Crooked Media - What A Day: Ante UPS

Two major American unions are on strike, and a third, even larger union, is on the threshold of striking as well. It’s the summer of organized labor, baby!
 

• Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike for over two months, and the Screen Actors Guild joined them last week for the first time the two unions have been on strike simultaneously in over 60 years. SAG released its list of demands alongside the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (the studio executives) responses, and if you weren’t fired up before, you will be now. 
   

• The studios outright denied the demand for revenue sharing on streaming services with actors—just as they did with WGA. Both actors and writers have received pennies in residual checks for their work on hit shows that are streamed millions and even billions of times. The strike has given the lie to the idea that television writers and actors are all fabulously wealthy. In order to qualify for SAG’s health insurance, an actor has to make $26,470 per year. According to SAG board member Shaan Sharma, a staggering 87 percent of SAG members do not qualify based on that threshold. 
   

• SAG reported asking for annual wage increases of 11 percent then four percent and four percent over a three-year contract, and the studios counter-offered five percent, four percent and 3.5 percent, effectively asking members to accept sub-2020 wages in 2026 when adjusted for inflation. The WGA and SAG-AFTRA filed grievances with the National Labor Relations Board against Comcast-owned NBCUniversal on Tuesday, accusing the company of blocking their picketing area. The unions claimed that NBCUniversal infringed on their right to picket and endangered striking members by obstructing a public sidewalk next to the company’s Los Angeles studio lot with an ongoing construction project.

In a very different corporate sector, an even more significant strike looms.
 

• The International Brotherhood of the Teamsters represents some 340,000 drivers, warehouse workers, and other UPS employees who could walk off the job if negotiations between the company and the union remain frozen ahead of the July 31 contract deadline. Should the workers go on strike, it would be one of the largest labor actions in United States history. Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said that he has asked the White House repeatedly not to intervene should a strike occur. “My neighborhood where I grew up in Boston, if two people had a disagreement and you had nothing to do with it—you just kept walking,” O’Brien said, which, if you ask me, is exactly the kind of vaguely-threatening Townie rhetoric this moment in organized labor so desperately needs. 
   

• The Teamsters represent more than half of the UPS workforce, and workers have asked for air conditioning in more trucks and to eliminate the company’s two-tier wage system, in which drivers who work weekends earn less money. The union is also asking for wage increases for part-time workers, whose base pay is $16.20 per hour. Last week, UPS announced it will begin training nonunion employees (scabs!) to step in should a strike occur. UPS corporate has been quick to emphasize how “destructive” a strike would be, to which every member of a union would say, “Yeah, that’s the fucking point.” 
   

The common thread linking the WGA/SAG strike and the looming UPS strike is corporate greed. Movie and television studios and companies like UPS have all reported record profits during and since the pandemic, but workers who make those profits possible are cut out of the spoils. Until corporations stop funneling all of their profits into stock buybacks while simultaneously cutting worker salaries, they should expect labor strikes to continue.

What happens when money, greed and corruption overpower plans to revitalize one small California city on the brink of collapse? Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto covers the rise and fall of Adelanto, a small California city that was on the verge of collapse until a stranger came to town with a wild idea to make Adelanto great again: weed. Named one of Vulture's best podcasts of 2023, this wild west meets weed story has appearances from Mike Tyson, and even a Russian oligarch gets involved. 
 

Search for Dreamtown: The Story of Adelanto to listen for free, wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe to Crooked’s subscription community Friends Of The Pod for ad-free episodes at crooked.com/friends.

As expected, the price of wheat has shot up since Russia announced it would withdraw from the Black Sea grain deal. Kyiv accused Moscow of carrying out “hellish” overnight strikes that damaged grain-export infrastructure, and Russia warned that, beginning on Thursday, any ships sailing to Ukraine’s Black Sea ports would be viewed as potentially carrying military cargo. Russia attacked the Odesa region on Monday and Tuesday night after pulling out of the agreement, so Ukraine announced on Wednesday that it is in the process of establishing a temporary route via Romania. According to Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, ten civilians, including a 9-year-old boy, were wounded in the attacks. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said on the messaging app Telegram: “Every Russian missile—is a strike not only on Ukraine but on everyone in the world who wants normal and safe life.”

Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed a joint session of Congress on Wednesday, and indirectly addressed the tension between Democratic lawmakers over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s planned judicial coup and his expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. 

The United States military is in the process of determining the fate of Private Travis King, an American soldier who made unauthorized crossing into North Korea

The Super PAC supporting the presidential campaign of Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) said that it will pour $40 million into television and digital advertising over the next six months. 

The U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security has expressed grave concern over the return of the weather phenomenon El Niño, and what that could mean for crop production and global food security.

Federal prosecutors in New York have called for an outside authority to take over New York City’s jails, which could be a deciding factor in persuading a judge to strip New York City Mayor Eric Adams of his power over the deeply troubled Rikers Island. 

Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne will resign on August 31 over “manipulation of research data” in his academic work. He will also issue lengthy corrections to or full retractions of at least three of his papers. 

Attorney General Daniel Cameron (R-KY) signed on to a letter opposing a change to HIPAA patient privacy rules that would block state authorities from obtaining protected information about reproductive health-care services obtained legally out-of-state “for criminal, civil, or administrative investigations or proceedings.” (Read: he wants to spy on Kentucky women to determine if they’ve received abortions out of state.)

China’s far western region of Xinjiang reached 126 degrees Fahrenheit on Sunday, setting a national record. Against that backdrop, President Biden’s climate-change envoy John Kerry traveled to China to resume talks between the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters about addressing global warming. Talks stalled for almost a year after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. Kerry warned that the world is running out of time to avert catastrophic climate change. He challenged the Chinese government to halt its rapid expansion of coal-burning power plants, which contributed to China surpassing the United States as the world’s largest emitter. 

President Xi Jinping delivered remarks on Wednesday to top Chinese Communist Party officials as Kerry wrapped up his third day of talks. His vision for China addressing climate change did not strike a particularly cooperative tone. Xi said that the pace of efforts “should and must be” determined without outside interference (i.e. pressure from the United States). This marks a departure from the 2015 Paris Climate Accords, in which an agreement between the United States and China laid the groundwork for the international goal of preventing global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Kerry described his talks with Chinese officials as “very cordial, very direct, and, I think, very productive,” but conceded that they resulted in no significant breakthrough.

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A federal judge rejected disgraced former president Donald Trump’s request for a new trial for sexually abusing and defaming columnist E. Jean Caroll. The judge also dismissed Trump’s request to reduce the damages he will have to pay Carroll. 

In response to the Supreme Court decision to end affirmative action, Wesleyan University, an elite liberal arts college in Connecticut, announced that it will end legacy admissions.