4,000 grassroots activists, members and supporters of labor unions who attended the Labor Notes conference in Chicago from June 17 to 19.

“I think we have the opportunity to make the word ‘union’ no longer some taboo word that we’re afraid to say in the workplace,” said Kylah Clay, organizer with Starbucks Workers United.

Since the 1980s, the American labor movement has been in decline. Over the past two years, however, there are signs that US labor may be reviving.

“As someone who’s studied labor issues for the last 30 years or so, I’ve never seen anything like it in terms of the level of interest and excitement from people who want to fight back at the workplace,” said Stephanie Luce, a professor of labor studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. According to Luce, the US labor situation is bad, with weak labor laws that are hard to enforce. “What’s happening, is people are finally just cracking and saying, ‘That’s it.'”

Union popularity is at its highest since 1965 according to US pollster Gallup.

A rise in private sector strikes at companies like John Deere, Kelloggs and Nabisco last fall — termed “Striketober” — indicates a renewed willingness by workers to participate in workplace actions. Unorganized workers are also making headway. Starbucks, Amazon and also recently Apple workers have led stunning wins in their workplaces, which were previously considered unorganizable. 

Labor union activists hope union wins at Starbucks and Amazon will inspire labor organizing across industries around the country, and potentially raise labor standards in their sectors. “We win a contract, guess how much better the other contracts in this country are going to be?” Amazon Labor Union (ALU) President Chris Smalls explained.

In the US, organizing campaigns by large unions have typically been top-down efforts, in which unorganized workers follow the lead of union staff organizers. Recently, the most exciting victories have flipped this relationship: Union staff support and follow the lead of the workers as the main organizers of the workplace.  the union victory at the Staten Island Amazon facility came from the workers themselves “having one-on-one conversations with workers, disrupting captive audience meetings.”

Captive audience meetings are mandatory meetings for employees in which employers express their opinions about unions, often with assistance from hired anti-union consultants. Having workers in the meetings to call out any informational inaccuracies or to express their pro-union sentiment was a major boon to the effort.  It also emphasized the importance of organizers having a presence in break rooms. “It gave us the opportunity to talk to workers, to make it clear being pro-union is not something that will get you fired.”

Labor Notes 2022: US workers are pushing unions into the mainstream | Business | Economy and finance news from a German perspective | DW | 22.06.2022

 Annual British pay growth stalled at 4% in May, leaving most workers with a rise in earnings worth less than half the 9% increase in prices.

Sheila Attwood, the  XperHR pay and benefits editor, said: “Despite pay awards reaching record levels not seen for 30 years, any marginal increases we are seeing are outstripped by the sheer pace of inflation.”

A letter on Friday sent to Boris Johnson by 67 economists said there was no wage-price spiral under way in Britain and keeping wages down would risk pushing the economy into a recession.

Stephen Machin, a professor at the London School of Economics, said the survey and official figures from the ONS, which showed pay rises averaging 4.2% across all sectors, revealed workers lacked the bargaining power to push up wages to match inflation.

“Bargaining power in the private sector has been especially weak in the 12 years since the financial crash. And the public sector has suffered even more, with pay deals below the equivalent agreements in the private sector,” he said.

Average UK pay rises stall at 4% – less than half the inflation rate | Pay | The Guardian

 American farmers in the late 19th and early 20th century knew exactly how the railroads and banks were screwing them. Likewise, organized labor understood from the Homestead Strike to the Battle of Blair Mountain that they fought and died in shocking numbers for the simple dignity to be free men and women rather than exist as wage slaves. 

 In 2016, the farm vote went 70-80 percent to Trump, a candidate who told them clearly that he would ignite a tariff war with the farmers’ largest overseas customer for soybeans and pork. For good measure, he would cut off the source of labor they needed for harvesting and downstream processing. Farm income plummeted and rural suicides spiked. No matter; they voted again for Tump in 2020 in even higher numbers.

In 2019 a vote on whether to unionize was held at the Chattanooga Volkswagen plant. VW, which actually has union members on its board back in Germany, said it was neutral on unionization, so there were no heavy-handed Amazon-style tactics used against the plant’s hourly employees. The workers voted to reject it.

Why is it that people are insidiously bamboozled to act against their own interests on behalf of the wealthy and powerful? Why would poverty-stricken disabled retirees vote for Republicans and against Medicare For All programs?

Elon Musk has a higher net worth than the gross domestic product of a country like Ukraine, with over 40 million people. In the past, Americans knew about corruption and called the oligarchs “Robber Barons”. 

For nearly two centuries, the works of Marx and others have dissected and denounced the machinations of the rich.

 In 2017, Americans spent $71 billion on lottery tickets nationwide, an average of over $1,000 per year per consumer. With the odds of winning the Mega Millions at one in 302 million, there is a good reason why mathematicians do not play the lottery. 

Why are so many of our fellow workers voting irrationally against their own interests? 

Adapted from here

Opinion | Why Do Tens of Millions in US Support an Economic System That Doesn’t Benefit Them? | Mike Lofgren (commondreams.org)

 A sombre warning comes from the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) that further food ration cuts are imminent for refugees as humanitarian needs multiply around the world while funding struggles to keep pace. The WFP has already been forced to significantly reduce rations to refugees across its operations.

“As global hunger soars way beyond the resources available to feed all the families who desperately need WFP’s help, we are being forced to make the heart breaking decision to cut food rations for refugees who rely on us for their survival,” said WFP Executive Director David Beasley. “Without urgent new funds to support refugees – one of the world’s most vulnerable and forgotten groups of people – many facing starvation will be forced to pay with their lives.”

Ration reductions of up to 50 percent are affecting three-quarters of all refugees supported by WFP in Eastern Africa. Refugees living in Ethiopia, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda are the most affected. Severe funding constraints in West Africa, where hunger has reached a record high in a decade, have forced WFP to significantly reduce rations for refugees living in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger. WFP assists on average 500,000 refugees in Southern Africa annually. Resourcing remains insufficient to meet the very basic needs of refugee households and imminent disruptions are expected in Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.

WFP is having to prioritize assistance to ensure that vital food reaches the most vulnerable families first. These painful decisions very often leave refugees without support at a time where food assistance is the difference between life and death. 67 percent of refugees and asylum seekers originated from countries with food crises in 2021. This, coupled with devastating conflict and climate extremes, is hitting refugees the hardest. In 2021, WFP assisted nearly 10 million refugees globally.

WFP is forced to institute ration reductions in order to stretch limited resources, where this year saw an additional 6 million refugee movements from Ukraine. Responding to the crisis, WFP in Moldova has delivered nearly 475,000 hot meals to families affected by the conflict in across 31 different localities.

Escalating needs, rising hunger: refugees caught in the eye of the perfect storm – World | ReliefWeb

 Looking to nature for inspiration, drug research, genetically modified crops or other products is nothing new — research groups and major corporations do it all the time. But discoveries based on traditional Indigenous knowledge or the wealth of biodiversity in developing countries can end up being exported and patented without proper credit or compensation, in what’s as biopiracy.

The practice is rooted in history. Colonizers like Spain, the United Kingdom and other global empires frequently took and profited from the natural resources of the regions they occupied, trading in products like coffee, cotton, tea, pepper and rubber.

Today, richer states often exploit the natural resources of poorer nations for medical, agricultural or industrial purposes. Though some protections have been in place for decades — including a World Trade Organization agreement that covers intellectual property rights for varieties of plants and animals — such protections aren’t always effective. Such was in the case in the decade-long fight against a patent granted to a US multinational on an antifungal product derived from the neem tree, the use of which has long been a traditional part of Indian medicinal knowledge. 

Another example is when American cosmetics firm Mary Kay tried to patent an ingredient from the Kakadu plum — a native Australian fruit which can sell for up to 40 Australian dollars ($27, €26) per kilogram — in its skincare line. The move would have shut out Indigenous producers from the Australian market, people who have long benefited from the plum’s medicinal qualities.

In the case of French Guiana,French researchers, based on interviews with Indigenous groups in 2005, identified — and patented — a component in Quassia amara, a traditional medicinal plant with anti-malarial properties. Though the IRD research group eventually agreed to share any potential scientific and economic benefits, it still retains the patent granted by the European Patent Agency in 2015, despite an appeal.

“This patent is a flagrant case of biopiracy. At no time were the six Indigenous communities of French Guiana consulted,” said Michele Rivasi, a French member of the European Parliament with the Greens/European Free Alliance. “This decision jeopardizes the use of traditional remedies, as the IRD can prohibit the use of these remedies by the communities that discovered them.”

How can developing countries confront biopiracy? | Environment | All topics from climate change to conservation | DW | 20.06.2022

 New research published on Tuesday shows that U.S. corporate price markups and profits surged to their highest levels since the 1950s last year. Authored by Mike Konczal and Niko Lusiani of the Roosevelt Institute, the analysis finds that markups—the difference between the actual cost of a good or service and the selling price—”were both the highest level on record and the largest one-year increase” in 2021.

“How high companies can increase their sales up and above their costs… matters for the economy more generally because these markups distribute economic gains from workers and consumers to firms and shareholders,” said Lusiani. “This is especially the case when almost 100% of these firms’ earnings derived from markups are distributed upward to shareholders rather than retained and reinvested.”

Study Shows Excess Corporate Profits in the US Have Become ‘Widespread’ (commondreams.org)

 According to the United Nations Refugee Agency UNHCR, more than 100 million men, women and children are currently displaced 

Of the estimated 8 million animal, fungi and plant species on our planet, only a fraction have been scientifically documented, according to the international biodiversity council IPBES. Throughout Earth’s history, species have lived, thrived and ultimately died out. But never before has so much biodiversity disappeared in such a short space of time.

Yet according to scientists, the world may lose nearly 1 million species by 2030, with one species already becoming extinct every 10 minutes. This is catastrophic because a world that lacks diversity is a dangerous place for all species, including humans.

Industrial agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, pollution, the spread of invasive species and soil sealing to make way for infrastructure are all contributing to an extinction rate that’s now 1,000 times higher than it would be without humans around.

 Between 1970 and 2014, the global population of vertebrates declined by 60%, while in South and Central America, that figure is almost 90%. The number of species living in freshwater environments decreased by 83% during the same period. 

Will the global community succeed in halting the extinction crisis?

A recent report from the Leibniz Research Network for Biodiversity stressed how the great variety of species on our planet’s is essential to just about every aspect of human life. “Whether it is the air we breathe, clean drinking water, food or clothing, fuel, building materials or medications — our life, our health, our nutrition and well-being all depend on the great diversity of resources that nature provides us with,” it stated. 

More than two-thirds of all crops worldwide rely upon natural pollinators such as insects. Without them, our food supply is likely to become less secure. Yet a third of all insect species worldwide are already facing extinction. 

Losing biodiversity could also spell disaster for the medical sector, as many pharmaceuticals — including close to 70% of cancer treatments — are derived from nature.

“The knowledge of 3.5 billion years of natural evolution is stored in biological diversity,” said Klement Tockner, director of Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, a group based in Frankfurt, Germany. “The progressive decline of our ecological capital poses the greatest threat to all of humanity — because once it’s lost, it’s lost forever.” 

 Ecosystems are the interaction of different species that depend on one another for survival and their environment. Losses within a single genus can have repercussions through the entire ecosystem — including on humans. 

Johannes Vogel, director of the Berlin Museum of Natural History, explained,  “Frogs are currently dying out worldwide because of a fungus spreading due to climate change,” he said. “Frogs eat a lot of mosquito larvae for example, so there will be more mosquitoes in the future — and mosquitoes cause more deaths globally than any other organism.”

As early as 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro adopted the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).  Under the convention, signatory countries committed to promoting sustainable economies that operate within our planet’s ecological limits. Further conferences and agreements followed. But so far, hardly any of the aims set out three decades ago have been achieved. The problem is all individual nations had to set their own conservation targets, but many of these have amounted to nothing more than declarations of intent. Particularly in industrialized nations, very few effective measures have been implemented. 

“While we can agree to work toward the 1.5 degrees Celsius target on the climate crisis — the fight against the crisis of nature is much more complex,” said Nicola Uhde, biodiversity policy expert at German environmental NGO BUND. “It cannot easily be reduced to a buzzword or standard. Awareness of the value of nature often only emerges with its loss,” she added.

Dying frogs rarely make the headlines. Yet the climate and biodiversity crises are intertwined. Rising temperatures and changing climatic conditions are driving some species to extinction. And as forests are cleared and wetlands drained, not only do the species they support vanish, essential carbon sinks are also lost, which in turn increases global warming. This is why both crises need to be tackled together.

′Biodiversity loss is humanity′s greatest threat′ | Global Ideas | DW | 21.06.2022

40,000 of RMT staff at Network Rail and 13 rail operators walked out from midnight. The RMT union is asking for a pay rise of at least 7% to offset the rising cost of living, but it says employers have offered a maximum of 3% – on condition they also accept job cuts and changes to working practices. 

RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch said staff were being asked to accept thousands of job cuts, reduced pensions, worse terms and conditions and a cut in real-terms pay as living costs soar. Mr Lynch said industrial action would run “as long as it needs to”, saying the strikes could last months if a deal was not reached. Mick Lynch, the RMT’s general secretary, raised the prospect of further strikes throughout the summer, as the two sides remained far apart.  Lynch said Network Rail had “escalated” the dispute at the talks that day by telling him there would be redundancies from 1 July.

Johnson has responded to the biggest rail strikes in a generation with plans to break the industrial action by allowing firms to bring in agency staff, a move unions have decried as unworkable, unsafe and potentially breaking international law.  It would make disputes long and bitter, unions warned on Monday, with the Trades Union Congress (TUC) accusing Johnson of taking a step that “even Margaret Thatcher did not go near”. It would inflame divisions between employers and trade unions when the government should be trying to bring about a deal, they said.

“Ethical” investing is one of the fastest-growing areas of finance. Corporations worldwide are backing projects to plant or protect carbon-absorbing trees which weighs up a company’s commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues.

Some environmentalists, however, argue that such efforts are often just cases of “greenwashing” – a way for companies to look like they are taking action to curb climate change without actually cutting their own planet-heating emissions.

“Funding for communities is not bad, but that doesn’t make up for the negative impact that the company may be having on the environment,” said Gustavo Pinheiro, a coordinator at the Institute for Climate and Society, a Brazilian philanthropic organization.

But the current ESG wave means many corporations are investing in forest protection as a way to buy external goodwill, instead of using the money to make internal changes to cut their carbon emissions, said Daniela Teston, Brazil’s corporate engagement manager for green group WWF.

“Sometimes a company supports a specific project and communicates that investment to the public as if it were a part of its strategy in terms of social-environmental conservation,” Teston said. Instead, companies should take “a broader look at concrete actions that are not focused on small projects,” she added.

In Brazil between January and March this year, tree loss in the Amazon rose 64% from a year ago to 941 sq km (363 square miles).

Can ethical investment help protect the Amazon rainforest? (trust.org)