![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Their algorithms are designed to emphasize and disseminate outrage, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. Social media platforms exist solely to attract and keep human eyeballs. Williams describes in her important analysis of social media-lack of privacy, decontextualization, narcissism, data mining and exploitation, harassment, and political polarization-are features, not bugs, of cyberspace. The real revival of the American labor movement that is occurring now is taking place at the grassroots level: on the streets, in Amazon warehouses, and among Starbucks baristas. Why hasn’t it organized massive demonstrations in support of the PRO Act and a $15 minimum wage? The answer is that it is embedded in the neoliberal Democratic web, and institutional Democratic victories mean more to its leaders than labor progress. To this day, the AFL-CIO barely utters a word against national Democratic policies, whatever they are. Under George Meany, the AFL-CIO became a passive arm of the Democratic Party, supporting the Vietnam War even supposedly liberal unions such as the United Auto Workers refused to back protests against the war. The expulsion during the McCarthy era of leftist unions from the Congress of Industrial Organizations removed many of the most activist, energetic, and committed leaders from the American labor movement. Re John Nichols’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris : Kamala Harris may be part of the most pro-labor Democratic administration since at least the 1960s, but this is barely a beginning.
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