Immigrants’ rights are workers’ rights.

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Justice for Port Drivers is an organization fighting for the labor rights of port drivers. I got an email from them today about solidarity with immigrants fighting the recent cancellation of the Temporary Protected Status Program.

From our shores to every store, port drivers are the first or last leg of the journey for what becomes the clothes on our backs, the food on our table, the shoes on our feet, plus the few remaining products we ship overseas. Source: Welcome – Justice For Port Drivers

A few weeks ago I wrote that we don’t have an immigration problem, we have a labor problem. I was writing at the time about farm workers, but it’s similar in many parts of the economy. The situation of the port drivers really *ahem* drives this home.

By misclassifying drivers as “independent contractors,” trucking companies have devised a scheme to increase profits by:

  • Illegally pushing the cost of doing business – fuel, insurance, maintenance, parking, lease payments, etc. – onto the backs of drivers;

  • Stealing workers’ pay by not paying us for all the hours we work; and,

  • Defrauding the government of taxes that help pay for our schools, roads, police, and firefighters.

Trucking used to be a decent job. Now it’s terrible exploitation that can leave people financially worse off than if they weren’t working at all. The people doing jobs like these are those who are the most vulnerable, desperate and are least likely to have the clout and resources to fight back.

Immigrants don’t steal these jobs – we let companies make jobs not worth working. If these jobs were properly compensated and regulated, then anyone would work them.

When we marginalize a group – immigrants, black people, women, poor people, etc. – we make our own labor less valuable. The more people we marginalize, the more companies can get away with paying them less and destroying working conditions and the more people end up marginalized. It’s a terrible feedback cycle.

If we have solidarity and force all companies to pay proper wages and ensure safe working conditions then that cycle gets broken.

Immigration does increase competition for some jobs and drive down wages, but largely because we let companies treat us like commodities.

Why I can’t write a good personal essay | Tenure, She Wrote

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I wrote about how my understanding of disability has shifted from internal to external and how that’s affected my ability to get support.

A little smarts and hard work and luck can’t make my chronically ill body “productive.” Even if they did, it would only make it alright for me – and that’s not good or fair. Telling those stories for so long made dealing with the reality of living-with-chronic-illness-under-capitalism/being disabled and past traumas really difficult. As soon as I decided the problem wasn’t me, but the response of people and systems to me, I stopped getting funding. As Dr. Sara Ahmed says, “when you expose a problem, you po

Source: Why I can’t write a good personal essay | Tenure, She Wrote

Scholarship is always political

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“Sokal Squared” is bad science. Its blatant manipulation of its own “data,” the lack of meaningful controls, and the disconnect between its methods and what it claims to prove are a remarkably poor model for nonpoliticized scholarship, even if it were true (as it clearly is not) that the hoaxers were any less driven by ideology than their targets. As historians and philosophers of science have long recognized, claims that good science is apolitical are routinely deployed in the service of very political end [Source: Orthodoxxed! | Online Only | n+1]

There are real problems with academia, with peer review and scientific publishing, with reproducibility in science. This hoax (which is not a hoax, but behavior ranging from misconduct to outright fraud) doesn’t get us any closer to fixing real problems and instead tries to use a the faux objectivity of scientific respectability to discredit political movements and ideas they disagree with.

I mean, look at who likes it – people like Jordan Peterson and Peter Pinker –

“It is hard to imagine a form of scholarship less rigorous, more motivated by nonscientific concerns, and more warped by political hobbyhorses than what these men practice.”

If SV really believes AI is an existential threat…

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Paradoxically, all the scenarios, apocalyptic or preventive, come from researchers and leaders of industry involved in the development of the very technology they are mobilising against.

Source: Silicon Valley funds our helpless future, by Charles Perragin & Guillaume Renouard (Le Monde diplomatique – English edition, August 2018)

If Silicon Valley actually believes AI is an existential risk, they should stop developing it. If we believe they believe it, we should shut them down for continuing to develop something they think will destroy us all.

We don’t have an immigration problem, we have a labor problem

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Re: Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers

The near total use of undocumented labourers is not news to anyone who’s ever lived in farm country.

All the bullshit about illegal immigration is really just about labor exploitation.

If a dairy farm would go out of business if it paid workers a real wage and stuck to real labor protections, then that dairy farm should fucking go out of business.

If we need those dairy farms for food security or want them for cultural reasons, then we ethically and transparently subsidize them.

 

Do you really want to impeach Trump?

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Impeaching Trump or backing out of Brexit won’t solve our problems.

In both scenarios – impeachment or a second referendum – the suspicion of elites would become even greater, and the political alienation and economic marginalisation that contributed to it would still exist. That’s not a reason not to support them. It is a reason to be wary. In isolation, both actions seek to press pause on the post-crash period, and the stagnant wages, class calcification, escalating inequality and growing uncertainty that came with it, rather than pressing stop and changing the tune. [Source: Think we can rewind to the heady days before Trump and Brexit? Think again | Gary Younge | Opinion | The Guardian]

I have mixed feelings about the whole “resist” movement in the US because it’s so focused on stopping Trump instead of building something better and it’s hurting our ability to build something better by constant references to some imagined pre-Trump good time.

It wasn’t a good time and it’s not possible to go back.

Many progressives want a return to something like the Obama era, despite its massive harms with regards to war, civil liberties, and deepening economic inequality and its ineffectual movement on issues like healthcare and climate change.

We should push back hard against bad things the current administration is doing, but it isn’t going to matter if we don’t also push hard for different ideas.

I want to see less sputtering outrage, less looking at the last 25 years of Democratic neoliberalism with rose-coloured glasses, and more pushing for and building something new and awesome.

The movements and ideas are there, they just aren’t getting the kind of support the latest #outrage is. Being constantly on the defensive means the best we can hope for is what we’ve got now. And that’s not good enough.

I know people are mad about Trump. And with good reason. But it’s exhausting to use all that anger resisting because there doesn’t seem to be a way out, a way to something better.

Go on the offensive and build something worth fighting for. Join the DSA, push to get the People’s Platform implemented, work on the Poor People’s Campaign, and get Campaign Zero implemented. If that feels too radical for you, fight for Elizabeth Warren’s sensible legislation.