Worker's Rights

United Auto Dubs

The UAW strike continues with some promising forward movement. Also, RFK Jr is running as an Independent, a TikTok ban in the US still looms large, the realest among us says goodbye to this life, and a quick reminder of what a difference a decade makes.

Endeavorance

Oct 11, 2023 — 3 min read

UAW Strike Updates

The United Auto Workers remain on strike against the big three auto makers in the US, and they're already getting concessions from the corporations.

This past Friday, workers learned that employees of GM's battery manufacturing plant will be able to unionize, something that the employers were previously saying would never happen. But as workers merely threatened to walk out of GM's battery operations, the company got spooked and conceded.

Reminder: companies are nothing without workers. Maybe the workers should be the ones reaping the benefits of their work.

Additionally, the strike is expanding, as workers at Mack Trucks have gone on strike after contract negotiations also fell through, with the company refusing to provide pay and benefits which workers deem acceptable.

RFK Goes Independent

Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer, is announcing he will be running for president of the United States as an independent, after previously aligning with the Democrat party, where he remains largely unpopular for his, well, conspiracy theories and anti-vaxx rhetoric.

Immediately, Republicans began to attack Kennedy for his run, as he now poses a possible spoiling threat to Trump, given that he is similar levels of unhinged without having the additional baggage. Republicans have labeled him a "radical," because that is the only word they know anymore, apparently, despite his relatively conservative views compared to most of his Dem peers.

It's also worth noting that essentially his entire family is vocally against the idea of him becoming president.

They Still Wanna Ban TikTok

The US Government is still mad that TikTok is successful. Oh, wait, lemme rephrase that: politicians who have been paid off by Meta and Google are feigning anger about the fact that TikTok is successful in the US despite being an international app, and so they're still trying to pass legislation to make decisions about what apps United States citizens can and can't use on their personal devices.

While the RESTRICT Act—the previous attempt at this which was met with hella pushback and legal challenges—totally failed, they're trying again, this time taking a different approach in the hopes of having less legal issues to deal with so they can more easily ignore the fact that most Americans don't want a Tiktok ban.

Democrat Maria Cantwell, a senator from the state of Washington, is working on a yet-unreleased legislation proposal called the Guard Act, of which Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is hopeful that it will expand the agency's ability to ban apps they don't like, citing that the bill would give the Commerce agency "a statutory set of tools to have a comprehensive approach to these apps."

Hey, fuck that.

The Realest of Us

In an unfortunate update, Dorothy Hoffner, the 104-year-old woman who recently went skydiving, has passed away.

She reportedly died in her sleep overnight on Sunday, and was found on Monday in her room. By all accounts, she was fucking rad. Rest in Peace to the realest among us.

On This day…

On this day in 1958, NASA launched its first attempt at a lunar space probe, the Pioneer 1. It was intended to orbit the moon and collect data, but ultimately failed and burned up in the atmosphere.

However, 10 years later in 1968, the Apollo 7 mission began, ultimately becoming a successful crewed mission in space.

From "oops, we fucked up our unmanned probe" to "humans in space sending a video feed back to earth" in a decade. Kinda neato!