Strike for the Record

Happy Friday! The McRib is back! But not everywhere. Much like a sticky, saucy golden ticket, the famed McDonald’s sandwich will only be made available at certain, so-far undisclosed restaurants. Good luck, McRib hunters!

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• A Russian missile strike on Thursday destroyed a café and grocery store in a village outside of Kharkiv, in northeastern Ukraine, killing at least 51 civilians—including children. The attack was the deadliest in the region since the start of the war, with one of the highest civilian death tolls in a single strike. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky called on European leaders to provide his country with missile defense systems to intercept such attacks. “Until there is a fully effective air-defense system, children cannot attend schools,” he said yesterday. Germany announced yesterday that it would send a second Patriot air-defense system to Ukraine. 
• Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on Thursday that Russia had finished and successfully tested a nuclear-powered and nuclear-capable ballistic missile known as the Burevestnik. The missile was first discussed publicly in 2018 as an experimental weapon that supposedly has significantly increased range compared to traditional cruise missiles. Little else is currently known about the weapon and its reliability. Putin also signaled on Thursday that he is considering backing out of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
• A United States F-16 fighter jet shot down an armed Turkish drone in northern Syria yesterday after the drone flew within 500 meters of American troops on the ground, violating a U.S.-declared restricted operating zone. The situation marked a rare use of force between NATO allies. U.S. military officials described the shootdown as a “regrettable incident,” but said they made repeated attempts to contact the Turkish military before downing the drone. The officials also emphasized there was no indication Turkey was intentionally targeting U.S. forces.
• The Biden administration announced it would resume construction of the border wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, and would waive more than two dozen federal laws—like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act—to expedite the process. “There is presently an acute and immediate need to construct physical barriers and roads in the vicinity of the border of the United States in order to prevent unlawful entries into the United States in the project areas,” the waiver notice, signed by Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Wednesday morning, stated. By Thursday, Mayorkas was attempting to walk back the statement, saying the language “is being taken out of context, and it does not signify any change in policy whatsoever.” President Joe Biden said yesterday that his hands were tied since the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is required to spend funds appropriated in 2019 for border wall construction.
• France officially began its withdrawal of troops from Niger this week, French defense ministry officials said Thursday. All of the approximately 1,500 French troops and military assets in the country are scheduled to be withdrawn by the end of the year, following calls from Niger’s military junta for a French exit.
• A federal court approved a new congressional map for Alabama yesterday following two failed attempts by the Republican-controlled state legislature to produce a map that met legal scrutiny under the Voting Rights Act. The new map maintained the state’s current majority-black districts, and created another district with a near majority-black population—which could potentially result in Democrats flipping a seat in 2024.
• Former President Donald Trump allegedly disclosed sensitive details regarding a U.S. nuclear submarine to Australian businessman Anthony Pratt months after leaving the White House, ABC News reported Thursday. Pratt, a Mar-a-Lago member, then reportedly shared that information with several other people, including journalists and Australian officials. He’s among scores of individuals identified to testify against Trump in special counsel Jack Smith’s federal case against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents. 
• Trump endorsed House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan for speaker of the House late last night in a post on Truth Social. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise has also announced his intention to seek the gavel.

Strikes, Strikes Everywhere 

Striking United Auto Workers (UAW) union members may have thought they were doing a pretty good job of getting their message across when President Joe Biden joined them on the picket line late last month—but have they thought about the effectiveness of aerial advertising over the Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors headquarters? If so, striking New Jersey nurses know a guy. 

As a tight labor market increases workers’ bargaining power and inflation undercuts their earnings, tens of thousands of workers have chosen to make known their frustrations. Some workers’ concerns stem from the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Other workers fear the ways technology could change—and potentially undermine—the nature of their work. Many are driven to action by kitchen table issues like wages and pensions. And polling suggests most Americans back workers to varying degrees in their efforts to change the state of play—as do an increasingly bipartisan contingent of politicians.

As we’ve reported in recent weeks, this year has seen a spate of high-profile strikes—and as soon as one ends, another tense negotiation or walkout crops up in a different part of the economy. Over the summer, Hollywood actors joined writers on the picket line for their first concurrent strike since Ronald Reagan was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. This past July, unionized United Parcel Service workers reached a contract agreement with UPS just days before they were set to go on strike. Tens of thousands of autoworkers represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union are, for the first time, striking at each of the “Big Three” U.S. car manufacturers—Stellantis, General Motors, and Ford—simultaneously. In New Jersey, 1,700 nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital are in their third month of work stoppages over staffing shortages and low wages. And just this Wednesday, 75,000 Kaiser Permanente health care workers walked off the job, kicking off the largest health care strike in U.S. history. 

The strikes over the course of this year have caused historic work stoppages. In August alone, strikes caused 4.1 million days lost, according to Labor Department data—the most in any one month dating back to August 2000.

A number of factors are driving what seems like a steady stream of strikes and near-misses. Some of the timing is coincidental—cyclical contracts across various industries needing to be renegotiated all at the same time. But a major factor contributing to tense negotiations is the tight labor market. Low unemployment—3.8 percent nationally in August, with September figures due later this morning likely to fall slightly below that—indicates a high demand for labor. This puts workers in a strong position to negotiate for higher wages and better working conditions—and threaten to strike if their stipulations are not met.

At the same time, inflation—driven at least in part by multiple financial relief packages as part of a pandemic-recovery operation—has taken a cut out of union earnings. Union wages typically catch up with inflation at slower rates than non-union earnings because contracts—which include wage increases—are set in several-year increments. “You might have signed a contract for 3 percent annual increases, which seemed like a good deal when inflation was running at 2 percent,” Alexander Colvin, dean of Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, tells TMD. “But [inflation’s] gone up and so it takes a while for you to get to the point of renegotiating your contract and catching up to what you were falling behind before.” To respond to those concerns, the UAW has made a cost of living adjustment—yearly increases to salary that match inflation, on top of base pay increases—part of their list of demands to the Big Three, though Colvin says the union is unlikely to succeed on that point. 

The COVID-19 pandemic also fundamentally changed certain sectors of the workforce. In the health care sector, perhaps most directly affected by the pandemic, burnout and staffing shortages persist. Those shortages are one of the primary complaints of the striking Kaiser Permanente health care workers and New Jersey nurses, who say those shortfalls are increasing wait-times for processing and procedures—and are ultimately dangerous for patients. “[The pandemic] was enormously difficult for health care workers,” Brent Orrell, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells TMD. “I don’t think that anybody who wasn’t in health care or wasn’t close to somebody in health care can really appreciate how bad and how difficult the situation was.” 

On the other hand, COVID-19—which saw all of us shopping online for our ring-lights, loaf pans, and comfy sweats, with all the accompanying shipping requirements—was a boon for shipping companies like UPS. Those gains have persisted into the post-pandemic economy, which is good for management’s bottom line—and for workers when their contracts are ready to be renegotiated. “That [success] both put UPS in a position where they could afford a more generous contract, but also one where a strike was more risky to them because they risk losing out on the kind of gold mine of delivery-to-home to their competitors—to FedEx and Amazon, even the U.S. Postal Service,” Colvin says. “So they didn’t want to miss out, and in that kind of situation—tight labor market, they’re in a sector that’s doing really well—the strike threat is more dangerous, more credible.”

The pandemic also saw us more tuned in to streaming services for the latest bingeable series, with subscriptions jumping by 14 percent in 2020. Despite that, television and film writers and actors went on strike in May at least in part over the way the accelerated transition to streaming had failed, in their minds, to fairly distribute these profits to writers. As we wrote in July: 

Much of the tension between workers and film studios has to do with a payment regime called residuals. In the old days, writers and actors owed a substantial chunk of their income to residuals—a type of union-mandated royalties paid out when a cable TV show was rerun. But residual checks for streaming services aren’t based on viewership. They’re determined by how many subscribers the streaming platform has, regardless of how successful any particular content is. That means an actor on HBO’s recent flop The Idol could make more in residuals than, say, a star in the award-winning show Yellowstone—because Max has more subscribers than Peacock. 

The writers’ strike finally ended late last month after 148 days, and the negotiated contract included bonuses on residuals for well-performing content. The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) remains on strike. 

But streaming isn’t the only technological change affecting the entertainment industry. Concerns about artificial intelligence were front-and-center in the writers’ strike and remain so for the still-striking actors, who are concerned their images may be used without their consent with the help of AI. According to the new Writers’ Guild contract, screenwriters can choose to use AI to generate scripts, but can’t be compelled to use it by studios if they prefer to write the old-fashioned way. But Orrell says those provisions aren’t terribly forceful, and the focus on AI may have been, at least in part, an effort to garner attention for their cause. “These are, after all, people who write plots for movies,” Orrell says. “They know how to tap into the public imagination.”

Technological change is also an undercurrent of the ongoing UAW work stoppage, as workers grapple with what the transition to electric vehicles (EVs)—which are much less labor-intensive to produce than gas cars—will mean for union jobs. UAW has made the right to strike over plant closures a part of their bargaining during this current round of walkouts. Despite Biden’s presence on the picket line, the UAW has still declined to endorse him. UAW President Shawn Fain has said Biden needs to “earn” the union’s endorsement, at least in part by providing a plan to ensure a “just transition” to EVs. The Biden administration hopes two-thirds of all new passenger vehicles will be EVs by 2032.

Republicans—not traditionally an ally of Big Labor—may see an opportunity to cut in on the support Democrats have long had from working-class voters. Former President Donald Trump openly courted the UAW endorsement in Michigan last week. Michigan, once part of a working-class “blue wall” of support for Democrats, went for Trump in 2016 before flipping back to Biden in 2020. 

As Trump was speaking to auto workers in Michigan, the other GOP candidates for president were on the debate stage in California, where a question about the UAW strike kicked off the night. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina had stuck to a more traditionally Reaganesque tone days earlier, when he suggested “You strike, you’re fired.” On stage, however, the candidates largely avoided criticizing the strikers themselves, pivoting instead to Biden’s policies. “Bidenomics has failed,” Vice President Mike Pence said. “Wages are not keeping up with inflation. Auto workers and all American workers are feeling it. Families are struggling in this economy.” 

“The Republican Party has become more oriented toward non-college educated, mainly white, voters,” Orrell tells TMD. “And more populist, obviously. And that reluctance to criticize the unions is a big change.” Often-populist GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri recently embodied this new worldview when he visited striking autoworkers late last month, declaring “I want to stand with them and their bold struggle to actually get what they deserve.” But it’s not as if this summer suddenly flipped the pro-labor switch on Republicans—when Amazon workers in Alabama made a push for unionization in 2021, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida voiced his support for their movement. For now, these two senators are outliers in their party—though perhaps not for long.

The tone shift may be Republicans reading the room: Public support for unions is at a near 50-year high. But even as talk of unions and strikes seems to dominate the airwaves, the chatter belies the reality: Union membership in 2022 remained near all-time lows of about 10 percent of workers. So is all this labor action just a flash in the pan? 

“It’s a little hard to say right now,” Colvin tells TMD. “I do think there’s quite a bit of energy on the labor side, so I don’t think we should rule out that this may continue on.”

Worth Your Time

• Ecuador used to be one of the safest countries in South America—but in the last few years, drug trafficking and correlated gang activity have destroyed the former paradise. The surge in violence has made it dangerous to open a business, attend school, and even go to the hospital. “Two years ago, a half a dozen armed men burst into the emergency room of a public hospital in Guayaquil where Dr. Danilo Dávila was trying to save bullet-ridden patients, including a local crime boss,” writes Ryan Dubé in an excellently reported piece for the Wall Street Journal. “Dressed in baseball caps and hoodies, the gangsters pointed their guns at Dávila, telling him to save their leader—or else. ‘I told them, “Easy, we are going to do our job, just let me look at him,”’ said Dávila. ‘But he was already gone.’ They didn’t harm Dávila. But not long after, hit men walked into another hospital to finish off a man who had survived an attempted homicide. They sprayed his room with bullets. But the man had been discharged hours earlier. Another patient, a woman, had just settled in. She was killed, police said.”
• Fat Bear Week is in full swing, and, as the National Park Service explains, it “is a celebration of success and survival.” The annual event is a March Madness-style bracket contest assessing the chunkiness of 12 select brown bears in Katmai National Park in Alaska as they pack on weight for their winter hibernation. The competition began Wednesday and runs through Tuesday with the public voting on each day’s matchup, which you can do here. Or, if you prefer to simply peruse the incredible summer to fall before and after photos, you can check those out here. 

Presented Without Comment

Semafor: ‘No Apologies:’ Ugandan Politician Defends Taking Back Donated Ambulance After Losing Election

Also Presented Without Comment

Politico: [President Joe Biden’s dog] Commander No Longer at the White House After String of Biting Incidents

Also Also Presented Without Comment

New York Times: A Florida Congressman Asks If Mar-a-Lago Can be Taxed at the Value Trump Claimed it was Worth

Toeing the Company Line

• In the newsletters: Nick argues (🔒) Nancy Mace is the Elise Stefanik of Nikki Haleys.
• On the podcasts: Sarah returned to the Dispatch Podcast and was joined by Steve and Jonah to discuss Biden’s border wall, the speakership battle, and corruption in politics.
• On the site today: Charlotte digs into an Iranian influence operation and its connections to the Biden administration’s suspended Iran envoy Rob Malley.

Let Us Know

Which industry do you think will see the next major strike?