*This musing is not very court reporting related. I do mention us a little. But insofar as I am a writer for the labor movement, here goes.

Amazon has joined the companies declaring the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional.

Fortune writes that an attorney for the Amazon Labor Union stated “since they can’t defeat successful union organizing, they now want to just destroy the whole process.”

Highlights from the event? The NLRB is over 80 years old and other companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Trader Joe’s have made similar arguments.

This one has a special place in my heart. I think of Christian Smalls, AKA Chris Smalls, who was able to unionize Amazon in New York City’s only “red” Republican-voting borough, Staten Island. My hometown. This is a surprise because the Republican political class is staunchly against working people. Right-to-work laws, for example, give a great name to something fairly insidious. The laws don’t actually provide a right to work or any working rights. They’re meant solely and exclusively to weaken union power. Unions raise pay for non-union workers, so unionization is a victory for all working people. But Republican voters are mostly working people who don’t have time to stay up on the politics and the societal impacts of these laws, so this kind of stuff flies under the radar. Chris Smalls broke through that and unionized anyway.

It’s very much like our field in a sense. Many reporters I’ve spoken to are anti-union. They think that being an employee means 9 to 5. They think that being an employee means less freedom. There are very few in the field who have the kind of free time they’d need to understand and conceptualize an employment contract that would give them all of the freedom they enjoy today and more. Thanks, in part, to my own success, I have that kind of time, at least at this moment in my life. I use it to promote discussion about the underpayment of educated working people. As I told a friend that recently accused me of being envious of the wealthy, my salary is more than 3x the median wage of the United States. I got mine. I’m trying to help everybody else get theirs. And I do mean everybody.

We don’t get there until we stop the systemic squeeze on the average Joes and Janes of the world and start talking about how to spark a brighter future in the face of all that we are facing. Don’t ever think I’m not grateful for the rich conditions I’ve grown up in, that is to say, I could have been born in a much poorer country or to a much poorer family. Many around the world struggle daily worse than I will ever struggle. But what can I say? I’m a writer. My ideal is one where I use my position of privilege to advocate for and inspire others to advocate for political and economic conditions that will allow America to do what it has done for hundreds of years and lead the world into the future not through military might and weapons of war but by invention of the technologies that will uplift all of us. It starts at home, folks. More money in more hands means more issues see funding. It’ll mean the market really will decide & provide rather than our current system where wealth concentrates at the top and leaves the bottom of the pyramid crumbling from habitual not-my-problem culture.

Traditional news doesn’t publish what I’m about to write because it’s not in the business of informing people, it’s in the business of clicks and views. That’s why, when I took to the internet to publish about the ongoing fraud on New York and Staten Island jobseekers, pretty much all the outlets I wrote to ignored it. It’s okay to swindle 30,000 people as long as you make the swindling complex enough that a newsroom editor says “let’s run with another story.”

Back to the Billionaire Brigade. This is the dumbest thing that these companies could do to America.

To understand why we have these laws, you have to go back in time and read about the history of the American labor movement. It was violent. Employers squeezed their employees, didn’t pay enough, and in some cases let them burn to death thanks to how bad the working conditions were.

In turn, some members of the labor movement blew up their employers with bombs and shot at people employed by union busters. What a surprise! When you create unfair conditions for people under the law, they start fighting back in ways that are outside the law. People must abide by the law. But we must address the truth of human nature. Unfair laws lead to revolution and the only way to stave that off is to have fair laws or crush people that would oppose the unfair laws. We allegedly have a mental health crisis in America. If these folks want to turn back the clock back a century and relive what was going on back then with the benefit of modern weaponry and deteriorating medical care for the chronically unwell while social media algorithms fill them with rage bait, we are going to live with the consequences. We have to make a choice on whether we want to live in that kind of environment or if we’d prefer the billionaire brigade to pay a little bit more and treat people a little bit better. Does everyone understand why I’m willing to write mean words yet?

As luck would have it, New York is a state that seems to understand that fair laws matter. It recently increased the statute of limitations for illegal employment discrimination from 1 year to 3 years under the New York State Human Rights Law, also known as our New York State Constitution. This is juxtaposed against the federal law, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which gives employees 6 months. I think this is a good move. I recently had correspondence with a New York City jobseeker from our field. We both believe she was discriminated against on the basis of race. But that decision to go to a lawyer and exercise her rights is a hard decision to make. And, in fact, I know a thing or two about looking for an employment discrimination lawyer. Even after you’ve made the hard decision, if there are bad facts or low damages, law offices might turn you away without giving you an honest reason why, even if they’re rumored to have phenomenal lawyers.

Those that fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. And you don’t have to look far back into America’s history to live in an America that most of us want no part in, and that our predecessors were smart enough to pull us from inch, by inch, by inch.

Are we all just another gradient on the ruler?

P.S.

For the Staten Island court reporters in my audience, feel free to check out r/StatenIslandPulse. I find the moderator to be much more accepting of news and content than r/statenisland. It’s a small group, but they’re pretty cool. Not my group. r/PatriotsAgainstCorps is mine, but it’s more a conversation starter than a group at this point in history.

I also started a Facebook group Staten Island Progressive. I figure I understand the laws well enough and can generally read up on what I don’t understand. With some likeminded friends we could probably make some real differences. For example, a campaign to codify more rights into our constitution or amend our criminal laws to be pro-people or even streamline the court process. That is, find the balance that keeps our Staten Island businesses safe and our criminal justice system reactive to the needs of our population. McMahon seems to be addressing the mental health thing. But will our next district attorney if our voters are perceived as being ignorant about these issues? No joke, I have a friend that was injured in 2018. His case is still open! Six years. Imagine waiting six years for a resolution to an injury case before the trial has even happened and the appeals have even started. I can barely remember what I did yesterday (Factorio)! I learned recently that all a company has to do is say it’s buried in subpoenas and needs 60 days to respond to delay a felony case by two months.

These are things that society needs to talk about, as under our current economic conditions, wealth concentrates at the top, people have less money for their innovative and vital spending. That is, if people cannot afford doctors, lawyers, and professionals of all shapes and sizes, the pay of those professionals may not increase commensurate with the cost of living, which will then create a sort of negative feedback where those white collar professionals can’t hire the blue collar professionals while the people who play with companies, credit, and people’s lives like they’re toys and video games pull even more money from the population and ultimately have more resources to play more games with companies, credit, and people’s lives.

If nothing else, just know that my message is the same as it’s always been. You have the power to make a difference.

And if anybody wants to lay down the funding for a political media company, I bet we could make a return. I know a man who has a voice for podcasting. I know a strong singer. And my ability to think outside the bounds of conventional companies makes me a candidate for directing the thing and managing the payroll, insurance, and all that good stuff. Even something like a for-profit think tank could benefit local businesses and our population in general by pushing alternative media that captures the attention and imagination of powerful people. Say what you want about people like Alex Jones, he made a lot of money. Now imagine if you had someone with morals that was willing to be just as zany and draw just as much media attention for the purpose of benefitting small businesses and the country as a whole, and making sweet returns for the investors that believe in it? I’m just not in a financial position to take a serious go at it. There’s definitely money in this stuff. Why couldn’t I help an investor, or even many small investors, to some of it?

A writer can dream, can’t he?

Thanks for reading.