[Plura-list] SNAPDRAGON; How unions de-risk work

[Cory Doctorow]

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I'm speaking at two more events this week!

Wed & Fri: World Ethical Data Forum
https://worldethicaldataforum.org/wedf-2020

Fri: "The Future You" with Brian David Johnson
https://www.changinghands.com/event/march2021/brian-david-johnson-future-you-break-through-fear-and-build-life-you-want

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Today's links

* SNAPDRAGON: Brilliant, witchy YA graphic novel.

* How unions de-risk work: Everyone wants to push risk onto someone
else's balance-sheet.

* This day in history: 2006, 2016, 2020

* Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current
writing projects, current reading

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💇‍♂️ SNAPDRAGON

While Kat Leyh is best known for her work on LUMBERJANES, her solo
debut, SNAPDRAGON (Firstsecond, 2020) is an outstanding work that
combines LUMBERJANES' madcap kitchen-sink approach with a narrative
simplicity that makes it a joy to read.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250171122

Snapdragon is a young woman living with her single mom - an adoring,
overstretched parent who's working multiple jobs while attending nursing
college. Snap - named for her mother's favorite flower - is lonely and
isolated, but that's about to change.

Everyone knows that there's a witch that lives on the outskirts of
Snap's town, and Snap is pretty sure that Good Boy, her missing, beloved
three-legged dog, has ended up in the witch's cottage, sure to be eaten.

Snap steels herself to rescue GB and bursts in on the witch, only to
discover a quirky old lady in green Crocs with a black eye-patch, who's
been taking excellent care of GB - and who introduces herself as Jack,
and Jack is *definitely* not a witch.

Jack, rather, is an amateur bone builder who brings home roadkill,
buries it until it is reduced to a skeleton, and then articulates the
skeletons and sells them online. Snap finds the hobby incredibly
exciting and pesters/sweet talks Jack into letting her help.

Snap's isolation is coming to an end. Not only is she discovering a new
passion with Jack - she's also found a friend, Lulu, a young boy who
comes out as trans and becomes a young girl.

But there's a lot more going on beneath the surface. Snap finds an old
photo of Jack with her grandmother, both of them young and in love - and
learns two secrets: one: Jack really IS a witch: and two, Jack and
Snap's granny were once deeply in love.

There's so much *stuff* going on in Snapdragon - a technical story about
anatomy and the preservation of animal remains, an historical story
about intersectional prejudice, several kinds of ghost story and at
least three coming-out stories...

It's a story about heroism and loyalty, friendship and family, secrets
and the meaning of both a good life and a good death.

And yet, for all of these moving parts, it has the elegant simplicity of
a YA tale, a plot that never lets up, and incredibly likeable characters.

I read it in one sitting, and then, having discovered that she has a new
book out for 2021 - THIRSTY MERMAIDS - I asked my comic shop to order me
a copy.

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Thirsty-Mermaids/Kat-Leyh/9781982133573

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💇‍♂️ How unions de-risk work

Yesterday, I published an essay about how monopolies beget monopolies:
when deregulation kicked off a wave of pharma mergers, the new pharma
oligopoly gained the power to raise prices on hospitals.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/16/wage-theft/#excessive-buyer-power

The hospitals weren't able to form a cartel to insist on better prices:
the US antitrust law created by Ronald Reagan's court sorcerer Robert
Bork is incredibly tolerant of monopolist price-rigging, but violently
opposed to cartels that price-rig.

Rather than forming a cartel, the hospitals gobbled each other up to
create monopolies. If the CEOs of six hospitals insist on better drug
prices, it's illegal. If the presidents of six hospitals (all owned by
the same monopolist) do the same thing, it's fine.

Big Hospital wasn't merely better positioned to demand better drug
prices from Big Pharma, they were also able to charge more to the
fragmented, decentralized health insurance industry.

Predictably, this kicked off a wave of mergers that produced Big
Insurance, a monopolized world that gives most Americans between zero
and two insurers who'll take their business.

Freed from the risk of losing customers and bulked up to meet hospital
monopolies on even footings, insurance companies could both insist on
lower payouts to hospitals and *higher* premiums from patients. And at
last we had some sort of equilibrium.

Pharma companies could charge more for drugs, but not too much more.
Hospitals could lower the standard of care, raise prices, and squeeze
workers' wages and working conditions. Insurance companies could cut
payments to hospitals, raise prices and hike co-pays.

Everyone got what they wanted, except for two groups that can't form
monopolies that push back against this monopoly-dominated industry:

* Patients, and

* Workers

Historically, the "monopolist" safeguarding patients' interests was the
state: democratically elected lawmakers who relied on voters for
re-election. The massive increase in corporate campaign finance was
attended by steady erosion of political loyalty to the public interest.

And so the public lost its champion, and prices went up and quality went
down and redress was whittled away to performative apologies after
crises of too great a magnitude to be ignored, accompanied by fines that
were mere fractions of the profits from corruption.

Meanwhile, workers' champions were their unions: solidarity
organizations that corrected the negotiating imbalance between employers
and employees by presenting a united front.

That unity extended beyond the gates of a single employer. Picket-line
crossing was a grave sin, so if your hotel's maids went out on strike,
the Teamsters wouldn't deliver your groceries and the taxi cabs wouldn't
pick up at your entrance.

And related trades were able to bargain together: in Hollywood, the
writers and actors and tradespeople would start each contract season by
visiting the weakest studio as a body and demand the best deal, then
require parity from other studios in turn.

Since the Reagan years, union power has been drained off. For example,
the way Hollywood unions negotiate has been flipped on its head. Now,
the *studios* visit the weakest union as a body and demand the most
labor concessions, then take those to the other unions in turn.

It's been generations since union power was a given, and we haven't just
lost our power, we've lost our imaginations - the sense of what is
possible, what we are owed, how the system could work. We've learned to
take precarity and low wages as a given.

That's why Reina Sultan's "8 People Describe How Unions Changed Their
Lives" for Vice is so important: not because it is heartwarming (though
it is) but because it is ripe with possibility, the recovered wisdom of
a fallen civilization.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxqvm/why-unions-are-good-first-hand-accounts-of-how-unions-change-lives

These eight workers describe how joining a union turned precarity into
certainty. How the hotels they worked for had to promise to hire them
back after the pandemic lifted. How they were promised ten hours of
uninterrupted sleep between shifts.

How their employers had to accommodate their disabilities. How they were
guaranteed health insurance that covered their whole families. How they
were protected from being arbitrarily fired, and guaranteed severance
pay when they were laid off.

These guarantees have a common theme: they de-risk being a worker and
make it riskier to be an employer. Much of our day-to-day life is a
series of negotiations over who should bear the risk that things will
turn out bad.

Think of all the corporate bailouts, how these are "socialism for
shareholders, capitalism for workers." When the fed bails out banks and
employers but not mortgage holders and workers, they move risk off the
finance-sector's balance sheet and stick it on our balance sheet.

When you run a business, you assume risks. Maybe you have a slow
Saturday and end up paying workers to hang around with nothing to do. If
you can book a worker's Sat, but unilaterally send them home two hours
into their shift because it's slow, you shift your risk onto them.

The worker has to be available for you, but you don't have to use that
availability. Likewise disability accommodations: when you hire and
train a worker, you face the risk that they will become disabled,
permanently or temporarily, on or off the job.

When that happens, you might have to pay to change the physical
environment so they can do their job, or give them disability pay. If
you can just fire them, you shift the risk onto the worker, and off your
own books.

Every benefit described by workers in Way's article is risk being
shifted from workers back onto employers. The right not to be summarily
fired means workers aren't at risk from vindictive, bad bosses. It also
means employers may struggle to shed "low-performing" workers.

It's a good reminder of the "struggle" in "class struggle." These risks
are, by their nature, zero-sum. To decrease the risk of being stuck with
a bad employee, you have to *increase* the risk of an employee being
targeted by a bad manager. There's no win-win here.

Sure, employers will say that they share the workers' interest in
rooting out bad managers, but there is an inescapable contradiction
between reserving the right to fire anyone, for any reason, and making
sure workers aren't unjustly fired.

The same goes for every benefit articulated by union members. If you're
an electrician who wants to be able to get home, sleep and go back to
work without being interrupted for ten straight hours, you push risk
onto your employer.

Meanwhile, if you *don't* have that right, your employer gets to shove
risk onto you. For example, they could underinvest in upgrades and
preventative maintenance, knowing that when things break down, they can
summon you to get them working again, without paying any overtime.

The project of worker solidarity comes down to this foundational
question: who should bear which risks? Would you rather have bad bosses
firing people over personal vendettas, or co-workers who are hard to
fire even though they're not great at their jobs?

We don't need to pretend that moving risk onto employers' side of the
ledger always produces better outcomes. It doesn't. Workers can be
jerks, too. But an individual bad boss has the power to do enormous harm
to their entire workforce over a long term.

Think of all the people maimed, killed and sickened in Amazon's
warehouses because of one individual's willingness and ability to shift
risk off his balance sheet and onto theirs.

It's true that an especially toxic unionized worker could make life
miserable for many, many other workers - but that's still a better
outcome than an especially toxic CEO, not least because unions give
workers the power to address bad workers even when management won't.

Is it possible for things to be overbalanced, for too much risk to be
shifted off of worker's balance sheets and onto employers' side of the
ledger? Sure, theoretically. But that is a situation so far removed from
workplace reality today that it's practically a fairy-tale.

And if we're really worried about too much risk landing on employers,
then we can go back to the peoples' source of power: democratic
governance. Unions represent a power-bloc that can (but don't always)
hold politicians to account.

It's hard to imagine any political path to checking corporate power that
doesn't include organized groups of workers *and* organized groups of
citizens, working for political change.

If health insurance, disability accommodations, retirement pay, parental
leave and other sources of workplace risk are moved onto the public's
balance sheet, they cease to be things that workers or employers need to
argue about. They're just a given.

Think of it this way: bosses and workers don't fight over who will pay
to pave the roads to the business. They don't fight over who will fight
fires, or allocate RF frequency for the office wireless network. These
risks are moved to the public ledger, where they belong.

This kind of political change is also hard to imagine, after 40 years of
Reaganomics. But unionization makes it more achievable, because another
word for "risk" is "profit." Shifting risk from workers onto bosses
shifts money from bosses to workers.

Monopolized employers extract monopoly rents from their customers and
gouge monopoly concessions from their workers. This isn't just extra
money to send to shareholders - it's also extra money to spend in the
political realm, blocking reforms that benefit everyone.

That's how we get wage stagnation and ghouls like Manchin and Sinema
tanking the $15 minimum wage. The money extracted from workers was sent
to these politicians so they would vote to make it possible to keep
extracting money from workers.

Unionization - workplace justice - doesn't win the war for political
justice. But it *does* cut the enemy's supply lines, deprive them of the
ammo they're using to fight us.


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💇‍♂️ This day in history

#15yrsago MPAA rep gets slammed at SXSW
https://web.archive.org/web/20060613001026/http://www.powazek.com/2006/03/000571.html

#10yrsago Canadian recording industry: P2P isn’t bad for business
https://web.archive.org/web/20060410075739/https://www.michaelgeist.ca/component/option,com_content/task,view/id,1168/Itemid,85/nsub,/

#5yrsago Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate
their own
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103115300135

#1yrago Patent trolls try to shut down covid testing
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#fortress-investment-group

#1yrago Naomi Klein: this disaster has no room for disaster capitalism
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/17/pluralistic-17-mar-2020/#disaster-socialism

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💇‍♂️ Colophon

Today's top sources: Naked Capitalism (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/).

Currently writing:

* My next novel, "The Lost Cause," a post-GND novel about truth and
reconciliation. Yesterday's progress: 500 words (116669 total).

* A short story, "Jeffty is Five," for The Last Dangerous Visions.
Yesterday's progress: 263 words (8355 total).

* A cyberpunk noir thriller novel, "Red Team Blues." Yesterday's
progress: 1080 words (30995 total).

Currently reading: Analogia by George Dyson.

Latest podcast: Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and
Interoperability (Part 3)
https://craphound.com/news/2021/02/28/privacy-without-monopoly-data-protection-and-interoperability-part-3/

Upcoming appearances:

* World Ethical Data Forum keynote, Mar 17-19,
https://worldethicaldataforum.org/wedf-2020

* Launching "The Future You" with Brian David Johnson, Mar 19,
https://www.changinghands.com/event/march2021/brian-david-johnson-future-you-break-through-fear-and-build-life-you-want

*  Balancing Worldbuilding and Narrative (with Karen Osborne and Kali
Wallace), Mar 24,
https://ucsd.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YSvD5IjGS7Su2z-xhQN1ZA

* Interop: Self-Determination vs Dystopia (FITC), Apr 19-21,
https://fitc.ca/presentation/interop/

Recent appearances:

* Conspiracy Theories (Utopian Horizons):
https://soundcloud.com/utopianhorizons/conspiracy-theory-w-cory-doctorow

* Canadian Speculative Fiction (Unknown Worlds):
https://unknownworlds.podbean.com/e/canadian/

* Who Uses the Users? (This Machine Kills)
https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/48-who-uses-the-users-ft-cory-doctorow

* Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future (CERIAS)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yC_hBDS-RU

Latest book:

* "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone
technothriller for adults. The *Washington Post* called it "a political
cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution
and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html

* "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
(print edition:
https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)

* "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html

* "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1562/_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer.html.

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provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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"*When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla*" -Joey "Accordion
Guy" DeVilla


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