T and R x 2, and Our Medal of Honor for Hosting the Nest goes to Ms. Benny!! 🙂 Great news out of TX. Also, Val Demings is pulling even with Rubio, and FL Primary Day is next Tuesday, 8/23. Of course, I’ve already voted. 🙂

But if you’re an unhinged conspiracy theorist with malignant anger management issues and a monstrous grudge, here’s your gun!

DOJ: Marijuana users are ‘dangerous to trust’

TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA — Department of Justice attorneys defended the federal law that bars marijuana users from buying guns this week. Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried sued the Biden administration earlier this summer, arguing the policy violates the rights of medical marijuana patients.

In a motion filed Monday, attorneys stated “marijuana use impairs judgment” – as Florida’s Board of Medicine puts it, “the ability to think, judge and reason. It is therefore dangerous to trust regular marijuana users to exercise sound judgment while intoxicated.”

https://www.wfla.com/news/florida/doj-marijuana-users-are-dangerous-to-trust/

LD will find this interesting https://labornotes.org/blogs/2022/08/game-and-tech-workers-drop-u-word

At noon on July 17, my co-workers and I at the video game studio Tender Claws stepped away from our desks.

Two of our work-from-home colleagues walked into the office unannounced; our out-of-state colleagues joined virtually on a laptop. We passed out a letter and read it aloud together: “Dear management: we are proud to announce we are forming the Tender Claws Human Union.”

Two weeks later we obtained voluntary recognition, making Tender Claws the fourth video game studio with a certified union in North America. Our company is small, with a unit of just 11 workers, but our victory joins a nationwide wave of organizing in games and tech.

Before 2020 there were virtually no unionized workers in these two industries. Today there are more than 3,000 of us in the Communications Workers (CWA) alone.

Case in point: on the very day we delivered our petition, quality assurance workers at Blizzard Albany launched their own union drive. This small unit would create a second union toehold in gaming giant Activision Blizzard, known for titles like Call of Duty and World of Warcraft.

TROUBLE IN ‘PARADISE’

Game workers make our living building video games. We create 2D and 3D art, compose audio, run quality assurance tests, code game functionality, write character dialogue, design game mechanics, perform customer service, and manage communities of game players. Through our labor, our industry has become a financial giant, forecasted to generate $200 billion this year.

Workers in high-tech jobs are often stereotyped as a ping-pong-playing elite, but the reality is more complex. Some in our industry do make six figures, but many are paid well below the cost of living in the country’s most expensive cities. And most quality assurance and customer service workers barely clear the minimum wage.

From Google to Activision Blizzard, our workplaces are divided between full-time employees and an underclass of temps, vendors, and contractors. Work-life balance is notoriously poor for both groups due to “crunch,” long stretches of overtime in the months or years before the launch of new software. And harassment and discrimination run rampant in workplaces traditionally dominated by straight white men.

We unionized Tender Claws as a wall-to-wall unit to reduce crunch, bargain for sustainable career development, and diversify our hiring process. Tender Claws was founded with the intention of being a progressive workplace, and management has made many efforts to act fairly, but we aren’t immune from the dynamics of the industry. The vision of a better workplace can only be fulfilled when workers ourselves have a direct say, through our union, in the decisions that affect us.

INFORMAL ORGANIZING

The problems in games and tech aren’t new. Workers have been organizing informally for decades, using salary spreadsheets, class action lawsuits, whisper networks, press exposés, and more recently, walkouts. Some of these standalone actions have yielded moderate wins, and over time they’ve developed consciousness in the power of collective action across our industries.

When you work in a zero percent unionized industry, it can be tempting to remain in this realm of informal organizing. A one-off action has a clean start and end, and feels less risky than organizing a union. It’s easier to get co-workers to commit to do something only once, and you can get away without forming a proper leadership structure.

But this cuts both ways. Standalone actions are easier because they don’t fundamentally challenge the balance of power between workers and management. It’s hard to hold on to the wins. The moment things cool down and managers no longer feel watched, they can quietly retaliate against troublemakers and restore the status quo.