Quickbait

Q U I C K B A I T

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released a report on union membership in the U.S., and—no surprise here—the percentage of workers who belong to a union continues its precipitous decline, dropping 0.2 points to 10.3 percent from 2018 to 2019. (In 1983, the first year the BLS collected this data, union membership was at 20.1 percent.) Public-sector workers are five times more likely than private-sector workers to be union members; blacks are slightly more likely to be to join unions than whites, Asians, or Hispanics; and union members tend to earn more a week than nonunion members.

North Carolina, of course, is a notoriously anti-labor state and has been for decades. In 1947, it banned closed shops; 12 years later, it barred public employees from collective bargaining. Not coincidentally, it consistently has one of the lowest union membership rates in the country— and it also hews to the federal minimum wage and has a Department of Labor that safeguards corporations more than workers.

Let’s dig into the fruits of our anti-labor. The State of Our Anti-Union State

Hawaii 23.5% (8.8%) New York21% (13.6%) Washington18.8% (10.3%) Rhode Island 17.4% (12.9%) Alaska 17.1% (10.9%)

Note: All five of these states have minimum wages in excess of $10 per hour.

South Carolina2.2% (15.3%) North Carolina 2.3% (14%) Texas4% (14.9%) Virginia4% (10.7%) Georgia4.1% (14.3%)

Note: All five of these states match the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Median Weekly Earnings, Full-Time Wage & Salary Worker

$1200

$1000

$800

$600

$400

$200

$0 Union Member Nonunion Member

Black Woman All Hispanic Man

By the Numbers

Average Weekly Wage Q4 2018

UNITED STATES $1,144

NORTH CAROLINA $1,013

11.5%

lower in North Carolina than the national average

Note: Five urban counties—Mecklenburg, Durham, Orange, Wake, and Forsyth— had an average weekly wage of greater than $1,000. The other 95 counties’ average wages were less than $1,000.

27th

North Carolina's rank out of 50 for economic growth by % change in GDP, Q3 2019

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

Ashley Canady

Ashley Canady, the president of the McDougald Terrace residents council, was tired of living in a hotel room and subsisting off of mac-andcheese cups. So last Tuesday, she made her presence known at the Durham City Council: “If I have to disrupt every city function, every county function, I want it. Because if they disrupt our lives, we ’bout to disrupt theirs.” Two days later, she and other Mac residents disrupted a council work session. On Friday—despite death threats—she appeared with council member Jillian Johnson and Bernie Sanders’s campaign co-chair Nina Turner at a town hall in East Durham, where she said she plans to run for city council and demanded the recall of the DHA board and executive director Anthony Scott. Through her activism, Canady is making sure that no one forgets the Mac’s residents as the crisis recedes from the headlines—not today, not next month, not next year. good

Thom Tillis

There are probably senators who’ve acquitted themselves just as poorly during Trump’s impeachment, but they don’t represent North Carolina. And so we’re once again going to talk about Senator Thom Tillis, a human-squid hybrid who has somehow survived 59 years on Earth without a backbone. Tillis, who’s been diligently kissing Trump’s derriere ever since his national border emergency flipflop last year, long ago declared Trump’s innocence. But on Sunday night, the news about John Bolton’s book— and Bolton’s claim that Trump told him he was linking the Ukrainian aid to an investigation into the Bidens— gave Tillis another chance to show a smidge of moral courage. Here was a bona fide conservative refuting the president’s chief defense; who wouldn’t want to learn more? Well, Thom Tillis. By Monday morning, he’d reiterated his position: Nothing to see here, move along. bad Dennis Nielson

Dennis Nielson, 71, a gun-shop owner in Johnston County, is running in the Republican primary for state Senate. He is also accused of domestic violence. But that’s just the beginning. As Carolina Public Press reported, Nielson allegedly told one of his primary opponents that she’s not qualified to hold office because she’s a woman. (Nielson denies that.) And according to records Nielson provided to The Wilson Times—he believed “the paperwork is proof that any woman can say whatever she wants and officials will automatically believe her,” the paper reported—his wife’s application for a restraining order accused him of taking her cellphone and keys, preventing her from working, bullying her disabled son, tracking her movements with electronic devices, physically assaulting her, and threatening to file criminal charges against her unless she had sex with him. He also gave her an eight-page document on “How to be a submissive wife.” (Side note: Nielson refused to discuss the domestic violence allegations with a lady reporter from the Times, so the paper reassigned the story to a man, which is bullshit.) If elected, Nielson told the Times, he wants to make it harder for women to file #MeToo-type allegations. Of course he does. awful