The United States Postal Service (USPS) is a front line in the struggle for democracy and justice against corporate power, as a memo released by Wells Fargo unveils. Published February 27, the memo outlines a plan for privatizing the USPS and enabling investors to reap the profits. The plan has been met with criticism and protest, since achieving profitability relies on selling off property…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
May Day 2025 in the United States came amid the most aggressive assault on U.S. workers in a century. The federal agencies that provide some minimal protection against corporate power — the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and many more — are being systematically destroyed. On May 1, hundreds of thousands protested at roughly 1,300…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads
As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.
Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!
What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.
China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.
Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.
The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time
For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:
How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.
World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.
The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.
The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?
Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World
For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.
Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not
The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?
The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant. As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:
BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum
This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?
Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.
Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.
Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.
Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?
I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.
Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.
Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.
Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s book After Capitalism.
What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.
This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.
The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.
The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy
There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.
Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.
Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.
What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.
There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:
Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.
So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.
Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.
Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds
For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:
To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.
Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing. On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.
What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism
The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.
Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.
I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.
For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
China reported a surge in the number of tourists and strong consumer activity during the five-day Labor Day holiday, but netizens have taken to Chinese social media to question the accuracy of the data, citing multiple economic pressures and a decline in exports.
China’s Ministry of Transport data showed total cross-regional passenger traffic averaged 293 million trips per day, up 8 percent from a year ago, while sales of major retail and catering businesses were up 6.3 percent during the holiday, the state-run Global Times reported.
“The twin boom in travel and consumption not only ignited the holiday economy but also revealed the depth and vast potential of China’s economic development,” a Global Times editorial on May 5 said.
Contrary to Chinese state media reports, sources in the region said the overall consumer sentiment and market environment during this year’s May Day holiday was far worse than before.
Once-bustling shopping venues were devoid of their usual volume of eager shoppers, while cost-conscious travelers were opting for cheaper alternatives to get around, they added.
For example, the Baidu search index showed the search popularity of “green train” increased significantly during the May Day holiday, as many passengers sought the cheap but time-consuming mode of travel, instead of the more expensive but significantly faster high-speed rail option.
The reality of the middle and low-income groups “having holidays but no budget” is very different from Chinese state media reports of “boom in consumption,” say netizens.
Wuhan resident Zhang said shoppers were few when he visited the popular Wangfujing shopping complex on Zhongshan Avenue.
“(It) was empty and there were not many people … The atmosphere is definitely not as good as before. Prices have gone up; even the price of medicine has gone up,” Zhang said.
Last month, RFA reported that businesses in major export hubs in southeastern China were announcing factory “holidays” – halting production and slashing employee wages and work hours – with more than 50% of export companies in Zhejiang set to take a “long holiday” after the Labor Day holiday on May 1.
“Even if we receive orders (from the U.S.) now, we have to transfer them to Vietnamese factories,” Chen Xiaoqin, head of a foreign trade company in Shenzhen city in Guangdong province, told RFA.
“Many factory production lines in Guangdong have stopped. What do you think we should do?” she asked.
Edited by Tenzin Pema and Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Qian Lang for RFA Mandarin.
Tens of billions of dollars in government investment in new industries and manufacturing capability is secure after Labor won the 2025 federal election and returned the Albanese government for a second term. Key programs like Future Made in Australia, the National Reconstruction Fund and an energy innovation push would have been shuttered if Peter Dutton…
The post Returned Albanese pledges to keep building local capability appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
As people worldwide filled the streets Thursday to celebrate International Workers’ Day and mobilize against attacks on the working class, a new analysis showed that average global CEO pay has surged 50% since 2019 — 56 times more than the pay of ordinary employees. The Oxfam International analysis examined figures from nearly 2,000 corporations across 35 countries where CEOs were paid more…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story is part of a Grist package examining how President Trump’s first 100 days in office have reshaped climate and environmental policy in the U.S.
Jeffrey Willig doesn’t mine coal anymore. For nine years he worked underground, most recently for a company called Blackjewel, which laid off around 1,700 workers in June of 2019 without paying them. Robbed of their final paycheck, Willig and the others set up camp and blocked the company’s last trainload of “black gold” from leaving Harlan County, Kentucky, beginning what would be months of protest. They called on Democrats and Republicans alike for support, and received some, but ultimately were left disillusioned, spending years in court fighting for what they were owed.
Their plight came during a wave of layoffs that has rocked coal country for more than a decade. When Willig heard Democrats discuss mine closures and extoll the growth of clean energy jobs, it frustrated him. “Say they want to do solar panels. That’s great,” Willig said. “But why don’t [they] put those type of jobs in our area? They don’t do that. That’s the problem.”
Democratic party leaders and renewable energy advocates didn’t always seem to understand, he felt, how good a job mining could be. Willig earned $75,000 a year without a college degree, in a county with an annual per capita income not even one-third that. What’s more, it was fulfilling — hard work, and dangerous, but it came with unmatched camaraderie and pride in helping fuel the world. When those jobs were gone, he felt Democrats didn’t provide a clear answer to what would come after.
“They didn’t replace those jobs,” Willig said. “I had guys that I worked with who were good people, and loved their family and everything, and they lost homes.” One friend took his own life, unable to see a way forward to provide for his family.
Harlan County still has many active mines, but, like all of coal country, it has seen layoffs and bankruptcies cut the number of jobs by more than half since 2012. The reasons are complex, but, during his first 100 days in office, President Trump — who has promised to “unleash American energy” and “restore energy dominance” — has reprised a notion he first raised in 2016: Those jobs will come back if environmental and labor regulators simply get out of the way.
Last month, the president appeared with more than two dozen men wearing reflective stripes and hard hats to sign an executive order titled Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry. “We’re bringing back an industry that was abandoned,” Trump said. “With us today are some of the amazing workers who will benefit from these policies.”
If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because the president’s 2016 run made a star of the Appalachian coalfields. He made regular appearances there, promising to end the “war on coal” by reopening closed plants and reinvigorating the industry. The campaign, which preceded a swirl of national soul-searching that positioned the region, many argued too broadly, as “Trump Country,” featured rallies in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, where the candidate, met by signs declaring “Trump Digs Coal,” donned a hard hat and once pantomimed digging coal.
“You’re real people,” Trump said at one event. “You made this country.”
Then, as now, the president was following an example set by politicians before him, said Lou Martin, a labor historian at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Candidates on both sides of the aisle, from FDR and Carter to Nixon and Trump, have dressed the part to campaign in Appalachia, where, despite its dangers, mining coal provided a middle-class living to generations of families.
“The coal miner has always been viewed as the epitome of hard work, a hardworking person who is noble and honest,” Martin said. Appalachia is a popular political backdrop because it is often seen as an epicenter of white rural poverty and “a recognizable world of suffering” for some voters. “Appalachia is seen as white in the national imagination,” he said, despite being home to a people from a diverse set of backgrounds for hundreds of years.
At the same time, Martin said, the Eastern coalfields have often been stereotyped as both out of step with modernity and left behind by progress. “When somebody pays homage to coal miners it’s like saying, ‘I see you and I care about you.’”
The order Trump signed on April 8 declares coal a “critical mineral,” a designation that requires a host of federal agencies, including the energy, treasury, and interior departments, to take steps to support the industry and eliminate regulations that hinder domestic production. Many of those gathered around Trump applauded the move, which comes even as the administration has taken steps to undermine mine safety and protection from black lung disease.
But little about the ceremony was representative of the working-class miners Trump’s campaigns have venerated, said Erin Bates, communications officer for the United Mine Workers of America. “Not a single one of those were union miners and most of them were management,” she said, men more likely wear sharp button-downs than hard hats and go to bed without having to shower first.
Bates wants to see mines remain open and miners remain at work, but she doubts the Trump administration can overcome the trends driving the sector’s downfall. Industry experts predicted in 2017 that the market forces sidelining coal were too strong and the its resurgence is unlikely, and so far they’ve been correct. The number of people working the nation’s coal mines has steadily declined from 89,000 or so in 2012 to about 41,300 today. Production fell 31 percent during Trump’s first term, and has continued that slide.
“He hasn’t spoken about coal miners quite as much as he did in 2016,” Bates said of the president. “And I think that’s because he wasn’t able to follow through on a lot of things.”
The reason for that is simple: Demand has slowed as renewable energy and, to a larger extent, natural gas have grown cheaper, making coal an increasingly expensive proposition — even as the cost of maintaining the power plants that use has climbed. Such facilities provide 88 percent of the electricity in West Virginia, and the longer they run, the more residents will pay for energy, West Virginia Public Broadcasting reported. That’s got some ratepayers turning against the fossil fuel.
Utilities like Appalachian Power have continued to raise rates to keep up with repair costs. Others, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, are decommissioning aging and expensive coal-fired plants and turning to natural gas. Coal-powered electricity generation steadily declined during the first Trump administration, and continues apace. A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis argued very few idled coal plants could be cheaply re-started, given high maintenance costs and the decreasing viability of coal power.
Given the domestic decline in consumption, many U.S. producers rely upon exports to countries like China — 14 percent of the nation’s coal went abroad in 2022 — but the trade war stemming from Trump’s tariffs threatens that lifeline.
Trump still enjoys broad support throughout eastern coalfields. “I think that he meant every word, he wanted to make the country more energy efficient. The guys that I worked with had high hopes,” Willig said, adding that he felt four years wasn’t enough time to enact real change.
Cathy Davis Estep, a retired teacher and the daughter of a coal miner who lives in Harlan County, remains hopeful that Trump will revitalize the industry. She takes note, however, that the administration has targeted at least 33 Mine Safety and Health Administration offices, including the Harlan County location, for closure. This comes after years of staff reductions and budget cuts to the agency had already wrung it of much of its power. Miners and their advocates fear the closures will diminish an agency that’s improved safety over the past 50 years or so despite its shortcomings and could play a vital role protecting them as the Trump administration promotes coal and the nation scrambles to produce lithium and other metals.
Vonda Robinson is vice president of the Black Lung Association and feels she has a handle on what miners need. Her husband dug coal until he contracted the disease, which is caused by chronic exposure to silica dust, in his 40s. Now 58, he is awaiting a double lung transplant. Many others are awaiting diagnosis and treatment, but Trump administration policies have stymied them. “We’re gonna have coal, we’re gonna dig baby dig, but what upsets me is there’s not one thing about safety,” she said. “If we do not take care of our coal miners, we’re not gonna have a coal industry.”
Miners’ health programs are shuttering, with immediate impacts, said Scott Laney, a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NiOSH, epidemiologist. His staff was put on leave last month and expects to be fired in June. His research laid the groundwork for the federal silica rule, which limits exposure to the toxic dust. The rule was adopted last year, but has been placed on hold pending a legal challenge by the National Sand, Gravel, and Stone Association, and NiOSH cuts have held up enforcement regardless.
Laney’s research also supported the Coal Workers Health Surveillance Program, which provided free black lung screenings throughout Appalachia. “We currently are unable to accept X-rays from clinics for these miners, we’re unable to go out in the field,” he said. Nor can the program provide the documentation essential to allowing workers diagnosed with the disease to transfer to roles with less exposure to silica, as required by law.
“As we potentially increase coal production in the United States, we’re in the midst of the worst outbreak of black lung that we’ve seen in the last 50 years and we’re shutting down the health and safety programs to protect these miners who may be entering the industry for for the first time,” Laney said. “The protections that were granted to their fathers and their fathers’ fathers will not be afforded to them.”
Even as Trump promises to revitalize an industry facing inevitable decline, its future remains uncertain. But Willig won’t be a part of it. He’s long since left the coalfields for a manufacturing job in Louisville, Kentucky. But he watches with a combination of frustration and hope as Democrats and Republicans alike promise to restore the fortunes of those who, like him, once enjoyed the middle class life that working underground once provided.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline 100 days in, does Trump still ‘dig’ coal? on May 1, 2025.
“They just look at you like you’re nothing,” said a housekeeper from the Hyatt Regency hotel in downtown Buffalo, New York. Sitting with me for a conversation in her East Side apartment, the housekeeper, who requested not to be named due to fear of retaliation, spoke of slashed hours and stagnant pay, arduous and unfair workloads, and racist treatment and verbal abuse from managers so severe…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the midst of a nationwide campaign to restructure their board and a contentious fight at the bargaining table, the members of the REI Union were dismayed to learn that REI’s culture of union busting and worker exploitation extended deep into their supply chain. Released in December 2024, a comprehensive report compiled instances of reported human rights and labor abuses at multiple Southeast Asian and Central American factories that REI contracted with. Workers at REI’s US retailers, represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers union, are resolved to make lasting change at the popular co-op, both at the bargaining table and within the board room, and the report’s release underscores the importance of that fight.
In early December, a report on REI’s relationships with their suppliers rocked the outdoor world. Students for International Labor Solidarity (SILS) teamed up with researchers at UMass-Amherst’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences Labor Center to dig into REI’s relationships with factories along their supply chain. The resulting report, ‘Beneath REI’s Green Sheen,’ pulled the bulk of its information from publicly available documents, international reporting, and worker interviews to form a clearer picture of the conditions that international workers labor under in the factories that REI has contracted with. The report found that REI’s use of co-op language “serves to bolster its brand image as a socially and ecologically-minded democratic organization, and helps to mask its corporate ownership structure,” and that “REI’s partnerships for “responsible sourcing and fair labor” offer minimal public transparency and lack enforceable obligations on REI to address identified violations.”
In El Salvador in 2017, union workers were fired en masse after a legal increase in the country’s minimum wage was implemented at Textiles Opico, a garment manufacturer that REI has contracted with for over a decade. According to the report, SITRASACOSI, the Salvadoran garment union, alleged that “union members were targeted in part to punish them for pressing management to fulfill its labor rights obligations,” which was independently investigated and found to have merit by the Salvadoran Ministry of Labor. In the wake of those findings, Textiles Opico reportedly refused to reinstate the fired workers until international pressure pushed the factory to remedy the situation. According to independent labor monitor Workers Rights Consortium (WRC), REI did nothing to contribute to the international pressure campaign, and as of December 2024, continues to buy from the factory.
In Taiwan, migrant workers at Giant Manufacturing, which supplied bicycles to REI from 2021 to 2024, were ensnared in expensive recruitment schemes, where they were required to pay exorbitant fees to recruiters in order to secure employment. As a result, many workers were forced to take out high interest loans, leaving them in severe debt. In order to pay those debts, and in some cases pay monthly fees to labor brokers, workers were obliged to work extreme overtime hours and housed in overcrowded, unsanitary dormitories on factory grounds. As the report suggests, “these abuses amount to at least five indicators of forced labor: abuse of vulnerability, intimidation and threats, debt bondage, abusive working and living conditions, and excessive overtime.” The report also finds that although REI no longer contracts with Giant Manufacturing, the brand maintained a relationship with the factory at the same time that workers were testifying about their appalling work and living conditions.
The report found that REI’s use of co-op language “serves to bolster its brand image as a socially and ecologically-minded democratic organization, and helps to mask its corporate ownership structure,” and that “REI’s partnerships for “responsible sourcing and fair labor” offer minimal public transparency and lack enforceable obligations on REI to address identified violations.”
The report also elaborates on a number of other cases, including: workers who were disciplined by being forced to sit outdoors on searing concrete in triple digit heat; using short-term contract schemes to deny workers legally protected bargaining rights; discrimination and intimidation against migrant workers; weaponizing the courts against union organizers; and discriminatory firings of union workers at various REI suppliers across primarily Southeast Asia and Central America.
REI’s messaging states that it adheres to a comprehensive internal code of conduct relating to its partnerships with factories farther down the supply chain. The tenets laid forth in its Factory Code of Conduct include such items as “Freedom of Association and Collective Bargaining,” where employers respect the legal rights of employees to form unions and collectively bargain; “Voluntary Employment,” where employers will not use forced labor in any form in their factories; and harassment policies which state that employers that they work with “will not use physical or psychological disciplinary tactics” upon their workforce. Researchers found that REI contracted with factories in multiple countries over a period of over 10 years where conditions did not meet those standards.
Additionally, researchers found that REI “does not prioritize long-term relationships with its suppliers,” preferring instead to switch out suppliers dozens of times over less than a decade, “potentially impacting as many as 100,000 workers.” As the report suggests, frequent supplier hopping “is the opposite of a sustainable approach to supply chain management.”
“It is extraordinary that our limited research identified so many violations at REI supplier factories, especially when workers are generally terrified to report publicly on rights violations they experience for fear of being retaliated against by their employer,” the report said. “It is therefore reasonable to assume that the violations described in this report are only a very small portion of the actual extent of labor abuses in REI’s global supply chain.”
In the report’s conclusion, researchers underscored the gravity of the situation regarding REI’s relationship with their suppliers. “Ultimately, we found a yawning gap between REI’s pretensions to social responsibility and the evidence provided by the workers who make its outdoor gear,” the report said. “Unless REI takes immediate and meaningful action to address these failings, its claims of social responsibility will continue to ring hollow.”
Katie Nguyen, national organizer for SILS and co-author of the report, explained the importance of the research, saying, “We knew that there was this ongoing union fight with REI, and so we wanted to connect our two struggles of ‘what are workers facing in REI’s global supply chain and how can we act in solidarity with US retail workers who are also organizing on [sic] REI?’” SILS’s primary focus is mobilizing students to organize in solidarity with garment workers in the global garment industry.
Nguyen drew attention to REI’s messaging around environmental sustainability and conscious consumer culture as a key factor in shining more of a spotlight on the brand’s production. “Any time a brand promotes itself as sustainable and really progressive, that raises flags about whether that’s really a reality, especially as you go deeper into the supply chain and it gets farther away from a US or Western consumer base.”
“Any time a brand promotes itself as sustainable and really progressive, that raises flags about whether that’s really a reality, especially as you go deeper into the supply chain and it gets farther away from a US or Western consumer base.”
Upon learning of the abuses suffered by workers in REI’s supply chain, US workers were shocked. “I’m extremely concerned and dismayed and horrified that I work for a company that has this sort of public face where we want everyone to get access to the natural world or outdoor life, when there are people that they effectively employ who are living in squalor and intimidation of losing their livelihood at all times–this sort of fly-by-night factory usage, where they bounce from facility to facility to get the lower rates for production of fast fashion garments,” said Andy Trebing, worker at one of REI’s Chicago locations.
As the board campaign swings into its final weeks, workers have split their focus with ongoing contract negotiations across their 11 unionized shops. REI refused to negotiate at a national table, so workers are forced to bargain shop by shop. According to Megan Shan, bargaining committee member for the Durham, North Carolina, shop, proposals are similar across the board and bargaining has been coordinated via national calls in order to present a united front to the company. “For all of our union stores, and probably the non-union stores too, we have a lot of the same issues regarding scheduling, hours, safety,” she said. “It’s all pretty universal.” Workers hope that REI’s new CEO, Mary Beth Laughton, will be more willing to work with them in securing a contract.
For some union workers, who have struggled for years to win a first contract, the board campaign embodies an earnest effort to engage in international solidarity with fellow workers who are experiencing the same exploitation farther down the supply chain. “We all as workers came to REI because we believe in the values that they claim publicly, and we do want to hold them accountable,” Shan said, “So I think it’s up to us to raise our voices in this fight.”
REI is a consumer co-op, meaning that any consumer can pay a one-time membership fee to join. Members are then able to elect a governing board, who are responsible for decision-making for the brand. According to REI’s own board website, “REI’s board is legally responsible for the overall direction of the affairs and the performance of REI. The board carries out this legal responsibility by establishing broad policy and ensuring REI management is operating within the framework of these policy guidelines.”
Years of union busting at their US locations and the increasingly corporate structure of the board led union workers from REI stores across the United States to seek out candidates who might bring a better voice to the board’s current corporate makeup. As Davie Jamieson reported for HuffPost in January 2025, “Allegations that REI is no longer a co-op in spirit predate the union campaign by at least a couple of decades. A 2003 Seattle Weekly story portrayed a profit-driven and opaque corporation that wouldn’t divulge its then-chief executive’s compensation. “Who Owns REI?” the story asked. “It can’t be the members.” (REI now makes executive pay public. [Former CEO Eric] Artz made $2.7 million in 2023 and topped $4 million in previous years.)”
According to REI’s bylaws, any member in good standing can submit an application to be nominated for their governing board. Co-op members will then vote for the nominee that they believe will govern the co-op effectively. The position requires significant business and management experience, but according to the board website, “all self-nominated candidates are considered during the selection process.” Ahead of this year’s board election, union members approached Tefere Gebre and Shemona Moreno to submit an application for the ballot. Both candidates work in the environmental justice movement, with experience running large climate-focused nonprofits. Gebre is the former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO and current chief program officer at Greenpeace.
For some union workers, who have struggled for years to win a first contract, the board campaign embodies an earnest effort to engage in international solidarity with fellow workers who are experiencing the same exploitation farther down the supply chain.
Moreno is the executive director of 350 Seattle, a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to the struggle for climate justice. Their organizing has focused on what Moreno calls “‘No’ Fights” and “‘Yes’ Fights,” where organizers have waged campaigns against increased fossil fuel infrastructure (pipelines, for instance), as well as worked within communities to create more green initiatives, as well as advocating for the Green New Deal. When the union approached Moreno with an idea to run for REI’s board, she was enthusiastic. “They’re like, ‘Shemona, we have an idea, this great idea. Would you be interested? We think you’d be great,’ and my response was like, ‘Hell yeah, I’d love to! I didn’t know that was an option, but I’m totally down to do it!’”
After they verified her membership as still valid, Moreno put together the application to the board and submitted the materials before the deadline. For weeks, Moreno didn’t hear anything back from the board. It wasn’t until she began doing press interviews about her candidacy that she was notified that she never submitted an application, despite having screenshots of the application being submitted before the deadline. “I was kind of shocked by that,” she said. “I thought for sure they would just kind of respond like ‘well, you don’t meet our qualifications; you don’t have enough business experience,’— I thought that would be the way they would go, but to straight out lie was pretty shocking for me.”
Ultimately, the candidates that REI submitted to their membership did not include any of the proposed nominees that were backed by the union. In response, the union waged a national campaign to urge members to vote “Withhold” on the proposed slate in hopes of sending a message that the current makeup of the board is too corporate and has strayed too far from the values that the co-op purports to embody (To give a sense of just how corporate the board has become, one need only look at the resumes of their current members: Chairman of United Airlines, former exec at Nike, former Exxon-Mobile marketing director, to name a few). The publication of UMass Amherst’s report added extra urgency to the campaign.
REI’s official social media channels are inundated with comments from members who are outraged at the board’s treatment of US retail workers and workers abroad, as well as their endorsement (and subsequent retraction of said endorsement) of Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has stated publicly that he would like to strip the national parks of their resources in order to increase energy production in the US, and oversaw the firing of thousands of National Park Service employees.
For Trebing, international solidarity with workers is an indelible part of the package. “I feel like the moment you know that someone else is being exploited and you don’t do something about it, or try to do something about it, you’re complicit,” he said. “I think if we are to honor the work and sacrifice that organizers have done before us in trying to protect the working class here and across the globe—if we don’t honor that, then why are we doing any of this?”
The voting period for the board will conclude on May 1.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Twelve years have now passed since the Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh, one of the deadliest industrial disasters in history. On April 24, 2013, the eight-story Rana Plaza building in Savar collapsed, claiming the lives of 1,134 people and injuring over 2,500 others. The collapse was a product of denied labor rights for heavily exploited garment workers and corporate disregard for unambiguously…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The British government says a new state-owned renewable energy company will not be allowed to source solar panels made with Chinese slave labor.
The government announced Wednesday that it will introduce an amendment to ensure that the planned company, Great British Energy, will not have slavery in its supply chains.
China is the dominant global player in the renewable energy market including solar energy. The BBC cited customs data that Britain imports more than 40% of its solar photovoltaics from China.
A key component is polysilicon sourced from the Xinjiang region in China’s far west, where minority Uyghur Muslims have faced persecution including use of their forced labor.
In 2021, the U.S. Labor Department listed polysilicon as a product made with forced labor in China in violation of international standards.
The British government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer had initially rejected an amendment to the Great British Energy Bill to include provisions to prevent purchase of solar panels made with slave labor.
However, on Wednesday, it changed track.
“Great British Energy will act to secure supply chains that are free of forced labor, under an amendment brought forward by the government today,” the Department of Energy Security said in a news release.
It said a new measure in the bill “will enable the company to ensure that forced labor does not take place in its business or its supply chains.”
The opposition Conservative Party described it as a “humiliating U-turn” for Ed Miliband, the secretary of state for energy and climate change, but it was also supported by some members of the ruling Labour Party.
Rahima Mahmut, executive director of the activist group Stop Uyghur Genocide, welcomed the amendment, posting on X that it was a “massive step toward justice.”
Forced labor is on a long list of serious human rights problems that have been documented in Xinjiang and is cited along with the incarceration of an estimated 1.8 million people in detention camps since 2017 and forced birth control by the U.S. government and others as evidence of genocide of the Uyghurs.
China denies the rights abuses.
Edited by Mat Pennington.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alim Seytoff for RFA Uyghur.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Mexican General Motors workers in the Silao, Guanajuato, factory complex clinched record raises after staring down company scaremongering about tariff threats. “They said, well, we’re offering 6 percent,” said Norma Leticia Cabrera Vasquez about management’s offer at bargaining. “We knew they were going to show up with that, but we said, ‘We still have weeks to negotiate, so we won’t let…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The Biden administration supervised the largest repeal in social benefits in U.S. history upon declaring the COVID-19 pandemic over. The Trump administration appears to be surpassing that feat, rapidly winding down the project called the United States. The fallout includes the health of the American people. In recent weeks, we’ve seen billions slashed from state health programs…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
As May Day approaches, two grassroots organizations of education workers, one created in response to neoliberal reforms and the other emerging from the strike wave that swept several red states in 2018, are coalescing to organize a rank-and-file movement of education workers. At the same time, a coalition launched by the Chicago Teachers Union, under the banner of “bargaining for the common good,”…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On April 7, federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempted to enter two elementary schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). According to LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho, the agents were trying to contact five students who they alleged entered the U.S. without documentation, and they lied to school officials by claiming that the students’ families…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Purge is the word symbol of Athena – Athens
But there is no drive-through.
I park and walk inside. There are few twenty-somethings sitting around in offices, but no tellers. Just an automated ATM, who one of the twenty-somethings tells me can take my deposit. But a maintenance worker has the ATM door swung open, working on it. So, I don’t get to make a deposit.
I resolve to make the deposit the next day, instead.
Then, my roomie rings me and tells me to pick up a few things at the grocery. I’m no fan of Wally World, but it’s the most convenient stop. I park, run in, and grab a few groceries. I go to the check out, and it’s a lot like the bank I stopped at. It’s not tellerless—it’s checkerless. It’s all automated.
This doesn’t amuse me.
The more I think about it, the worse it gets. And, worse still, I do some research.
Talk about a bill of goods.
A decade or two back, “outsourcing” was all the rage. Our jobs were being sent overseas and we were livid. Now, blaming immigrants is in vogue.
But the numbers are funny and don’t really add up. And you don’t have to look real hard to figure it out. According to the internet machine, 4.5% of American jobs are outsourced each year. Also, according to the internet machine, immigrants make up 19% of the American workforce (one in five jobs).
Neither percentage is anything to dismiss—they just miss the point.
Our politicians and political pundits use figures like these to obscure the real issue … it’s all sleight of hand nonsense. And it’s a bummer, really, for so many of us, because we’re Pavlovian about terms like “outsourcing” and “immigrants”—as if we live for ill-informed finger-pointing. These economic bogeymen have been drummed into us for decades. Half of you are probably slobbering, now. But, please, dab your taco hole with your shirtsleeve and bear with me.
Outsourcing and immigrants really only infringe on an already diminished share of the scraps. According to the internet machine, automation has replaced 70% of Middle-Class jobs in the United States since 1980—and a related economic corollary is worse. Also, according to the internet machine, automation has driven down Middle-Class wages 70% since 1980. AND THESE AREN’T OBSCURE FACTS. They’re proffered front and center by a search engine’s AI shortcut!?
Put that in your mouse and scroll it.
It’s not just mouth-breathers that need to unite. It’s all of us. It’s anyone that may need a breather. It’s anyone that needs to breathe at all. Because what’s replacing most of us doesn’t.
President Dildo J. Trump’s claims about immigrants and bringing manufacturing jobs back to America are bald-faced lies, because most of those jobs were lost to robotics, computer processing, etc., and they’re never coming back. Immigrants and outsourcing are obviously easier targets than automation or AI, but still. This should scare you, reader. This should terrify you.
Immigrants and outsourcing are perfect red herrings, for sure, but neither—as proto-punk, rock-and-rolling band The Trashmen once sublimely put it—“bird is the word.”
“Purge” is the word.
Obsolescence is the word.
Human obsolescence.
And it’s coming to a universal wage station near you.
This is what technology hath wrought.
Vocationally speaking, human jobs have been being tossed in the trash for decades. It probably started innocently enough with something like gas station attendants. But don’t kid yourselves.
We are no longer surfing the web—the web is surfing us.
And the wave is about to break.
The post Purge, Purge, Purge Is the Word first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs. As organizers stated on the Kill The Cuts website:
“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding NO cuts to education and life-saving research.”
In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, we take you to the front lines of the Kill the Cuts rally that took place in Washington, DC, and we speak with workers and union representatives whose lives and work have already been affected by these cuts.
Speakers include: Margaret Cook, Vice President of the Public, Healthcare, and Education Workers sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA); Matt Brown, Recording Secretary of NIH Fellows United (United Auto Workers Local 2750); Rakshita Balaji, a post-baccalaureate researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Amanda Dykema, shop steward for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1072 at the University of Maryland, College Park.
Additional links/info:
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
I got work. Who protects us? We protects us. Who protects us, who protects us, who protects us? We protects us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to another on the Ground edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I’m here in Washington DC right in front of the US Capitol Building where dozens of local union members and union leaders just held a rally as part of a national Kill The Cuts Day of Action. Similar protest rallies were held today from California to Illinois to New York. Organizers called for the National Day of Action to raise awareness and fight against the Trump Musk administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to federal research, health and education. As the homepage of the Kill the Cuts website states by cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care.
The Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding no cuts to education and lifesaving research. The National Day of Action is sponsored by a plethora of labor unions, including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the Communications Workers of America, ame, SEIU, the Debt Collective and more. I came down to the DC action to talk to union members about this fight and what their message is to the Trump administration, to the labor movement and to the public.
Speaker 3:
Alright, we’re our last speaker. We have got Margaret Cook, who is the vice president of the Public Healthcare and Education Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. Let’s give it.
Margaret Cook:
I am a little short. Let me move this back a bit. Good afternoon everybody. Yes, I am your last speaker and I promise I won’t be like a Baptist preacher. I’m not going to keep you for another hour. My name is Margaret Cook and I am the public healthcare and education worker sector Vice President of Communication Workers of America representing over 130,000 state municipal and higher education workers across the country in Puerto Rico, including thousands of researchers, lab technicians, public healthcare clinicians and nurses, and thousands of additional support and wraparound staff, many of whom have seen their work shut down, cut off, and possibly killed by these cuts. You’ve heard from all of these people about today. Cuts that are illegal, cuts that are unethical, cuts that are immoral cuts that are unacceptable, cuts that are fatal. And I don’t mean just figuratively
Speaker 1:
Because
Margaret Cook:
As you’ve heard today, these cuts to research that will, these are cuts to research that will save lives. And so our message is pretty clear today. Kill these cuts before they kill us. I’m proud to stand here today with all these other members and leaders from labor who are going to work each day to deliver care and discover solutions for each and every one of us, which is a lot more than you can say for the people who are doing the cutting. You got the world’s richest man on one hand and the world’s most arrogant man on the other.
These men are living in a fantasy world, which may explain one of the reasons why they are so hostile to science. I’ve sat back and I’ve listened to them talk about how they need to cut back on the size of our federal government and to do so by going on a rampage against these workers who are doing some of the most critical and vital work that our government does. Well, what they aren’t telling you because they’re liars and cheats is that today the size of the federal workforce is the smallest it has been since the Great Depression at just over 1.5% of the jobs in this country, years of plundering public dollars for corporate greed, decades of austerity and slashing and burning the public good has left our government smaller than it has ever been, and these jackals aren’t done tearing away at it. And for what? Let’s cut the crap on the racist dog whistles about DEI, setting aside for the sake of argument, the fact that we do need to address inequality and injustice. Are you really telling me that the cuts to people working on cancer research is about DEI, that the cuts to people working to deliver vital aid and care is about DEII see right through it and I know you do too.
The reality is we need more public investment, not less because what is it that our investments really do? What these workers do is they discover, they educate, they provide care, and they prevent and act in emergencies, in labs and research settings across this country, these workers are discovering cures and treatments for diseases that threaten all of us. My grandfather died two days ago from stage four cancer, and my mother currently has stage two in campuses and schools. They’re educating and helping elevate the knowledge of future generations in clinics and hospitals and public service facilities. They’re delivering care to people who need it and in dire straits from outbreaks of viruses like measles. Measles, y’all.
These are people who put themselves at risk to protect the rest of us, and that’s who Trump and Musk and a bunch of kids without any real world knowledge and experience are trying to fire Trump and Musk whose genius lies and putting their name on work and breakthroughs of other people and then have the nerve to charge rent for it well enough. This money is the public’s and we demand that it be used for the public good. Not one penny less. No. I firmly believe for us to meet the incredible challenges and realize the potential of our country, we need so much more public investment. That’s why we’ve got to unite across our unions, across all kinds of work and across our communities to stand up, speak out, resist these attacks, and defend the services and work we do for the people we serve and work for. Lives are on the line. These cuts are wrong. So I say again, kill these cuts or they’ll end up killing us. Thank you.
Matt Brown:
My name is Matt Brown and I’m the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United. We’re a local of the UAW number 27 50.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Matt, thank you so much for talking to me, man. The kill cuts rally just concluded here. The Senate building is right behind us, but for folks who aren’t here right now and are listening to this, can you just say a little bit about what we just witnessed? What brought you guys out here today?
Matt Brown:
Of course. Yeah, max, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the pod and what brought us out here is saving the completely devastating cuts that are currently happening to publicly funded research here in the US at NIH Fellows United. We’re members of the intramural scientific team at the NIH that are working on things like carrying cancer and making treatments for diabetes, and we’re partnering up with all the folks that are being affected by the cuts to the extramural side of the NIH. So all of the universities and other institutions that receive grants to work on those same things outside of the NIH. And yeah, it’s been really great to see all of these people come together to save the life-saving work that we’re all doing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Say more about the extent of these cuts and the impact on research intra and extramural. I guess give listeners a sense of how deep this goes and what the impacts are really going to be.
Matt Brown:
This is truly an existential crisis for biomedical research in America. Flat out the cuts to the intramural program have seen thousands of jobs cut from the people that support the science that we do. And on the extramural side, the cuts that we’re seeing to grants these so-called indirect costs, it’s a bit of a jargon term that can be hard to parse, but really that goes towards supporting the life-saving research that we do. The cuts that we’re seeing are going to decimate the amount of research that we can get done on these awful diseases that people face. And like I said, this is an existential question, do we want biomedical research to continue or not?
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what about, let’s talk about the flesh and blood workers who are making this research happen and the working people who benefit from that research. Who are these cuts actually hurting right now?
Matt Brown:
These cuts are going to affect every single person. Historically, scientists and researchers have been considered somewhat apolitical quote because, hey, who doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by cancer? Right? It’s pretty easy to fund cancer research because it can be so devastating. And so yeah, everybody’s going to be affected by this. It’s not just the researchers here at NIH and Bethesda. It’s not just the researchers at universities, but it’s going to be every single person who has or has known someone with a really awful life altering disease.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what’s the message? What was the rallying message that we heard here today for folks in attendance and folks who aren’t in attendance? What are these unions doing to fight back and what are you saying to other folks about how they can get involved?
Matt Brown:
Well, really what I think the rallying call is, is to look around us. It’s look at who are the people that are trying to save each other’s lives. Here it’s the organized workers that are involved in biomedical research around the country. We’re not hearing things from NIH leadership. We’re not hearing things from university leadership. We’re hearing things from the organized researchers who are getting their butts out here to try to save what we do. And that’s really what this is, is it’s about getting as many people out here as possible and all moving in the same direction to not just save our jobs and not just save science, but to save lives around the country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And last question. I mean, there were a number of different unions present here and represented here. What does it mean that this is such a crisis, that it is bringing together different sides of the labor movement and uniting around a common fight?
Matt Brown:
Absolutely. And actually that’s a very special question to me because as NIH Fellows United we’re one of the unions that was part of organizing this as well as reaching out to other universities, one of them being my former bargaining unit with teachers and researchers United, which is local of UE 1 97. And so
Yeah, it’s been really special to see people come together and not just start organizing the workers in their own workplaces, but reaching out to everybody else in their own regions, in their own careers and making sure that we’re all pointed at the same thing, which is saving lives. This is obviously not some sort of move towards government efficiency, that everything that the Trump and Musk administration is doing right now is entirely done to antagonize workers and make us feel like we’re hopeless. But things like today show us that we’re not and we need to continue doing things like this along in the future to make sure that they can’t move on with their destructive agenda.
Rakshita Balaji:
So hi, my name is Rakshita Balaji Currently I’m a post-baccalaureate fellow, a researcher at the NIH. So what that means is I’ve been spending the last almost two years now post-graduation from getting my undergrad degree working at the NIH and getting training in order to prepare myself for success in my next step of my career stage, which is to go to graduate school and I’ll be a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania coming this fall. So what I’m interested in is neuroscience research, and that’s what my career trajectory has been so far.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. Well, congratulations on your acceptance and good luck. We need you out there. For folks who are listening to this who only see an acronym when they hear NIH, I’m not asking you to sort of describe everything that goes on there, but could you just give folks a sense of who actually works in the NIH and what kind of work is being done there?
Rakshita Balaji:
Yeah, this is a great question and a question. I actually had myself when I was young and going into the NIH or the National Institute of Health, I was 22 when I joined, and I actually also had no idea what goes on behind those gates. And it turns out what I’ve learned so far is that the N NIH is full of awesome people who are passionate about their work, but they’re also not, maybe the scientists you think of in the media that work isolated in a lab in an ivory tower doing crazy experiments. These are people who have families, people who have loved ones who have been affected by diseases and people who really want to make a difference in healthcare in America. And so I just want to first make the point that the NIH is full of regular people who just happen to love what they do and love science, just like everyone in this country is passionate about what they work on.
And so National Institute of Health is comprised by a bunch of different sub institutes. So they’ll work on things like allergies and diseases, cancer, pain, neuroscience, looking at neurodegenerative diseases, looking at aging. There’s a bunch of different types of research that’s going on in order to serve every subset of someone’s health profile and all of the different types of diseases or different afflictions that people can have throughout the us. And what’s also really special about the NIH in particular is their ability to use their knowledge and their resources to target diseases and conditions that are not necessarily as prevalent. So for example, rare diseases where people oftentimes don’t always find care in their own physician settings or don’t always find the right answers, just going to the doctor that doesn’t have the research or the exploratory privileges that people do at NIH. So for example, we look at diseases where the population of people that suffer from them can be so small, yet they don’t go ignored because our clinical center has people who are specialized in learning about specific genetic mutations or specific, I think that’s, yeah, specific genetic mutations for example, or specific diseases that don’t always get studied.
And so the NIH not only tries to serve the general public in terms of looking at complete profiles of people’s health, but they also can target their resources to looking at things that oftentimes go under the radar and give care to people who oftentimes don’t find answers whenever they go to the doctor and they actually find those answers in possible treatments at the NIH.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Could you tell folks listening what these cuts, everything Doge and the Trump administration are doing, what does this all look like from your side of things and how are you and your colleagues been responding to it? What do you want folks on the outside to know about what it looks like on the inside?
Rakshita Balaji:
Yeah, so the first thing that really comes to mind when I was thinking about these cuts, especially what’s happened February 14th, April 1st, it’s almost like a trap door. You’re sort of walking into work, you’re getting prepared. Maybe you got your kids ready for the day, maybe you got up and made breakfast and lunch and you made sure that everyone was ready, you got into work and suddenly the four just falls apart beneath you because you no longer have access to your work email. You no longer have access to your data. You are no longer as appreciated as you thought you once were as a federal employee, and all of a sudden you are left stranded without a job, maybe on administrative leave, not knowing if you’d have the chance to come back. And it sort of is almost like a disappearing act is what it really felt like for no apparent reason.
And that’s the worst part to hear that the numbers are the most important thing. How many people can they get rid of? How many people can they actually eliminate? Rather than thinking about how many lives are actually just being torn from underneath people? That’s kind of all I can describe it as. It’s a really strange disappearing act. You don’t know, we had the manager of our building, someone who takes care of our building when we have leaks or have issues with our labs, be fired on this random day and then reinstated the next. It’s all very chaotic. And this chaos is preventing us from actually being able to move forward with our work, which might’ve been the goal, but actually ends up harming way more people than just us doing the work, but the people that we’re trying to serve. So that’s the best way I can describe it. It was immediate, it was forceful, and it was completely and utterly uncalled for. I mean, we had people who were dedicated employees for over 10 years, 20 years, just suddenly say, I’m no longer able to come in. People who couldn’t even email anyone telling anyone that they were fired and had to shoot texts to people that they knew because they were immediately locked out of their computer. I mean completely. It just felt like a huge slap in the face.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think the response from so many people has been fear and shock, and it’s almost been immobilizing because there’s so many executive orders, so many cuts, so much bad news hitting us day after day, which we know is part of the quote, flood the zone strategy. But what we are seeing, especially in recent weeks is anger, mobilization, organizing and the coming together like today of different unions. So there are different kinds of actions that folks are taking, whether it be going to these town halls and screaming at their elected officials or writing emails or doing mass protests. What we’re seeing here today is more about what unions and what workers can do when they come together with their labor power to fight this. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about that. What is the message here about what workers and unions in these agencies and what the labor movement can do to fight back against the Trump agenda?
Rakshita Balaji:
Yeah, so I think the first word that comes to mind is solidarity. I mean, we’ve now seen that an ultimate betrayal take place from our own employers and from our own administration showing us that we’re not valued. And so the only solace and the primary solace that I think is the most powerful has been within one another. We come into work, the morale has been extremely low. It feels like you’re trudging through molasses just trying to get one day to the other. And really all you can do with all that pent up frustration in order to not let it implode you is to actually share it with others and to bring community about it. And I think the most important thing that our union has brought about is that sense of solidarity, that sense of information, connection, network, especially when the actual protocol for all of these things has been so unclear going from a fork in the road to a riff, more acronyms might I add. The only place that we can really get answers is by sharing information and having open lines of communication with one another. And so the community that we fostered, I think that’s our strength and that’s what we want to preserve through all of our labor movements and unions is to understand that knowledge is power and we’re not afraid to share it with one another. We’re not afraid to speak the truth time and time again and to talk about our experiences and we will not be shut behind a door and left out of this conversation anymore.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what comes next? I guess for folks listening to this, what’s your message about why this is the time to get involved and what they can do?
Rakshita Balaji:
I think with regards to when is the time, my only answer would be when else is the time? This whole period of time since the inauguration has felt like an avalanche, like you mentioned, it’s a barrage of information that usually makes little to no sense and has harmed so many people. So what other time do we have? I think because the only question I’d have, when else do we come out and do this as we need to be active and keep pushing back in the moments that things are happening and that’s how change occurs, what people can do. I think if you’re hopefully angry just like we are, you can call your representatives, keep telling them the stories, especially if you have been a victim of these removals from your job or a victim of the lack of funding for your research or even how this administration has been shaking up your life.
Those are important stories. Your story is as important as everyone else’s, and to not undervalue the power of your voice, whether it’s calling your representative, showing up to these protests, being in unison and harmony with other people, because not only will you find solace in that, but you’ll create strength and to look and try to plug into your local communities as well because typically you’re not the only one who’s going through this. And you can definitely find people who are willing to help you, willing to give you information and speak up. Don’t be afraid to ask questions whether it’s about, regardless of, for example, if you’re worried about things related to your immigration status, if you’re worried about things related to how your funding’s going to work, how you’re going to receive, are you going to receive a pension? These questions that have gone unanswered, echo it as much as you can because through those echoes, you’ll find answers within other people and eventually those echoes will be heard by people who can do more to help make a change and actually protect us from these kinds of ridiculous actions.
And again, if you’re angry, I think anger only will boil up inside of you if you let it fester. So the best thing to do is to release it at places like this, find local movements, do some searching, and look for places you can actually get your voice heard. And I promise that you don’t, don’t feel like you need to be someone special with the name or an acronym that helps you move forward. Just let yourself be heard and give yourself grace during this time too. And I hope that together we’ll be able to make this change together. Don’t lose sight of the power we have within one another when it feels like we’re being towered over. We actually are on an even playing field if we have each other, and we can begin to even that out in numbers if not in position.
Amanda Dykema:
My name is Amanda Dykema and I am a shop steward with AFSCME Local 10 72 at the University of Maryland College Park.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Amanda, thank you so much for talking to me today. I know you got a lot going on and the crowd is dispersing, but I wanted to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what we just witnessed here and what brought all these folks out here to DC today?
Amanda Dykema:
Yeah, well, I think you saw people from all kinds of different unions and different kinds of workplaces who are all impacted by the same thing, which is these cuts that are happening to research and medicine and scientific innovation and education, and they’re hitting all sectors. And what we’re seeing is at the University of Maryland, faculty’s grants that were approved and have been ongoing for years being abruptly terminated with no cause. We’re seeing faculty grants that went in last year not being reviewed on review panels and we’re seeing cancellation of programs that have had huge impacts for things like expanding the STEM pipeline to people who have been historically excluded from it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What’s on the ground impact of this? What would you want folks to know who are maybe just hearing about that and they’re saying, oh, that’s good. That’s eliminating waste. It’s getting rid of woke programs. What do you want folks to know about what these cuts are actually doing to your members and the people who benefit from their work?
Amanda Dykema:
So my members at the University of Maryland, we support all university services. You can see my t-shirt says we run this university. And so what it does for our members is those of us who work for research centers are concerned about the futures of their jobs. And for our students, we’re seeing student workers who are being let go because the funding’s not there anymore. For students who were looking for careers in these sectors who came to the University of Maryland to learn how to do this kind of research, if a research lab gets shut down, they’re not able to learn how to do that. They’re not able to prepare for grad school, they’re not able to go on. But mainly what we’re seeing is a chilling effect that faculty, students, and staff really have to work together and get organized to fight against. They want people to stop this kind of research. They want people to be scared, and we are here to get organized and work together so that we can fight against that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What are the long term effects? If that doesn’t happen, if these things go through unchallenged, what are the long-term effects going to be for the University of Maryland specifically and higher ed in the United States more broadly?
Amanda Dykema:
That’s a big question. I’ll give it my best shot. The University of Maryland is a preeminent public research university. It’s the flagship of the state, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding every single year, and it funds all kinds of work. We heard today from a climate scientist. I work really closely with a lot of people in the College of Education who do work on K 12, and we have researchers in the humanities, in history, in museums, in data science. All of those agencies that fund that type of work have been subject to significant cuts, and those people will not be able to do their jobs or there’ll be a greatly reduced scope and the trickle down effect or the very obvious effect of their research. And when it comes to broader impacts on society, we’re not going to see those things. We’re not going to learn what is the best way to teach kids what is the best way to create climate resilient communities? We’re not going to learn those things if we don’t have this research funding.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So what was the message today about how workers and unions can fight back? I mean, it was really powerful to see so many different unions represented
Amanda Dykema:
Here,
Maximillian Alvarez:
And so that in itself seems significant. But I guess where does it go from here? What can rank and file folks listening to this do to get involved?
Amanda Dykema:
Yeah. Well, the number one thing, I’m going to say it every time is get organized. If you have a union at your workplace, join it. We’re more powerful together. If you don’t have a union at your workplace, work on getting one because we’re not going to be relying on whether it’s the president or whether it’s university administrators. We can’t rely on them to protect us. We have to work together to protect ourselves. But otherwise, the thing I really heard today was a lot about medical advances and people’s health. We’re going to see, if someone is not familiar with a research university, they might not know what this means, but if they go to their doctor and there’s not a clinical trial available for their diagnosis, they’re going to see what it means. And so I think what we’re trying to do now is reach out to our legislators who, the thing I haven’t said so far is that research is a huge economic driver for every state in this country.
And so we’re reaching out to our legislators to say, not only on its merits should this research be funded, but this is going to gut communities. This is people work in these labs and then they go and they spend their paychecks in their hometowns. And so what we’re asking is for people to understand that this isn’t a kind of an ivory tower thing that only impacts universities. It’s a thing that impacts everyone in this country. Senator Markey talked about health doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, and so people need to realize how this will impact them and their loved ones.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, which is like the largest or one of the largest employers of that entire state.
Amanda Dykema:
Exactly. I’m from Michigan.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah,
Amanda Dykema:
Now that you’re listeners will care, but yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and any final messages that you have because we are also at the same time that these cuts are being pushed through experiencing a violent, vicious state crackdown on the very right to dissent against such things to speak out against such things, and universities are becoming the flashpoint for that war on free speech.
Amanda Dykema:
Well, I think the other reason we’re all here today, the people who came to this rally, we work at agencies like NIH and institutions like the University of Maryland, and we have to pressure our administrators to stand strong in the face of this. Trump clearly wants to stifle free speech, but what is a university, if not a place where people learn and grow through free speech expression and exposure to ideas. And so if that’s really our value, we have to call upon not only our legislators, but our administrators at these institutions to stand strong.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank the guests who spoke with me today. It’s cold out here in DC and I’m about to head back home to Baltimore. But I also 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 cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism like this that lifts 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. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez reporting from Washington DC. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
On March 31, also known as Cesar Chavez Day, unions and workers from across California converged on Delano, home of the historic Delano Grape Strike that began the struggle of the United Farm Workers. The Real News reports from the ground, speaking with union and community leaders who say workers are coming together across sectors to oppose Trump’s attacks on immigrants and the federal workforce.
Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Additional Footage: Bucky Gonzalez
Additional Sound: Tom Pieczkolon
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
On March 31st, 2025, thousands of workers from all over the state of California met in Delano, California to celebrate the life and legacy of Cesar Chavez, and stand in solidarity with immigrant workers across the United States. One in every three workers in the state of California are immigrants. And raids by ICE and border patrol agencies on immigrant communities have intensified in the months following Donald Trump’s inauguration in mid-January. In California, all across the state, immigrant workers have been detained and deported. Some of the most harrowing experiences have been in Kern County, in California’s Central Valley, where ICE raids have terrorized the immigrant community and left workers uncertain about their future in the country. In a show of solidarity, union workers from all over the state traveled to Delano to remind the country and each other that these attacks on immigrant workers won’t go unchallenged.
David Huerta:
Today’s also, not only a recognition of that, but also really standing united against the attacks against working people and the most particularly, immigrant workers, right? And so I think we stand today in the sense of saying that we stand shoulder to shoulder with one another, all workers for every worker. Doesn’t matter your status, doesn’t matter what language you speak, doesn’t matter. We have to stand united as working people at this moment in time, as we see this president continuous attacks against working people, and most particularly, against the immigrant community.
Mel Buer:
The Real News joined a caravan from Los Angeles to Delano, organized by the Service Employees International Union-United Service Workers West. Dozens of workers from all over Los Angeles met early in the morning, shared breakfast together, and then made the two and a half hour journey to Delano to march. When asked about the importance of organized labor coming together in support of each other, SEIU President David Huerta had this to say.
David Huerta:
This is the moment in time that as every fight, working people have to stand united. Whether you’re a farm worker, a janitor, a hotel worker, a state worker, a nurse, all of us have to stand together because really with this administration, their attack right now is against federal employees. But that attack against federal employees is just a precursor to what he’s trying to do to the rest of the labor movement, and that’s dismantling. And we cannot allow that to happen because the labor movement is the last line of defense for working people in this country.
Mel Buer:
After arriving in Delano, workers gathered for opening speeches in Memorial Park before beginning the three-mile march to Forty Acres, owned by the United Farm Workers. Members of CWA, the Teamsters, UAW, SEIU, UNITE HERE, and other unions were represented in a massive show of solidarity with immigrant workers in California and the U.S.
Speaker 3:
So I think when we think about what Trump is doing on immigration, it’s an attack on the working class. And not just immigrant workers, the entire working class. When one group of workers is so afraid of getting deported that they’re not willing to talk about wage theft or unsafe working conditions, obviously, that’s bad for them, but that’s also bad for every other worker in that industry. So we’re looking at construction, agriculture, home care, kitchens, janitors, right? If you’re an American worker in those jobs, when undocumented workers who are essential to those industries are in those same battles, they’re afraid to speak out, that’s bad for everyone. So I think it’s literally true that an attack on any worker pushes wages and working conditions down for every worker. And so it’s so important that labor defend immigrant workers. If for no other reason then, we cannot have a labor movement in this country if the immigrant working class, which is such a large and literally essential portion of that working class, is afraid for their very life.
Mel Buer:
For members of the Chavez family, the continuation of their father’s legacy and activism as founder and leader of the United Farm Workers in modern day movements has been a high point of the Cesar Chavez Day in California and beyond.
Paul Chavez:
It’s heartwarming to see that his legacy continues to inspire whole new generations of workers and activists. My dad had commented that it would’ve been a terrible waste of a lot of hard work and sacrifice if his work ended with his life. And the fact that we’re here with people from all walks of life that have come from the many places, and a lot of times from places far away, would put a smile on the face because I think he would say that his work continues even after his passing.
Speaker 5:
And this is a great opportunity for us to do that as a community, as people, especially, people who know the struggles of the people who actually have this country moving forward, those immigrants that at times are abused or do not have the recognition that they should as people that they are. May this moment for all of us be an empowering moment so that we might remember our commitment as Christians to uphold the dignity of those who are voiceless. May we be an inspiration to others to do the same in every aspect of their lives.
Mel Buer:
Reporting from California for The Real News Network, I’m Mel Buer.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Last week, President Trump escalated his administration’s war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.
In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating in protest actions in locales across the US on Saturday, April 5. In this episode, we speak with James Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service, a veteran, and a member of the Federal Unionists Network, to get a firsthand account of the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers, agencies, and the people who depend on their services.
Additional links/info:
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximilian Alvarez:
All right. 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. I’ll be hosting new episodes this month and my co-host Mel er, will be hosting again in May. Today. We continue our coverage of 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. In the last episode that I hosted at the end of February, I spoke with current and illegally fired employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, as well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and we spoke in that episode about what was then a newly launched assault on federal workers, government agencies, and the people who depend on them by President Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge Musk has been granted immense power to cut government agencies and their federal workforce and unprecedented access to sensitive government and citizen data.
Now that assault has continued, it’s hard to sum up the scale and scope of the damage that Trump and Musk are wrecking upon our government and our government workers and contractors right now, all ostensibly in the name of increasing efficiency and rooting out so-called wokeness. But to give you a sense at the top of the show, here’s the latest report from Newsweek. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced across numerous federal agencies. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring plan. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than a thousand scientists and other employees according to the Associated Press. It has also been reported that the Internal Revenue Service or IRS plans to lose about 18,000 employees, about 20% of its workforce.
Meanwhile, former postmaster General Lewis DeJoy told Congress that 10,000 workers at the United States Postal Service would be cut. The Department of Education has announced plans to lay off more than 1300 employees while the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs. According to an internal memo obtained by the AP in March, the Pentagon reportedly plans to cut its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people. At least 24,000 probationary workers have been terminated since Trump took office, according to a lawsuit filed by nearly 20 states alleging the mass firings are illegal. In March two, federal judges ordered 19 federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. Meanwhile, about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for receiving pay and benefits. Until September 30th and last week, president Trump escalated his war on the federal workforce when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions and agencies with national security missions across the federal government citing authority granted to Trump under a 1978 law.
And as the AP reports affected, agencies could include the Department of State Defense, veterans Affairs, energy, health and Human Services, the Treasury, justice and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Now, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has already sued the Trump administration over the executive order to end collective bargaining across the federal workforce. In response to these attacks, union’s, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups and people of conscience around the country are also showing up to local and national protest actions. They’re showing up to town halls with elected officials and making their voices heard, signing petitions and writing letters to their representatives. And one such engaged group includes the Federal Unionist Network, an informal association of federal unionists and their allies on their website. The Federal Unionist Network say plainly that Elon Musk is trying to steal the federal government slashing public services, firing essential workers, and handing power to billionaires like himself.
It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and we won’t stand for it. Through a mass action campaign, federal workers and community supporters will challenge every illegitimate and unjustified layoff. Instead of letting Musk steal their jobs, they’ll show up for duty with a clear message. Let me work. I serve the American people, not the richest man on earth who nobody elected to be my boss. To get an inside view of the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on the federal government and the federal workforce and why you and every working person should care about it, and to talk about who’s fighting back, how they’re fighting back, and what people can do to get involved. I’m honored to be joined today by James Jones. James is a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service based in North Carolina. He’s a veteran and a member of the Federal Unionist Network. James, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it.
James Jones:
Hey, it’s my pleasure, max. Thanks for inviting me.
Maximilian Alvarez:
Well, it’s an honor to be connected to you, although of course, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, which we’re going to dig into over the next 50 minutes. But I wanted to just start here at the top, just getting your response to all this, especially since we’re talking just days after Trump’s executive order to end collective bargaining rights for workers like yourself across the federal government.
James Jones:
Well, I think as far as my union, I’m an A FG member with local 4 4 6 out of Asheville, North Carolina. I live in Boone. We expected a lot to happen from Trump’s first term. He did things to attack our union the first time, and we expected him to do it again, albeit maybe not on this level, but I think maybe some people at the national level of a FG would probably, they probably counted on what was going to happen even with some of the atrocious things he’s done already, a FG and my local both. We’ve been fighting a FG national, they’ve sued the Trump administration over several of these illegal acts he’s done after he came on after his inauguration, like firing a bunch of probationary workers and some other things. And the courts have sided with the unions a FG, especially over some of these illegal acts.
And I think if you read the order, I didn’t read it closely, but it did mention a FG in that order is EO banning collective bargaining for these agencies that are so-called entwined with national security. So to me, it sounds like it’s retaliatory against the unions, the NTEU, the FFE and a FG for bringing suit against Trump because they’re fighting back and we’re fighting back at the local level. We’ve held several rallies in Asheville. We had a town hall here in Boone. Our representative Virginia Fox never showed up. We had a packed house of 165 people and she never showed up to address the constituents in her district, which was expected because we’re a dot of blue and a sea of red here in Boone, North Carolina. So she usually avoids meeting with her constituents in Watauga County. And this Saturday, April 5th we’re we have a mass march in rally in downtown Boone to address the attacks on all these agencies and what it means for the American people. So I’ll be there at that as well.
Maximilian Alvarez:
I definitely want to make sure that we talk a bit more later in the show about the attempt to repeal collective bargaining rights as if you could just sign that kind of thing away and talk about the fight back in more detail ending with the day of action coming up at this weekend. But I guess before we get there, let’s take a step back because so much as I read in the intro, so many federal workers are being impacted by this and the amount of people who depend on their labor is incalculable at this point. But when you start reading just the thousands, the numbers and the thousands of folks who are losing their jobs or getting fired or what have you, it’s really easy to lose sight of the human beings behind every single one of those numbers. And I wanted to ask for folks who are hearing those numbers, but they’re not hearing the human beings behind them. If we could just talk a bit more about your time working as a federal worker and in the National Park Service. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into doing that work and what up until, I guess recently that work entailed?
James Jones:
Yeah, so I started working with the Park Service in 2002. I served in the military prior to that, went to college, got two degrees and decided I didn’t want to do what I had gone to college for, a lot of folks do, I guess, and just took a job with the park service doing maintenance work, and I’ve worked here on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina my whole career. So yeah, I started out as a wage grade eight employee. I worked my way up to a wage grade 10. I’m still a wage grade 10 today, and I enjoy taking care of the park. I enjoy where I work. We have, it’s called the Moses Cone Estate. It’s about a 4,000 acres state that’s part of the parkway proper. There’s 26 miles of historic carriage trails that I maintain. And then there’s some other areas that we try to do historic preservation work to keep the facilities up like the cone manor and the carriage barn and the historic apple barn and that sort of thing.
Over the years, I mean since I’ve been there in 2002, there’s just been a steady decline of money. The budget basically has remained static over that timeframe. It’s increased a little bit over the course of say, 23 years. The budget has remained static, which is basically a budget reduction, cost of living, cost of doing business keeps going up, but your budget remains static. When you lose people to retirement, you’re really not able to cover that position sometimes because you’ve got to cover the cost of living raises, the cost of insurance, and all these other things go up. So over that span of time, we’ve actually lost employees in great numbers. And if you remember back in 2013 when they passed that sequestration bill, the Park service I think in general lost about 30% of the workforce then, and we’ve really never retained that number of employees back since that time.
And so now we’re faced again with a possible 30% cut under DO’S proposal to cut the park service. We’re already lean. I always joke and say, we’re not down to the bone anymore, we’re down to the marrow. We can’t really operate anymore unless we get more money and people and equipment and things to do our job. So it’s been a struggle, especially for the last 12 years, and people are noticing with the proposed doge cuts and what they’re saying about the park service people here in this area, most people love the outdoors. We’re in the mountains. They’re turning out, they’re turning out and protesting this stuff. They don’t want to see their parks decline further than what they already are. They want their parks to be taken care of. And when you still, I think the maintenance backlog now is something like 16 billion for the whole park service. They just don’t have any money to maintain a lot of the facilities and trails and roads and such. So this is just another blow. It’s another gut punch to an agency that’s already suffering from a lot.
Maximilian Alvarez:
James, I wanted to ask a little more about what you were just talking about, right, because I think this is really important for folks to understand that it’s not as if Elon Musk and Donald Trump have come with their axes and hatchets and started making cuts to fully funded agencies. Like you were describing how your agency has been losing budget and people for your entire time working there. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to on a day-to-day level for folks who are still working for the Park service when they have to now deal with an underfunded, understaffed agency and what that looks like for folks who are coming to take advantage of the parks and enjoy them.
James Jones:
Well, I’m sure President Trump and Elon Musk don’t visit national parks and some of the other billionaires that he’s appointed in his cabinet, I am sure they don’t visit those areas public lands because they own their own land. They probably own as much land as some national parks having capacity as far as acreage. But yeah, so any given day in the park service at my park particularly, and I’m sure it’s park wide, I know people that work in different parks around the country, you just don’t get all the work done. I mean, things that need to be tended to, there’s a priority list. Obviously. You got to do the things that take priority over other things. So if you don’t have enough people to take care of what needs to be taken care of, that gets put to the wayside. And then the important things like cleaning restrooms, cutting trees out of the roads so people don’t get the trees driving 50 miles an hour through the park.
I mean, picking up trash. I mean, I don’t do those things, but I do more of the skilled labor. But even then, you’ve got these systems, these infrastructure systems in the park service that are outdated and most of ’em need to be replaced. Water systems, sewer systems, electrical systems. Most of the park service have antiquated systems. I mean, they’re running, some of these systems are probably 60, 70 years old. I mean, they’ve been upgraded some over the years, but a lot of these systems just need a total replacement. And so when more people visit the parks, which is the case year after year, population increases, more people come. We’re not upgrading these systems. We’re not building newer facilities, bigger facilities. We’re not making more parking lots for people because there’s no money. Then it takes a hit, and we have to shut these systems down sometimes because they’re overwhelmed. The water system can’t keep up. Our sewer systems can’t keep up. People park all over the place now they’re beating the sides of the road down the shoulders of the road with their vehicles, and we don’t have enough rangers to enforce a lot of the rules and regs on the parking anymore. We’ve lost a significant number of law enforcement people. So yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t change course and protect our parks.
Maximilian Alvarez:
I want to ask kind of a follow-up question to that. That is really for anyone listening who is still sort of buying into the justifications for this that are coming out of the Trump administration all over Fox News, all over Musk’s, social media, platform X, all that stuff, what would you say to folks out there who are still convincing themselves that, oh, it’s a park. You don’t need that many people. I can just go and walk around. What do I need all these government aid workers for or beyond that, people who are pretending that flesh and blood working people like yourself, maintaining our parks are somehow like this part of this evil deep state bureaucracy?
James Jones:
Well, we’re not. We’re working people. We live in the same communities as these people do. Our kids go to the same schools, they go to the same churches. We go to the same grocery store, whatever. I mean, we’re all part of the community. We’re not some sort of evil sect or cult that we have ulterior motives in the Park Service or any other federal agency for that matter, to do harm to people. And this notion that government workers are lazy, that one always floors me because I know plenty of people in government service that work hard and they’re dedicated to their missions. I sometimes think the public may not understand the depth of some of the work government workers do, because a lot of it is different than the private sector. Government doesn’t operate to make profit. We’re here to serve people. This notion that we should run government like a business, I don’t buy that.
We’re not a business. We provide services. And since we’re not in the business of making a profit, then maybe some people see that as they’re not motivated enough to work hard because they’re not making money. Well, that’s not true. I myself, and I know a lot of other people that could quit government tomorrow and go to work in the private sector and make more money, but we don’t because we enjoy public service. We enjoy providing. Me personally, I enjoy, I take pride in my work I do at Mile Park. I know people come there, they enjoy my area of the park. They tell me a lot. I know people in the community and blowing rock where I work. They tell me, you do great work here. This place is nice. I mean, I take a lot of pride in that, and to me that’s more important than making another $10 an hour somewhere. That’s my take on it. And I think I can speak for a lot of other federal employees and a FG members too that work in different agencies with that.
Maximilian Alvarez:
Well, I’m curious, again, given that you’ve been doing that work for decades and you’ve seen so many kind of changes in American politics and the ways that the population talks about government workers. I mean, I remember what was it like over 10 years ago in Wisconsin, like Scott Walker and the Republicans really rammed through a lot of these same anti-labor policies, including eventually turning Wisconsin into a right to work state in a large part based on vilifying government workers in the ways that you’re talking about. So this problem is not new. I mean, I grew up conservative. I remember us talking about government workers this way when I was a kid. I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about how deep that goes and how it’s impacted you and other government workers and what we need to correct in the ways that we understand the work and lives of our federal workforce to stop falling into these traps that lead to us just not caring when we slash budgets year after year, we lay off more people year after year. It feels like this has been a slow building crisis that’s now just reached a critical point, but the roots of that run deep all the way through your career.
James Jones:
Well, max as well as I do, a lot of politicians hate labor unions. And it’s pretty obvious why, because unions traditionally have always been the tip of the spear to fight corruption. Greed read these businesses that prey and exploit on people’s vulnerabilities. I mean, it’s been going on for well over a century. Labor unions have had to fight and scratch for everything for their members. As Frederick Douglass said back in the 1850s, power concedes nothing without demand. And it’s true. They’re not going to give up anything. The billionaire class, they’re not going to give up anything. They’re just going to keep taking. And it is just sheer greed. It seems to me like a disease. I think the message needs to be that these people, and I think Bernie Sanders does a good job of messaging when it comes. He’s always harping on the billionaire class, these people are greedy.
They want everything you have. They can’t ever get enough. I think he was on the Senate floor yesterday and maybe the day before addressing the Senate, how he’s traveled the country and how so many Americans are fed up with the economy. You have two Americas, the ones with everything and the ones with nothing. I think that has to be the message. And as far as government workers go, we need to be in that category. We’re working people. We are not special people. I think the other problem is too, the government has to abide by the law.
President Obama, when he was in office, he had the standing that the federal government was a model employer, that we did everything by law, by Reg, did the right thing. And I think that we need to get back to that. But in order to do that, there is a lot of, sometimes what people perceive as waste is just the government doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of private companies, I’ve worked in the private sector, they don’t always do what they should be doing. They try every which way in the world to circumvent the law. Cause it costs ’em money if they have to abide by all these policies that the government imposes on ’em. But a lot of these policies are for good reason. They protect people health and safety. Look at osha. When I was a local president, I worked closely with OSHA because when you work for an agency like mine and even the va, and I know people that work at the va, the VA try to cut corners on safety and health, and you’ve got to have some sort of safeguard and check on that. And some people might view that as waste for one example, that it shuts down production so the OSHA guy can come in and check out on everything. But I mean, it’s just the way things have to work.
Yeah, the messaging’s just got to change with federal workers and state workers and local workers. We’re not lazy people. A lot of it’s just things we have to go by through legislative action and law and that sort of thing.
Maximilian Alvarez:
Well, and it makes me think about what you were saying earlier, right, about the fallacy of wanting government to be run a business. That may sound good to certain people in theory, but as someone who my entire job is interviewing workers in the public and private sector, I can tell you that most workplaces are dictatorships where your working person does not have any rights, let alone the right to make any demands on their employers without losing their livelihoods. And so why would we want that to be the model of our government? I think there’s really something missing for folks who really aren’t making the connection between this is how businesses are run and this is how they treat their workers in America, and this is how it’s going to look if that takes over government entirely.
James Jones:
Yeah. To me, corporations are tyrannies. There’s no democratic process with corporations private power. They have a board of directors. They make the decisions. I mean, there are some companies like the automotive industry, the big three where they’re unionized and the UAW has a lot of power and they have good collective bargaining agreements, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t enjoy those benefits and privileges that they have now through a contract. So at least with the government and in unionized workplaces, you have due process with the federal government. It’s a little more restrictive. We can’t bargain over certain things like wages, healthcare, that sort of thing, but we can still bargain over a lot of things that affect our working conditions. And if that’s taken away, then these agencies, a lot of ’em run just like a corporation. They’re a top down. You have no rights. I mean, you have certain rights. I mean, I shouldn’t say that you still have certain rights as a federal worker without a union, but I would prefer to have a union contract over any kind of administrative procedure that I’m granted. I’ll put it that way, because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen how both work. I’ll take my union any day over that.
Maximilian Alvarez:
James, I wanted to ask if you could just follow up on what we were just talking about. For folks out there listening who may not fully grasp the differences between unions representing government workers and other unions that they may have heard of the Teamsters, UAW. Could you just say a little more for folks out there about what the role of a union is for a federal workforce like the National Park Service where you work?
James Jones:
Yeah, so federal unions, they’re like private sector unions, trade unions. They’re there to protect the workers. They’re there to promote better working conditions and that sort of thing that we’re no different in that regard. A FGE, my union, I’m sure NTEU and FFE, they’re there to bargain collectively bargain with their respective agencies, better working conditions. And that can be everything from a grievance procedure to disciplinary adverse actions over time. Your lunch break, when you’re going to take that, your 15 minute breaks. And I want to say something real quick there. Some people don’t realize this. The federal government does not have to give you two breaks during your workday. We have that in our contract. We get a 15 minute break between the start of the shift and lunch and get another 15 minute break between the end of lunch and the end of the workday.
A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to give you that. We have that in our contract. I mean, it’s those little things like that that make a difference. And I’m not saying some of these agencies might be very good and it doesn’t matter, but management comes and goes, and believe me, their solicitor and their HR departments tell ’em what they can get by with than what they can’t get by with. I would much rather have that contract that outlines how they’re going to treat their workers and not having that at all. So generally speaking, most unions, that’s what they’re looking to do is to promote good ties with management, improve the working conditions. We just can’t do certain things. Like the big one is strike. We can’t strike, which is, I get it, you’re a public servant. You go on strike. I mean, the taxpayers, basically, they’re paying you to work. So that was laid out in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.
The other ones are we can’t negotiate pay, we can’t negotiate the amount of leave we get all that is set by Congress. Congress. You probably, a lot of people realize that every year the president presents a budget, Congress approves the budget or they go back and forth until they get a budget. Federal employees usually get, depending on inflation, we usually get two, three, 4% cost of living raise at the end of the year for the following year. That’s set by Congress and the president. We can’t negotiate over that. A lot of private sector unions can, the UAW, the Teamsters, those big unions, they can strike their employer. If they don’t lock what’s happening, their membership votes to strike, they go out on strike. We can’t do that. So we don’t have a lot of power as related to some of those private sector unions. But we still have power as far as establishing certain things, certain rights in the workplace.
And the billionaire class can’t stand that. They pretty much destroyed the private sector unions. I think union density now in the private sector is 7% the last number I looked at or somewhere hovering around that. So we’re now, yeah, it’s probably lower. North Carolina is one of the lowest states. I think it is the lowest state when it comes to union density. The state I’m in, the public sector, unions are up, I think around 30 some percent, maybe close to 40, and they want to get rid of that power. These billionaires, they want to take that away. Just two years ago, we had a decertification drive at my park where a disgruntled employee brought in the National Right to Work Foundation to represent her to decertify the union at my park, and we beat it. And these people, I think the National Right to Work Foundation, they’re backed by the Koch brothers and other big money interest. It doesn’t even matter if these federal employee unions are part of their company, which they’re not. But they know if they can keep undermining that power structure, it helps their cause. And that’s why it’s so important that we fight this and win it.
Maximilian Alvarez:
Well, and there’s clearly some power on top of that that has been frustrating, the Trump administration in terms of the power of federal unions to stall or stop or challenge or reverse these decisions coming from the White House and through Trump’s administration. I wanted to ask from your vantage point from your union, why is he going after the unions and your collective bargaining rights? Trump is claiming that this is a national security issue. Do you believe that?
James Jones:
No, I don’t. It is already in the Civil Service Reform Act. Certain agencies can’t unionize that are involved with National Security, FBI, the CIA, national Security Agency. And then there’s some other smaller agencies out there that kind of fall under that umbrella. Maybe I think some of the department homeland security folks, law enforcement types, I’m not sure, but I think there’s some of those that are excluded. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same old playbook. They use this broad umbrella of saying, alright, all these agencies, I’m going to declare part of national security. They’re not part of national security. I mean, already in the law that there’s certain agencies excluded from unionization because they’re already involved with that. And I fought my own agency over this a few years ago. We had a guy, he was an IT when I was the local president, and they had him mislabeled as non bargaining unit as a non bargaining unit employee like management or HR employee.
And he asked me one day, he’s like, Hey James. He said, I want to join the union, but they say I can’t because I’m non bargaining unit status. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in it. So when I inquired about why they had him labeled as such, they said, well, he sees sensitive information because he’s an IT guy. Well, so what? He’s still eligible to join the union. So I had to file an unfair labor practice and enforce the agency to classify him as union eligible. And so he joined the union, but I mean, they come up with all these, I mean, it’s no different than what Trump’s doing. They come up with all these excuses, these legal arguments that, oh, well, we got to exclude all these people now from collective bargaining, I mean wasn, that wasn’t the reasoning. The reasoning was because a FG and other unions have beat him already on two big cases.
One was the TSA, the other was the probationary people that were getting fired, I’m sorry, the TSA people. That’s still pending, but the probationary employees, and then they filed the suit on the deferred resignation program, which they had to backpedal on that quite a bit. So it is retaliatory for sure. I mean, I would think any judge or judicial panel would see that and say basically what you’re saying about national security, it’s overly broad. It doesn’t apply here because we’ve already got that in the, it’s already covered by, and secondly, it’s clear retaliation. They even mentioned A FGE in the order that they’re thwarting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Well, that’s just too bad. That’s what unions do, protect their members, right? I mean, yeah, it’s insane. It is, but we’ll still be here.
Maximilian Alvarez:
And the thwarting of Trump’s agenda thing, two kind questions on that one. If this executive order just sort of became totally the law of the land and collective bargaining rights were gone from these federal agencies, what would that look like for workers like you and what would that mean for executing Trump’s agenda without the unions getting in the way? Why are they doing this?
James Jones:
Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I think there’s so much animosity at this point. Unions are still going to do what they’re going to do and they would still fight. You would just have to keep filing actions against the government, against his administration, still follow your contract, still file grievances, whatever you needed to do, LPs, et cetera, on fair labor practices. And then wait it out until he’s out and then have your day in court then and bring it all back. I mean, of course I’m not an attorney. I don’t know if they outlaw collective bargaining for these agencies. I don’t know how that would work as far as getting any kind of recourse or being made whole. It probably wouldn’t even happen, but I think they would would still be a lot of resistance toward that. Another thing is, if he’s successful at this, that’s going to be a green light for big corporations to basically go after their unions.
Just like the PATCO strike in 81. I’m old enough to remember that strike. I was 10 years old and I remember watching it on tv and my dad, he was a factory worker, unionized factory worker, and he said, we’ll never get another contract, a good contract because of this. And he was right. That company, he worked for the union basically. Every time they’d go to negotiate a new contract, they just kept losing. They had to concede things. The company would say, they’re going to shut the plant down. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. And it’s just been a steady decline since the PATCO strike. Basically, the Reagan administration said, we’re going to turn a blind eye. You guys want to break labor law. Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that would be the same thing today, if they’re successful with this EO that he just signed s strip away collective bargaining rights. But much worse, I think
Maximilian Alvarez:
I work in the news and it’s impossible to keep up with all these executive orders, right? We’ve talked about on this show, I mean, that’s very much part of the strategy. The flood, the zone overwhelm. People hit people with so much bad news that we just become immobilized and unions may challenge some of them while others get through. It’s been a very dizzying couple months. I wanted to ask what the last two months have looked like from your vantage point in Boone as a government worker in a union that represents workers across different agencies, like from Trump’s to now. Could you just give us a bit of a play by play on how this has all unfolded in your life and how folks are reacting to it?
James Jones:
Yeah, obviously there’s been a lot of uncertainty, especially for folks that probationary folks after he was inaugurated and they first proposed firing all the probationary workers because they were easy to get rid of, easier to get rid of, and that hasn’t worked for him. But still, even these folks that are probationary, they’re still hesitant because they don’t know. Even though a lot of ’em got reinstated, they’re still going to do a RIF probably down the road. Who knows? I mean, I’m sure they will with certain agencies. I can’t speak for my agency. I know they’ve offered another round of voluntary buyouts and voluntary early retirement. But yeah, it’s been stressful. Even folks like me that have a lot of time, and I could have taken that first round of deferred resignation program when they offered it, but I don’t want to retire right now. I’m just 53 years old.
I’ve still got a lot of years left, and I’ll retire on my terms, not their terms. That’s the way I look at it. But yeah, I can’t imagine some of these folks, these folks that are just now getting into the government, they’re scared. They’re scared they can’t plan. I mean, I’ve heard of stories where people moved all the way across the country to take another job. These are people that have 5, 10, 15 years with the government. They took a new job. They were put into, they accepted a new job series, which basically your probationary period starts over. Anytime you leave a job series, go into another job series, you still have a one year probationary period. And then to get fired after you’ve had that many years in to say, well, you’re no longer needed, even though you’ve been a good worker and you’ve had good performance ratings, I mean, it’s crushing for those people, I’m sure.
And not all those people got their job back either. I think out of that 24,000, I think only 16,000 were ordered reinstated. So I can’t imagine having to moving into a new job, federal job, two 3000 miles away where I was at and then told You’re fired after you’re trying to resettle in an area. I mean, it is just cruel, inhumane. It’s just unbelievable. But yeah, as far as my agency goes, we don’t have a lot of people anyway. As I mentioned earlier, we’re down to the marrow. I call it the marrow instead of down to the bone, but I think we lost one probationary worker. That’s all we had when that order was signed. And that person is reinstated, to my knowledge, has been reinstated, but I don’t know what’s to happen with this Vera. The voluntary early retirement authority that came back out and the vsip, the Voluntary Separation Incentive payment Department of Interior offered that.
They excluded my job series on maintenance. The Department of Interior excluded a bunch of jobs from that where you couldn’t retire early law enforcement, firefighting, wildland firefighting, and then the park service excluded just about all the maintenance positions. So I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, so I tend to think with maintenance, the reason they did that is because we don’t have many people anyway, so if they get rid of all the maintenance, just close the parks because you’re not going to be able to go in the park because nobody’s going to be there to do anything. Yeah, but there’s a lot of other jobs I’m worried about that they’re going to try, try to riff. They’ll try to do a riff. If they don’t get the so-called 30% reduction, which nobody seems to know what that means, there’s been no guidance issued. 30% of watt, 30% of this park, 30% across the board, 30% of a certain cap of money that they need to cut. I mean, who nobody knows. It’s kind like one of those things they, they’re just flying by the seat of their pants and doing things, whatever they feel like when they feel like it. So that’s the uncertainty of it too. You don’t know,
Maximilian Alvarez:
James, we talked at the top of this episode about the fact that you yourself are a veteran, right? That you’re union local. A FGE also represents workers at the VA over there in North Carolina where you are near Boone. I wanted to ask just a little bit about that, how all of this is hitting you as a veteran who has served your country and also served your country like working for the Park Service while we’re also seeing these devastating cuts to the VA and so many veterans who are being affected by these cuts outside of the VA even as well.
James Jones:
Yeah, the va, I’m disabled, so I use the VA for all my healthcare, dental, health, vision, the gamut. And one of my providers, I do telehealth quite often just because it saves me from having to drive to Asheville, which is an hour and a half drive and Hickory’s about an hour drive. So I’ve been doing a lot of telehealth appointments over the years and now that a lot of that’s gone because of the return to office mandate. A lot of these counselors and some other people were able to telework at home to treat veterans, especially with mental illness stuff, therapists, certified mental health counselors, that sort of thing. They were working at home and even some of the people in admin that I know that work at the VA national that do billing, they were able to work at home and do billing and this notion that we got to get everybody back in the office because they’re not doing anything.
Well, that’s a total lie and a myth. The VA uses tracking software on these folks that do telehealth. They know when they’re working, they know when they’re not working. They’re not at home doing nothing or doing the laundry or on the treadmill or whatever these people think. I mean, they’re being tracked. They have to meet their production quotas. But now since they’re back in the office, especially like with the care with Veterans Care, now I’m having to wait longer to get an appointment for my mental health counselor because now he has to drive 45 minutes to work to the nearest facility. And you say, well, that’s not much. Well, that’s time. He could be at home working, helping another veteran. I mean, I don’t understand where they get this, that people that telework or work remotely don’t do anything because I’m pretty sure most of the federal government, especially the bigger agency, well even the Park service, we had some folks at Telework, they have tracking software.
They know what they’re doing. I mean, if they’re not working, if they’re down less than more than 10 minutes, they get a text or an email. What are you doing? I mean, I don’t know how it works. I don’t telework, but I’ve been told that by many employees that our union represent. There is accountability with that system. But yeah, that’s just one thing. The other thing with Veterans Care, I think President Biden ordered about 60,000 people hired after the PACT Act was signed in 2022. They needed those people to file more claims to help process claims that veterans were filing after the war in Afghanistan ended in sometime in 20 21, 20 22, I can’t remember right after Biden took office, there’s been a flood of veterans from that era, from Iraq, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have come into the VA fold. Thousands of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, and this administration’s proposing to go back to the 2020 levels of VA staffing.
Are you kidding me? You’ve grown the veteran population tenfold since then. It is not like Secretary Collins. The VA secretary said something the other day on TV about the VA’s not an employment agent. See, dude, dude, you’ve got all these veterans coming back from Afghanistan that are filing even veterans like myself. I filed on the PACT Act. I’m a Gulf War vet. I filed on the PACT Act as soon as it was passed. There’s some Vietnam era veterans that have filed under it. I mean, you’ve got a flood of claims being filed and plus people with real health issues, me included. I’ve got breathing problems. I’ve got all kinds of issues from my surface in the Gulf floor. It’s all connected. And for them to propose to reduce 80,000 positions in the VA system, they call it bloat or waste. It’s a farce. They’re basically sticking their nose up in the air to all of America’s veterans, the people that went over and served their country and sacrificed everything.
Maximilian Alvarez:
I mean, even just hearing that it’s my blood boiling, I can only imagine what it feels like for you and other people who have actually served in the military. I have not. Right, and it really brings us to the point that we’re at now, right? Where I think the rage is really setting in. For the past two months, there’s been a lot of fear, understandable fear. I am a brown tattooed man in the state of Maryland where someone who looks like me just got abducted and disappeared to a fascist colony in El Salvador under a administrative error by the Trump administration, and now he’s going to sit there and languish for who knows how long. I mean, the terror is real. We’re all feeling it in different ways, but I think after two months, the anger is really starting to boil up as well, the need to do something, the need to fight back, the need to speak out, and also the developments that have frustrated the Trump administration’s agenda both in the courts and elsewhere.
So we find ourselves at a very critical moment here at the beginning of April, and I wanted us to sort of end the discussion on that. I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could say more about how you got involved in the Federal Unionist Network, what local unions like yours are doing to fight back and what folks out there listening, whether they work for the government or not, whether they’re in a union or not. What’s your message to folks out there about why they should care about this and what they can do to get involved in the pushback?
James Jones:
Yeah, it’s not just an attack on federal workers. I mean, when the administration attacks, federal workers are basically attacking the American people because federal workers serve the American people. We’ve heard this over and over and over again, but it has to be said again, if you don’t have federal workers, you’re not going to have clean air and water. You’re not going to have safe food. You might not get your social security check. You might get it delayed. I mean, all this is up in the air. Your national parks close or they’ll be restricted to where you can’t access all parts of the park BVA services for Veterans Healthcare Benefit claim processing. That’s going to be reduced, and this is for people that don’t even work for the government, the FAA, they keep our airline, our airways safe, our border people that keep, hopefully they’re keeping the border safe and vetting people that are actually dangerous, that this stereotypical myth that everybody that comes across our border is some kind of criminal is just insane.
That’s scary too. Well, just like you mentioned earlier about the person that they arrested, I think it was in New York the other day, or the El Salvadorian guy, they took what’s next? They’re going to arrest American people, American citizens because they think you might be linked to the Venezuelan gang or something, and like you said, they’ll languish and you sit there in jail without any kind of due process. I mean, it’s just a matter of time if people don’t start fighting this, and I think they are. I mean, it is really, I think in the last two months we’ve seen the tides start shifting. People are starting to get involved, and I work with a group here, it’s called Indivisible Watauga, and I think it’s a nationwide group, indivisible. They’re kind of organizing these marches I think for April 5th, one of the many groups. And I’ve talked with a lot of my friends in Indivisible and in the county where I live, and we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots organizing.
I mean, I’ve been doing it through my union, through these people, but I think that’s what it takes is a collective effort. The united front across the community, your community and the nation to fight this. And I think we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be a fight. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We’ve got to keep the pressure mounted for as long as it takes. I don’t think the courts alone are going to be our savior. I think they’re important and I think they’ll keep things somewhat between the guardrails, but I think the major power here is going to be us. We the people. If you can get out on April 5th, I think it’s a nationwide effort. Find out where April 5th rally is going to be a hands-off rally march slash rally. I think they’re happening everywhere and I think there’s going to be a huge turnout, and I think it’s going to send a direct message to Trump and Elon Musk that we’re not going to take it. You want to try to be a dictator or king or whatever you’re wanting to try to be. It’s not going to work out for you because we live in a democracy and Americans like their democracy and they will fight to keep it.
Maximilian Alvarez:
Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, James Jones, veteran and a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’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, 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 Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story originally appeared in Truthout on Apr. 01, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
On the morning of March 25, farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was forcibly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. People to whom Juarez has spoken say he requested to see a warrant, and when he attempted to get his ID after being asked, the ICE agents smashed his car window and detained him.
Twenty-five-year-old Juarez helped found Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington State, in 2013, when he was just a young teenager. He has advocated around issues like overtime pay, heat protections for farmworkers and the exploitative nature of the H-2A guest worker program. Juarez is a beloved member of the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community, and there’s been an outpouring of support for him across Washington State and the entire country.
Juarez is currently being imprisoned at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. His detention comes as the Trump administration escalates its assault against immigrants and workers. Union members and immigrant rights activists have been detained. The administration has also intensified its attacks on foreign-born students who have spoken up for Palestinian rights, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.
To learn more about Juarez’s situation, Truthout spoke with Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, about the farmworker organizer and his detention, the outpouring of support for him, and more. Franks, who also spoke to Truthout last November about the challenges facing farmworkers after Trump’s reelection, has worked closely with Juarez — who goes by “Lelo” — for over a decade.
Derek Seidman: To start, what’s important for readers to know about Lelo?
Edgar Franks: The most important thing is how much he cares about farmworker issues and how much he has advocated for farmworkers, especially the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community that he’s from. One reason he organizes is because there are so few organizers in the state that speak to the issues of Indigenous Mexicans from his community. He’s very committed to his community and all the issues that affect farmworkers and immigrants. He’s always available, anytime people call him, because he believes so much in the cause.
He was one of the main people who helped start our union. When we first began, it was hard to communicate with some of the workers who still used their native language and didn’t speak Spanish well. Alfredo was key to bridging that communication gap because he spoke English, Spanish and Mixteco. With him, we were able to really get information from the workers about what they wanted and help them organize.
He also helped us lobby for the overtime rules for farmworkers and the rules on climate around heat and smoke. All our recommendations came straight from workers that Alfredo spoke with. He was always talking to workers. He’s also been calling attention to how exploitative the H-2A guest worker program is and how growers use the H-2A program as a tool to take power away from farmworkers. He’s also been lobbying on issues like housing and rent stabilization.
He’s a member of our union who’s been around since the beginning. He’s sort of like a shop steward. Everything that the union has done has Alfredo’s fingerprints all over it.
How do you understand his detention? What’s your analysis of what happened?
ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants.
We believe his detention is politically motivated because of his organizing in the farmworker and immigrant community. We believe he was targeted. The way that ICE detained him was meant to intimidate. They hardly gave him any chance to defend himself or explain. He wasn’t resisting, and he just asked to see the warrant. They asked to see his ID, and right when he was reaching for it, they broke his car window. The ICE agents escalated really fast. From what we heard, it was less than a minute from the time he was pulled over to him being in handcuffs.
I think the intent was to strike fear and intimidate Alfredo, but also to send a message to others who are speaking out against ICE and for immigrant rights, that this is what happens when you try to fight back.
In past years, we’ve seen people getting pulled over and asked for their documents, but now it’s becoming more aggressive. ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants. It’s free rein for ICE to do whatever they want. When you have federal agents with no real oversight, it empowers them to be violent and coercive over everybody. The tone being set by the Trump administration gives ICE agents and Border Patrol the feeling that they’re unstoppable. That’s really concerning.
Can you talk about the outpouring of support for Lelo?
It’s been great to see the huge support for Alfredo. It speaks to how much of an impact he’s had in the state and all over the nation. It’s been really nice to see the solidarity from people that probably never even met him or knew anything about the farmworker struggle, but who know an injustice has happened.
There was a rally on March 27 organized by the Washington State Labor Council, which represents all the unions in Washington. They showed up at the detention center calling for Alfredo and another union member, Lewelyn Dixon, to be freed. For us as a union, it’s most important to see our labor family stepping up. During the presidential campaign we saw how workers and unions were being used by Trump, but now all of our labor folks are seeing what’s really happening here, which is that Trump is using immigrants to attack workers and unions. It’s been great to see labor really stepping up on the side of immigrant workers.
What affects everybody else affects immigrants. At the end of the day, we all want food and housing and good schools. Immigrants have nothing to do with the rising costs of housing, or gas or eggs. The difficulties that are really affecting people’s lives are not caused by immigrants. They’re caused by the system and by billionaires like Elon Musk. The frustrations that people feel are real, but their anger is being pointed at immigrants, and that’s not where the anger needs to go.
How is Lelo doing? What have you heard?
He’s obviously upset. He misses his family and friends. He’s also been very moved by all the actions that are happening. But when some of his supporters went to go see him last week, you know what his message was? To keep fighting and keep organizing. That gives us strength and confidence to move forward. Lelo wants us to fight, so we’ll fight. If he’s fighting on the inside, we’ll keep fighting for him on the outside.
He now has legal representation, which was also a big concern for us. We can fight as much as we want on the outside, but we really need fighters in the legal system to help Alfredo. We’ll be there for whatever the legal team needs to uplift his fight, including creating pressure in the streets.
Lelo’s detention is coming amid a larger crackdown in the U.S. Do you see connections?
Lelo is concerned about others who are being detained. Lewelyn Dixon is a University of Washington lab technician and a SEIU 925 member. She has a green card and has been living in the U.S. for 50 years. She’s at the Tacoma detention center.
From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer.
There’s the case of immigrant rights activists Jeannette Vizguerra in Denver. There’s the case of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and other students being detained who speak out about Palestine. It’s not a coincidence anymore. This is the trend now, and it’s really concerning. The U.S. talks a lot about repressive governments in Venezuela or Cuba, but we have political prisoners right now in the U.S.
Do you think Lelo’s detention is part of a larger plan to attack farmworker organizing?
From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to send a chill among farmworker organizations that had been gaining momentum. It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program.
We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult. All the gains that have been made in the last couple of years for farmworkers are at risk.
What are you asking supporters to do?
Alfredo’s big on organizing. Wherever you are, there are similar struggles that are happening. Whether you’re in New York, Florida, Texas or California, there’s organizing for immigrant rights and workers that needs just as much support as he does. We should go into our local communities and support those organizing campaigns.
We should see Alfredo’s case as an example of how effective he is and how much that threatens the establishment. But at the same time, he wouldn’t want people to stop organizing because he’s detained. He would want people to organize even more.
You’ve worked closely with Lelo for over a decade. What are some memories that come to mind that tell us more about who he is?
When we first started organizing in 2013, he was only around 14 years old. A lot of farmworkers didn’t know how to speak English, and so these workers, who were grown adults, would ask Alfredo to present their case. He was just a young teenager, basically a kid, and he was given the responsibility to represent farmworkers at speaking engagements with hundreds of people. And when he went, he spoke eloquently for over an hour about the life of being a young farmworker and why farmworkers needed a union. The campaign was maybe two months old, but he had already captured the idea of why unions were important at such a young age.
I remember all this because I would have to drive him around since he was too young to drive! So I would take him to talk to churches, or unions, or other groups around the community. He was doing all this when he was 14 years old. I was amazed. I couldn’t speak for two minutes without getting nervous, but here was this 14-year-old who could talk for an hour!
He was also asked to go to the 2022 Labor Notes Conference to present on the work of the union, and I just remember how excited he was that Bernie Sanders was going to be there. He got the opportunity to give Bernie a letter about our campaign to oppose the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. He was so excited about meeting Bernie Sanders.
He’s still like a little kid (laughter). He likes Baby Yoda and likes to watch animated cartoons. He tries to enjoy being young. He’s really humble. He’s 25 now, so almost half of his life has been toward organizing. It’s amazing just how much he’s been able to accomplish even as just a young man.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
On the morning of March 25, farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was forcibly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. People to whom Juarez has spoken say he requested to see a warrant, and when he attempted to get his ID after being asked, the ICE agents smashed his car window and…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Mar. 28, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
In his broadest attack on federal workers and their unions to date, President Donald Trump on Thursday announced an Executive Order that claimed to end collective bargaining rights for nearly the whole federal workforce. Early estimates have the move affecting 700,000 to 1 million federal workers, including at the Veterans Administration and the Departments of Defense, Energy, State, Interior, Justice, Treasury, Health and Human Services, and even Agriculture.
This gutting of federal worker rights has the potential to be a pivotal, existential moment for the labor movement. It is a step that recognizes that the Trump administration’s rampage against the federal government is hitting a roadblock: unions.
Much remains to be seen: How quickly will the government move to execute the order? How much of it will stand up to challenges in court? Members of the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), who have been protesting ongoing firings and cuts, are holding an emergency organizing call on Sunday, March 30.
The move echoes past attacks on federal and public sector unions, including President Ronald Reagan firing 11,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Reagan’s move signaled “open season” on the labor movement, public and private sector alike.
The dubious mechanism that Trump is using to revoke these rights involves declaring wide swaths of the federal workforce to be too “sensitive” for union rights.
The Executive Order claims that workers across the government have “as a primary function intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative, or national security work.”
Historically the interpretation of this has been much narrower. While CIA operatives have not been eligible for collective bargaining, nurses at the Veterans Administration have. These rights have been law since the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and in various forms for years prior, starting with an executive order by President Kennedy in 1962.
For example, the Veterans Administration has the largest concentration of civilian workers in the federal government, with more than 486,000 workers. The Trump Executive Order declares all of them to be excluded from collective bargaining rights.
The order names 10 departments in part or in full, and eight other governmental bodies like agencies or commissions, ranging from all civilian employees at the Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency to all workers at the Centers for Disease Control (a part of the Department of Health and Human Services) and the General Services Administration.
Federal unions immediately denounced the Executive Order, promising to challenge it in court. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal union, said in a statement that AFGE “will fight relentlessly to protect our rights, our members, and all working Americans from these unprecedented attacks.”
It is unclear how quickly the federal government and its various agencies will act to nullify contracts and all that come with them.
At the Transportation Security Administration, where collective bargaining rights were axed in recent weeks, the impact was felt immediately: union representatives on union leave were called back to work, grievances were dropped, and contractual protections around scheduling were thrown out the window.
Some protests already in the works may become outlets for justified anger about the wholesale destruction of the federal labor movement.
Organizers with the FUN, a cross-union network of federal workers that has jumped into action as the crisis has deepened, are organizing local “Let Us Work” actions for federal workers impacted by layoffs and hosting the Sunday emergency organizing call March 30.
National mobilizations under the banner of “Hands Off” are also already planned for April 5.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Joe DeManuelle-Hall.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
President Donald Trump’s latest attack on the working class was delivered in the form of an executive order late Thursday that seeks to strip the collective bargaining rights from hundreds of thousands of federal government workers, a move that labor rights advocates said is not only unlawful but once again exposes Trump’s deep antagonism toward working people and their families.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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.
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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.
Libby Lindsay spent 21 years working underground as a miner for Bethlehem Steel in West Virginia. She saw many safety improvements over the years, and always felt grateful that she could call the local Mine Safety and Health Administration office whenever she wondered whether a rule was being followed. She joined the safety committees launched by the local chapter of the United Mine Workers, which collaborated with the agency to watchdog coal companies. She understood the price that had been paid for the regulations it enforced. “Every law was written in blood,” she said. “It’s there because somebody was injured or killed.”
Still, she and others who work the nation’s mines worry President Trump is about to limit the agency’s local reach. As his administration targets federal buildings for closure and sale, 35 of its offices are on the list. Fifteen are in Appalachian coalfields, with seven in eastern Kentucky alone and the others concentrated in southern West Virginia and southeastern Pennsylvania. Of the remaining 20 offices, many are in the West, in remote corners of Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado. Miners’ advocates worry these closures could reduce the capacity of an agency that’s vastly improved mining safety over the past 50 years or so and could play a vital role as the Trump administration promotes fossil fuels like coal, and as decarbonization efforts increase the need for lithium and other metals.
Since its inception in 1977, the agency has operated under the auspices of the Department of Labor to reduce the risks of what has always been one of the world’s most dangerous jobs. Before Congress created the agency, known as MSHA, hundreds of miners died each year, in explosions, tunnel collapses, and equipment malfunctions. (The number was far higher through the 1940s, often reaching into the thousands.) Last year, 31 people died in mining accidents, according to the agency’s data. Even after accounting for coal’s steady decline, that tally, while still tragic, reflects major strides in safety.
“Coal mining is a tough business. It’s a very competitive business. There’s always a temptation to compete on safety, to cut corners on safety, to make that your competitive advantage as a mine operator,” Christopher Mark, a government mine safety specialist who has spent decades making the job safer, told Grist. “And it’s our job to make sure that nobody can do that.”
Trump’s pick to lead MSHA, Wayne Palmer, who is awaiting confirmation, previously was vice president of the Essential Minerals Association, a trade association representing extraction companies. The Department of Labor declined to comment on the proposed lease terminations. A representative of the U.S. General Services Administration, which manages federal offices, told Grist that any locations being considered for closure have been made aware of that, and some lease terminations may be rescinded or not issued at all.
Many of the country’s remaining underground coal mines – the most dangerous kind – are located in Appalachia. MSHA has historically placed its field offices in mining communities. Although the number of coal mines has declined by more than half since 2008, tens of thousands of miners still work the coalfields. Many of them still venture underground.
The dwindling number of fatalities comes even as the MSHA has been plagued by continued staffing and funding shortfalls, with the federal Office of the Inspector General repeatedly admonishing the agency for falling below its own annual inspection targets. It also has recommended more frequent sampling to ensure mine operators protect workers from toxic coal and silica dust. After decades of work, federal regulators finally tightened silica exposure rules, but miners and their advocates worry too little staffing and too few inspections could hamper enforcement.
“There are going to be fewer inspections, which means that operators that are not following the rules are going to get away with not following the rules for longer than they would have,” said Chelsea Barnes, the director of government affairs and strategy at environmental justice nonprofit Appalachian Voices. The organization has worked with union members and advocates for those with black lung disease to lobby for stricter silica dust exposure limits.
Last month, the United Mine Workers’ Association denounced the proposed office closures. As demand for coal continues to decline, it worries that companies could pinch pennies to maximize profits — or avoid bankruptcy. ”Companies are completely dependent upon the price of coal,” said Phil Smith, executive assistant to union president Cecil Roberts. ”[If] it’s bad enough, they think, ‘Well, we can cut a corner here. We can pick a penny there.’”
The Biden administration made an effort to staff the agency. In the waning days of Biden’s term, Chris Williamson, who led the agency at the time, told Grist he was “very proud of rebuilding our team” because “you can’t go out and enforce the silica standard or enforce other things if you don’t have the people in place to do it.” The union worries that the Trump administration, which has pursued sweeping layoffs throughout the government, will target MSHA, where many of the Biden hires remain probationary employees. Despite the previous administration’s attempts to bolster the agency, it still missed inspections due to understaffing.
Anyone who isn’t terminated will have to relocate to larger offices if Trump shutters local outposts, placing them further from the mines they keep tabs on. In addition to inspecting underground mines at least quarterly and surface mines biannually, inspectors make more frequent checks of operations where toxic gases are present. They also respond to complaints. Work now done by people in the offices throughout eastern Kentucky likely would be consolidated in Lexington, Kentucky, or Wise County, Virginia, which are 200 miles apart.
Field offices have been consolidated before, and mining experts acknowledged there may be a time and a place for such things, but it’s highly unusual to close so many without due process. In early March, the House Committee on Education and Workforce submitted a letter to Vince Micone, the acting secretary of labor, requesting documents and information on the closures and expressing concern that as many as 90 mine inspection job offers may have been rescinded. Their letter specifically referred to the agency’s history of understaffing that led to catastrophes like the Upper Big Branch mine explosion that killed 29 people in 2010, the nation’s worst mining accident in four decades.
“One of the lessons of the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, according to MSHA’s own internal investigation, is that staffing disruptions at the managerial level resulted in MSHA’s inspectors failing to adequately address smaller-scale methane explosions in the months leading up the massive explosion that killed 29 miners fifteen years ago this April,” read the letter, which was signed by Democratic representatives Bobby Scott of Virginia and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota.
The impact of potential cuts stretches far beyond coal, into the mines that will extract the lithium and other metals needed for clean energy and other industries. As of last year, the nation employed almost 256,000 metal and nonmetal miners who pull copper, zinc, and other things from the earth. “It’s an agency that matters, regardless of how we’re producing our energy,” said Chelsea Barnes of Appalachian Voices.
After spending so much time in the mines, Lindsay is concerned by the direction the Trump administration is heading, even as lawmakers in states like West Virginia and Kentucky have in recent years attempted to roll back regulations. “That’s going to be the future of MSHA,” she said. “They’re going to be in name only. Miners are going to die. And nobody but their families are going to care.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump administration moves to shutter mine safety offices in coal country on Mar 25, 2025.
This post was originally published on Grist.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
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