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America’s Eyes Are on Unions

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › uaw-strike-biden-unions › 675490

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The president was on the picket line, and the American public is paying attention to unions. This moment of renewed interest in organizing could energize labor activity in the U.S., but it also turns up the pressure on union leaders.

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“A Genuinely Historic Moment”

“Unions built the middle class,” the president of the United States bellowed this week through a bullhorn emblazoned with an American flag. “You deserve what you’ve earned, and you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now.” On Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first sitting president to join striking workers on a picket line. In standing with the United Auto Workers, who have been on strike against the Big Three car companies for almost two weeks, he has picked a side. As my colleague Adam Serwer wrote today, “A president on the picket line, telling workers they deserved to share in the wealth they had helped create, was a genuinely historic moment.”

Public approval of unions is the highest it’s been in many decades. Data from Gallup last month found that, after dipping to a low of 48 percent in 2009, around the time of the recession, Americans’ union-approval rating is now at 67 percent, down slightly from 71 percent last year. Three-quarters of respondents said that they sided with autoworkers over management in their negotiations (this was before the UAW strike had actually begun), and support for striking television writers over their studios was nearly as high. A record-high number, 61 percent, said that unions help rather than hurt the economy.

Organized labor has contracted dramatically in the past 50 years: In 1981, President Ronald Reagan fired 11,000 striking Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization workers, ushering in a period of union decline that has continued since. Now a successful UAW strike could inspire other workers to stand up, potentially even serving as “a reverse PATCO moment,” says Johnnie Kallas, a doctoral candidate at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the project director of its Labor Action Tracker. Kallas’s research shows that so far this year, there have been 291 strikes involving about 367,600 workers. That is an uptick from a few years ago, when his team began documenting strikes. And beyond the numbers, there are other indicators that we are in a strong labor moment, he told me: High-profile victories at Starbucks and Amazon point to a rise in labor interest in private industries. And, of course, there’s the president on the picket line.

Recent strikes may make the public more curious about unions. Many Americans don’t fully understand the potential benefits of unions, Suresh Naidu, an economics professor at Columbia, told me. For decades, “one reason the labor movement has not had so much energy is that it’s been taken for granted that it can’t win strikes,” he said. But given how publicized the UAW’s effort has become, Naidu observed, a successful strike could send onlookers the message that “when you actually have a union that’s willing to go to bat for you, it can really deliver good wages and working conditions.” The high level of current public interest in unions also means that the pressure is on: If the UAW workers do not end up winning a strong contract, it may damage public perception of strikes, Naidu explained. And in strikes like the UAW’s, union leaders need to thread a needle: If they settle for a weak contract or let the strike drag on long enough that it significantly affects workers and their communities, they could lose public support.

As the labor movement gains momentum, workers in such seemingly different industries as Hollywood and mail delivery are making real gains, often on related issues. “We’re seeing a confluence of concerns around the high cost of living, the role of technology in degrading our work, and what people call work-life balance,” Tobias Higbie, the faculty chair of labor studies at UCLA, told me. “These strikes have a way of defining the key conflicts of a particular historical moment.” The coronavirus pandemic has changed the way many people view their lives, he added—and the role that work should play in them. The past few years have also exacerbated public concerns about income inequality, as many bosses and corporations have grown wealthier while workers have struggled with inflation.

Where America’s labor movement will go next is impossible to predict. After months of picketing, Hollywood writers returned to work yesterday with a strong contract in hand; meanwhile, UAW workers are holding the line, and may even expand their strike this week. “Any kind of negotiation is about power,” Higbie explained. “The UAW is giving a master class on how to strategically utilize the power that you do have so that you can get what you need.”

The Big Three’s inevitable collision with the UAW

Today’s News

As tensions continue among congressional Republicans, the U.S. government has begun notifying federal employees that a shutdown appears imminent. The House held its first hearing in the Biden-impeachment inquiry; witnesses chosen by Republicans stated that there is currently no evidence of a crime, but that more bank records from the president and his son are still needed. The Senate unanimously passed a dress-code resolution after controversy over Senator John Fetterman’s casual attire.

Evening Read

Paul Spella / The Atlantic

Group-Chat Culture Is Out of Control

By Faith Hill

Here’s just a sample of group chats that have been messaging me recently: college friends, housemates, camp friends, friends I met in adulthood, high-school friends, a subset of high-school friends who live in New York City, a subset of high-school friends who are single, a group of friends going to a birthday party, a smaller group of friends planning a gift for that person’s birthday, co-workers, book club, another book club, family, extended family, a Wordle chat with friends, a Wordle chat with family.

I love a group text—a grext, if you’ll permit me—but lately, the sheer number of them competing for my attention has felt out of control. By the time I wake up, the notifications have already started rolling in; as I’m going to bed, they’re still coming. In between, I try to keep up, but all it takes is one 30-minute meeting before I’ve somehow gotten 100 new messages, half of them consisting of “lol” or “right!” I scroll up and up and up, trying to find where I left off, like I’ve lost my place in a book that keeps getting longer as I read.For better or for worse, we might be in the Age of the Group Chat.

Read the full article.

A Court Ruling That Targets Trump’s Persona

found Sep '23 The Atlantic

www.theatlantic.com › newsletters › archive › 2023 › 09 › new-york-ruling-trump-organization › 675475

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Donald Trump is a deals guy. He rode his image as real-estate mogul and a maestro of transactions first to pop-culture stardom, then to the White House. Now a judge has ruled that much of that dealmaking was fraudulent: New York Judge Arthur Engoron found yesterday that Trump and his associates, including his sons Eric and Donald Jr., committed persistent fraud by toggling estimates of property values in order to get insurance and favorable terms on loans. The judge ordered that some of the Trump Organization’s “certificates,” or corporate charters, be canceled, and that a receiver be appointed by the court to dissolve some of its New York companies. This latest blow for Trump puts on record that his mythos of business acumen was largely built on lies.

This ruling on its own hinders some of the Trump Organization’s operations in New York State by cutting off Trump’s control of assets. But really, it is just a first step toward the broader business restrictions on Trump that New York Attorney General Letitia James is seeking, Celia Bigoness, a clinical professor of law at Cornell, told me. And to the extent that this ruling shows how the judge feels about James’s suit, first brought against Trump last year, things are not looking great for him. In the trial set to start next week, the judge will determine penalties for the fraud committed: James has requested that those include a $250 million fine and restrictions that prevent the former president and some of his children from running a company in New York ever again. “Trump is synonymous with New York,” Bigoness said. Losing control of his New York businesses and properties would amount to “his home and the place that he has tied himself to shutting him out entirely.” It could also be hugely costly.

This week’s summary judgment is unusual, legal experts told me: The judge essentially determined that it was so clear that Trump had committed fraud that it wasn’t worth wasting time at a trial figuring that part out. Instead, the trial will be used to determine whether Trump’s New York businesses should be further limited as punishment for the fraud—and whether the other demands of James’s suit will be met. It’s somewhat rare for a summary judgment to get to the core of a case like this, and the judge’s decision was distinctly zingy and personal. Responding to Trump’s team’s claims that the suit wasn’t valid, Judge Engoron said that he had already rejected their arguments, and that he was reminded of the “time-loop in the film ‘Groundhog Day.’” In a footnote to his ruling, he quoted a Chico Marx line from Duck Soup: “Well, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

In another unusual move, the judge also included individual fines against Trump’s lawyers as part of the ruling, charging each $7,500 for bringing arguments so “frivolous” that they wasted the court’s time. Separately, Trump’s lawyers are trying to sue the judge (a long-shot attempt). Trump, for his part, posted on Truth Social that he had “done business perfectly”; he also called the judge “deranged.” Reached for comment, the Trump attorney Christopher Kise called the decision “outrageous” and “completely disconnected from the facts and governing law.” “President Trump and his family will seek all available appellate remedies to rectify this miscarriage of justice,” he said in an emailed statement. An appeals process from Trump’s camp could extend into the next presidential-election cycle. His team might also attempt to get an emergency stay to prevent the trial from starting next week.

This ruling, and the rest of James’s suit, are circumscribed to New York. Technically, Trump would still be free to spin up new businesses as he sees fit in another state, and he has holdings beyond New York. But even if he could legally incorporate a new business in, say, Florida or Illinois, it might not make financial or brand sense for him. The fallout from this case could wind up being very costly for Trump, so setting up shop elsewhere, although not impossible, could be a major financial hurdle. Plus, “New York is the place Trump wants to do business and has been doing business for forever,” Caroline Polisi, a white-collar defense attorney and lecturer at Columbia Law School, told me.

Yesterday’s ruling may do little to dampen Trump’s appeal among his die-hard fans, who have stuck with him through all manner of scandals, including a running list of criminal indictments. But it could puncture Trump’s persona. My colleague David A. Graham wrote today that the fact that Trump and his co-defendants, including his sons, committed fraud is not surprising. What is surprising, he argued, is that they are facing harsh consequences. “Trump’s political career is based on the myth that he was a great businessman,” David told me. “This ruling cuts straight to the root of that, showing that his business success was built on years of lies.” Indeed, when Letitia James filed suit against Trump last year, she dubbed his behavior the “art of the steal.”

Today’s News

The U.S. soldier Pvt. Travis King, who sprinted across the border into North Korea two months ago, has been released into American custody. The second Republican presidential primary debate will be held in California tonight. A federal judge struck down a Texas law that drag performers worried would ban shows in the state.

Dispatches

Up for Debate: Driverless cars are a tough sell. Conor Friedersdorf compiles reader perspectives on the future of the technology.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Revealed: The Authors Whose Pirated Books Are Powering Generative AI

By Alex Reisner

One of the most troubling issues around generative AI is simple: It’s being made in secret. To produce humanlike answers to questions, systems such as ChatGPT process huge quantities of written material. But few people outside of companies such as Meta and OpenAI know the full extent of the texts these programs have been trained on.

Some training text comes from Wikipedia and other online writing, but high-quality generative AI requires higher-quality input than is usually found on the internet—that is, it requires the kind found in books. In a lawsuit filed in California last month, the writers Sarah Silverman, Richard Kadrey, and Christopher Golden allege that Meta violated copyright laws by using their books to train LLaMA, a large language model similar to OpenAI’s GPT-4—an algorithm that can generate text by mimicking the word patterns it finds in sample texts. But neither the lawsuit itself nor the commentary surrounding it has offered a look under the hood: We have not previously known for certain whether LLaMA was trained on Silverman’s, Kadrey’s, or Golden’s books, or any others, for that matter.

In fact, it was. I recently obtained and analyzed a dataset used by Meta to train LLaMA. Its contents more than justify a fundamental aspect of the authors’ allegations: Pirated books are being used as inputs for computer programs that are changing how we read, learn, and communicate. The future promised by AI is written with stolen words.

Read the full article.