from the terror organizations there.

Smotrich acknowledged that Operation Shield and Arrow had been focused only on PIJ, which is a direct Iranian proxy and the second-largest terror group in Gaza, rather than Hamas, “after weighing all the considerations.” This, even though “it is Israel’s position that Hamas is the sovereign in Gaza and bears responsibility” for all that happens in the Strip.

Hamas has also “suffered severe damage in recent weeks to its infrastructure,” he said, adding, “Our big challenge will be that the peace is not used to strengthen the other side. We saw it with Hezbollah in the north and I hope we won’t see it with Hamas and Jihad in the south.”

The bottom line was clear to the head of the right-wing Religious Zionist party, even if he could set no time-line for it.

“It will be necessary to take care of the root of the problem,” he said. “In my opinion, at the end we’ll have to dismantle Gaza and disarm it of its weapons.”

The post Major ground operation in Gaza inevitable, warns Israeli Finance Minister appeared first on World Israel News.

Latest round of terrorist rocket attacks highlights the strain of war on young residents of the Gaza border region, experts say, calling for greater mental health care services.

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

Activists and psychologists are urging the Israeli government to invest more resources in mental health services for kids and teens in the South, who are traumatized by living under the constant threat of rocket fire originating from the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Doron Heyman, an educational psychologist who serves clients in the communities bordering the Strip, which most often come under threat from terror groups in the coastal enclave, said that younger residents are in desperate need of additional support.

Heyman told Ynet that during Operation Shield and Arrow, the government opened a handful of temporary “resilience” centers providing basic mental health services, but described the practice as “a Band-Aid on a bleeding wound.”

Because the centers are now being shuttered due to the end of this round of fighting, youth in the area are once again left “abandoned” without a long-term solution to help them cope with the trauma of life in the region and the destruction caused by rockets from Gaza.

There are no permanent mental health clinics specializing in the treatment of children and teens in the Gaza border region, forcing parents to transport children to larger cities for treatment, which can be a significant distance away.

“There are children who are dealing with depression… but there are no long-term therapists in the area,” Heyman told Ynet. “Children and youth have to travel outside the area, and are subject to waiting lists [for mental health treatment] that sometimes reach over a year.”

Heyman added that “for parents of an 11 or 12-year-old child who needs treatment, it is very difficult to drive him once a week to Beersheba or Ashkelon. The private psychologists are also in high demand, and cannot receive all the referrals.

“It’s very unfortunate. Some people simply don’t get treatment because of it. And then the [mental] damage keeps building.”

Dr. Rotem Sternberg, a social worker and lecturer at the School of Social Work at Sapir College in Sderot, told Ynet that “the struggles of the residents of the South get worse with each escalation, and some people even remain [traumatized] for life.”

She added that “every week, it feels like we are getting a more and more [mentally distressed] population.”

Sternberg noted that simply adding more psychologists to the area isn’t the answer, and that a long term solution to the conflict with Gaza is critical.

“It doesn’t matter how much we increase the number of therapists, as long as the security situation remains the way it is,” she said.

The post ‘Abandoned’ youth in Israel’s shell shocked South need more mental health resources: activists appeared first on World Israel News.

The Hollywood screenwriters’ strike has deep historical roots: stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age, writers and many others in the industry have insisted that filmmaking is a form of labor — and fought for their rights as workers.

Prominent writers Billy Wilder and Gore Vidal (right and second from right) join a writers’ picket line at 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, June 25, 1981. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) is on strike. The union representing about 11,500 writers of film, television, radio, and online media announced a walkout as their last three-year contract expired on May 1, explaining that “the survival of writing as a profession is at stake in this negotiation.”

At the center of the dispute are deteriorating working conditions stemming from the rise of streaming services and the boom in made-for-television production. The union’s proposal, sent to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, includes both traditional demands like higher minimum wages and unique claims concerning “viewership-based streaming residuals” and the regulation of artificial intelligence usage.

In a recent interview with the New Yorker, Alex O’Keefe, who worked on the hit FX show The Bear, complained, “I thought we would be treated more like collaborators on a product. It’s like an assembly line now.” Similarly, Stephanie McFarlane, a writer for BET+, told the New York Times that she just wants her “income to be a livable wage,” since “right now, it’s like a gig economy.”

Such statements have a long history in the film industry. Thinking of themselves as workers, screenwriters, actors, directors, and many others in the film industry stretching back to Hollywood’s Golden Age in the 1930s and ’40s have insisted that filmmaking is a form of labor and resisted attempts to categorize it just as entertainment or art. Screenwriter Philip Dunne, who worked for 20th Century Fox, argued that no matter how “glorified” his work was, the movie writer is an “employee, subject to the directions, and in some cases the apparent lunacies, of the studio executives.” Joan Crawford thought that Hollywood actors “have jobs the same as any girl in a ten-cent store, and we do what we’re told.” James Cagney suggested that he was “just like a shipping clerk. I was just a salaried employee.”

Hollywood workers felt entitled to fair labor standards and the protections guaranteed by US labor law. And they fought for those rights. In fact, the first battle waged by Hollywood scribes was for their right to form a union.

At the height of the New Deal, screenwriters, actors, and directors, like millions of other US workers, joined the ranks of organized labor. While actors and directors adopted a more conservative, craft-focused unionism, they nonetheless raised their own standards. And writers proved to be comparatively militant, quicker to strike to defend and expand their rights on the job.

That kind of worker consciousness was as crucial then as it is now. Despite attempts to focus on the glitz and glamor of their industry, time and again Hollywood workers have been compelled to turn the attention back to the sphere of production and labor rights.

Unionizing in an Anti-Union City

Hollywood and worker struggles have been intertwined from the very beginning.

In the 1910s, the film industry relocated from the East Coast to the Los Angeles area in large part because of the city’s reputation as the United States’ premier nonunion city. A coalition of bankers and employers, including Los Angeles Times publisher General Harrison Gray Otis, had turned the city into what scholar Mike Davis later called “a paradise of the open shop.” Owners of motion-picture companies found this anti-labor atmosphere immensely appealing.

Movies were getting longer and more expensive, and the production process required many skilled craft-workers, such as carpenters, electricians, tailors, and painters. Weak unions and a steady supply of new residents in search of work meant that salaries in Los Angeles were a fifth to a third below the prevailing rates in San Francisco, and in some cases half the wage levels of New York.

The film industry relocated from the East Coast to the Los Angeles area in large part because of the city’s reputation as the United States’ premier nonunion city.

Some unions did manage to infiltrate the studio lots. The East Coast origin of most studio heads, as well as their loose ties with the interests of the more traditional downtown Los Angeles businesses, made labor organizers hopeful about their chances.

First among them was the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Established in New York in 1893, the union represented a combination of crafts closely tied to the building trades, as well as the motion-picture machine operators, property men, and grips. In 1908, IATSE opened its first local in Los Angeles and soon found itself locked in jurisdiction battles with two of the city’s long-standing trade unions.

Nevertheless, IATSE and other American Federation of Labor–affiliated locals, including musicians, managed to form a united front and, in 1926, they forced the Motion Picture Producers Association to sign the first Studio Basic Agreement, which recognized most unions, granted the eight-hour workday, standardized overtime payments, and formed a committee to settle labor disputes.

The struggles of the back lot soon found an echo among the creative ranks. In 1919, film and theater players set up the Actors’ Equity Association and, a year later, the first Screen Writers Guild was established. While both failed to draw many members, producers were still spooked about the potential of these creative guilds. So in early 1927, just a few months after signing its first agreement with IATSE, a group of industry captains led by MGM’s Louis B. Mayer put together a company union of sorts called the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (Yes, the organization that today dispenses the Oscars was originally a company union.)

Yes, the organization that today dispenses the Oscars was originally a company union.

When the Great Depression hit, the major studios used their company union to impose a sweeping across-the-board pay cut. As the Screen Guild’s Magazine reported at the time, writers, actors, and directors were left feeling that “the Academy was the medium through which wholesale theft was committed under the guise of necessity and parliamentary processes.”

Meanwhile, IATSE, an independent union, resisted any pay reduction for its members. Inspired by the example of this worker-run union, a group of writers reorganized the old Screen Writers Guild (SWG). They immediately signed up 173 charter members. Three months later, in July 1933, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) was formed, and the Screen Directors Guild (SDG) was founded in 1936.

Unions Conservative and Militant

Studio bosses tried to nip the new organizing in the bud. Whenever it was asked to recognize a new union, the Producers Association insisted that the workers in question, be they directors, cinematographers, or script clerks, were not employees under the definition of the law and, therefore, were not entitled to the associated rights. They consistently questioned the authority of the federal government to determine whether a group of distinctive craft-workers could be considered a separate bargaining unit and resented the New Deal for meddling in the labor-management relationship.

Interestingly, the creative employees of Hollywood initially displayed a somewhat similar attitude. SAG, for example, empowered itself by taking advantage of a back-lot dispute. On April 1937, after failing to win recognition from the producers, the guild joined forces with a new craft union called the Federation of Motion Picture Crafts (FMPC). SAG announced it was going to join an FMPC walkout, only to renege on its promise once producers agreed to negotiate with the guild if it called off the strike. As the Los Angeles Times reported, this agreement threw a “stumbling block in the path of striking studio craftsmen.”

Whenever it was asked to recognize a new union, the Producers Association insisted that the workers in question were not employees under the definition of the law.

Directors played a similar craft-oriented game. From the get-go, SDG declared that it would have no affiliation or working agreement with any other talent or craft organization. Unimpressed by the show of conservatism, the studios still refused to recognize the guild until it filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and threatened to strike. Even then, unit managers — formative members of SDG — were left out of the bargain and forced to form their own union. For directors, organized labor was a mere safety net: they preferred a peaceful, narrow agreement, catering mostly to the artistic aspirations of a select few.

The talent group that came closest to a traditional proletariat was the writers. The screenwriters lacked the personal cachet of high-profile directors and box office stars. And in terms of brute leverage, they simply were not as threatening. After all, as an economic analysis of collective bargaining in the industry explained, “a strike of actors immediately halts all photography; a strike of writers does so only after the backlog of previously prepared screen plays has been exhausted.”

The talent group that came closest to a traditional proletariat was the writers.

The producers fought SWG ferociously. They rebuked their writers in meetings, handed them guild resignations slips, threatened to blacklist SWG members, and even helped form a sweetheart union. Still, emboldened by the NLRB, SWG persisted. After two separate appeals to the NLRB, SWG finally won recognition in 1939. The writers singed their first studio contract on May 1940 and included an 80 percent guild shop.

From Dissension to Unity

Despite their craft exclusiveness, the Hollywood guilds won significant gains. By the early 1940s, all three of them had inked lasting contracts with the big studios, achieving higher wages, arbitration of disputes, and, most importantly, an extensive guild shop that covered between 90 and 100 percent of studio employment.

These victories are even more impressive in hindsight. In his book Stayin’ Alive, Jefferson Cowie writes that by the late 1970s, “the rate of successful organizing efforts had fallen from about 80 percent in the first ten years of the Wagner Act to 61 percent in the 1950s to only 46 percent by 1977.” A Pew Center study published this year reports that the share of US workers who belong to a union has fallen from 20.1 percent in 1983 to 10.1 percent in 2022.

In Hollywood, the triumphs of the New Deal era lasted through the 1970s and beyond.

Yet in Hollywood, the triumphs of the New Deal era lasted through the 1970s and beyond. SAG, SDG, SWG, and IATSE remain powerful organizations today. With slightly moderated structures and names, WGA, Directors Guild of America (DGA), and SAG-AFTRA strengthened their hold and represent a labor force that now extends to other industries such as radio, television, and digital media.

The current moment has the potential to unite the film workers’ ranks even further. DGA started its contract talks with the producers’ association (currently the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, or AMPTP) on May 10; SAG-AFTRA will follow on June 7, and IATSE next year. In a stark departure from the past, all of these unions are displaying a united front. As Lindsay Daugherty, head of IATSE’s Teamsters Local 399 said in the WGA strike meeting, “they’re starving all of us out, not just you guys. So, whatever they pay you guys now, they’re going to pay all of us later, with interest. . . . We have to fight. We have to keep fighting together.”

Producers will try to divide and conquer. They are already focusing their efforts on reaching an agreement with DGA, whose only strike lasted for three hours and five minutes in 1987. The chances of a general Hollywood walkout are probably slim.

But if the creative guilds and the craft union can stick together, they are likely to find out that even against AI, the most effective protection is organized labor.