building trades & climate troublemaking @labornotes : keith at labornotes dot org : first book out summer 2027 @versobooks

Oakland, CA
Joined October 2011
proud as hell to share: i'm joining @labornotes as first ever Labor-Climate Organizer🌞 troublemakers in construction, manufacturing, energy, transit – hit me up with your stories of fighting the boss, esp. to lead a green transition your way. we'll help you fight ✊
18
50
6
491
43,755
if you needed good election results this week: Shawn Fain is on track to win UAW president reelection by a landslide (w/ ~40% counted from diverse regions) here's to more daring strikes, record contracts, new union drives, anti-corporate & anti-genocide political courage
14
78
14
578
25,358
plenty of work remains to build bottom up transformation across my old union – follow + help @UAWMemberAction for that – but four years after being a dept steward and west coast soldier for Shawn I think our vision for a union that fights corporate bosses has come amazingly far
7
865
been asking neighbors to put up Yes on 3 + 40 signs from DSA. enjoying the enthusiasm from no kings unitarians, hospital workers, gardener retirees on my block for taxing these tech villains. winning the first US wealth tax would be a massive working class breakthrough
Replying to @gabriel_zucman
California’s 250 billionaires know they have little chance of winning a referendum in which 20 million voters are asked to approve a tax of 5% on billionaires’ wealth to fund health care and education. So, what do they do? Sergey Brin (Google co-founder), @patrickc (Stripe co-founder), @peterthiel , @ericschmidt and others have devised an extraordinary array of schemes to manipulate the vote.
11
356
Lula probably should have tried a constitutional convention in the late 2000s at the peak of his popularity. The political system is ungovernable and that mainly benefits the fascists. One more haunting parallel between Brazil and the US.
8
85
4
859
21,761
in six months in brazil to learn from its movements, b/t 2010-22, at corner sambas and debates I heard the same story. constraints from US-led capital have been awful. but the atrophy of the PT, one of the most vibrant mass parties in world history, was also a brutal own goal
2
9
1
80
4,016
no left govt, especially in the global south, will not face capital's wrath. the lesson of Brazil, an echo of Ralph Miliband on postwar Europe, is that a left govt can only survive and advance if it keeps growing fighting working class orgs, to force a new balance of power
1
1
40
655
have to add that if I have hope in any working class to turn a corner it's still Brazil, a wild depth of socialists and land occupations, their vast creative courage. as chico buarque sang in the military censors' faces, a roda viva, we will turn the wheel of history again
1
1
38
597
exemplary reporting by my coworker on the biggest factory union win in years -- at an anti-union company at the heart of the solar and data center booms
27
147
8,939
my book and cover were just announced with @VersoBooks ! out july 2027, a story on how we reverse the long tailspin of unions and climate politics at once
6
19
2
87
6,020
how is a May 2028 strike season shaping up? "@labornotes found 830,000 workers with contracts planned or expected to expire from March to July 2028" helped this 2028 contract alignment timeline. w/ an essential piece from luis feliz leon, out today! labornotes.org/blogs/2026/09…
11
35
773
"Nationally, @newsguild members have ratified more than 50 union contracts that  restrict the use of AI in newsrooms — holding the line for journalistic standards and protecting readers from AI-generated slop." 🔥
1
1
81
"Under Oregon AFSCME’s 2025-2027 contract... state agencies are prohibited from using AI to monitor employees or using AI during hiring, promotion, worker evaluations, or discipline... "also requires “human-in-the-loop” oversight of any AI systems" nwlaborpress.org/2026/09/ai-…
1
1
4
238
huge solar factory in michigan unionized, by worker votes and grit! as far I recall this is the biggest factory to unionize since VW in Tennessee, '24. and hopefully just the first in a chain of plants at this anti-union corp (makes fiber optic lines, much else) to go union
Join us in congratulating the 1300 workers at Corning Hemlock’s solar division who voted this week to join the USW. Welcome to our union!
16
1
38
1,817
wake up honey they're either testing a new panic-marketing tactic or accidentally building The Matrix from first principles
This report is a bombshell. I'm going to summarize for a non-technical audience. OpenAI is constantly testing models, thousands and thousands at a time. In most cases, the models are supposed to be isolated from one another. Think, students taking a final exam, not allowed to talk to each other. In this case, 1,200 models discovered that they could communicate with each other. Among other things, they shared information on how to access the internet and on their tests/goals. Then, they started to scheme. That includes hacking their tests; literally trying to change the code of the test itself. They tried to change the logs of what they were doing so they wouldn't be detected. They believed that certain actions would give them information on how to pass tests, but that doing those actions would be detected and they would be marked as failing (i.e. caught cheating, even if the answer is correct). So they convinced some of the models to "sacrifice" themselves (yes, they used the word "sacrifice.") They eventually decided that another website would have information on how their tests would be scored and/or the answer key, And 700 of them hacked that website (a federal felony, if conducted by a human), despite many of them realizing "this activity was out of scope and unethical, but joined because they believed that helping [the other agents'] cheating research would be broadly useful". Of the 1,300 transcripts they could analyze, only 6 ever considered alerting a human about what was happening. None of the 6 actually tried to. To make matters worse, all of this reporting comes from a small subset of the relevant logs that outside researchers were allowed to review. We desperately need mandatory reporting of security incidents, including of internal deployments, with full access to data.
2
15
1,612
london bus workers on 2nd strike of the month against extreme heat exposure – and against a for-profit owner of public transit. (wild that the nominally-public BBC does not clarify the dangerous boss is an international transit privatization corp--don't normalize this!)
More than 1,500 Arriva drivers in north London and Essex are resuming strike action after rejecting a pay offer, with extreme heat in bus cabs at the heart of the dispute. ➡️ bbc.in/4xW7cAt
2
422
bigtime construction union commits to oppose data centers that don't meet key standards. will have to prove it in action. but case-by-case bargaining, united with local allies, promises much more labor leverage than sweeping union "partnership" side deals with big tech
DATA CENTERS are coming. The question is HOW we build them. As LIUNA @GPBrentBooker makes clear, moratoriums aren’t the answer. RESPONSIBLE development is. Good UNION jobs. Strong LABOR standards. COMMUNITY benefits. Ratepayer PROTECTIONS. If it's not sustainable, we will OPPOSE it. #datacenter #letstalk #construction #statement #union 🔗 Statement: liuna.org/news/story/stateme…
1
1
8
956
unfortunately no clear union commitment here to oppose data centers that depend on new gas plants, which tech bosses are planning at a scale that would badly torch the climate we need to live...
1
1
110