Hot Girls Join Black-Ass Picket Lines
Welcome to This Black-Ass Life! This week, we’re talking strikes and channeling Renaissance - release your jobs! If it was unclear before, we are #unionstrong. We’ve both been in unions and have also worked for unions. While imperfect, a system where workers can take collective action in this capitalist hellscape is one we can get behind.
I. The Facts
From Hollywood to healthcare, people are on strike and demanding better for themselves and their fellow workers. Companies are truly TRYING IT every which way.
UAW workers at Mack Trucks want their wages to match the increased cost of living, among other issues.
Speaking of vroom vroom, Detroit’s Big Three automakers have laid off nearly 5,000 autoworkers since the UAW strike began.
While the WGA has reached an agreement, SAG-AFTRA is still on strike with talks continuing this week. AI is a big issue with actors fighting for the right to their likeness and to not compete with AI-generated actors for roles.
Video game workers are joining actors and writers in authorizing a strike, too. Core demands include better pay, medical treatment and breaks for motion capture performers, and protections against AI.
In Nevada, teachers are fighting for the right to strike and advocate for working conditions that allow them to support themselves and their students.
In Massachusetts, patients and their families joined nurses on strike for better pay and benefits closer to what their colleagues in their nearest big city make. Solidarity!
Pharmacy workers are walking out because they want safe conditions in order to do the life and death task of filling prescriptions accurately.
Hundreds of hotel workers in California are on strike for affordable healthcare.
Models are not on strike yet but are bringing to global attention agencies that con people they recruit from refugee camps (only to return them with debt to those same refugee camps).
Why does it matter?
Labor history is Black history. A continued legacy to fight for wages and benefits, yes. And also this is about our collective dignity as workers. We want our bread and roses!
People are having to fight for wages that kind of come close to the significant increase in cost of living! Kind of. People are struggling to make ends meet and it’s not because Americans aren’t working. We are, and we are working a lot!
Yet, for many, benefits like healthcare, paid vacation days, and sick leave -- a pertinent demand as the pandemic continues to cause long-term health damage, remain out of reach.
Strikes for job security matter especially given how layoff happy companies have been.
It didn’t used to be this way. Not too long ago, Americans of all political affiliation understood that it is workers that build and sell the thing, whatever that thing is, that brings the profits.
Republican President Dwight Eisenhower was at the AFL-CIO building dedication and showed support for organized labor many times.
It’s not a surprise that in the 1960s when more Americans supported organized labor, a CEO made $21 on average for every dollar that a worker made. Unfortunately, conservative’s concentrated efforts to dismantle the organized labor movement in the 1970s and 1980s and their harebrained commitment to “trickle-down economics” of the 1990s means that CEOs now make an average of $351 to every dollar a worker makes.
And yet, they want more! CEOs continue to approve higher salaries for themselves and are simultaneously on the record saying they want workers to “see some pain.”
Y’all, we need to run up on these fat cats! Figuratively and literally through strikes.
What can my Black ass do?
Check out the AFL-CIO strike map to find and support picket lines and this map from Cornell for U.S. based strikes.
Start a union at your job - all the cool kids are doing it!
Read the classic from Manning Marable: How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society.
Dr. Marable also wrote one of my (Jumoke’s) favorite biographies.
II. Other Things
Black-ass happenings
Simone Biles has done it again with another win in Antwerp! Shout out to the history-making Black gymnasts who also ran the 2023 World Gymnastics Championships.
We have a new Color Purple trailer.
How Harriet Tubman’s chosen home is preserving her legacy.
Gabrielle Union on how healing past traumas helped her become a better mom later in life.
An interview with the legend Tiffany “New York” Pollard.
A lot of fashion things happened but we must call out Angela Bassett shutting down the Mugler show in Paris.
Men are being radicalized online and this rapper seems to be feeding into that.
Our Black-Ass song(s) of the week (Jumoke):
Autumn is the jazziest season. 🍂
Things we look forward to:
I (Mitu) very much look forward to Samara Joy’s upcoming holiday EP. Tis’ the season!
I (Jumoke) very much look forward to side eyeing Mitu and the rest of y’all who usher in the season too damn early. My lil sister already has a tree up! Christmas season starts the Friday after Turkey Day, no exceptions!
lll. Text from a Black-Ass Parent
I (Mitu) brought my dog to visit my parents this week as they are her biggest fans. And my mom had this to say immediately after I sent her a photo of how my dog was laying next to me while I worked (in her new bed and blanket bought and warmed in the dryer by my mama).
Stay Black, have a snack, and take a nap today. We'll hit your inbox next on October 24!