Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

Sidney's Picks: Striking Hoppers, Missing Immigrants

Photo credit: 

Trash bags awaiting pickup on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, where sanitation workers known as hoppers are striking for a living wage. For illustration only.  By Tony Webster, Creative Commons

  • The garbage workers of New Orleans continue their strike because Black lives matter. (Discourse Blog) 
     
  • The Trump administration had a naturalization ceremony at the RNC, but they disenfranchised up to 300,000 people by delaying their ceremonies until after the election. (WaPo)
     
  • Unionized professional athletes are striking to protest police brutality and teaching a lesson about the power of labor. (Nation
     
  • Armed right-wing extremists stormed the Idaho state legislature, pushing past police and shattering a glass door to pack the gallery. (NPR)
     
  • Detroit’s embattled nursing home workers delay their strike, despite the urgent needs of their membership. (Dissent)

Sidney's Picks: Baby Chicks Smother as USPS Cuts Cause Backlog

Photo credit: 

Fui, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Baby chicks smother and rot in their packages as Trump’s cuts plunge a major USPS sorting facility into chaos and squalor. (LA Times)
     
  • Some Friends: Posh Brooklyn Friends day school claims unions are against their “Quaker values.” (In These Times)
     
  • Meatpacking plants were warned for years to get ready for a pandemic, now they say they couldn’t have known. (ProPublica)
     
  • Kids are being stashed in hotels in a shadow immigration system. (WHYY)
     
  • Millions struggle to survive without their $600/wk pandemic UI supplement. (Guardian) 

Sidney's Picks: Trump Vows to Starve Post Office to Win Election

Photo credit: 

Quinn Dombroski, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Donald Trump announced that he would veto aid to the U.S. Post Office so that we “can’t have universal mail-in voting.” (Vox, WaPo)
     
  • With mail slowing nationwide, the U.S. Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without explanation. (ABC7, Vice)
     
  • The USPS says it’s unlikely that it will be able to process mail-in ballots in the critical swing state of Pennsylvania by Election Day. (NBC)
     
  • Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor with no prior postal experience, is invested in competitors to the Post Office. (Verge, CNN)
     
  • Cherry crush: Undocumented workers struggle to pick 24 billion cherries in 8 weeks (NYT

Sidney's Picks: Sights on the NRA

Photo credit: 

ArbyReed, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Top NRA execs accused of multi-million-dollar fraud in lawsuit by NY AG to disband the gun group. (The Trace)
     
  • Target’s delivery workers says tip “glitches” are shorting their pay. (WaPo)
     
  • Civilian sailors known as CIVMARs are  succumbing to despair, trapped on Navy ships without basic hygiene supplies under a sweeping COVID control order, their union warns. (Navy Times)  
     
  • Daisy Coleman, a 23-year-old survivor of the infamous Maryville Rape case, has died by suicide. (NYMag)
     
  • Trump supports housing segregation, unfortunately, many white liberals do, too. (The Nation)

Sidney's Picks: John Lewis & Sudden Evictions

Photo credit: 

John Lewis in 1965, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • John Lewis’s final letter to the nation passed the civil rights torch to the Movement for Black Lives. (NYT)
     
  • It’s illegal for bosses to ask their workers about their plans to organize, but a third of Fortune 500 companies are using online surveys to identify and crush “union hotspots.” (One Zero)
     
  • Tenants in Philadelphia are being evicted without warning by an opaque, heavily privatized system. (Philly Inquirer)
     
  • How can television contextualize, dramatize, and analyze the Black Lives Matter moment?, asks Wesley Morris, naming five Hillman Prize-winners as scholars to ground this project in reality. (NYT)
     
  • Unable to delay the election, Trump schemes to derail it. (The Nation)

Sidney's Picks: An Eviction Crisis & A Constitutional Crisis

Photo credit: 

EVICT,” by Steve Rotman, Creative Commons

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Millions of renters face eviction if Congress doesn’t act by Saturday. Some landlords illegally initiated eviction proceedings even before the moratorium expired. (Video) (ABC, NYT)
     
  • The constitutional crisis deepens as Oregon state lawmakers demand that the federal government withdraw its shadowy agents from Portland. Judge blocks federal agents from arresting legal observers. (PBSKVAL, Nation, AP)
     
  • Thousands of workers walked off the job, Monday as part of the Strike for Black Lives. (Yahoo)
     
  • Nationwide testing backlogs may be hiding the true spread of COVID-19, experts say. What looks like a plateau could instead be a maxed-out system. (NYT)
     
  • Jobless claims rise as the fate of the $600/week enhanced unemployment benefit remains undecided. (CNBC)

Sidney's Picks: Unmarked Feds Snatch Protesters; Goya's Dirty Labor History

  • Federal agents without badges are grabbing protesters off the street in Portland and throwing them in vans. (WaPo)
     
  • With Goya Foods in the news, let’s take a look back at their dirty campaign to deny their majority-Latino workforce a union contract. (American Prospect
  • How Trump and his cronies are exploiting the pandemic to bust unions. (New Yorker)
     
  • MO Death Trip: Missouri will spend $15 million in federal COVID relief funds on enticing tourists to the state. (KS Star)
     
  • NLRB seeks an injunction to force a Nevada gold mining conglomerate to recognize the union it says it illegally disregarded. (NV Independent)
     
  • Mask use is widespread in the US, but compliance varies dramatically by region. (NYT)

Sidney's Picks: Strike for Black Lives & COVID-19 in ICE Detention

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • More than 40% of staff at a massive ICE detention facility have tested positive for COVID-19. (USA Today)
     
  • OSHA has only issued one citation for a COVID safety violation and unions are demanding to know why the agency isn’t stepping up. (CNBC)
     
  • An in-depth investigation into everything that’s wrong with Florida’s COVID-19 data. (COVID-19 Tracking Project)
     
  • In a historic win for tribal sovereignty, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that eastern Oklahoma remains a reservation because Congress never revoked the treaty that created it. (ICT, SCOTUS Blog)
     
  • The death of Sha-asia Washington, a 26-year-old Brooklyn woman who died after a C-section is reviving urgent concerns about maternity care for Black women. (The City)
     
  • Indigenous-led research reveals new secrets about the mysterious Spirt Bears of British Columbia. (NYT/Flickr)

Sidney's Picks: Making Essential Workers Whole

Photo credit: 

 Shana-Kay Henry, a physician’s assistant in New York City holds up a card showing how much she owes in student loans, photo by Bayete Ross Smith, used with kind permission of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. 

  • Can student debt relief make our essential workers whole? (Guardian/EHRP)
     
  • How corporate America crushed workers’ rights, and how COVID could revive organized labor. (Bloomberg)
     
  • Silicon Valley billionaires are terrified of journalists. Good. (Vice) 
     
  • How Dollar Stores became magnets for murder. (ProPublica/New Yorker) 
     
  • Schools might be able to reopen safely in the fall, if we shut bars and gyms now. (WaPo) 
     
  • Over 300 kids have caught COVID-19 in Texas daycares due to lax safety measures. (Texas Tribune)

Sidney's Picks: Racial Justice, the Coronavirus Explosion

The Best of the Week’s News

  • “My Body is a Confederate Monument” (NYT)
     
  • The virus gets the upper hand as the U.S. enters a devastating new phase of the pandemic. (Atlantic)
     
  • How Arizona lost control of its coronavirus epidemic. (WaPo
     
  • Survivors of three meatpackers who died of COVID are suing Tyson Foods, alleging the company lied to keep them on the job. (Des Moines Register)
     
  • Colorado is reinvestigating the 2019 police killing of 23-year-old Elijah McClain. (APElle)

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