| Hillman Foundation
June 5, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Police Brutality, Habeas Corpus, and COVID

Photo credit: 

Victoria Pickering, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • A judge suspended habeas corpus for protesters arrested in New York City this week, meaning that they can be held without charge for over 24 hours. (Gothamist)
     
  • The no-knock raid on Breonna Taylor was illegal. (WaPo)
     
  • The largest labor coalition in King County, WA gave an ultimatum to its member police unions: Fix your racism, or get out! (Crosscut) 
     
  • Coronavirus cases jump in Florida. (Sun Sentinel)
May 29, 2020

Sidney's Picks: A Death at Amazon, OSHA's Indifference, CNN Crew Arrested on the Air

The Best of the Week’s News:

  • Employers have a legal duty to protect their workers from hazards including coronavirus, but Trump’s OSHA refuses to enforce the law. (TNR)
     
  • Harry Sentoso took a job at Amazon’s warehouse in Irvine to bank some quick cash before retirement, 2 weeks later he was dead of COVID-19. (LA Times)
     
  • George Floyd, the 46-year-old black man killed by a Minneapolis police officer, was a beloved member of his community. (Buzzfeed)
     
  • How Wendi C. Thomas built MLK50, a non-profit newsroom dedicated to the low-wage workers of Memphis. (NYT)
     
  • A CNN camera crew was arrested live on the air in Minneapolis as they covered the aftermath of last night’s protests against the killing of George Floyd by a police officer. (CNN)
May 22, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Meatpacking Safety, a Gig Worker Collective, and Biodiversity

Photo credit: 

US Fish and Wildlife Service, Creative Commons. Juvenile Mariana fruit bat. 

The Best of the Week’s News

  • These 11 women organize nationwide strikes, but they’ve never met. (Next City)
     
  • The president of the Utility Workers of America says his members are terrified of catching COVID-19 on the job and asks OSHA for safety standards. (EE News)
     
  • Meatpacking plants ignore OSHA’s safety recommendations…because they can. (WCNC)
     
  • Coronavirus is killing the middle class. (New Yorker)
     
  • Flight: the antiviral super-power of bats. (Phys.Org) 
May 15, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Strange Stats & Sanitation Workers

Photo credit: 

Screencap from WDSU-6 via PayDay Report

Sidney’s Picks:

  • How Virginia is juking its COVID-19 stats. (The Atlantic)
     
  • Sanitation workers in New Orleans were demanding hazard pay and PPE, they were fired and replaced with prisoners making $1.33/hr. (PayDay Report)
     
  • How the Indian state of Kerala beat COVID-19. (The Guardian)  
     
  • Ohio workers got a reprieve thanks to hackers who crashed the state’s snitching website. (Vice)
     
  • Remembering Celso Mendoza a Mississippi chicken processor and labor leader who died of COVID-19. (Clarion Ledger)
May 8, 2020

Sidney's Picks: The Death Track and COVID Tiger King

  • “ ‘Essential worker’ just means you’re on the death track,” a slaughterhouse worker who caught coronavirus speaks out. [USA Today] 
     
  • The “Tiger King” park reopens to huge crowds, raising concerns that cubs are being exposed to COVID-19, which tigers can catch. [National Geographic] 
     
  • How to talk about racial disparities in COVID-19 without reinforcing racism.  [New England Journal of Medicine] 
     
  • A new federal investigation has found that Indiana officials improperly exonerated Amazon after a worker was crushed by a forklift. [Reveal]
     
  • Hillman’s own Jelani Cobb on why Stacey Abrams would like to be Vice-President. [New Yorker]
     
  • The Supreme Court is making it easier for police officers to kill people and get away with it. [Reuters] 
May 1, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Celebrating May Day and the 2020 Hillman Prizes

Sidney’s Picks:

April 24, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Chloroquine, Cruises, and Coronavirus

Photo credit: 

Used with the kind permission of Dissent. 

The Best of the Week’s News

  • The inside scoop on Trump’s crackpot plan to flood the nation will millions of dosesof hydroxychloroquine, an unproven treatment for Covid-19 that seems to kill patients. (Vanity Fair, AP)
     
  • 21% of all cruise ships had at least one case of coronavirus, and 65 passengers died, according to a new analysis. (Miami Herald)
     
  • NewsGuild’s Nastaran Mohit: Organizing in a pandemic (Teen Vogue)
     
  • Hillman board member Danny Glover, the son of two union postal workers, warns that black families would be hardest-hit by the privatization of the Post Office. (USA Today)
     
  • From farm workers to call center reps–interviews with dozens of frontline workers (Dissent)
April 17, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Morgue Temps, Costco, and the "Responsibility Bonus"

Photo credit: 

Yuri Samoilov, Creative Commons. (website)

The Best of the Week’s News: 

April 10, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Landfills, Instacart Monsters, and Prison Workers

Photo credit: 

Inauguración del Hospital Municipal de Chiconcuac, Creative Commons. 

The Best of the Week’s News: 

  • The first U.S. ER doctor to die of Covid-19 was a champion of the disenfranchised.
     
  • What it’s like to work at a landfill during a pandemic.
     
  • The worst people in the world are luring Instacart delivery workers with huge tips and then yanking the tips back when the groceries arrive. 
     
  • Unicor, the federal prison labor program, kept many inmate workers on the job without PPE well into March and still has some sewing masks. 
     
  • The Covid Crash caused cutbacks at over 1000 media outlets and a group of journalists created The Furlough Fund to support each other. 
April 3, 2020

Sidney's Picks: Florida Sabotaged UI & Sanitation Workers' Lives Matter

Photo credit: 

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The Best of the Week’s News

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