🚨 A questionnaire for you, and some news, too
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🍿 The union behind entertainment
The screen makes us feel seen. Art and entertainment keep us connected, often serving as refuge, especially during an isolating pandemic. We all have our favorite movies and TV shows and musicals and plays. And the people behind the art, work, and production deserve protection.
The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States, Its Territories and Canada, (@IATSE) finally shared the results of their strike vote this weekend. Negotiations with producers and studios are ongoing.
Read the news here.
🎞️ Watch: @MorePerfectUS’s video highlighting workers.
Featured on Workday:
Michael Moore from Union Advocate (@unionadvocate) reports on the M Health Fairview psychiatric healthcare workers who have unionized with SEIU Healthcare MN! From the piece:
Like many workers forming unions recently, M Health Fairview employees said the COVID-19 outbreak gave their campaign a sense of urgency. Senior psychiatric associate Andrea Rivas described working in small, confined areas with patients who sometimes refused to wear masks, and uncertainty over access to personal protective equipment.
What we’re reading & watching
This piece by Gaby Galvin (@mg_galvin) from data company Morning Consult. Galvin reports on the national shortage of long-term healthcare workers as a historical crisis:
“This country can no longer kick this can down the road,” said April Verrett, chair of the Service Employees International Union’s national home care council and president of a local in California. Going forward, long-term care should “deliver the care that people need and not neglect the workers who work in that system, because it goes hand in hand.”
A few degrees of separation. After reading this Star Tribune obituary for Glennis Ter Wisscha, who died at 62 from natural causes, I texted my mom. Ter Wisscha was the youngest worker in the “Willmar 8,” a group of bank workers at Citizens National Bank in Willmar, MN, that went on strike over sex discrimination. A TV movie titled “A Matter of Sex” was based on the workers. Her parents live in Clara City, the town my parents are from and where many family members live, so I asked my mom, “was she from CC?” Mom replied, “yep, she graduated with Laurie, Duane, and Cindy.” My mom’s sister, her husband, and my dad’s sister. Rest in peace.
“Food is political, it’s always gonna be political.” Tonight at 8pm, TPT is airing the documentary The Co-Op Wars on the history of co-op movements in Minnesota. You can watch on TPT2, or it will be streaming online.
In the 1970s, young people in Minnesota radicalized by the Vietnam War created a unique alternative economy featuring dozens of food cooperatives, but a shadowy revolutionary group used conflicts over class and race to try to seize the movement. The ensuing clash pitted friends and comrades in a sometimes violent conflict over the future of the counterculture.
Art, work, food—it’s all political. We are each other’s harvest.