Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers union since March, has declared “war” on the Detroit Three automakers, with contract demands that even he calls “audacious,” including proposals for a 46 percent raise, a return to traditional pensions, and a 32-hour workweek.
Now the 54-year-old who began work as an electrician at a Chrysler casting plant in 1994, is threatening to take his 150,000 UAW members out on strike. If he doesn’t have contracts with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, maker of Jeep and Chrysler models, by the Sept. 14 deadline, the UAW could strike all three simultaneously — something it has never done.
“The deadline is the deadline,” Fain said an interview earlier this month at the UAW’s Solidarity House headquarters along the Detroit River.
honestly kinda unfortunate that the only spooky library aesthetic is the victorian fancy bookshelves dark academia one bcos like. ok here’s some library stories.
while i was at the university the library was undergoing a major refurbishment so for a little while the print journals were being stored temporarily down in the basement.
basically nobody event consulted the print journals bcos 99% of stuff undergrads would be looking up is online these days so every time i went down there it was dead fucking silent & empty. you had to walk through what felt like several miles of empty basement to reach the collection, which was in a room w a photocopier shoved in the corner and a bunch of these:
u turn the handles to move these around (saves space) and every time you had to go and check the aisles first on the offchance that someone was in there so they wouldn’t get u know. Compacted.
many years ago i did a week’s work experience with the National Library of Scotland. here it is:
but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. it keeps going down the side of the bridge, like so:
i got a tour of the stacks while i was there. it’s floor after floor of this:
the bookshelves are made of metal & i was treated to the ‘fun fact’ that the shelves are, bizarrely, load bearing. for this reason they have to be constantly vigilant about fire hazards because even a relatively small fire could cause a bookcase to buckle from the heat, which in turn could cause the whole building to collapse in on itself like a house of cards.
Rachel Zeglar: I’m gonna be the first Snow White who is not going to be a damsel in distress dreaming about true love and instead she’ll learn to become a fighter and a great leader for her kingdom! No one’s ever done an independent Snow White before!
Me:
And before anybody decides to defend it by going ‘well, she means Disney Snow White..’
"I was hired by the New Yorker in 2002 to photograph Robin Williams, and after doing my research what stood out most for me was that he was a very physical comedian. I came up with this idea to photograph him swinging from a chandelier in a grand hotel room. Most publicists shoot down these kinds of wild ideas, so I didn’t tell anyone what I was up to, but rigged up a chandelier at the Waldorf Astoria hotel for him to swing from. When Robin got there and saw what was happening, he lifted up his shirt and showed me this enormous scar on his shoulder. He’d just had surgery and couldn’t so much as lift his arm. He was so disappointed! He really felt bad about not being able to do it, because he loved the idea and really wanted to help me accomplish my vision.
Unlike most Hollywood stars, he was unfazed by his success and position. He talked to everyone from stylists to the crew, to the hotel staff. We ended up asking a maid at the hotel to swing from the chandelier instead, and I asked him to just sit there and read a newspaper, which I think in the end was an even funnier, more unexpected picture.
It’s crazy that these strikes are happening given that all the writers and actors are asking for is less than 0.3% of the revenue these studios make.
This is what gets me. The writers and actors aren’t asking for much but these CEOs are digging their heels in
It’s because it sets a precedent that the CEOs are terrified to set. That they will acquiesce to worker demands if the workers are resolute enough.
Because in an ideal world for these rich fucks, the workers give up, and the CEOs win, and its reinforced in the collective public mindset that all a strike does is “disrupt the economy, deprive people of valuable products, and waste people’s time”. The goal is to maintain the assertion that Strikes Don’t Work. I don’t think they genuinely give a shit about 0.15% of their revenue. What they care about is the OPTICS.
They cannot back down, for the exact same reason that WORKERS cannot back down. Because if the workers win, it shows people just that bit more that The Poors have power and ultimately we can make the rich do what we want if we put our fucking minds to it. And that, to the rich, is bad news bears to the highest degree.
today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.
The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing “apocalypse.”
Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but “augh! it’s already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!” is specifically the worst response
what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.
This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years
I’ve been researching the history of conservation in the USA…and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.
The eastern USA’s natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.
In the 1930’s, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.
I’ve seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970’s would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!
We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They’re still here. They’re reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost
There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don’t know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn’t making a big difference, and they think that because they haven’t seen what it’s still holding back.
When my dad was a kid (in the north of england) he thought that stone used in construction was naturally black bc all the stone buildings he saw were covered in soot and other industrial gunk
I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. In the decades before I was born, the river there, the Cuyahoga, was so polluted that it literally caught on fire multiple times.
But now, after 50+ years of cleanup and environmental protection?
