2022
December
06
Tuesday

Monitor Daily Podcast

December 06, 2022
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Laurent Belsie
Senior Economics Writer

For makers of war and dark fantasy games, a rare moment of peace has broken out for some of the game creators themselves. Microsoft is allowing employees at its ZeniMax Online unit to decide for themselves whether to unionize. Voting started on Friday and will last a month.

In theory, companies are not supposed to interfere with union votes. But corporate America’s playbook for the past half-century has been to do everything possible to keep unions out. Many tech giants of today – such as Amazon and Apple – continue to follow that anti-union script.

Microsoft is taking a different tack. The company, which makes a leading video game console, the Xbox, has offered to buy software developer Activision Blizzard, which would make Microsoft the world’s No. 3 video game company. Several government agencies are scrutinizing the $69 billion blockbuster deal, including the Federal Trade Commission in the United States.

Faced with possible FTC opposition, Microsoft in June struck a deal with the Communications Workers of America that it would not interfere with either the current union vote by almost 300 ZeniMax quality-assurance employees or, if the acquisition goes through, a union vote at Activision. That stance has won rare praise for management from the CWA, which now supports the Activision deal. “We applaud Microsoft for remaining neutral through this process and letting workers decide for themselves whether they want a union,” its president, Christopher Shelton, said in a statement today.

Creating game software isn’t always the fun, adventurous job you’d expect. It’s often grueling work and many companies expect their employees to “crunch” – work long hours for long stretches – to get the job done. Now, at least some of those employees will have the opportunity – and peaceful labor-management space – to decide if unionization will solve their woes.


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Today’s stories

And why we wrote them

A tool that’s helped China keep COVID-19 outbreaks under control has also opened the door to unprecedented levels of surveillance. Will Chinese be freed from their digital health codes once the country ends its strict “zero-COVID” policies?

Howard LaFranchi/The Christian Science Monitor
Seema, with three of her grandchildren, stands in the doorway of her new house in Mir Khan-Goth, Pakistan. Across Sindh province's Gadap region, similar villages are showing signs of rebuilding, as local organizations work to fill the void of government and international aid.

In Pakistan’s flood-ravaged Sindh province, a notable absence of government and international disaster aid has left much of rebuilding to civil society. Many local initiatives are aiming to make communities more resilient.

Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
Children play in the James Smith Cree Nation reserve, site of a mass knife attack in September, on Nov. 11, 2022. The assailant killed 11 people and wounded 18 in one of the deadliest massacres in Canadian history. There is no Indigenous police force on the reserve.

A mass killing on an Indigenous reserve in Canada prompts a question: Might an autonomous Indigenous police force have prevented the tragedy?

Richard Burkhart/Savannah Morning News/USA TODAY NETWORK/Reuters/File
Colorful homes of some of the few remaining families descended from the Black people enslaved on Sapelo Island centuries ago can be seen along one of the dirt roads running through Hogg Hummock. The homes tend to be small, sturdy, and easy to repair if a hurricane floods them.

The longtime efforts of Gullah Geechee descendants to preserve their ancestors’ land is a fight to save a people and a culture. Some believe it could also save a slice of coastal Georgia.

Q&A

What gives life meaning? A professor of philosophy says that grappling with adversity helps us feel empathy for others, which shifts our focus and makes genuine hope possible. 


The Monitor's View

After eight years of war that took more than 377,000 lives, Yemen has enjoyed eight months of relative peace under a cease-fire brokered in April. Poverty remains high and the economy is in shambles, yet the war has had one salutary consequence. It has led to a shift in the way one of the world’s most male-dominated societies values women.

In August, for example, the Presidential Leadership Council (PLC), an interim governing coalition set up under the truce, appointed the first woman to the Supreme Judicial Council, the highest court authority. Last week, two Yemeni women were recognized by the United States Institute of Peace in Washington for their success in rights advocacy and peace building.

“Yemeni society’s view of women today is completely different from what it was before,” Ahmed Ghaleb, an education official in the city of Ibb, told The National, a media outlet based in the United Arab Emirates. “It used to be an unforgivable crime for women to work, but now society is more aware.” Participation for women in civic leadership roles, he added, is “one of their legitimate rights and not a favor.” 

Women have, in fact, been a persistent force in Yemen’s pro-democracy and peace movements. They helped secure a 2015 draft constitution that would have required that 30% of all governing bodies be filled by women. Three years later, women helped produce a cease-fire in the port city of Hodeidah.

Even so, women still face harsh restrictions. In areas controlled by the Houthi rebels, they are prohibited from traveling without a male escort. The PLC includes no women.

But even as the war has compounded the dire conditions Yemeni women face, it has also created new necessities for their inclusion. As men have gone to war, women – and a growing network of organizations created by them – have stepped in. They are learning to tap the very cultural traditions that shaped their exclusion.

In the southwest city of Taiz, for example, a local female civil society leader rallied the town’s male elders behind her effort to restore water resources co-opted by the military. “On first reception, [the military] wouldn’t accept me negotiating as a woman,” Ola Al-Aghbari told the United Nations, “but when they saw all the local leaders in the city in the alliance, all religious men and local authorities from the city, they agreed to talk.”

A future for Yemen “built on equal citizenship, democracy, and national reconciliation,” argued Nadia Al-Sakkaf, director of research at the Arabia Brain Trust, in an October interview with Institut Montaigne, “has to emerge from the ground up by empowering the local communities, especially women and youth, giving them something to care about rather than engage in the armed conflict in search of a source of income or empty ideology.” 

From Iran to Sudan in recent years, democracy movements have poured into the streets to challenge the restrictive rule of male-dominated regimes. Those open protests are more visible expressions of the quieter revolutions taking place within Middle Eastern societies – waged, as they are in Yemen, by recognizing women as equal with men in creating just, peaceful societies.


A Christian Science Perspective

About this feature

Each weekday, the Monitor includes one clearly labeled religious article offering spiritual insight on contemporary issues, including the news. The publication – in its various forms – is produced for anyone who cares about the progress of the human endeavor around the world and seeks news reported with compassion, intelligence, and an essentially constructive lens. For many, that caring has religious roots. For many, it does not. The Monitor has always embraced both audiences. The Monitor is owned by a church – The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston – whose founder was concerned with both the state of the world and the quality of available news.

Whether we feel the fullness of God’s presence gradually or suddenly, it happens through our earnest seeking to understand more about God and ourselves as God’s children.


A message of love

Alex Brandon/AP
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California embraces former Washington Metropolitan Police Department officer Michael Fanone before the start of a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony honoring law enforcement officers who defended the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They are standing in the U.S. Capitol rotunda in Washington on Dec. 6, 2022.
( The illustrations in today’s Monitor Daily are by Jacob Turcotte. )

A look ahead

That’s a wrap for today. Thanks for joining us. And tune in tomorrow when we look at Jordan’s efforts to rebuild trust with its emigrating youths.

More issues

2022
December
06
Tuesday

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