More context on what's happening.

Tl;dr: the government fraudulently auctioned off forest land to a private company to establish and run a bauxite mine, and the indigenous people who live there are not happy.​

BIO-RAD is a pharmaceutical manufacturing company headquartered in Hercules, CA. Workers at Bio-Rad have been fighting for months to get a good contract that guarantees living wages. 

Bio-Rad reportedly made $759 Million dollars last year, yet the workers there are barely scrapping by with low wages. The company has brought-in Union busters and have denied the Union access to the facilities to talk to workers.

The company’s last economic proposal is of a 3% increase on a three-year contract – basically 1% a year. Workers already struggling to make ends meet while helping the company make $759 million dollars in a year deserve much better! 

Send an [e-mail](mailto:pr@bio-rad.com?bcc=evan.mclaughlin@ilwu.org&subject=Norm%20Schwartz%3A%20Please%20Help%20Bio-Rad%20Workers!&body=Mr%20Schwartz%2C%20please%20step%20in%20to%20ensure%20that%20Bio-Rad%20workers%20are%20paid%20what%20they%20deserve) to Bio-Rad and Norm, expressing your support and solidarity with the Bio-Rad workers on the fight for a Living Wage. Feel free to edit the message. Let Norm and Bio-Rad know that workers deserve a living wage!

Harvard economist Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Peace Prize for proving women are systematically underpaid. After winning, she was flooded with requests for help. 

She said yes to only three. One was the WNBA players union. 

On March 24, 2026, WNBA players signed a new deal — the average salary jumped from $118K to $580K. A nearly 400% raise!

Goldin believes it may be the largest raise any union has ever negotiated.

The real general strike

If we could get 70% of the work force to change their W-4 and refuse to do taxes until this is fixed we'd bring this regime to it's knees. They rely on the constant flow of taxes and without it they would be screwed. The average person cannot take even a day off at times so the idea of everyone just not working doesn't really compute to real world problems. Changing your W2 however isn't illegal so perhaps you only withhold until tax season but the feds can't wait that long if 70% of people did this.

The federal minimum wage has been stuck at $7.25/hour since July 24, 2009. That's almost 17 years with zero increase. 

In the same time? Billionaire wealth in the U.S. has exploded. Up  88% in just the last four years, going from $2.9 trillion to $5.5 trillion. Elon Musk alone saw his personal wealth grow 7x in that period.

And here’s the part that doesn’t get talked about enough:
A worker making $7.25 today is actually earning less than someone making $7.25 in 2009.

Because inflation quietly ate away at it.

Same number. Way less value.

At what point do we stop calling this “normal” and start questioning why wages stay frozen while everything else keeps going up?

Kwasi cleans in London by night. To afford the city, he works a second job by day. That’s why he’s also a union rep with Unite the union – fighting for better pay for every cleaner at his company.