Content moderators from several African countries demanded compensation of 1.46 billion euros for violation of labor rights and outsourcing. So far, most of the demands made by the sector to the technology transnationals have been ignored.

Kenyan workers who clean the Internet of toxic and harmful content have formed a union to demand better working conditions. The situation of underemployment and precariousness of work, which affects workers in this sector hired by high-tech companies, is well known.

The job of the content moderator is to navigate through online content and detect information that is violent, disturbing, and controversial. Sometimes it may be extremely violent videos, other times it may be political propaganda, images that denigrate people, child pornography, etc.

The need to filter the content of social networks has created a labor sector that has been characterized by poor remuneration and inadequate working conditions. A starting point in the long struggle of demands of the new union will be the raising of the current salary in Kenya, which is barely three euros an hour.

Other demands of the Kenyan union will be directed to the design of more respectful protocols, the creation of mental health services, as well as the establishment of safety standards and means of occupational safety.

As in other sectors of production and services, the first world externalizes the socio-economic and political cost of "decontamination" jobs to underdeveloped labor markets. In this way, they evade the rigorous protocols of their countries of origin and make labor cheaper.

In 2022, Facebook's Spanish-language content moderation staff, subcontracted in the United States itself, denounced the terrible working conditions they had, compared to their English-language counterpart.

The basic demands that have arisen from workers in the sector around the world, especially in those countries where there are fewer labor regulations for online work, have been: the need for a programming of rotation cycles for at least three months. This involves rotating through different types of content, as well as total rest from moderator work. Thirdly, there is the right to mental health assistance, and the design of realistic demands for compliance with the work program. Longer times should be determined to make moderation decisions, which on average requires regulating content every 60 or 66 seconds with an effectiveness of 85 percent.

Months earlier, content moderators from several African countries demanded compensation of 1.46 billion euros for violation of labor rights and outsourcing. So far, most of the demands made by the sector to the technology transnationals have been ignored.

Two weeks after workers at the company announced a union drive, Grindr management has issued a return-to-office policy that workers say is retaliatory.

LGBTQ dating app Grindr has issued a new return-to-office policy requiring staff to relocate to other cities, just two weeks after its workers announced they were unionizing with the Communications Workers of America. The certification form, sent to workers on Monday night and obtained by Motherboard, states that the policy requires workers to either move within 50 miles of their newly designated office or lose their jobs.

Workers told Motherboard that the policy was first announced on Thursday, during a previously scheduled all-hands meeting, and that it was the first time they had heard from management since the unionization was announced.

“We announced our union on July 20 and then we heard literally nothing from Grindr management until Thursday, when they announced that we all had two weeks to decide whether we were going to move across the country or get fired,” said Quinn McGee, a trust and safety product manager and organizer at Grindr United CWA. “As soon as George [Arison, Grindr’s CEO] stopped talking, one of my colleagues began to ask a question about all of us suddenly having to uproot our lives—and they cut the call.”

“The root of the problem here is that it's an extremely disrespectful and rude way to convey this kind of dramatic change,” said Jack Alto, a staff software engineer and union organizer.

On Monday night, Grindr management sent out a return-to-office certification form, which was obtained by Motherboard. The form asked workers to declare whether they lived within 50 miles of their designated office, and if not, whether they were willing to move by October 3. If workers were not willing to relocate to their new offices—Chicago for the engineering team, Alto said, and Los Angeles or the San Francisco Bay Area for the product and design teams—their jobs would end on August 31. By choosing this option, workers would receive six months of severance pay and COBRA healthcare benefits, the memo states.

“Any team member who does not complete and return this form by August 17, 2023 will be considered not to have agreed to comply with Grindr’s hybrid work policy and RTO plan and/or to have declined to relocate, (if applicable),” the notice states. “Those team members will be offered the applicable severance package (including a separation agreement and release) and their last day of employment with Grindr will be August 31, 2023.”

The form states that Grindr was “excited about its hybrid work model” and how it would “foster the inclusive culture and community we so deeply believe in.” In a memo reported by Bloomberg, CEO George Arison claimed that the company had been working on the policy “for many months.”

“It's not even a well-drawn-out plan,” said McGee, who mainly works out of their home in New York City. “They have not told us where the office in the Bay Area is going to be. If this was indeed planned for months as they're claiming, why isn't there a lease? They’ve sublet a WeWork space that I would wager, given the WeWork space that we have in New York, is not big enough for the entire product design team that they've told to move to California. So where do they expect us to be working?”

A Grindr spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

“To tell me that I have two weeks to decide whether or not to uproot my family's life, for a job that won't come to the table and speak with me as an adult—it’s dehumanizing,” McGee said. “This is a very, very difficult time in the country right now for trans people. This is hard for anybody, but particularly for trans people. That they have to uproot themselves from where they have found safety and security and family is appallingly cruel. Telling us to move to cities where we don't have medical providers. It's appalling. I'm lost for words.”

Workers first started organizing in December of last year, Alto said, after Grindr became a public company and they started seeing some “worrying signs.”

“Our demands as a union can basically be summarized as, ‘We like our jobs. We like our benefits. We would like to codify these in writing so that the rug doesn't get pulled out from under us,’” Alto said. “And Grindr management's response, likely at the urging of Littler Mendelson, has been to pull the rug out from under us faster.”

Littler Mendelson is a law firm that says it specializes in “initiating strategies that lawfully avoid unions.” The CWA announced that Grindr had hired the firm on Friday. The union also filed an unfair labor practice charge against the company claiming the new policy was retaliatory to unionizing workers.

“This requirement to return to in-person work threatens employees with job loss if they either do not work near an in-person office or relocate to an area near the in-person office and constitutes a change in its disciplinary system,” the charge states.

“The queer voices that are the workers of Grindr engaged in protected organizing activity, and asked for voluntary recognition, and were ghosted,” McGee said. “We want a strong Grindr. We want a successful Grindr that works for all the people who use it as a welcoming place for the whole LGBTQ community. And we want to build it together. There's still time to do the right thing. All they have to do is say yes, and it would be that easy.”

I'm job hunting and went to a website to confirm if it was a real business. It just sucks that it's my personal responsibility™️ to make sure the email that replied to my application was the real thing. That somewhere between the email confirmations, the website redirects, and the occasional polite interviews, somebody could've just taken my personal information or gotten my money.

And then there's nobody who will do anything if I did get scammed.

But go off on how nobody wants to work anymore. This shit is exhausting.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/292581

The most famous female labor activist of the nineteenth century, Mary Harris Jones—aka “Mother Jones”—was a self-proclaimed “hell-raiser” in the cause of economic justice. She was so strident that a US attorney once labeled her “the most dangerous woman in America.”

Born circa August 1, 1837 in County Cork, Ireland, Jones immigrated to Toronto, Canada, with her family at age five—prior to the potato famine with its waves of Irish immigrants.

She first worked as a teacher in a Michigan Catholic school, then as a seamstress in Chicago. She moved to Memphis for another teaching job, and in 1861 married George Jones, a member of the Iron Molders Union. They had four children in six years. In 1867, tragedy struck when her entire family died in a yellow fever epidemic; she dressed in black for the rest of her life.

Returning to Chicago, Jones resumed sewing but lost everything she owned in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. She found solace at Knights of Labor meetings, and in 1877, took up the cause of working people. Jones focused on the rising number of working poor during industrialization, especially as wages shrunk, hours increased, and workers had no insurance for unemployment, healthcare or old age.

Jones first displayed her oratorical and organizing abilities in Pittsburgh during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. She took part in and led hundreds of strikes, including those that led to the Haymarket riot in Chicago in 1886. She paused briefly to publish The New Right in 1899 and a two-volume Letter of Love and Labor in 1900 and 1901. A beloved leader, the workers she organized nicknamed her “Mother Jones.”

Beginning in 1900, Jones focused on miners, organizing in the coal fields of West Virginia and Pennsylvania. For a few years, she was employed by the United Mine Workers, but left when the national leadership disavowed a wildcat strike in Colorado. After a decade in the West, Jones returned to West Virginia, where, after a violent strike in 1912-1913, she was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder. Public appeals on her behalf convinced the governor to commute her twenty-year sentence. Afterward she returned to Colorado and made a national crusade out of the tragic events during the Ludlow Massacre, even lobbying President Woodrow Wilson. Later, she participated in several industrial strikes on the East Coast between 1915 and 1919 and continued to organize miners well into her nineties.

Despite her radicalism, Jones did not support women’s suffrage, arguing that “you don’t need a vote to raise hell.” She pointed out that the women of Colorado had the vote and failed to use it to prevent the appalling conditions that led to labor violence. She also considered suffragists unwitting dupes of class warfare. Jones argued that suffragists were naïve women who unwittingly acted as duplicitous agents of class warfare.

Although Jones organized working class women, she held them in auxiliaries, maintaining that—except when the union called—a woman’s place was in the home. A reflection of her Catholic heritage, she believed that men should be paid well enough so that women could devote themselves to motherhood.

In 1925, she published her Autobiography of Mother Jones. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can reserve a spot here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 💚 Resources for Palestine
• 🐌☕ Zapatista Coffee

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

"This has been a long, horrible battle trying to get animation writing covered. We are not giving up. I’m really just here to say that when the strike is over, when we have won the contract we deserve, we are circling back to animation. We are going to be back. We’re going to be better than ever. And we are going to get this goddamn industry organized."

The effort to unionize animation’s east coast writers has been discussed for over a decade. Like much of animated children’s television, New York’s animation writing community is not covered by a WGA contract and does not fall under the collective bargaining agreements of the Los Angeles-based Animation Guild, IASTE Local 839, which represents animation artists, writers and technicians.

UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations. We’ve changed the game, battling it out day and night to make sure our members won an agreement that pays strong wages, rewards their labor, and doesn’t require a single concession. This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement and raises the bar for all workers.

Highlights of the tentative 2023-2028 UPS Teamsters National Master Agreement include:

• Historic wage increases. Existing full- and part-time UPS Teamsters will get $2.75 more per hour in 2023, and $7.50 more per hour over the length of the contract.

• Existing part-timers will be raised up to no less than $21 per hour immediately, and part-time seniority workers earning more under a market rate adjustment would still receive all new general wage increases.

• General wage increases for part-time workers will be double the amount obtained in the previous UPS Teamsters contract — and existing part-time workers will receive a 48 percent average total wage increase over the next five years.

• Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.

• Current UPS Teamsters working part-time would receive longevity wage increases of up to $1.50 per hour on top of new hourly raises, compounding their earnings.

• New part-time hires at UPS would start at $21 per hour and advance to $23 per hour.

• All UPS Teamster drivers classified as 22.4s would be reclassified immediately to Regular Package Car Drivers and placed into seniority, ending the unfair two-tier wage system at UPS.

• Safety and health protections, including vehicle air conditioning and cargo ventilation. UPS will equip in-cab A/C in all larger delivery vehicles, sprinter vans, and package cars purchased after Jan. 1, 2024. All cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments.

• All UPS Teamsters would receive Martin Luther King Day as a full holiday for the first time.

• No more forced overtime on Teamster drivers’ days off. Drivers would keep one of two workweek schedules and could not be forced into overtime on scheduled off-days.

• UPS Teamster part-timers will have priority to perform all seasonal support work using their own vehicles with a locked-in eight-hour guarantee. For the first time, seasonal work will be contained to five weeks only from November-December.

• The creation of 7,500 new full-time Teamster jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions, establishing more opportunities through the life of the agreement for part-timers to transition to full-time work.

• More than 60 total changes and improvements to the National Master Agreement — more than any other time in Teamsters history — and zero concessions from the rank-and-file.

Lawmakers are celebrating a bipartisan agreement to fund the Federal Aviation Administration for the next five years, which they say will also tackle major issues like “addressing workforce shortages in the aviation sector,” according to Rep. Don Davis (D-NC).

The legislation cleared the House on Thursday and now heads to the Senate. It includes a provision to raise the pilot retirement age from 65 to 67, a move that Senator Lindsey Graham says will “allow thousands of experienced and well-trained pilots to stay on the job.”

However, Captain Dennis Tajer says while the idea sounds good, the reality is different.

“Issues that may not keep someone from working as an attorney or as a doctor, keep you out of the flight deck,” Tajer said.

Tajer has been a pilot for over 30 years and is the spokesperson for the Allied Pilots Association. He says the proposed retirement age increase would create other challenges.

“The real killer in this, the international group that handles flying, ICAO, does not allow flying outside of individual countries beyond age 65,” Tajer explained.

Tajer says that means international pilots may be forced to re-train on smaller domestic aircraft once they hit 65.

Additionally, pilot associations oppose increasing the retirement age. Along with Democratic Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, who vows to try to stop the changes.

“I will continue to work with the Senate to ensure that we listen to our pilots,” Jackson Lee said.

On this day in 1877, the demand of train workers in East St. Louis, Illinois for higher wages was rejected, marking the beginning of a general strike in which workers seized and destroyed property, dismantling over forty factories.

The 1877 St. Louis General Strike was one of the first general strikes in the United States, growing out of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a national period of strikes and rioting due to economic depression. The St. Louis strike was largely organized by the Knights of Labor and the Marxist-leaning Workingmen's Party, the main radical political party of the era.

On this day in 1877, in East St. Louis, Illinois, train workers held a secret meeting, resolving to call for an increase in wages and to strike if their demands were not met. The demand was made and rejected that same night, and so, effective at midnight, the strike began.

Within hours, strikers virtually controlled the city. Although the strike was mostly bloodless, the protesters seized the city's Union Depot, stopped freight and some passenger trains from passing through the city.

Workers attacked productive capital, including flour mills and sugar refineries, dismantling over forty factories in total. The strike ended when the National Guard and U.S. Marshals began to break up demonstrations by force five days later.

Megathreads and spaces to hang out:

• ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
• 💖 Come talk in the New Monthly queer thread
• 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
• ⭐️ October Movie Nominations ⭐️

reminders:

• 💚 You nerds can join specific comms to see posts about all sorts of topics
• 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
• 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
• 🌈 If you ever want to make your own megathread, you can go here nerd
• 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog

Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):

Aid:

• 🌈 LGBTQ+ Resource Post
• 💚 Resources for Palestine

Theory:

• ❤️Foundations of Leninism
• ❤️Anarchism and Other Essays

https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/155ubx2/instead_of_raises_we_get_work_bux_to_use_on_a/

I'm going to repurpose these as ration cards in the gulag that I'll put this demon in.

Employees at the LGBTQ dating company Grindr Inc. are petitioning to unionize, extending a wave of organizing among tech workers.

Workers filed a unionization petition with the U.S. National Labor Relations Board Thursday and announced the campaign to management during a previously scheduled all-hands Zoom. Pro-union staff say they’ve signed up the vast majority of a proposed bargaining unit of around 100 employees, including cloud engineering, IT, design, marketing and quality assurance workers.

“As members and allies of communities that are systematically oppressed, we know that strength lies in working together, not alone,” employees behind the effort wrote in a mission statement. “We’re already all in this together: we just want to DTR,” they added, using dating lingo for “define the relationship.”

Employees said the recent wave of political attacks on LGBTQ people and the rounds of layoffs in the tech industry brought urgency to their campaign. They are asking the company to voluntarily recognize and negotiate with their union.

By unionizing, employees say they want to secure existing benefits, such as trans-inclusive health care, and win new protections like pay transparency and job security. “We want a company built for queer people, not one built to extract wealth from queer people,” employees said in their letter. “And we want to build it together, united.”

Like Starbucks Corp.’s union, they are urging their company to add a worker representative to the board, a practice that’s common in Europe but rare in the U.S.

In an email, Grindr spokesperson Patrick Lenihan said, “We respect our employees’ rights and point of view, and we will continue to work together to make Grindr a great place to work for all.” The company didn’t elaborate on how it will respond to the campaign.

Grindr, which was sold by the Chinese firm Beijing Kunlun Tech Co. in 2020 after U.S. regulators raised national security concerns, went public last year via a merger with the special purpose acquisition company Tiga Acquisition Corp. The Grindr app, which shows customers a grid of other nearby users organized by how many feet away they are, had 12.8 million monthly active users as of March 31.

U.S. labor law allows companies to recognize and negotiate with a union as soon as it has signed up a majority of employees, or to refuse and hold out for a government-run election. That labor board election process can mean weeks of wrangling over topics such as which workers should be eligible to vote — time companies often use to campaign against unionization.

“We’re zero feet away,” the workers wrote.

The employees are organizing with the Communications Workers of America, which over the past two years has won union recognition among New York Times Co. tech workers, Microsoft Corp. video game testers, Apple Inc. retail staff and subcontracted Google Fiber sales workers. Unions have also recently secured new footholds at prominent, previously union-free firms like Starbucks and Amazon.com Inc.

“Workers across industries are realizing that they should have a say in the conditions of their workplace,” said Grindr product manager Quinn McGee, a member of the organizing committee. “This idea is having a resurgence, that workers can come together to make sure we can protect each other from the vicissitudes of the current state of things.”

“Trader Joe’s is entitled to a permanent injunction, restraining and enjoining Defendant [Trader Joe’s United]...from using in commerce the TRADER JOE’S Family of Marks or any colorable imitations thereof. Trader Joe’s is also entitled to recover Defendant’s profits, increased to adequately compensate Trader Joe’s,” the lawsuit states. Trader Joe’s is also asking for the union to “deliver up for destruction all commercial merchandise in its possession” that was in violation of the copyright.

The union representing UPS pilots says they will not cross picket lines if Teamsters drivers and package sorters walk off the job when the current contract expires Aug. 1, resulting in the immediate shutdown of the express logistics company’s global air operations.

UPS (NYSE: UPS) has 3,300 pilots who are represented by the Independent Pilots Association (IPA), a separate union from the Teamsters.

“If the Teamsters are on strike, we will honor that strike and we will not fly,” IPA spokesman Brian Gaudet told FreightWaves.

UPS pilots are allowed under their collective bargaining agreement to honor primary picket lines and did that for 16 days during the Teamsters’ strike in 1997.

Nitter

This is DPS5 in Santa Clarita, California. These tough sons of bitches are marching in 93 degree heat and basically stopping all work withing the warehouse as we were in the process of loading the vans up when they arrived. It's a beautiful thing to see. Management wanted to keep us all around because we were already behind for the day but I just clocked out and went home. If you live in like Northern LA County you're not getting your Amazon package today. Unless you're REALLY far north and get your stuff from the Delivery Station in Palmdale.

For those who don't know about the different types of Amazon buildings, there are Fullfillment Centers, Sort Centers, and Delivery Stations like DPS5. We receive already packed orders from fullfillment centers and every day we sort out everything into individual routes to be picked up by the delivery vans that actually like go to your house and stuff. The delivery drivers are all independent contractors who work for what Amazon calls "Delivery Service Partners" so they are not technically Amazon employees making it harder for drivers as a whole to unionize. The driver jobs are fucking brutal and the surveillance they're under on the job is so incredibly fucking invasive. I guess there was some kind of contract dispute between one of the delivery companies and station management so some drivers were refusing to work too. If the drivers ever unionize Amazon would be so fucked.