Four are retiring. Two have lost. #WYAL Rep. Liz Cheney (R) is on track to lose in a landslide. #WA03 Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R) is in extreme danger of being locked out of the top two. #CA21 Rep. David Valadao (R) is in a Toss Up race against a Democrat.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 5, 2022

Fears of More Recessionary Fed Rate Hikes as Jobs Numbers Smash Expectations

New Labor Department data published Friday showed that U.S. job growth surged to 528,000 last month, defying analysts’ expectations of a slowdown and deepening concerns that the Federal Reserve will continue hiking interest rates in its bid to curb inflation.

The better-than-predicted hiring and the slight uptick in wage growth after months of deceleration increase the likelihood that the central bank will impose its third consecutive 75-basis-point interest rate boost in September, despite warnings that the Fed’s effort to cool economic demand and rein in prices could induce a damaging recession and mass unemployment.

“A recession caused by the Fed raising rates too aggressively would undo a great deal of the enormous gains that have occurred in the current recovery.”
Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said Friday that while the new jobs figures show that “we’re almost surely not in a recession now, the Fed may have already overshot and secured a recession in coming months” as rate hikes slowly work their way through the economy, slashing investment by making borrowing more expensive.

“Regardless, they should slow the pace of rate increases substantially and be ready to go into neutral or even cut rates,” Shierholz argued. “A recession caused by the Fed raising rates too aggressively would undo a great deal of the enormous gains that have occurred in the current recovery.”

Fed chair Jerome Powell has publicly admitted that rate hikes are not likely to impact key drivers of record-high inflation such as gas and food prices, leading lawmakers and economists to caution that the central bank is risking a recession and huge job loss for no reason.

The Fed chief has conceded that the central bank’s actions could push the U.S. into recession, though he has said that is not policymakers’ intention.

“The Fed’s single tool for fire-fighting—interest-rate increases—is aimed in the wrong direction,” former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in an op-ed for The Guardian after the Fed’s latest policy meeting on July 27. “It’s hitting working people rather than corporations responsible for most price increases (over and above the rising costs of global supplies).”

“We need to fight rising prices, not working people,” Reich added, arguing that corporate greed is primarily to blame for surging inflation.

Despite mounting recession concerns stemming from the Fed’s actions and fresh evidence of slowing economic growth, U.S. central bankers have provided no indication that they plan to stop raising interest rates any time soon.

Mary Daly, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, told the New York Times earlier this week that the central bank is “nowhere near almost done” hiking rates, a sentiment that other officials echoed.

But experts have stressed that inflation is hardly just a U.S. problem, pointing to global supply chain snags caused by the pandemic and major energy market disruptions from Russia’s war on Ukraine—price pressures that the Fed can do nothing about.

“Rather than the specific policies of the Biden administration driving inflation, the roots of today’s inflation are a more complicated cocktail of other forces: from the spike in raw material, energy, and commodities prices due in large part to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, to lingering supply chain disruptions and distorted consumer demand patterns stemming from the pandemic,” EPI’s Josh Bivens, Asha Banerjee, and Mariia Dzholos wrote in a blog post on Thursday.

“This is not an academic exercise or simply providing political cover for any particular policymaker,” they added. “Instead, there is real economic danger from misdiagnosing the inflation problem. An engineered, unnecessary recession will only cause more economic pain to those still just recovering from the Covid-19 recession, and will undercut the strong economic recovery underway.”

Instead of potentially recessionary rate hikes, economists and Democratic members of Congress have called for legislation to tackle sky-high prescription medicine prices, housing costs, and child care expenses.

Senate Democrats are on the verge of passing the Inflation Reduction Act, compromise legislation that would modestly cut drug costs for Medicare recipients.

Overall, according to a group of nearly 130 leading economists, the bill would put “downward pressure on inflation.”

Dems Promised Universal Pre-K, Paid Leave, and Free Community College. Now It’s All Gone.

These weren’t planks of the Bernie Sanders 2020 platform scorned by mainstream Democrats like Joe Biden. They were presented as important elements of the president’s agenda and included in the “Build Back Better” package rolled out with great fanfare in 2021.

Fast-forward to last week, when it was announced that, after many months of stops and starts, negotiations between Democratic leadership and recalcitrant Democratic senator Joe Manchin have finally resulted in a bill that incorporates some elements of what Build Back Better was supposed to do.

But there’s no universal pre-K. No family and medical leave. Not a single semester of free college.

Most of these things went by the wayside so many rounds of negotiation ago that it may be hard to remember you were promised it all in the first place. But you were. And you should be furious that it’s all been taken away.

What Happened
In the spring of 2021, breathless commentators were comparing Joe Biden to FDR and LBJ. In addition to the temporary relief he’d already signed into law, the lofty comparisons were based on the ambitious spending Biden was proposing — most obviously a $2 trillion infrastructure package.

Then something strange happened. The package was surgically divided into a bipartisan version with all the Chamber-of-Commerce-friendly infrastructure projects and a separate “Build Back Better” bill that included all the stuff like free community college, a resuscitation of the already-stalled PRO Act to make it easier to organize unions, universal pre-K, expanded health benefits, and universal government-funded family and medical leave. You know, all the parts that would make life better for working-class people at the expense of upper-income taxpayers.

But, we were told, this was nothing to worry about! It was a “two-track strategy.” And everyone important promised that they wouldn’t vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Build Back Better had passed. As anyone who wouldn’t fall for the “wallet inspector” from The Simpsons would have predicted, that’s not what happened. The part that was good for rich people got passed, and Build Back Better went nowhere.

One of the crucial figures blamed for it going nowhere was West Virginia’s senator Joe Manchin. Over the course of many dismal months, Manchin would demand that money be cut from the package, negotiate, pull out of negotiations, signal a willingness to compromise after all, and — as my favorite Slovenian would put it — “so on and so on and so on.”

Then a week ago, something happened that stunned observers who’d been watching this sad little dance play out since last year. Manchin and Chuck Schumer announced that they’d made a deal. Not a vague set of priorities or a framework for further negotiations, but an actual, fully fleshed out bill that would do (a version of) some of the things Build Back better was supposed to do — crucially, on climate change.

The new “Inflation Reduction Act” includes $369 billion of spending on “climate change and energy security.” There’s been furious debate among progressives about whether this is a victory worth celebrating, with some arguing that this is the “biggest climate investment made by any country ever” and others highlighting the embedded gifts to the fossil fuel industry and raising questions about what the bill will look like by the time it’s ready for a vote. Journalist and democratic socialist commentator Ana Kasparian told me that she sees the climate action the bill currently promises as a “cover story” for deregulation and expanded drilling.

Whatever you think about this debate, it’s worth taking a long step back to remember what no one thinks the bill addresses. Because right now, none of these things are even part of the mainstream discussion.

Remember What You Were Promised
If someone you love has a medical emergency and you need to take a few weeks off from work, you were told the government would help you out. If you and your partner are both working and your kids aren’t old enough to start kindergarten, you were promised universal preschool. If those kids have grown up and you’re ready to send them to college, you were told that the first few semesters, at least, could be tuition-free.

Would you have gotten these things if the Democrats’ Senate majority didn’t include Joe Manchin (and Kyrsten Sinema), or if they had a majority of fifty-two instead of fifty? Maybe, maybe not. It’s hard to be confident about the counterfactual one way or the other, but it’s worth remembering a few salient points.

First, very little about Joe Biden’s pre-presidential career leads us to think that he cares very much about accomplishing these reforms. Second, Barack Obama made some of the same promises when he was elected in 2008. Obama came in with a much healthier majority — in fact, he enjoyed a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate at one point — and he and his vice president, Joe Biden, didn’t exactly burn up an enormous amount of political capital trying to turn promises like a “public option” for health care and “card check” to make it easier to organize unions a reality. Finally, in areas where Biden and the Democratic leadership could have carried out important promises on their own, they’ve dropped a pretty remarkable number of balls.

Whoever you blame, though, you should be livid about this outcome. These are services so basic that provisioning them would be totally uncontroversial in an even slightly less brutal version of American capitalism. Liberals spent months congratulating themselves about how they were going to finally deliver these things to you. And they’ve all been taken away.

UPS Is Installing Surveillance Cameras in Our Trucks, but Not Air Conditioning

One day before heading into work last week, I stopped into the bodega across from my apartment building to buy a Gatorade. It was going to be another hot day. The man in line behind me noted my UPS uniform and said, “Let me ask you a question: Is it true that you don’t have air conditioning in your truck?” I told him it was true, and that a driver in California had died recently due to heat exhaustion. He stared at me in awe. I held up the Gatorade and half-jokingly added, “They tell us to drink electrolytes.” He shook his head. Then I told him that our union had planned rallies to demand air conditioning, and that we may have a chance to win it in our next contract. He perked up and said, “I hope you do, brother.”

When the weather forecast shows temperatures pushing into the high nineties at the peak of New York’s humid summer, we UPSers brace for extreme conditions. But try as we might, it’s hard to stay cool. Many drivers bring coolers full of ice and put them in the back of the truck, but by lunchtime all the ice has melted and the cooler has become a bucket of warm water.

And we need that ice. The cargo area of the package car is like a sauna, with temperatures reaching 120 or 130 degrees. On any given day, we step into the cargo area over a hundred times to retrieve packages. All it takes is a few seconds before you’re sweating bullets. To make matters worse, packages are almost always loaded into the trucks out of order. Every package needs to be sorted in the order it is supposed to be delivered, which is technically the job of the preloaders, but the task is usually shifted onto us drivers. It can take an additional thirty minutes to an hour to complete, and if we don’t do it we can be disciplined. I have personally been issued a warning letter by management for not having my truck perfectly sorted when stopped during an observation. (Management personnel follow drivers in their personal cars and film us with their personal phones.)

When choosing between disorganized cargo and dangerous heat, many workers will sweat it out, even at risk to our own safety.

Management’s Mess
Some drivers blame the preloaders for the messy cargo area, but the issue can be better understood as a consequence of UPS’s management strategy. UPS chronically understaffs the preload shift and cracks the whip to get as much productivity out of each worker as possible. Instead of assigning preloaders one or two trucks each, they assign four or five. They run the belt at an unreasonable pace, and supervisors bark at workers, threatening discipline if too many packages go by and pile up at the end of the belt.

Just like the trucks, the warehouses aren’t air conditioned. So not only are the preloaders harassed and overworked, but they’re also trapped in a hotbox. Anyone who spent a day in the shoes of one of these inside workers would immediately understand why trucks go out with disorganized cargo. It’s impossible to load each package in order without letting a ton of other boxes go by and stack up at the end of the belt. The blame for messy cargo should fall not on preloaders, but on UPS management, who could fix the problem by hiring more workers and slowing the pace of the belt.

It doesn’t matter how healthy and hydrated we are; moving hundreds or thousands of pounds of cargo for up to fourteen hours in temperatures ranging between 95 and 130 degrees is dangerous. Period.

In the absence of these changes, however, the burden of organizing the work falls farther down the line of production onto us drivers, who are forced to sort the packages ourselves in the sweltering heat. We can open the back and bulkhead doors to air out the cargo area, but not all of the heat escapes. In addition, this extra effort extends our workday, which means more time toiling in the heat. While regular package car drivers have contractual overtime protections, management regularly violates said language by instructing drivers to stay out and finish their over-dispatched routes.

That extra time in the heat could make the difference when it comes to safety. I’m a 22.4, which is the second-tier driver job created in the last contract, and we don’t have any overtime protections other than the fourteen-hour workday limit enforced by the Department of Transportation. It doesn’t matter how healthy and hydrated we are; moving hundreds or thousands of pounds of cargo for up to fourteen hours in temperatures ranging between 95 and 130 degrees is dangerous. Period. In one week alone this summer, at least four drivers went to the emergency room from within my union Teamsters Local 804’s jurisdiction in New York and Long Island, and surely many more drivers suffered from heat exhaustion but didn’t report it.

A driver in Queens measures the temperature in the cargo area of the package car.
Just as the warehouse shifts are understaffed, so too are the driver shifts. And just as preloaders are assigned more trucks to load than they can handle, so too are drivers assigned more packages to deliver. UPS chooses to force us to work overtime rather than hire more drivers because it reduces costs via benefit contributions for each additional employee. And just as they bark at the preloaders, they do the same with drivers, pressuring us to finish the over-dispatched routes as quickly as possible.

Every move that UPS makes is guided by a profit maximization strategy. The heavy workload and management-by-stress exacerbate the dangerously hot working conditions that already jeopardize our safety. Meanwhile, UPS is more profitable than ever before. Why can’t they spend some money on air conditioning? We know why. It’s because what matters most is not worker safety, but the corporation’s bottom line.

Safety Not Surveillance
Around the same time that news of UPS drivers collapsing and even dying from heat exhaustion began circulating, a picture started circulating on UPS driver WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups. It showed a driver facing a “Lytx” camera in the cab of package cars. The cameras arrived without notice to the union, catching drivers completely off guard. UPS also began installing forward facing cameras on the windshield of trucks. It is unclear whether or not they have audio recording capacity.

One morning during the heat wave, a driver approached me to ask if I had any idea what the camera does or if it is even working at the moment. Nobody in management had informed him that the camera would be installed or how it would work. One day it wasn’t there and the next day it was. He worried that the camera had a microphone allowing the company to listen to his conversations with his wife. Other coworkers have expressed concern that the company might be able to listen to them when speaking with their union representative. Drivers with the Lytx camera in their trucks have said that if they reach for their water bottle while driving, the camera sounds an alarm: “Distracted driving, distracted driving!”

Whatever its capabilities, the mere presence of the camera has stoked fear and paranoia among my coworkers, because we have all experienced how UPS management uses technology and surveillance to gain leverage over employees through the implicit threat or outright use of discipline. These cameras take that threat to the next level. A supervisor once told me during a disciplinary hearing, “The logistics industry is all about speed.” Most management personnel are more cunning with their choice of words, especially during disciplinary hearings, but this one said the quiet part loud: surveillance and discipline are used to make us work faster.

It’s not in our interest to work beyond a safe and steady pace. We are paid by the hour, so more work during the same period of time means the same amount in wages for us — plus more exhaustion and greater safety risks. But us working faster is in the interest of the company, which wants to maximize revenue while minimizing costs.

Insurance companies offer lower rates for commercial vehicles with cameras, so these cameras will save the company a lot of money. But where will this extra cash go? If UPS has their way, it will line the pockets of corporate executives and major shareholders. Workers will see nothing but a decline in our working conditions.

The Union Fights Back
This shameless prioritization of profit over people prompted Vinnie Perrone, Teamsters Local 804 president and IBT Eastern Region package director, to issue a statement calling for rallies across our local. The main rally took place at my facility on Foster Avenue in Brooklyn before work on July 28. Management peered out from their air conditioned offices while we demanded “Safety Not Surveillance”: no to installing cameras, and yes to installing AC.

Leading up to the rally, I and other stewards across the local created “fan request lists” and collected signatures and truck numbers from drivers who want a fan installed in their truck. As per our contract, such a request cannot be unreasonably denied. But when one driver made a written request for a fan to be installed in his truck last month, the mechanic responded that UPS corporate had decided that fans could not be installed. We understood that the demand for AC may be a longer-term fight than fans, but we wanted to take action on both short- and long-term goals.

On July 29, New York City–based UPS driver Elliot Lewis and I tweeted a call for the public to make complaints to the UPS customer service hotline, demanding UPS take worker safety seriously. Our tweets received thousands of responses. When I called, a customer service representative nervously said that she had heard many complaints about the topic and, before hanging up, informed me that UPS planned on installing air conditioning in the trucks next week. I took her words with several grains of salt, but I do believe that UPS is beginning to get the message: we are a new, fighting Teamsters union and the public is increasingly supportive of our struggle as essential workers.

We are a new, fighting Teamsters union and the public is increasingly supportive of our struggle as essential workers.

This week marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1997 UPS strike and one year out from the expiration of our current contract. Despite the great success of the 1997 strike, the years following Ron Carey’s ousting from Teamster leadership have been marked by Jimmy Hoffa’s class collaboration. Our current contract, which established a two-tier system for drivers despite majority opposition from the rank and file, was undemocratically forced upon members by Hoffa, who utilized an archaic bylaw in the Teamsters constitution to get the contract ratified.

But times have changed. Decades of organizing by militant rank-and-filers and members of the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union have finally started to bear fruit. At the 2021 Teamster National Convention, workers won the eradication of the two-thirds rule that Hoffa used to force the 2018 contract, strike benefits on day one, and the inclusion of rank-and-file members on the bargaining committee. In November of 2021, we elected Sean O’Brien and the Teamsters United slate to International leadership in a landslide vote. O’Brien campaigned on issues such as the elimination of the two-tier system and higher part-time wages in our 2023 contract. He has said that if UPS won’t give us what we want in 2023, we will strike.

This week we kicked off our contract campaign with rallies held outside UPS facilities across the entire country. We are finally feeling the power of a union ready and willing to stand up and fight against the greed of corporate America.

Biden has said:

The unemployment rate now matches the lowest it’s been in more than 50 years: 3.5%.

More people are working than at any point in American history, and it’s the result of my economic plan to build the economy from the bottom up and middle out.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) August 5, 2022

Yea, right. 3/4 of the IRA bill (Inflation Reduction Act) is for the S&P 500. How is this bottom up?

Somehow, this isn’t in the IRA bill:

Biden administration expected to sign new $1 billion Ukraine security assistance package in coming days, per Reuters.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) August 5, 2022

Wouldn’t this increase our inflation rates? Debt? Deficit?

Benny’s Bar is open! Budtenders available as well as bar tenders. We’ll start with some mojitos and a cannabis-infused mocktail.

I rewrite Dick Cheney's campaign ad for his daughter https://t.co/Z0pTojzMDr by Bob Johnson

— Benny🌹 (@Benny06) August 5, 2022

Great diary, expresses most of my sentiments about that war monger.

Alex Jones ordered to pay $45.2 million in punitive damages, $4.1 million in compensatory damages

— Tiffany Hsu (@tiffkhsu) August 5, 2022

Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy (to steal from Josh Marshall)

It’s one thing to vote yes on new Schumer-Manchin-Sinema bill, it’s another to celebrate it. It’s the usual five percent of what we started with. Already every reporter is doing marketing for it by calling it historic. We said they were always going to shred BBB & we were right.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) August 5, 2022

Yacht owners are complaining that they're getting hit by high diesel prices, per NYP.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) August 5, 2022

Guy running to stay in office until he is 94 years old blames someone else for lack of family time https://t.co/pMXMr3XX8P

— Rob Sand (@RobSandIA) August 5, 2022

boo hoo