deadryn.

legendary gay club Heaven is getting priced out of business by its corporate landlords. its landlords just happen to be fucking Blackrock

I realized I totally forgot to post last month's new soup recipe from the soup patreon! Well, now you get to see two soups at the same time! On the left we have chipotle coconut mushroom, farro, and black bean soup and on the right we have baby corn and tomato green lentil coconut soup with basil!

For $5 a month you will get a new original soup recipe every month, in addition to the back catalog of 5+ years of soup recipes. I strive to make my soup recipes vegetarian-friendly (this month's is vegan!), budget-friendly, and depression- and fatigue-friendly. I like getting a little weird with it, like with unusual soups... you want a pastrami and pretzel soup? I got one of those!

If you'd like a sampler of some recipes I have up for free, I've got that for you here. You may be thinking, whoof, Whit, it's about to be summertime... soup? are you sure? And I say, trust me, baby.... trust me. Also, maybe you're in the southern hemisphere! It's your time to shine!!!

Back in high school, I bore witness to the events of Snyderville, the unbelievable saga of a small-town fascist power grab that briefly turned a half square mile in northern Indiana into a two-person autocracy.

(A disclaimer: There aren't a lot of primary sources about this that are easy to access anymore. Many of the specific details in this article, including all the images, come from a student documentary that's still on YouTube. The rest are drawn from local news reports and my own memories of what went down. I may get some details wrong or I may have embellished some things in memory, but otherwise, the story you are about to hear is true.)

In the first setback of its ambitious campaign to unionize 150,000 autoworkers, the UAW lost its effort to unionize an Alabama Mercedes-Benz plant on Friday. This was despite two-thirds of workers at the plant signing union cards.

The proximate cause of failure here is obviously union busting. As noted previously, the union campaign here was subject to such significant union busting that both unfair labor practices and a complaint against Mercedes-Benz in Germany were filed by the UAW. These charges are currently in the process of being litigated. But there were other major sources of interference during the campaign, including a letter spearheaded by Alabama governor Kay Ivey (and signed by a number of other Southern Republican governors) that called on workers to reject the UAW. There is also some evidence that the anti-union campaign severely outworked the UAW's on-the-ground campaign in the final weeks and flipped votes in doing so.

But: unionization in the South, partially because of factors like this and partially for other social reasons, has always been incredibly difficult. Even the win at Volkswagen earlier this year was the culmination of a decade of efforts at the plant and required three previous failed votes before breaking through. Previous big unionization efforts in the South have also tended to lose by two-to-one or worse margins, such as a UAW thumping of that margin at Nissan in 2017. All things equal, the 56-44 result here is certainly disappointing—particularly given the amount of support expressed for UAW in terms of union cards—but not unexpected by any means. The UAW certainly is not giving up on its efforts to unionize here, nor on its efforts to continue unionizing other plants. It's also possible (although not immediately likely) that the union busting campaign here actually results in Mercedes being ordered to bargain with the UAW anyways under the Cemex bargaining order standard.

Labor Notes also has a good piece out today with some quick goods and bads of the campaign and what to learn from it; definitely worth a look if you are aspiring to form a union for things to do and things to avoid.