International

Bosses Are Retaliating Against Workers for Showing Solidarity With Palestinians

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and The Nation. Last April, after the death toll in Gaza climbed to 34,000 and Israel carried out its second raid on Al-Shifa Hospital, Erin Donevan started wearing a small circular pin that said “Free Palestine” to the Catholic school where she taught ninth-grade English. Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland touts its commitment to “enriching society” and “social justice,” and, according to Donevan, teachers sometimes wore pins or hung posters in their classrooms for other causes, like Black Lives Matter, support for Ukraine, and LGBTQ rights. By wearing a pin for Palestine, Donevan told me, she hoped that she could signal to students that she was an adult they could talk to if they were upset or confused. She told me, “I was thinking about my students and knowing they all have access to the same Internet I do, and they are seeing these incredibly traumatizing things.”

On April 25, Donevan received an email from the school’s principal, Doug Evans, asking her to “please refrain” from wearing the pin on campus, citing a complaint from a student’s family.

International

These Teachers Want the Largest Union in the Country to Rescind its Biden Endorsement Over Gaza

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This article was jointly produced by Workday Magazine and The Nation. When Israel escalated its military operations against Gaza in October, Rahaf Othman was so distraught, she said, she “couldn’t think straight.” The 45-year-old Palestinian American, who teaches social studies at Harold L. Richards High School in Oak Lawn, Ill., recalled that she “started getting nightmares from my own experiences when I was in Palestine. I was functional at work, but barely functional. My brain was mush. I was getting traumatized every time I turned on my phone.”

“For the first month, people were asking me what we should do, but I couldn’t think, couldn’t focus.” While in this state, she said she discovered that she could lean on some of her colleagues.

International

Stop Letting Auto Companies Pit Workers Against the Environment

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This article is a joint publication of Workday Magazine and In These Times. In recent media coverage of the United Auto Workers’ stand-up strike against the Big Three car makers — Stellantis, Ford and General Motors — a false narrative is circulating: that the walkout is in conflict with the urgent need to mitigate climate change. The basic argument is that if wages and benefits were to improve, this would make the transition to electric vehicle manufacturing unprofitable, and would therefore imperil a centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s environmental policy. 

“Union demands would force Ford to scrap its investments in electric vehicles, Jim Farley, the company’s chief executive, said in an interview on Friday,” reporter Jack Ewing wrote for the New York Times on September 16. Ewing goes on to quote Farley saying, ​“We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future, not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”

In an article that ran on September 13, the day before the strike began, New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber put it similarly: ​“The companies say that even if they could raise wages for battery workers to the rate set under their national U.A.W. contract, doing so could make them uncompetitive with nonunion rivals, like Tesla.”

These reports echo the talking points of the same companies that have had a direct hand in slowing the transition to electric vehicles. All of the Big Three automakers are members of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, a trade group, that lobbied against a proposed Biden administration rule to require that two out of three new passenger cars sold in the United States are electric vehicles by 2032. 

These companies have also played a key role in fueling climate change. Scientists at Ford and General Motors knew about the impacts of global warming as early as the 1960s, yet the companies intensified their fossil-fuel heavy business model, turning to the manufacturing of trucks and SUVs over the ensuing decades while donating ​“hundreds of thousands of dollars to groups that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on global warming,” as revealed in a 2020 investigation by E&E News.