Collective no-bargain

I have no plasma screen and all I know about plasma is blood related and my experience with streaming is strictly allergy related.

I've attended traditional movie theaters avidly ever since I was uploaded with hormones and found the dark and intimate back rows of these fleapits conducive to romantic exploration. Now, they're fading fast (the theaters, not the hormones). 

The decline of movie theaters has been arrested, and it was not by ICE. Their revival with urban and urbane audiences has dovetailed with labor activism. 

Around five years ago, workers at seven movie theaters in Manhattan and Brooklyn unionized. And last February,  workers at the dine-in NYC Alamo United theater chain, represented by United Auto Workers Local 2179,  voted by over 98 percent to go on strike. 

It is still unsettled and so are the workers.

The Sony Pictures-owned theater chain has 35 mostly non-unionized locations across the country. The ones in Brooklyn and Manhattan are the most profitable. The union filed an unfair labor complaint with the National Labor Relations Board for the reinstatement of 70 workers who had been summarily laid off, but management remains hard-nosed and pigheaded.

Critics want to believe that unions and the labor movement are in critical condition, but in what shape are they, actually?

Reuters has been around since the year that a flip of coin determined that a new city in Oregon would be named after Portland, Maine, rather than Boston, Massachusetts. 

The news agency is considered an unbiased source, but one should be skeptical, since the International Criminal Court and the BBC, other venerable institutions, have also been resting on laurels that have turned to poison ivy. Their claim that union membership in the United States hit record lows last year, assuming its accuracy, is sobering but not overly consequential. 

What counts more than an ephemeral and likely errant statistic, is the sturdiness of the labor movement’s foundation, its range, momentum and trajectory of recruitment, its endurability during unsettled political climates, and its resistance to pressures from power-flexing authorities among legislatures, chief executives and complicit judiciaries and media.

Equally important is the extent of cross-culturalism among members in all types of workplaces, outcomes of litigation in the wake of strikes and other job actions, how the fruits of victories strengthen shared fundamental rights and the extent that they are locked in permanently and universally. 

The state of Labor today is not discernible from a scorecard of grievances and strikes and even disenfranchisements. 

Its prospects may be robust even in the absence of collective bargaining coups. It is possible to plant the seeds for gaining ground in the long-term even in the midst of present retreat. Victory and defeat are prone to paradoxical optics. Fortune hinges on long-term strategy, knowing the enemy's nerve points, and sometimes embracing or feigning partnerships.

Despite the stirring of labor’s embers and ignition of the fires of effective union activism, what has happened on a federal level may foreshadow trouble for collective bargaining in the private sector, as management is sensing blood and people may get used to the unthinkable reality of total decimation.

By executive order citing national security concerns and invoking Title 5 of the U.S. Code and the Civil Service Reform Act, President Trump has obliterated, not merely suspended, collective bargaining rights for unions representing more than two-thirds of federal employees. Among the casualties are the Environmental Protection Agency, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Health and Human Services Department, Federal Commission, General Services Administration, Veterans Administration and parts of Homeland Security.

Former President Reagan's elimination of the air traffic controllers' union was electrifying. This is electrocuting. 

As he surveyed the tornado-like impact to his own Agency, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr, said he wants "to empower everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of purpose and pride, and a sense of personal agency and responsibility." The former "family" members exemplified those traits and what did it secure for them?

"Non-essential employee" is a term used by the Department of Government Efficiency to describe workers whose productivity to the core mission is insufficient to justify their retention. That word, which sounds antiseptic, is vague, arbitrary, slippery and very subject to expedient contortion. 

Many of the laid-off or fired employees did tasks that either were indispensable outright or enabled "essential" employees to do their jobs, for which on the record they receive total official credit and the "non-essential" employee does not.

"Overreach" is another popular term in the lexicon of ideological punditry. Of late it's been used a lot to describe the rulings and pronouncements of federal judges like U.S. Appeals Court Judge Patricia Millett, who was scolded for claiming that deported Venezuelans were treated worse than the Nazis of World War II.

Regardless of anyone's opinion about ICE's removal protocol, the judge's observation is largely accurate. 

The defendants at the Nuremberg trials were among the most senior criminals in Hitler's regime. They were direct instruments of slave labor, sadistic persecution and mass murder on the most massive scale in world history. 

And although their guilt was beyond reasonable or even unreasonable doubt, they got to choose their own counsel and received full due process, including rules of evidence, witness testimony on their behalf, examinations in open court and opportunity to speak for themselves.

Other Nazi genocide practitioners, (not counting the ones like Treblinka death camp commandant Franz Stangl, who was expatriated via the "ratlines" with the complicity of Bishop Alois Hudal), effortlessly avoided any judicial process by being shamelessly recruited by American and other governments, who gave them credit for their anti-communist views and expertise as no-nonsense interrogators.

Other Nazis who were treated better than our deported migrants included the mastermind of Hitler's "Vengeance 2" rocket, the swashbuckling special forces guy who rescued Mussolini before his ultimate accounting, former Nazi lieutenant generals who helped set up NATO, and numerous industrialists who pivoted the marketing of their products from concentration camp crematoria to over-the-counter commodities available at your local pharmacy. 

Others lent their talents postwar to repressive regimes in South America and the Middle East.

Many Nazis who murdered in excess of 10,000 people each got their prison sentences commuted to just a few years' time served. Certainly, such Nazis were treated royally compared with the gangbangers we have expelled. And the conditions in the Nuremberg cells were luxurious compared with the jails of El Salvador.

Although the heavenly canopy seems more threatening than protective of Labor right now,  we remain captains, not captives of our destiny. We have the tools to deliver ourselves from adversity.

It is now the matinee on the big screen of this cinema of national drama. Let's go, unionists, to the "concession stand" (where we get, don't give concessions, for a change), buy some popcorn (avoid the cyanide-laced butter from management), and behold the trailers together.