Within weeks, the nation will deploy 9,000 people to begin restoring landscapes, erecting solar panels, and taking other steps to help guide the country toward a cleaner, greener future.
The first of those workers were inducted into the American Climate Corps on Tuesday during a virtual event from the White House. Their swearing-in marks another step forward for the Biden administration’s ambitious climate agenda. The program, which President Joe Biden announced within days of taking office in 2021, is a modern version of the Climate Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era project that put 3 million men to work planting trees and building national parks.
During the ceremony, the inaugural members of the corps promised to work “on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.”
The American Climate Corps was among the first things Biden announced as president, but it took a while to secure funding and get started. More than 20,000 young people are expected to join during the program’s first year, according to the White House, with new openings appearing on the American Climate Corps job site in the months ahead. The pay varies depending on the location and experience required, with open positions ranging from around $11 to $28 an hour.
The administration is promoting the corps as a way for young people to jump-start green careers. In April, the White House announced a partnership with TradesFutures, a nonprofit construction company, a sign that the program might help fill the country’s shortage of skilled workers who can help electrify everything. The White House will also place members in so-called “energy communities” like former coal-mining towns to help with environmental remediation and other projects.
“Whether it’s managing forests in the Pacific Northwest, deploying clean energy across the Southwest, or promoting sustainable farming practices throughout the heartland, the president’s American Climate Corps is providing thousands of young Americans with the skills and experience to advance a more sustainable, just tomorrow,” White House climate advisor Ali Zaidi said in a press release on Tuesday.
The launch of the American Climate Corps might appeal to the young voters who were crucial to Biden’s victory in the 2020 election over President Donald Trump and many of whom, according to polls, aren’t sure they’ll vote for him again. This same demographic supports climate action, surveys show, with more than three-quarters of younger Americans, both Republicans and Democrats, saying they want the United States to take steps to address climate change.
The pledge the corps members swore to on Tuesday was written by Barbara Kingsolver, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who famously explored the consequences of climate change in her 2012 novel Flight Behavior. Kingsolver told Grist that the climate corps is “one of the most exciting things that’s happening in the country right now.” She has seen rising concern among younger generations inheriting a warmer world. “I’ve always thought that worry can be a paralyzer or an engine that puts you to work, and that you’ll go farther and feel better if you put your worry to work,” she said.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on June 18, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Amazon Labor Union members voted June 17 to affiliate with the Teamsters.
Workers cast 878 ballots at JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center on Staten Island, N.Y. The tally broke down to 829 votes in favor of the affiliation and 14 against it; 10 ballots were spoiled.
Total turnout was 11 percent out of 8,000 workers. However, workers estimate the workforce has dipped to between 5,000 and 6,000 workers during the off-peak season.
A Teamsters statement said the union will now “represent the roughly 5,500 Amazon warehouse workers.” Turnout works out to 16 percent based on that number.
“On behalf of the Amazon Labor Union, I’m proud of our members choosing a path to victory. We’re now stronger than ever before,” said ALU President Chris Smalls said in a statement.
“Having the support of 1.3 million Teamsters to take on Amazon gives us tremendous worker power and the opportunities to demand better conditions for our members and, most importantly, to secure a contract at JFK8.”
The affiliation agreement charters a new local known as Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ALU-IBT Local 1), for the five boroughs of New York City. That may signal that Amazon workers will not be integrated into existing locals with other Teamster crafts.
“Together, with hard work, courage, and conviction, the Teamsters and ALU will fight fearlessly to ensure Amazon workers secure the good jobs and safe working conditions they deserve in a union contract,” Teamsters President Sean O’Brien said in a statement.
The ALU is the fledgling independent union that sent shock waves through the labor movement two years ago when it won a landmark election to organize 8,000 workers at Amazon fulfillment center JFK8 on Staten Island.
The union’s current leadership and the reform caucus both backed the affiliation and had met together with O’Brien and other Teamster officials in Washington, D.C., on May 20, after weeks of conversations about what an affiliation would involve.
“The ratification vote by our members is a historic moment—and it sends a powerful reminder to Amazon that we’re not giving up in our years-long campaign for respect, better wages, and safe jobs,” said Connor Spence of the ALU Democratic Reform Caucus. Spence is running for president of the local and was one of the key organizers of union drive at JFK8.
“Affiliating with the Teamsters and chartering a strong, autonomous local union signals a new chapter for so many working people and for this industry.”
NEW ELECTION
Amazon workers will soon vote on their union leadership. The mail-in ballots go out June 27 with a return deadline of July 18. The American Arbitration Association is running the vote.
The affiliation agreement says the Teamsters “will provide resources to effectuate an internal election for ALU-IBT Local 1 in a manner so that potential officers may reach, with equal access, as many eligible members in JKF8 as possible.”
The internal election became possible only after the reform caucus sued the union last year for violating the ALU’s constitution because it “refused to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”
The ALU was supposed to hold elections within 60 days after the National Labor Relations Board certified the union. But before the NLRB certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership, changing the timeframe for officer elections to after the union ratified a contract with Amazon.
The reform caucus asked a Brooklyn court to compel union leaders to hold an election. The court did so.
THE MAIN SLATES
Current and former members of the ALU executive board are running on the slate ALU-Ma-at, on a platform of truth, justice, and harmony—the qualities of the ancient Egyptian goddess Ma’at.
Leaders said the slate’s main focus is to get a contract. Claudia Ashterman is running for president, Tyrone Mitchell for vice president, Rina Cummings for recording secretary, and Arlene Kingston for secretary-treasurer.
The ALU-Ma-at slate is backed by Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, and Jordan Flowers—the founders of the Congress of Essential Workers that later formed the ALU.
The Amazon Labor Union Democratic Reform Caucus slate includes Spence for president, Brima Sylla for vice president, Kathleen Cole for secretary-treasurer, and Sultana Hossain for recording secretary.
This slate is proposing major reforms to the union: creating a system of stewards, allowing members to vote on and approve budgets, hiring an external firm to conduct financial audits quarterly, and expanding the executive board from the current four officers to 20 to 30 JFK8 workers.
A third slate known as Workers First! is led by Michelle Valentin Nieves, a former ALU executive board member and a key leader in the union. It is made up of current JFK8 workers. Some of the people running on the other slates have been terminated, pending the results of unfair labor practice charges.
Ashterman and Kingston were key leaders in the successful union drive at JFK8. They mobilized Black Caribbean workers and helped build a culture of support by cooking West Indian staples like jerk chicken and curry goat. “To bring people together, people in the Caribbean cook,” said Ashterman, who has four years at Amazon.
The union was certified in January 2023. But Amazon has been pulling all the stops to challenge the election through the courts. Two and a half years later, it’s still refusing to bargain—and donations have dried up.
Amazon spent more than $3 million on anti-union consultants last year. The Teamsters told the ALU, according to the New York Times, that it has committed $8 million to support organizing at Amazon, including tapping the union’s strike fund of $300 million to aid in efforts to organize workers at the logistics behemoth.
“We didn’t know it would take so long to get a contract,” Ashterman said. “We depended on funds from whoever donated. That’s exhausted.”
Ashterman is known as a fighter inside the warehouse. “I had to fight Amazon tooth and nail for this walker,” she said. In 2020 she demanded that Amazon allow her to sit while she stuffed boxes. After multiple abdominal surgeries, she argued that with the high pace of work she could risk a fall without proper accommodations. Eventually the company agreed.
STEWARDS NETWORK
Hossain, running on the reform slate, said June 12 that she was voting yes on the affiliation—the Teamsters resources could help.
“But I do believe that organizing needs to happen bottom-up,” Hossain said. “It’s about the rank and file coming together and demanding more for themselves. And that is how we plan on organizing a national coalition.”
Reform caucus leaders say they’ve built a stronger organizational structure inside the warehouse than the official union has—including an informal steward structure and job actions like marching on the boss. The current ALU leaders have adopted a grievance handling process overseen by Rina Cummings who was paid to fulfill the role until the union ran out of funding. But the approach was more service-oriented, including helping workers apply for unemployment benefits.
Cummings shared the example of a worker who Amazon alleged had stolen a co-worker’s Uber Eats order. Because stealing was against company policy, Amazon denied the worker unemployment benefits.
That stands in stark contrast to the class struggle orientation of the ALU reform caucus.
While leafleting outside the warehouse entrance in June ahead of the Teamster affiliation vote, a handful of workers marched on Amazon management to deliver a petition demanding Juneteenth as a paid holiday, part of a petition coordinated across Amazon facilities in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.
Jessica Marrero is one of the workers who has been supported by this stewards network. She credits Cole, another candidate on the reform slate, with walking her into HR and getting her reinstated. She had been fired for job abandonment after an injury.
“My hand got caught in the conveyor belt,” she said. “I ended up tripping over a bunch of boxes causing a sprain in my hands and in my wrist, and it caused a contusion between my fingers. They yell at you about safety, but they don’t do anything about safety in there.”
Since its blockbuster win in 2022, ALU’s efforts to make inroads at other Amazon facilities have gone down in defeat. The union has also faltered in efforts to bring Amazon to the bargaining table.
These organizing failures gave rise to the caucus, which won the right to hold democratic elections for the union’s top spots.
As the ALU struggled to advance further at Amazon, workers at the air cargo hub KCVG in Northern Kentucky, who had begun a card drive with ALU, voted in April to affiliate with the Teamsters. The tug and ramp workers at a nearby DHL facility had joined the Teamsters and won a lucrative first contract in January.
The Teamsters launched an Amazon Division last year to bring together various organizing efforts under one big tent. Teamster activists and staff have been involved over the past three years in supporting Amazon workers in building organizing committees in key metro regions across the country.
Amazon Teamsters have extended picket lines to other Amazon facilities, after delivery drivers organized in Palmdale, California, last April. These 84 workers were nominally employed by a contractor, Battle-Tested Strategies—one of 2,500 “delivery service partners” that carry out package deliveries while Amazon retains full control. Amazon illegally terminated their contract.
Since then, more independent groups organizing at Amazon have worked with the Teamsters, hoping the union can help them.
PERMATEMPS
Eligible voters in the ALU-IBT leadership election will include all current employees who are not seasonal workers.
That’s a sore point as Amazon has leaned into hiring more permatemps. Amazon organizers estimate a third of the warehouse is made of permatemps known as white badge holders. Permanent employees wear blue badges. Organizers say permatemps can’t hold those positions for more than eleven months, but Amazon promotes people into permanent positions arbitrarily.
Ray Bowie started working at JFK8 seven months ago and he said people in his same recruitment class have moved to blue badges while he hasn’t, in spite of asking HR about moving to a permanent role.
Amazon warehouses across the tri-state area, including the sortation center LDJ5 across the street from JFK8 warehouse, are running a petition demanding conversion to permanent status after 30 days of employment.
Even though Bowie can’t vote in the officer election, he supports the union, citing a case involving his god-brother’s wrongful termination for job abandonment when security cameras showed him being wheeled out of the warehouse and put into an ambulance.
“Even one of his supervisors went to the hospital to visit him the next day, and he wound up getting fired because he couldn’t come to work because he hurt his leg,” said Bowie.
The worker found out he was terminated via an email. While hospitalized, he didn’t check his phone. “When he returned to work, he just tried to scan his badge to come in and it didn’t work.”
Like dozens of workers at the facility, the slog to get a contract hasn’t diminished their support for a union because their lives are replete with stories of how Amazon forces them to work long days to the point of injury and limits their time off, including to go to the restroom.
“Now I understand the amount of work that they expect us to do and the pay it just doesn’t add up,” said Bowie. “I mean, they really want you to be robots in there.”
As he said those words, I pointed to the hoodie he was wearing spelling out in bold white letters against navy blue: “JFK8 World Class-Talent Machine!”
Although Donald Trump has been eager to garner support from American labor unions for his re- election campaign, there are lots of reasons he’s not going to get it. Chief among them is his record in sabotaging the nation’s labor movement.
During his decades as a wealthy businessman, Trump clashed with unions repeatedly. And, upon becoming President, he appointed people much like himself―from corporate backgrounds and hostile toward workers―to head key government agencies and departments. Naturally, an avalanche of anti-union policies followed.
Under Trump, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)―the federal agency enforcing the nation’s fundamental labor law, the National Labor Relations Act―led the charge. Instead of following the intent of the 1935 legislation, which was to guarantee the right of workers to union representation, the Trump NLRB widened the basis for denying that right. According to the NLRB, the nearly two million Uber and Lyft drivers, as well as other workers in the gig economy, were not really workers, but independent contractors and, as such, not entitled to a union. The NLRB also proposed depriving graduate teaching assistants and other student employees at private universities of the right to organize unions and collectively bargain.
When it came to the reduced number of workers still eligible to form a union, the Trump NLRB adopted new rules making it more difficult for them to win the employee elections necessary for union representation. The NLRB hindered union activists’ ability to organize workers during non-working hours and, also, allowed employers to gerrymander bargaining units. In March 2020, the Trump NLRB used the excuse of the Covid-19 pandemic to suspend all union representation elections and, thereafter, allowed mail ballot elections only if the employer agreed to them.
Unlike their Trump-appointed managers, many NLRB employees, as career civil servants, resented the agency’s shift toward anti-union policies and sought to enforce what labor rights remained under the National Labor Relations Act. But the new management undermined their ability to protect workers’ rights by refusing to fill vacancies, thereby hollowing out the agency. As a result, the number of NLRB staff members dropped by nearly 20 percent.
Major federal departments moved in the same anti-union direction. Trump’s Department of Education scrapped collective bargaining with the American Federation of Government Employees and unilaterally imposed a contract curtailing the union rights of the department’s 3,900 workers. Trump’s Department of Labor removed requirements that employers disclose their use of “union-busting” law firms (a practice in 75 percent of union representation elections at an estimated annual cost of $340 million). And the Department of Justice, in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in the Janus case, delivered what was expected to be a devastating blow to public sector unions.
Janus v. AFSCME Council 31 was the culmination of lengthy efforts by big business and reactionary forces to cripple unions representing teachers, firefighters, and other public servants by slashing their source of income: union dues. In the past, the courts had ruled that, even if a public worker chose not to join the union, the worker, in lieu of union dues, would still have to pay “fair share fees” to cover the costs of collective bargaining and administration of the union contract. In the Janus case, though, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling, prohibited public sector unions from charging fees to nonmembers for representation. In this fashion, the narrow Court majority (including all three of Donald Trump’s appointees) established a significant financial incentive for millions of workers to stop paying union dues and become “free riders,” securing union benefits without paying for them. To widespread surprise, though, union-represented workers simply stuck with their unions and went on paying union dues, thereby foiling this Trump administration gambit.
In addition to relying on his appointees, Trump took direct action as president to undermine American unions. Kicking off Labor Day in 2018, he denounced the nation’s top labor leader, Richard Trumka, president of the AFL-CIO, stating that Trumka’s policies explained “why unions are doing so poorly.” In 2020, after the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act―billed by the AFL-CIO as “the most significant worker empowerment legislation since the Great Depression”―Trump blocked the legislation from moving any further by threatening to veto it.
Trump’s disdain for the American labor movement continued in the years after he left office. In August 2023, attacking the newly-elected, dynamic leaders of the United Auto Workers (UAW), he told UAW members that “you shouldn’t pay those [union] dues because they’re selling you to hell. Don’t listen to these union people who get paid a lot of money.” That October, he insisted: “The auto workers are being sold down the river by their leadership.” In fact, though, that November, UAW president Shawn Fain and his team led one of the most impressive nationwide strikes of modern times, securing wage raises for auto workers of at least 25 percent, as well as boosting retirement contributions and other benefits.
Not surprisingly, the UAW doesn’t have much respect for Donald Trump. In January 2024, the 400,000-member union endorsed Joe Biden for re-election, with Fain remarking that Biden “stood with the American worker,” while “Trump has a history of serving himself and standing for the billionaire class.” These remarks echoed Fain’s comments of a few days before, when he called Trump “a scab” who “stands against everything we stand for as a union.”
The AFL-CIO, which unites most of America’s unions, delivered a similar appraisal in a press release (“Donald Trump’s Catastrophic and Devastating Anti-Labor Track Record”) the preceding September. “Trump spent four years in office weakening unions and working people,” it maintained. “We can’t afford another four years of Trump’s corporate agenda to … destroy our unions.”
If Trump expects significant union support this November, it’s merely another of his many illusions.
On June 10, in the working-class community of Curtis Bay in South Baltimore, over 50 residents, activists, and supporters from around the city marched through the streets of Curtis Bay to hold CSX Transportation accountable for polluting their community, homes, and bodies with toxic coal dust. Even after an expansive scientific study co-sponsored by the Community of Curtis Bay Association, the South Baltimore Community Land Trust, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, and the Maryland Department of Environment confirmed the presence of coal dust in the air of the South Baltimore community of Curtis Bay, CSX has denied culpability and called the study “materially flawed.” Residents say they’re fed up with the company refusing to take responsibility for the coal dust, and with the city government for ignoring their cries for help for years, and they’re not going to stay quiet.
“We got to stand together for Curtis Bay, for South Baltimore,” one resident and youth leader, Carlos Sanchez, told the crowd. “We have to remove CSX for the health of our communities.” With other locals watching from their porches, sidewalks, and storefronts, the crowd marched from the Curtis Bay Rec Center all the way up to the gates of the CSX terminal. There, they signed and delivered a giant “Eviction Notice” to CSX, a company that recorded over $10 billion in gross profits last year. In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Curtis Bay residents on the day of the march and takes you to the heart of the action.
Speakers in this episode (in order of appearance) include: Shashawnda Campbell of Baltimore Community Land Trust; David Jones, a resident who has lived in Curtis Bay for over 35 years; Angie Shaneyfelt, a resident who has lived in Curtis Bay for 17 years; Angela Smothers, a lifelong resident of Mt. Winans in South Baltimore; Carlos Sanchez, a youth leader born and raised in Lakeland, South Baltimore; Roma Gutierrez, a lifelong resident of Brooklyn, South Baltimore, and an environmental organizer and youth leader with South Baltimore Community Land Trust; an unnamed representative of Malaya Movement Baltimore; and Maria Urbina, a South Baltimore resident.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Crowd Chants:
Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like! Show me what democracy looks like. This is what democracy looks like!
Maximillian Alvarez:
Those are the massive coal piles right there that you can see piled up around the CSX terminal here in Curtis Bay. Baltimore.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, welcome everyone to another special on the ground episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. I’m recording this on Monday, June 10th. It’s about two 30 in the afternoon. Here we are at the Curtis Bay Rec Center in Curtis Bay, which is a community here in South Baltimore where residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore communities are gathered here to deliver evidence and testimonials to CSX transportation, the Rail Giant in response to CS X’s statements denying that their coal export terminal causes harmful pollution.
Crowd Chants:
What do we want? Air to breathe! When do we want it? Now! What do we want? Air to breathe! When do we want it? Now!
Shashawnda Campbell:
And so we are here today to say you are going to be held accountable. This is happening. People testifying about what it’s like living next to this cold peer dust is getting in their homes, dust is getting in their lungs, and they’re afraid of what it means for their health. And that is a problem in itself. And not only that, we had amazing students in amazing universities that came together to help us do a cold report that was launched that talked about coal is in the community. So not only do we have those testimonies, but we also have that research which people always say you need this research. To some people like myself, the stories is enough, the testimonies are enough, but we did do that too. And still that was not enough. That isn’t enough. And so we are here to say no more.
This is enough. We’re giving you the testimonies, we’re giving you the research. And they’re still saying that’s flawed. That’s not true. That’s not true. And it is true. And that is all we need to know to be here today. And so today, what we want to do of all, we’re going to let them know we’re not going anywhere. This is going to, you’re going to have to change. The minimum things you can do is in the transition of stepping away from coal because we know it’s going to happen. Cover up the coal here, cover it up. That’s the least you can do to say you’re working with communities if you want to take a step in that direction, which they haven’t done yet. But that’s a way to show that they’re trying to minimum be good, but they’re not. And so if they minimum can’t do that, and then also stand with people that we want to face, coal out coal is not even an industry that’s going to last long anyway.
It should have been faced a long time ago. And so we are also going to evict them. We’re going to evict them today and yeah, evict them, evict the excess today. But another thing that we want to say is that there was a settlement that did happen to that tune of 1.7 million for residents, which is a win. Yes, but it’s not really a win. When you look at how much money this corporation has, it has billions of dollars. This is a slap on the wrist and if this is the only slap that they’re going to get, they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing. And so that’s not enough. That’s not enough at all. It’s not enough to cover the health damages that’s happening to people. It’s not enough to cover the experiences that people aren’t getting to simply open their window and feel a breeze.
Those experiences are missing in this community and there is communities that probably can’t even imagine what that feels like, but it is time to not imagine it anymore because it’s time to say no more. We want to open windows. Windows should be open. People should feel a breeze. People should feel comfortable walking in their community and not worrying about what they’re breathing in. And so we are here today to say, enough is enough. We’re not here again to do the same thing we done last time. We’re not going to go, oh, lemme tell you all these stories again. We’re not going to be like, lemme tell you about this research again. We’re going to actually going to play those testimonies that already been stated by people. We’re not going to keep having ’em repeating themselves, repeating themselves, repeating themselves. So we’re going to play those testimonies and we’re actually going to do that in silence for them to say, your story is enough. That’s all that matters, right? If they want to worry about the research, they can look at the research. It’s available and and that moment we also, again, we want to tell those stories and then since those stories have been told, the research has been done, like I said, we’re going to evict them. So we’re going to put those signs up. We got lungs out here today to remind them this is what people are afraid of. Those lungs are black. People are afraid of that.
David Jones:
I want to say thank you for everybody coming out today for sticking through with this fight. Even though sometimes it feels like we’re not getting any traction and we’re not going to win, we are going to win this. Unfortunately, this has been generational and this has going on too long. And for me, the next place we need to take this is to Annapolis. We need to fight in Annapolis because we need to let these people know that we’re tired of fighting in our own community and not getting anywhere. We’re tired of saying the same thing time and time again and no one doing nothing about it. I want to be able to breathe clean air. I want my grandson to be able to breathe clean air. I want everybody in this community to be able to breathe clean air and it’s time to say enough’s enough. And it’s a time to evict CSX out of this community just along as the other industries in this community. Thank you.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Hey guys, I’m Angie and I’ve lived in here in this community for 17 years. I’ve not opened my windows for 17 years. Time is over. I’d like to open my windows and breathe fresh air, but I can’t. We don’t have it here. We need it here. Yeah, I’m just done. And how dare them even discount our citizen science with Johns Hopkins. Hello? Where did their people come from? No, we worked hard and it’s proof that we deal with it every single day. Just two days ago I was watching out my back window and saw the coal wafting off of the coal pile, but their coal is not in Curtis Bay. It’s from spares point. No, no, just no. And we’re done. We’re really done. Let’s get this out of here. Let’s breathe clean air now guys.
Crowd Chants:
No more coal in Curtis Bay!
Angela Smothers:
Thank you guys for the invite. My name is Angela Smothers and I’m from Mount Winans experiencing the same issues that ongoing here. I’m a lifelong resident of Mount Winans. Before the last interview guys, they said you didn’t even look up. Well, I want to look up to each camera now to let you know that this isn’t a fight that is going away. I even went as far as to bring my medication. I will give each including CSX, the opportunity to go into my medical records so they can see where this is not medication for an allergy medicine. I mean a seasonal allergy medication. This is something that I’m required to take every day if you can hear my voice. I didn’t take my medication today on purpose because I want you guys to hear what I sound like not being able to take. It’s as if I’m having to get an extra wind to be able to speak, to breathe.
I shouldn’t have to live like this. That’s right. So CSX cameras every camera where I want you guys to know that I am an open book. You will see that I was a healthy person living in Mount Lions, enduring all of these issues that’s taking effect. Now, I can’t say a name, but I have a friend of mine that I grew up with that’s dying noun in hospice. Noun. You know what I mean? From cancer, from living in the community that I share Mount Winans, that’s also experiencing the transporting of the coal un tarped. We know you are not going anywhere, but you can definitely help us live a more productive, healthier lifestyle. You have the resources to do so and all. We ask that you stop taking profit more serious than the people that is living amongst, you know what I mean? The way that you transport the coals that you are making billions, trillions. That’s all we want. We’re not trying to put anyone because we know people do make a living off of your railways. However, just help us live a little longer. Help us be able to see our grand babies fight another fight. But this fight right here, it’s been ongoing. I’ll be 57 if I’m lucky, June the 17th, and to be subjected to what I’m subjected to for 57 years of my life. It is time for it to end CSX. You got to go. If you can’t work with us, you got to go.
Shashawnda Campbell:
Now, we’ve heard from residents that live here in those testimonies. Again, sorry for you guys to keep repeating yourselves. You shouldn’t have to, should have been heard the first time. But now we’re going to talk about some of these amazing students, which I want everybody to put your hands together for all of the students that see, they’re not just here today just showing up as a body. They have been doing the work, okay? They have been getting to it. And that’s why we’re going to have Imma come up here and tell you guys some of the work they’ve been doing and how they’re moving science in this community.
Roma Gutierrez:
Hello, my name is Roma Gutierrez and I am really happy to be here. I am from Brooklyn, Baltimore, which is right adjacent from Curtis Bay. I’ve grown up here my whole life. So I’m an environmental organizer and the youth leader working with South Baltimore Community Land Trust. And they partnered up with Charmed last year with Johns Hopkins University. Last summer, a group in youth. We went to different places in South Baltimore and we researched lifelong community questions for CSX because they had been harming the community for so many decades. We needed evidence for this. So we had, the questions were how far, how fast and if it was detectable, if the code dust was detectable offsite, CSX code terminal and the chain tracks. So we had different methods. We had tape strip methods and we had tape samples. We had them up for at least a month to see if the coal dust was accumulating in the South Baltimore. And it was accumulating in South Baltimore. We found that they were accumulating, you could actually see the coal dust on the tape strips. And we tested it on an electron microscopic, and we do have scientific evidence that it was detectable. And we want to stop this. We want to stop it now. We had it last year, but now we can actually stop it. Go green and yeah,
Shashawnda Campbell:
Y’all give it up for again for them and all that work they did. They did the science behind the testimonies. And we thank y’all for that. We thank y’all for stepping up and sure out everything y’all do, and they are here today. That just shows you how important this issue is, right? Look around, look at all the people you see. This issue is important because it’s affecting all of us. Even if you don’t directly live in Curtis Bay. This is being transported throughout the city. So no matter where you live, you, the air is going flow, you are breathing in the same air we are breathing in. So this is your fight just as much as it’s ours.
Carlos Sanchez:
How’s everybody doing today? That’s good. I’m really excited and really happy to see how many people showed up with a small amount of time we had. But just a few words, this is like Shonda said, today’s the day that we’re evicting CSX. So we got to say it loud, say it proud. This is our community. This is our home. And we have to continue putting pressure on facilities like this for our sake, for our health, for the health of our communities, for kids, for our families. This is a fight long from over and together we’ll be able to accomplish so much. And we’ll start off by with this march, we got to stand strong. We got to stand together for the Curtis Bay, for the South Baltimore. We have to remove CSX for the health of our communities.
Crowd Chants:
People united shall never be defeated. The people united shall never be defeated. The people united shall never be defeated. Curtis Bay united shall never be defeated. Curtis Bay united shall never be defeated.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
My name’s Angela Shaneyfelt, I live in Curtis Bay. I’ve lived here for 17 ish years. I’m married with a husband that’s older than me and twin girls that are 11 that we’re adopting hopefully at the end of it, we’ll see. Yeah, and I’ve just been fighting this since the explosion in 2021.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Angie, yeah, thank you. But you’ve been like, as everyone here can attest, yourself included, you’ve been dealing with it long before that,
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Right? Very long before it. I have not opened my windows in 17 years or 16 years.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Tell me a little bit more about that. I guess just for folks who are listening to this, who heard the first episode that we did with your neighbors from South Baltimore, which you were supposed to be on with us, but then your phone died. So folks are getting to meet you finally now. But I wanted to ask if we could just do a kind of shortened version of your history in Curtis Bay and how you’ve been dealing with this up until the explosion in 2021 and then how that got you into the fight. Yeah.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Well, I opened, we moved here because this is where our money took us. I grew up in Pasadena, not too far from here, and then lived on the other side of the bridge on the tunnel in Middle River, Essex. And then landed here just because that’s what we could afford a whole house for $2 more than the apartment we were living in. And we opened our windows the first year. We’re here. That’s what you do on a nice day, no matter where you live in America or wherever. And then we realized that we are having this black dust in our house on everything carpet, on upholstery, all of it. And so then it was just, you get tired of being tired of cleaning everything on a daily basis and wiping down everything. So it came down to just we don’t open the windows anymore. And then now the bridge collapsed and we actually did open our windows, which is weird. And we’re like, oh yeah, we didn’t even realize it. But the air felt different. It wasn’t as heavy as it had been for so long.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, can you say a little more for that for folks who are not in Baltimore? So yeah. So since the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed two months ago, what has that meant for you all here in South Baltimore?
Angie Shaneyfelt:
It’s meant a little bit quieter. We still hear the trains, but not as much. While the channel was shut down, now open, but less train noise, less just coal in the air, just blowing around it. Just crazy. I didn’t realize it at first until, I think it was last month, we were at a community meeting and another person, another community member said, I actually got to open my windows. And I was just like, oh yeah, we did that too. You’re living your every day. And there was just, the heaviness was lifted for just that little bit. And then of course the next week the channels open and we’re hearing the trains again. And I watched a coal pile. I live right up the street, directly line sight, direct line sight from the coal pile. And it sat for the two months and it didn’t go down and go back up. But then it did get a little bit, I guess they were still collecting it to be shipped out and it did get as high as they could possibly get. And then in a day it was gone. Wow. Just to be filled back up two days after that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. The channels shut down. So that’s where a lot of this coal’s going. Yeah.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
And even it’s crazy because not too far from here is where they lined the train cars up, the open air train cars. And it was weird even to see that was even less that the Francis got key bridge collapse, didn’t completely shut ’em down. They still heard it and the lines go through or whatever, but it was just a pause. And then I saw on the news that they were boasting about how while they were shot down, they were able to regroup and make it to where they can ship out even more than what they already were doing. Really? How much more do we have to take really? I mean, I’m thinking of moving in two years to buy a house. Is it going to be in Kurdis Bay? Absolutely, a hundred percent. 110% not. But I’ll still be here. I’m still rooted here. I’m still connected here. So I’ll still fight the fight even though I’m not in the community. So
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, because I mean, how much of this can any one person or any one family or any one community take how sick and twisted is that where we live in a country where you got to hope that a bridge collapses in your city so that the coal traffic coming through the pier and into your community is decreased for just two months so that you can open your window.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
We can have a little bit of clean air, not completely, but a little bit of clean air. Go out and breathe what fresh air, really what fresh air because we have nothing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And that’s like, again, it’s literally present around you. Me, right now we are standing here at the Curtis Bay Community Center. It is a lovely day. It
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Is. And it’s windy. And I’m sure if these white buildings were not here, I just saw it Saturday looking out my back door. My husband noticed it. The wind was blowing and it was the pile you could see, physically see the dust just swooping up and just blowing. He was like, Ange, come look at this. The coal is just, the dust is flying and he doesn’t pay attention to anything outside of four walls of our house. So that’s for him to notice. No offense to him, but he older and he doesn’t care about, unless there’s fire engine lights outside of our door. Then he kind of, what is that? And I’m the one that goes out and looks,
Maximillian Alvarez:
But that’s again, all to the point that you can’t even enjoy a beautiful day like this with your community without worrying about what you’re inhaling.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Am I going to have an asthma attack? My kids have seasonal asthma, you egg, coal and pollen. And that’s not anything anybody. Just the stickiness of that into your lungs, like, ugh, I’ve had to do inhalers when I never had to before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
One of the most tragic lines from that podcast I did with some of your neighbors a couple of weeks ago was from a woman who said, I know so many people who walk around with oxygen tanks.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Oxygen tanks. We don’t go, my kids don’t go on field trips without carrying an inhaler with them just in case because they’re going somewhere else outside of here and it’s almost like a dome effect. They’re going to be breathing in fresh air. So when you get fresh air in, it’s got to make room and you’re going to be coughing up stuff possibly.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I know I got to let you go in a second, but I wanted to just ask if you could say a little more about how the peer explosion in 2021, I guess for listeners who will link to some articles about it in the show notes. But can you just take us back to that moment and why, what it meant for you and getting into the fight and what you were doing here today, what the purpose of this gathering is?
Angie Shaneyfelt:
Well, to start, I had covid on that day. It was when they had the 10 day quarantine. I lost my sentence now, and you you’ll see why that’s so important in a second. When I tell you what happened in the sense, so my one daughter and myself both had Covid 10th day of quarantine and I was just in my house. So I’m doing what I can just not go insane. One bedroom,
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’ve been there, Sis.
Angie Shaneyfelt:
So I came downstairs, I’m standing in my living room, I think I came down to get a trash bag or something, I don’t know. And I’m standing in my living room and you could feel it. Windows are closed. Mind you, we don’t open windows. You could feel it like a sonic boom. So you felt the pressure and it was just increasing. And I’m standing in my house in the middle and I’m looking around and I’m just like, what is going on then? Then I heard it the boom and I’m like three blocks up and one block over from where it exploded at. And then I’m doing the mental checks that I know that I’ve done before in this community for other things. And I’m just looking around. I’m like, okay, the electric’s on. That’s fine. There’s no busted windows. That’s fine. There’s nobody shooting outside of my house.
Okay, I think I’m fine. And then I look and my daughter, my husband, I’m in quarantine. So he went to Dunking for a Dunking run and he had just wrecked the car a little bit prior to that. So it was even a thing for him to be even driving. And so I look at my kids and my one daughter’s looking at me, she doesn’t know. She’s like looking for direction without saying anything. My other daughter mentally checked out. We don’t do, she doesn’t do fireworks very well. Even before this, she doesn’t do balloons very well. And I had to tap her on her chin three times to say, it’s okay, it’s okay. And when I looked in her eyes, she was not there. And that’s the scariest thing that I’ve ever even experienced in my life. I’ll take anything over that because what do I have to deal with past that?
So then my husband later had said that when he was driving up the hill, it felt like the back tires of the car lifted up off the ground. And with him just wrecking a car, he got out. When he turned, he got out and he checked all the way around the car to make sure everything was fine. I don’t know if it actually lifted up. I wasn’t there. But yeah, it was just insane. So just that, and that’s what drove me to her being mentally checked out was what drove me to the city council hearing. And they even wrote notes, they’re 11 now. So 20, what? Three, four years ago they were like, what? Seven, eight. So they wrote notes that I read in the city council hearing of their impact and she made a sign for today, CSX or MDE, let us breathe.
Crowd Chants:
Get off it. This planet’s not for That’s bullshit. Get off it. This planet’s not for profit!
Shashawnda Campbell:
I am Shashawnda Campbell and I work with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Shashawnda, thank you so much for chatting with me today. And we are standing here at the Curtis Bay Rec Center talking about what this community can do to keep this coal dust out of their lungs, out of their homes. I was wondering if you could just say a little more to the folks who are listening to this about you, where we are, what y’all are fighting for, and what folks in Baltimore and outside of Baltimore need to know about why we’re here today. All
Shashawnda Campbell:
Right. We are here today because just like any community, your community, your family’s community and just communities that we are fighting to keep this community safe, we are fighting because this community has been dealing with the brunt of cold dust getting everywhere in the community in their homes. They can’t open their windows and just have a nice breeze on their face in the springtime. They can’t do that. And that’s a problem when people can’t simply open their windows in communities. And we brought that forward for many, many years we’ve been saying that and nothing happened. And so since the explosion that happened at CSX closed pier in 2021, people have been taking so many steps to be proactive to say they don’t want another explosion. We learned from the first time we don’t need an explosion to say that this coal dust is getting out to immunities.
We don’t need an explosion to say that coal, coal, it is explosive. It can explode. And so we are really trying to hold CSX accountable to not only just that explosion, which they are saying, yes, that happened, but to the constant cold dust that’s getting out and into people’s houses, into people’s lungs that they’re worried about. They’re scared to say, what’s happening to me when I’m bringing in all this cold dust? And so we are here to say that enough is enough. And we had done a report working with students from the local high school, Ben Franklin, where I went and where a lot of the amazing students that’s here today goes, we have worked with them and then universities like Hopkins was one of them, the Bloomberg School and then also just many scientists around coal to make sure that we can actually determine that coal justice in the community. And we’ve done that and we put that report out. And CSX is saying that it’s flawed, that it is non complete and that it’s not true and that’s not okay. So we are here to say it is true first of all, and you hear these stories and testimonies from people that’s telling you it’s true. That’s enough. We also done a title six complaint to say, first of all, outside this complaint, not about necessarily the cold, but just around the incinerator that’s here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, there’s a whole lot of other pollution…
Shashawnda Campbell:
But all of these things are actually a together, because what it is doing is creating a tive impacts where it’s not, we don’t know who’s doing what, right? But with the code, it’s not a mystery to know what this black substance is. We know it’s coal dust, right? And so it’s a direct linkage between that. And we want them to stand firm in that. And we also want them to pay for it. You have to pay for the damages that you’re costing and to pay for something, you have to admit you’re doing it. And they did have a settlement that just came out to the tune of 1.7 million to residents and the residents to be able to get some of that money for that explosion that happened. But that’s not enough to a billion dollar company. That’s nothing. That’s a slap on the wrist.
And it’s also not accounting for the constant coal dust that’s getting off their premises into communities, which is hazardous because coal is a hazardous material, which anyone will say. And so we are really here to say, first of all, you need to be held accountable and we need our city to also hold them accountable. We need our city to stand with us to say, this is not okay. That explosion had brought to our eyes that this is not safe for communities. Save it right all this time. And so what we are doing today is telling them, if you are not going to change a minimum, cover up the code. That’s minimum you can do. That’s a direct thing you can do to show residents that you are listening to them and that you want to actually be helpful in the community. But they’re not going to do that because they don’t want to be. They want to do whatever they want to do. They want to allow the cold dust to happen and not be held accountable. And we’re saying today, that’s not going to happen. You’re going to be held accountable or you’re going to get out of the community. That’s the goal today. And we’re super excited to have everyone out here to read that same message
Crowd Chants:
When the land we love is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back! When the water we drink is under attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back! When the planet we need is undera attack, what do we do? Stand up, fight back! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!
Malaya Movement Rep.:
I wanted to speak in the international. This is the same playbook they do in the Philippines. They do in Congo, they do in South America. It is the same tactics over and over to put profit over the people in the Philippines where we see foreign companies putting in their mining operations and the runoff poisoning the soil of farmers who don’t even own their land. They can’t even eat the food. They grow much less even keep it because most of it is exported. We see when profit is put over the people our everyday lives, people are saying here, you can’t even open the window to enjoy the weather, to even breathe in the place you live in. So I wanted to speak today and thank you for hosting this event, but also show support of solidarity across the ocean, across national Borders. At the end of today. Climate change. These horrible things that companies will put our communities through will not benefit us. And it is only benefiting a few small percent of the population that are going to have so much more wealth than we’ll ever know what to do with. They’re not the ones that keep our world together to keep us running together, to keep us healthy. We are the ones that do that together here today. And thank you all for coming out.
Shashawnda Campbell:
First of all, I just want to concur to that message. I want to say I agree wholeheartedly. This is not only a Baltimore issue. This issue is across many cities and states and even international. We see the same problem. But I want to thank you all first. I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have to be here today. I’m sorry this is happening. I want to say that first and foremost because I don’t want to romanticize this in any way. It’s a terrible thing. It’s very terrible. But I do thank you guys for also being the people that’s feeling the burden of these systems and then also being out here marching on the front line. Y’all are doing the thing. So I want to congratulate you guys for taking back your community. No matter where your community is, even if your community ain’t things up, Baltimore, you take back your communities because like you said, we take care of each other. We care about our house. We are here for people. When they are putting profit of us, we are putting ourselves over that profit. So I thank you all for standing here today. I don’t want to make y’all stand too much longer, but we do got March back. So we going to start back. If y’all feel any spirit to jump on this mic, I’ll pass the mic. So just let me know whenever y’all feel that spirit. Alright. Is y’all Ready? I need Y’all to be louder than that. We trying to stop coal today.
Crowd Chants:
What do we want? No coal! When do we want it? Now! And if We don’t get it? Shut it down!
Hey, hey, ho ho, fossil fuel’s have got to go! Hey, hey, ho ho, fossil fuel’s have got to go!
Carlos Sanchez:
My name is Carlos Sanchez. I am a youth leader with the South Baltimore Community Land Trust.
Maria Urbina:
My name is Maria Urbana. I’m just a resident around here supporting the cause. Hell
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, it’s great to meet you in person, listeners of the show. We’ll recognize you from the last episode. Got to chat with Angie, another one of your neighbors here in South Baltimore. Before the march, and we just concluded the march, we are back here at the Curtis Bay Rec Center. After marching with dozens of folks to the CSX rail terminal where residents and supporters issued an eviction notice to CSX saying, get out. No more coal, no more poisoning our communities. Talk to us a bit about what we just saw here happen and why it’s important.
Carlos Sanchez:
Yeah, of course. Well, you get saw here today was the amount of support that is here in the community, not just in the community, but outside of the community. This is something that is affecting the community, it’s affecting everybody. And you’re kind of seeing how everybody came together in such a short amount of time. I think it was like a week ago that we started, but it’s powerful to see how many people came out in a short amount of time for the cause to get CSX out of the community. We have community signs done. We have support and stuff to show that what people are breathing in and what have been breathing in for decades. It’s true. It’s true what people are saying, they’re breathing in coal dust and we know that there is no level amount of particulate matter or coal dust that it’s safe to be breathing in.
And having people out here all wanting the same thing, which is CSX, to go and have the state to do something about this really shows a lot. This is something that all residents, not just in Curtis Bay, but in all South Baltimore, Lakeland, cherry Hill, Mount Winans, Westport, all the South Baltimore communities are facing not just with the terminal, but with the rail cars. With the rail cars. And so this is one march out of many. It is a still start and it’s still a long way to go. But at the end of the day, this is all about getting what the community needs. And that’s clean air and cleaner communities.
Maria Urbina:
It’s really important that CSX gets evicted because they’re trying to kick out actual residents of the community when we were here first. And it’s not fair that we’re having to breathe and the consequences of what they’re doing to our air, our community.
Carlos Sanchez:
And I would like just to add on to that because what happened was that when somebody talked to Sheila Dixon and asked her about question, Hey, what do you think about the Curtis ban, the overburdened with polluting industries like CSX. And the first response was maybe move everybody out and make it all industrial. That’s what happened. To Wagners point, that’s what happened. To Hawkins point, that’s what happened to Fairfield. There were three communities already there that were completely just moved away, wiped out of existence to make more room for industrial. So if it’s just a repetitive thing, why is it? And clearly it’s not working. Why is it the communities that have to leave? Why is it the people? And at the end of the day, if it’s just keep on this repetitive thing where it’s just kick out the communities, you’re going to end up kicking out all of South Baltimore. That was a quote that somebody in the community said, you’re just going to end up kicking all of South Baltimore.
Crowd Chants:
We are unstoppable. A better world is possible. We are unstoppable. A better world is possible. We are unstoppable. A better world is possible.
One hundred years ago this month, I was reminded by Portside’s “This Week in People’s History” feature (5/29/23), a constitutional amendment passed both houses of Congress, with large majorities, and went to the states for ratification. It remains a proposal, not a law, to this day, because the necessary three-quarters of states didn’t accept it.
The proposal is the Child Labor Amendment, giving Congress authority to regulate “labor of persons under 18 years of age.”
Efforts to protect children from dangerous work continued anyway, of course, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act included prohibitions on children under 14 working in most occupations. Separate rules have been crafted for agricultural jobs (which is its own story).
Popular concerns used for private ends
Notre Dame professor David Campbell (Washington Post, 4/23/23): Because “a bill [that] will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions…sounds wildly unpopular…you have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights.”
In the last four years, state legislatures in at least 28 states have taken up proposals to roll back child labor protections; 12 states have passed such laws.
In April 2023, the Washington Post (4/23/23) reported on the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, that’s crucially behind these state-level moves to undermine rules to keep children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. The Iowa state senate had just approved an FGA-maneuvered bill letting children as young as 14 work night shifts.
Post reporters Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl explained how the group has worked systematically, if stealthily, to push state policy to the right on things like restricting access to anti-poverty programs and Medicaid expansion.
Despite what is, on examination, a broad deregulatory agenda, the FGA, with some 115 lobbyists in 22 states, presents child worker bills as part of a cultural debate about “parental rights.” They aim to remove “the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” a representative said. One bill, in Georgia, would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
Besides a warning to legislators, such a report ought to have been a call to reporters: Beware of “grassroots” efforts that suspiciously mimic the goals and language of this right-wing interest group, with its undeclared intent to use popular concerns to advance private ends.
‘Shocks the conscience’
Steve Benen (MSNBC, 4/19/24): “Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.”
Over a year later, child labor rules are still in the news: Early June saw a Labor Department lawsuit against Hyundai after a 13-year-old girl was found working a 50- to 60-hour week on an Alabama assembly line (CBS, 5/31/24). It “shocks the conscience,” said one official.
Before that, we had the Louisiana House voting to repeal the law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks (MSNBC, 4/19/24). Many of my child employees want to work without lunch breaks, claimed bill sponsor and Republican state representative and smoothie franchise owner Roger Wilder.
But what about the puppetmasters? A rough Nexis test I did found that over the last three months, a search for the term “child labor” in US newspapers gets 740 results. Add the words “Foundation for Government Accountability” and the number drops to 14.
Does every story on child labor need to mention the advocacy group? Of course not. But if you consider the rollback of child labor laws a problem, connected to other problems, then calling groups like them out adds something key to understanding that problem and how to address it.
Featured image: MSNBC depiction (4/19/24) of a child agricultural worker. An estimated 500,000 minors work in the farm sector in the United States, some as young as 12 years old.
Dozens of containers of tomato paste exported from Xinjiang to Italy are the subject of domestic criminal and international complaints filed by rights lawyers on behalf of Uyghur advocacy groups who allege that the goods were produced using Uyghur forced labor.
They were among 82 containers of agricultural products from China’s state-owned Xinjiang Agriculture and Animal Husbandry Investment (Group) Co., Ltd. shipped by rail and sea from Urumqi, capital of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, to southern Italy in late April, according to the plaintiffs.
The shipment also sparked outrage among Italian farmers who protested against the arrival of the cheaper processed tomato products from China in what they said were unfair imports.
Xinjiang, a major producer of tomato products, accounted for at least 80 percent of the total tomato products produced in China in 2023, according to Chinese figures.
Uyghurs and other Turkic groups in Xinjiang have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party for decades, including being forced to perform labor that benefits state-owned companies.
On May 30, StraLi filed a criminal complaint demanding that the goods be seized as evidence and that a criminal investigation take place on behalf of the World Uyghur Congress and the U.K.-based Lawyers for Uyghur Rights.
It also filed a submission to the U.N. Working Group on Business and Human Rights on June 3, requesting a communication to the Italian government to seize the goods and investigate the companies involved in the importation.
The EU’s 27 member countries must approve the Forced Labour Regulation for it to enter into force and will have three years to implement it.
Protesters in Salerno, Italy, oppose the arrival of containers of tomato paste allegedly produced by Uyghur forced labor in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, May 29, 2024. (@coldiretti via X)
“This legal challenge addresses both violations of fundamental principles of human dignity and international law instruments, as well as calling for the seizure of these recently imported goods under national law,” said a statement issued by these groups on June 3.
The groups have presented evidence from Adrian Zenz, senior fellow and director in China studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, highlighting the prevalence of forced labor products from Xinjiang, the statement said.
StraLi lawyer Loide Cambisano, who’s in charge of the case, said this was not the first time that goods produced with Uyghur forced labor have been exported to Italy.
“Agricultural products and tomatoes in particular have arrived in Italy from the same region in China,” she told Radio Free Asia on June 4. “It’s most likely that slavery and labor exploitation is occurring.”
StraLi is seeking an immediate halt of the unloading of the tomato paste at the port of Salerno and a ban on its distribution in Italy, she said.
“We’re also asking for the end of the importation of any goods in the future which are made and transported from Xinjiang,” she said.
‘Conspiracy to support slavery’
Michael Polak, a London-based barrister who chairs Lawyers for Uyghur Rights, said the domestic criminal complaint argues that the goods violated Italian law and would hold accountable those responsible for slave labor in Xinjiang’s agricultural sector.
“On the national level, we say this importation is in breach of Italian domestic law in relation to the encouragement or conspiracy to support slavery.”
Protesters in Salerno, Italy, oppose the arrival of containers of tomato paste allegedly produced by Uyghur forced labor in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region, May 29, 2024. (@coldiretti via X)
As for the complaint filed with the U.N. Working Group, it alleges that China has violated international laws, specifically Articles 23 and 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Polak said.
The transportation route combining rail and sea transportation services is a flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative, or BRI, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s signature debt and infrastructure program, according to Chinese media.
The shipment occurred despite Italy’s pullout from the BRI in 2023.
Human rights advocates and members of the Italian agricultural NGO Coldiretti — Europe’s largest agricultural organization — protested the arrival of the shipment at the port of Salerno on May 29 to show their opposition to what they consider unfair imports and the exploitation of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in Xinjiang.
A Coldiretti official told RFA on June 4 that it is very important that products imported to Italy be produced under the same working conditions as those in Italy.
Coldiretti’s President Ettore Prandini previously testified in the Italian Senate against the exportation of Chinese workers or what he called unfair imports that did not comply with European standards.
Coldiretti and Filiera Italia indicated that the World Tomato Processing Council, an international nonprofit organization representing the tomato processing industry, estimated that China would produce 7.3 billion kilograms, or over 8 million tons, of processed tomato products in 2023, surpassing Italy’s production.
Translated by RFA Uyghur. Edited by Roseanne Gerin and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Jilil Kashgary for RFA Uyghur.
Labor advocates decried Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in favor of Starbucks in a labor dispute between the international coffee giant and seven of its employees who were terminated for leading a unionization campaign at their Memphis store. In an 8-1 decision — with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting — the justices in Starbucks v. McKinney made it more difficult for the…
Advocates for a living wage say Donald Trump’s recent pledge to end taxes on tipped income is an empty campaign promise that does little besides expose his naivete about working people and the economy. Economic experts cast doubt on the proposal. However, they say Trump’s comments reveal an opening for President Joe Biden and other Democrats who support raising the wage floor and shifting the tax…
A Myanmar trade union leader has fled from the surveillance of the military after release from more than two years in prison, to a region controlled by forces opposed to the junta, traumatized but unbowed and determined to fight on, she told Radio Free Asia.
Khine Thinzar Aye, who joined the Myanmar trade movement at the age of 19, was arrested in April 2022 during a strike against the military regime that took power in 2021. After a military truck hit a taxi she was in, soldiers arrested her and two other Confederation of Trade Unions Myanmar (CTUM) members. The CTUM has more than 65,000 members nationwide.
As head of the union’s communications department, the now 29-year-old says she was subjected to intense questioning because of her position in the organization. During interrogations, Khine Thinzar Aye was told to kneel on the ground while soldiers beat her and forced her to confess to protesting in exchange for 30,000 kyat (US$11).
After being moved to the Shwepyithar Interrogation Center, she was checked for life-threatening injuries before being tortured for another seven days. Soldiers told her that they could kill her at any time, she said.
“When we arrived at the interrogation, we were blindfolded and handcuffed, then drunken men surrounded us and beat us and brutally cut our legs with knives,” Khine Thinzar Aye said, adding that they sexually assaulted her. “They put lit cigarettes on our faces and asked us to reveal the location of our trade union leaders’ homes.”
After a week of interrogation, she was sent to Yangon’s infamous Insein Prison to await trial. That December, she was sentenced to three years in prison with hard labor under the notorious provision 505A of the penal code, which criminalizes comment that can cause fear or spread fake news.
Insein Prison was so packed it was often impossible for prisoners to sleep, she said.
“It wasn’t humane. It was really crowded. One person was forced to stay in about a foot and half of space,” she said. “At the time when COVID was happening, if one person slept on their back, the other had to sleep on their side, taking turns.”
She was moved to the decrepit Thayarwady Prison in Bago Division for her last year.
“Plaster fell on us from the ceiling, the dormitories in our prison were more than 100 years old,” Khine Thinzar Aye said. “All the detainees were worried about when it would collapse.”
She was released in April, a few months early under an amnesty.
Unions under attack
Trade unions were among the groups that spearheaded protests that swept the country after the military seized power in early 2021, bringing a brutal end to a decade of reforms that had brought hope for change in a country ruled by generals for decades.
Nearly 1,000 trade union members have been arrested since the coup, another labor leader told RFA. However, because people are moved about the prison system so much, it is difficult to track the precise number.
“Thirty percent are released, some workers are sent to prison for life without parole,” said the second labor leader who declined to be identified in fear of reprisals. “Some union leaders, we can’t find them because we don’t know what kind of prison they’re in or the place they were arrested. Some were shot on the street and died.”
Khine Thinzar Aye protests the Myanmar military dictatorship in Hlaing township, Yangon in March 2021. (CTUM)
Shortly after the coup, the junta banned 16 unions. Since then, workers have faced increasing challenges fighting for fair wages and freedom of association.
The military has become increasingly concerned about union funding, the second labor leader said, adding that they were constantly being questioned about connections to the shadow civilian National Unity Government and People’s Defense Force militias fighting the regime.
“Every evening, when the workers are going home from the factory, they check their phones,” she said. “If we like or follow some of the PDF or NUG channels, they beat us or arrest the workers.”
Returning to work
Khine Thinzar Aye said that during her interrogations, soldiers repeatedly asked her about involvement in “terrorist activities”, scrutinized the union budget and asked how it spent money.
She was released on April 26 traumatized by her experience.
“I had no peace of mind,” she said. “I knew I’d be constantly monitored, and I’d have to go to the police station and report.”
Escaping the city of Yangon, she fled to a region under the control of ethnic minority insurgents where she plans to stay and continue her work for the labor movement.
“Our country was on a path, moving toward democracy,” she said of the 10 years of tentative reform that the military ended with their coup.
“Our young people, our workers, all of us, will soon actively eradicate this dictatorship and its unjust oppression and illegal coup,” she said.
“We can do it if we’re united and push together.”
Edited by Taejun Kang.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Kiana Duncan for RFA.
The Labor Department has unveiled a change to federally mandated overtime policy that promises to enact sweeping pay reform for salaried workers across domestic industries. With this newly announced increase, as of July 1, employers will be obligated to pay overtime to workers on salary who make under $43,888. Eventually, in a second phase in 2025, the minimum will increase so that the overtime…
Last month, Oscar Hernández couldn’t sleep. The cook, who worked at a restaurant located inside of a Las Vegas casino, had found that after coming home from his shifts, his body would not properly cool down.
The air conditioning at work had been broken for about four months. Hernández worked eight-hour shifts during the restaurant’s brunch service, whipping up eggs, waffles, and fried chicken. He spent hours in front of a scaldingly hot grill — an older model that only ran at extremely high temperatures. Most often, his station on the line was in a corner, and it seemed as if all of the other heat sources in the kitchen — the gas burners, the four deep-fryers, the waffle iron — converged right there. Summer had not officially started, but Las Vegas was already seeing above-normal temperatures in May, sometimes reachingtriple digits. The fans that the owners put in the kitchen were not strong enough to cool down the space.
Extreme heat is nothing new to Hernández, who lives in Nevada and has worked in the restaurant industry for 22 years. But the situation at this restaurant on the Las Vegas strip was becoming untenable. Sometimes it got so hot in the kitchen that Hernández preferred the heat outside, where at least there was a breeze. He had a headache that would not go away, and at home he sometimes found himself getting irritated with his children over small things.
“The heat inside a restaurant is different — it gets into your body,” Hernández said in an interview in Spanish. He knew doctors recommend getting adequate rest to help recover from overheating, but now he could not do even that. So he quit.
“I’m the only one who works in my family,” he said. “So I decided that I’d rather look for another job, one where I can work comfortably and then hopefully, I’ll be able to get some sleep.” He has since found a job at a different restaurant.
Stories of working under heat stress are common in the restaurant and food service industry, where back-of-house workers stationed “on the line” must stay on their feet for hours, cooking and prepping next to hot stoves, ovens, fryers, and more. But increasingly, this workforce must contend with an additional source of heat exposure: the record-breaking summer temperatures and heat waves taking place outside the kitchen. The confluence of indoor and outdoor heat has inspired some workers to unionize and fight for stronger safeguards at work. Employees at a Seattle-based sandwich chain recently secured historic protections against extreme heat in their first union contract. Labor organizers say they expect more food service workers to organize and bargain around heat in the years to come.
Of all the climate issues that workers are facing on the job, “Heat, I would say, is one of the most common right now,” said Yana Kalmyka, a volunteer organizer for the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a grassroots effort started out of the pandemic to support worker organizing.
Scientists now largely agree that all heat waves are made more likely or stronger because of climate change. That’s thanks to a relatively new but growing field called attribution science, which allows researchers to determine how much more likely extreme weather events are made by global warming. A report published last month found that in the last year, human-caused climate change led to a global average of 26 additional days of extreme heat.
Food workers have long been on the front line of worsening global temperatures. Farmworkers in the U.S. are necessarily exposed to the elements, but lack federal regulations around heat exposure and safety. Delivery workers must also travel through extreme heat (and other weather events) to earn a living, and may not have adequate places of rest throughout the day.
Similarly, restaurant cooks and servers can often be subject to extremely high indoor temperatures — and depending on their workplace setup, outdoor temperatures can exacerbate that heat stress. The nature of restaurant work — where quick service is key and kitchens stay open even during global pandemics — means that workers are expected to show up for shifts even during historic heat, when their safety and that of their customers might be compromised.
Jason Flynn, a Chicago line cook who has worked in restaurants for many years, said that the fast-paced, high-pressure nature of commercial kitchens, where workplace injuries are often simply toughed out, means workers may feel as if working through excessive heat exposure is their only option. The result of that, he said, is that, “People are going to pass out, have strokes, or other kinds of long-term heat-related issues, like blood pressure and heart problems.”
Women and people of color are disproportionately represented in certain restaurant roles. For example, Hispanic people are more likely to be staffed as dishwashers or cooks, according to an Economic Policy Institute report. Many are immigrants or undocumented, and may fear retaliation or losing work for speaking out about working conditions. These are “populations who already experienced heightened impacts of climate injustice at home in their community,” said Kalmyka. “And their growing exposure to extreme heat at work is just another dimension of how inequitable the impacts of the climate crisis are.”
There are a few ways that outdoor heat exacerbates indoor heat for restaurant workers. Tall windows in restaurants and cafes can let in a lot of heat on sunny days — as is the case at multiple locations of Homegrown, the Seattle-based sandwich chain that recently won heat protections after unionizing.
Some Homegrown locations, according to workers, are in older buildings that lack adequate climate control. Most are set up for counter service, meaning the workers take orders in the same area where they toast and prepare sandwiches. “We’re in this big old brick building,” said Zane Smith, a worker-organizer at Homegrown. “And we don’t have very good air conditioning, and we have an oven. So the whole building becomes this big brick oven.”
Smith, a Seattle native, said heat was one of the main issues workers were rallying around when they first started talking about forming a union. Despite working indoors, Homegrown workers say they have been feeling the impact of Seattle’s record-topping summer heat. The city, which has historically lacked air conditioning, faced record-shattering heat in 2021, with temperatures as high as 108 degrees Fsending many to the hospital with heat-related illnesses. Attribution scientists said the unprecedented heat wave was made at least 150 times more likely by human-induced climate change.
“It’s always hotter inside than it is outside,” said Smith. “Every time it’s 80 degrees outside, it’s 85 in the store; when it’s 90, it’s 95 in the store.”
Homegrown workers set up a cooling station to help with the impacts of extreme heat.
Maris Zivarts
In what is likely an industry first, the workers at Homegrown won language in their union contract in March that could help with that. The workers fought for a clause that allows them to receive time-and-a-half pay when temperatures in the store reach 82 degrees Fahrenheit and double pay when store temperatures reach 86 degrees F. (According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, when a workplace reaches 77 degrees F, it becomes potentially unsafe for workers to engage in “strenuous work.”)
Emily Minkus, who has worked for Homegrown for nearly six years, said her colleagues shared stories about working through heat stress and illness during bargaining sessions with management.
“We have people who have passed out. We have people who have had asthma attacks,” said Minkus. “We have locations where people were taking breaks in walk-in” freezers.
She credits these testimonials with convincing management that workers were asking for heat pay not because “ideologically, it’s good for the world. We’re doing it because we need it.”
Homegrown workers unionized with Unite Here Local 8, which represents about 4,000 hospitality workers in Oregon and Washington state. Anita Seth, the president of Unite Here Local 8, said the goal of the Homegrown heat pay language is to “really incentivize the employer to update and improve their heat mitigation systems,” which could include repairing and maintaining AC but also installing shade coverings for windows. It seems to be working — Minkus reported that when the AC broke down at her store this spring, she and her colleagues received heat pay for three days straight. The following week, a technician arrived to repair the equipment.
Homegrown’s management didn’t reply to Grist’s request for comment.
Homegrown isn’t the only food chain where heat and faulty cooling systems have become a labor issue. Last summer, workers at a Starbucks located in Houston, Texas, went on strike over extreme heat in their store.
“We did not have a functioning air conditioner last summer, and we were forced to work in temperatures between 80 and 85 degrees,” Madelyne Austin, a Starbucks barista organizing with Starbucks Workers United, said in a statement. “Our managers had known the air conditioner wasn’t working correctly for months, but refused to listen to us when we begged them to fix it.”
The Starbucks union is currently bargaining with the coffee chain over a “foundational framework” that will help shape contracts at the store level. Austin said that workers are fighting for “universal safety standards” to mitigate extreme heat.
In response to a request for comment, Starbucks said the company is committed to ensuring worker and customer safety and routined review conditions in stores. “Where issues in store jeopardize the well-being of our partners,” the company said in a statement, “we have been working with deep care and urgency to take action.” (Starbucks refers to all employees as “partners.”)
The Starbucks story demonstrates how sometimes the quickest way restaurant workers can secure their own safety during a climate emergency is to shut down. Starbucks Workers United confirmed that after the Houston store employees walked out, their AC was repaired.
Homegrown workers also understand this well. In addition to their heat pay language, they won a clause in their contract that allows them to clock out due to extreme heat in their store without facing disciplinary action. Minkus and Smith say workers have already been taking advantage of this provision, and that staff members are prepared to simply close up for the day if it ever gets too hot.
Minkus called working in 88-degree heat next to a 600-degree oven “miserable.” “And so a lot of workers are leaving early. We had one location shut down early because everybody was just so, so hot.”
Smith says that when Homegrown workers first approached the bargaining table, they were fighting for better air conditioning. “That’s still what we want,” he added. “Heat pay is great, but we would actually like the workplace to be a reasonable, safe temperature year round.” Until then, workers at Homegrown know they’ll be paid extra for working through the heat; Smith says that since the contract went into effect in March, his store has received 10 or 15 days of heat pay.
Seth notes that extreme heat is increasingly impacting workers across industries, most immediately outdoor workers, and that heat has come up in other food service contract negotiations. For Kalmyka, the connection between climate change and labor organizing takes on even greater urgency when considering productivity demands on workers. “Across the service industry and many other industries, we see employers continually trying to squeeze their workers to produce more for less,” she said, adding that “as a result, workers are often forced to work more and faster under pretty dire levels of short staffing,” which can exacerbate the effects of heat stress.
As the labor movement continues to be impacted by the climate crisis, organizers like Kalmyka are hoping to help workers draw connections between their struggle and the planetary one. To her, the connection between worker exploitation and human-induced climate change is clear. “Both have the same root cause, which is putting profits ahead of people and the planet.”
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on June 5, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
The Amazon Labor Union and the Teamsters have signed an affiliation agreement.
“Today is an historical day for labor in America as we now combine forces with one of the most powerful unions to take on Amazon together,” wrote ALU President Chris Smalls on Twitter, now called X. “We’re putting Amazon on notice that we are coming!”
Smalls and Teamsters President Sean O’Brien signed the agreement on June 3, according to a copy obtained by Labor Notes.
The affiliation agreement charters a new local known as Amazon Labor Union No. 1, International Brotherhood of Teamsters (ALU-IBT Local 1) for the five boroughs of New York City. That may signal that Amazon workers will not be integrated into existing locals with other Teamster crafts.
The ALU is the fledgling independent union that sent shock waves through the labor movement two years ago when it won a landmark election to organize 8,000 workers at Amazon fulfillment center JFK8 on Staten Island, New York.
The Teamsters announced the affiliation in a tweet, saying the agreement had been approved unanimously by its board. The ALU’s rank and file hasn’t yet voted on it.
SURPRISE ANNOUNCEMENT
The union’s reform caucus supports the affiliation, but was surprised that the Teamsters had announced the news publicly before rank-and-file members had voted.
“Ultimately, the agreement reflects what we would have wanted out of this process,” said Connor Spence, who’s running for president of the ALU and was one of the key organizers of the successful union drive at JFK8. “We would have liked a different timeline, namely holding the vote after the leadership elections, but we’re going to organize in support of the agreement either way.”
Leaders of the Amazon Labor Union Democratic Reform Caucus, including Connor Spence, Brima Sylla, Kathleen Cole, and Sultana Hossain, and current and former members of the ALU Executive Board, including Derrick Palmer, Gerald Bryson, Claudia Ashterman, and Arlene Kingston, met with O’Brien and other Teamster officials in Washington, D.C., on May 20, after weeks of conversations about what an affiliation would involve.
Since its blockbuster win in 2022, ALU’s efforts to make inroads at other Amazon facilities have gone down in defeat. The union has also faltered in efforts to bring Amazon to the bargaining table.
These organizing failures gave rise to the caucus, which won the right to hold democratic elections for the union’s top spots.
As the ALU struggled to advance further at Amazon, workers at the air cargo hub KCVG in Northern Kentucky voted to affiliate with the Teamsters in April and will redo their ALU union affiliation cards. They made the decision after the tug and ramp workers at a nearby DHL facility joined the Teamsters and won a lucrative first contract in January.
Teamsters launched an Amazon Division last year to bring together various Amazon organizing efforts under one big tent.
“If we’re going to bring Amazon to the table, we need to build a national movement of Amazon workers who are strike-ready,” said Spence. “Trying to build that without some kind of institutional backing is a long shot.”
Amazon Teamsters have extended picket lines to other Amazon facilities after the Teamsters organized delivery drivers in Palmdale, California, last April. These 84 workers were nominally employed by an Amazon contractor, the Southern California company Battle-Tested Strategies—one of 2,500 “delivery service partners” that carry out package deliveries while Amazon retains full control.
Since then, more of the independent groups organizing at Amazon have worked with the Teamsters, hoping its backing can help them organize their own facilities.
NEW ELECTIONS
ALU will hold officer elections in July at the JFK8 facility. Eligible voters will include all current employees who are not seasonal workers. The affiliation agreement says the Teamsters “will provide resources to effectuate an internal election for ALU-IBT Local 1 in a manner so that potential officers may reach, with equal access, as many eligible members in JKF8 as possible.”
The internal election became possible only after the ALU’s reform caucus sued the union last year for violating the ALU’s constitution because it “refused to hold officer elections which should have been scheduled no later than March 2023.”
The ALU was supposed to hold elections within 60 days after the National Labor Relations Board certified the union. But before the NLRB certification, the union’s leadership presented a new constitution to the membership, changing the timeframe for officer elections to after the union ratified a contract with Amazon. The reform caucus asked a Brooklyn court to compel union leaders to hold an election.
For nearly a century, a substantial portion of America’s iconic yellow school buses have been manufactured at a factory in Fort Valley, a town of 9,000 people surrounded by peach and pecan orchards in central Georgia.
Carolyn Allen has worked at Blue Bird for 13 years, and she talks about this fact almost as though it’s a surprise to her. “I live about 15 miles away and I never thought I’d be here,” she told Grist. “I never wanted to work here, because people were always being laid off all the time.” But life’s contingencies brought her to the company anyway: “I got to where I was looking for a job, and this is the one that came open.”
Even though she stayed, Allen wasn’t happy working at Blue Bird. “There was so many things in here that was not right. There was unfairness, favoritism, workload,” she said. “Lord, we worked sometimes six and seven days a week, and people needed to go home and see their families sometimes. And unfair wages.”
So a few years ago, when she got a call inviting her to a union organizing meeting, Allen didn’t need much persuading to get involved. After a long organizing drive, the effort paid off in May 2023, when the factory’s 1,400 employees voted to affiliate with the United Steelworkers.
The new union made national headlines and was congratulated by President Biden, who later hosted one of the organizers at a White House event. The national attention was partly a reflection of the scale of the workers’ achievement: The Deep South is a notoriously difficult place to unionize an auto plant. But the other reason for the national spotlight was that the factory was set to receive up to $1 billion over five years from the federal government in contracts to build electric school buses for districts across the country.
After the vote, Allen put herself forward as a candidate to be elected to the union’s 10-member bargaining committee, and was elected to represent her fellow workers in the quality department. The contract negotiations lasted for a year — and during that period, Allen says she and her fellow workers did not immediately see the benefits of their historic union vote. In fact, she and others said conditions inside the plant initially changed for the worse. Management curtailed lunch breaks and cracked down on worker discipline.
But last month, the workers announced their efforts had paid off in the form of a first contract that guaranteed raises to every factory employee, new retirement benefits, and a profit-sharing agreement with the company.
Allen says she was “amazed at the things that we got.” With this contract, she says, she can finally see the bigger purpose of her taking the job she’d never really wanted. ”It took a long time, but I believe that’s why I am here now,” she said.
Read Next
Blue Bird’s union contract sheds light on the bigger question of what the green manufacturing boom the Biden administration has sought to spark means for the nation’s resurgent labor movement. Soon after the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act, a tension between Biden’s climate and labor goals became apparent. The new green jobs in sectors like electric vehicle and battery manufacturing were overwhelmingly going to Republican states where unions have a small presence and so-called “right-to-work” laws hinder union organizing. Concerns that workers would be left behind in the EV transition led the United Auto Workers to briefly withhold its endorsement for Biden’s reelection. But unions have also seen the growth of green industry in the South as an opportunity for new organizing, not just a hurdle. The union vote at Blue Bird was one example; another was the UAW’s landslide victory in April at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga whose primary product is the ID.4, Volkswagen’s flagship electric car. This was part of an ongoing push by the UAW to organize nonunion auto and battery plants. In May, the union lost a vote at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama, but has petitioned the National Labor Relations Board for a new election, alleging illegal union-busting tactics by management.
Blue Bird’s union vote and its new contract, which is in place for three years, might seem to demonstrate that Biden’s strategic vision of economic renewal designed to counteract what the administration views as a host of overlapping problems — in particular, global warming, Chinese global power, and the blighted wake of deindustrialization — can also create favorable conditions for organized labor. As a political matter, this narrative is favorable to a president who has frequently boasted of his aspiration to be the most pro-union president in history. But practically speaking, it’s difficult for the federal government to directly intervene in support of unions, even at factories it subsidizes. “What the Biden administration has used is the tools they have at their disposal, to attach labor standards to federal loan and grant programs,” Jason Walsh, executive director of the Bluegreen Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and environmental organizations, told Grist. For example, he said, some of the federal grant programs include a requirement “that applicants should be submitting community benefit plans as part of their applications that include language like, for example, a clear demonstration that you’re going to respect the bargaining rights and the rights of workers at this facility to organize into unions. Those are powerful hooks but it’s not the same as pegging federal funding to unionization. We don’t have that statutory authority.”
At the Tennessee facility, the union vote was arguably assisted by a different Biden policy: the recently finalized tailpipe emissions standards, which encourage electric vehicle production. In light of this policy, Volkswagen could not credibly threaten closure of its sole American EV plant in the event of unionization (a standard union-busting tactic).
In the case of Blue Bird, the grants to build electric school buses — disbursed through the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program, funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — included a “union neutrality” provision prohibiting grant recipients from using the funding to sway workers against joining a union. But the provision is hard to enforce — and at Blue Bird, according to many workers, it was at times openly flouted: The union accused management of retaliatory firings during the union drive (although they later withdrew their NLRB complaints, so the matter was never officially adjudicated, and the fired workers were later reinstated).
The contract negotiations certainly could have gone worse. In right-to-work states where unions can’t force workers to pay dues, companies often drag out negotiations. “What is quite common is for workers to successfully unionize and then a company draws out bargaining of the first contract as long as possible, trying to frustrate workers and frankly disillusion them, and then try to get them to decertify,” said Walsh. “That is a very common union-busting tactic. It’s notable that that did not happen with Blue Bird.”
Alex Perkins, a longtime Steelworkers staffer who played a leading role in organizing workers at the plant, said the contract that Blue Bird workers won was among the strongest he has negotiated. Every worker will receive at least a 12 percent raise, and the lowest paid workers will see a raise of 40 percent. Perhaps more remarkable is the profit-sharing agreement. The contract includes a trigger in which net company profits of over $30 million entitle workers to a 4 percent share of those profits. Perkins said he represents workers at 20 companies across Georgia and Alabama, none of whom have such an agreement.
Perkins said the profit-sharing proposal was suggested by members of the bargaining committee, not Steelworkers staff, and reflected workers’ awareness of the government funding for electric buses. “The employees felt that with them making record profits, they should have a share in that,” said Perkins.
More broadly, he thinks government subsidies for EV production helped them achieve a strong contract simply because the extra cash gave extra space for the company to be generous with workers. “Quite honestly, if you look back four years ago, Blue Bird was really struggling, so they have rebounded really well since they started producing EV buses,” Perkins said. “Had it not been for the EV buses I don’t think they would have financially been in a position to give the employees the contract.”
Workers and union organizers said the national spotlight may also have compelled the company to bargain in good faith. “The company was a little slow with us,” Allen said, “and I think that once they found out that they were part of things I think they changed their minds.”
That spotlight was awkwardly apparent in January, when, with contract negotiations still ongoing, Michael Regan, the head of the EPA, visited Georgia to announce a new round of $1 billion in electric school bus grants to be awarded across the country. (Another tranche of $900 million was issued last week.) The press conference took place in a school gym in the Atlanta suburbs, and speakers included Georgia Democratic congressmen Hank Johnson and Raphael Warnock, as well as Blue Bird’s CEO, Phil Horlock, and a member of the bargaining committee, Craig Corbin.
The event was held at Stone Mountain Middle School, which was set to receive some of the new buses, and featured marching bands and cheer squads from around the school district. Scattered among the students in the bleachers were a few factory workers and union representatives. After the conference, the politicians piled into a Blue Bird electric bus for a short ride and an explanation of its benefits from a company engineer. (“All right, y’all, we’re headed to homeroom,” Warnock said.)
The pageantry demonstrated that this wasn’t ordinary bureaucratic grantmaking but retail politicking in a swing state. Large banners reading “President Joe Biden: Investing in America” adorned the gym and the school bus. While the school bus grants are just a small portion of the administration’s suite of climate investments, their political importance stems from their visibility in communities. Unlike the tax credits for planned factories or subsidies for clean energy, their impact is already being felt by families (and voters) nationwide. In addition to reducing fossil fuel consumption, electric school buses have strong health benefits for children when compared with traditional diesel buses, whose harmful exhaust is linked to higher asthma rates. Some studies show upgrading to cleaner buses even increases school attendance.
Later that day, Regan drove to Fort Valley to tour the Blue Bird factory itself and address the workers. There, asked by a reporter to comment on speculation that the labor protections in the EPA grants had helped the workers unionize, he said, “Those labor protections were built in for a reason, and as far as we can tell, those labor protections have been respected for all of those who are applying for these grants, so we’re excited about moving forward.”
Four months later, contract negotiations concluded — and set an example for workers elsewhere. “The Blue Bird contract, like the contracts won by UAW members with the Big Three, should send a signal in flashing red lights to every non-union worker at vehicle manufacturing plants across the country, but particularly in the South, that the pathway to better wages and benefits on the job runs through a yes vote for unionization,” said Walsh.
Carolyn Allen, who had never been in a union before Blue Bird, is closely watching union drives at other auto plants. “We was excited for the ones that made it, disappointed at the ones that didn’t come through,” she said. “I was happy that at least they were trying to get through, because everyone needs a union.”
Whether organized labor can use the energy transition to make inroads remains an open question — but the contract in Fort Valley suggests that the urgent demands of decarbonizing America’s economy can be accomplished by a revival, not a weakening, of worker power.
In response to Israel’s genocidal siege of Gaza, a new progressive effort, the “Reject AIPAC” coalition, is calling on federal candidates to refuse endorsements and contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), whose vast political operation has spent millions trying to crush left-leaning Democrats who criticize Israel. At the same time, the labor movement…
This story originally appeared on Truthout on June 1, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
A strike is underway within the University of California (UC) system — with UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz all now participating — as unionized graduate student workers take collective action to protest the brutalization and repression of fellow union members and Palestine solidarity protesters.
With academic employees unionized with the United Auto Workers (UAW) walking out at all three schools, the UC administration has found itself contending with the consequences of its decision to invite state aggression upon its own students as they protested the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Those consequences appear to be piling up, with additional union workforces at UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara set to join the strike on Monday, and UC Irvine workers walking off the job on Wednesday, according to UAW 4881.
The strike takes place in a national context in which administration crackdowns on Gaza solidarity encampments have encompassed everything from sanction, expulsion and eviction of students and firings of faculty (and even top administrators willing to parlay), all the way up to violent police action, as was on especially ugly display at UCLA. The striking UC workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 (also called the Academic Student Employees Union), were provoked to strike after UC administrators decided to shut down UCLA’s Gaza solidarity encampment by calling in city police, who stood by while a pro-Israel mob attacked the camp and beat protesters. The police crackdown led to direct harm to UAW members, among others. A subsequent encampment at UCLA was similarly dismantled by riot police — and a similar response is presently underway at UC Santa Cruz, where on Friday, May 31, police surrounded and cleared protest barricades at the entrance to campus, detaining an unknown number of demonstrators.
A Stand-Up Strategy
In the wake of the events at UCLA, UAW Local 4811 called a joint council and assembled a list of demands before voting on strike authorization. The membership’s wishes were made resoundingly clear, with 80 percent of total votes cast in favor of taking action. With Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges already filed against the UC, Local 4811 increased pressure by executing the first phase of a “stand-up strike,” as organizers are referring to it, which involves calling on other UC campuses to join in the strike at staggered intervals, denying employers advance warning and curtailing the latter’s ability to respond. The stand-up strike differs from a traditional rolling walkout, however; when other campuses stand up, UCSC will not stand down. The aim is to hold out in concert, as other campuses join piecemeal. Because UCSC graduate workers are the first to begin, they will need to hold out the longest — the expectation is that the strike, which began on May 20, could run until the end of June.
UAW 4811 itself represents graduate student workers like teaching assistants, who shoulder the bulk of academic labor: grading, attendance, and other less-romanticized day-to-day tasks of education. With 48,000 members across the system, the UAW carries significant heft in the balance of worker and administration power across a public university network that has for years been roiled by conflict between the diametric interests of the neoliberal university and the precarious, largely untenured labor force upon which its pedagogical operations depend.
With this latest strike action, academic workers are seeking to underscore that they will refuse to accept police violence against campus protests. On its website, UAW 4811 described the motivations behind the strike authorization vote:
Academic workers at UC strongly support the right of the encampment organizers (many of whom are our coworkers) in their right to peacefully demonstrate. Our union will not negotiate on behalf of encampment organizers, but we do call on UC to negotiate with them in good faith. We strongly oppose any escalation by UC to dismantle the encampments and/or take disciplinary/legal action against organizers.
Rebecca Gross, a graduate student worker in UCSC’s Literature Department who is also the unit chair of UAW 4811, described the chain of events that precipitated this strike to Truthout, saying:
Members of our union, my local, at these other campuses were participating in peaceful protests at and around the Gaza solidarity encampments. And, especially at UCLA, these workers were brutalized by a Zionist mob that had shown up, and brutalized again by police officers who had been called by the university — LAPD, not just UC police…. Workers were arrested, beaten, maced. After this happened, on a statewide level, we got together with other members of the union in a joint council meeting and discussed what can we do around this.
The meeting resulted in a list of demands, which Gross summarized as follows: “Amnesty for all protestors, emphasizing our free speech rights, divestment [a demand that was recently won at California State University, Sacramento], disclosure and transitional funding.” The latter, she explained, is the idea that workers “who work in say, Department of Defense labs, if they object to working in those labs, would be able to get funding from the UC to transition away.” The concept is especially applicable, she added, to workers in UCSC’s renowned astronomy, astrophysics and physics departments, who may find themselves working on military projects to which they conscientiously object.
After the strike authorization vote, the University of California responded with a ULP charge of its own, alleging to the adjudicating body, the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), that the union had no right to strike over what the administration’s charge claimed was a non-labor issue. In a press release on May 23, the UC commented, “The University remains disappointed that the UAW is engaging in an illegal strike in violation of our contract’s mutually agreed no-strike clauses to advance issues that have no bearing on employment at UC.”
“If the university can just arrest and mace its workers for standing in solidarity with students on a moral or ethical cause that we feel called to use our First Amendment rights to support, then workers across the state are going to stand up and say, we can’t let the boss do that.”
Gross disagreed with that characterization. On the contrary, she claimed, the act of solidarity with UCLA members has everything to do with their job — at play are inherent issues of academic freedom, the right to protest and the obligation of employers to ensure the safety of their workers. She told Truthout: “The UC has made false allegations that this is not a lawful strike, and actually in doing so has committed another ULP [violation] — in that that is not for the university to decide. It’s for PERB to decide.” Elected representatives from her union, she added, are currently entering ongoing mediation with the university.
Part of the UC’s claim is that the strike violates the UAW’s no-strike clause. However, UCLA professor of labor law Noah Zatz wrote for the UCLA student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that “a longstanding and deeply entrenched body of labor law says otherwise.” There exists significant legal precedent, Zatz argued, establishing that “even broad no-strike clauses with terms like ‘any strike’ generally do not preclude strikes over issues outside the contract itself, including serious ULP strikes and sympathy strikes.” Zatz went on to cite precedents that apply federally, and might very well apply in the eyes of PERB as well, concluding that, the UC’s illegality claim “is all bark and no bite on its central point.”
In addition to filing its own Unfair Labor Practice charge, the UC also sought an emergency injunction with PERB, aiming to stamp out the impending strike. Administrators took the major and disruptive step of moving classes online for the week, in a clear attempt to keep students off campus, staunch the flow of marchers and impede organizing efforts. (In a telling indication that, contra the UC’s claims, the strike has legal validity, PERB denied the injunction.)
The UAW is not the only union on campus at UC Santa Cruz. The school’s lecturers and librarians — many of them contingent workers, like adjunct professors, without the protections afforded by tenure — are organized with the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT).
Josh Brahinsky — a UC-AFT member and lecturer in the History of Consciousness Department at UCSC who was previously on the bargaining committee of the UAW as a graduate student worker — commented on the thin justification of safety that the school cited to move classes online. “Our people are having our working lives thrown [into disarray] — unilateral changes to working conditions is what [this type of violation is] called,” he told Truthout. “It’s a pretense; it’s crowd control.”
While a no-strike clause in its own contract evidently does prevent the UC-AFT from joining the UAW on the picket line, the UC-AFT did file an Unfair Labor Practice charge in tandem with its fellow academic workers, indicating a level of tacit support. In a press release cited in The Daily Bruin, UC-AFT President Katie Rodger said: “This ULP is intended to bolster the protections our members have to continue their expression of free speech and make our campuses safer. We will continue to talk together about the possibilities of future labor actions.”
Tenured faculty at the school, meanwhile, are collectively represented by the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA). Members of the unionized faculty in the SCFA have also voiced support, with some, alongside many other faculty members throughout the UC system, signing a pledge that they will refuse to retaliate against any of their graduate worker colleagues participating in the strike. Per the pledge document, these faculty members will not assist the administration in punishing any legally protected strike activity, “including TAs withholding grades, research assistants withholding research labor, or any other form of legally protected labor withholding … including additional labor burdens imposed at the strike’s conclusion.”
As Brahinsky explained, UC-AFT members are, at minimum, planning to show solidarity with the strike by pledging responses to the same effect. Should the administration pressure them to cover for work left undone by striking UAW members, many in the UC-AFT plan to refuse.
“We’re in the middle of getting our members to sign a pledge not to pick up struck work,” said Brahinsky. “A lot of us are leading classes with teaching assistants that are going on strike. When a teaching assistant doesn’t do the grades, [UC-AFT lecturers] get pressured to pick up that work. We’re committed to supporting people and not doing that — it’s not something we’re legally bound to do. We’re going to hold that line.”
A Continuity of Tactics
While this most recent UAW action is a response to a particular context of anti-protest crackdown, labor tensions at UCSC are far from unprecedented, and the nature of the current strike evinces a continuity with recent years of preceding labor activity. In 2019, UAW 4811 members, dissenting with the contract that the statewide UAW had settled the previous year, initiated a wildcat strike (i.e. a rank-and-file action conducted without the express consent of union leadership). A central issue at hand was the exorbitant cost-of-living increases that had come for Santa Cruz. Graduate worker pay, already inadequate (around $18,000 a year after taxes), had become utterly impossible to live on.
Rent and expense increases had befallen Santa Cruz thanks to the tech wealth that percolated out of the corporate cauldrons in San Francisco; in that context, the total pay that UAW members were earning came as a bitter joke. A long series of less drastic efforts to compel the UC, one of California’s top three largest employers, to offer more than poverty wages to the workers who conduct the majority of its academic labor had ended in failure, and their own state-level union leadership had agreed to only a 3 percent annual wage increase. As such, the wildcat strikers demanded a cost-of-living adjustment, among other measures to forestall enforced impoverishment for grad workers.
Workers’ widespread willingness to engage in the inherently transgressive act of a wildcat strike against a union leadership contract indicated that a new generation of radical organizers were coming of age in the UAW. Brahinsky noted that a change in leadership reversed a reluctance to strike. The unionists who gained experience in the 2019-2020 wildcat strike, as well as in earlier strikes throughout the 2010s, went on to change the direction of academic worker militancy in Local 4811 and the UC system. As Brahinsky remarked: “The people who did those changes — some of it was us in the 2010s. But in 2019, the people who did the wildcat strike went into leadership statewide in the UAW, and fought for the strike to happen [in 2022], and fought for this one.”
Another contributing factor was the UAW strikes at Big Three automakers in September 2023. Beyond just being generally inspirational — as witnessing a major strike of tens of thousands of union workers can certainly be — that context also provided something of a testbed for stand-up strike, an evolution of rolling walkout tactics. The deliberate, calculated and solidarity-based approach revitalized strategy with creative simultaneous tactics such as the “Create Havoc Around Our System” (“CHAOS”) method. That approach, with its provocatively amusing backronym, was popularized by the Association of Flight Attendants.
As an American Bar Association article described it, the CHAOS method “calls for both intermittent and rolling strikes. The National Labor Relations Act, which governs the autoworkers, prohibits intermittent strikes. So instead the UAW used a rolling strike strategy, beginning with a few strike locations and ramping up work stoppages as bargaining continued.” The unpredictable upsurges of the UC strike owe their origins at least in part to these recent tactical experiences, hard-won on the UAW’s more traditional terrain of struggle against car manufacturers.
At UC Santa Cruz, currents of greater militancy would continue to swell. After the wildcat cost-of-living adjustment strike in 2019 and 2020, said Gross, “we also had a statewide six-week strike in the fall of 2022. That was while we were in bargaining for a new contract.”
Gross pointed out that, for some academic union members, the strike might have seemed an unavoidable necessity because the administration’s use of police violence against academic workers was absolutely beyond the pale. She described the broader trend: “There are people in my department, in the literature department, and they didn’t strike in 2019 or 2020, they didn’t strike in 2022 — but now they’re striking. There’s something about the idea that violence could take place towards our students or towards us that’s really galvanizing people, in a different way than, say, a wages demand might be.”
Poised to Strike
With UC Davis and UCLA walkouts now initiated in addition to the ongoing strike at UCSC, administrations are likely sensing the mounting pressure, and rightly so. While immediate connections are not yet apparent, this week, UCLA’s campus police chief was lightly sanctioned with an imposed reassignment (though the university described the transfer as “temporary” in a statement). A slap on the wrist, to be sure — but at minimum, this could reasonably be interpreted as an appeasement move in response to the looming strike.
Regardless, the snowballing strike activity shows no signs of slowing. UAW organizers will continue to urge further actions across the UC system in the hopes that the walkouts grow to avalanche proportions. UCSC, with its large union presence and strong tradition of faculty and student radicalism, is well-placed to hold out the longest, anchoring the strike as workers on other campuses rise up.
At Santa Cruz, organizers are prepared for what Brahinsky says they’re calling a “long-haul strike.” Together with the stand-up tactic, it’s a strategy that has been in development since before the genocide in Gaza began. So too with the union’s demands — meaning that the current juncture offers a chance to expound on inter-UC solidarity and apply leverage to address multiple concerns. As Gross reflected, “It’s been exciting to see rank and file workers’ demands taken up on a statewide level like this.… Momentum is building with our UAW comrades walking off the job at other campuses, and more campuses will be called to stand up and strike if the UC doesn’t come to the table to resolve these ULPs.”
Given the stakes and the opportunity, it’s no surprise that there is real determination on display. Gross was keen to underscore the extent of Local 4811’s resolve.
“We see this as the strike that’s preventing a precedent from forming,” Gross told Truthout. “If the university can just arrest and mace its workers for standing in solidarity with students on a moral or ethical cause that we feel called to use our First Amendment rights to support, then workers across the state are going to stand up and say, we can’t let the boss do that. That’s what we’re seeing take place right now.”
The United Auto Workers on Friday formally challenged last week’s election loss at a pair of Mercedes-Benz facilities in Alabama, accusing the company of engaging in “an unprecedented, illegal anti-union campaign” and requesting a new vote. “All these workers ever wanted was a fair shot at having a voice on the job and a say in their working conditions,” the UAW said in a statement.
CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain, including difficulties meeting basic needs.”
A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.
Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”
And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).
So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”
Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).
This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Janine Jackson.
From June 17 to 21, officers, staff and members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) will meet in Vancouver, Canada, for their biennial convention. Delegates to the convention will undoubtedly be preoccupied with the immediate business of the union, which represents workers in industries ranging from bookstores to breweries, though it’s best known for unionizing dockworkers up…
Although Donald Trump, as president, proclaimed in his 2020 State of the Union address that he had produced a “blue-collar boom” in workers’ wages, the reality was quite different. Using his control of the executive branch of the U.S. government, Trump repeatedly undermined the wages of American workers by blocking raises and imposing wage reductions.
Only the preceding year, Trump derailed vital wage legislation. In July 2019―with the pathetically low federal minimum wage stuck at $7.25 per hour for a decade and some 13 million workers holding two or more jobs to support their families―the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed the Raise the Wage Act. If enacted, the legislation would have gradually increased the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour over a six-year period. But, instead of supporting the legislation or proposing an alternative, the Trump White House announced that, if the Senate passed the House bill, Trump would veto it. Consequently, the measure died in the Republican-controlled Senate. According to the AFL-CIO, the legislation would have raised the pay of 40 million American workers.
That same year, Trump’s Department of Labor succeeded in rolling back planned wage increases for millions of workers by restricting eligibility for overtime pay. In 2016, the last year of the Obama administration, the Labor Department had issued a rule substantially raising the income level below which workers were paid time and a half for work done beyond 40 hours per week. But the Trump Labor Department, seizing on a delay in implementation occasioned by a judicial decision, lowered the level by more than $20,000, thus depriving 8.2 million American workers of the right to overtime pay secured under Obama.
In August 2018, Trump canceled a scheduled 2 percent pay raise for millions of civilian federal employees, leading to criticism even from some Republicans. This action, plus other administration assaults on the rights of public employees, led to a massive flight of workers from government service. By the fall of 2019, there were 45,000 vacancies in the Department of Veterans Affairs alone. To fill these vacancies, the Trump administration hired large numbers of temp workers at low wages and with minimal benefits.
Yet another administration policy that undercut workers’ wages emerged with the Trump Labor Department’s issuance of a “joint-employer” rule. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been fashioned to ensure that businesses using staffing companies or subcontractors would be accountable for complying with basic workplace protections. Even so, the Trump administration’s joint-employer rule substantially limited liability for wage and hour violations, thereby making it harder for workers to hold all parties accountable. As a result, U.S. workers lost an estimated $1 billion annually thanks to subcontracting or wage theft by employers.
Of course, not all Trump administration attempts at holding down wages succeeded. In 2017, the Trump Labor Department proposed that employers could simply pocket workers’ tips, as long as the workers were paid the minimum wage. Economists estimated that this policy would lead to the loss of $5.8 billion per year in tips for workers, 80 percent of whom were women. But after the discovery that Trump’s Secretary of Labor had gone to great lengths to hide his department’s findings about how harmful the new policy would be, Congress stepped in and amended the Fair Labor Standards Act to prohibit employers from seizing the tips of their employees.
Another Trump administration failure occurred in connection with reducing the wages of farmworkers, some of the most exploited, lowest-paid workers in the United States. In mid-2019, the Labor Department proposed a new regulation that would change the rules of the H-2A visa program, used by agricultural employers to hire migrant farmworkers for seasonal work―for example, by President Trump’s wineries. As one of the rules changes would lower wage rates for H-2A farmworkers and, consequently, for their U.S. counterparts, the United Farm Workers challenged it in federal court and, ultimately, prevailed.
Although the “real wages” (after adjusting for inflation) of American workers did rise during Trump’s presidency, the rise was minimal. According to a 2020 Congressional report, during Trump’s first three years in office, workers’ “real average hourly earnings increased by an average of just 0.9 percent.” Admittedly, there was a very substantial jump in real average earnings in the fourth year. But this jump reflected the fact that, in 2020, a disproportionate number of low-wage workers lost their jobs thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and, therefore, were not included in wage calculations.
And even these minimal wage gains usually reflected factors other than administration actions. Responding to the failure of the federal government to ensure adequate wages for workers, many states and cities enacted minimum wage raises, fueling wage growth for the most poorly-paid. Indeed, a study by the National Employment Law Project found that the median wage for low-wage workers climbed much more sharply in states that raised their pay floors than in states that didn’t. In addition, a surge in strike activity by teachers and by unionized workers at major U.S. companies during 2018 and 2019 increased wages for yet another portion of the nation’s workforce.
Overall, then, far from sparking a wage boom, the policies of Trump and his administration depressed the wages of American workers.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on May 17, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
A no-holds-barred campaign by Mercedes management convinced a majority of workers at its Alabama factory complex to vote against forming a union.
In addition to anti-union videos and mailings, captive-audience meetings, firings, and an onslaught of pressure from state politicians and even a local pastor, the winning move was to fire the company’s U.S. CEO and replace him with a vice president who promised to care about the “team members.”
A team leader named Ray Trammell, who voted no, said his area was 100 percent union before the former CEO was removed. “[New CEO] Federico [Kochlowski] has been a positive influence,” he said. “A lot of people want to give him a chance. It was all production-driven before him; he’s more about the team members. He’s willing to change.
“We have a year. We have that year to see what he does. If he doesn’t make positive changes we can bring the union in.” (After losing an election a union has to wait a year before filing a new petition for the same group of workers.)
The vote, held May 13-17, was 2,045 in favor of forming a union to 2,642 against. The majority of the workforce is Black. There were 51 challenged ballots, and five voided; 5,075 workers, not including contract workers, were eligible to vote.
“These courageous workers took on this fight because they wanted justice,” said United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain. He said the federal government and the German government are investigating the intimidation that Mercedes inflicted on workers, following the “same playbook” of union-busting as other U.S. employers.
“Ultimately these workers are going to win,” he said. “We have no regrets in this fight.”
Pro-union fit and finish worker Rick Webster had brought his fourth-grade son Aaron to the vote count. “I wanted him to witness history,” he said shortly beforehand. “It’s going to be life-changing. We can’t wait. We will be able to negotiate instead of being dictated to.”
At Mercedes, previous union efforts had never gotten this far. So this was the first time workers had experienced a full-on anti-union campaign—and it worked on some of them. A worker named Keda, for example, said she wanted to “give Federico a chance.” She pointed to management’s elimination of two-tier wages as an indication of good faith.
Others voted no more out of fear than out of hope. “If it’s not broke, don’t rock the boat,” said a worker named Terry. Team leader Arthur Bates said he didn’t want to see layoffs. “Mercedes has shareholders and they have to keep the shareholders happy,” he explained. “If they lose some money somewhere, the company will find a way to make that money back.”
The workers who have been fighting so hard to organize were surprised and disappointed at the loss—but they said their resolve wasn’t shaken. “We’ll try to figure out what we did wrong, where we missed the mark,” said battery worker Robert Lett. “We’ll try to figure out how to shore up for the next time. Because there will be another time. We’re not just going to shrug and walk away.
“We know this company; we know their M.O. We know the company values their profits more than they value their employees. As soon as they feel like it’s advantageous to them, they’re not going to take workers’ personal lives into account.”
“It’s disappointing that some of our supporters slipped to vote no,” said Kirk Garner, a quality worker in plant two. “It’s disappointing that the company put on an anti-union campaign when it was part of their company policy not to.”
But, he said, “we’ve been trying this for 25 years. We’ll try again next year and every year till we get it. We’ll wait three or four months and start over.”
ONE WIN, ONE LOSS
The UAW declared last fall after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis that it would springboard its militant strike into organizing across more than two dozen non-union auto plants.
Today’s loss follows a landmark union victory April 19 at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where 4,300 workers joined the UAW—the first auto assembly plant election the union had won in the South since the 1940s.
Workers there had been through two previous narrowly lost union campaigns, in 2014 and 2019. Their management had promised to “do better,” and workers had been let down each time. That, combined with the momentum of the UAW’s record contracts in fall 2023, gave nearly three-quarters of VW workers the impetus to vote yes last month.
The success at Volkswagen boosted organizing at Mercedes, though not quite enough to put it over the top. “When Volkswagen workers won their union, when Daimler Truck got their big raise, we could point to it—this isn’t just a dream that we’re selling,” said Lett.
Today’s sad outcome makes the score so far one win and one loss in the UAW’s $40 million push to bring 150,000 non-union auto workers into the union, most of them in Southern states—and all of them facing employers, from Toyota to BMW, who located their plants with an eye to remaining union-free.
DOLING OUT CARROTS
Mercedes’ union-busting program included doling out carrots. In February, a month after workers reached 30 percent on union cards, the company announced it would hike the top pay by $2 and eliminate the wage tiers, so now everyone would top out at $34 after four years.
Michael Göbel, president and CEO of Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, stepped down in a video message that workers were shown in April. Göbel had groused in a captive-audience meeting about a worker’s claim that Mercedes had come here for the “Alabama discount”: low wages. The top pay of $34 may appear high, but not compared to $43 for production workers at Ford by the contract’s end in 2028.
Though his departure showed the union drive was already getting results, the firing of Göbel swayed some workers into the “no” column. Kochlowski circulated a letter the first day of voting thanking workers for a “warm welcome,” promising vague things like “to make this a place you’re proud to work,” and imploring them to give him a chance. He had walked the floor the last two weeks talking to literally thousands of workers and making promises.
“People bought that bullshit about the new CEO,” said David Johnston, a battery worker on the organizing committee. “We needed every vote we could get to win, especially in plant two [the non-electric vehicle plant]. But unfortunately workers flipped. The fight is far from over.”
Sandra, with 21 years in, works in quality control. She voted no. “I pray it doesn’t happen,” she said before the vote count. “I earned a really good living, put two kids in the University of Alabama without having to take out loans, at $27 an hour. Now I make $34.
“Is any company perfect? No. The new president is willing to work with us team members. You still can earn a good living. Some of the people pushing the union are disgruntled.”
…AND THE STICK
But Mercedes also brought out the stick. It sent a barrage of anti-union text messages, held captive-audience meetings to grill union supporters, played anti-union videos at daily team meetings, put an anti-union banner at the factory entrance, and hired a union-busting firm, RWP. That’s to be expected in the dictatorships that are U.S. workplaces.
“The company brought in some anti-union consultants,” Garner said. “They would bring small groups into a meeting room and show them videos with half-truths about unions—and apparently that worked on some people.
“They get paid $3,200 a day apiece and there were three of them, for three weeks. You can check that out when they file their LM-20 at the end of the month.”
The company’s official “principles” say executives will remain neutral in organizing campaigns, but Mercedes has carried on its anti-union offensive even after the UAW filed charges against it last month for violating a German supply chain law and after the U.S. government and the European Commission asked it to respect workers’ right to organize.
The German government is now investigating Mercedes for illegal union-busting conduct. The Alabama plant is operated by Mercedes-Benz U.S. International, a subsidiary of Stuttgart-based Mercedes-Benz Group AG.
“Alabama auto workers are sick of the interference from Mercedes in our organization efforts,” said battery plant worker Brett Garrard ahead of the vote. “This is what we deal with—not to mention the captive-audience meetings, the mandatory anti-union videos and propaganda they force-feed us after we are on the clock, in what is supposed to be our start-up meeting to discuss the daily topics such as safety, quality, and morale.”
“They were clearly trying to prey on people’s emotions with the constant barrage from all sides,” Lett said.
The UAW filed six unfair labor practice charges against the company for firing union supporters, banning union materials, surveilling employees, holding captive-audience meetings, disciplining employees for discussing unionization, and implying that union activity is futile.
“I’ve got no use for it,” said Tim Earnest, a quality worker who has been here 27 years. “We don’t need them. They are a divisive force.”
Ciarra Tate, an assembly worker, said she didn’t vote at all because she was only planning to work here for the short term, planning to start a career in health care. She has been at Mercedes two years.
HEAVY POLITICAL PRESSURE
Alabama Governor Kay Ivey and the Business Council of Alabama have been vociferous in their opposition to the UAW’s new drives. Ivey said that unions would attack “the Alabama model for economic success.”
Six Southern governors, including Ivey, signed an April letter urging workers to reject the UAW lest they undermine the auto industry’s growth.
As workers began voting this week, Ivey signed legislation May 13 that would revoke economic incentives for companies that voluntarily recognize unions. Nathaniel Ledbetter, the Republican speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives, who pushed the law through, called the UAW “dangerous leeches” in an anti-union op-ed.
Ivey said at a Chamber of Commerce function, “We want to ensure that Alabama values, not Detroit values, continue to define the future of this great state.”
“We’re up against our local government,” said Garrard. “We’re up against the Business Council of Alabama, the corporate elites, and we’re working-class Americans. So why are you waging war on us?
“This is not a political fight. We just seem to have a political enemy. Our fight is for fair treatment, respect, and auto worker pay.”
COMPANY PASTOR
As Mercedes workers began their 12-hour shifts at 6 a.m. May 13, their phones buzzed with a company text message: “Here in Alabama, community is important, and family is everything. We believe it’s important to keep work separate. But there’s no denying, a union would have an impact beyond the walls of our plant.”
For its last-ditch union-busting effort, Mercedes called in divine intervention in the form of a video message from Reverend Matthew Wilson, a pastor of the Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Marion, Alabama, and a city councilperson for Tuscaloosa.
In the video, Rev. Wilson implored workers to give Kochlowski a chance, saying “the legacy of the state of Alabama is counting” on it. The reverend also walked around the shop floor talking to workers one on one.
“This is a strategy as old as unions,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner of the Cornell University School of Industrial Labor Relations. Indeed, in the 1930s Henry Ford recruited Black pastors to recommend new-hires and oppose the UAW at his Ford Rouge plant outside Detroit.
“Particularly in towns dominated by a very large corporation,” Bronfenbrenner said, “companies give enough money to churches to purchase their long-term loyalty, and rely on the church leaders to preach an anti-union message.”
“They had everything, except the guys in the mob movies with the billy clubs doing the union-busting,” said Lett.
WORKER-RUN CAMPAIGN
Previous efforts at Mercedes over the past two decades had always fizzled before coming to a vote, the most recent in 2022, stalled at 20 percent on cards.
What was different about this drive? “First off, the workers were up front leading the campaign as opposed to the previous one,” Lett said.
And the organizing took place mainly inside the plant, rather than in house-visit blitzes: “The strategy this time was to focus on the area that you work in and talk to the people you see literally every day, because you already have rapport with them.”
Lett said workers took pains not to make it sound like they were recruiters or selling anything.
Those in different work areas played different roles. “If you’re someone like me whose position is constrained to one particular spot, you see the same handful of people all the time. So I’m talking to them,” he said.
“If you’re a tugger or forklift driver, you’re going all around the shop grabbing parts, delivering parts. I might not have the same kind of rapport with people I see. But I can come back, ‘Hey, man, the people on trim three, they’re not really feeling the union. Someone should go talk to them.’
“And so you’re able to build a network, able to figure out where the strengths and weaknesses are. And you can actually strategize based on what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong to make these adjustments in real time.”
GRUELING UNDERSTAFFING
The organizing drive was fueled by workers’ anger. Plant conditions had gotten more and more grueling, due to a combination of high turnover and understaffing.
At the start of the pandemic, the company shut down from March to May. When workers returned in May, Mercedes laid off all the temps. “That was like roughly a third of our workforce—just gone,” said Lett. “So because of that, Mercedes went from three shifts and combined them into two. They were assuming that the market demand was going to be lower.”
That didn’t happen. But instead of hiring more people, Mercedes tried to wring out more production from its reduced workforce. “They just tried to get the same output out of two shift people instead of three,” said Lett. “So you’re going from working roughly eight hours a day, five days a week, maybe a Saturday here and there to working 10-plus hours a day, roughly six days a week on a regular basis, with one weekend off a month.”
When the company tried to hire more people, they would leave just as soon as they started the job because of the exhausting demands. “We went from making maybe 300 cars a shift to making 430,” said Lett.
Supply chain snarls contributed to a chip shortage. But the Alabama plant was a moneymaker, Lett said, so the company closed other factories worldwide and had the chips sent to Alabama to keep up with the high demand.
The Mercedes plant is the most prominent exporter in Alabama’s auto industry; 100 or more supplier companies in the area employ thousands more workers. Its annual economic impact on Alabama was estimated at $1.5 billion in 2017.
These supply chain investments make anti-union threats of layoffs and a plant relocation less effective company talking points, because it’s less plausible to imagine Mercedes walking away from all this.
When you put Mercedes together with Honda in Talladega County, Hyundai in Montgomery, and Mazda Toyota Manufacturing, Alabama’s exports hit $27.4 billion in 2023, according to Made in Alabama, a pro-business website linked to the union-busting website Alabama Strong.
Mercedes workers build the luxury SUV models GLE and $170,000 Maybach GLS, and batteries for electric vehicle models EQE and EQS.
FLUCTUATING SCHEDULES
The productivity comes at a high cost to workers.
“For a lot of the workers at Mercedes, there isn’t a singular event that led up to the union campaign,” said Detrick Lewis, an assembly line worker in the body shop who has been here since 2014. “It’s kind of like a snowball at the top of the mountain. You don’t pay any attention to that small ball, but once it’s a giant boulder coming down, then it’s: how did it get so big?”
When Mercedes moved from three eight-hour shifts to two 10s or 12s, it eliminated the graveyard shift, 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., which had allowed parents to plan around their children’s school schedules.
“Now a lot of workers—single mothers and fathers—weren’t able to find childcare because their schedules revolved around them working at night,” said Lewis. Parents had depended on the schedule over the past 10 years.
Jacqueline Johnson-Avery, an assembly worker in quality control with 25 years on the job, said she had preferred the overnight shift as better for childcare; it also paid more.
The changes haven’t stopped, and they’ve only grown more frequent and arbitrary. Workers say management has changed work schedules five times since the Christmas shutdown. The current schedule is six 10-hour shifts in a row, two days off, six more days on, then five days off (excluding Sundays). The result is only one Saturday off per month; workers used to get two. And most Saturdays will be paid at straight time; time-and-a-half kicks in only after 40 hours per week.
ACHING BODIES
Johnson-Avery said the preferred, lighter jobs aren’t assigned by seniority. Instead, many go to lower-paid temps who work for contractors (and weren’t eligible to vote).
In February the Department of Labor recovered $438,625 in back wages, unpaid bonuses, and damages for two workers who were fired after requesting family leave.
Injuries are common. Workers stand on their feet for 10 to 12 hours, without breaks for long stretches of time, while working at a pace of 72 seconds per car.
Garrard was a steelworker before he was hired at Mercedes in 2004. “I thought I was a pretty tough guy,” he said. “I did hard work. I came here and started turning little screws—hundreds of thousands of them a day. My hands have never hurt so bad in my life. I go home: I’m soaking hands in Epsom salts and hot baths.”
“We’re making high-end vehicles, and the company is pretending they can’t afford to give us raises and good health insurance,” said Lett. “The idea they’ll just nickel and dime us because we’re in a low cost of living area is a slap to the face. You guys made $18 billion with a ‘b’ in profits last year!”
FAVORABLE CONDITIONS
Nationally, the conditions are ripe for organizing: historically low unemployment, a tight labor market, high approval ratings for unions, a National Labor Relations Board that is following the letter of the law for once, and a reinvigorated labor movement that’s showing what union power can achieve.
The UAW in particular is riding a wave of momentum after winning landmark contracts at the Big 3 automakers last fall. The UAW spent $152 million on strike benefits for workers in 2023—compared to the $116 million the entire labor movement spent in 2022, according to union researcher Chris Bohner.
Mercedes workers debated on Facebook the UAW’s April contract at Daimler Truck in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia. Mercedes is Daimler’s largest shareholder. After coming to the brink of a strike, Daimler workers won a deal that ends wage tiers, boosts wages 25 percent over four years, adds a cost-of-living adjustment based on the formula of the Big 3 contracts, and creates, for the first time, profit-sharing.
Mercedes has made $156 billion in profits over the last decade, according to the UAW.
“You hear about what UPS Teamsters got in their contract, what the Big 3 auto workers won in their strike, you see what happened with Volkswagen in Tennessee, and Daimler Truck in North Carolina—these are all huge wins,” said Lewis.
“And people are seeing this and looking at their workplace. You come to work at Mercedes and their slogan is ‘The best or nothing.’ They carry that legacy of the best for everything, except for their workers.”
Laboratory technicians and assistants at Oregon locations of the multibillion-dollar multinational testing chain Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (better known as Labcorp) took part in a groundbreaking union election this month. The results came in with a resounding win for labor, as all seven locations involved in the election voted to unionize. The percentage of workers that voted to…
When Grinnell College wanted to begin compensating community advisors (CA), who work to provide students living in residence halls with programming and support for personal and academic issues, on an hourly basis, undergraduates at the private liberal arts school in Iowa took collective action. They went on strike at the end of the spring semester in 2023. Hannah Sweet, a third-year student at the…
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on May 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
As campus protests—and violent police repression—continue to roll across the country, some unions are getting involved.
More than 2,700 protesters have been arrested on 64 college campuses since the initial arrests at Columbia University in New York on April 18. Encampments have appeared at 184 campuses worldwide. The protesting students are calling for full disclosure of their universities’ finances and divestment from all financial ties to weapons manufacturers and Israel’s war on Gaza.
Unionized academic workers are demanding decision-making power over their work and what it’s used for. For instance, academic workers in the astronomy department of the University of California Santa Cruz have organized to refuse to apply for or accept funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, weapons manufacturers, and military contractors.
In an open letter published by the magazine Science for the People in January, they wrote, “UC has received $295 million in research funding from the Department of Defense in FY 2022 alone… Technology that astronomers have developed for science is being misused to surveil and target people both within and outside the U.S.”
For others, the police assaults on protestors and university administrators’ attacks on campus free speech have become issues of contract violations and workplace safety. Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, representing 48,000 academic workers across the University of California system, filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against their employer over violent police attacks on the UCLA student encampment.
“UCLA unilaterally changed its workplace free speech policies without providing notice or bargaining,” Local 4811 said in a statement. “In so doing it violated its policy of content neutrality toward speech by favoring those engaged in anti-Palestine speech over those engaged in pro-Palestine speech.”
The local will hold a strike authorization vote over the ULP May 13-15. The vote could lead to thousands of academic workers striking for free speech and in solidarity with the student movement for Palestine.
DEMOCRACY BUILT CONFIDENCE
At UC Santa Cruz, organizing within departments brought union members out on a single-day wildcat walkout on May 1. The idea was first raised at a monthly membership meeting a week before.
“No one came into the meeting thinking, ‘This is the proposal and we want to get it passed.’ It was more like, ‘Let’s talk about how we as unionists can meet the moment,’” said Sarah Mason, a sociology department steward.
Ideas were thrown out for single-day walkouts, strikes until the student demands for divestment and disclosure were met, and answering the Palestinian Federation of Trade Unions’ call for a global work stoppage on May Day. But with only 75 members present out of 1,000, they knew they couldn’t make the decision there.
Instead, stewards called department meetings to hold open-ended discussions. Out of 33 departments, 23 held meetings—a sign that the union has developed a robust steward structure.
The night before the proposed walkout, 300 union members attended an emergency meeting, 150 in person and 150 over Zoom. “Stewards were lining up to give report-backs on what the meetings were like in their departments,” Mason said. “It was an incredible thing to see.”
They decided on a single-day walkout the next day, and formed a committee to determine longer-term demands and discuss future strikes.
Mason credits a six-week strike in 2022 for helping embolden Santa Cruz workers to walk out again. Transparency in the decision-making process was important. “Every step of the way, people were discussing and deliberating respectfully, talking about things like strategy and risks,” she said. “Having that really clear picture produced confidence in people.”
POLICE VIOLENCE AT WORK
“This is a moment where we’re seeing the importance of the student-worker labor movement in advancing political causes,” said Joanna Lee, a department organizer at the Student Workers of Columbia, UAW Local 2710. “It hasn’t been part of the broad consciousness in the labor movement to think in these internationalist terms, but we’re seeing a shift right now.”
SWC represents 3,000 graduate and undergraduate academic workers at the university. The union voted to join the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition in November 2023 after two student organizations, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, were banned from Columbia’s campus.
Lee said that when Columbia called police, who violently attacked student activists—many of them union members—it helped show other union members why this was a workplace safety issue for the union.
SWC has since filed grievances and ULP charges due to police violence against its members. A Columbia Spectator report described the April 30 arrests, including a student who fell down the stairs after allegedly being pushed by police. An NYPD officer accidentally fired his gun while clearing the occupation of Hamilton Hall.
SWC members coordinated with Columbia unions representing post-docs and faculty while at this year’s Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, Lee said.
During the coordinated NYPD sweeps of camps at Columbia and City College of New York, 282 protestors were arrested. But new campus protest encampments have been springing up across the country. According to Students 4 Gaza, there have been student encampments at least 184 college campuses across the world. Some have won some or all of their demands, like the open bargaining sessions being held by hundreds of student protestors at San Francisco State University with their university president.
In the UAW, there has been action from both the rank-and-file and union leadership. UAW Region 9A held a “Stand Up for Gaza” solidarity rally on April 26, gathering faculty and students from NYU, Columbia, and The New School in support of protesting students. The rally ended with a march to the student encampment at NYU.
UAW Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla said in an interview with Jacobin: “This is a student issue, it’s an academic free-speech issue—but it’s also a labor issue, because our members have made it so and have exposed how much it affects the rights of everyone on campus, not just their own bargaining units.”
FIGHTING CONTRACT VIOLATIONS
Some union members have taken action by simply pointing to their union contracts. City bus drivers organized with TWU Local 100 refused to transport arrested protestors to jail at an April 23 Jewish Voice for Peace protest—a Passover “Seder in the Streets” outside of New York Senator Chuck Schumer’s home.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) had commandeered city buses to take the protestors to jail. Six TWU Local 100 members walked off the job instead, stating that the task was outside of their assigned routes and not part of their union contract.
The NYPD eventually found police officers with commercial drivers’ licenses to drive the buses, but arrestees reported dangerous conditions as the drivers sped, hit several curbs, and got lost, according to The Nation.
JUSTICE AT HOME AND ABROAD
“The systems that deprive workers here from better working conditions, from fair wages, and from equality, are the same systems that fund and prop up the Israeli occupation,” said Taher Dahleh, a rank-and-file member of Communications Workers Local 1109 in Brooklyn, and organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement. “The same repressive tools developed by Israel are bought and used by oppressive regimes to target organizers of all kinds, including labor.”
Through his union, Dahleh has been able to have difficult conversations with coworkers about the importance of fighting for justice in Palestine. Dahleh said one coworker who comes from a politically conservative background and was initially uncertain about what he was seeing on the news. “We have worked closely on work and union issues, and he trusts me as a coworker and fellow union member. This trust allowed me to share personal stories about things that family members and loved ones in Palestine experience.”
“I asked him, ‘Why is it that every single time we sit down to bargain with Verizon, we have to fight them for raises to keep pace with the cost of living….when this country clearly has the money to pay for our needs?’”
This coworker joined Dahleh and other CWA 1109 members at a Palestinian Youth Movement march. “This was my friend’s first ever protest, and he left saying that next time he’s going to bring his son and wife!” Dahleh said. “We have always been at our strongest when we fight for broad movements for justice and against oppression.”
As campus protests — and violent police repression — continue to roll across the country, some unions are getting involved. More than 2,700 protesters have been arrested on college campuses since the initial arrests at Columbia University in New York on April 18. Encampments have appeared at more than 400 campuses. The protesting students are calling for full disclosure of their universities’…
Les Clark III took charge of the West Side Recreation and Park District in 2018, just as the bottom was falling out in Taft, California. The oil pumps that surrounded the town of 9,000 had been nodding up and down for decades, but all at once they froze in place, beams hovering in the air like hammers about to fall. The drilling rigs and service trucks vanished from the winding roads around the town, blanketing it with an unfamiliar silence.
For as long as Clark could remember, the oil fields around Taft had swarmed with motion. At the time that he took over the rec center, Kern County drilled over 140 million barrels every year, more oil than almost any other county in the U.S. That oil flowed out of the ground and through a network of pipelines to nearby refineries for conversion into diesel. Above the pipelines, workers in hard hats and jumpsuits circled the fields in pickup trucks to monitor production; others manned towering drill rigs that rattled as they bored into the ground.
Trucks drive along a road near Taft, California. The town’s economy has declined over the last decade as oil production has fallen. Brian L. Frank / Grist
All this motion made money, and the companies that ran the oil fields shared some of that money with Taft, showering the town with millions of dollars in tax revenue and making philanthropic donations to fund schools, scholarships, and community events. While Taft is home to just 1 percent of Kern County’s population, the town’s plight is emblematic of that facing the entire county, a sprawling metropolitan area of nearly a million people whose middle class and tax base are firmly anchored by oil.
As the heart of Kern County’s oil industry, Taft enjoyed a prosperity that neighboring areas did not; the town sits at the southern end of California’s Central Valley, an agricultural region that struggles by almost every metric of healthandsocialwelfare. Many Central Valley towns don’t have grocery stores or parks, let alone an athletic complex like the one run by Clark.
Indeed, Clark’s recreation center campus, which stretches across four buildings, encapsulates the town’s unique prosperity. It boasts a virtual empire of sports and leisure activities — not just the usual youth football and softball but also bingo, jazz dance, bunco, jiujitsu, and bowling, plus a weekly potluck dinner. More than half its budget comes from oil industry contributions, and individual companies have endowed some of the biggest expansions: the Aera Energy gymnasium, the Berry Petroleum movie theater, the Chevron science room for kids. Clark, who just turned 49, proudly dons a black ball cap adorned with the park district’s logo, an oil rig rising up from green fields on a sunny day.
Les Clark III manages the West Side Recreation and Park District in Taft. Most of the district’s funding comes from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
But starting about a decade ago, Taft began to lose its grip on middle-class prosperity. The world oil market took a nosedive in 2014, leading local companies to lay off workers and idle wells in the fields around Taft. Even after oil prices bounced back, a new wave of environmental lawsuits and an oil permitting pause instituted by Governor Gavin Newsom stopped local oil companies from drilling new wells. Meanwhile, the rise of fracking diverted industry investment to untapped shale deposits in states like North Dakota and Texas.
As drilling slowed in Kern County, oil company contributions to the parks district disappeared as well, forcing Clark to lay off 10 of his 14 employees and scale back sports when he couldn’t find volunteers. Then the families of laid-off oil workers started telling him they couldn’t afford to enroll in youth sports — except for the baseball and softball leagues, where Chevron continued to cover all the costs.
The baseball and softball fields at the parks district in Taft are sponsored in part by Chevron. The home and away teams are “roustabouts” and “roughnecks,” both of which are terms for oil field workers. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Clark’s father and grandfather both worked in the oil fields, but he had never wanted to follow them there. His passion was for sports, and when pro football didn’t work out he figured that coaching at the town’s rec center was the next best thing. But the oil crash hit him just as hard as it hit his neighbors who worked for Chevron; when the industry sank, it took the rec center and the rest of the town with it. Clark is a large man, with a voice that travels even without the aid of the basketball gym’s acoustics, but his speech gets clipped when he talks about the impact of the oil crash on the kids who played on his softball teams, and the adults who took his fitness classes.
“It’s a tough deal,” he said. “We’re at a point where we can’t afford to spend in the red anymore.”
In recent years, as governments around the world have begun to shift away from fossil fuels and commit to stemming climate change, scholars and activists have promoted the idea of a “just transition” for communities that rely on carbon-intensive industries. The promise of a just transition is that the government will step in to support displaced workers and abandoned communities, offering subsidies and direct financial support to help build new industries and stave off economic collapse.
So far, this has not happened. The collapse of coal in Appalachia has helped slow climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but it has also eliminated tens of thousands of jobs and emptied out towns across Kentucky and West Virginia. Efforts to stoke new growth with corporate tax breaks, relocation stipends, and broadband investment have so far borne little fruit — though a recent wave of industrial policy legislation from Congress hopes to change that. The growth of renewable energy and the rise of electric vehicles now threaten to condemn oil communities to the same fate. Multiple large California refineries have closed in recent years, pushing hundreds of workers into lower-paying jobs or long-term unemployment.
General Petroleum Road in Taft. Many of the town’s residents work in the oil fields or in related industries. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Kern County hopes to take a very different path, transforming its fossil fuel industry into an industry that will help reduce carbon emissions. In 2021, the oil company California Resources Corporation, or CRC, unveiled a first-of-its-kind plan to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide and stash it in depleted wells near town, preventing the greenhouse gases from wreaking havoc on the atmosphere.
Both CRC and Kern County officials promise that the project will deliver thousands of new manufacturing jobs, many of them perfect for former oil workers. They also say it will refill local tax coffers and restore institutions like Clark’s rec center. In theory, a carbon storage boom would help Kern County leap over the abyss created by the decline of oil, allowing the county to fashion its own “just transition” without a government bailout. To Clark, it all sounds like a godsend.
A pump jack at the Elk Hills oil field near Taft, California. The oil company California Resources Corporation is seeking to repurpose a section of Elk Hills for carbon capture. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The plan’s ambitious promise has created a curious spectacle: an oil town rallying around a pivot to climate action by the state’s largest oil company. Leaders from the high school, the community college, and its chamber of commerce have all joined Clark in endorsing the project. It even landed an endorsement from Taft’s mayor, an ardent critic of renewable energy.
“There’s some kind of window of opportunity, because the industry is trying to evolve,” said Clark.
The consensus view of the “just transition” is that governments will have to make big investments in places like Taft to fill the void left by fossil fuel companies. Kern County is attempting something altogether different by trying to build a new boom industry out of the ashes of an old one, allowing oil companies like CRC to pass the torch to themselves as the county’s economic leaders. If the scheme pans out, the carbon management industry will act as a pacemaker for an ailing economy, replacing a carbon-spewing business with a carbon-saving one, all while protecting the fragile middle class created by oil.
Les Clark III points to the “Chevron S.T.E.A.M.” room at the West Side Recreation and Park District. The new facility offers video games, computers, and science activities for local kids. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The audacious initiative is not without its critics. Many residents of the Latino communities near Elk Hills, the massive oil field where the carbon will be stored, are concerned about the safety of stashing such huge volumes of the greenhouse gas underground a few miles from their homes. Some California climate activists are skeptical that the potential benefits of carbon capture are worth extending a lifeline to the oil fields near Taft, and they question if an effort designed to revive the oil industry can help the Kern County communities that never benefited from it in the first place. (Taft is about 60 percent white, but Kern County overall is about 60 percent Hispanic.)
From Clark’s vantage point at the rec center, there isn’t much of an alternative. As he sees it, Taft’s relationship with companies like CRC is the reason his hometown has so much more to offer residents than the towns around it. In fact, CRC representatives reached out to Clark directly to talk about how the company’s carbon capture plan could benefit the parks district. Next week, the rec center will unveil a new sports complex with a soccer field, volleyball court, and bonfire area — all thanks to CRC. If carbon capture can renew Taft’s prosperity, Clark is all for it.
“They made a point to come to us, because they know we’re hurting,” said Clark. “They wanted to make sure that we’re OK.”
A woman walks down the street in Taft. Many residents of Taft and surrounding towns work in agriculture and have seen little benefit from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Most booms begin with the sudden discovery of a new resource: Think of the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill that drew hundreds of thousands of people to California’s mountain mines, or the Spindletop oil gusher in Texas that gave birth to an American petroleum boom almost overnight. The carbon boom in Kern County, if it comes to pass, will be very different. It will have been reverse engineered, built not around a new resource but around the loss of an existing one.
Oil production in Kern County has been falling for decades, but the industry’s rapid decline over the last 10 years has thrust the county of almost a million people into a crisis. In 2014, when crude prices started to slump, oil and gas facilities accounted for almost a third of all assessed property tax value in the county. Within two years, the value of the county’s wells had fallen by half, dealing a $61 million hit to the county’s budget and wiping out more than 4,000 of the county’s approximately 12,400 oil jobs. Those jobs were some of the highest-paying in the area, with many salaries more than triple the average county salary of around $50,000.
The petroleum industry has long been the bulwark of Taft’s economy. Here, the local rotary club commemorates the famous Lakeview oil gusher. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The crisis fell into the hands of Lorelei Oviatt, the county’s director of planning and natural resources, a powerful and divisive public official with an astonishingly intricate grasp of economics and environmental law. When Oviatt attended college in Ohio in the 1970s, she watched the Rust Belt economies around her collapse as manufacturing jobs fled overseas. She was determined not to let the same thing happen in Kern County, where she took over the planning department in 2010.
Oviatt’s strategy for economic revival could be summarized as “all of the above.” While she has tried to speed up permits for new oil drilling, she also hedged her bets by simultaneously permitting several large solar and wind farms in the county. In doing so, she helped make Kern County a national leader in renewable energy and filled the landscape around her home in the county’s eastern mountains with thousands of rotating wind turbines. But neither solar farms, which require very little labor after construction and are exempt from local property taxes in California, nor wind, whose footprint is limited by the county’s geography and transmission constraints, could match the economic windfall of oil.
“It’s death by a thousand cuts,” said Oviatt. “The state of California’s energy policies are pushing us at an accelerated rate, because climate change is an urgent issue, but they are not providing us any assurances that we can keep our libraries open, or that we can keep Meals on Wheels. So we’re kind of under the perspective here that Kern County needs to design our own future.”
Lorelei Oviatt, Kern county’s director of planning and natural resources, is a proponent of developing both carbon capture and green technologies in the county.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
Lorelei Oviatt, Kern County’s director of planning and natural resources, has promoted both oil and renewable energy in the county. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Kern County, California is undergoing one of the nation’s fastest and most turbulent energy transitions as its famous oil industry shuts down amid declining reserves and aggressive state climate action. The county is putting its faith in a new and untested industry—carbon capture as well as expanding green-energy alternatives such as wind and solar. It’s far from clear that the benefits of these new industries will alter the county’s longstanding political and social inequalities.
Wind and solar have been greatly expanded in recent years in Kern County. Local officials and oil companies have touted the benefits of combining green technology with carbon capture to offset the carbon footprint of the petroleum industry and provide needed energy to California.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
Oviatt has permitted almost 20,000 megawatts of solar and wind energy in Kern County, making the county one of the nation’s leading producers of renewable power. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Wind and solar have been greatly expanded in recent years in Kern County. Local officials and oil companies have touted the benefits of combining green technology with carbon capture to offset the carbon footprint of the petroleum industry and provide needed energy to California.
Brian L. Frank / Grist
The oil companies themselves approached Oviatt in 2021 with a potential solution. If Newsom and the courts wouldn’t let them drill more in Kern’s oil fields, maybe they could use those same fields to store carbon dioxide. Studies suggested that depleted oil wells and the underground formations that stretch out beneath them were an ideal place to store captured gas: The wells stretched more than a mile into the earth, they sat in remote fields that were miles away from any residential area, and the companies already had the expertise to move gas around underground. California was betting on carbon sequestration to help it achieve its climate goals, and a provision in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act nearly doubled the tax credits available to companies capturing carbon. Even conservative estimates suggest that the Central Valley could store at least 17 billion metric tons of carbon in perpetuity, which theoretically is far more than enough to get California to net-zero emissions.
There are two types of carbon capture: “point-source” capture, which involves sucking up carbon-filled air directly from pipes and smokestacks before they release it into the atmosphere, and “direct air capture,” a newer process that uses high-energy fans to extract carbon dioxide from ambient air. Kern County’s oil industry has thrown its weight behind both. CRC, Chevron, and Aera have all announced plans to pursue point-source capture at pipelines and power plants on their existing oil fields, and they also all won federal grants to build direct air capture facilities near Taft.
A power plant at the Elk Hills oil field near Taft, California. The oil field’s owner, California Resources Corporation, is seeking to capture and store carbon dioxide in the field. Brian L. Frank / Grist
No company was more devoted to this idea than California Resources Corporation. After exiting a debt-driven bankruptcy in 2020, the company began an aggressive pivot toward carbon capture, planning a slew of carbon storage projects in the Central Valley and pitching itself as a “different kind of energy company” to new investors. CRC later bought Aera in a transaction that the company said would double its “premium CO2 pore space.”
“In our efforts to mitigate climate change, we are … laser-focused on investing in and growing our carbon management business,” said Francisco Leon, the company’s CEO, in an open letter to investors last year.
It was easy to see the business case: CRC’s inaugural project at Elk Hills, which it calls “Carbon TerraVault I,” will capture gas from the oil field’s infrastructure and its onsite power plant, reducing the carbon emissions tied to the company’s traditional oil production and streamlining its compliance with California climate regulators.
Even more important, though, is the revenue CRC hopes to generate by selling space in its carbon wells. If other factories or companies want to reduce their emissions, they can pay CRC to bury captured gas underground. The company has already signed deals to store carbon for a hydrogen plant, a dimethyl ether plant, and a “renewable gasoline” plant, all in the works near Elk Hills. All told, Carbon TerraVault could store more than 46 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas, enough to theoretically negate the annual emissions of a million passenger cars.
Pipelines at the Elk Hills oil field. CRC plans to capture carbon dioxide from pipelines and power plants as well as other nearby factories and industrial facilities. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Oviatt saw something even bigger in CRC’s strategy, something that she thought could reverse the county’s economic tailspin. She drafted a proposal for what she called a “carbon management business park,” an interlinked complex of new factories that would produce hydrogen or steel — and store the carbon they emitted doing so in nearby oil fields. CRC, Chevron, and Aera had all expressed their interest in such projects, and Oviatt wanted them to know the county was open for business. She also invented what she termed a “cumulative impact oil and gas reservoir pore space charge” — basically a county tax on the space used for carbon capture.
When the county commissioned a third-party study to estimate the economic benefits of all this new industry, the results told Oviatt all she needed to know: A full-size carbon park would generate up to $56 million in tax revenue, about three-quarters of what the oil industry contributed in 2019. Even more importantly, it promised to provide a destination for former oil workers. The report was light on precise details, but it claimed that “at full buildout, the [business park] and related off-site activities would directly and indirectly support 13,500 to 22,000 permanent jobs.”
Oil industry signs adorn the walls of Jo’s Restaurant in Taft. The diner has long been a popular haunt for local oil field workers. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Despite the rosy projections, the scope of the challenge was not lost on Oviatt. CRC and the county were proposing to engineer the kind of industrial boom that typically happens by accident, and to do so in the span of a single decade. Success would require buy-in from almost every civic pillar of the county — not just its elected officials, industry advocacy groups, and three chambers of commerce, but also the institutions that support its residents from cradle to grave.
Kern County’s colleges and workforce development programs have already begun to pivot. After California Resources Corporation donated $2 million to the Kern Community College District in 2022, the district established the “CRC Carbon Management Institute” to create “customized workforce development opportunities” in the new industry. Bakersfield College debuted a new course on the subject, “ENER B52NC, Carbon Capture and Storage,” which included “discussion about the upcoming career opportunities in this field.” Even high schools are buying in; a handful of area teachers have been trained to teach carbon capture by experts from the world-famous Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Berkeley. At a recent high school career day in Taft, CRC passed out handheld signs that allowed students to announce they were “future leaders in carbon management.”
Oil companies like Chevron and Berry Petroleum provide most of the West Side Recreation and Park District’s funding and also contribute to schools and colleges in Taft. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Labor unions also endorsed the plan. Most oil field jobs in the county are nonunion, but construction trade unions like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers could benefit from hundreds of temporary construction jobs that such a buildout would create. Plus, the business park promises to bring thousands of new manufacturing jobs to a county that has historically had very few, given that any new factory would theoretically have instant access to a system that could neutralize its carbon emissions. It helped that CRC already had a cozy relationship with the trade unions; the company agreed in 2016 to hire union contractors for all its maintenance work, and the unions are now negotiating a new agreement with CRC that would cover the company’s carbon projects.
It’s easy to understand the reasoning behind these endorsements: Carbon capture promises to solve one of the most vexing problems of the just transition, the question of how to replace a high-paying and labor-intensive industry. A high school graduate in Kern County can make six figures working for Chevron or CRC without attending a day of college, and thousands of families in the area have attained middle-class prosperity thanks to oil field work. Many workers who’ve lost jobs with these companies have left Taft for states like Texas and North Dakota rather than transition to a new industry. They have taken their sales taxes and property taxes with them, exacerbating the area’s economic pain.
A flag supporting former president Donald Trump flies outside a home in Taft. Kern County is far more conservative than California as a whole; a majority of voters backed Trump in the 2020 election. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Still, Kern County is better off than many other coal- and oil-producing regions, because it is still growing: The county has recently secured new investments in hydrogen, biodiesel, and warehousing, and its solar and wind farms have created hundreds of temporary construction jobs. The county has done its best to help laid-off oil workers transition into these new fields. Its workforce development department holds “rapid response” orientations at oil fields where companies are about to announce layoffs and pays for laid-off workers to take construction or electrician training courses. Kern Community College District also runs a “21st Century Energy Center” that designs certificate programs for energy workers, allowing them to train in electric vehicle charger maintenance and solar panel installation.
But none of these industries has reached anything like the scale of the oil industry, and many of them are either too temporary or too low-paying to be more attractive than oil field work, which requires far more operational and safety expertise than working in an Amazon warehouse or building a solar panel — and thus tends to pay much better. Until a few years ago, the Kern Community College District’s renewable energy center still offered a rudimentary oil safety training called the “oil field passport.”
“To be honest, if our people get jobs out working in the oil field, that’s not a negative, because the ultimate measure is that they got a family-sustaining job,” said Dave Teasdale, the director of the 21st Century Energy Center. “But we do have the concern about, how much longer are they going to be working there?”
A pump jack in the Elk Hills oil field. Petroleum production in Kern County has been falling for decades, eliminating thousands of jobs in Elk Hills and other nearby fields. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The manufacturing complex at Oviatt’s new carbon business park promises to marry the best of both worlds: the labor intensity and remuneration of oil field work with the sustainability and growth potential of renewable energy. Plus, the skills needed to put carbon dioxide into an oil well are not that different from those required to take oil out of it, so many oil workers could transition to the new work with minimal retraining.
But the avalanche of jobs is hardly guaranteed. The state permit for CRC’s first cluster of carbon wells says that they will create 80 temporary construction jobs but only five permanent positions. The county won’t see the full benefit of carbon capture unless steel manufacturers and hydrogen startups flock to the county for CRC’s carbon storage space, and that depends on factors that are outside the county’s control. If companies find other ways to cut their emissions — or if the EPA halts the process of carbon storage out of safety concerns — the market for the carbon business park might vanish.
A sign in Taft promotes “Oildorado,” a celebration of the oil industry that takes place every five years. Brian L. Frank / Grist
That hasn’t stopped most of the county’s civic leaders from pinning their hopes on the project. Earlier this year, when the EPA hosted a public hearing to discuss the carbon storage project’s potential impact on underground aquifers, representatives from almost every major county institution attended to praise carbon capture as an economic boon. The EPA had already given provisional approval to CRC’s carbon storage effort, but everyone from union leaders to community college administrators showed up to stress their support for it.
The hearing was held in the farmworker community of Buttonwillow, which is almost 90 percent Hispanic, and a number of residents and environmental justice advocates showed up to voice their fears that the stored carbon dioxide would leak into the surrounding air. This has happened at least once before when a pipeline in Mississippi ruptured and hospitalized 49 people, but the EPA views such a calamity as unlikely in Kern.
California Resources Corporation argues that capturing and storing carbon dioxide in the Elk Hills oil field could be an economic boon for the county, offsetting the decline of traditional oil production. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Meanwhile, the boosters kept beating the drum of economic development. One oil company owner declared that the project would help “hundreds or thousands of young men and women to launch their careers,” while another former oil worker who taught at Taft High School said the project would help “those people who are being transitioned out of the petroleum industry” to keep working in the county. Les Clark and his rec center employees were there, too, and Clark took a turn at the microphone to celebrate the economic revival CRC promised to bring to Taft.
The EPA officials at the hearing only had the legal authority to consider the project’s effects on water quality, and many of them were only present because of their geological expertise. As dozens of locals stood up one by one to thank CRC for saving Kern from economic ruin, the regulators could only smile and nod.
The California Aqueduct runs through Kern County, delivering water to farm fields in the area. Many county residents work on almond and pistachio farms for very little pay. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Danny Gracia, 45, grew up in Buttonwillow, near the Elk Hills oil field and about 20 miles from Taft. At that time Buttonwillow was a hub for the American cotton industry, and the work was grueling. Gracia’s mother and father worked long shifts at the town’s massive cotton gin to provide for him and his three older brothers. As soon as Danny’s brothers reached adolescence they joined their parents at the gin to help support the family, making only $8 an hour each.
This was the status quo for tens of thousands of people in Kern County in the 1990s — and it still is today — but Gracia managed to escape it. He was still in high school when one of his brothers heard about a job opportunity on a drilling rig; soon he was making far more money than the rest of his family. When Gracia graduated high school, he joined his brother in the field for a summer job, then quickly took a permanent position expanding old wells. His company paid for him to rack up trainings and certificates, and within a few years he got a promotion to rig supervisor, which allowed him to buy a house at the age of 21. His mother was able to quit working at the gin and stay at home cooking for Danny and his brothers, who paid her for feeding them between shifts.
“My intention coming into the oil fields was to provide a good life for my families like my brothers and friends,” he told me. “I did more than that. I made a career out of it. I gave my family more than I ever thought possible.”
Danny Gracia has worked in the oil industry for more than 20 years. He grew up in a family of farmworkers and credits the oil industry with helping him achieve a middle-class existence. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Gracia’s story shows why so many of Kern’s institutions have rallied around carbon capture as a successor to the oil industry. But it also shows why many environmental and economic justice organizations are critical of the county’s plans: Carbon capture might help oil workers like Gracia, but it doesn’t do much for other people in towns like Buttonwillow who have never benefited from the oil industry — and who may have suffered harmful health effects from living near oil infrastructure. Agriculture employs around 30,000 people in Kern County, more than twice as many as the oil industry, but most of those workers make around $20,000 a year, and there are nowhere enough training programs or job openings in the oil industry for these workers to ascend the economic ladder. As some activists see it, the county is missing out on the opportunity for broader economic reform with its focus on mitigating the decline of oil.
“We talk a lot about oil workers, and I respect that, but at the same time, there are a lot of agricultural workers that are sustaining a lot of the economic health of the region,” said Daniel Rodela, a community organizer who grew up in an agricultural community near Taft and now works at a nonprofit called Faith in the Valley. “But obviously, in our community, there’s going to be folks that are going to be advocating for things remaining the way that they are.”
Oil companies like California Resources Corporation own much of the land around towns like Buttonwillow, but many low-income residents in these towns say they’ve never benefited from the oil industry. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The Biden administration has sought to alter this dynamic as it plows money into clean energy projects in fossil fuel communities. The federal grant that CRC received for its direct air capture facility requires the company to create a “community benefits agreement” for its carbon projects, including commitments to disadvantaged areas around Taft. As it applied for permits to store carbon underground, the company also had to build social consensus across the county, including in agricultural communities like Buttonwillow.
CRC did not shrink from this task. As the company pushed Carbon TerraVault, it erected billboards near highways and oil fields in Bakersfield, announcing that the company was “committed to our net-zero future.” It held dozens of meetings with city leaders, environmental organizations, unions, and the family members of the activist Cesar Chavez, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association in Kern County in 1962. CRC employees knocked on doors in Buttonwillow and the other communities around Elk Hills, taking selfies to document the effort, and sent out mailers in English and Spanish. They held a meeting at a movie theater in Taft that Clark’s rec center runs, playing a teaser video for carbon capture before screening the action movie Expendables 4. The company even dreamed up a partnership with Grandma Whoople Enterprises, an “anti-bullying entertainer” in nearby Bakersfield who agreed to conduct “elementary field trips for frontline community children.”
Children play with a slingshot in Taft. Social justice organizations have criticized the county’s proposed carbon capture plan for not doing enough to address the county’s economic disparities. Brian L. Frank / Grist
But these efforts don’t seem to have succeeded in building popular support for carbon capture, despite the wave of institutional endorsements for Carbon TerraVault. When the social justice nonprofit Dolores Huerta Foundation partnered with the University of California, Merced, to survey hundreds of disadvantaged Kern residents last year, asking them where they wanted to see more jobs, the top answers included solar, wind, and oil well abandonment. Carbon capture placed a distant seventh, with only 1 in 3 respondents endorsing it.
California Resources Corporation declined interview and comment requests for this story. A spokesperson for the company said it was in a “media quiet period” as it sought carbon capture permits. A representative for Chevron did not respond to questions about the company’s projects in Kern County.
The “Chevron S.T.E.A.M.” room at the West Side Recreation and Park District in Taft. Companies such as Chevron have pushed carbon capture as an economic lifeline for Kern County. Brian L. Frank / Grist
There are alternative visions for Kern County’s revival, ones that don’t involve a project sponsored by oil. Many environmental organizations have given particular attention to proposals that would employ workers to seal defunct oil wells and clean up the land and water around abandoned oil fields. A report published by the Sierra Club last year found that there are more than 40,000 idle or orphaned wells in the state, and CRC and Chevron own more than two-thirds of them. Plugging all these wells could create at least 13,000 jobs in Kern County alone, the report found — almost as many as the carbon business park, though the former would by nature be short-term. Hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law could help kickstart the effort. These jobs wouldn’t last forever, but they could allow much of Kern’s aging oil workforce to reach retirement without retraining. Temporary solar construction jobs could help fill the gap.
This remediation industry is at the center of a recent economic development proposal by the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment, or CRPE, a decades-old environmental justice organization based in Kern County. Drawing a contrast with the county government’s embrace of carbon capture, the proposal lays out a vision for a new workforce that would seal old wells, remediate oil land, and build public infrastructure, supplemented by a state program that would replace the wages of laid-off workers as they seek new employment. It’s a vision where government rather than industrial initiative is the driving force.
Juan Flores, a lead organizer at CRPE and one of the authors of this plan, said that many people in disadvantaged parts of the county are wary of the oil industry because they’ve suffered the health impacts of oil production, like cancer and preterm births.
“I think on that rubric of [a] ‘just transition,’ the county has failed,” he said. “They continue to think, ‘how can we keep the oil industry alive?’”
Juan Flores, a community organizer at the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, rejects the county’s plan for a transition focused on carbon capture. He argues the county should focus on remediating abandoned oil wells instead. Brian L. Frank / Grist
Others argue that carbon storage in Kern County could function as a public good rather than a private business. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is proposing a “community-centered direct air capture hub” that would run like a public utility. Whereas CRC’s carbon complex could pitch in a share of its revenue to the county through property taxes, the Berkeley proposal could see locals elect a governing board that would manage the carbon facility directly and route its revenue toward impoverished areas.
These alternatives might not be that much more ambitious than Oviatt’s carbon business park, but realizing them would require a herculean amount of coordination between local governments, employers, schools, labor unions, and advocacy groups.
Kern County has shown that this coordination is possible, but only in service of certain ends. As the region’s largest taxpayers and most sought-after employers, oil companies have had an outsize influence over how the county navigates the energy transition. These companies have plowed millions of dollars into education and capital projects in the region even as oil itself declines, a stark contrast with the fate of Appalachian communities that saw their biggest employers cut and run during the collapse of coal. But the condition of this investment is that the county has to pursue economic development on the industry’s terms, and its transition to a low-carbon future will happen in a manner that benefits the industry rather than dismantling it.
The Oil Worker Monument in downtown Taft. The government of Kern County is seeking both to attract new industries and to preserve legacy industries like oil. Brian L. Frank / Grist
The risks of this dynamic became apparent in the weeks after the carbon capture hearing, when a state appellate court dealt Kern County’s oil industry another defeat. A panel of judges voted to throw out Oviatt’s attempt to permit thousands of new oil wells, ordering the county to draw up a third environmental review for the drilling plan. This effort could take the county as long as a year to complete, and even then it would be subject to new legal challenges. But Oviatt was undeterred, and she got right back to work revising the permits.
“There’s no oil drilling, there’s no more money — those companies can roll up and leave and decimate our community,” she said. “These companies have to have money in order to evolve.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on May 13, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
From Monday through Friday, around 5,200 employees of Mercedes-Benz in Alabama will vote on whether to join the United Auto Workers—which has set its sights on the U.S. South after contract wins at the industry’s “Big Three” in Michigan last year.
While Republican leaders in the state, including Gov. Kay Ivey, and at least one worker have publicly attacked the unionization effort, multiple Mercedes employees have signaled their support for the UAW going into this week’s voting at an assembly facility in Vance and battery plant in Woodstock.
“I’ve watched our company not keep up with the times,” Mercedes worker Brett Garrard recently told the Detroit Free Press. “We pray for fair wages, comparative wages inside the auto industry. Benefits packages have suffered throughout the years. My wife, herself, has stage four cancer. I’d like to see something implemented to maybe help our situation.”
David Johnston, who works at the Woodstock plant, has also cited medical concerns, telling Forbes that “I’m always in a medical hospital. I’m always sick. I need better healthcare. Plus, when I retire I’m not going to have any insurance until Medicare kicks in.”
Johnston is optimistic about the vote in Alabama. He pointed to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Volkswagen plant employees last month overwhelmingly voted to join the UAW.
“I mean, hands down. I think we’re gonna win. We’re gonna win. Hopefully by a lot,” he said. “It seems like it’s gonna be a slam dunk just like Volkswagen. Everybody’s excited.”
Haeden Wright, a senior organizer for Jobs to Move America, told AL.com that a win in Alamaba “would show workers across all different industries that they can stand up together and fight for more.”
In comments to The Guardian, Mercedes employee Rick Webster similarly framed this week’s vote as part of a larger battle.
“It’s time for Alabama workers to stand up and unite not just at Mercedes, but at Hyundai, Honda, and Toyota. It’s time for everybody to stand up and have a voice and we need to end the Alabama discount,” he said, using an organizer term to highlight how workers in the state have subpar wages and benefits compared to their peers elsewhere in the country.
Webster also called out Mercedes’ efforts to convince workers in Alabama not to vote in favor of joining the UAW—which has filed multiple union-busting complaints against the company with the National Labor Relations Board.
“It is a daily barrage of text messages, emails, and there’s an app we have for work for every kind of announcement you can think of and we’re getting two to three notifications daily. Every day before the shift, we have to sit in the team room and watch anti-union videos,” he explained. “It’s just been a constant barrage. Everybody is just sick and tired of it.”
Johnston told NPR that “the entire message in those meetings is Vote no, vote no, vote no. We don’t think you need to do this. This is not what you want.”
A company spokesperson has told multiple news outlets that Mercedes-Benz U.S. International “fully respects our team members’ choice whether to unionize and we look forward to participating in the election process to ensure every team member has a chance to cast their own secret-ballot vote, as well as having access to the information necessary to make an informed choice.”
The United Auto Workers webpage on the Alabama effort includes information about who is eligible to vote, how to participate, and workers’ rights as well as the UAW’s responses to some of opponents’ allegations against the union.
“Right now, Mercedes is doing whatever they can to discourage us. But voting yes for our union is a game-changer,” the UAW webpage says. “Once we vote yes, the company is legally required to sit down with us as equals to bargain a contract. Just like VW, Mercedes has negotiated union contracts with workers all around the world. We can win our union, our union contract, and our fair share right here in Alabama.”
In recent years, the right has targeted diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, and, as we barrel toward a presidential election, the scapegoating of DEI is worsening. According to the University of Southern California’s Race and Equity Center, 18 states have banned spending public funds on DEI-related activities in K-12 schools, and eight have done the same for colleges and universities.
For three and a half decades, lean management drove the production and movement of goods. But now logistics and manufacturing employers are shifting to a new model. To maximize our leverage, workers should understand it. Lean production, introduced in the 1980s from Japanese automakers, caught on in many U.S. industries. It was a whole bundle of techniques to maximize profit…
Argentina’s primary trade union federation on Thursday held another nationwide general strike, the second called since President Javier Milei, a far-right economist, took office in December and began pursuing sweeping austerity and deregulation. The South American nation’s unions organized the strike “in defense of democracy, labor rights, and the living wage,” according to a statement from the…
