Since the start of the pandemic (and really, before that), frontline health care workers have been rightfully lauded for the tireless work that they have done to keep the health care system from cratering in this country. This is no easy task, as we have seen the devastation that the pandemic has wrought among our communities, and especially within the health care field. In Southern California, the cost of living crisis has filtered into the workplace, with many health care workers finding themselves priced out of their neighborhoods due to rising costs and unchecked gentrification, their stagnant wages and dwindling access to health care benefits compounding an already untenable situation. More than 2,200 health care workers at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California are fighting for improved working conditions and a chance to combat the cost of living crisis with a new contract. So far, they have been met with an aggressive management that is hellbent on freezing wages and striking some of the most important benefits that health care workers enjoy from the contract. Represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, or NUHW, these workers —medical technicians, respiratory therapists, licensed vocational nurses, housekeepers, and nursing assistants— have made clear their demands for improved working conditions at multiple USC health care facilities across Los Angeles, and we’ve brought on Francisco Cendejas and Noemi Aguirre, two worker-organizers at Keck Medicine, to talk about the ongoing contract negotiations.

Note: This episode was recorded on July 18, 2024. Negotiations with Keck-USC are still ongoing.

Additional links/info below…

• NUHW – Keck-USC Negotiations Factsheet
• Penn Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics, “How Inadequate Hospital Staffing Continues to Burn Out Nurses and Threaten Patients”
• National Union of Healthcare Workers – Main Site

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Francisco Cendejas:

Hi, morning. I’m Francisco Cendejas, I’m the director of our hospital division for our union here in Southern California.

Noemi Aguirre:

Hi, good morning. I’m Noemi Aguirre. I work as respiratory therapist at Keck USC. Also, I do hold a position within the union as an executive board member, as well as a steward in my department.

Mel Buer:

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews for the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that we do with The Real News by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

Since the start of the pandemic and really before that, frontline healthcare workers have been rightfully lauded for the tireless work that they have done to keep the healthcare system from cratering in this country. This is no easy task as we have seen the devastation that the pandemic has wrought among our communities and especially within the healthcare field. In Southern California, the cost of living crisis is filtered into the workplace with many healthcare workers finding themselves priced out of their neighborhoods due to rising costs and unchecked gentrification, their stagnant wages and dwindling access to healthcare benefits compounding in already untenable situation. More than 2200 healthcare workers at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California are fighting for improved working conditions in a chance to combat the cost of living crisis with a new contract.

So far, they have been met with an aggressive management that has hell-bent on freezing wages and striking some of the most important benefits that healthcare workers enjoy from their contract. Represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers or NUHW, these workers, medical technicians, respiratory therapists, licensed vocational nurses, housekeepers and nursing assistants among them have made clear their demands for improved working conditions at multiple USC health care facilities across Los Angeles. And we’ve got two worker organizers here today to discuss this important negotiation. To start off this conversation, I think it would be probably a good idea to give our listeners an idea of what your working conditions look like. What are the issues that you’re currently working through on a daily basis? What does your regular workday look like for you?

Noemi Aguirre:

Sure. Hi everybody. This is Noemi again from Respiratory. I’m a respiratory therapist here at Keck. I’ve been here since 2002, so it’s been a minute. Obviously, it’s changed a lot throughout the years, but ever since the pandemic a little bit more recently, my workday consists of, well, any of a million things because respiratory therapists, they come in and they basically get assigned to go to different ICUs or areas in the hospital. I specifically will go to a specialty area today, for example, I would go to the bronchoscopy suite and we will have had scheduled outpatient visits for procedures. Usually, it’s every two hours. They’re spaced by two hours, so sometimes it’s 7:00, 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00. This is a lab that’s been growing in the last two and a half years because of COVID it was interrupted, so we had started growing the lab and then COVID came.

Because interventional pulmonology is a growing field, it’s a bit of a hit or miss for us in terms of how we’re doing these bronchoscopies and what the physicians are expecting. But basically we are going nonstop, so we don’t have any particular lunch that’s pre-planned, we just are winging it. It’s starting to lose its luster because in the beginning it was like, “Don’t worry. Once this becomes a well-oiled machine, so to speak, like cath lab or something, then everything will be… It is going to fall into place.” But two and a half years later, we’re still waiting to fall into place and we haven’t fallen into place. What we’ve fallen into is losing a lot of therapists to other facilities that pay better and do a lot less work. And who wouldn’t want to get paid more money to do a lot less work? And this being a specialty hospital, they just think that using their name is a laurel that they’ve been resting on for way too long that people are going to be working in their place because it’s such a great name, “I want to be associated with it.”

But after quite some time and a lot of changes in leadership, it doesn’t seem to change much. I’ll have an eight o’clock case, a 10 o’clock case, we set up, we assist in the procedure, we break everything down. We do an initial wipe down before EVS comes in and the housekeeping cleans the room, sterilizes it. And then we take all the samples that we took, whether it’s a biopsy or any kind of washings, and then we get those samples together. We label them all, we log them all in. We take them to their perspective areas, whether it’s pathology, cytology, microbiology. And then after we do that, we come back, we set up for the next case. A lot of times we are by ourselves sometimes on Mondays and Wednesdays when it’s busier, we do have two therapists, but it just barely hits the minimum at the moment as to, we’re not even thinking about lunch until you start to feel hungry.

And then it’s like, “Hey, when are we going to take a break?” We do have staffing issues. We do have issues with when we’re going to sign our breaks and we’re trying to keep up with what is interventional pulmonology out in other facilities like UCLA and other places that have it a little bit more down pat but we’re still waiting. And it doesn’t help that we’re in the middle of negotiations. I also am part of the bargaining team, and it doesn’t help to have their reactions or the looks on their faces when you’re asking for just basic stuff, which is more money because of the inflation you mentioned and also to have a better structured department, and they just look at you like, “Why haven’t you done this for yourself?” Well, here we are.

Mel Buer:

Francisco, I did want to really dive in here and really talk about one of the bigger issues that… Let me give you some context. My mom is a retired OR surgical nurse who throughout my entire life really had something to say about staffing issues at these hospitals that she worked at. And I really do believe, and I’m sure you agree, that when you have a staffing shortage or when you have workers who are putting in extreme hours handling caseloads that are way above normal, that what it translates to is a reduction in the quality of patient care.

When you’re talking about wanting to improve the working conditions for the workers in these hospitals through better pay, because yes, I got some information about starting wages for some of the workers in your unit and way too low for the speciality that they’re doing. But also really just this draw attention to, skeleton crews mean the work is not… You’re not being given the time to be able to really spend that time that you need with patients to be able to take care of these cases on a case by case basis in a way that provides high quality care. Would you agree that when you have these better working conditions and better staffing, that you really do have a better quality of care for the people who come through your hospitals?

Francisco Cendejas:

I think that it’s obvious, and it’s clear that that’s true. The rate of burnout of healthcare workers starting with the pandemic, even after the pandemic has just been, it’s unmatched. It’s never been as bad as now. And so knowing that is the case and the employer, Keck Medicine of USC having literally over 100 open positions at any given moment knows that what is being offered now knows that what’s on the table currently isn’t sufficient and is having the effect of just increasing the workload for so many other people, and it’s driving them out of the industry as well. And it’s just this vicious cycle.

Now, Keck is also, Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center are two highly specialized hospitals that do pride themselves in the specialties that they operate in and the quality of care there. But how is it able to be maintained as long as we’ve got this persistent, almost structural staffing crisis? This is why we make the proposals that we do. This has got to be fixed, and it doesn’t require individual efforts. It means that we need to have a contract that actually builds in fair wages, better control over workloads, guarantees that people have a reason to stay at their-

Francisco Cendejas:

… owns, guarantees that people have a reason to stay at this hospital for the length of their career. If the company’s not willing to agree to that, then they’re saying that they’re not willing to agree to having stability in their staffing, which is so necessary for the quality of care that patients do deserve.

Mel Buer:

Noemi, you had mentioned too, it’s not enough to be able to see that you’re at this illustrious hospital. The name is not enough to keep you around. The reputation of the name is that this is a hospital that has presented high quality of care, that is highly specialized in providing life-giving cancer care, right? Things of that nature. But for an employee there, eventually you start to look somewhere else, especially when a university like the University of California and UCLA’s Healthcare Centers offer 10 to 19% more in starting wages based on specialty, right?

The question that I want to ask then is throughout these negotiations and the proposals that you’ve brought to the table, not only are you talking about retention of the talent that you have and being able to keep people fed and keep them feeling like they are being respected and wanted in the workplace, but also trying to attract new talent that can help kind of shore up these staffing shortages. As of right now, it doesn’t seem like the reputation of Keck is that it’s a good place to work. Does that seem accurate?

Noemi Aguirre:

I mean, I think so. I’ve seen it with the new hires. We have a lead who’s like, “Hey, my wife just got hired at Kaiser, 10 bucks above me, and I’m a lead here. I’m the leading supervisor of the shift with a nighttime differential.” So we all laughed actually as we presented that across the table. But it’s one more thing that’s laughable almost about a place like this because you see their mottos, that’s the one that kills me, right? And for some reason in my mind, they have these mottos that are ever-changing, right? Like, “Exceptional, beyond exceptional care.” And you’re just like, “Okay.” And then, “Now, we’re limitless.” And it’s not that you don’t feel that your work is good work, right? It’s just that they’re seeing themselves in a way that makes you laugh because you know how quickly you did something that you should have taken a little bit more time with, right?

And it just, in my own mind, when I look at those things and I laugh inside, it just reminds me of Enron. When they used to ask associates like, “Well, you saw this all going down, didn’t you?” “Yeah.” Well, they’ve got all these mottos that sound like, “Beyond exceptional, limitless.” And so now it’s so extremely out there that it’s almost a running joke. When we’re going to start to do something and, “Oh, I’m missing this. I couldn’t start.” “Well, we’re limitless.” That’s why we run out of this. Or when we had supply issues, right? We had all these supply chain issues during COVID, of course, that’s no fault to the university, but then you start to hear these whispers that they’re just hoarding this stuff, should something else happen, but they don’t want to use it. And you’re just like, “How much stuff can you store when you need it now?” And you’re just like, we look at each other and we go, “Well, we are limitless.”

And so then when you’re working, and it’s a little bit sad too, because I don’t want to work in an organization where I’m almost like, “I feel like it’s a bit of a running joke.” But it’s a running joke to the workers because we’re here, right? It shouldn’t be good if I’m an administrator to hear that someone’s like, “Hey, our new model is limitless.” We’re like, “Yeah, limitless ability to be short on this, limitless short staffing, limitless low pay.” And so your own motto for your own company is the joke to your workers. It’s like, “Come on, dude.” It’s like, “It sucks.”

Mel Buer:

Yeah, yeah. Let it be known to all our listeners that you don’t give a shit about your job, right? You care very much, right? And you wouldn’t be asking for these things at the bargaining table if you didn’t care about what’s going on at the hospitals that you work.

Noemi Aguirre:

And we’re still going and getting the education. I, for one, before I came here, I didn’t have these little interventional pulmonology, one more year, get a certificate, just to assist. We have people that are actually really engaged in what they do, and they want to learn what’s out there and we’re constantly getting education on our own, even though they cover very little of it, we still go out and do it because I would feel like I’m doing a disservice. If my mom walked in the door and I have to do something and I don’t even know what the doctor is doing.

I’ve got to learn everything to make sure I could be able to function and make sure that if the doc has a moment where he needs something, I can sort of already know in advance what it is they need, so we can keep it smooth and make sure that everyone’s getting the best care that they’re getting, but it’s a trade-off. How do you do it? These are people you’re dealing with. You’re not… And I don’t think management sees it. That’s how we feel. We feel like we go and they forget they’re not making T-shirts that say “USC” on them. They’re actually taking care of people.

Mel Buer:

Well, I mean, that’s something that my mom, God bless her, used to talk about all the time that these patients aren’t patients, they’re just numbers of people who come through the door, right? And it’s unfortunate that our healthcare system, in large part, due to our insurance system, is set up that way. When you know that every worker who is coming through that door to take care of patients is there specifically to do that job and to take that seriously.

So when there’s a breakdown in scheduling or in staffing in general, and suddenly you’re finding yourself between a rock and a hard place, trying to take care of as many patients, up to 20 patients per shift, which is obscene. It’s tough to handle that caseload when, as you say, you might be the only person in that section of the hospital on that floor for eight hours. That’s incredibly… I don’t know how you do it, power to you, and I really hope that that can change.

Speaking of that changing, Francisco or Noemi, do you want to talk about how the negotiations have been going? What are the demands that you’ve brought to the administration? How has management responded? I got a little fact sheet and the way that management seems to be responding is frustrating, to say the least, so if you would like to talk about how those negotiations are going?

Francisco Cendejas:

Yeah, I can give you a quick summary. Look, this is the first contract to be negotiated at this hospital since getting over the worst of the pandemic, right? In that time, almost 20% inflation in three years, which is the duration of the last contract, right? So this is a time where the employees are looking for a way to not just fix everything that has been wrong for years now, right? But then also, yeah, make back everything that they lost as their wages just declined and declined and declined in their actual value, right?

So what are we looking for? Wages that actually match the premier hospital employers in LA County, right? It’s one thing for Keck Medicine of USC to say that they’re top of the market, leading hospital, and it’s another thing to actually recognize that in terms of compensation to employees. So yeah, that’s one thing.

Maintaining benefits for all members. How absurd that hospital workers have to be fighting for free family healthcare, right? Which our members do have. But this is something that the employer wants to take away based on their proposals. We’ve also proposed to ensure that we are properly recognizing people’s loyalty and time of service with the company, which is something that they’ve also been rejecting.

But see, what we’re looking for here is, of course, to maintain a strong contract that’s been in place for a long time, make the necessary improvements to make up for the last three years of terrible inflation. And what we’ve seen from other hospital employers is that look, they know that something has to be fixed, so they come to the bargaining table and they say, “All right, look, this is after the pandemic, those were strange times, and this is now a unique occasion and we need to fix things.” That’s been the posture that we’ve seen from a lot of other employers, and that’s why healthcare workers and in other industries too, right? Union members are winning better contracts than have happened before.

And instead, what we’re seeing from Keck, is just tons of takeaway proposals, which are terrible on their own, but just wildly misplaced considering just the strength of unions and the labor movement now, right? Shocking to think that they’re going to propose, for example, that union members can’t meet with their union reps in the break rooms, right? That’s an absurd thing. It’s an absurd thing at any point that they would propose to get rid of seniority-based hiring, right? And say, “Well, we want to have more discretion in determining whether someone is more skilled and therefore more qualified.” Right? Things like being able to dredge up old disciplines that are more than a year old to be able to stack on top of current issues…

Francisco Cendejas:

… stack on top of current issues, and instead of letting old disciplines expire over time, which is in the contract currently. But I think maybe even just maybe some of this is some of the most shocking that now would be the time that the employer would say, “We want to be able to subcontract all of your jobs, not without bargaining, but we want to send any position that we want over to another company to do.” Or if Keck were to sell a hospital or a clinic, can’t guarantee you that your job is still going to be there. We want to get rid of what’s called a successorship guarantee. Right? That your job and your union contracts or union representation would stay in the proposing to get rid of that too.

These are the kinds of things that are just, like I said, they’re terrible takeaway proposals to issue to union members at any point, especially now when folks are so ready to fight for the contract that they deserve. I mean, here’s the thing about our history with this company. We’ve never settled a contract with Keck Medicine of USC without at least authorizing a strike against them. And at times, even going out. It doesn’t look to be different this time, it doesn’t look like they want it to be different this time. And it’s shocking to think that that’s what you would want to have happen, as we emerge out of the worst of the pandemic, the first contract to be negotiated after the worst of it.

Mel Buer:

Has management given any sort of rationale for why they would submit these takeaway proposals? Is there some sort of perceived economic reason for this or anything at all that would clue you in as to at least what they’re attempting to present as the reason for why they’ve asked to do include these?

Francisco Cendejas:

I mean that the company gives reasons, sure, they give reasons. But they give the same reasons about whether they’re talking about hospitals or whether they’re talking about any other industry, and say, “Well, we need to have greater flexibility in operations. Management needs the rights to be able to determine staffing levels, and that’s why we can’t agree to add a few more positions in your department where you are so sorely understaffed.” And so on and so on. So we could be talking about a widget factory, we could be talking about a clinic. And the reasons are the same, that they’re saying, that any boss is saying to a union bargaining committee of just, “Well, we want to have more power here in the workplace.” So sure, they’ve got their reasons and they’re not new ones.

Mel Buer:

Right. Yeah, that’s a good point, and it’s something that I bring up a lot when I talk to union workers who are in the midst of contract negotiations or organizing drives. Noemi I’m sure you have these conversations with your fellow workers on the floor. It comes down to power, because often when we’re about these corporations, whether it’s a hospital or Kellogg’s or Amazon or Starbucks or whatever, it could be a small business down the road. But oftentimes they either give you that more flexibility excuse where they tell you there’s not enough money for those proposals. But what it comes down to is, they don’t like it when workers come together collectively to organize for better working conditions and assert their rights in the workplace.

And it is really a power struggle. And so, I think it’s good to kind of zoom this out a little bit and to give that context to our listeners. What is the biggest thing that you want our listeners to know about perhaps this contract struggle, but maybe about healthcare work organizing in general that you think is really important for folks to know who have not had the same exposure to it that you and I may have had?

Noemi Aguirre:

I mean, healthcare is the only place that I’ve been in, so I can’t really say as it compares to something else. But what would I want folks to know? What I want them to know is that at the end of the day, since this is a power struggle, you just have to find the more clever way of letting them know that this is what’s going to happen while maintaining that they feel like they’re still in control. Because it doesn’t seem like their power hunger ever ends.

We’ve been negotiating under NUHW for our contracts since 2009, its inception into the union world. But it’s the same thing every time. They want to rewrite the whole book. They want to rewrite from start to finish. Why do we still have to argue about whether the entrance is on the north side or the south side? All this stuff that is seemingly unimportant, when people say, “Hey, well, how’s it going in bargaining?” How’s it going in bargaining? It’s not. It’s slow. It sucks and it makes no sense.

And then you think, “Well, maybe they’re just that much smarter than you. You start to question yourself, but don’t question yourself. Because you start to think, “Maybe what I’m asking for either doesn’t make sense or I’m not getting the bigger picture.” And it’s not true because the turnover rate, even for admin, is the same as the turnover rate for the workers. So, what’s happening in the bigger picture? This organization that calls itself USC, does the right hand know what the left hand’s doing? I don’t know. It’s because they entrust all these people that, at the end of the day, are human. And even if it’s a smaller department, as long as they’re overseeing two or three people, we cannot trust them to do the right thing. I don’t know why we still are where we are.

An employer like USC, that’s humongous, still has to be forced to do the right thing. Every single time we have to, “Oh, we’re going to strike you. Oh, we’re going to this you. Oh, we’re going to that you.” Why haven’t we already knocked out… Why don’t we already know where we’re parking? We should. We park in the same place. Maybe a block over, maybe not a block over. What does it matter? Why are we still discussing things? Why do we rewrite this entire thing every time? And one of our negotiations, a couple of contracts ago, we had a second year anniversary for negotiations. What the hell’s going on?

And then they look at you when you get something that’s status quo, they’re like, “Oh, you see, you got your parking back.” What are you talking about? You are the one that opened up the can of worms that should have never been opened so that we could talk about what’s happening now in 2024 or whatever year it is that we’re negotiating. We need to talk about our circumstances now and the climate and how crazy everything is getting, so that we can deal with people that are tired of working just in general. Or even everybody in respiratory, everybody in nursing, even the people that PCTs and EBS workers that had to clean during COVID that just saw… I mean, it’s not normal. I mean, unless we’re in a war zone, which we didn’t think we signed up for, it’s not normal to see people just being carted off and carted off. And you couldn’t do anything and you couldn’t do anything. And you’re just like, “What is going on?” It just doesn’t make any sense.

So, it is a power trip. And don’t let it sway you and think that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, because you’ve been doing what you’re supposed to be doing all along. It’s just these human beings that think that if the trustee is giving money and he wants more bang for his buck, he needs to make more money. And in the end, what do we do? Oh, we get our towels are cheaper. Our linen is cheaper. Because if they only cut 10 cents here, they can make more money. And you’re just like, “Okay, great. Now I need two sets of linen because the patient’s freezing because you switched the thick blanket for the thinner blanket. But now I got to use two.”

So, it’s like this common sense stuff. And you think to yourself, “What is going on here?” Do they care? No. They just want to be able to tell you what to do. It is nothing but power. Do not second guess yourself. You know what you’re doing, you’re good at it, and you should exert your rights. You should always exert your rights. But anyway.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Well, and those small cuts, and Francisco, I’m sure you can speak to this too, those small cuts and the cheapness or the quality of supplies, for example, don’t do anything to pad the pockets of the workers. It’s not like they’re making those cuts to save money so they can raise wages. I’m staring at executive salaries to the tune of millions of dollars per year that have not changed, I’m sure, except to go up. While your average Keck healthcare worker makes $61,000 a year, which after taxes in California, it’s probably what, less than 50 take home. That’s untenable. It’s not a livable situation in a county like Los Angeles, because the cost of living here is way too high.

And so, I guess here’s a question just to kind of drag all those nebulous thoughts together so that you actually have something to respond to. Francisco, you talked about the fact that every contract has at least had a strike authorization. If you would like to talk about that, do you see that in the future for this one as well? Or are you hoping to avoid that and to actually have a fruitful negotiation that doesn’t end up there?

Francisco Cendejas:

Yeah. I mean, anyone on the bargaining committee will tell you, what we’re trying to do is get to a fair contract that is good for the membership. Right? Anyone will tell you that that’s the first thing that they want to see happen. Also, the history with this employer is the history with this employer. And their proposals right now are what they are. Right? So, is this noticeably better than in the past? Absolutely not. It’s…

Francisco Cendejas:

… Is this noticeably better than in the past? Absolutely not. I think these takeaways are terrible and the thing is our members are not going to tolerate them. So as a strike authorization possible, it’s absolutely possible. And it’s a decision that our bargaining committee who are elected by their coworkers because that’s who our union is, right, all the decisions about whether a strike is going to happen or going to be called for, it’s going to be for up to our bargaining committee.

And I don’t see it going in the direction where we’re not going to having to ask ourselves that question. I mean, just remembering who USC is here, they’re the largest private sector employer in LA. The tone that is established then in these negotiations is felt far beyond just what happens in this clinic or within this one unit in the hospital. Because of their sheer size, they are a premier employer in certain aspects, just not in the ones where they don’t want to be in, the ones that really impact the thousands of members that we represent there that do the actual work of keeping LA healthy. So where is this going? I think our members are going to have to answer that question pretty soon.

Mel Buer:

Thank you so much, both of you, for coming on and talking about this really important negotiation. Before I get your final thoughts, I will say just listening to this conversation and talking about what it means to be a premier sort of healthcare employer in the city, Keck has the ability to really set itself up to be a community leader in this way. And there’s nothing here that says that coming to a fair agreement with its workers is going to not do that.

And if they care about their reputation, both as an employer and as a trusted and safe set of hospitals and healthcare clinics that can actually take care of some of patients who are in the worst sort of illnesses of their lives, this is an important piece I think. So those are kind of my final thoughts and I really appreciate you both coming on. Before I do my little outro, do either of you have any final thoughts that you would love for our listeners to know? Is there a way to reach out to your union to offer support? Any major dates coming up in terms of negotiations or information sessions or anything that you think our listeners might be interested in?

Noemi Aguirre:

I can do my last thought and then Francisco can give you the important dates.

Mel Buer:

Cool.

Noemi Aguirre:

Okay. Just as an example, I wanted to let you know that priorities… I mean, again, biggest employer in Southern California. Are their employees a priority? Well, doesn’t feel that way. They interrupted… Our contract expired in April. We started negotiations in March. We had beaucoup dates in March. We were not getting anywhere, but at least we had dates. Come April, they basically blocked us out for an entire month because they interrupted our negotiations to run and see if they can go and do something football related. Because that is where their priorities lie. And we know it and we felt it. And when people ask why didn’t we meet in April? We’re like, “Well, they have bigger priorities, their football team.” That money over there has bigger priorities. So we’ve felt that. We felt that the entire time. And it’s a symptom of everything and it’s the bigger picture all the time.

But what I am happy about and I want everybody to know that I am happy to know that it does feel like labor is having the sort of a rebirth, a renaissance because of everything we see. So people are actually excited to go out there and fight. And they’re not afraid right now. They weren’t afraid last year. They weren’t afraid this year. And I think that that momentum hopefully holds and it feels like it is going to hold that when you look up employment, you know what? I don’t want to leave this place. I want to hold [inaudible 00:34:28] accountable to what they need to do to my coworkers and to everybody else in this hospital. I could very easily go to county. I could very easily go to UCLA. I have the experience. I know people… Every community is a small community when you just take it for itself and we can go anywhere and get more money and work less, but I’m not going to.

I like my commute. I’ve done a lot here. I think there’s still a lot to do. I think there’s still a lot to learn because we learn something every day and I’m glad. I’m glad that labor has this great awakening and that we’re no longer afraid that if I lose my job, I’m going to be a destitute next week because I feel like I have learned enough and I’m capable enough that I can just go somewhere else. And that absence of fear is also what’s been driving… And I guess we could thank COVID for that. That there’s a lot of some jobs in certain sectors. But that’s the great part about it, is that more people are willing to speak up and I love it. So I think keep it up. Working people should keep it up because we’re the ones that have to dictate everything. We’re the ones here.

Francisco Cendejas:

Noemi said it right. Look, we are still in negotiations. We have bargaining dates both multiple this week and next week too. So this is a very much evolving situation. Techuschealthbeforewealth.nhw.org, that’s where the public can see some of the updates about our bargaining and also of course following us on social media. But this is an important critical time for the labor movement, in LA, in our state across the country, And this fight is hopefully one more drop in the big wave that is necessary for the rebirth of our movement. Thanks a lot for having us on.

Mel Buer:

Absolutely. And we’ll make sure to put that link in the show notes and any relevant of informational… I got some good informational packets as part of doing this research for this. So for any of our listeners either in Southern California or elsewhere in the country who want to see the updates and get a sense of what’s been going on in healthcare organizing, I will make sure that those end up in our show notes. Thank you as always for coming on and taking the time to talk about this. I think this is an extremely important piece of contemporary labor organizing, which is why I’ve even brought on working people to really talk about is the struggles that are happening now that are affecting the material conditions of workers, union organizers, and folks in the community that these workers serve. So thank you so much for coming on you both.

As always, I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories of the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Network newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and we’ll see you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

In 2024, Working People officially crossed the 300 episode mark! Since we published our first episode back in 2018, the show has grown in ways we never could have imagined, and the world itself has changed in radical, hopeful, terrifying ways, the labor movement has undergone incredible changes, and we’ve done our best to document that change and this moment in history through the conversations we’ve had with workers across industries, from all walks of life, about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles.

Over the past seven seasons of the show, we’ve interviewed working people, young, old, and middle-aged, union and non-union, worker-owners at worker cooperatives, workers who were just laid off, workers on strike, workers unionizing, families of workers who were killed by their jobs, Indigenous workers living on reservations, workers whose children were murdered in a school shooting, sex workers, academic workers, manufacturing workers, railroad and airline workers, educators, yoga instructors and professional massage therapists, social workers, baristas, journalists, healthcare workers, service workers, construction workers, coal miners, lumberjacks, Amazon workers. We’ve spoken with working people in Cuba, Canada, Brazil, Slovenia, Turkey, Myanmar, the UK, France, and more. In this special episode commemorating 300 episodes of Working People, Max and new cohost Mel Buer reflect on how far the show has come and where we’re going next.

To all of our listeners and supporters, to those who have been with us since the beginning and to those who found the show at some point over the past 7 seasons, to everyone who has ever listened to the show, shared our episodes, donated to our Patreon, to everyone who ever reached out to remind us that someone was listening and encouraged us to keep going, to everyone who has supported us , THANK YOU. We love you, and we wouldn’t be here without you. We hope to keep making you and all our fellow workers proud with this show, and it’s an honor to be in this struggle with you.

Additional links/info below…

• Maximillian Alvarez, Current Affairs, “Can the Working Class Speak?“
• Working People, “Jesus Alvarez” (the first episode)
• Mel Buer’s TRNN Author Page and Twitter/X profile
• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!

Permanent links below…

• Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.

Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you.

Share our episodes with your co-workers, your friends and family members, leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate. And please support the work that we do with The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com\donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the U.S. and across the world.

My name is Maximilian Alvarez

Mel Buer:

And my name’s Mel Buer.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And Mel and I have got a special little update episode for y’all today, and we’ve got some big announcements regarding the show. Now, in one sense, this is kind of a prelude to a larger celebration that we’re going to work on over the summer. As you guys probably noticed, we recently crossed a pretty significant milestone on Working People. In 2024, we officially crossed the 300 episode mark since I recorded, edited, and published that very first episode with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, back in 2018 we’ve been on a wild ride.

The show has grown in ways that I frankly never could have imagined back then when I was producing it as a broke grad student with rented equipment from the library. The world has changed in radical, hopeful, terrifying, violent, unpredictable, and in fact very predictable ways. And my own life has changed in dramatic, beautiful, intense, fortunate and devastating ways, and the labor movement in this country has undergone incredible changes, and we’ve done our best to document that change and what it’s like to live through this moment in history through the conversations that we’ve had with workers across industries from all walks of life about their lives, their jobs, their dreams and struggles.

Over the past seven seasons of the show, I’ve interviewed working people, young, old, and middle-aged. Union and non-union worker owners, worker cooperatives, workers who were just laid off, workers on strike, workers unionizing, families of workers who were killed by their jobs, indigenous workers living on reservations, workers whose children were murdered in a school shooting, sex workers, academic workers, manufacturing workers, railroad and airline workers, educators, yoga instructors and professional massage therapists, social workers, baristas journalists, healthcare workers, service workers, construction workers, coal miners, lumberjacks, Amazon workers. I mean, I’ve interviewed working people in Cuba, Canada, Brazil, Slovenia, Turkey Myanmar, the UK, France, and more.

I’ve never made any money from this show, we’ve only ever brought in enough Patreon earnings to pay Jules and to support other independent shows and journalists. And to be honest, I’ve struggled and failed to make the show anything resembling a commercial success, but I am incredibly proud of this work and I’m incredibly excited about where we’re going to take the show over the next 300 episodes. And that’s what we’re going to do today, we’re going to reflect a bit on how far the show has come and give y’all a sense of where we’re going next, but as we annoying journalists love to say, “We don’t want to bury the lead.” And I figured that we should start with the big announcement, does that sound good to you, Mel?

Mel Buer:

That sounds pretty good, I think. I do want to take a small moment, if I can leave the audience in suspense for a little bit longer, just to really hammer home what a monumental achievement the last 300 episodes have been of this podcast. Just hearing you talk about the myriad people that you have invited onto this platform to share their stories, their personal struggles, their triumphs, their moments where they have come to know solidarity for the first time is nothing short of amazing.

And I know that Working People was sort of born out of this inspiration of what would it be like if Studs Terkel had a podcast? And I think that you have done his memory extremely proud, and the work that you have contributed is there’s no understating how important it is. So I just want to just really hammer that home.

Congratulations on 300 episodes, that is mind-blowing, how cool that is, truly. And fuck it being a commercial success to be honest, because that’s just a small marker in what is a really truly impactful piece of work that you’ve been working on these last, what, six years now? I think that’s incredible. So congratulations, Max, that’s so cool.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Thank you, Mel, that really means the world to me. And it’s hard, frankly, to wrap my head around it, but just once I start thinking about all the people that I’ve met through doing this show, yourself included, I mean as a fellow podcaster, that’s kind of how our paths eventually intertwine. And that was also what set me on the path and for us to both end up eventually at The Real News. And when I start thinking about it in those terms, when I start thinking about the people I know, the connections I have, the things that I’ve learned, the ways that I’ve developed as a person through this show, then yeah, I really start to get a sense of just kind of what a monumental undertaking this has been and how much of a collective effort it’s been.

I mean, everyone who’s ever listened to and shared the show, anyone who’s ever recommended the show or put in a good word for me so that I could get an interview with someone who had no idea who I was, just there are too many people to thank. But truly, if you’ve ever helped me on this show, if you’ve ever helped me and Jules, if you’ve ever done anything to help us keep going on this quixotic endeavor, trust me when I say it means the world to us and we would not be here without you guys.

And yeah, to sort of build on that, like we were saying, this show led me and Mel to connect years ago. And as you guys know from this show and the work we’ve done at The Real News in recent years, that led me and Mel to get really invested in covering the ongoing labor struggle on the nation’s railroad system. And we interviewed countless railroad workers two years ago in the midst of their intense contract fight with the Class I rail carriers. We don’t have to go over that whole saga, and I think we all remember what happened, looked like was going to be a strike or a lockout and Biden and Congress conspired to crush a potential rail strike, and then two months later, East Palestine, Ohio happens.

And as you guys know from listening to our coverage over the past year, our railroad coverage led me directly to East Palestine and I have not left, frankly. My heart in many ways is still in East Palestine because you can’t hear what those folks are going through, you can’t know all that from the interviews that we’ve done about how the railroad system has gotten to where it is now and how we are all in danger and have been put at hazard because of relentless corporate greed and government under regulation. But these people in East Palestine are the ones paying the price for all that corporate greed, just like working people across this country are paying the price for corporate greed, and deregulation, and government disinvestment, and the systematic devaluation of labor and life itself.

And so I say that all to say is that, as I’ve gotten into reporting on the struggles of our fellow workers living in and around East Palestine, Ohio where the Norfolk Southern Train derailed on February 3rd, 2023, this has become something of an obsession of mine. East Palestine led me to investigate more cases of working class folks living and working in what we ghoulishly call sacrifice zones. These are areas where people live that where life is becoming unlivable because of industrial pollution, because of contamination from government sites like Department of Defense, Department of Energy. But also areas where life as we know it is being sacrificed to the elements. And that could also mean the climate chaos that we’re experiencing right now in areas that people inhabit that have just been sort of given up on. And folks there have been left to flounder like so many other working people in so many different areas of this country.

And so that is really where my focus needs to be and in order to give that coverage the focus that it needs, and to do the research, make the contacts, talk to folks living not just in East Palestine, not just in areas like South Baltimore here where we are, where I’ve been interviewing folks there who are being industrially poisoned by rail companies as well as other polluters, but that has led me to Portsmouth Ohio where we also interviewed Vina Colley, who’s a former electrician who worked at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant there and has been fighting for half a century to get her community the recompense that they deserve for the poisoning that’s happened there.

That led me to Red Hill in Hawaii and back to Navajo Nation where the uranium gold rush left generations of indigenous people poisoned and cancer-ridden. That led me to ‘Cancer Alley’ Louisiana where poor and working-class, predominantly black communities are being systematically sacrificed by industry and their own government. That led me back to West Virginia and the mining and fracking booms that have decimated the ability of some of the most beautiful parts of our country, some of the most beautiful parts of the world where people can’t drink the water.

Speaking of drinking the water Flint, people in Flint still don’t have water that they can trust to drink or serve their children coming out of their faucets. To say nothing of Jackson Mississippi, North Carolina where PFAS is in basically all of the water. Rural parts of Maryland, Wisconsin, Iowa where concentrated animal feeding operations and the off-run of those operations is contaminating the water and poisoning the environment. This issue, this problem, is so monumental in scale and so monumental and devastating in terms of the human and non-human impacts that are already being felt across this country that are being felt across the world.

Frankly, Americans have no idea how poisoned we already are, and I feel like I’m at the very beginning of a very long journey into this dark side of our history and our present, and I want to keep talking to working folks, living and working and fighting for justice in these areas. I want to help put those communities in touch, I want to help folks understand that this is all of our problem just as we’ve tried to do in East Palestine. But that’s obviously going to mean that I can’t give that my full attention, I can’t juggle all the responsibilities I’m juggling as editor-in-chief here at The Real News and co-executive director here, and also continue to cover contemporary shop floor and labor organizing stories with the full rigor that I’ve been able to over the past seasons.

And so that is why I couldn’t be more excited to be bringing Mel onto the show as a co-host, we’re going to be tag-teaming this while I go deeper into our sacrificed series. And so you can expect a lot more coverage from me in that vein. Mel has graciously agreed to come on the show and really help us stay on top of worker and organizer focused interviews that really keep you up to date on the critical labor struggles that are happening all around us right now.

I mean, autoworker, union drives in the South, Amazon Labor Union just affiliated with the Teamsters there are huge contracts up for hundreds of thousands of postal workers with the American Postal Workers Union and National Rural Letter Carriers Association. We’ve got questions about the role unions have played and we’ll continue to play in fighting against war and genocide. What a second Biden or Trump term will mean for the National Labor Relations Board and for unions and for working people in general. How things like AI and climate chaos are reshaping our working and non-working lives and how working people are fighting back.

There’s so much here to cover, and I’m so excited that Mel is going to be coming on and helping us basically bring you guys these two critical areas of coverage on the podcast. And Mel, I just wanted to kind of toss it to you and ask if you could say a little bit since we’re in a reflective mode here, I was wondering if you could say a little bit about how your own path into labor reporting has brought you to this point, and what you’ve seen in the labor world over these past couple years, and what you’re really looking forward to covering on this show this year and beyond.

Mel Buer:

I came into labor reporting because there was a strike in my community in 2021, Kellogg’s went out on strike. One of the big manufacturing plants that makes cereal is in Omaha Nebraska, and I had a unique connection to that plant. I drove past it every single day on the way to school, it was part of our backyard where I grew up it’s always been there, and it was a unique moment to be able to sort of step beyond the gates that we always drove by and see the people who were making the food that we eat and they were on strike.

Prior to that, I was in mostly movement reporting and I had a sort of widening interest in what the labor movement does in the U.S. and how it operates and who benefits and who could benefit and this was the sort of trial by fire, you know? And I was just freelancing at the time, and Max graciously paid me a decent amount of money to write an article, and I got a chance to sit down and talk to my literal neighbors about working conditions. And it was a revolutionizing sort of moment for me. And I came to the realization that when I was still living in the Midwest, as you know, I’m living in Los Angeles now, but when I was still living in the Midwest, there was something unique about being able to reach across this perceived union fence, if you will, and to really kind of reach into the lives of folks who really care a lot about the work that they do. And as you know, Max, that is a really radicalizing sort of thing just to be able to have these conversations with people that you probably wouldn’t meet otherwise.

And my journey further into labor reporting has led me to all sorts of places to the middle of Iowa, small towns in Iowa to talk to railroad workers and to manufacturers of tractors who are on strike. And now I’m in on the West coast, which has unique sort of and vibrant organizing around entertainment, and media, and fast food workers, and healthcare workers, and service workers, and academic workers, and I’ve been able to see the sort of transformative power that solidarity has on the sort of micro bits of the movement and how they all kind of fit together.

And now, I mean, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this week and last week’s Supreme Court decisions about dismantling the administrative state essentially and what that does for the NLRB and how folks are going to react to that within the labor movement and the organizing spheres that I now can sort of rub elbows with.

But it’s clear to me that as we move farther into sort of worsening material conditions that our latest stage of capitalism has presented to us that labor organizing is no small part of what it means to sort of build community in the face of that. And I think that in the future, the more earnest conversations that we have about the organizing that is happening right now and the lessons that we can take from both the triumphs and the failures of these both high profile and not so high profile organizing drives, and strikes, and pickets, and all of those things, I think is going to be invaluable information into how we can push back against what I believe to be the fascist creep turn sprint frankly, in this country. And imagine new ways that we can participate in the social fabric of this country and I mean that in a holistic sense that includes the sort of materialist analysis that the communists in the audience would love us to talk about.

But in the grand scheme of things, I’m no Kim Kelly, I haven’t been writing about labor for 10 years like Sarah Jaffe, you know what I mean? Alix Prest has got her amazing sort of work, but I am hoping to contribute something and this is where I can be in this sphere talking about this kind of work and hopefully putting it not only in the contemporary world that we’re living in and helping the audience, our audience now, get outside of themselves and throw open the curtains and be able to see what’s outside of your immediate concerns and how your neighbors and community members and people who look, and sound, and work, just like you are taking on this challenge and what we can get out of that.

So yeah, I mean, I’m stoked. I was very surprised to get this invite and I’m very honored and I feel like this is a very unique privilege to be able to contribute something to a project that I think is very invaluable in our current shit hole media landscape. So I don’t know, should I be cussing? Are we putting this on the radio?

Maximillian Alvarez:

No, for right now we’re still a cussing podcast. But that is one of the things that we want to do moving forward is we want to get working people on more radio stations, like parts of the show do end up on the radio through our friends at the Labor Radio Podcast Network, so some of y’all may have found us through the radio. But we want to get this show syndicated on more stations, which may mean that we may have to cut down on the cursing a little or rely a little more on bleeping knowing me and Mel, it’ll probably be the latter, but-

Mel Buer:

Incoherent screaming every time we talk about corporations.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean it’s the most natural thing in the world to cover what we cover and let the expletives fly because yeah, I mean so much of what we cover is fucked up. But also so much of what we cover is just so astonishingly beautiful and inspiring, and I think that one thing that Mel and I both agree on and we’ve talked about is that that’s the thing that gets us through the really rough days, the days when the weight of the world itself as we descend more into like nakedly corrupt corporate oligarchy and fascistic gangsterism in our own country, to say nothing of climate chaos and increased war around the world, it’s a lot. We understand that believe us, we’re in the news, we work here and it fucking sucks and it’s really depressing. But the connections that you make with other working people and the stories that you hear, the fight that you see and learn about and hopefully that we are able to communicate to you guys on the show, I mean, that is where you find hope.

And I wanted to kind of just say something about that because I really loved how you were talking about why that matters and it really spoke to where this show came from in the first place. It’s funny that over the years we’ve become more known, you and I as union folks, labor folks, people who are in the know, on the organized labor movement, and you get to be that way by reporting on it and learning about it and learning from a lot of other people who told us a lot of stuff that we did not know a few years ago.

But to be honest, this show, it was never meant to be a union show, I didn’t know a whole lot about unions when I did that first interview with my dad. As I’ve talked about many times, I didn’t have a union job until I was a grad student and our family was not a union family and so there was a lot that I had to learn myself about how unions worked, labor law worked, how to report accurately on things like strikes and organizing drives. But going back to that very kind of core idealism of the beginning of this show, again, I didn’t want to do this show because I wanted to get everyone to join a union, although you should join a union if you don’t have one to join, you should start one.

But I started the show from a much more basic place. I started this show because of what was happening to my family, because of what I myself was going through and we were all going through in the Great Recession. And not only the economic hardships, not only losing our house, not only working any low-wage jobs we could just to try to keep what we had, but also just the deep soul rot that comes with that, that comes with living in a country that we will throw all of its resources around protecting the big banks while letting millions of families like mine just fall through the cracks and lose everything. Living in a country where in most states you can get fired just because the boss doesn’t like your face right, or who you are as a person. And most people don’t even know they have rights in the workplace, let alone the courage or wherewithal, or frankly the practical ability to exercise them in the workplace.

That’s where the show grew out of is from that general condition that so many working people are in this country and the ways that we start to convince ourselves that we’re worth that, that we’re worth as little as the system tells us we’re worth, that we’re worth as little as we get paid, that we’re as small as the customers and managers who berate us, lead us to believe, and that the society leads us to believe. That’s why I started the show is because I wanted working people to believe that they were worth more than their lot in life in this shit hole society. I wanted my dad to not go to his grave feeling like a failure and to not feeling alone. And that was really just the star that guided me through from the beginning to now. I’ve learned a lot since then, but that’s really what it’s all about.

And that’s where you naturally end up reporting more on organizing efforts, whether they be union efforts or non-union efforts to lead a walkout or to form a worker cooperative. There are many ways that working people can organize and fight to change their circumstances, but what I have found just endlessly inspiring and heroic in the stories that we’ve covered on this show, the stories that Mel has covered at The Real News, is just that effort, that decision by working people to say, “I’m not going to accept this and this is unacceptable, and I’m going to do something to change my circumstances, rather than just roll over and accept whatever the bosses and the powers that be give me. I did not know that I had more options as a low-wage worker than just staying at my job and sucking it up or quitting and trying to find something else. I really didn’t.”

And that’s why I will always find it so incredible whenever I talk to another working person who along with their co-workers has made that jump to say, “No, we’re going to do something about this in our workplaces.” And it starts there, but the more that you start to organize and work with your fellow workers and build power and fight through adversity and build solidarity, you start to realize the power that working people have collectively, and you start fighting to build more of it beyond the shop floor.

And in fact, if we can work and organize to change our circumstances at our jobs, we can do the same in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our apartment buildings, in our cities, our towns, country, and beyond. It’s that spark of getting yourself to believe that you are the change you’ve been waiting for. That is the spark of hope that you hear throughout this show, throughout the struggles of our fellow workers across the world. And that’s the thing that Mel and I have seen that, yeah, even though we didn’t get formal training in journalism school or weren’t trained as union organizers or what have you, that’s the thing that we follow and we learn so much from the stories that people tell us.

Mel Buer:

I think it’s also important to note that what we’re talking about is really simple. We live in a society that everyone, you can feel the sort of, as the materialists like to say, the alienation, the atomization of people, you feel like you’re walled off from yourself, you feel like you’re walled off from your family, from your neighbors, from the people that you go to school with, from your co-workers. And it is a wholly isolating, lonely experience to be a working person, a member of the working class in the western world, surrounded by distraction, surrounded by rampant sort of consumerism that is purpose-built to sort of take your eye line elsewhere from the problems that are causing such deep troubling experiences within yourself.

And to anyone who’s organized even a potluck with your neighbors for 4th of July. There is something about that feeling of being connected to someone outside of yourself, outside of your immediate circle, that is absolutely intoxicating. And building that sort of whether you’re in a union, or you’re deciding to march on the boss who’s stealing your tips, or you collectively assert your sort of humanity within the workplace or outside of the workplace, once you get a small taste of what that can feel like, you never want to go back to whatever nightmare you were living before.

And I think in my short time, the last couple of years, three years or so, reporting on the labor movement and talking particularly in the Midwest, talking to workers who are either organizing union drives or out on the picket line, they’ve never experienced a sit down with someone on a different shift at the same job before where they had the time to sit together in front of a barrel, a fire barrel, and just talk about life. And you realize that their kids go to the same school, or you may have gone to the same football games, or you attend the same church, you just had no idea that you also worked in the same place and you were experiencing the same sort of herring working conditions. And now the two of you from first shift and second shift are sitting on a picket line and you get to have that moment where you get to reach across just these gulfs of relation where you have this void to be able to build that.

So when we talk about building community, when we talk about solidarity, and when we talk about mutual aid, these aren’t these theoretical concepts that left us to throw out into the ether when we’re talking about how to respond to the sort of nightmare conditions that are being perpetuated by people who have amassed massive power in this country. These are real concepts, and you do them every day whether you think you do or not, and if you put a little bit more effort into it, I’m going to get off my soapbox here in a second, but if you really try to reach through whatever fear you have about organizing, about talking to your coworkers, about talking to your neighbors, about going to a community event and just reach through whatever fear and anxiety you have about it and actually try and meet people where they’re at, you’ll find that they’re trying to do the same thing, and you have a lot more in common than you think, and that is what the powers that be, whatever you want to call it, are fucking scared of.

They don’t want that to happen because that really is a truly powerful moment and that little bit of euphoria that you feel is magnified fucking a million times over and I don’t know, I think that it’s really for my part sitting as a quote outsider in the media, I’m sure Max, you feel this as well, we still feel that warmth, what the sunlight of solidarity can do. And we have these skills as journalists, as podcasters, whatever you want to call us, media individuals and we hope to share those stories so that more people can understand that sometimes all it takes is just hearing about someone similar to you doing something that maybe you were too afraid to or didn’t know that you could do.

So, hopefully that’s what we can do with this podcast, and hopefully I can provide examples of one way in which to build that sort of power in your community. I’m off my soapbox, so that’s all I got.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yeah. No, no, hopefully about it, baby. I know you’re going to, and it’s going to be incredible and I’m super excited again, started this show in my dinky little apartment in Ann Arbor never knowing that we’d make it to 300 episodes, let alone that we’d be talking about the next 300. So even just the fact that we’re here now, bringing you on as co-hosts is just really, really exciting for me. And I hope our listeners are just as excited, and I hope that you guys are just as excited as Mel and I are about how we’re going to be able to grow the show in this way. And I wanted to sort of round out by kind of talking about that places we want to go and appeals we want to send to our listeners right now because we want you guys to reach out to us. We want to make this show always what is the most useful for you as you struggle to get what you’re worth and to fight for a future worth living in for yourselves, for all of us, for our children.

And so we want this show to be that resource. We want it to be a place where you can feel that solidarity, where you can learn about struggles that your fellow workers are going through that you didn’t know others were going through, you’re learning about how they and their coworkers are and winning. Or when they are fighting and losing, what can we learn from those experiences? How do we keep the struggle going? And we want to hear from you guys about the kinds of working people you want us to talk to here in the U.S. and around the world. This show has been growing internationally as well, and certainly we want to continue that growth on this show and at The Real News, we are all ears.

And as you guys know from the past 300 episodes, whether we’re talking explicitly about a strike or whether we’re more talking about a person’s life and the work that they do, or something that they in their community are going through even if we’re not necessarily talking about their jobs, but they’re still working class people dealing with the realities of working class life like here in capitalist America. I mean, we try to take a really broad scope here in trying to cover again, the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of our fellow workers wherever those stories may lead.

And so Mel just wanted to ask, yeah, if you had any sort of prompts or ideas that you wanted to just toss out to the audience about what you are going to be looking into, or what sort of areas you’re excited to expand into, or the kinds of folks you want to reach out to us?

Mel Buer:

A bit of a broad sort of ask for me. Not only do I want to hear about the picket lines, the strikes, the contract negotiations, the minutiae around organizing drives, the various things that are kind of the capital U Union sort of news. It doesn’t matter where it is, if it’s in SoCal, I’ll see you in person, if it’s elsewhere in the country or in the world let’s get on Zoom and let’s talk about it. My email will be in the description of this episode, it’s Mel, M-E-L @therealnews.com. Send me an email. Even if you think it might not be a story, I guarantee you it’s interesting to me and it will be interesting to our audience, so talk to me about that.

But not only do I want that, I want to hear about the sort of small triumphs that maybe you as a union member, or you as a labor adjacent person, or someone who is affected by some sort of moment of solidarity around the labor movement in your community, hit us up about that.

Did a union hold a fundraiser for someone who was ill? Did you have a really fun softball tournament that allowed you to reach out and start to build these bonds of solidarity between union locals? It doesn’t matter. If it seems minor, it’s likely not. But what I am hoping is that we can kind of build this conversation around not only just the sort of “official contemporary labor struggles” in the United States and elsewhere, but to also kind of, again, draw the curtain back on what it means to be a union member. What it can do for your life, who it can affect in your life or around your life, and what that community looks like. Especially if you’re a union member who really feels that sort of community, let’s talk about it and let’s give folks ideas on how to build something in their own backyard.

And this is just an offhand ask, and it’s not really something that I’m expecting will come through my email, but if you’re a freaking laborer historian nerd and you want to talk about an anniversary coming up, or you can draw these parallels between say, Amazon delivery drivers and some obscure Teamsters fact that from a hundred years ago, hit me up, let’s talk about it. Let’s really try and build this place to be one of the many podcasts that kind of helps us demystify what it means to be a member of the labor movement in the United States, and to be part of an international coalition that really builds international solidarity, let’s talk about it.

And again, my email is melattherealnews.com. Do not send me a DM on social media, I won’t read it, my Twitter DMs are closed. You just got to send me an email or you can hit me up and ask for my signal number and we’ll get on the phone and talk about it. All right, that’s my ask, thank you.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Hell yes, all right, gang, reach out to us and again, we want to make this show more interactive too, right? I mean, send us voice messages, we always include a link to our digital voicemail service in the show notes we always want to hear from you. What we’d love to do, and I’ve expressed this desire and in seasons past, I’d love to start each episode playing a listener submitted a voicemail like either thoughts that you have on a previous show, updates about what’s going on in your neck of the woods, or in your workplace, or at your union local. Just I think the more that we can get, more of y’all’s voices on the show we’d love hearing from you, even if it’s just sharing your thoughts about an episode, your critiques, your suggestions, we want to hear from you. So please, yeah, reach out to Mel, reach out to me, give us story ideas, let us know your thoughts.

But also, yeah, please send in voice messages if you are so inspired to make a piece of art after hearing a story that one of our interviewees has shared, share it with us and we’ll share it with our audience as well on our social media accounts and all that good stuff. We do want to keep making the show as interactive as possible, we want to hear from you guys, and I’m so, so excited to hear the episodes that result from what you guys send into Mel and the things that she’s already investigating.

And for my part, as I said, I want to give this Sacrifice Zone series my full attention, not just because in many ways every sacrifice zones different. In other ways, they are eerily similar or the conditions that working people are left in, the things, the bureaucracy that they have to navigate, the lack of legal recourse that they have, the symptoms that they’re developing. Sadly, a lot of those are very similar. But it’s important to, if I’m going to do this series justice, if I’m going to do the folks that we talk to justice like with East Palestine, I’m going to have to really learn as much as I can about the specifics of each community, the sources of their pollution or their larger sacrifice. Like I said, I want to expand our understanding of sacrifice zones to not just include areas where people live near heavy industry, but to also include zones where life is becoming unlivable because of government sources of pollution.

I mean, one of the most consistent sources of PFAS contamination are military bases across the country. And as I already mentioned, the way that climate chaos continues to get more and more chaotic. And as we were discussing with the great journalist Mike Fox recently, I mean this is already impacting poor and working people across the globe. It’s already turning millions into climate refugees making their sources of food, and water, and their livelihoods unsustainable, where they live, where they’re from, where their roots are. And that’s I think one of the real kind of crucial reasons that I can’t move away from this series is because I think that in our imaginations, we tend to think of, again, working class people and working struggles and labor struggles in one bucket, and then climate disaster and industrial pollution and these other sorts of things in another bucket.

But as Mike Fox and I talked about in that episode about the floods in Brazil, it’s like, who do you think is living in these communities? They are our fellow workers, they are people that you probably go to work with, or that you yourself are experiencing this. The fact that you go work one place and you may be getting polluted or poisoned at work does not negate the struggle that you and your fellow workers are going through at home when you’re being blasted with toxic chemicals or coal dust, or there are contaminants in the water coming out of your faucet that your children are bathing in. I mean, the struggles of working class people do not begin and end on the shop floor.

And so again, that’s why Mel and I are going to really be trying to do a full court press on these two key areas of coverage to give you guys as broad of a swath of coverage as we can on the realities of living and working in modern day America and beyond. And I just wanted to say another by way of rounding out just what I hope really comes across to folks in the reporting that we’ve already done for this sacrifice series, primarily on East Palestine and Portsmouth and South Baltimore, but as we continue to go down this road and in fact this is going to be the focus of my next book of interviews, is working people living in different sacrifice zones.

And the reason that I felt this justified not only committing myself to it in this podcast series, but for another book, is because East Palestine Ohio, as we know, is not an anomaly like many other poor communities in this country, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and colonized communities, they already know what it means to be sacrificed` and they have long been familiar with life on the great American chopping block and other White and mixed working class communities have felt it too. And increasingly more communities across this country are learning what that feels like.

I mean, as I already said, four hours away from East Palestine for the past four decades, as you guys heard in our interview with Vina Colley, it’s been people working and living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, and that’s one of Ohio’s poorest counties. In Navajo Nation, it has been generations of Dine’ people poisoned by the Cold War uranium mining gold rush, and who are now being doubly squeezed by climate change and the not so slow moving water crisis in the Southwest, to say nothing of hundreds of years of violent settler colonial domination.

In ‘Cancer Alley’ Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans it’s the majority black parish communities that have been poisoned by the petrochemical plants surrounding their homes, and that includes the coastal communities where people’s homes and ways of life are already in the process of being sacrificed as the climate crisis intensifies.

In Hawaii, where the U.S. military owns like 200,000 acres of land across the islands, it’s the military native and non-native people living and working in Honolulu near the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, a U.S. Navy facility that has been leaking fuel and poisoning the local water supply for the past decade, and probably a lot longer than that.

And across the Cape Fear River Basin between Fayetteville and Wilmington and North Carolina, it’s communities of people connected by the same waterways that are just teeming with PFAS that’s coming from multiple sources. So why am I going so deep into this? Because as I said, it’s not just East Palestine, it’s so many other communities and accepting the wholesale sacrifice of communities like East Palestine, like South Baltimore, that in itself should be like in every sense of the word unacceptable.

And yet, in the good old U.S. of A, not only has it been accepted as a thing that corporations, shareholders and policymakers can get away with, but after forty-plus years of runaway deregulation, public disinvestment, and capitalist domination, America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers. They are, in my estimation, a harrowing model of the future that lies in stores for most of us, especially as the world continues to spiral further into climate chaos and bringing all the economic, political, and humanitarian crises that come with that. And if these corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires poisoning our communities aren’t stopped, that’s where we’re all headed. And it’s going to be us, the ones directly in the path of all this reckless and preventable destruction, working people fighting as one who are going to stop them. I believe that in my heart, and I see it in the folks that I’m talking to, and we’ve got to fight with everything that we’ve got because the depth of pain and injury being inflicted on all of us right now, our people, our planet, it is impossible to communicate in raw numbers.

And because something fundamental in our society and our economy needs to change. And yet we find ourselves in a situation, as Mel said, where the ruling corporate, financial, military, and political classes just currently have our society’s collective foot slammed on the gas barreling in the wrong fucking direction towards more death, more war, more global warming, more unfathomable and preventable misery, and more sacrifice because we have to fight to get what we deserve. And frankly, we deserve so much better than this and that has always been the message of this show. And I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has stuck with us over these past 300 plus episodes, these past seven seasons, everyone who has been patient with me and with Jules, as we’ve been struggling to keep the show going while keeping our lives going, and jobs, and relationships, and deaths in the family, just your support has really meant the world to me and to us.

And I just can’t thank you guys enough for listening, for caring, for sharing these episodes, sharing the stories of these great folks that have given us their time and shared their life stories so openly with us, that is ultimately what it is all about. And you guys listening to those stories, sharing them, learning from them, that’s the greatest gift that any one of us can give to one another is listening, and seeing each other for our whole human selves when we trust each other enough to open up the way that people open up on this show.

And so I wanted to really end by thanking you guys, the listeners, the folks who have stuck with us from the beginning, the folks who have found us somewhere in the middle or even recently, like thank you for keeping the show going. Thank you for keeping us going even when we wanted to quit. And thank you for constantly inspiring us by fighting for a better world wherever you are, thank you.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.