July jobs report exceeds expectations, this week in the war on workers

[Brexiter]

Good things were happening with jobs in July:

There is still a big gap in the labor market, but even with some slowing from this pace of job growth, we will be back to pre-COVID health by the end of 2022—a recovery *five times* as fast as the recovery following the Great Recession, thanks to the vaccine and to the ARP. 2/ pic.twitter.com/if03xjeJpf

— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) August 6, 2021

But while that’s good news, Republican state unemployment cut-offs have left 1.6 million people without unemployment benefits, with another 7.5 million set to lose aid that expires on September 6. And no, the unemployment cut-offs have not produced any quick rise in hiring in those states relative to others.

● Strikewave’s C.M. Lewis has a nuanced, thoughtful take on Richard Trumka's legacy. Harold Meyerson has another.

● Striking mine workers in Alabama held a major rally and, Hamilton Nolan writes, it held the promise of a better South.

I am from the South. I was born in the South, I grew up in the South, and my entire family lives in the South. I have never in my life seen a racially and politically integrated crowd of people in the deep South, utterly united for a cause, as I did at this rally. The only things that come close are church events or football games, which I would argue lack the socially redeeming qualities of yesterday’s event. It is possible, down South, to get a racially integrated crowd where everyone agrees politically, but to get thousands of Black and white people whose politics range from strongly pro-Trump to strongly pro-Black Lives Matter together in a single place, in total unity of purpose, with virtually no conflict, and without being the explicit result of trying to assemble such a crowd to satisfy some sort of demographic diversity goals — well, that just doesn’t happen that much, ever.

This is the promise of unions. Not just better wages, or better working conditions, but a better society.

● Read this whole thread:

As a group, unions have been extremely pro-vaccine. They’ve spent millions of dollars reaching out to millions of members and non-members to persuade them to get vaxxed and make it easier for them to do so, and to combat vaccine misinformation. 2/ https://t.co/98QWcpDNEM

— Noam Scheiber (@noamscheiber) August 4, 2021

● Democratic National Committee staff are unionizing, which is excellent.

● The climate crisis is coming for undocumented farmworkers first, writes Maurizio Guerrero.

● Ugh.

This email has all the buzzwords. “Nuance”! “Fairness”! “Individual Rights”! https://t.co/QMOcJTNCPG

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) August 6, 2021