As we’ve mentioned many times before on the show, movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the ninth floor and 10th floors–where 200+ workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration, options for escaping the fire were few. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, catapulting some pro-reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government with the introduction of the New Deal 20 years later. 

Near the 114th anniversary of this tragedy, Mel sat down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of his forthcoming book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment.

Additional links/info:

• Cornell University – ILR School: Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire
• Dr. Erik Loomis on Bluesky
• More information about Dr. Loomis’s forthcoming book, Organizing America

Permanent links below…

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• Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
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• 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.

Mel Buer:

Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’ve been your host for the month of March. Next week, max will be back at the helm for the month of April, bringing you more stories from the working class today for the last episode of this month, we’re taking a moment to train an eye on the past. As I’ve mentioned many times before, movements today are part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

With that in mind, we’re talking about the triangle shirt, waist Factory fire. Today on March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames spreading to the ninth and 10th floors where 200 plus workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration options for escaping the fire were few, by the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, even catapulting some pro reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government. With the introduction of the New Deal, 20 years later near the a hundred and 14th anniversary of this tragedy, I’m sitting down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island, an author of his forthcoming book, organizing America Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment. Thanks for coming on the show, Dr. Loomis. I really appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk about a very important piece of our labor history.

Erik Loomis:

Thanks for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Mel Buer:

To start off this conversation, I just want to give our listeners a little bit of a chance to get to know you and who you are. So who are you, where do you teach? What kind of work do you do?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. So my name is Erik Loomis. I am a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. I focus on labor history. I’m also environmental history, so I teach a lot of courses at my university. I kind of cover a lot of ground in US history that people don’t necessarily otherwise would be able to take. So I try to offer things that students need or want, but I make sure I teach a lot of labor history. I’m teaching labor history right now and super awesome, a great group of students, and so that’s been a lot of fun. And then I write about these issues in any number of different ways. Everything from I write at the liberal blog, lawyers, guns of Money, a lot of that’s about labor history. I have this day labor history series that I started there that I also syndicate do threads on Blue Sky to give a lesson almost every day. Not quite every day, but almost every day I have a lesson about labor history that’s out there. So yeah, so I do what I can to publicize our labor history basically.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I think that’s actually a good place to start with our conversation. One thing that I like to do when I am hosting this podcast is sort of pull back the curtain on what it means to organize within the labor movement and to kind of give folks a sense of the nuts and bolts of what that looks like, but also to really help our listeners tap into the legacy of organizing in the United States, which is long storied, often violent, and really important to ground ourselves in this space. So to start this conversation, let’s just talk about what it means to learn about our own labor and movement history. And as a historian, why is it important to pay attention to and learn about this?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that and this book have coming out in the fall or I guess late summer Organizing America kind of gets into this a lot because I am very interested in sort of like what do we do with our past? Every American, everybody probably in the world tell stories about the past for themselves, and those stories often reflect what they need in the present. So why do we could tell all of these different stories about all of these different moments in time, and that includes in our labor history. So triangle is a horrible fire, one of the worst things that have ever happened. Of course, we’re going to get into this, but it’s far from the only mass death incident in American labor history. Why do we tell that story? So I’m really interested in why do we tell these stories that we tell and what do they do for us?

And for me anyway as a labor historian, and I think different historians would have different answers for this question. I don’t represent the historical community on this. For me, there’s a combination of things. Some of it’s inspiration, and I think that would be something a lot of people would say, right? We could be inspired by these movements in the past. And I agree with that. But I also think, and maybe we’ll get into this as we talk about triangle, that sometimes when we tell stories that are strictly inspirational, we actually lose something that I have this idea of our movement history and the way we teach it is a Mount Rushmore sort of thing, which in my world is not a compliment. It’s like I know how I have a great idea how to represent the past. Let’s blow some faces into a mountain in South Dakota.

What a great idea. And everybody could come gaze, and I’m like, oh, it George Washington. Oh, he’s so wonderful. But we kind of do that with our movement history. We sort of gaze up as Malcolm and King and Chavez and Rosa and Debs, and we kind of look up. It was like, wow, if only we could have those leaders today. And I would try to counter that a little bit because if you get into the details of what they were doing, they didn’t really know what they were doing at the time either. And I think in some ways learning our labor history is really useful to sort of ground ourselves not only in what they achieved, but the fact that we’re not really that different than them. We can be them. We can become that person. And I think that’s a really important piece of it that I really try to emphasize is the humanity, the mistakes and the realization that there’s not that big of a difference between our struggles and the struggles that they had.

Mel Buer:

And we’ll talk about this a little bit later in the conversation, but I read David Re’s Triangle in preparation of this episode and beyond the book, the book itself is kind of a monumental achievement in really kind of laying out the conditions leading up to the fire, the minute by minute details of the fire, which are harrowing and horrifying, and the reform movement that was born out of the fire plus the manslaughter trial. And we’ll talk all about this here in a moment, but the thing that strikes me the most about reading these books, and this is something that I come across often when I read labor history, is that good historians, good journalists through their archive work, resurrect these people in a way that makes them far more real than just a photo on a labor website or a story about these monumental achievements.

As you say, these are human beings who could have at another time been my neighbor or I could have been sitting next to them at a factory table, and their lives are full of the same sort of quiet dignity and indignities that we suffer and enjoy as working class people today. So I feel my background is in, I have a master’s degree and in literature, I did a lot of work within archives for my own work research when I was in grad school. And I’m always struck by the ability to take what is just a little short newspaper clipping or a receipt or some sort of bit of detritus that makes its way forward into our current moment and to really kind of build life from it and depth from it and memory and to sort of share in that humanity. And so I agree, I think that especially with labor history, not only does it provide the playbook for how to potentially tackle some of these similar problems that we are experiencing with Triangle and with the shirt, waist Factory workers strike that happened a year prior to the fire, they’re going up against the same sort of political machine that we have now.

They’re going up against the same sort of exploitation and indignities that workers are experiencing now. And you can learn a lot from the ways in which they organized and often their failures to be able to have a sense of what you can do in this moment.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, and I think it’s also worth noting, while you don’t want to overdraw the lessons from the past, I mean the past and the present are not exactly the same thing, but within, we live just thinking here of American labor history, we live in a society that is shaped by a series of political and economic constructs, and by looking at our labor history, we can also get a sense of in our present debates around anything from the relationship of labor unions to democratic party or issues of democratic unionism or strikes or whatever it may be, a really deep dive examination into our labor history can really do a lot to suggest the potentials or limits of various contemporary issues that we’re talking about. Again, not that the past necessarily is a restriction on what’s possible in the present, but the basic structure of our economy and government has not changed a lot over the centuries. And even with Trumpism, I mean, everything that’s happening right now is basically a return to the conditions of the Triangle fire that we’re talking about. And some of those strategies used back then may become more valuable again with the destruction of labor law and the other horrible things that are happening right now. So I think that those deeper dives into our labor history, real discussions of our labor history as opposed to just snippets, but really help us move conversations at the contemporary labor and movement building world forward in some very concrete and useful ways.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, I think that’s a good segue into getting into the meat of the discussion today, which is to talk about the triangle shirt, waste Factory Fire, which happened on March 25th, 1911. First, I kind of want to put it in a bit of wider context about what was going on in New York City at the time. So in the early 20th century, garment production was the largest manufacturing business in America. In the decades leading up to the early 20th century, there was this popularization of standardized off the rack fashion during the Industrial Revolution. It meant that instead of making clothing at home or via various sort of cottage industries, the Industrial Revolution standardized that entire process and turned it into the ability to walk into a clothing store like Nordstrom’s or something and to pull a sized garment off the rack. And prior to more mechanized processes that didn’t require as many hands in the process, these garment production factories were staffed by hundreds and thousands of workers. And the largest piece of that was in New York City, in the east end of the city. So just to give our readers, our listeners a sense here, what do these conditions look like for workers at the time who worked in specifically the garment industry in New York?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. Yeah, it’s rough work. You had a mostly immigrant workforce, particularly Jewish immigrants, some Italians as well. And that was working in clothing was something that quite a few of these immigrants had brought over from particularly Russia where there had been a lot of tailors and cutters and things like this. They enter into a growing American garment workforce that you accurately described, and that is happening at a moment in the late 19th and into the early 20th century. We’re beginning to see a shift so that a lot of the early sweatshop industry in New York was home-based. Basically, this contractor would move things out through these subcontracting systems and put things in people’s homes. And so you think about a tiny little New York apartment on say the Lower East side where a lot of this was taking place and people might complain today of their studio apartment, how small it’s, but there could be 10 to 15 people living in that at the time.

And then during the day, they’re working in it right there. They’re basically moving, what they have is for furniture to the side and putting the sewing machines in there. By the 1905 or so, that’s beginning to shift pretty heavily to what we would think of more of as a modern sweatshop, that it becomes more efficient for contractors to have the work in a particular place such as the location of the factory that would become notable for the triangle fire. And that was a very exploitative workforce. They hired mostly women thinking that they could control ’em. Work weeks could be 65 to 75 hours a week, but also tremendously unstable. And so you’d be working those 65, 75 hours a week if there was work, but then if the orders dried up, you went to nothing. So rather than have a consistent 40 hour week or even more than that, but consistent, it was either all the time or nothing at all. The women worked basically between three to $10 a week for all of these hours, which was poverty wages, even at that higher level. And factory owners really tried to control workers’ movements. Locking doors was super common. Fear of these workers stealing cloth and things like that would lead to searches requesting permission to use very unsanitary and disgusting bathrooms, fines all the time at work being required, supply your own supplies such as needles and things like this. Sexual harassment of these workers was a real problem. It’s a rough way to work,

Mel Buer:

And I kind of want to draw a parallel. It’s not a one-to-one, but I do want to draw a parallel from these sort of sweat up conditions that lead into this sort of wider factories that come through in the mid 19 aughts to sort of gig work that we see in some industries today where it is truly a race to the bottom in terms of payment wages and conditions and in these sort of sweatshop conditions. Absolutely. You would find that these contractors were a dime a dozen, and if you were the type of person who wanted to ask more for more wages for what you were working, they could throw you out and find someone within 15 minutes by walking to a market down the street. We see these conditions a lot in the sort of gig economy, certainly in some of the white collar industries like writing or things of that nature where people are making pennies on the dollar for some of the work that they do. And you can sort of see those parallels. And it didn’t just because these factories then establish themselves within a garment district and start employing 500 to a thousand workers per factory or what have you, doesn’t necessarily mean that those conditions improved much.

Erik Loomis:

Oh, absolutely not. I mean, in many cases they became worse. I mean, homework is not a great thing by any stretch of the imagination, but you had a certain control over your, no one’s sexually harassing you, no one’s locking the door, no one’s saying you can’t go to the bathroom. So conditions were probably even worse. I mean, the whole point of centralizing it is of course to maximize profit and you are continuing to maximize profit by exploiting this very frankly, easily exploited workforce for the reason that you discuss in that you have masses and masses of people coming to the United States at this time. And there was a lot of people desperate for work.

Mel Buer:

I think I read a statistic that was like Ellis Island was processing upwards of like 5,000 people a week at the height of peak of that piece of immigration. So you can imagine streams of individuals coming in after spending a week in the bow of a ship, making it through the sort of gauntlet that is Ellis Island and then ending up in the streets of New York and wanting to engage in some sort of employment that they can have skills for.

Erik Loomis:

And a lot of times part of the reason they’re willing to accept these horrible wages other than not having a whole lot of other options is that the first thing they’re trying to do is get their families over.

And so the more people that are working even in exploitative conditions, the more money they can save to get the cousins over or get, A lot of times a father would go first, save money, get their family over, and then they’d kind of collectively get that extended family over. And given that these were Jewish immigrants in Russia at this time, a lot of that is desperately escaping the state sponsored antisemitism that’s going on at that time. So there was very real reasons for these workers to sacrifice a lot, even knowing that they’re working in a terrible job because they had higher calling at that point.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, and this kind of brings us to a remarkable sort of labor action that happened in 1909. So we have at this point 20 to 40,000 garment workers in New York City who are working in various factories, the triangle fame factory, I think they had what four other locations that were making various items. They’re called shirt waste. They’re, or essentially blouses varying sort of degrees of fashion with lace and other things. But there were also factories all over the lower East side and the east side of New York that were doing some of the same stuff. And in 1909, in response to worsening conditions, there was a massive strike in the garment district that lasted close to a year, I believe, that was led primarily by women over 20,000 garment workers took to the streets and they walked out of dozens of factories in the garment district on strike.

And something that kind of gets missed a little bit in history, maybe this is just me loving a good name for it, but they called it the uprising of the 20,000 and it was considered an opening salvo and a new struggle for better working conditions in the industrialized sort of industries in New York City. So maybe we can kind of start with the strike itself and really kind of underscore how revolutionary it was to see a militant fighting union of primarily women leading this particular labor action and sort of how those impacts reverberated into the following years and decades.

Erik Loomis:

The union they had that was in that industry, it was called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILG as it’s commonly known. But ironically, the leadership of the union was basically all men and men had taken over that union, and a lot of these men were skilled cutters and things like this. And even despite the name, they weren’t really that comfortable with masses of women in the workforce. I mean, they brought over gender ideologies as well. And so in New York, you have in those weeks and months leading up to this strike, which begins in November of 1909, you have young organizers, again, mostly Jewish women, some of whom who will become pretty famous in the future, Clara Lemick, Roche Schneiderman, Pauly Newman, all of which will become pretty famous names in American labor and reform history are organizing and the factories to say, we don’t have to live this way.

It’s not necessary that our conditions are so exploitative. Some of them came from families who had brought radical politics with them, which was a growing thing in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe at the time through the Jewish fund. Others did not. Lelet came from quite politically conservative families who were outraged that their daughter was engaging in such radical activities. But it all begins to come to a head that fall. And there’s a big meeting in New York, I think a Cooper Union. And the point of the meeting in part is for labor leaders to try to cut the strike off. So the ILG member, the president’s there and other leading figures are there, American Federation of Labor Head, Samuel GOPer shows up and basically urges caution. And you have these, you can almost imagine it, it’s like two hours of these guys getting up and talking and going on and on and trying to kill time and trying to really undermine what they saw as a rebellion of low skilled workers that they feared would undermine the very limited gains that they had made in other parts of the garment industry.

And finally, after listening to this Lemick, who is this very small woman, the very tiny young woman gets up and basically marches up to the stage. And in Yiddish says, and I’m going to quote what she says here, I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers. You talk in general terms, what we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now. And she simply overwhelmed all those men on the stage. The workers walked out the day

Mel Buer:

Right standing ovation for that, the whole place just, and they had overflow for that as well. It was a very, very large meeting of workers, I think. And Clara Lemick specifically is unique in that she is probably in my reading over the last couple of years of labor history, a really solid example of what happens when you can successfully salt workplaces. She would hop from factory to factory, get hired on and salt the crap out of the workplace, organize those workers and bring them out on strike. And inevitably for some reason, she would either leave the job or get fired from the job and she would move on to the next one. And her organizing was so dangerous to the factory owners that they actually had her followed and she got the crap beaten out of her in the street and the next day and for the following weeks, you could see her on street corners displaying the bruises on her face. And using that as a rhetorical sort of example to say, we’re onto something, join us. And I dunno, as a woman in the labor movement, I find those examples to be really meaningful to anyone who’s listening to these sort of stories is that you may not even know who Clara Le is, but she is truly a revolutionary spirit in the labor movement.

Erik Loomis:

And I think that learning about people like that, I think there’s this whole, people like to say history repeats itself, which it doesn’t. Don’t ever say that to a historian, but there is these lessons out there. There are these people out there that you can be like, wow, they really did this amazing work and they suffered for it. I mean, getting the shit beat out of you is not a great story. That sucks. And she will be during the strike itself, lime Lake is beaten by a cop and suffer six broken ribs. She’s arrested 17 times during the strike. So it’s not, and these stories from the past, it’s not great. But I think that in a moment in which I think you see a lot of activism out there, or the beginnings of whatever we’re trying to do to stop Trump and all this horrible stuff. And there seems to me to be a lot of, I want something to happen, but I don’t actually want anything to happen to me.

I’m scared of something happening to me. And the reality is things are probably going to be happening to us. And learning that you can take that and build from it, I think is a critically important thing. It is a little bit of a side note, but I was just, yesterday in my labor history class, we were reading oral history from Harry Bridges, the great organizer of the longshoreman. And my students were struck because he talks in this oral history. He’s like, yeah, every day the cops would beat the shit out of us, and then the next day we would just come back and keep doing the same thing. And it blew their mind that you could do that. And I think these are the things that are important to understand, to bring from that past to the present. Lelet can be very inspiring this way.

Mel Buer:

So what was the outcome of the strike? So they were on strike for quite some time. A lot of these young women were arrested, sent to the workhouse for a brief period of time. You had some really interesting cross class solidarity and fundraising. Even JP Morgan’s own daughter was fundraising for the strike at one point. Funnily enough, they kind of moved away from support of the strike after some pretty hefty socialism and socialist rhetoric entered the sort of demand structure of the strike. But what was the outcome? What happened to these workers?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, the answer is in a sense, it is both a win and a lush. I mean, the cross class stuff is fascinating. These wealthy women come out, some of which would be big players in the future. I mean Francis Perkins, we’ll get into later is one of them, right? And this is a moment, this progressive era is a moment in which middle and upper class, particularly younger people are looking at society and they’re saying the things our fathers created in this era of uncontrolled capitalism, they’re just way out of control. And maybe these workers have a point. So there’d be these tentative alliances, which as you described, it’s one of the things that happen. What will happen to the strike itself is that by and large, the owners very much including the men who would own the triangle fire, were definitely there to resist as much as they could.

And after about 11 weeks, workers begin to, they start trickling back. I mean, because the international, the ILG, they still didn’t really support the strike, and they didn’t have the ability to have a big strike fund or anything like that anyway, so they don’t win a union shop. They don’t win a lot of workplace safety gains. But the manufacturers do agree to some real concessions. The work week drops to 52 hours in most of these factories that were four paid holidays a year. You don’t have to buy your own work materials anymore. And there’s kind of a vague agreement to negotiate pay rates, which is not really followed that much in the aftermath, but there were real material wins. What there was not were material wins about the conditions of work, which will be a huge problem going forward for the union, though that ILG local, local 25 really expands to become a big power player in New York for the next several years. And so the workers themselves feel very empowered by what happened to them. It’s a victory,

Mel Buer:

Right? And many of these workers who picketed outside the Triangle Factory are some of the ones who walked into work on March 25th, the 1911 and did not come out. And now on to sort of the hard conversation here. So this is a year after the strike workers have gone back to work. March 25th, 1911 workers walk into the ASH building, the Lower East Side. They took the elevators up to the upper floors to the triangle shirt, waist factory, which occupies the eighth, ninth, and 10th floors of the Ash building, which is now owned by cuny, right? It’s a science building, university science building.

Erik Loomis:

I think it’s N-Y-U-N-Y-U,

Mel Buer:

Yeah,

Erik Loomis:

NYU.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. So as I said earlier, I read Triangle, which is a very good book that kind of digs into the conditions of the garment workers, and it gives a minute by minute accounting of the triangle fire itself. I’d never really taken the time to learn the details of the fire. I found that there’s those sections of the book to be frankly harrowing, openly crying while reading it. It is, I don’t want to get into really the hardcore details of it because it is really upsetting and maybe for a lot of folks, but suffice to say, so the conditions in these couple of floors, eight and nine are floors where the factory work is being done. The 10th floor is kind of where the owners sit. They have a showroom. There is some tables for packaging and shipping the items that are put together, but the vast majority of materials are being worked on on those two lower floors.

So the fire begins right around the time of the closing bell. Folks were getting up to leave right around what 5:00 PM And something to note about these particular setups is that the cutters who are the ones who do the sort of precision cutting of the materials that are then sewn together in a sort of assembly line style at various parts in the factory are dropping scraps of highly flammable cotton materials into a bin underneath their cutting tables. And we learn later during the manslaughter trial that those bins are only emptied like four times a year. And so you can imagine that what’s underneath these tables is tons and tons of extremely flammable cotton and lace materials that just pile up. And obviously there’s a no smoking sign in every floor because this is a highly flammable workplace environment. Some of these cutters still smoked at the tables. And on the evening of March 25th, we’re not quite sure exactly what got thrown into the bucket, but it was probably a still lit match or a cigarette butt or a cigar butt that gets thrown into one of the buckets under the table and it lights a fire within what, I think it’s like less than 10 minutes. That entire floor is on fire.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, so it starts on the eighth floor

And everybody on the eighth floor gets out. They call up to the 10th floor as you point out that the office or the owners are, and those guys are all able to get out. You have those close New York buildings and you can kind of hot from building to building in that area, but in the panic sort of people forgot to call the ninth floor. And within just a few minutes, you have this raging fire on the eighth floor smoke coming up to the ninth, and the doors are locked to get out and there’s an elevator and some workers do get out via the elevator. About a hundred are able to get out in those few minutes before the elevator becomes non-functional. But then you have 146 workers still stuck up there and there’s nothing that they can do. They try to open the door, they’re looking for the key, nobody can find it, and they end up facing a choice of burning the death or jumping from the ninth floor,

And then they all die. So you have 146 dead workers. This was not particularly uncommon. I mean the numbers were high, but you had more workers than that die in coal mines pretty frequently. And you also had other garment fires that were hardly uncommon. There had just been one the year before in Newark, across the bay from New York, but no one sees that. The thing about these sweatshops is that it’s a very low capital industry. All you really need is some sewing machines and a few other things. So you can set these up anywhere. So as you pointed out, it’s an afternoon. It is a nice day. We’re in March right now, and there’s been a couple of nice days, and everyone including myself is like, oh my God, I’m so happy to be outside. It’s sunny, including I look outside the day. It’s a beautiful day here in Rhode Island. And so that’s how people were, right? And so it’s late afternoon. People are strolling around. It’s the lower East side, but it’s kind of on the border of more prosperous areas. So people are just walking around and all of a sudden plumes of smoke will rise up and all these people head over to see what’s up and what’s up is a mass death incident.

And what made this different was honestly for our American history is not the numbers, it’s the fact that this became a public event. People saw this, people saw the people making their clothes die, and that makes an enormous difference in the response of a nation that had traditionally been quite indifferent to workplace death.

Mel Buer:

And there were a number of things that might have made this less of a mass casualty sort of incident. The owners of the Triangle Factory could have at any time updated their factories with fire suppression systems. This was not something that was particularly new. Fire safe factories had been a thing for a number of decades prior to this horrible tragedy. There is an interesting note in Von Dre’s book that suggests that perhaps the two owners were setting fire to their previous, trying to essentially commit insurance fraud in order to get rid of some of their previous stock in previous years. There’s no indication that this was anything other than accident. I want to make that clear. But the way that the building was designed was not designed very well for escape. There were no fire drills that were happening with any sort of regularity that would’ve made it easier for workers to have a direction to go.

And yes, there is. There were two exits, two doors. One door was kept locked in order to reduce the amount of stealing that was happening. Whether that’s true or not, doesn’t really matter. Folks had to go through essentially a carousel at the other door in order to get their things searched before they could leave, which obviously is leading to serious bottlenecking in times of panic. And even the fire escape didn’t really have, it wasn’t really a fire escape. It wasn’t quite rated for the amount of people to run down the steps, and it did not lead to anywhere. There was no clear egress to the street at the bottom of the fire escape. And unfortunately, it was just a rickety thing and it collapsed. And 35 people died plunging to their desks because the fire escape collapsed. So we have all of these things, these things that contributed to a really horrendous workplace accident.

And you’re right, tens of thousands of folks were on the streets watching on buildings nearby. There’s dozens and dozens of sort of accounts of the fire. And even Francis Perkins, who figures a little bit later was standing on the street watching this happen, and they’re watching workers hold each other outside of the windows of the ninth floor and drop their friends onto the concrete, and they’re seeing others who are flying out of the windows on fire. This is a really horrendous thing for a lot of people to witness. And to your point, there is a testament to how affecting it was for folks to witness this and hear about this happening in the days after the event when they lined the victims up for identification at the pier, sort of a coroner’s warehouse. There were tens of thousands of people there who were thousands of people who just wanted to walk through and potentially pay their respects, but also family members who were trying to find their loved ones. And even in the days afterward during these funeral processions, you have folks standing out for hours in the rain watching these funeral processions as folks are identified and then taken to various cemeteries around the city. So we can kind of start there in terms of just beyond the real sort of impact of this and how this moved into answering the question, what are we going to do about this in the years leading after the tragedy?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah. Well, it’s a mixed bag. I mean, first as you point out, the owners blanket Harris were incredibly negligent. They had been really the most anti-union of all of the major garment worker owners or garment factory owners in the uprising. They really don’t get any serious legal punishment for it. In fact, they just, what? They kind of disappeared from the record, but we know that they at least attempt to open up another factory. They don’t even seem to care after all these workers die. They’re really indifferent. But part of the legacy of Triangle, we’re moving in that direction. And it is interesting because it kind of shifts from a worker story to a middle class performer story

Because Perkins is there and she’s already involved in some of these issues, but she gets really motivated to become a much more active labor reformer, and of course later will become the first female cabinet member Secretary of Labor under FDR for his 12 years. And really a truly remarkable human being. But the changes that come are not really about workplace activism. What happens is that Perkins, Robert Wagner, who’s a rising politician in the New York legislature who will later be the sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act, that creates the system of labor negotiation that we sort of still have today, although it’s probably disappearing soon, thanks to our lovely Supreme Court. But the union election process is something that kind of has some things that come out of this. But in the immediate aftermath, there’s serious investigations that happen. And what it leads to are important things around fire safety, building safety, things like this.

So the New York Fire Department could only really handle fires up to the seventh floor of a building. This starts on the eighth floor. There’s changes around that. There’s changes around the kinds of conditions that are allowed in a workplace around issues of flammability, for instance. And these are truly important advances. And New York becomes a leader in creating a safer workplace. But the flip side of that is that at almost the very same time that’s happening, the textile industry begins to leave places like New York, and so they don’t have to deal with Claral LEC anymore. They begin to move to North Carolina, to Alabama, to Tennessee. And you have a whole nother generation of, because again, I mean part of the reason that people like Blank and Harris don’t hardly care where you had other industries that are taking these issues more seriously is that the capital investment needed to open a sweatshop is so they’re not protecting a serious level of investment. And so you could recreate these factories in east Tennessee and Western North Carolina and avoid immigrants, avoid socialists, avoid any union traditions. And so by the twenties and thirties, that’s all shifted down there and you have a new generation of labor organizing that takes place down there, new generations of violence in a industry that proves quite resistant to changing its fundamental ways that it operates, including to the present.

Mel Buer:

Right. So I mean, what’s the sort of antidote to that? I mean, I know that particularly with Francis Perkins and the sort of committees that were born out of the Triangle Fire, they didn’t just stop with garment factories is my understanding. They spent a lot of time, energy, and they had the political will because Tammany’s political machine sort of backed this as they’re moving into the mid-teens to really sort of begin to look at places like candy factories and bakeries and the various sort of industrial places that are also in need of reform. And so we see this sort of new decade or so of real, the political will is there essentially to support these sort of this reform movement that then brings us into what ultimately becomes FDRs new deal and things of that nature. But I guess my question is if the political will didn’t exist, if Tammany wasn’t willing to back these sort of plays because they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, they’re seeing that there is enormous among voters, enormous need and want for increased oversight things, more progressive working conditions, things of that nature, would we have the same sort of, I guess you could call them policy wins within the labor movement?

Erik Loomis:

Probably not. I mean, I think the political atmosphere is very, very important. And I think that we sometimes ignore that in our contemporary conversations too, our peril. It really is a matter of kind of a combination of worker activism and a particular moment in time in which the politics are ready to act, in which people who have more access to power are willing to do what workers want them to do, either because they support it genuinely or they’re afraid of the worker power.

And this really leads into the New Deal. I mean, these things, the rise of Perkins and the creation of National Labor Relations Act and all of this is a part of two decades, really 25 years by that point, consistent working class struggle to try to pressure the political world to create these changes. Tammany needed to do it because Tammany was relying on working class voters as its core. They had a heavy, they were very heavily involved in the immigrant communities and providing services and things like that. And if those people weren’t going to come out and vote for Tammany politicians, then Tammany was potentially going to lose out. It was in their interest to see this through. New York had a far from universal, but it had a lot of capital, progressive politicians like these middle class people who saw needs for legitimate reform. And that begins to, of course, then influence the Democratic Party.

The Republican party remains tremendously hostile to almost all of this and create, thanks to the Great Depression and other conditions, the ability of this to go relatively national in 1930s, the rise of Perkins, the rise of Wagner, the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, all of that stuff is super critical. So yes, I mean the political side of it is real. And this is the thing is you see other worker struggles. It’s not like when these factories say textiles move to Tennessee and North Carolina that all workers acquiesce to this system, they struggle too. But the problem there is that the governors are just willing to call the National Guard to shoot them, and there’s not the political will there. And that is still a problem that we see in when we’re talking even before we get into issues of globalization, which if we’re talking about this industry, we have to talk about the reality is that the United States, even today, the politics of New York or the politics of Tennessee, let’s just say they’re a little different, and workers have a lot more power in a place like New York City in part because politicians will listen to them. We’re in Tennessee where I used to live as well and was working in labor issues. They don’t care what you have to say.

Mel Buer:

How do you get folks to have such, to have a heel turn on that? How do you start to begin to pull those threats in service of the labor movement? What are some ways in your experience that workers can kind of with a clear eye see as a sort of pathway towards really engendering more political will for better worker legislation?

Erik Loomis:

Honestly, I think a lot of it has to, I think there needs to be a lot more internal political organizing within unions. I think this is a serious problem in the contemporary framework is that a lot of unions are not really doing a lot of political education in their rank and file. And we see this in the kinds of the ways in which Trump has made inroads in the working class and things like this. At the time back then you had the level of political education. If you read union newsletters just as an example, they’re engaging. It could be even relatively conservative unions like say the Carpenter’s Union.

They’re engaging in very significant political education, like helping workers understand their position in society, helping them figure out how they’re going, what their proper action is. As a carpenter or as a wobbly or as a member of a communist union later, it really goes across the political spectrum. What is your role as a worker in this society? And that was in states where those conditions kind of lent themselves to that could lead to serious political action supporting candidates. And that’s going to become really crucial. So if we’re thinking if we move forward to the thirties and we think about the Flint Sitdown strike, a big reason why the Flint Sitdown Strike Succeeds is that the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, has been elected by workers and had pledged as part of his platform to never use the national guard against workers. So workers had elected this person who then does what he says he’s going to do, will not forcibly evict these sit down strikers from that GM plant in Flynn and in GM at that point has no other options. They were relying on state power to crush those workers, which had been the standard way of the past.

And so that stuff can make just an enormous serious difference. But in some ways, it has to start with unions doing the work themselves to be like, we are going to engage in a serious political education aspect for our members. And that does not just mean showing up two weeks before the election and telling you who to vote for, but actually building worker power by getting an everyday person who’s a busy person, who’s got kids and soccer practice or wants to hang out at the bar or whatever they want to do to get them to take that time that they don’t really have and to understand their position in society. And I think that’s really critical.

Mel Buer:

I think as we kind of round out this conversation, I think also are living in a time where there’s like what 9% union density we are and have been for quite some time sort of fighting this rear guard battle against the interests of capital and the exploitation of the workforce. And rightfully, I think a lot of unions have spent a lot of their time and energy and money on trying to continue to bring in new organizing is a way to stop the slow bleed that is union organizing in this country. The problem is it feels like this needs to be, this is becoming or has always been a sort of multi-front fight struggle here. And in the last couple of years, especially as I’ve been working as a labor reporter, I’ve been feeling pretty heartened by the amount of new independent organizing that has been happening. And I really hope that it’ll continue and there’s ways in which we can kind of maybe begin to become more militant in a new generation and to allow these more militant, younger folks to really kind of push forward policy and education that they’re bringing into as the sort of shot in the arm to the labor movement. But yeah, we have an uphill battle quite a bit.

Erik Loomis:

Well, I think it’s worth noting Claire Lemick had an uphill battle too, right? I mean, what you’re describing is a lot of what Lemick and Newman and Schneiderman and these other leaders were facing, right? A union leadership that was pretty fat and happy with what they had. They were really nervous about young people coming and taking over the movement and they didn’t really support them when they did, and it just didn’t matter, right? Lemlich did it anyway, and she spent the rest of her life as this incredible organizer doing all sorts of things, ending her life, actually helping the nursing home workers out in California where she was by the time she was an older woman, helping them organize into their own union and forcing the nursing home to honor the United Farm workers. Great boycott. So she continued organizing forever, but never really, actually never with the support of the international lady garment workers union leadership, I mean, she had to fight for a pension from them in the fifties and they were like, oh no, it’s that woman again.

I think it’s important to understand for younger organizers that the idea that the power structure, even within the labor movement’s just going to roll over for you. They’re not going to do that. You just do it anyway. They just create a scenario where they don’t actually matter anymore. And I think that’s important. And we’ve seen that to some extent. I mean, some of the things that say that the Starbucks workers have done, for example, which is regenerated a lot of energy, but at the same time, because of these larger political conditions, has not led to a growth in the actual overall labor movement, which is part of our story too.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We’re going to have to end it here. Please come back on anytime to talk about your forthcoming book, come back anytime to talk about history. I mean, I’ll be doing some history episodes when I come back here to host in May and hoping to do one on the Memorial Day massacre here in Chicago and hopefully something about Mayday. So if you’d like to come back on and chat about that, I’d love to have you.

Erik Loomis:

I’m always happy to chat about labor history, so anytime you want.

Mel Buer:

Great. Thank you so much.

Erik Loomis:

Hey, thank you.

Mel Buer:

That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then 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 from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel Buer and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

This week, we’re staying in Southern California, where the workers of Touchstone Climbing Gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer. Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California, experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations early last year. The successful campaign with Workers United created a wall-to-wall union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. Members of the LA-based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive.

However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers’ demands is better communications, higher safety standards, and better pay. 

With me today to discuss their unionization, and their negotiations are Ryan Barkauskas, PT desk staff at the Post in Pasadena and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, now FT Workers United organizer. 

Additional links/info: 

• Touchstone Workers United Instagram
• Climbing Business Journal – “Touchstone Workers United Win Union Election – First Southern California Climbing Gyms to Unionize”
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Sam, 10+ year Yoga Instructor
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Martell, Front Desk Worker at The Post in Pasadena

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.

Mel Buer:

I got work. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’m your host for the month of March. Stay tuned this month as we share the mic with workers from all over this country and discuss pressing issues central to today’s labor movement. Last week we checked in with behavioral healthcare workers in Southern California as they entered their 20th week on strike. If you haven’t checked out that episode, be sure to head on over to our channels and take a listen. This week, we’re staying in Southern California where the workers of Touchstone climbing gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer.

Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations. Early last year, successful campaign with Workers United created a wall to Wall Union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. And members of the LA based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive. However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers demands is better communication, higher safety standards, and better pay with me today to discuss their unionization. Their negotiations are Ryan Markowski, part-time desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and now full-time Workers United organizer. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, thank you.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Okay, so to kick things off, we got a lot to talk about. I really kind of just wanted to start by giving our listeners a bit of background on this current struggle that you’re engaged in. Jess, if you would like just to start this conversation, can you tell me a little bit about the climbing gyms that you used to work at, that the bargaining unit works at? How many locations does Touchstone own in California, in Los Angeles? What is the sort of makeup of this particular shop?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So there’s Touchstone Climbing, which is where our story originated. They are a chain just in California that’s fairly large. They have five locations in the Los Angeles area. They have Burbank, Hollywood, Pasadena, Culver City, and downtown. And last year they opened one in Torrance as well, so it five are in our bargaining unit because that’s when we organized. And there’s one more in Torrance Class five that has not been added. And then up north they have another big clump of gyms, especially around the Bay Area. I think it’s about 10 more gyms, Ryan, I think, and then they’re opening a couple more this year up there.

Mel Buer:

How big is the bargaining unit? How many employees?

Jess Kim:

It’s about 170 employees inside the unit. We did organize wall to wall, which means everyone inside of the building who is not a supervisor is included, so that’s disc staff, route setters, safety staff coaches, yoga instructors, janitorial and maintenance employees.

Mel Buer:

Ryan, what are the sort of jobs that folks are doing at a climbing gym? For our listeners who maybe aren’t in the climbing community, they may have never set foot inside of a climbing gym, don’t even know what it looks like or what the sort of space is. Could you kind of clue us in on what that is?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Absolutely. There’s a lot of kind of guest relations because it is a gym that requires servicing and some customer facing. So me personally, being a desk staff, I greet people, I check them in. I assist people with their memberships. I do instruction as well. And besides just the general maintenance and the upkeep of the gym, a large part of our responsibility is the interaction with the community. There’s additional roles such as safety staff that largely their position is meant to just facilitate those lessons, get people first acclimated with climbing, and then be keeping everybody safe. But something that’s usually encouraged and that we really appreciate about the job is walking the floor, being there with the climbers, letting them know about community events, how to be active in this great community, but really, yeah, again, that’s just a couple of the small roles. There’s coaches, there are youth teams that we foster. There are yoga instructors, separate fitness instructors past that, and just as Jess said, there’s janitorial, there’s maintenance, there’s everything that requires this building to continue to function.

Mel Buer:

Would you say, Jess, that these gyms are sort of situated and interfacing really well with the community, just as Ryan has said, but give us an idea of what the climbing community looks like in Los Angeles or in the United States? What does it feel like to you?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, the climbing community is legendary, perhaps just among ourselves for our comradeship and our support. I’ll drop a little hint that when we form a local, we’ll be local 69 because we believe in mutual care. So I started climbing actually on the east coast, and when I was over there, I got in because my friend in college wanted to learn how to escape the zombie apocalypse, and this seemed like the best route for her, and I am a adamant people pleaser, so I was like, sure, let’s go. We got sucked into the climate community there, and everyone is just so supportive, kind, no matter what you look like, if you’ve ever do other sports before, people don’t care. Everyone can get on there and touch those colorful holds on the wall, and we love to see it. So I love being part of that community.

There is a rash of a bros, as in many of the sports, and I feel like that’s just entertainment for other people who come to the gym. You see a man grunting on the wall, just let that go. He’s doing his business up there, he’s getting his emotions out. In California, we are lucky because in LA we have such a strong union community, and so many of our climbers work in industries that are prolific within the working class and organizing within the working class. So we have Hollywood, all those entertainment unions, which I’m a part of. Ryan works in Hollywood as well. We have teachers unions. We’re so active, so we have a very strong community that sees each other in and outside of the gym. And we’re lucky actually at Touchstone, we have groups called Affinity Groups, and these are specialized meetups for people of color, for queer folks. We have lager, thes, brew crush, Eskimos, hair cliff hangers for disabled climbers. We have lots of ways for people to find their people in the gym, and that’s what we love about it.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I’m new to climbing just recently started in the last couple of months, and I would say that it’s the same experience for me. It seems like there’s a very low barrier to entry and that everyone is welcome. And it seems like that’s kind of baked into the community that you have lived and worked in for as many years as you have. One thing that I do want to ask though is you formed this union in the end of 2023, and there was some issues that were happening at your gyms in LA that kind of pushed you to really collectively organize. Ryan, do you just kind of want to tell us what the issues were and why it was important that folks came together and filed for a union?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, there were a few errors, a few omissions and inconsistencies. We were seeing pay being different from location to location. You could work someone else’s coverage and be expected to not be paid their same rate. There wasn’t proper a ladder of seniority, there weren’t establish ways to really protect yourself and have look a path to advancement, better checking in with our bosses, they touched on kind of had this mentality of, oh, we’re so mom and pop. We so easily can just directly work with you. And that works to an extent. But when there can be things that come up that jeopardize our safety that worry us, and that we feel like, Hey, we’d like to have more communication with you every now and then we’ll just get a little bit of like, no, I think we’re doing okay though. That sparked, I think a lot of that organizing us feeling like, but this is our opinion, and wouldn’t you like to hear that? And to just kind of be told, no, I think we know best.

Mel Buer:

We’re a family here. Take your pizza party and walk out the door kind of experience.

Jess Kim:

We didn’t even get pizza that rough.

Mel Buer:

So you tried to solve these problems and tried to open up lines of communication with management ahead of organizing, and they just weren’t receptive at all.

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s a very short progression and still what they encourage is very informal means of we just go to our direct manager and our direct managers are then supposed to be the go-between, but that puts a lot on that middleman. If they make a failure in communication or if it just escalates there and our remote admins just deem it not necessary. We feel like we don’t have any direct say, and it can make us really feel powerless, especially if we don’t, unfortunately might not have the best relationship with our managers. We can hope for the best, but that can only do so much when they’re always like, oh, let’s just talk about it. Let’s make it informal. It doesn’t always work.

Mel Buer:

It doesn’t seem like there’s, when things are informal like that, A, there’s a lot of bottlenecking that happens because there’s a lot of people who are passing messages along in a game of telephone, the worst game of telephone ever, people’s livelihoods, and B, it seems like there’s no documentation for you to be able to track solutions. Does that sound accurate in this situation?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, I think we’ve struggled in that way for sure. There can be some paper trails of emails, but past that, they even changed our communication systems when they changed programs on us to Slack, which I’m sure many people are on, but just simple requests that we have of just like, Hey, can we just put this in writing? Can it be more consistent? Can you include this group in the Slack? Maybe there’s a certain job title that isn’t even on the team communications yet, and they miss announcements. They’re resistant to do even that, and we’re like, why should it be so hard to even just share information?

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, Jess, how did folks come together in January? What was the process for really coming to start collectively organizing and forming this union? One thing that I like to do, especially on this show, is that many of our listeners aren’t really familiar with how unions come together, and a lot of these episodes that I do is really the aim is to sort of pull back the curtain a little bit on what that organizing looks like. So what did that look like for you and the bargaining unit here with Touchstone Workers United?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So when I had started working at Touchstone, I feel like people joked about forming a union like, oh, we should do that, but there wasn’t any real action despite all these frustrations that Ryan had described. And we had a really unfortunate incident that made the LA Times in October and November of 2023 where there was a threat made against the gym that was very specific, and there was an FBI investigation started, and the company communicated so poorly that the workers and the customers were put in danger, and obviously that doesn’t go over well. And the response from the company was not apologetic. It was very much a little blamey to be honest, and didn’t make people feel comfortable in the workplace. And because of that, like Ryan said, we had a centralized system for most employees to talk to each other with management prior to this.

And because so many people were documenting the status of the threat at these different locations and talking Touchstone did shut down that method of communication, but we had already exchanged emails, so we had a big email thread going with mostly employees and had already signed a petition to help with that situation. So because many of us were talking already, it was pretty simple to be like, you know what? We’re going to really organize. We also are fortunate that at Touchstone, we cover each other’s shifts frequently for desk staff, so we travel to other locations, we get to talk to each other, and then our setters and coaches and instructors, most of ’em work at multiple locations as well. So there’s a good flow of communication. Plus we all hang out. We hang out after hours, we climb, we hang out outside to climb. We have the unifier of being addicted to climbing.

So once we have the comms going, just like classic union campaigns, but if the listeners aren’t familiar, we live in America and in America, you do not want to talk about the union campaign openly, unfortunately, because it is really difficult to protect someone from being fired or retaliated against at this stage in the campaign. So if you’re organizing, you want to use non-work emails, you want to meet offsite, you want to talk in person, and you want to make sure that everyone who’s involved knows that they don’t want to just be talking about the union at this specific workplace out at the grocery store. You never know who’s around. So unfortunately, that’s the reality. So yeah, we just got people talking. We had the emails and then we distributed what are called the NLRB. There are cards indicating your interest in a union, you want 30% of the workforce to sign to file for an election, but kind of the gold standard in most unions now is getting more than 70% of workers to sign because you need a bigger majority to win an election. And so we were able to get that very easily and very quickly because we had the impetus from people feeling very unsafe, even with the security guards that were hired by Touchstone for a brief period of time who were not the best. I will say.

Mel Buer:

Oh, yeah, I mean, yes. One thing to also note here too is when you’re talking about a majority that’s 70% or more is what people call a super majority of cards signed. It’s essentially alerting the NL rrb that if you were to have an election, say for example, you file and your employer doesn’t voluntarily recognize your union, it then goes to a union election that is put on by the NLRB. You’re essentially telling them with confidence that you will win that election because more than a majority, a super majority of your eligible bargaining unit has signed cards saying, yes, I will vote yes. Right. It’s also really good when you file and you present this information to your management, to your boss, you can say, I don’t know, man, 80% of us are already for this. It might just be easier. It’s going to happen.

You might as well just say, yes, let’s get this party rolling. And oftentimes if they’re receptive, they will voluntarily recognize and then your union can be certified and then you can really start the process of negotiations for first contract. So if any of our listeners are feeling the opaqueness of that, that’s the general sort of gist of how unions can be certified in this country. And Jess, you are right. Oftentimes what happens with organizing situations is you really kind of have to plan and prepare for how you’re going to approach people in order to get them interested in the union. I have certainly been in situations in the service industry where I’m from in Nebraska where we tried to organize unions at the bars that we worked at, and unfortunately the organizing was happening in places that got overheard by management. And so they will begin to do things like captive audience meetings, like leaning on certain members to say no to this process.

All of this is technically illegal or there’s a line there. But oftentimes management is not interested in seeing workers collectively organize. They view it as a loss of power in the workplace because often, especially with Touchstone or Ryan, I’m sure you can kind of note this as well, it seems like they have enough of a profit in order to handle anything in terms, and we’ll talk about negotiations after our break here in 15 minutes or so, but it would seem that they have enough money in their pockets to be able to handle you asking for a raise. You know what I mean? So I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems to me, especially in all of my reporting, when we have a struggle like a bargaining that goes sideways or a picket line that forms or a strike, oftentimes it’s a question of power. Who wants to have power in the workplace? And Ryan, what are your thoughts on that? What has it felt like to kind of collectively come into your own power as a worker with Touchstone Workers United?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It feels, I mean, it feels empowering or dare I say, nothing really great comes that easy. It’s just really frustrating to recognize how much work and resistance this will involve. Like you said, companies might sit you down and try to talk you out of it. We had that moment. I remember when our CEO and one of the other CFOs came in, and that’s their last little ditch effort to say, Hey, we think we could serve you better if you don’t do this. And at that little meeting, our CEO promises to us, and this feels almost like a little bit of manipulation, how he says, I will not be a union busting CEO if you choose to ratify, I will accept that. Okay. I guess that’s what the majority of my work was wanted. I thought I knew better, but if you tell me this, that’s what I’ll hear.

So what we’ve seen is the opposite of that. I felt inspired to propose to put myself on this bargaining committee only as a part-time staff as well. Most of the people that I’m really trying to fight for are my full-time friends that are more invested in this company that really want to make this like their homes. And I just saw the failings of the communication that what we were getting from our higher ups, and I was like, well, maybe I could lend a part of that. I think maybe I’m a little bit wishful in my thinking when negotiations are a little bit more red and very protected. Everything is said through one lawyer and it’s been frustrating, but really what it’s shown is the need for this was like, wow, I guess. Yeah, his words weren’t exactly true when he said that.

Mel Buer:

No, I think you bring a good point in here, Ryan, is that oftentimes management does feel, it feels a little squeaky talking to him when you’re talking about organizing a union. What’s that one meme? All the questions you have are answered by my t-shirt that says, I’m not going to union bust. You know what I mean? It feels weird, but I will say, you did the thing you filed for election. Did they voluntarily recognize the union? No, they did not. Okay. Absolutely

Jess Kim:

Not. They didn’t even answer or voluntarily.

Mel Buer:

So yes, it was all bs. Them sitting you down and saying, oh, we will. We’ll hear that answer. No. And so you went through the election. What was the results of the election?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was fairly close. We had a number of issues. We had a lot of union busting from the employer. Like Ryan said, we had those captive audience meetings, which again are illegal if you’re in the US currently anywhere in the US it is illegal, but especially in California, it was already illegal to have those meetings, which is when the employer comes in and tells you not to accept the union or try to persuade you to not unionize. We also had people like managers threatening that if you unionize, your benefits will be taken away or you won’t be able to talk to your manager anymore. And we received, which is my favorite daily mail to our house in just stacks from the company that was these big, bold, why unions are terrible headlines saying they’re going to come into our homes.

And it was like Scooby Doo investigation out there. It was rough. It was not factual. And then we got an apology letter actually from the CEO mark that was like, oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that there were so many mailings because people were so angry about getting this pile of mail at their house. And I think there’s something there too in that the anti-union efforts can become from the employer can be so annoying and out of touch and irritating that actually drives more people to want to unionize. We’ve had folks who went to a captive audience meeting undecided, and they came out being like, man, those assholes, I want to be with you guys. We’re like, yeah, that makes sense.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, the best organizers, often the boss. We’ve seen that certainly in the federal worker unions in the last month or so, folks who never would’ve joined the union have seen what’s been going on at the federal level and they’re like, ah, actually, give me a card. Let me sign. I am tired of this. One more thing before we go to the break here, and then when we come back, we’re going to talk about the negotiations themselves and how things have been going since then because all of this has happened in early 2024 or so. But how has the climbing community responded to your unionizing effort, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Geez, overwhelming support. It really is, like you said, how accepting the community is. The motto is the crag is for everybody outdoors. We take care of nature, we take care of it all. We just want to continue to enjoy this. We want everything that’s left behind to be shared and loved by all. And yeah, like Jess said, so many people are a member of II are working freelance in so many different disciplines and jobs, and so they hear about this and every time I’ve told someone that what’s happened, they say, that’s amazing. I’m happy for you guys. And they’re checking in. They want to know how to support. So really the community is really behind us and these are the relationships that we have. We talk to these people every single day. We have become really good friends and we are around them constantly and we’re all invested in each other. So to have the behind us really, really means a lot.

Mel Buer:

Jess, from your position as an organizer, how have you sort of seen the sort of community response to both the union effort that was successful? And now as you’re getting into deep into your negotiations at this point, how has the community response been in terms of support, in terms of reaching out to Workers United and wanting to share their experiences with the unionized gyms? What has that been like for you on your end?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I agree with Brian. Completely overwhelming support. I was only recently fired from Touchstone in, I want to say October. So I’ve only been a full-time organizer with Workers United a few months, but we have an Instagram account for our workers. It’s at Touchstone Workers United. We get a ton of dms from people offering support from high profile climbers to local people in our community to people across the US who want to support, and they’re a part of their local climbing community. We also get interest from other gyms in the US who are asking, how do we organize? Can you walk us through it? And of course, we’re very happy to. It’s been truly wonderful. We haven’t gotten a single negative dm. What also really gets me is I discovered some Reddit threads yesterday about the organizing and wow. People in there are so supportive and so petty. There’s some memes on there that absolutely sent me. It was just, wow, I love the support, what the level of petty is, just That’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, you got to laugh at it when things are so frustrating. So we’ve kind of talked about how the organizing was last year. How long have you guys been in negotiation process? When did you start bargaining for your first contract?

Jess Kim:

We started our first session in September, 2024.

Mel Buer:

Okay, so it’s been, what is that, four months? No longer, five months, six months of bargaining.

Jess Kim:

Yep. A long time.

Mel Buer:

Not. Great. Okay. Let’s kind of break it down a little bit. So just overall, Ryan, you’ve spoken about some of the frustration in the organizing prior to the election and probably in the aftermath as well, and you are on the bargaining committee overall. Let’s start there broadly. How have the negotiations been going?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Like pulling teeth? Yeah, me going into that with some hope that, oh, I could just start a real good line of communication. I could just appeal to reason. And what we’re met with is a lawyer from a notoriously anti-union firm who does all of the speaking. We are faced with three other representatives of our company, none of which really add anything to the conversation unless he has a question. Simple things that we would love to just be able the flow of information and to be able to actually go back and forth across the table are usually met with, oh, I guess I’ll have to look into that, and maybe we won’t hear back until six weeks later when the next meeting is right. And so it’s really frustrating to see this wall that I think has been put up by the company to say, Hey, this is us just really worried about our self-interests and we’re going to hold onto this as best as we can and give you as little as we can. In the six months that we’ve been meeting, we have two or three tentative TAs on the contract, and they’re very basic, the ones that we have. So it’s really been a struggle.

Mel Buer:

What are some of the main bargaining priorities that you went in there with? Obviously you’re talking about parody and wages, you’re talking about better safety conditions. What are some of the specifics of that that you really are really pushing for as you continue these negotiations with the company?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, we based our campaign on three kind of pillars, which is safety, equity, and empowerment. Ryan spoke before about difference in wages between employees doing the same job. We’ve been there the same amount of time. The only difference could be gender, it could be anything. It’s just not unfair, it’s not fair. So our contract has a series of articles in our non economics. Most of our articles regard safety issues that we have in the gym. So a lot of it’s just compliance with general federal and state law. There’s a lot of things that are not compliant with law. We’ve had OSHA come in several times for different violations, and it’s simply just not an environment where you feel safe as a worker or where customers feel safe. And it’s very frustrating that there is no mechanism in America to really have companies comply with different laws.

For example, we have the workplace violence prevention law in California, which can law in July of last year of 2024. And in that employers are supposed to design blueprints with the employees, with the employees, like a collaborative effort on how to react to active shooters and how to react to different violent scenarios in the workplace. And given our history in 2023 of having issues related to this, it’s incredible that we not only don’t have a plan, but we have requested a plan many, many times in bargaining via email, people in person to our HR director. And there’s, there’s no compliance with that, and there’s nothing you can do. So outside of the union contract, what path you’re going to pursue with the contract, we can put that through the grievance and arbitration procedure, get that amended, get anything reparations back into it, because it’s not fair that workers want to simply go to work and not fear for their safety, and they want to comply with basic, the most basic laws that we have, which aren’t even that strong in America for safety protections.

And we don’t have those. So safety’s a big thing. Wages for sure, we have a lot of issues with the wages in the climbing community. There’s this history, this beautiful romantic dirtbag history of climbers who are living off the earth and they’re climbing outside. And in the past, they would just work at a gym for six months to get enough money for the whole rest of the year. Then they’d go climb and work on their projects, which is beautiful. But no one can build a savings on what is out here at the climbing gyms. We’re chasing minimum wage. They’re highly skilled positions. Our route setters have to use power tools at heights of 40 feet. They have to communicate with each other and use all these safety measures, and they design routes every single day that are different on three different styles of terrain. And they also take in consideration people who might be vi or visually impaired, people who have different abilities.

So there’s certifications involved. There’s a lot of factors. So to be offering people basically minimum wage, especially in a city like Los Angeles or up in the Bay Area is also not acceptable for us. It’s just not livable. And we do have staff who can’t afford housing and things like that. So that is a huge factor for us. And then the final thing is, as Ryan touched on some of our most basic asks are respect, like building communication structures within the company. We asked for a joint labor management committee, which could meet whenever there’s large safety issues. We asked for to bring back that centralized communication platform that people, everyone was able to use to get notices on new policies or talk about issues that are affecting all of the gyms. And we built in structure as well for what to do when someone receives warning when someone gets disciplined or is leading toward discipline.

And another big issue in our community is sexual harassment. We work in the fitness industry. We ask for different levels of how are we addressing issues in our gyms, these that are very prolific. And so our biggest issues are not building a new handbook or building a new code of conduct. It’s like we’re asking for basic compliance with laws. We’re asking for livable wages for folks, and we’re asking for basic safety protections both legally and mentally and with sexual harassment and ways to address these issues because Touchstone does not have an internal structure, an internal path for these problems. And in the past when people report discrimination or sexual harassment, they can just go unanswered or the answer is deal with it yourself. And that’s not okay. That’s not a safe environment for people to be working.

Mel Buer:

You want to make sure that people stay at their jobs. And these are basic sort of protocols and structures. The cool thing about a union for many of our listeners who maybe aren’t aware is that within the collective bargaining agreement that you ultimately agree on, it is a binding document that both sides sign. So when you ask for these things and they agree to them instead of this pie in the sky, yeah, we’ll get to it, trust us, you now have a binding legal contract that you can point to that says, actually, you said you’d get this to us six months ago. We gave you some time. Now we’re going to start pulling on this thread so that we can actually bring you to do this thing so that you are compliant or we’ll grieve you, we’ll file a grievance. We’ll bring in these mediators to say they haven’t done their side of the bargain, and we have.

And so the things that you’re asking for, you’ve touched a little bit, just some clarity for any of our listeners who maybe aren’t familiar. When you are negotiating, you’re negotiating both non-economic and economic proposals. The non-economic ones fit in the realm of these protocols that you’re talking about, these communication structures, safety plans and things of that nature. And then the economics is going to be obviously your wages, potential benefits, retirement health insurance, things that you may be a pension, perhaps, things that these that deal with the material conditions of the workers who will then be receiving those benefits. So oftentimes during bargaining, you will ta a small piece of that means a tentative agreement. It means you’ve come to an agreement on one provision in your contract, and then you can move on to the next. And sometimes it takes a while, but six months is a long time.

However, there are folks who have been bargaining for years and years and haven’t reached a conclusion. And oftentimes it leads to this frustration that you’re talking about, Ryan, where the assumption is, and maybe this is just me being idealistic, but the assumption is that you would come to the table in what’s called good faith, meaning you are willing to work towards a solution, you’re willing to make compromises and to have a collaborative sort of conversation that ultimately ends in the better working conditions for all happier workers means more profits oftentimes. And for whatever reason, oftentimes the company just decides to throw that out the window the second that you start asking for these things. So I want to ask, you’ve laid out a lot of these proposals, Ryan, you’ve already talked about the frustration, but what has been the sort of response to these demands?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s been a lot of legal jargon and slowing down the process really gumming it up. A large contention right now is something that we’ve had to call out and that we might be filing an unfair labor practice for this as well, is we’re arguing that they’re not in good faith for the fact that we have not received counter proposals on our economic proposals

Mel Buer:

Yet,

Ryan Barkauskas:

Ever. When did

Mel Buer:

You introduce them? When was the first time you introduced

Ryan Barkauskas:

’em? Those? A couple months ago.

Mel Buer:

So they should have something by

Ryan Barkauskas:

Now. Yeah, yeah. We had a change in our healthcare that was presented to us with very limited notice that then we had to see if we could bargain, which in itself is unfair labor practice. They’re changing conditions on us. And we very quickly were like, okay, we need to talk about this because this is affecting our bottom line. We’re met with a response of, well, if you would like to keep your same health insurance, maybe you’ll all just take a pay cut. And you can imagine when that was at the table, our reaction and how much that hurt to hear. And yeah, since then there has been just a real slowness on the non economics. They’re feeling like they’re just doing the bare minimum and their argument, which is truly just holding that bargaining chip against us saying, Hey, we want to see more movement on the non economics before we even talk to you about economics. Their justification saying Maybe we don’t know what you’re really going to be wanting to hold onto, but that’s trying to take all the power for themselves to say, we want to see you sacrifice more and to know what you’re willing to give when we should be bargaining the entire agreement when everything should be open to discussion. So it’s been frustrating as always to just receive lots of words and have to comb through them and say, oh, okay, what do they even mean by this?

Mel Buer:

And

Jess Kim:

It’s like homies, they ask for our economic proposals, we delivered them, and then they were like, actually, we’re not going to look at them. They’re like, oh, are you sure? Because we’re bargaining health insurance. They’re like, yeah, I don’t think it’s appropriate at this time. We’ll come back to it. And it’s been four months and we’re like, you asked for it, so we delivered. You got to response. I mean, it’s a long time.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, so it feels like it’s just completely fallen off the rails a little bit. You’re not really getting the movement, even the conversation towards the movement that you’ve been hoping for. And yeah, I can see how that would be an extremely frustrating experience. When’s your next bargaining session? When are you supposed to meet next?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, we have the next one about two weeks, March 10th.

Mel Buer:

What’s next? Just keep doing it. Keep doing the deal and see if you can make it work. I mean, I know that you’ve been pretty open about the frustrations with the negotiations on your social media and your town halls that you do. And really just kind of trying to gather more support from the community to really puts a pressure on management to come back to the table in good faith and to really kind of come to a solution because no one wants to be bargaining a contract for six months, for a year for however long you just want it done. You want to be able to sign the thing and get back to work. Some gym goers have put together a request for a boycott of the gym calling for people to cancel memberships and to send in letters of support. I’ve seen action networks that were put together in the last couple of months for this. One big question. I do want to ask, especially about something as important as calling for a boycott. Has the union itself called for a boycott as these negotiations have continued? And if not, what can supporters do to support the union and their negotiations to continue that sort of pressure for management to do the bare minimum, the right thing instead of canceling their membership? What are some thoughts that you have?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, so regarding the boycott, we as the union did not call the boycott. We don’t sanction the boycott. We appreciate the intention of the people who are calling for it, and it is a very powerful move for customers to make. For the union, we mostly just reserve our power to call a strike. So a boycott is when customers choose not to patronize a business. And a strike is when workers will not be working and they ask. Customers also do not come to the business, but we saw on social media there’s been some interchange of the terms, so we just want to be a little bit clearer there. And we found, first of all, the support from the community as always is incredible. And for people who are thinking of organizing, I think one of the most powerful tools that we have is communication because Touchstone is not great at communicating either consistently or clearly or responding in general to messages.

So for us, it was very important in our campaign to always have a weekly update. Every Wednesday we send an email to every employee in the unit with what’s going on, even if nothing big is going on that week. And then of course we have our social media. So if customers or members or community members want to support, we have a couple ways at our gym front desks right now, we have what are called union support cards. They look like a belay card for your harness, but they have a little pledge that you are amazing first of all, and second, you support the union and you support the workers. So get a little ego boost and a little color and add it to your harness two. We also have car signs. So these signs say, I support a unionized gym workers, or I demand better pay and benefits for touchstone workers.

You can leave them in your car around town in the parking lots. We’ve seen them in the wild, which is really cool the last couple of weeks here in la, and we also have a rally coming up. I don’t know when this episode is going to be released, but we have a rally coming up on March 7th in city at 6:00 PM It’ll be outside of our gym location, cliff Seve along the street, but it’s going to be a huge party. We’re going to have music, other unions are coming in, they’re bringing their soundtracks. It’s going to be a delight. It’s only going to be for an hour. If you are a worker, as we sent our email, do not walk off the job. We are not closing the gym down. If you’re on break, come on out and join us. It’ll be a great time. And we also have union pins people can wear. You can put on your chalk bag, put it on your gear, also wear it on your shirt. And we have union, so we only have a little bit of those left, but we are partnering with a local lining brand that people love. I don’t want to announce it yet, but let me just say people love this brand and they’re designing our next round of shirts, which will be available not only for our staff, but we’ll also be available to the public.

Mel Buer:

This episode is going to be out on March 12th. So when you have your rally, grab some video, send me some links, we’ll put some links in the description. We’ll put some photos up at the rally to see how much of a party it was so that folks can kind of see that. We’ve got a couple of minutes left here. Ryan, I want to start with you to the folks that are thinking of organizing in any capacity, their shop, whether with attaching themselves to a large union like the Teamsters for example, or doing it themselves, what words of advice, support, solidarity would you start with? What would you tell them if they were in your email inbox today?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Consider your most basic needs and your coworkers. This is clearly what we need for ourselves, but what we believe our community needs, what our friends and coworkers need. So considering them, we I think are very good at checking in and working as a team, but to be organized in such a way means really understanding, oh, I don’t need the same thing that they need there, but have these conversations, right? Understand if that’s going to be that necessary step for you guys, what it means. Ask other unions, understand the process. It can be scary. There was a lot of disinformation. There’s a lot of saying like, oh, are we going to be paying dues before we even have a contract? No, that could be something that could be thrown at you and made you worried. You can wonder if it’s all going to be worth it, and then just be patient. Nothing that great. Is that easy?

Mel Buer:

Do you think it’s worth it, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

I think so. I mean, again, the evidence of how much we’ve struggled against this makes me feel like the fight, it has really become worth it. And to have the support of everybody to just make, I just want this community to be the best it can be. When I moved out to la, I knew right away I was going to climb it touchstone. It had the name and the relationships I formed with some of the employees was what got me in as an employee myself. And so it’s always had this relationship with the company and I want the best for it, and I’ll continue to want that and have to fight for it.

Mel Buer:

What about you, Jess? What would you say to someone, I know you’ve already talked about folks coming into the dms and asking about how to organize, but to anyone who’s looking to organize, what are some thoughts that you have that you would like to share?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I want to echo what you said earlier, actually, Mel, is that when you are organizing for the company, it’s not about money, it’s about power. People do not want to see the power be taken away from them. And you as the worker, you have the power. You keep the company going every day. You are on the floor, you’re facing the customers. If you and your coworkers chose not to work, to slow down work, to not comply with different policies, you truly have the power. The people who are giving you, not orders but directions and new policies, they don’t know how to do your job. They can’t do it like you. So be brave. It’s scary. But you as a group have power. And there’s an image on social media that I love of a big fish chasing a school of fish. But when the school of fish turn around together, they chase off that big fish. Kind of like finding Nemo when they all get out of the net. Okay, so swim together, just keep swimming. Don’t come from me, Pixar. And that is the message I want to be.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I mean, I want to reiterate that for my listeners. Folks have been listening to me on this podcast and other podcast for many a year talking about union organizing specifically. But really what it comes down to really is just you collectively have power and also you are an expert in your own workplace. These CEOs sitting in their nice houses up in San Francisco or wherever the hell they’re sitting with, their very deep velvet lined pockets are not standing there on the shop floor with you. They don’t necessarily know what’s going on. You do. You are an expert at your job. You’ve spent many, many years building skills. It doesn’t matter where you work. If you’re working in a call center, if you’re working at a climbing gym, if you’re working as a barista, if you’re in the steel manufacturing business, it doesn’t matter, right?

Anytime that you’ve put into this vocation, this work experience, this wage labor that we spend so much of our time doing, eventually you become an expert in it. And so you know what you need and you know what will make the job better. And final thought for me before I let you folks go and let you have the rest of your night is really just do it anyways. Even if you’re freaked out, as my mom likes to say, walk through the fear and see what happens on the other side. Because oftentimes what you’ll end up with is a better place to work and a sense of security and a sense of belonging. And I will tell you, and anyone who has experienced it will tell you that feelings, true solidarity for the first time is better than anything that you could possibly imagine. And we’re living through some really harsh times right now.

So if you can build that solidarity with yourself in the workplace, with your friends that you spend so much time trauma bonding over behind a bar or a desk or wherever you are, and you can also, I don’t know, kick management in the pants a little bit, I think it’s probably worth it. So Jess, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for giving us really an interesting sort of look into this independent union organizing that you are doing and Godspeed with your negotiations. Hopefully this is one of the things that’ll help kick management in the pants to just get moving. And you are welcome back on the show anytime to talk about updates, to talk about events that you’re doing. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Thanks Mel. We appreciate the platform.

Jess Kim:

Thank you. So good to meet you. Come climb. We will catch

Ryan Barkauskas:

You. Yes. Welcome to the cult as I always tell our members.

Mel Buer:

One thing to note before we end our episode for the day after we finished recording, Ryan and Jess let me know that multiple members of their bargaining unit were deeply impacted by the Eaton Fire in Altadena this past January. If you’d like to support them, I have shared GoFundMe links in the description for those members. That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then 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 from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel er and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

A strike by Southern California healthcare workers at Kaiser organized under the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) has now carried on for 20 weeks, prompting the intervention of California Governor Gavin Newsom. After months of deadlock, Kaiser refused to yield to workers’ demands for pensions and adequate time to attend to patient care duties. Over a month after Newsom’s office offered to bring both sides into mediation, Kaiser finally agreed to sit down with the Governor’s mediators, with sessions beginning on March 10. Mental health patients in particular have been left in the lurch by Kaiser’s intransigence, and the crisis is only worsening as the aftermath of the recent Los Angeles wildfires takes its toll on the area’s residents. Working People co-host Mel Buer investigates the ongoing strike in this interview with Kaiser workers Jessica Rentz and Adriana Webb.

Editor’s note: this episode was recorded on February 25, 2025, before Kaiser agreed to mediation on March 3, 2025.

Additional links/info: 

• Previous coverage of the strike from The Real News:
  • ‘What they’re offering is stabilization, not care’: Kaiser Strands Patients in Limbo as Strike Approaches Fourth Month
  • Kaiser workers’ strike enters second week in Southern California
• ABC7, February 7: “Kaiser Permanente mental health workers strike can end with help of a mediator, Gov. Newsom suggests”

Links to support the strike:

• Mutual Aid: “Adopt a Striking Worker”
• Strike GoFundMe 
• Picket Line Locations 
• NUHW Strike Page 

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:
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.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock-on effect on the American economy.”

This already-chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and Donald Trump’s unelected executioner of federal agencies, demanded that over 2 million federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points over email on Monday or face dismissal. While Musk’s order has now been rescinded, the chaos, confusion, and naked corruption unleashed by the Trump-Musk administration’s assault on the federal government, federal workers, and the people who depend on them is intensifying with each passing day. In today’s episode, we take you to the front lines of struggle and hear directly from three federal workers about what is happening inside the federal government, why it concerns all of us, and how federal workers and concerned citizens of all stripes are fighting back. 

Panelists include: Cat Farman, president of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Union, Local 335 of the National Treasury Employees Union; Jasmine McAllister, a rank-and-file CFPB Union member and data scientist who was illegally fired two weeks ago; and Will Munger, a rangeland scientist who works across the intermountain west and who, until this month, served as a postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. 

Additional links/info: 

• CFPB Union website, 
• Federal Unionists Network website, Bluesky page, and Instagram  
• 5Calls.Org website 
• Ed Pilkington & Chris Stein, The Guardian, “US personnel office walks back email ultimatum from Musk to workers”
• Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, “Elon Musk is making technofascism a reality before our eyes”
• Democracy Now!, “‘Grand Theft Government’: Federal workers send SOS over Musk’s DOGE, mass firings & service cuts”
• Emily Anthes & Apoorva Mandavilli, The New York Times, “Mass federal firings may imperil crops, cattle and pets”

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: Maximillian Alvarez
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:

Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent episode for y’all. Today we are focusing on the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. We are recording today’s episode on Monday, February 24th, and things just keep getting more hectic, absurd, and terrifying by the minute. As Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein reported this morning in the Guardian quote, at least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration, most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections.

In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is engaging in one of the biggest job cutting rounds in US history, which could have a powerful knock on effect on the American economy. Now, this already chaotic situation got even more chaotic this weekend when as Pilkington and Stein continue, Elon Musk, the Tesla billionaire turned White House sanctioned cost cutter demanded federal workers detail what they do at their jobs in bullet points or faced dismissal. The Saturday email sent to millions of employees was the latest salvo in Musk’s campaign authorized by Donald Trump to dramatically downsize the federal government. Musk’s Ultimatum was sent out on Saturday in a mass email to federal employees from the Office of Personnel Management, one of the first federal organs, Musk and his team on the so-called Department of Government Efficiency infiltrated after Trump was sworn in, the message gave all the US governments more than 2 million workers, barely 48 hours to itemize their accomplishments in the past week in five bullet points and in a post on X Musk indicated that failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.

The order provoked instant chaos across the government with Trump’s own appointed leadership in federal agencies responding in starkly different ways, workers in the Social Security Administration and the Health and Human Services Department were told to comply with the email. And CNN reported that the Department of Transportation ordered all of its employees to respond to the musk email by its deadline that included air traffic controllers who are currently struggling with severe understaffing and a spate of recent accidents. Several other agencies told their employees to refrain, including the FBI, where the new director Trump Loyalist Cash Patel asked agents to please pause any responses. Now, this is a fast moving crisis with long-term consequences that concern all of us, but we cannot understand this crisis if we are swimming in seas of misinformation and if our mainstream media channels and our social media feeds are just not giving us the information that we need, or they’re actively suppressing our access to the voices of current and former federal workers who are on the front lines of struggle right now and on this show and across the Real News Network, we are doing everything we can to counteract that.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing today to help us navigate this mess and to help us figure out how we can fight back before it’s too late, not as red or blue or non-voters, but as fellow working people, the working class of this country, I’m honored to be joined today on the show by three guests. Kat Farman is president of the CFPB Union, which is local 3 3 5 of the National Treasury Employees Union, and they represent workers at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage lending scandal, an agency that was effectively shut down by the Trump Musk administration two weeks ago after having clawed back over $21 billion from Wall Street banks and credit card companies for defrauded customers. We are also joined by Jasmine McAllister, a rank and file CFPB Union member and a data scientist before she was illegally fired two weeks ago, along with around 180 employees at the CFPB.

And last but not least, we are joined by Will Munger. Will is a rangeland scientist who works across the Intermountain West and around the world. Before the Valentine’s Day massacre, he served as postdoctoral researcher with the USDA Agricultural Research Service. Kat Jasmine will thank you all so much for joining us today, and I really, really wish that we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, but I’m so grateful to have you all here with us and in the first 15 minutes here, I want to start with where we are right now as of this recording on Monday, February 24th. By the time this episode comes out later this week, we’ll presumably know more about the fallout from Musk’s absurd mandate to federal workers this weekend and about who complied and who didn’t. I wish it could be taken for granted that people see right through all of this, that they see federal workers like yourselves as human beings and understand the incalculable impact that this techno fascist coup and all these firings are going to have on all of us that they see Musk and his drugged out, neo-Nazi insane clown, CEO posts and nakedly self-serving corrupt behavior, and they see him for what he is and that they see the Trump administration and all this oligarch led destruction and reordering of our government, our economy, and our society to serve their profit and power motives.

But we know that we can’t take that for granted because Musk Trump, Fox News and the entire ripe wing media apparatus, the social media algorithms controlling our feeds, they’re all pushing the narrative that this is righteous vengeance against the anti-American deep state against wokeness and waste, and a lot of people are buying it. So can we start by going around the table, having y’all briefly introduce yourselves and walk listeners through what this has all looked like for you three over the past week or so and what you want people to know about what’s actually happening to our government in real life in real time?

Cat Farman:

Yeah, thank you, max. Thanks for having us and thanks for being a voice for working people and for the working people who are under attack, specifically in public services working for our federal government. And that includes not just federal workers, but people who work at contractors. There are a lot of private contracting businesses that people are losing their jobs there because Musk is attacking those jobs too. There’s a lot of working people under attack right now. So I’ve been working at the CFPB now for 10 years, and when I got this job, I was excited because I had been working in tech before that, going from small company to small company, just trying to get my foot in the door and prove myself and also get compensated for the work that I do. And one of the things that I struggled with working in the private sector was I wasn’t really finding a lot of opportunities where I live in Philadelphia and the opportunities that did exist were very corporate in nature.

It was a lot of building websites and application software for companies like Ben and Jerry’s or Papa John’s, and those are kind of cool, fun projects to do. But it felt like what it was, which is I’m just being exploited to create something for someone else’s profit, and I’m spending a lot of my life and my time building and crafting very detail oriented code bases and designs for someone to just sell pizza, and it didn’t feel very useful. So I was really excited to find that the folks at CFPB were hiring and that it was to do work using my skills and my technology background to actually provide a socially useful service to the public. So I’ve worked on projects like the consumer complaint database website, which is where before two weeks ago, any person in the USA who had an issue with your big bank, your financial service provider, your mortgage lender or servicer, your student loan servicer, if they were not responding to you because they don’t, right?

They have bad customer service experiences on purpose. They want you to give up. Instead, you can come to the CFPB, you used to be able to submit a complaint or call us, do it on our website and we would require a response from the company in two weeks. That is not happening anymore, but that’s the kind of service that I got to work on and use my skills for good. So we were talking about someone like me who grew up in small town in East Texas, and I was lucky to have internet growing up in that small town. And then to get to use those skills and have a career in that, but find the jobs are wanting few and far between, don’t pay as well as we were told tech skills can get and they’re kind of miserable. And then to be able to come into public service and actually give something back with those skills and know that all the time and effort I’m putting, working 40 hour work weeks or longer, it’s actually doing something useful for society.

That was just a huge shift in my career that I was so excited about and coming into working at the bureau, been there for 10 years, and then realizing also a lot of the benefits that I in my head always ascribe to a government job, stability, security, a decent pay, even if it’s not as high as a private sector, but it’s going to be enough benefits like retirement. We have a pension. These things that I associated with government jobs, they come from unions. It was actually our union contract that got us those and unions fought and won those and have protected those. And unions remain under attack for decades. And in the federal work sector, it’s one of the last sectors that’s got higher than average numbers of unionization. I think it’s still only a third of the sector that’s unionized though, right? So it’s like 34% instead of 10% of Americans in general, but it’s still a higher percentage.

So I learned a lot about unions. This is the first union job I had all the things that made my family from Texas really excited that here I was. I moved to the big city far away and then I was able to get a good stable government job. They knew what that meant, all those things that represents to them. They come from unions and union contracts. So having that for the first time too had been just a total shift and getting involved in our union to fight to protect those things under the first Trump administration and then since to expand on them when we’ve had opportunities to, and then now here we are where the entire sector is under attack. It’s been eyeopening and it’s also been quite a joy to realize we rest on all this labor history that brought us here to where we are today, but also to see that we still have much to learn from that past if we’re going to be able to even survive the current moment.

We have this revived labor movement in this country and federal workers have been a part of that. CFPB union is a part of that. And I believe that is one reason we’re under attack right now. And that’s something that I hope listeners understand that we’re being targeted because we’re unions, because we’re labor and that these attacks are on the right wing that are trying to paint us as faceless DC bureaucrats or suits in Washington are lies meant to obscure the reality, which is where are your neighbors, where your family, your friends, where your community members who are working people and our services that we provide serve working people. We provide those services to the public for free funded by the government. And that means Elon Musk can’t make a buck off of it. And so when he comes in to shut down the CPB to steal our data and to fire our workers illegally when we are the ones who would be regulating his payment processing plans for x.com, it’s because he doesn’t want us standing in the way of him making a buck. And he has no need for any public services for people who are just working, people who want public goods to be provided to them so that they can have a little bit of a shot against the big that we regulate or the financial companies, what Elon wants to be.

That is what he’s doing. He’s seeing no value in the public services that federal workers provide, and if he can’t make a buck off it, then he’s going to find a way. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Thanks Max. Thanks for having us. Yeah, I wanted to address the first part of what you were asking. So you had mentioned this language that it’s like anti wokeness and the deep state and waste and all of that. And to be honest, I think that’s a distraction and that’s just excuses that they’re using to do what they really want. When you think about who these people are, they have dedicated their whole lives to accumulating wealth and power. They want to keep doing that. It’s like a machine that can’t be satisfied and they’re bad bosses. They’ll make people work in factories in a natural disaster. You think of tech jobs as being cushy, but then once people start to get more bold and organize and try to start unions at their tech companies like mass layoffs, no, it’s not stable. So yeah, I think that they do really want to attack the idea that you can have a stable, dignified job.

It might not make as much money as you could elsewhere, but it’s stable contributes to public life. That idea is threatening to who they are as bosses and what they are in the labor market. So I think that’s threatening to them as well as just organized labor in general. So their strategy to execute on destroying organized labor, destroying the federal services, destroying the federal workforce and making them the only big bad bosses in town. Their strategy to do that is to cause chaos and confusion. So you’d mentioned some headlines from this weekend and yeah, I think maybe you also mentioned that I was legally fired two weeks ago that firing was illegal. I feel like the news is covering it as layoffs. It’s something that’s allowed to happen as routine. It is possible to have a reduction in force in the federal government, but it needs to be thoughtful.

There’s rules and processes for how this is normally followed. If you want to take that kind of action and do it thoughtfully, which they’re completely ignoring, and in terms of what it looks like on the ground, it does feel chaotic and confusing, especially when it’s kind of hard to sort your attention because I feel like I’ll try to be like, okay, a lot’s happening, but I’m going to focus on what I can do and what’s in front of me and what’s in my control. But then I’ll get texts from like, oh, my parents, they saw a headline and they’re like, oh, did you know Elon Musk is saying people resign if they don’t reply to this email? But Elon Musk is not in our chain of command. That’s something that I think is being covered as just a fact when that’s not anyone’s boss. And you’ve seen a diversity in responses from different agencies. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

In fact, if this were in a bizarro world where Republicans did not have a trifecta control of the government, you would have folks on the other side of the aisle screaming about the illegality of all of this. But essentially what the culmination of that GOP trifecta is, is that no one in Congress is doing anything about the blatantly illegal actions of the unelected richest man in the world taking a meat cleaver to our government agencies.

Jasmine McAllister:

Exactly. Yeah. And I think in the absence of leadership from Congress, I think it’s really on each of us as individuals either as federal workers or just American citizens, to do what’s within each of our individual power. So one thing that our union has been really good about is reminding people their rights and their obligations in terms of legal orders. And so one thing that we’ll say is there’s all these rules about what sort of information can be shared where and who gets access to what. And there’s a lot of details there, but if you’re a federal worker listening to this, just remembering I do what my boss tells me to do, and if I’m getting an order from someone who’s not at my agency or not in my chain of command, I ask my boss, is this an order? And I think it violates x, y, Z rules and they can correct you, but don’t do anything that’s illegal and don’t comply. Don’t be scared into complying just because you’re scared. They’re trying to cause chaos and confusion. It’s working, but we need to remain clear-eyed about what our processes are to make our democracy work.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Will I want to bring you in here. We had Kat and Jasmine giving their on the ground accounts of the past couple weeks. I’m wondering what that looked like from your vantage point, not being in DC, but being directly impacted by this same top-down takeover.

Will Munger:

Sure. Well, thanks for having us on Max and Jasmine and Kat, my heart goes out too. And solidarity, this has been a really hard week for everyone. We’re definitely all in this together. I want to paint you a picture of the landscape where I work. I work and live in rural Idaho and Montana. I work with mostly ranchers who are working on public lands as well as the public land managers who are responsible for those public lands, as well as a number of scientists who are doing research and science for the betterment and management of those public lands. And so in my day-to-day job, I talk with ranchers about the issues that are facing them. These are complex issues in the west, there’s multiple jurisdictions, and it’s not just about producing food and fiber for the American people, but also there’s a number of new ask that are being asked of farmers and ranchers to conserve biodiversity, to help mitigate climate change, to deal with rapidly changing rural communities and land fragmentation.

So the challenges facing America’s farmers and ranchers are numerous, and having a federal agricultural research service is so important because we can do public interest research that the private sector isn’t able to do. And so me and my team were actually on our way back from the Society for Range Management meeting where we had been talking with ranchers and public land managers from around the country when we got the call that we were getting fired. And we were actually really shocked and surprised is so many people were. But one thing that I think is unique about my experience is I’m a young scientist. This is my first year in the service. I defended my dissertation in April of last year. And like Kat was talking about, to come from a rural community be able to have a federal job is and be able to serve your community is something that’s really important.

And a lot of young people are really excited to be here because day in day out, we hear from our stakeholders about how important the work that we do is. And when we got the news that we had been fired, it was just a real shock for us because we had been at this conference where we were getting really great feedback while we were hearing from our stakeholders that we were performing at a very high level and actually addressing a lot of the challenges that they’re facing. So it’s pretty dispiriting. But I think the thing I really want to uphold and really call attention to is the impact that these mass terminations have on rural communities out west. A lot of these communities are public lands communities where the people that were fired in this live and work in their livelihoods are interwoven with these lands, these rangers, firefighters, and also locksmiths, mule packers, educators. It’s a real range of people that have been hit by these. And some ranger districts that I’ve heard from have lost 50% of their crews, entire trail crews have been decimated. And over the last week, there’ve been a number of protests in these small towns. This is McCall, Idaho, Flagstaff, Arizona, my hometown of Logan, Utah. Hundreds and thousands of people are coming out in these small towns to say, Hey, these are public servants who serve our interest, who are taking care of our public lands, and we’re going to stand up for them.

Our stakeholders have been really active in making calls to the higher powers it be. And I think this is important because these are no democrats. These are mostly red states. These are mostly conservative agricultural communities, and they feel like projects that they have put a lot of time and effort into are being attacked here. And I think that that’s really important to recognize is that this is a moment where we can really bridge the urban rural divide and listen to each other and really think about what is the point of public science, of public service and what are the goods that brings? And I think this is a real clarifying moment. And the other thing I want to really highlight is the impact to young workers. I coached the range team at Utah State. I’m in contact with a number of young workers around the west, and they are really feeling decimated where these entry level jobs, these probationary positions that were terminated, this is our pathway where young people find their place in the world and can be compensated and rewarded for serving their communities.

And to cut that off is really cruel and not efficient at all. And here’s the real deep irony about calling this governmental efficiency is that so many of these programs are because of years of experience that this works. We responded to the Dust Bowl by creating conservation districts and watershed science so that we don’t have the impact of the Dust Bowl anymore. And our public land servants who are working on the range of issues that our communities are facing are really public servants who deserve to be supported. And that’s why I think it’s so important that we’re raising our voice and making these connections between rural America and what’s happening back east and in our cities.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Let’s take a quick step back and help listeners hear what we’ve been trying to get them to hear since the very first episode of this podcast that your fellow workers doing the unsung work that makes our whole society and economy run are human beings just like you. Can we go back around the table and have each of you just talk a bit more about how you personally got into doing this work, what that day-to-day work entailed before all of this madness with the second Trump administration and how that work contributed directly and indirectly to the public Good. I

Cat Farman:

Came into CFPB 10 years ago now as a web developer and technologist and looking for purpose. And I think that’s really common for people of the millennial generation. And we grew up in a time when we were told, if you go to college and find meaning and passion, there will be jobs and a good life waiting for you on the other side. And then we saw the lie of the 2008 financial crash and the great recession, and that was not the case and that there was no magical great American dream waiting for us after all. And in fact, to the extent that it ever existed, they were doing everything they needed and wanted to do to take away any of the foundations of that. And that includes bailing out corporations and big banks instead of American homeowners who lost their houses in that crisis and lost their jobs.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I feel I got to state, just as a disclaimer, as folks who listen to this show know my family was one of those, the very first interview I ever did on this show was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, talking about what it was like for our family to lose the house that I grew up in. So I feel like I have to say that for if nothing else, to make the disclaimer, but also to make the point that this impacts millions and millions of us.

Cat Farman:

Yes. And so I hear Will speaking about how the fact that these jobs exist that we’re talking about, that will and Jasmine have been unjustly legally fired from now that these careers exist, that these services exist for the public good is because we’ve learned from past disasters, like you said, the Dust Bowl, that’s the Great Depression. And then with the Great Recession, one of the lessons was there needs to be actual oversight in a central agency of government of these Wall Street banks that they don’t crash the economy and screw over the American people on such a scale again. And that includes regulating the mortgage market and auto loan market lenders and financial products. And that’s what CFPB was created to do. So I hear a lot of patterns, a lot of these services. There were a reason that we were created was because there was a moment, a history of greed and disaster resulting from that greed. And so here we are again. Greed is attacking these and creating disastrous economic effects already on American people. So we already know this history, it’s repeating. We’re in this new gilded age where the billionaires are running away with everything again and seeing if they’ll get away with it. So I think it’s important to remember that history and look back and see what’s going to be necessary for us to put a stop to this coup that’s happening and this corporate takeover of public good.

But yeah, so came to work at CFPB, it was in that context of the sort of disillusionment of being a working person realizing I’m going to have to work the rest of how long of my life and seeing the fallout of the economic, the great recession, and that impact on me and my generation friends and family members too. And again, Jasmine and Will talking about too, and then seeing opportunity in finding a public service job that’s got some security behind it, and that is meant to actually provide a social counterbalance, these forces of greed, corruption, corporate malfeasance, fraud by the billionaire and CEO class. So I’m still very proud to be able to do that work and it is motivating in a way that getting up in the morning to sell pizza every day is not and never was in those previous private sector jobs that I had.

One of the other differences I found too is that the small business tyrant experience is real. I worked for the small business tyrants at previous jobs and they have these little fiefdoms and there are not a lot of protections for workers in those kinds of jobs in this country. The difference is vast between working at those kinds of workplaces and going and working in public sector. And something too, and this is something shameful about some of these places I worked in technology, they shut out people of color, women of color, people like me from these industries, and I had never worked with a black coworker until I worked at the CFPB in technology. I never had a technology job where I had a black colleague in Philadelphia. So that kind of shameful discrimination and industry-wide creating hass and have nots who has access to certain kinds of work and salaries that come along with that, right? That’s something that in the public sector there are a lot more rules, regulations, and there’s a lot less segregation because of that. And I think that’s really key too, to keep in mind a part of the reason that we’re under attack right now is this is federal workforce is one of the more diverse and representative of the American people generally in all areas of demographics. And that is something that billionaires don’t want and certainly racist people like Musk and Trump are against too.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Jasmine, I want to come to you and ask if you could pick up where we left off and just say more about how you got into working at the CFPB, what that work entailed and how that work contributed to the public good.

Jasmine McAllister:

Yeah, so I was doing pretty similar work at the state level before coming to CFPB. So I was at the New York State Attorney General’s office similar to CFPB. CFPB has a law enforcement function among other functions. So I was doing law enforcement at the state level for all types of laws in New York state. So like labor laws, voting rights access or some of the things I worked on as well as consumer financial protection. So an everyday person when they interact with their auto lender, what sort of rice do they have and how do they make sure they’re not getting cheated? So that was the type of work I was doing beforehand and I spent many years building those skills up. It’s pretty complicated work. I’m a data scientist and when you investigate these companies, it’s not like they’re sitting around saying, yeah, sure, this is how we’re breaking the law.

It’s pretty complicated. The lawyers have to develop their legal theories and then they talk to us and we say, okay, what type of data might exist? If we look at that data, how can we tell what’s really happening? It’s usually millions of rows of data that we have to link together. So yeah, it’s a pretty specialized skillset that I developed elsewhere and it was pretty competitive to get the job. More than a thousand people applied to my posting and my team had four people hired from that thousand. So yeah, so it’s pretty complicated work and it’s pretty hard to find the skills for this. And all four of us, me and my coworkers, we had to take a technical test that was pretty difficult. We all hit the ground running right away, but then I talk about it being an illegal firing. The excuse that they gave is that it’s performance based. So for new hires, it is possible to fire them for performance based issues, but they fired all new hires in one day at 9:00 PM and it’s just not possible that all of us we’re not performing our jobs, and that’s really just a loophole that they’re trying to use to bully people, and it is illegal. What happened,

Cat Farman:

We have supervisors too who had no say in these firings, right? So your supervisor didn’t say your performance was bad. They didn’t even ask your supervisor because that wasn’t one. Yeah.

Jasmine McAllister:

Well, and my specific supervisor saw this coming. So my specific supervisor was proactively thought that this administration would do this and was sending emails up his chain of command all the way to the director saying, Hey, I know they’re going to try this tactic. These people I would vouch for. It was very difficult to hire them. His supervisor, supervisor agreed. Everyone who would normally have the power in a decision like this to evaluate performance has said no. The performance was extraordinary for these four people. And I think that’s true for all 180 of us who were fired. We have in writing, I have a proactive supervisor, but other people, there’s supervisors now are saying, I would be a reference. Their supervisors are posting on LinkedIn trying to help people get jobs. It’s clearly not performance based and they’re just trying to bully us.

So anyways, that was a tangent. But yeah, I’ve always been interested in holding power to account. I’ve always been interested in balancing out the power imbalances that exist in the world. And yeah, I’ve been doing that data work for a long time. I started doing it in CF PB six months ago. Some of the cases I’ve worked on since joining have to do with illegal overdraft fees. So one such case, it’s the biggest credit union in the country. They provide services to military families and they were doing this thing with illegal overdraft fees where it would say one balance in your account when you make the payment. So you’re like, okay, I’m at the grocery store, I’m looking at my basket. Can I afford this extra item? Oh, cool, I have $40 in my account. I’m going to make sure I’m under that $40. You pay your grocery bill and then the next day you see that actually the way that the transactions were posted in the order that they came in means that by the time that your $35 grocery bill hits your account, actually it was less than that by that time, and now you get an illegal overdraft fee.

So that’s not supposed to happen. That’s deceptive. And that’s something that CF PB got them to stop doing. And we won money for people who were cheated in this way. There were other things happening at this company too where you’re like, okay, cool, I need to buy something, but my friend owes me money. They send me a Zelle payment and then I buy the thing I need to buy, but actually the Zelle payment won’t be posted until the next business day. And that’s something that they were not forthcoming about disclosing. And these are military families. I think that that’s something that is a pretty sympathetic, I think that this sort of thing happens to people across the country and that’s why CPB exists to protect anyone. But the fact that this was happening to military families is an extra layer of they’ve served their country and now the institution that would protect them from this sort of predatory behaviors being abolished.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I mean it really underlines a point that we’ve been making throughout the conversation here that will brought up even earlier, right? It is like maybe people are cheering this kind of top-down government destruction on for partisan reasons, but it is going to have fully nonpartisan effects for all working people regardless of what state they live in. And will, I wanted to bring you back in here and ask if you could talk a bit more about the communities you serve, the work that you do there and how that work is as much in the public interest as what we’re talking about here with the CFPB, even if it’s not something that folks know about or see if they don’t live in a rural redder district.

Will Munger:

So the constituency that I work with are mostly ranchers who are working on a mix of both private and public lands. And on these public lands are multiple resources that are public. And so for example, there’s a huge demand for restoration of species like grizzly bears and wolves and bighorn sheep, which puts sometimes that into conflict with ranching families. So for example, there’s a disease transmission issue that happens between domestic and wild sheep that causes a pneumonia that can destroy wild sheep populations. And so doing really important genetic research, epidemiological research as well as community-based research to figure out how can we restore bighorn populations and have domestic sheep grazing, what’s the right combination? That’s one example of a lot of these complicated, both agricultural and public lands management issues, and obviously wolves and grizzly bears and the introduction of large carnivores in the Intermountain West is another huge issue that are impacting people.

And I think I also want to recognize that a lot of my stakeholders who I’ve been talking to and I’ve been doing qualitative research, interviewing a lot of people, so have a little bit of a grounds to stand on. They do see that there have been too many regulations. They do see their livelihoods diminished and they do want to see some reform. And so that is really important to acknowledge that that demand is out there as well. However, the group that I was working in was specifically created to address these complex public lines challenges by organizing collaborative science efforts rather than having a top-down loading dock model of science where a scientists say, oh, we have the silver bullet. Here’s what these communities have to do. We’re working with ranchers saying, what are the issues that are important to you and how can we work together to make science that is relevant to your livelihoods, to public lands, conservation issues, and be able to find that sweet spot?

And so our project has been years in the making. It takes a lot of work to build relationships both with livestock producers as well as environmental groups who have had conflict with those public land agencies and ranchers. So it takes a lot of time to build that trust and then it takes a really specialized set of specialized team that has geneticists, fire ecologists, social scientists, collaborative experts and facilitators to make these things happen. So these efforts take years and a lot of public investment to turn a page on these issues. And so when you come in and decimate that, that has a real impact on people.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been seeing letters from different wool grower organizations, different stockman’s organizations, different public lands, employee unions who are saying a very similar thing, which is these public servants are serving our interests, our livelihoods, our public lands, and we want to stand up for them because these projects have direct impact on our livelihood. And I think that’s the really important thing to drive home here, is that this is not a political game in the rural west. These are operators who are working on thin margins. These are wildlife populations that have been endangered and are in a route to recovery, and we need really innovative science to keep those things happening. The other part I think that is really important that goes back to some of the larger political economic changes, is that we’re seeing changes in public land ownership out west.

We’re seeing efforts to take over public land, and we are also seeing billionaires buying up working ranches and turning it into resorts, and it’s third and fourth and fifth and 14th homes. And so that both destroys working ranch livelihoods, but then also destroys that wildlife habitat. And so there’s I think, an opportunity to combine some convergences. Where can we build new political coalitions that can bring forth a vision of what might unite us, what might really help take care of rural communities going into the future? And so both Kat and Jasmine were talking earlier about it’s a little disorienting right now. There’s just so much new, so much feed, and that’s the flood the zone strategy, right? It’s the shock and awe that makes us just forget that we are in a web of relationships that are connected and responsible to each other. And so I think what I really want to emphasize is that our relationships make us strong. And whether that’s a union working in a big city, whether that’s a community group working out in the rural west, we need to uplift that next generation and continue to take care of each other during this hard time.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Kat, Jasmine will, there’s so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a little time left. And in that time I wanted to go back around the table and ask if you could say a little more about who’s fighting back right now and how, right? Is it unions, your unions, other unions will mentioned earlier that the stakeholders that you work with on a day-to-day basis or writing letters to the federal government urging them to not continue with these cuts, these layoffs, this top-down destruction. Are there elected officials who are leading a fight? Can you tell folks more about who’s fighting back and how? And I also wanted to ask by way of rounding out if you had any parting messages that you wanted to leave listeners with about why they need to care about all of this, how they can get involved in that fight, but also who and what we’re fighting against and who or what we’re fighting for here.

Cat Farman:

Well, thank you, max. We’re fighting for ourselves. One of my union comrades today put it perfectly. It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone. This is about a billionaire and his rich buddies seizing power and getting rid of anything they cannot profit off of no matter the collateral damage because it does not personally affect him. What he doesn’t care. So that’s what’s at stake. And we’re not exaggerating when we say that. I think who’s organizing, who’s fighting back, who’s doing what, definitely I’ve seen workers being the first to sound the alarm, and we’ve tried to do that as well at CFUB Union. We know we’re under attack. We’ve been under attack since we were created because we regulate the biggest banks in the world and we give Americans money back when they get ripped off by these banks. We are the agency that sued Wells Fargo and got people money back from Wells Fargo fraud.

So of course we were under attack again under this second Trump administration. And so what’s gratifying is to see workers are still and continue to be fighting back every day and sounding the alarm about the implications for all of us not waiting for us to lose all these services before we sound the alarm and warn people. Now we know that social security, Medicare, Medicaid, these pillars of what’s left of a welfare state in this country that provides some security for people in old age or in ill health, that these are under attack and they’ll be in the next on the chopping block. So we have to fight back. We don’t really have a choice, right? People subsist on government public services because they’re public good. That was democratically created by the people for the people. That’s not to say that everything in government matches that ideal, and we’re always going to have to work hard to reach full democracy in this country and everywhere.

And that battle always seems to come down to the people versus the greedy, wealthy business owners who don’t care about democracy or public good because they can’t make money off of it. So what we’re doing is continuing to be in the streets and in the courts and everywhere where we need to be on the podcast, on the radio shows to sound the alarm, fight back, get people to join our fight. So CPB Union, we’re hosting pickets multiple times a week all over the country. One of the things that people don’t realize about this fight is that federal workers, most of us are outside of dc. It’s 80% of federal workers that work and live outside of the capital of Washington. So I think all of us on this show right now, we work and live outside of DC so we are representative of that and we are doing actions all across the country too.

So CFPB Union, we have workers in 40 states. We have a lot of folks who are the ones that go into banks to make sure that they’re following the law that live in rural communities, small towns, small cities, big cities all across the country if someone in Hawaii. So we have people everywhere. And what we’re doing along with our pickets DC and New York on Thursday is we’re also having events outside of our regional offices. That’s Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco. We are also going to Tesla dealerships where those are to bring the picket and the union and the fight to where Musk makes his money too. And we are going outside of the big banks. So everyone’s got a big bank in your town, no matter how small or there’s a big bank probably near you, you can go outside and info picket and tell people what’s going on.

Just tell people, did you know that this bank is operating lawlessly for the last two weeks because of Musk and this government corporate takeover that’s happening? That means that no one’s watching the big banks to make sure that they’re following the law. So if are you really going to trust your paychecks and your savings and your dollars with a bank that has zero oversight right now? That is what’s happening. The biggest banks in the country are not being supervised. The laws are not being enforced at those banks. We’ve been told to stop working. So for two weeks they’re operating without any oversight or accountability to the American public. So we invite folks to join us and post on social media. When you do that, spread the heat around where it belongs, do town halls and wherever you are, your local congress member needs to feel the heat bully your local Congress person, bully your local Republican. They need to take the heat for this and answer to what’s happening. What are they doing to stop it? Bully your local Democrat too.

Jasmine McAllister:

They all need to stop it.

Yeah, I definitely agree, Kat, you said that it’s not Elon Musk fighting the government. It’s really all of us fighting for ourselves. One thing that someone had mentioned to me this morning that I knew but kind of forgot just how many people are directly impacted by this, there’s us who work in the federal government, but also a lot of local state, local government, state government and nonprofits for land on federal funding as well. So in my role at the union, I’ve been trying to just build as many connections as possible either within the union or since I live in New York with other federal workers who live in New York, or after the conversation this morning, I’m like, I should try to figure out a way to build a relationship with people who are at these other levels of government or nonprofits that also their jobs are also on the line and their work is on the line and the services they provide to people might go away without this.

Yeah, and I think that’s related to what Will had said about our web of relationships making us strong. I think thinking about, okay, whose interests are aligned with mine? Who can be my allies, who can be in my coalition? And at a very broad level, I think that’s the whole 99%. I think they try to distract us with these different social issues and the different buzzwords, but it’s actually the 99% against the 1% or even the 0.01%. It’s a handful of guys versus the rest of us. So I think that, yeah, and this is maybe a tangent, but I feel like after the 2016 election in my more liberal leftist community, there was kind of a lot of chatter of talk to your racist uncle at Thanksgiving. And it’s like, that’s not what relationship building looks like and you’re just going to further push each other away if you have a big fight at Thanksgiving, I think about who you have access to and who you can influence and do that in a way that’s true and respectful to the relationship you have and the love that you hold for each other. I think that’s really important. And yeah, I mean I think there’s some of us who are in unions and can go through that bridge or our jobs are aligned, but there’s also people where it’s just like your family, whether or not they realize it does have interest aligned with you if they have to have a job to pay rent or a mortgage and eat food. So I think also just thinking about your relationships and then one quick plug, five calls.org makes it really easy to call your congress people and other representatives

Cat Farman:

Five calls.org to bully your local congress person.

Will Munger:

Well, I think those are some great steps and the town hall thing I think is really important right now, particularly in rural communities for folks who are impacted out west, showing up at these protests down at the courthouse, talking to your coworkers, talking to the folks at the bar, talking to the folks at your church. I just think we got to have this conversation from the bottom up. I’ve been reading a really great book by Robin Wall Kimer called The Service Ferrets about reciprocity and abundance in the natural world, and she’s a Potawatomi ecologist and really kind of brings a lot of indigenous science and to the table. And one thing that has really struck me in this web of relationships is whether it’s responding to climate change attacks by billionaires, pandemics, bottom up mutual aid where we’re taking care of each other, making sure no one falls through really, I think is that’s the jam in this social movement that’s got to come and whatever the political outcome, the more we can build relations with each other, with people who are different than us, who might speak a different language, who might have a job that’s different than ours.

I just think the powers that be these billionaires, they want us separated, they want us hating on each other and any way that we can find solidarity from the bottom up to reimagine how we get through this period together, but then also continue to thrive together in the face of all the challenges that we’re up against, I think that that’s something that we can be able to practice day in and day out and we’ve got to stick together on this one, I think.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, KA Farman, Jasmine McAllister and Will Munger. I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez, take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.