Background Briefing: December 14, 2021

On By gram

 

Workers at the Candle Factory and the Amazon Warehouse Were Not Allowed to Seek Shelter From Deadly Tornadoes

We begin with reports emerging from workers at the candle factory in Kentucky and the Amazon warehouse in Illinois that were destroyed by tornadoes revealing that efforts to evacuate the premises when the tornado warning sirens were blaring were impeded by supervisors who threatened workers that they would be fired if they walked off the job to seek shelter at home in the absence of suitable shelters at work. Joining us is Debbie Berkowitz, a practitioner fellow at the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University who until recently was the National Employment Law Project’s Worker Safety and Health program director, following six years serving as chief of staff and then a senior policy adviser for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Her past positions also include health and safety director of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union and the health and safety director of the Food and Allied Service Trades Department of the AFL-CIO and she joins us to discuss how few rights and little health and safety protections non-union workers have.

 

The Dickensian Disregard for Workers American Employers and Supervisors Have

Then we look further into the almost Dickensian disregard for workers American employers and supervisors have and speak with Will Bunch, an award-winning national opinion columnist  for the Philadelphia Inquirer. He blogs at attytood.com and is the author of The Backlash: Right-Wing Radicals, High-Def Hucksters, and Paranoid Politics in the Age of Obama and The Bern Identity: A Search for Bernie Sanders and the New American Dream. He joins us to discuss his latest articles at the Philadelphia Inquirer, “Nothing is more important than Team Trump’s January PowerPoint urging a full-blown coup” and “Tornadoes ripped the roof off American capitalism.”

 

Liz Cheney Implies Trump Could Eventually be Charged for the Insurrection

Then finally, with Liz Cheney the Republican co-chair of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, when announcing criminal contempt of congress charges against Mark Meadows asked rhetorically “Did Donald Trump through action or inaction corruptly seek to impede congress’s proceedings”, words almost identical to the text of the federal criminal statute, the likelihood that Trump may eventually be charged arises as a real possibility. Joining us is Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University and a cultural critic who is an internationally acclaimed historian, speaker, and political commentator for the Atlantic, CNN, the Washington Post, and other publications. Her latest book is Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, and she recently founded Lucid, an online publication about threats to democracy, abuses of power, and how to counter them, and she has an article as MSNBC, “Mark Meadows’ PowerPoint is about more than Jan. 6.”