The Historic Battles of “Hot Labor Summer”
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2023
⏱️ 38 minutes
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Summary
This summer, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild are on strike together for the first time in sixty-three years. At the same time, hotel workers across Southern California are organizing coordinated rolling work stoppages. The Teamsters just successfully negotiated substantial wage increases and averted a strike for workers at UPS. But now the United Auto Workers, whose contract is up in September, are threatening to strike. What is behind all of this labor unrest? Is it a lingering effect of the pandemic, or something larger? E. Tammy Kim, a contributing writer and a former lawyer, joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the forces that led to what organizers are calling “hot labor summer,” and to imagine what may come after.
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| 1:10.0 | We have the Writers Guild on strike in Hollywood. We now have the |
| 1:13.3 | actors joining them. SAG after is on strike. UPS was about to be on strike, which would have been |
| 1:18.7 | the largest private sector strike in recent history. That's my colleague Tammy Kim, who writes |
| 1:25.4 | about labor and the workplace for The New Yorker. |
| 1:28.6 | So over the past year, there's been a lot of anticipation of what people in the labor movement |
| 1:32.9 | affectionately referred to as hot labor summer, and that is what we are in right now. |
| 1:38.6 | You're listening to the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. |
| 1:44.1 | I asked Tammy why it seems |
| 1:45.2 | like contract negotiations are falling apart across the country. So like on the UPS and a lot of |
| 1:51.3 | workers talk about how during the pandemic they didn't get hazard pay, they didn't get bonuses, |
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