January 27th
Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 44.3 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
Today’s news, fermented:
It’s climate day! Biden is set to sign a handful of executive orders today that will outline how hard the climate movement will have to push in the next few years.
Amazon is trying to block its workers from voting by mail to unionize—while ‘offering’ logistics support to the Biden administration. This is what corporations always do: bury evidence that they’re knowingly wreaking havoc, then turn around and act like benevolent saviors to decision-makers.
I know that individual consumption is not the key to systemic change, but really, do you need some plastic shit you ordered on the internet to arrive at your house the next day, while the corporation fulfilling that order is refusing to pay its workers a living wage and sufficiently protect them from a deadly pandemic?
Paying your workers well is one of a big portfolio of ways that drivers of the economy—read, those who profit while destruction and suffering ensue—take responsibility for some of the damage they’ve caused and are causing. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) is another; a new bill drafted by New York State legislators seeks to use EPR to reinvigorate recycling in the state. Basically, producers of things that become plastic waste will have to pay to build and run facilities to process that waste.
Right to work on a hot planet dives deep on how the climate and labor organizers share a common enemy, and how capitalism is an engine fueled by the twin disasters of labor abuse and extraction.
Humpback whales, like unions in Amazon’s warehouses, are struggling to reproduce in a warming ocean.
(via)
*Hot Goss*
Back tomorrow from the superb Latifah Azlan.