cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/58004
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Seattle Hotel Workers Strike as World Cup Visitors Arrive
Last week, Payday Report released an interactive map showing how unions are fighting back against ICE raids. (Check out our map about this growing trend across the country)
At the Embassy Suites in Seattle across the street from Lumin Field, where World Cup games are being played, UNITE HERE members decided to go on strike. They are striking around, both having their hours cut and the refusal of their hotel to refuse entry to ICE.
“Hotel workers who are welcoming visitors from around the world to Seattle shouldn’t have to work second and third jobs to support their families or worry about whether they will have healthcare over the slow months in winter,” said UNITE HERE Local 8 President Anita Seth. “And, as a majority immigrant workforce, they deserve the peace of mind of notification from their employer if ICE or DHS is on property.”
For more, check out our friends at The Stand.
Feds Likely to Indict More Labor Leaders in Minnesota
Earlier this week, the Trump Administration announced that they were indicting 15 activists, including labor leaders, on a variety of charges. Many labor leaders suspected that the 15 were charged so that the prosecutors could gain access to their signal chats.
Now, a new expose from The Intercept shows that ICE was able to obtain messages from Signal that many previously thought were encrypted and protected. From the Intercept:
The bulk of the indictment consists of transcripts of group messages; at various points it also makes mention of voicemails, text messages, Signal direct messages, and Signal calls. For instance, the indictment in one spot mentions that two of the indictees “exchanged approximately 20 connected Signal calls.” This hints that authorities were able to access not just group chat messages, but likely had wholesale access to the devices of at least some of those indicted.
The Signal app provides end-to-end encryption, protecting communications in transit, so that anyone monitoring your internet or cellular data connection cannot see the contents of your messages. Signal also minimizes the amount of metadata collected, so if the organization behind the app, the Signal Foundation, was served with a compulsory legal process to reveal user information, it wouldn’t even know with whom you spoke or chatted.
But all that falls apart if your device gets into the wrong hands. In order to safeguard your Signal data from someone who obtains access to your device, it’s necessary to manually harden Signal by modifying some of its default settings.
Perhaps Signal’s most well-touted security and privacy feature is its ability to set disappearing messages. Messages can be set to expire in periods ranging from seconds to weeks. A default expiration time for all messages can be selected, and specific groups and conversations can be set to custom retention times. To minimize risk, set retention times to the shortest feasible duration — minutes or hours — rather than days or weeks.
For more safety tips, check out the Intercept.
UAW Votes to Divest from Israel Bonds
At the UAW’s convention this weekend, they voted to become the largest union to date to divest from Israel Bonds. The UAW owned approximately $400,000 worth of Israeli bonds.
"It felt so overwhelming and amazing, but it also was so reaffirming that the United Auto Workers is actually a union that stands for progressive, militant, rank-and-file action and protecting the most vulnerable among us," Olga Karounos, 33, a public defender in Brooklyn, New York, from UAW Local 3235, who sponsored the resolution, told the Detroit News.
Karounous’ family is Greek Orthodox, and she said that the Israeli attack on Church of Saint Porphyrius in Gaza City in 2023 had a strong effect on her, deepening her commitment to divest her union from Israeli bonds.
"We vote with our dollars, and we just voted not to support our dollars going to genocide,” Karounus told the Detroit News.
For more, check out the Detroit News.
Amazon Workers Under Investigation for Speaking about Data Centers
Finally, Wired has a look at how three Amazon workers say they are under investigation for speaking out about data centers:
Earlier this month, five current Amazon employees publicly urged Seattle City Council to regulate data centers. It was an unprecedented act of advocacy by tech workers, and now, three of the staffers say they are now under internal investigation for what they understand to be allegedly representing themselves as spokespeople for the company without prior approval. “It’s a totally ridiculous claim,” says one of the affected employees, Patrick Schloesser. “It’s patently absurd.”
The three software engineers, who work in different divisions of Amazon and all live in Seattle, believe they are being unfairly targeted for expressing their political beliefs. They filed a joint complaint on Thursday to Seattle’s Office for Civil Rights, according to the employees and a filing seen by WIRED. They accused Amazon of illegally attempting to intimidate and retaliate against them for expressing their personal opinion outside of work about the need to regulate the environmental and social impacts of data centers.
“Seattle is one of just a few jurisdictions in the country that prohibits private employers from discriminating against their employees based on the political beliefs they hold and the organizations they belong to,” says Abby Lawlor, an attorney at Barnard Iglitzin & Lavitt who is advising the employees. “Here, we have legal tools to fight back and ensure that tech workers can be full democratic participants in these important local discussions. We hope the city of Seattle will do its part to ensure that this vital Seattle law is enforced.”
News & Headlines Elsewhere
- From cell to cell, jailed Minnesota unionists sang of freedom
- Tech workers who don’t embrace AI face triple the layoff risk, Gallup finds
- Entry-level work didn’t disappear, PwC finds with ‘seniorization.’ It just morphed into something young workers can’t get
- 650 National Park Service employees vote to unionize in the Rocky Mountain region
- Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Convention To Vote On One Member, One Vote
- Ocean State Media, Rhode Island’s NPR and PBS organization, has voted to unionize
- How has U.S. Steel changed since Nippon took over a year ago?
- Gig workers in China need more than promises
- Finally, FIFA’s Haiti jersey ban echoes the long campaign to discredit and downplay the Haitian Revolution
Alright folks, that’s all for today. Keep sending tips, comments, and complaints to melk@paydayreport.com
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No individual should be allowed to accumulate a billion dollars worth of wealth, much less a trillion. That wealth is created by working people, and it is our right to put that wealth under the democratic control of working people.
Fuck Dick Blumenthal.