Workers

Thom Hartmann - The UAW’s successful unionization effort last week at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee — the first successful unionization effort at a car factory in the South since the 1940s — is breaking the brains of Republicans in that region. They’re truly astonished that workers might not trust their corporate overlords with their working conditions, pay, health, and retirement…. Southern autoworkers, though, aren’t listening to the GOP’s BS any more: a unionization vote is set for the week of May 13th at a Mercedes plant in Alabama and more than half the workers there have already signed a card indicating their desire for union representation. The problem for Republicans is that unions represent a form of democracy in the workplace, and the GOP hates democracy as a matter of principle. It’s why conservatives have opposed every effort to expand voting rights from the Jim Crow era, through fighting woman’s suffrage, to opposing voting rights legislation from 1965 to this day.

Newsweek - Companies are planning to lay off the Gen Z workers they just hired, according to a survey by Intelligent. The report found 78 percent of 800 U.S. hiring managers questioned said their company will lay off recent graduates due to artificial intelligence advances.  Only 22 percent of the hiring managers indicated recent graduates were safe from layoffs at their company due to AI. Granted, the layoffs might not necessarily be huge in nature. AI A two-armed robot called ADAM prepares coffee. Hiring managers believe artificial intelligence will mean Gen Z job losses, according to a new Intelligent report. But among the companies that said they plan to lay off recent graduates, 23 percent said less than 3 percent would be let go, and 27 percent said between 5 to 10 percent will lose their jobs. However, 11 percent of the companies are planning to cut 15 to 30 percent of their recent graduate employees. And the same number said a whopping 30 to 60 percent will be laid off in total.