Taipei We landed in Taipei almost 30-minutes early after a twelve-and-a-half hour flight from San Francisco. We cleared customs, baggage claim, and money changing within one-hour of landing, which is amazing in itself. The express train to the central station was only twenty-two minutes and hardly cost $4 USD per person. All good so far! Our hotel, Citizen M, was only minutes from the central train station, once we figured our way out of the station, led by its blazing red sign only minutes away through the North Gate.
Some snafus at check-in, although the process was unique. No counter with desk agents, but a bank of computers and one helper where you entered your number and went on from there. We had a bit of a glitch because the hotel thought we were coming in Wednesday evening, rather than Thursday evening, but they fixed it pretty quickly with our New Orleans command center able to get on the web and get it righted with a refund within minutes.
Everything at the hotel is super high-tech, like much of Taiwan, we’re learning. A tablet turns on and off the lights and TV, raises and lowers the nightshades and blinds, and is very impressive. I couldn’t figure out how to drain the basin, but it turned out with my son’s help to be “old school,” where you took your fingers and pushed it down, so it would pop up. I saw a simple fix in the traffic system to accommodate mopeds and motorcycles, where they put them in “boxes” on the streets to achieve less chaos and more safety. Very smart! A morning presidential alert on our phones was surprising. A small earthquake caused the building to sway a bit on the 10th floor for a few seconds. This is going to be an interesting experience on so many levels for the Organizers’ Forum!
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I saw a note from the EPI that the UAW had filed unfair labor practice charges against former President Trump and Elon Musk over comments and tweets they had made on his X-Twitter interview. They filed the charges alleging their efforts to intimidate and coerce workers by claiming that workers could be fired for exercising their clear section 7 rights under the NLRA for striking were illegal.
I loved this! Many unions don’t realize that they can file these kinds of charges. Local 100 United Labor Unions had its 15-minutes of fame in sports pages around the country a couple of years ago when we filed charges against the Dallas Cowboys NFL team and its owner Jerry Jones for threatening to discipline and dismiss players for their concerted activities in the kneeling protests for racial justice at the time. We withdrew the charge after Jones retracted his statement, but he and others were surprised that the National Labor Relations Act allows any union or individual to file a charge when the law is broken, but of course it does.
I’m not saying the UAW and its lawyers and leaders were copycats. I’m just saying that we broadly advocated that unions and labor activists use this tool everywhere to push back against illegal efforts to thwart the rights of workers to organize and advocate in their own interests, so we were delighted to see the UAW pick up that fight. Everyone needs to be ever vigilant and not let these blowhards like Trump and Musk get away with threatening workers’ rights. They’ve crossed a line, as their lawyers will tell them, and we need to all push them back.