First *real* snow of the season.
Category: Local
Rainy days and Mondays don’t necessarily get me down.
Bring on the snow.
Marriott strike SF
Nearly 2,500 workers walked off their jobs Thursday morning from seven Marriott hotels in downtown San Francisco to demand higher wages, workplace safety and job security.
Picket lines formed outside the Courtyard by Marriott Downtown, the Marriott Marquis, the Marriott Union Square, the Palace Hotel, the St. Regis, the W and the Westin St. Francis, according to Unite Here Local 2, a union that represents 89 percent of the workers.
via sfchronicle
Murals, Denver
Marriott Strike in Boston
Hotel workers walked off the job at seven Marriott hotels in Boston Wednesday morning, launching the city’s first major hotel strike in modern history following months of fruitless contract negotiations.
via Boston Globe
Monday morning 10/1/2018
The best thing about certain times of day is that they are quiet.
Fall is here
Denver Performing Arts Center
Labor Day podcast episode on where the labor movement is now
http://radioopensource .org/a-new-labor-movement/
It’s Labor Day week 2018, and “The American Worker” doesn’t fit any single poster shot. Is it the Uber driver – working flex time in the ‘gig’ economy, for a magic dispatcher of taxis around the world? Is it the brainiac Google engineers insisting to their CEO that “we need to know what we’re building?” In a gilded, globalized, unequal economy of work today, the old industrial unions are almost gone. But suddenly non-union professionals feeling dealt out of pay and power are shouting, we’re workers, too, and forming unions: graduate students at great universities, magazine writers at the ritzy New Yorker. Prisoners, too, and sex workers, coming out of the shadows to claim rights, and respect, as workers, with skills, thank you. Plus hospital nurses and public school teachers coast to coast.
The midterm measure of the American mood in Trump-time may well turn out to be not – or not just – the off-year House and Senate election scorecard, but the work-place turbulence all over the map this year. Workers who never organized before – in grad schools, in media, in sex work, in prisons – are talking solidarity. And notice the word “strike” is back in circulation, inspired maybe by the furious telemarketers in the seriously funny fantasy film, Sorry to Bother You. In the movie they shout “Phones down!” In real Boston, this week, housekeepers in three Marriott-owned hotels downtown could soon be shouting “Mops down!” in their fight for a new contract.
We’re in the work-place, not the political arena, this hour, though of course they’re connected as soon as workers say it’s all about the power of the corporate class, a fight about places at the table and restoring an idea of people-power democracy.
Fall is coming
Minecraft City
via reddit
Denver – 1864
Denver Public Library Collection
Panoramic view of brick and frame commercial buildings in downtown Denver, Colorado and the flooded South Platte River nearby. Shows the brick Denver Mint building at 16th (Sixteenth) Street and Market Street and businesses on probably Larimer Street. Signs on buildings read: “Chamberlain’s Ambrotype & Photographic Gallery” “Ladies Emporium” “Woolworth & Moffat, Blank Books, School Books, Maps & C” “Metropolitan Billiard Hall” “Bank” and “Denver Meat Market.” Shows fenced livestock yards. Frame houses are surrounded by flood water.
Moving Picture Row, Curtis Street – 1913
Cheerful Alley
Seen from 16th street Denver
Residential Architecture
Patchwork Quilt-ism?
This building is in Denver, on Broadway and just south of I-25. The boxiness is fine, the color scheme chaps my hide though. Loud and inharmonious. Reminds me of the old orange roof on Howard Johnson’s. Least that had the justification of letting people know there’s some place to eat.
WBUR is on it ->
In cities like Seattle, Boston, Denver and Charlotte, new “luxury” condos and apartment buildings are going up to meet demand for new housing. But many of these buildings look like simple, plain boxes.
Housing Construction Per Household
Home construction per household is now at its lowest levels in nearly six decades, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. This isn’t just a problem in San Francisco or New York, where home prices and rents have gone sky-high. It is also a problem in midsized, fast-growing cities farther inland, like Des Moines, Iowa; Durham, N.C.; and Boise, Idaho. In Boise, an analysis by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed there is a demand for more than 10 times the number of homes being built right now.
via NPR
16th Street from Millennium Bridge
The Old Prospector
… “The sculptor, Alphonse Pelzer, modeled this statute after flamboyant and colorful “Colonel” John William Straughn, a civil war veteran, prospector and wheelwright who lived from 1842 – 1902.”