Month: October 2023

Enlarge / UAW members and workers at the Mopar Parts Center Line, a Stellantis Parts Distribution Center in Center Line, Michigan, hold signs after walking off their jobs at noon on September 22, 2023, and picketing outside the facility. (credit: MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images)

On Friday, the United Auto Workers gained a key concession from General Motors in its ongoing strike. Workers at GM battery manufacturing plants will be allowed to unionize, as revealed by UAW President Shawn Fain in a livestream.

"We were about to shut down GM’s largest money-maker, in Arlington, Texas. The company knew those members were about to walk immediately. And just that threat has provided a transformative win," Fain said. Our plan is winning at GM, and we expect it to win at Ford and Stellantis as well."

The autoworker strike began when around 13,000 workers walked off their jobs at three factories in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio after the UAW's previous contract with Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors expired without a new contract in place in mid-September. A week later, another 5,600 workers joined the strike at 38 locations across 20 states.

Enlarge / The Miura 1 rocket takes flight from Southern Spain. (credit: PLD Space)

A Spanish launch company claimed success on Saturday after its suborbital Miura 1 rocket lifted off and achieved an altitude of 46 km before plummeting into the Atlantic Ocean.

Saturday's launch from Southern Spain is exciting for several reasons, but most notably because PLD Space is the first of Europe's new space launch companies to have some credible success. To that end, Saturday's modest flight represented the dawn of the European commercial space age.

"This launch culminates over 12 years of relentless effort, yet it marks just the start of our journey," said PLD Space Launch director and co-founder Raúl Torres in a statement after the launch. "This test flight has yielded valuable data, enabling us to validate crucial design elements and technologies that will underpin the development of our Miura 5 orbital launcher."

Enlarge / FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel speaks during the US Chamber of Commerce's Global Aerospace Summit in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2022. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

With the Federal Communications Commission preparing to reimpose net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation on Internet service providers, the broadband industry is almost certain to sue the FCC once the decision is made.

The Democratic-majority FCC is expected to define broadband as a telecommunications service, which means it would face common-carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act. Industry trade groups that represent Internet service providers will likely argue, as they have unsuccessfully argued before, that the FCC does not have authority to classify broadband as a telecommunications service.

Federal appeals courts upheld previous FCC decisions on whether to apply common carrier rules to broadband, a fact that current agency officials point to in their plan to revive Obama-era regulation of ISPs under Title II. But some legal commentators claim the FCC is doomed to fail this time because of the Supreme Court's evolving approach on whether federal agencies can decide "major questions" without explicit instructions from Congress.