This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.
Also on the show: Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week on the show.
This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.
Also on the show: Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week on the show.
Nearly 50 labor organizations representing a wide range of U.S. workers — from teachers to letter carriers to mine workers — are urging members of Congress this week to oppose Republican efforts to roll back a slew of Biden administration rules aimed at protecting the nation’s workforce from abusive employers and unscrupulous Wall Street investors. Led by the AFL-CIO, the country’s largest…
A right-wing group is expecting to bring together hundreds of public school teachers from across the country this week to teach them how to decertify their unions and keep “the socialist dogma of their leadership [out of] our children’s classrooms.” The Teacher Freedom Summit, held in Denver, is the second annual gathering designed to provide public school teachers with “intensive leadership…
Janine Jackson interviewed Northwestern University’s Hatim Rahman about algorithms and labor for the July 5, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Many of us have been bewildered and bemused by the experience of walking out of a doctor’s appointment, or a restaurant, and within minutes getting a request to give our experience a five-star rating. What does that mean—for me, for the establishment, for individual workers? Data collection in general is a concept we can all grasp, but what is going on at the unseen backend of these algorithms that we should know about to make individual and societal decisions?
Hatim Rahman is assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He’s author of the book Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Hatim Rahman.
Hatim Rahman: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
JJ: The book has broad implications, but a specific focus. Can you just start us off explaining why you focused your inquiry around what you call “TalentFinder”? What is that, and what’s emblematic or instructive around that example?
HR: Sure, and I want to take you back about a decade ago, when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, in the engineering school, in a department called Management Science and Engineering. And at that time, when I was beginning my studies, there was a lot of talk about the future of work, and how technology, specifically algorithms and artificial intelligence, are going to lead us to the promised land. We are going to be able to choose when to work, how often we want to work, because, essentially, algorithms will allow us to pick the best opportunities and give us fair pay. And from an engineering perspective, there was this idea that it was technically feasible.
But as I began my studies, I realized that the technical features of algorithms or artificial intelligence don’t really tell us the whole story, or really the main story. Instead, these technologies really reflect the priorities of different institutions, organizations and individuals.
And so that’s kind of the through line of the book, but it was playing out in what a lot of people call the “gig economy.” Many of us are familiar with how Uber, Airbnb, even Amazon to a large extent, really accelerated this concept and the idea of the gig economy. And so you mentioned, I found this platform, which I use a pseudonym called TalentFinder, that was trying to use algorithms to create an Amazon for labor. What I mean by that is, just as you pick a product, or maybe a movie or TV show on Netflix, the thought was, if you’re looking to hire somebody to help you create a program, write a blog post, any task that you can think about that’s usually associated with knowledge work, that you could go onto this platform and find that person, again, as I alluded to earlier, just as you find a product.
And the way they were then able to do that, allow anybody to sign up to work or to find somebody, was with the use of these algorithms. And what I found, though, the reality of the situation was, that as the platform scaled, it started to prioritize its own goals, which were often in conflict, or were not shared, with workers on these platforms.
JJ: So let’s talk about that. What do you mean by that, in terms of the different goals of employers and potential workers?
HR: Sure. So it kind of went to the example you started with, that one of the thoughts was—actually, I’m going to take you back even further, to eBay. When eBay started, we take it for granted now, but the thought was, how can I trust that this person I don’t know, I don’t even know them. How can I trust that the images that they’re showing, the description that they put on, is true?
HR:And so eBay pioneered, really, or at least they’re the most famous example of the early company that started, like, “Hey, one way we can do this is through a rating system.” So I may take a chance and buy a product with somebody I don’t know, and if they send me what they said, I’m going to give them a five-star rating, and if they don’t, I’ll give them a lower rating.
And so since then—that was in the mid-’90s—almost all online platforms and, as you mentioned, organizations and—sorry, it is a small tangent: I was recently traveling, and I saw an airport asking me for my ratings for my bathroom experience.
JJ: Of course, yes. Smiley face, not smiley face.
HR: Exactly, exactly. Everyone copy and pastes that model. And that is helpful in many situations, but it doesn’t capture, a lot of times, the reality of people’s experiences, especially when you think about the context that I talked about. If you hired me to create a software program, and we work together for six months, there are going to be ups and downs. There are going to be things that go well, things that don’t necessarily go well, and what does that mean if you gave me a 4.8 or 4.5, right?
And so this was something that workers picked up on really early on in the platform, that these ratings, they don’t really tell the whole experience, but the algorithms will use those ratings to suggest, and people will use the search results that the algorithms curate, to make decisions about who to hire, and so on and so forth.
The problem that I traced, over the evolution of the platform, is that once workers realized that it was really important, they found out ways to game the system, essentially, to get a five-star rating all the time. And from speaking to workers, they felt this was justified, because a lot of times in an organization that hires them, they mismanage the project….
And so, in response, what the platform did, and now again almost all platforms do this, they made their algorithm opaque to workers. So workers no longer understood, or had very little understanding, of what actions were being evaluated, how they were being evaluated, and then what was the algorithm doing with it.
So, for example, if I responded to somebody faster than the other person, would the algorithm interpret that as me being a good worker or not? All of that, without notice or recourse, became opaque to them.
I liken it to, if you received a grade in class, but you don’t know why you got that grade. And, actually, many of us may have experienced this going through school; you hear this “participation grade,” and it’s like, “Wait, I didn’t know that was a grade, or why the professor gave me this grade.”
So that does happen in human life as well. One of the points I make in the book is that as we turn towards algorithms and artificial intelligence, the speed and scale at which this can happen is somewhat unprecedented.
JJ: Right, and I’m hearing Taylorism here, and just measuring people. And I know that the book is basically engaged with higher-wage workers, and it’s not so much about warehouse workers who are being timed, and they don’t get a bathroom break. But it’s still relevant to that. It’s still part of this same conversation that’s categorically different; algorithm-driven or determined work changes, doesn’t it, the basic relationship between employers and employees? There’s something important that is shifting here.
HR: That’s correct. And you are right that one of the points that I make in the book, and there’s been a lot of great research and exposés about the workers that you mentioned, in Amazon factories and other contexts as well, that we’ve seen a continuation of Taylorism. And for those who are less familiar, that essentially means that you can very closely monitor and measure workers.
And they know that, too. They know what you’re monitoring, and they know what you’re measuring. And so they will often, to the detriment of their physical health and well-being, try to conform to those standards.
And one of the points I make in the book is that when the standards are clear, or what you expect them to do is comparatively straightforward—you know, make sure you pack this many boxes—we will likely see this enhanced Taylorism. The issue that I’m getting at in my book is that, as you mentioned, we’re seeing similar types of dynamics being employed, even when the criteria by which to grade people or evaluate people is less clear.
So, again, for a lot of people who are engaged in knowledge work, you may know what you want, but how you get there…. If you were to write a paper or even compose a speech, you may know what you want, but how you’re going to get there—are you going to take a walk to think about what you’re going to say, are you going to read something unrelated? It’s less clear to an algorithm whether that should be rewarded or not. But there is this attempt to try to, especially in trying to differentiate workers in the context that I mentioned.
So the problem with everyone having a five-star rating on eBay or Amazon, or on TalentFinder that I studied, is that for people who are trying to then use those ratings, including algorithms, it doesn’t give any signal if everyone has the same five-star rating. In situations and contexts where you want differentiation, so you want to know who’s the best comparatively to other people on the platform, or what’s the best movie in this action category or in the comedy category compared to others, then you’re going to try to create some sort of ranking hierarchy. And that’s where I highlight that we’re more likely to see what I call this “invisible cage” metaphor, where the criteria and how you’re evaluated becomes opaque and changing.
JJ: I think it’s so important to highlight the differentiation between workers and consumers. There’s this notion, or this framework, that the folks who are working, who are on the clock and being measured in this way, somehow they’re posed or pitted against consumers. The idea is that you’re not serving consumers properly. And it’s so weird to me, because consumers are workers, workers are consumers. There’s something very artificial about the whole framework for me.
HR: This is returning to one of the earlier points that I mentioned, is that we have to examine what in my discipline we call the “employment relationship.” How are people tied together, or not tied together? So in the case that you mentioned, many times consumers are kept distant from workers; they aren’t necessarily even aware, or if they are aware, they aren’t given much opportunity.
So generally speaking, for a long time, like Uber and Lyft—especially in the earlier versions of the platform; they change very rapidly—they don’t necessarily want you to call the same driver every time, [even] if you have a good relationship with them. So that’s what you mentioned, that the design of these systems sometimes keeps people in opposition with each other, which is problematic, because that’s not the technology doing that, right? That’s the organization, and sometimes the laws that are involved, that don’t allow for consumers and workers, or people more broadly, to be able to talk to each other in meaningful ways.
And in my case, on TalentFinder as well, I spoke to clients, consumers or people who are hiring these workers, and a lot of them were just unaware. They’re like, “Oh my gosh.” I highlighted in the book that they designed the rating system to say, “Just give us your feedback. This is private. We just want it to improve how the platform operates.” What they don’t tell them is that if they were to give them something slightly less than ideal, it could really imperil the workers‘ opportunity to get a next job.
We sometimes refer to this as an information asymmetry, where the platform, or the organizations, they have more information, and are able to use it in ways that are advantageous to them, but are less advantageous to the workers and consumers that are using these services.
JJ: And part of what you talk about in the book is just that opacity, that organizations are collecting information, perhaps nominally in service of consumers and the “consumer experience,” but it’s opaque. It’s not information that folks could get access to, and that’s part of the problem.
Hatim Rahman: “If you are a worker, or if you are the one who is being evaluated, it’s not only you don’t know the criteria, but it could be changing.”
HR: That’s right. It goes to this point that these technologies, they can be transparent, they can be made accountable, if organizations, or in combination with lawmakers mandating, take those steps to do so. And we saw this early on on the platform that I study, and also on YouTube and many other platforms, where they were very transparent about, “Hey, the number of likes that you get or the number of five ratings you get, we’re going to use that to determine where you show up in the search results, whether we’re going to suggest you to a consumer or a client.”
However, we’ve increasingly seen, with the different interests that are involved, that platforms no longer reveal that information, so that if you are a worker, or if you are the one who is being evaluated, it’s not only you don’t know the criteria, but it could be changing. So today, it could be how fast you respond to somebody’s message. Tomorrow, it might be how many times did you log into the platform.
And that’s problematic, because if you think about learning, the ability to learn, it fundamentally relies on being able to establish a relationship between what you observe, or what you do, and the outcome that leads to. And when that becomes opaque, and it’s so easy to change dynamically—sometimes even, let’s put aside day-to-day, maybe hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute—those really kind of supercharge the capabilities to what I call enable this dynamic opacity.
JJ: And not for nothing, but it’s clear that in terms of worker solidarity, in terms of workers sharing communication with each other, put it simple, workers need to communicate with other workers about what they’re getting paid, about their experience on the job. This is anti all of that.
HR: In related research, for my own and others, we have tried to examine this as well, especially gig work; the setup of this work makes it very difficult for workers to organize together in ways that are sustainable. Not only that, many workers may be drifting in and out of these platforms, which again makes it harder, because they’re not employees, they’re not full-time employees. And I talk to people in the book, I mentioned people, they’re between jobs, so they just want to kind of work on it.
So in almost every way, from the design of the platform to employment relationship, the barriers to create meaningful, sustainable alternatives, or resistance or solidarity, becomes that much more difficult. That doesn’t mean workers aren’t trying; they are, and there are organizations out there, one called Fairwork and others, that are trying to create more sustainable partnerships, that will allow workers to collectively share their voices, so that hopefully there are mutually beneficial outcomes.
I talked about this earlier; I mean, just to connect again with history, I think we can all agree that it’s good that children are not allowed to work in factories. There was a time when that was allowed, right? But we saw the effects that could have on the injuries, and just overall in terms of people’s development. And so we need to have this push and pull to create more mutually beneficial outcomes, which currently isn’t occurring to the same extent on a lot of these gigs and digital platforms.
JJ: Finally, first of all, you’re highlighting this need for interclass solidarity, because this is lawyers, doctors—everybody’s in on this. Everybody has a problem with this, and that’s important. But also, so many tech changes, people feel like they’re just things that happen to them. In the same way that climate change, it’s just a thing that’s happening to me. And we are encouraged into this kind of passivity, unfortunately. But there are ways to move forward. There are ways to talk about this. And I just wonder, what do you think is the political piece of this, or where are meaningful points of intervention?
Consumer Reports (5/07)
HR: That’s a great question. I do like to think about this through the different lenses that you mentioned. What can I do as an individual? What can I do in my organization? And what can we do at the political level? And, briefly, on the individual consumer level, we do have power, and we do have a voice, going back to the past, right? Consumer Reports. Think about that. Who was that started by? And that had a very influential difference on the way different industries ran.
And we’ve seen that, also, for sustainability. There’s a lot of third-party rating systems started by consumers that have pushed organizations towards better practices.
So I know that may sound difficult as well, but as I mentioned, there’s this organization called Fairwork that is trying to do this in the digital labor context.
So I would say that you don’t have to do it on your own. There are existing platforms and movements, as individuals, that you can try to tap onto, and to share these what we call again third-party alternative rating systems, that we can collectively say, “Hey, let’s use our economic power, our political power, to transact on platforms that have more transparency or more accountability, that are more sustainable, that treat workers better.” So that’s one, on the political level.
Maybe my disposition is a little bit more optimistic, but I think that we’ve seen, in the last few years, with the outsized impact social media has suggested it’s had on our discourse and politics, that politicians are more willing than before, and I know sometimes the bar is really low, but still, again, on the optimistic side, that they’re at least willing to listen, and hopefully work with these platforms, or the workers on the platforms, because, again, I really fundamentally feel that ensuring that these technologies and these platforms reflect our mutual priorities is going to be better for these organizations and society and workers in the long term as well.
We don’t want to just kick the can down the road, because of what you talked about earlier, as it relates to climate change and CO2 emissions; we’ve been kicking it down the road, and we are collectively seeing the trauma as it relates to heat exhaustion, hurricanes….
And so, of course, that should be warning signs for us, that trying to work together now, at all of those different levels, is necessary. There’s not a silver bullet. We need all hands on deck from all areas and angles to be able to push forward.
JJ: I thank you very much for that. I co-sign that 100%.
We’ve been speaking with Hatim Rahman. He’s assistant professor at Northwestern University. The book we’re talking about is Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers. It’s out next month from University of California Press. Hatim Rahman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The largest labor union in the United States is not the Teamsters, the United Auto Workers or the Steelworkers — it’s the National Education Association (NEA), which represents 3 million educators, retired educators and soon-to-be-educators across the country. Led by President Becky Pringle, the union is used to squaring off against powerful school administrators and government officials to defend…
The twists and turns of France’s recent election have ended with a surprise majority for the New Popular Front, a hastily cobbled together left coalition running the gamut from the Communists to the Greens. The NFP’s unexpected triumph turned the early success of the far-right National Rally in the first round of the election on its head. But the right in France is far from defeated, and whether the NFP can hold its ground, or expand its influence from here, remains to be seen. Axel Persson, general secretary of the CGT Railway Workers Union in Trappes, joins The Marc Steiner Show for a postmortem of the election, the challenges that remain ahead for the French left, and what lessons can be learned by observers from around the world.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on the Real News. It’s great to have you all with us again. As we all know, France just went to the polls, but first let me tell you, I’m home a bit under the weather. We have to get this program out given what just happened in France. Bear with me if the sound quality is not as great as we always have it. But it’s an important conversation and nobody thought this was going to happen. Everybody thought Le Pen and the right would win this election.
The right would take over France, but the people had a different idea. And this election in France, the left coalition made up the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Ecologists or the Greens, created something like a 1930s Popular Front that they did then to combat Nazism and the right, demand worker rights in during the depression. Now a new Popular Front has taken over and taken up that mantle and all the disparate groups in the left in France and together to stop the right wing from taking power. And this left wing coalition is there. We’ll see what happens in the future. And we are joined now by Axel Persson who is a train driver in France, General Secretary of the CGT Railroad Workers Union in Montreuil, in a suburb of Paris. And Axel, excuse me, good to have you with us.
Axel Persson:
Thank you. Happy to be with you.
Marc Steiner:
And you’re joining us from Sweden.
Axel Persson:
I’m actually joining from Sweden because I’m actually on holidays for 11 coming days. I left this morning for Sweden.
Marc Steiner:
Welcome. Glad you could join us.
Axel Persson:
Thank you.
Marc Steiner:
This really was in many ways, absolutely unprecedented. People did not think this was going to happen. Talk a bit about what you think happened and how and why the left went beyond what people expected to happen.
Axel Persson:
The very name Popular Front that was used to define this broad alliance between the Social Democrats, the Communist Party, the Green Party, and also one of the biggest parties on the left nowadays that is called [foreign language 00:02:03] in French, which would translate into the Unbounded Rebellious France, came together of course using this very politically charged name of Popular Front because it refers to a very specific period in French history in the 1930s and of course different situations but similar dynamics where the far right was on the rise and also on the verge of taking power. They decided to come together, unite in order to prevent them from seizing state power at least through the means of election. It was a direct reference to that period of history in order to mark as heavily as possible in the collective conscience that this is what was at stake here right now.
And of course it worked to some extent. And I must add also that this is not only a coalition of political parties, it’s also a coalition that includes, for example, trade unions such as mine, the CGT, the General Confederation Labor, which is the oldest trade union in France. And also groups like anti-fascist groups which joined the front of feminist organizations, anti-racist organizations and different movements such as, for example, Jewish, anti-Zionist organizations that joined the Popular Front in order to unite on a platform that of course made many compromises on various issues. But that defined a minimal frame into which one could form an agreement in order to prevent and go to the polls and prevent the far right from seizing power, which worked, at least for now. And I’m saying this at least for now, because even though the Popular Front managed to prevent the far right from gaining the most seats in parliament and the Popular Front is the coalition that has the most seats in parliament, it neither has its own majority.
And it cannot hide the fact that despite this, the far right has grown in French society and this election, even though they didn’t gain as much seats as they hoped for, does confirm that they’re on an upwards trend and that their ideas have been deeply rooted in French society, which means that unless we manage to switch the tide and turn it backwards, it’s just a matter of time because they managed to seize power. This is an alert, it worked this time. The Popular Front tactic worked this time, but it also gives us high responsibilities in order to seize this opportunity where we managed to prevent them from seizing power to transform it into hope. Because in the end, just preventing them from seizing power is not a political program in itself that could satisfy the large swath of the working class and the population in general.
What we need to do now is take the offensive back, gain the ground we’ve lost, gain back the ground we’ve lost and go on the offensive. And us as a trade union, what we are saying now is that the only issue at hand for us is to organize massively and use the weapons of our collective class, which are strikes, insurrections, demonstrations, because those are the only way into which we’ll be able to transform the society, not institutional politics, even though we do not underestimate importance of elections. But in the end, that is not what is going to change radically the lives of the people who are demanding this desperate change in order to live in a better world to put things simply. That is our task at hand, which is actually the most difficult part. It’s not the elections that were the most difficult, it’s actually what’s coming now.
Marc Steiner:
Let me just say, Axel you said so much here. Let me see if I can get some of it out and I can see why you’re one of the leaders of the movement. But let’s first of all talk about, one of the things you said was how the right has grown and how they have a powerful base in France, talk about for all of our people listening about the political struggle in France and why the right is so strong and why the surge as it has in the United States, as it has in India, as it has in lots of places, but what’s the French story? Why is there such a surge on the right?
Axel Persson:
There’s many explanations of course. The first one being of course, that the far right is being financed and fueled by very powerful forces in French society. For example, there is a very, very famous, one of the most powerful billionaires in French society who is called Vincent Bollore, who is a CEO of an industrial empire who has for the past decade now methodically bought up massive amount of medias within the written press, television, radios, and is now actually pushing and lobbying for the privatization of the public media in order to be able to privatize them and has managed to push through this campaign and a massive amount of media campaigning, pushing basically far right theories, shifting the blame that working people can lay on the issues that facing, such as housing crisis, low wages, layoffs in factories, even in security. Everything, everything, everything, literally, there’s no exception to it, is being linked to issues such as immigration, ethnicity or sometimes even religion.
And that is a massively coordinated campaign that is being fund and financed by very powerful forces in French society who have a right wing agenda. But the fact also that it has succeeded because that is not the only factor is also because of the weakness actually of the organized left, even though it’s stronger than in other countries, the fact that for example, the Social Democratic Party, even the Communist Party have been in power most notably in the eighties and nineties and even actually in 2012, have repeatedly failed and disappointed vast sections of the working class when they were in power implementing policies that were against the working classes or even sometimes pushing racist policies.
I’m thinking particularly about the Social Democratic Party, which has led to a massive disillusion in politics, which has given way to this far right that much like in the US actually where we have this quite absurd situation where billionaires, because it’s literally billionaires like Trump for example, as you have in the US who are billionaires from the system, the establishment, and who managed to portray themselves as the anti-system candidates, which is quite absurd when you see where they’re coming from and how they’re being funded.
But that is basically the dynamics into which… And they’re managing to tap into the sentiment a large portion of the society here through that. And one of the things also another pillar by that is that we used to have in France the biggest, the strongest communist party in the entire industrial world, which meant that it was not only strong electorally, it was also strong in society, in the grassroots, it controlled large neighborhoods, it controlled cities. And within these cities they had organized a complete counter society by controlling unions, controlling sport clubs, controlling all these associations that would help people with housing issues, even homework, everyday problems.
And as this Communist Party participated in governments that disappointed large section of the class, this party progressively started its downhill phase and not disappeared, but got very, very weakened. And this whole counter society that managed to basically fight this narrative in the working class neighborhoods has been weakened a lot, which has given a leeway to the far right that has managed to tap in into those communities that used to be organized by the communist movement and are now having a much easier time to basically dive into the collective psyche of the workers than that we had before.
Marc Steiner:
Just from your responses to the questions I ask, I can see we could spend days here, we don’t have days to spend, but I would like to probe that a little bit more deeply because one of the things I thought about in watching what was happening in France in this election is that it is emblematic of the struggle across the globe.
Axel Persson:
Yes.
Marc Steiner:
I’d like to hear your analysis as someone who’s been a union activist, who’s been fighting in the political struggles in France, why you think, what your analysis is about why the left seems to have come apart, has lost power in its way? Even though in France itself, you built this coalition that won the election, or at least you had more votes than anybody else in the election, that’s almost unprecedented since the thirties to be able to put that broad liberal left and left coalition together to stop the right. Tell me, I just want to hear your answer why you think the left is having so much problem and B, what do you think that holds for the future?
Axel Persson:
What it holds for the future is that of course what made basically the left in this particular situation, and not only the political left, even the trade unions and all these associations that took part, that are part of the Popular Front is the weight of history and the conscious and this very strong historical conscience of what happened last time when fascists were in power. That is something that is shared amongst the broad left, despite all our differences because the lessons from the thirties basically were drawn that, we might have a very, very vocal and very severe disagreements, very passionate disagreements amongst us on issues that are very important, such as, for example, Palestine is an issue that are currently going now, the war in Ukraine, even the pension reform on matters of internal French politics on all issues. But in the end of the day, we know that the fascists, they don’t care about our difference.
They will basically smash all of us. They will put us in prison, they will attack us all. They didn’t actually, the groups, they don’t discriminate in between us, they attack us all widely. We don’t have a chance, we don’t have any other choice but to unite in order to fight for survival. And that is something that is very ingrained in the political conscious. But the reason why also we are in a weaker position that when we were before though, is the fact that this collective counter society, this collective political ideal, that another society is actually within reach, that we can build it, that we can transform through collective radical struggles, has been abandoned by many of the political leadership of the historical left who has traded it for institutional politics, which has left many disappointed. And that is not only the case in France, it has been the case in the UK, it has been the case in the US, it has been the case in many, many parts of the world.
And this whole ideal that we can change the world to make it a better place by overthrowing the current system is something that is not being taught or nothing being vaculated in our structures and our unions and our political parties anymore. It is nowadays being done again, which is giving more hope. But it is something that is vital because the far right prospers on the despair of the working people. And that is something we need to do is be able to give a perspective and a hope that we can actually change this world.
Marc Steiner:
As a union man helping to run the union and as a political activist, how do you see that happening? Right now we don’t know what’s going to happen inside the parliament. It could be just an archic madness happening inside of the parliament in France because nobody has a majority.
Axel Persson:
Exactly.
Marc Steiner:
That’s A. Let me stop here, let me hit that. What do you think is going to happen? Then I’ll come back to the question about organizing for the future. What do you think is going to happen in the coming weeks and months given the absolute divide and split in France as shown by this election?
Axel Persson:
The first maneuvers the establishment is going to make is going to try to divide the Popular Front amongst its more reformist elements and it’s more radical elements. They’re going to try, for example, what they call the central block, which is basically the critical block formed around President Emmanuel Macron’s block basically are going to try, for example, to convince parts of the Popular Front, such as the Social Democrats or the Greens, to join their block in a coalition that would basically implement liberal policies with him. And in exchange of course for things like ministries or different positions within the state and machine, I’m not sure that’s going to work because the pressure is so high on the Popular Front within the working class and within the popular neighborhoods within our communities that anybody who leaves the Popular Front in exchange for this are going to get basically a very violent backlash from it.
And what we are saying as union members is that there is no hope to gain from institutional politics, what has always worked in France, but all across the countries in the world, in general world, there’s a working class is only, and there’s only one thing that works, it’s when we go on strike, it’s when we go on general strikes. It’s when we organize a corrective upheaval of our forces. And we’ve proved it in the past, we proved it. And I’m not talking about the past that happened like 150 years ago. I’m talking about something that happened a few months ago. For example, in very concrete example in my industry last year we won a general strike with all other workers to defend our pension issues. We refused to go back to work. We continued it even this year and we won an agreement just a few months ago that basically secured my right solving, my right, to retire at 53 years old at full pension.
And that is possible, that was made possible, not because we voted right, it wasn’t made possible because we fought, organized, and made them cave in and made them bite the dust and not the other way around. What we are saying is that as workers, the only issue forward is not to trust in what’s going to happen in the institution, it’s what we’re going to do as workers organizing the workplace and using the most important weapon we have is to strike because that’s how you paralyze the economy. That’s how you force them to cave into your demands.
And it also demonstrates that without our labor, they can’t do anything. They can’t produce the profits they’re living on, they can produce their dividends and it just comes to prove that they’re the one needing us. We’re not the one needing them. And this is a very, very important political point that we need to make and that we’re basically hammering through now and even within the institutions, in order to force institutions to bow down to our demands, we have to force them through our collective struggles. This is the only line we’re pulling in all the workplaces now is that prepare for a strike, prepare for the general struggles now.
Marc Steiner:
How do you see then that playing out in the coming months? You said this, you have this broad coalition and there are some differences obviously inside these liberal left coalition that was built to stop the neo-fascist from taking power. How do you see all that, given what you just described as well, how do you see that playing out? What do you think will happen over the next few months?
Axel Persson:
There’s two options. If there is no massive mobilization within the popular neighborhoods, within the workplaces, within the unions, it’ll end up, unfortunately, as it will always end up, when we don’t force them to go into our demands, it’ll end up in tactical alliances within different parties into the institutions, which will just lead to further disillusionment and disappointment. That is what will happen. But on the other hand, what may happen is that if this gives only a regained, a renewed sense of hope and people take to the streets, take to the fight basically in all the places in society, whether it be the universities, the workplaces, the neighborhoods, everywhere basically, even the high schools, if people start mobilizing mastery through demonstrations, occupations, and strikes, which we have proved we can do in a very recent future, then things might change for real.
And this is also why the name Popular Front is important because of course in the history in France, the name Popular Front refers to the government that was formed in 1936 and is associated in French social and political history with major social advances such as paid holidays, collective agreements, reduced working hours, the eight-hour working day, et cetera, et cetera.
And also trade union rights. But what one must not forget is that most of the things that were gained in 1936 were not even on the political platform on which the Popular Front parties on 1936 went to elections with. What happened was that there was a general strike in June 1936 that lasted for months in which major, all the factories in France occupied by the workers. And after one month’s long strike, the employers and the government were then forced to sign an agreement which gave all these advances and social rights, which we benefit still from today. And that’s what we are saying, we are saying, “Yeah, we revived the Popular Front, we revived the coalition, basically the electric coalition, what we need to arrive now is what made it really interesting.” It was a general strike that followed, and this may sound a bit very simplistic, but there is no other way actually, people are saying something else are just lying.
Marc Steiner:
When you have a country like France and like the United States that are so deeply divided among the people, we have an election coming up and people on the left they go, “We despise Biden, we can’t vote for Biden.” But then again, you don’t want the neo-fascist to take over the United States. That would be a disaster for our country and the planet. In France, how do you maintain this coalition and really seize power so it can’t be pushed out?
Axel Persson:
The fact is that we know that for the next year, the president does not dispose of the faculty to dissolve the parliament. We know that for the coming year, basically the parliament is going to stay at least for a year. But the thing is that-
Marc Steiner:
What does that mean? We just had this election in France and you’re saying the president has the power to not allow it to take power, to take their seats, to change. [inaudible 00:19:18].
Axel Persson:
It’s a very peculiar power the French president has is that the French president has the faculty to what they call to dissolve the parliament if for example, is what he just did, for whatever reason, he can decide that the parliament is no longer session and new elections are being held. But he can only do that once a year maximum. He can’t do it like every day either. And what I’m saying also is that in the absence of a majority in parliament, because neither block has a majority, the constitution wasn’t really tailored for such a situation. We don’t know what’s going to happen because it wasn’t tailored for that. And we’re going to find out in the coming weeks what strategy Macron and the other parties are going to have. I can’t really speculate on that because this is quite new basically in French political society.
But what we do know though is that they’re quite intent on not letting the program of the Popular Front being implemented. They’ve been very clear on that. What we’re going to have to do, and I’m always coming back to these fundamentals, is that this coalition was good in the sense that it prevented the far right from getting a majority of the seats in parliament. But it doesn’t mean we have ceased power as workers. When I’m going back to work after my 11 days of holidays, my bosses will still be there. They will still be holding the power over me in the workplaces. The banks will still be owned by the same owners who will still dispose of the same power. And what we are saying to the people and the workers listening to us is that is where the real power lies and that is the power we need to seize.
It’s that power we need to target. I’m not trying to avoid your question. I’m just saying that what we are saying as union now is that the only way to direct our strength and level our collective strength at those who hold the real power is to paralyze and shut down the economy. And I will say this because you mentioned a very divided country. It’s true that it is divided. But what we have shown in the past, for example, last year when we were on the pension strike Macron, and this is part of the reason he actually lost these elections, tried to implement pension reform that will raise the general retirement age to 64 for the general public. And when we went on strike and the society was massively paralyzed by our strikes, and this was a strike that was very massively supported by the working class and the population in general, even their own polls showed that more than nine out of 10 working people supported our strikes, which means that even those who voted for the far right supported it, which means that there is common ground because we have common interests.
And it is only in these periods when we managed to mobilize on our interests, on our objectives, with our methods, that actually the far right disappears from the political scene for a while because that is the only time in society where we actually managed to unite. And actually everybody unites behind our banner, including people who vote for the far right and who are confused. This is why we’re saying this is a path forward. It’s not necessarily only electoral politics. It is to manage to build mobilizations that unite us around common interests. And that is our role as a trade union and that is what we can do. That is why our responsibility is so important because we’re the only force that can actually and manage to do that.
Marc Steiner:
That to me, before we have to go on, I know we have lots to do today. That to me is very fascinating because what you’re saying is you have to organize and keep pushing. You’ve got this huge number of people in the parliament, but the issue is organizing the people which also can bring in the right. And it makes me think about decades back when I was probably closer to your age and organizing, we organized a right wing racist neighborhood in coalition with a black neighborhood to fight for their rights both on the docks and also in terms of housing rights.
Axel Persson:
Exactly.
Marc Steiner:
And you’re saying that that’s the same approach seems you’re taking in your strategic thinking about how you build on this and not allow the right to come back.
Axel Persson:
Exactly. That’s the key to it. Because at the end of the day, even if it’s very difficult to admit because what some of these people are saying when we’re talking about society is very difficult to hear sometimes when we’re discussing it’s very racist series, it’s extremely violent. But at the end of the day, even if they ignore it, and it’s not about being paternalistic or anything or condescending, even if they ignore it, they as workers have the same interest as the other workers, regardless of their skin color, regardless of their gender, regardless of their religion, even if they ignore it, they do have the same interest. And they actually do realize it only in periods where we as unions managed to mobilize the entire French society around our common objectives. And we proven that this is not like an abstract theory. When we go on massive strikes for pension issues, they support us.
And that is actually the moment where they actually join people they theoretically hate when they vote. That’s the only time of the year basically where they actually join and fight with them. And that is in these moments where we can build beyond abstract discussions, we can build concrete common mobilizations and make their consciousness evolve into something more progressive basically. And for example, right now many workers are facing issues such as insufficient wages to meet their needs, their daily needs or housing problems. Some of them will say for example, that the housing problems are due to immigrants taking better housing or that lower wages are due to immigrants doing it for lower wages and whatever. But at the end of the day, when we manage to organize mobilizations for decent housing in the neighborhoods or high wages through strikes, that is a moment where we actually manage to unite them where they can meet or what can discuss.
And that is where I’ve seen personally political consciousness evolve. And that is why we’re insisting and joins what you said yourself about when you organize these type of neighborhoods back in the days, it’s the only moment where actually political consciousness involved when they can actually become allies. But it’s actually the most important task we have at hand is to manage how to unite our class around its class objectives and make the clash consciousness rise again. Basically that is the task at hand because that is what is lacking the most in order to rebuild not only the Popular Front, but rebuild basically a capable organization that are capable to overthrow the society because divided we fall.
Marc Steiner:
That’s wonderful. I almost want to end it there, but one really last quick question, let you go back to the family is that I’m curious in all the work you’ve done as a union leader, organizer, leading strikes, organizing people and helping to build this Popular Front that really stopped the right wing onslaught for now, for this moment, where do you think it goes from here? Where do you think the next couple of months, which will be very critical, will take it?
Axel Persson:
It’s going to be very critical because if we fail, basically what happened now needs to be translated into tangible results for working people in the coming period. I’m not saying the coming day or the coming weeks, but it needs to be translated into tangible results for the working class. Because if it doesn’t, this will just mean that the far right will be able to, even if there was a bit delayed, but will only delay the ascension to power because they will be able to tap into that sentiment that, “All of these politicians, all of these forces are rotten and in the end of the day they betray us and they don’t provide and they don’t live up to the promises they made.”
And basically people will resort to forces that actually promise to crush us because that is what they’re doing. The far right, the promise is not only to crushes, of course the most known part is crushing immigrants or just discriminating against blacks or LGBTs, you name it, they do it, but they also, and it’s something they less publicize, is also about how they promise to cross the trade unions in France, which is one of the pillars of fascism.
And what we need to go from here is to make sure that our mobilization, that we manage to force the Popular Front to stay true to its program and also that our mobilization manages to prevent all the other parties from stopping the program from being implemented. That’s why I’m always coming back to the basics. Back to the basics. The only social force that can save the working class is the working class itself. There is no supreme savior, it is only us, through our mobilization that can force this to happen because we are the one who make all the cogs of societies, all the wheels of societies turn. Without us, nothing works. There will be no train, there will be no fuel, there will be no electricity if we decide to withdraw labor. We hold the power, we just need to gain the conscious that we have it and that we need to use this in order to crush them, in order to prevent them from crushing us.
This will need a broad alliance from anti-racist organizations, trade unions, feminist organization, anti-colonialist organizations such as those that are involved in the struggle for the liberation of Palestine because we all share the same and common enemy, which is the capitalist state. And if we managed to unite in all our fights in order to deal a common blow at our common enemies, that is how we will rebuild the class consciousness and build a potent force that is capable of bringing down the society and not only bringing it down, but heralding a new hope for millions of people who are just craving for something to hope for.
Marc Steiner:
Axel Persson, I want to thank you so much for taking the time today on your break on holiday in Sweden. This has been a really interesting conversation. I look forward to having more conversations as we cover what’s happening in France because I think it’s emblematic and a story for all the people struggling for equitable society across us the globe need to hear, especially here in the United States where I live. Again, Axel, thank you for your work, thanks for your time and we’ll be staying in touch.
Axel Persson:
Thank you very much.
Marc Steiner:
Once again, thank you to Axel Persson for joining us today. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program and our audio editor, Alina Nelah and the tireless Kayla Rivara for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News for making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you to the Axel Persson for joining us today, and we’ll be bringing you more about France and the struggle against the right and the fight for the future and bring more people, bring Axel back and other folks who are in the midst of that struggle that have a lot to say to us about the future. For the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved and keep listening.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on July 08, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Before I ever met Jane McAlevey, I received a package from her in the mail. In addition to a copy of Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, her first book (written with Bob Ostertag), it contained instant coffee and a few other items that one could imagine packing into a rucksack while on the move.
I’d just reviewedA Collective Bargain: Unions, Organizing, the Fight for Democracy, her then latest book. My piece opened with an anecdote about Hosea Hudson, a legendary labor organizer and black Alabama communist in the 1930s, a time when being either of those things put one’s life at risk. Of his rap to new recruits, Hudson said, “We had [to] tell people — when you join, it’s just like the army, but it’s not the army of the bosses, it’s the army of the working class.” I likened Jane to a drill instructor, the book an army manual. If there were any doubt as to whether the comparison was apt, Jane’s care package confirmed it.
We are always in a class war, but sometimes it felt like Jane was one of the few people who acted like it. Urgent, direct, no bullshit: that was Jane, the master organizer and negotiator and communicator and strategist. And she was like this with everyone in her orbit: once you were in, you were to be cared for, looked after, and, fundamentally, organized by her — toward the end of keeping up your strength to not only wage class struggles, but to win (one of her favorite words). Her father was a World War II fighter pilot and progressive politician; the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.
Jane devoted her life to union organizing, and then to writing about it. But the writing was organizing too, a means of multiplying herself, allowing the lessons to reach into countless nooks and crannies across the economy and globe. Bay Area factory workers, striking teachers from West Virginia to Los Angeles, Starbucks baristas, and Amazon warehouse workers have all mentioned her work to me as an inspiration. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that many workers treat Jane’s writing like a kind of Bible, but that would imply a reverence that the substance itself refutes. As Jane argued again and again, workers already have the power to change the world, and the organizer’s role is to show them that: to listen, to identify what they cannot stand, and to teach them the skills to channel their power effectively in order to wrest control from the bosses — to fight and win.
Win, Win, Win, Win, Win
No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the Gilded Age, her 2016 book, has played a role in a dizzying number of organizing drives and strikes across the country. It began as her late-in-life sociology PhD dissertation at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center (advised by social movements scholar Frances Fox Piven, whose own career-long emphasis on the importance of “ordinary people” plays a major role in McAlevey’s book). Each chapter is a case study: “The Power to Win Is in the Community, Not the Boardroom,” “Nursing Home Unions: Class Snuggle vs. Class Struggle,” “Chicago Teachers: Building a Resilient Union,” “Smithfield Foods: A Huge Success You’ve Hardly Heard About,” and “Make the Road New York.” The conclusion’s title is classic Jane: “Pretend Power vs. Actual Power.”
Assessing the reasons for the wins and losses in each case, Jane hammers on the distinction between mobilizing (getting people out for a one-off rally or action) and advocacy (which dispenses with ordinary people entirely) versus the deep organizing that was her everything, the process by which power is transferred “from the elite to the majority.”
The writing was organizing too, a means of multiplying herself, allowing the lessons to reach into countless nooks and crannies across the economy and globe.
In her view, the Left and progressives’ decades-long decline is partially explained by a shift away from deep organizing in favor of shallow mobilizing and advocacy. The book also takes the reader through power-structure analysis, a tool Jane used time and again in building campaigns that homed in on the enemy’s weak points in order to win.
No Shortcuts also lays out a clear emphasis on organic leaders rather than activists — a distinction of critical importance for budding organizers, many of whom fall into the latter category. In a workplace, you shouldn’t focus on the people who already agree with you, but rather those who are trusted and respected by their coworkers. It’s the organizer’s job to bring them (and their networks) into a campaign, to teach them the skills they need to win, then to test the strength of the majority being assembled again and again (what Jane termed “structure tests”). This is how one builds a supermajority at an employer, a battle-ready army that can withstand the boss’s inevitable attacks.
As she writes,
Which key individual worker can sway exactly whom else — by name — and why? How strong is the support he or she has among exactly how many coworkers, and how do the organizers know this to be true? The ability to correctly answer these and many other related questions — Who does each worker know outside work? Why? How? How well? How can the worker reach and influence them? — will be the lifeblood of successful strikes in the new millennium.
The same criterion applies beyond the workplace. It’s the leaders in your community, your neighborhood, your religious or social organization, the ones who have earned the respect of those around them, who are your target if you hope to build a mass base for your cause that has staying power.
McAlevey didn’t invent these principles, but she popularized them among broad swathes of the labor movement and the Left, in large part through No Shortcuts. Ever since its publication, characterizing a strategy as a “shortcut” is about as damning a condemnation within the labor movement as you can make.
Raising Expectations, Jane’s first book, is a memoir, but no less instructive for it. The title is Jane’s phrase for what she believed organizing is about at its core. To organize is to make a worker demand more
about what people should expect from their jobs; the quality of life they should aspire to; how they ought to be treated when they are old; and what they should be able to offer their children. About what they have a right to expect from their employer, their government, their community, and their unions. Expectations about what they themselves are capable of, about the power they could exercise if they worked together, and what they might use that collective power to accomplish. Ultimately, expectations about where they will find meaning in their lives, and the kinds of relationships they can build with those around them.
Jane called this expansive vision “whole-worker organizing,” an approach that draws on a worker’s entire self, rather than bracketing their lives outside and beyond the workplace. A worker’s relationships inside the workplace are the foundation for organizing: the means by which they can move others to action, the trust needed for workers to take on the risks that come with acting collectively, the faith and confidence such action requires.
But Jane saw their ties off the job as both another resource and a place they could organize in turn upon gaining workplace-organizing skills. Not only could a worker enlist their religious institution, their community organization, or their social clubs to strengthen a campaign, but a good organizer could expand the expectations a worker brings to the other areas of their lives. When unions failed to engage workers in their entirety, she was unrelenting in her criticism.
She rejected the dichotomy of workplace and union versus community and community organization, arguing instead for “bringing community organizing techniques right into the shop floor while moving labor organizing out into the community.” Everything was a feedback loop with Jane: power begets power, wins beget wins, community begets community; multiplication not division, a sense of self-interest that continually broadens. You start with your on-the-job interest and, if the organizer does her job right, you end with the entire community.
Always War Footing
Raising Expectations is about how workers can organize and win, but it’s also a record of the sexism that pervades the labor movement. (Jane: “If I discussed every instance when [sexism] had a negative impact on the work I was trying to do, there would be no room to talk about anything else.”) In this respect, too, Jane was a pioneer: there are lots of female union leaders today, but the culture remains hostile to women, and especially ones like Jane who don’t put up with such disrespect. As she told me when we first met, gin and tonic in hand: “Don’t worry about all the bullshit you’ll get from men in the movement. Fuck ’em.” It felt like I was being inducted into a secret sisterhood.
Indeed, the labor movement’s shortcomings almost led Jane to give up on it. A lifelong environmentalist (her later decades were split between a rent-controlled apartment in New York and a leafy, spartan outpost in the Bay Area, and she was prone to going off the grid to ride horses), college-aged Jane saw the labor movement opposing “every environmental principle I believed in.”
At SUNY-Buffalo, she joined the student association, becoming its president. It was there that she first gained organizing skills. After a foray around Central America, including work on a construction brigade in Nicaragua at the height of the Contra War, she devoted herself to environmental work — though her time in Central America added further marks against unions. It was the 1980s, and the AFL-CIO was implicated in backing death squads in Latin America via the American Institute for Free Labor Development, its international arm.
As she wrote of that period, “The unionists I was working with, who were already deeply engaged in a battle with a capitalist class of the most brutal and violent nature, now also had to deal with killer thugs funded by the unions of my country.” It made an impression on Jane, planting the seeds of a lifelong devotion to making the labor movement, that pain in the ass that is our only hope, better.
Jane’s time in the environmental justice movement connected her with the storied Highlander Research and Education Center, which played a central role in the civil rights movement, hosting and training everyone from Rosa Parks to Martin Luther King Jr to John Lewis and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) throughout the 1950s. By the time Jane was in her twenties, she was working at the center to develop its globalization program, traveling the globe to fight toxins that don’t respect borders. She referred to Highlander as a “creative hothouse,” with her subsequent work in unions traceable to the hours she spent browsing the center’s archives of educational materials from its era as the training and education arm of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.
As she told my colleague Micah Uetricht in a long interview last year,
I was set up in the library [of Highlander], because there was no office space for me. I was in my mid-twenties. I started to go into the archives, and that was the first time I saw organizing manuals from the CIO and realized, “Oh my God, it’s always been the labor movement in the civil rights movement. These have always been inseparable movements.
She was recruited into the AFL-CIO in the late ’90s, heading up the experimental Stamford Organizing Project, which focused on cab drivers, city clerks, janitors, and nursing home aides, exerting influence through Stamford’s churches — “Note to labor: workers relate more to their faith than to their job, and fear God more than they fear the boss,” Jane wrote of the campaign — and organizing workers around a range of issues beyond the workplace, including affordable housing.
After Stamford, Jane became the national deputy director for strategic campaigns in the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) health care division. In 2004, she was appointed SEIU Nevada’s executive director and chief negotiator, where she began leading open-bargaining sessions in which hundreds of workers would attend negotiations, seeing the boss’s tactics for themselves and getting a hands-on training in negotiations in the process. Her unwillingness to abide by what she characterized as undemocratic orders from higher up in the union hierarchy put her at odds with SEIU leadership, but it took a 2008 ovarian cancer diagnosis to put a pause on her organizing activities. She used the time off to write Raising Expectations.
As the pandemic created one crisis after another for the working class, Jane designed an international organizing training program in conjunction with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, an almost industrial-scale workshop to train groups of workers around the globe. At the time of her death, she had trained some twenty-five thousand people through the program, a remarkable legacy.
No matter what her schedule, Jane somehow always found time for workers. When the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) sought help following their unlikely victory at JFK8 in Staten Island, Jane squeezed in intensive trainings with founding members. When the New Yorker, a shop in my union local, was organizing toward a strike, I received an email informing me that Jane McAlevey would be leading a training.
Her PhD from CUNY led to a postdoc from Harvard Law School, then a position as a senior policy fellow in her beloved Bay Area, at the University of California at Berkeley’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. There she continued to teach unions and community organizations the fundamentals of organizing and winning (and seemed to never miss a Golden State Warriors game; if Jane had ever held a time-management training, I’d have been the first to register).
Jane devoted her life to collective action, but she never forgot that collectives are composed of people, and every person is a world unto themselves.
She kept writing through all of it, offering a real-time first draft of the history of working-class struggle in the United States. She had a column with Jacobin and was the Nation’s “strikes correspondent” (an enviable title). Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations, a book on democratizing union negotiations, written with Abby Lawlor, was published last year.
Her final piece before announcing that she would be pausing her work as she entered hospice care is titled “Enjoy Labor’s Tailwinds — but Don’t Forget to Keep Rowing!” It concludes: “Given the odds against workers, all victories are worth celebrating, but we can’t afford to rest until we’ve seen those wins codified in a union contract — enforced by an organization that keeps going toe-to-toe with the bosses, the union busters, and the political elites. Nothing else will do it.” War footing, always.
“They Thought I Would Be Dead a Few Weeks Ago”
I loved this about Jane, as did countless other people, as evidenced by the flood of testimonies on social media from workers around the world as to how her work changed their lives. To be committed, a soldier in struggle, is worth honoring, yet it was her singular personality — a loud, polarizing, unmistakable individuality and pride — that really set her apart. Jane devoted her life to collective action, but she never forgot that collectives are composed of people, and every person is a world unto themselves. She modeled that: living off the grid in the Bay Area, disappearing to ride horses in Mexico, taking pride in her accomplishments, extending herself beyond all conceivable measures to mentor so many of us. Leave the world better than it was when you arrived and leave many more organizers in your place when you go.
“They thought I would be dead a few weeks ago,” Jane said on Democracy Now! in late April, shortly after announcing that she had entered home hospice care, having exhausted treatment and clinical trial drugs for the multiple myeloma cancer she had been battling since 2021. Ever with her eye on the prize, she was on the show to talk about the United Auto Workers’ earth-shattering win at Volkswagen’s auto plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “I’m out again. I’m riding my bike. I’m on your show. And I’m going to fight until the last dying minute, because that’s what American workers deserve.”
It’s an ethos in the labor movement to never say “thank you,” as it implies one did something for you, rather than the truth, that we speak up and take risks and act for ourselves. So I won’t say that. Instead, I’ll leave it with what Jane herself wrote in finally, reluctantly, announcing that she had found one fight that she could not win: “I have loved being in this world with you.” We loved it, too, Jane, and we’ll fight like hell to make it every bit as good as you knew it could be.
This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. You might see it as deciding what you see on social media sites, where maybe they get it wrong: You don’t actually want to see a lot of horror movies, or buy an air fryer; you just clicked on that once.
But algorithms don’t only just guess at what you might like to buy; sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the US use online platforms to find work, to find livelihood. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful.
Hatim Rahman has been working on this question; he’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
A Trump-appointed federal judge on Wednesday partially blocked a Federal Trade Commission rule banning most noncompete clauses, ubiquitous anti-worker agreements that prevent employees from moving to or starting their own competing businesses. Judge Ada Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a preliminary ruling preventing the ban from taking effect against the…
Just a few months before the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the Biden administration appears to be accelerating its timeline to finalize a regulation that could protect 36 million workers from the harmful effects of exposure to extreme heat.
In a press briefing on Monday, a senior Biden administration official described the draft rule’s requirements as “common sense.”
“The purpose of this rule is simple,” said the official, who offered comments on the condition of anonymity. “It is to significantly reduce the number of worker-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses suffered by workers who are exposed to excessive heat and exposed to these risks while simply doing their jobs.”
The draft rule requires employers to implement heat injury and prevention plans that grant workers access to drinking water, shade, rest areas, and breaks once the heat index hits 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Employers would also have to develop an acclimatization plan to help new employees to become accustomed to working in extreme heat, and train supervisors and employees in how to identify heat illness. (Notably, three out of four worker fatalities that stem from heat-related illness happen on the first week of the job.) Once the heat index exceeds 90 degree F, additional breaks and increased heat-illness symptom monitoring would also be required. The proposed rule includes a requirement that employers evaluate these plans for potential updates at least once a year.
These regulations would apply to all employers overseeing outdoor and indoor work where OSHA has jurisdiction, which includes most private-sector employers and workers in all 50 states and Washington, D.C., but doesn’t cover some workers at state and local government agencies, self-employed workers, or independent contractors. The draft rule also exempts workplaces where there is no reasonable expectation of exposure to the initial heat trigger, and indoor working conditions where temperatures are kept below the 80 degree F threshold. Furthermore, it excludes situations where employees are exposed to temperatures over the standard threshold for short periods of time, among other exceptions.
On Tuesday, OSHA released the draft text of a proposed rule on preventing heat injury and illness amongst the U.S. workers. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
Advocates who have been fighting for national heat regulation for years are praising the move. Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the nonprofit Worker’s Justice Project, a New York City worker center for low-wage, immigrant workers, said her group “applauds” the proposed rule.
“The Biden administration is moving to protect the lives of workers,” said Amy Liebman, chief program officer at the nonprofit Migrant Clinicians Network, which aims to reduce health inequities among immigrant communities. “This effort is particularly critical as states such as Texas and Florida are not only failing to protect workers from the heat but pursuing legislation that will cause undue harm to workers.” Last year, Texas Governor Greg Abbott passed a law that blocked cities from enacting their own heat protections for workers. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a similar law into effect this past spring.
OSHA first announced that the agency would begin developing a federal heat stress rule in 2021, following a summer of record-breaking temperatures. Typically, the federal rulemaking process is fairly lengthy, and experts and organizers who spoke to Grist last month worried that the Biden administration would let the proposed heat regulation linger under review for another year or longer — at which point, depending on the outcome of the presidential election in November, the rule could be nullified by a new administration or a Republican-controlled Congress. But the surprise release of the proposed rule this week appears to signal a readiness from the Biden administration to advance the regulation, potentially with the goal of finalizing it before the end of the year.
Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, said he feels certain, following a visit from a top OSHA official to his home state in June, that finalizing a federal heat standard is the agency’s top regulatory priority. “I think it’s clear that President Biden and his administration are responding to the climate crisis, are responding to what workers are asking for, and they’re expediting this because workers just can’t wait seven or eight years,” Casar said.
Experts expect that the OSHA rule could face legal challenges. “There are always technical quibbles,” said Michael Gerrard, the founder and faculty director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, “and sometimes, some courts will pick up on those quibbles.” Gerrard pointed to the recent Supreme Court decision to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Good Neighbor” rule, which regulated smog by taking aim at smokestack emissions, as an example of a successful legal challenge based on the argument that federal officials neglected to address public comments on the draft plan. Potentially, going forward, “people who want to challenge rules will take a look at the comments on the draft rule and complain if any of the comments wasn’t thoroughly responded to.”
The draft heat rule is now subject to a public comment period and a subsequent final review by the White House. Given the highly politicized nature of heat regulation, it is likely that OSHA will receive a considerable amount of comments on the proposed standard, which could potentially draw out the process of finalizing the regulation. A spokesperson from OSHA said the agency “cannot speculate” as to when the rule may be finalized, but that it was moving “swiftly and responsibly” to ensure workers have necessary protections.
“All workers deserve safety and an advocate for their rights,” said Guallpa. “We are heartened to see the federal government stepping up to require basic protections from extreme weather.”
On the morning of Thursday, June 20, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally outside the hospital to raise awareness of their efforts to secure a first contract and to show management that they’re not backing down from their core demands for safe staffing and an operational model that puts patients and patient care first. “St. Agnes nurses are calling on Ascension to accept their proposals to improve safe staffing and, subsequently, nurse retention,” a press release from National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU) stated. “Nearly 20 percent of nurses at St. Agnes began employment at the hospital after January 1 of this year. Meanwhile, just over a third of nurses have more than four years of experience at the hospital… The Catholic hospital system is one of the largest in the country with 140 hospitals in 19 states and also one of the wealthiest, with cash reserves, an investment company, and a private equity operation worth billions of dollars—and, because of its nonprofit status, is exempt from paying federal taxes.” In this on-the-ground episode, we take you to the NNOC/NNU picket line and speak with Nicki Horvat, an RN in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit at Ascension St. Agnes and member of the bargaining team, about what she and her coworkers are fighting for.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Crowd chants:
What do we want?
Safe staffing!
When do we want it? Now!
What do we want?
Safe staffing!
When do we want it? Now!
What do we want?
Safe staffing!
When do we want it? Now!
Nicki Horvat:
Alright, so you know we’re all out here because essentially gave us a very underwhelming wage proposal and we’re just out here to show them that we know our work, that we are work more than they’re trying to make us settle for, that our patients and our lives and safety are worth fighting for. Our community. Our community, exactly. So let’s show them that we have solidarity among us, that we have community support and that we’re not going to back down until we win.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today … brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio / Podcast Network… if you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends, and family members, leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work we do at The Real News by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the frontlines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got another special on-the-ground episode of the show for y’all today. On Thursday, June 20, at 8 in the morning, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally outside the hospital to raise awareness of their efforts to secure a first contract and to show management that they’re not backing down from their core demands for safe staffing and an operational model that puts patients and patient care first. St. Agnes Hospital is part of the Ascension Health network… Ascension is one of the largest private healthcare systems in the United States, and it is now the largest nonprofit and Catholic health system in the country.
In their press release about the action, the union, which represents over 500 registered nurses at Ascension, St. Agnes, stated:
“Registered nurses at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Baltimore, Md. will rally on Thursday, June 20, in support of “Patients First” and staffing protections, which they have proposed to hospital management during contract negotiations. The nurses, who are members of National Nurses Organizing Committee/National Nurses United (NNOC/NNU), have been in negotiations since Jan. 18, 2024… “Nurses are fighting for ‘Patients First’ protections in our contract because they are essential safeguards for our patients and the community we serve,” said Nicki Horvat, RN in the Neonatal Intensive Care unit and member of the bargaining team… St. Agnes nurses are calling on Ascension to accept their proposals to improve safe staffing and, subsequently, nurse retention. Nearly 20 percent of nurses at St. Agnes began employment at the hospital after January 1 of this year. Meanwhile, just over a third of nurses have more than four years of experience at the hospital… Saint Agnes nurses’ “Patients First” proposal includes Ascension’s commitment to maintain all facilities and services within the community for the duration of the contract and that any replacement be “equally accessible.” It also includes patient protections against lawsuits for the resolution of billing disputes and against surprise billing or excess charges… A January 2024 report from National Nurses United found that Ascension cut a quarter of its labor and delivery units in the past decade amidst a nationwide rise in pregnancy- and childbirth-related mortality. These cuts drastically impacted metropolitan areas and areas with hater rates of low-income, Black, and Latine patients… In November 2023, Saint Agnes nurses voted to join NNOC/NNU, making Saint Agnes the first private-sector hospital in the city to unionize and the fourth Ascension hospital to unionize in 13 months. The Catholic hospital system is one of the largest in the country with 140 hospitals in 19 states and also one of the wealthiest, with cash reserves, an investment company, and a private equity operation worth billions of dollars – and, because of its nonprofit status, is exempt from paying federal taxes. Tax records indicate Ascension’s CEO took home more than $13 million in compensation in 2021.”
In response, as Angela Roberts reported at The Baltimore Sun, “Justin Blome, director of marketing at Ascension Saint Agnes, said in an email that patient and associate safety remains the hospital’s top priority. Thursday’s rally wasn’t a strike or work stoppage and did not affect patient care, he said. During contract negotiations, Blome said, the hospital has been focused on “setting a tone and tenor of collaboration and respect” as leaders bargain in good faith with National Nurses United. “We believe differences are best resolved at the bargaining table, rather than through public demonstrations, and look forward to continuing the work of reaching a tentative agreement on a mutually-beneficial contract that supports all,” he said.”
I was there on the ground at the rally for The Real News, and after the chants died down and the crowd disbursed, I got to sit in the shade and speak with registered nurse and bargaining team member Nicki Horvat about what she and her healthcare coworkers are fighting for.
Crowd chants:
Who got the power?
We got power.
What kind of power?
Nurses power!
Who got the power?
We got power.
What kind of power?
Nurses power!
Nicki Horvat:
Hi, I’m Nicki. I am a NICU nurse at Ascension St. Agnes here in Baltimore.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Nicki, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me. I know you’ve had a long morning. We are here right out in front of Ascension St. Agnes Hospital here in Baltimore where y’all just held a rally and I wanted to ask if you could just tell folks listening a little more about who you are, who these folks are here and what brought y’all out to this street corner this morning?
Nicki Horvat:
So I am on, well first of all, we unionized. We formed the first nurses union in Baltimore back in November. We had our election and we won and we formed a bargaining team of which I’m a part, I lead the maternal child health division or I represent them. And so we rallied today to bring attention to mainly two things, which is safe staffing and our patient’s first language in the contract that we’re trying to bargain. And I’ll explain what that is after I say the next. So right now we’re in the process of bargaining our contract, which means that the five of us nurses who have been elected to represent our fellow nurses in the hospital, we sit at the bargaining table with Ascensions lawyers and their labor relations people with our lead negotiators and we negotiate the contract. So our goal is to get a strong first contract that has patient first language in it, which means that patients are the number one priority regardless of who they are, where they come from, what their situation is, and that they are not treated like commodities like patients very frequently are in this country. And that one of the main reasons we unionized was because we have been bringing up issues year after year collectively and they’ve kind of fallen on deaf ears.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let me ask a little more about that real quick because I’ve been telling folks for the past four years, every interview I’ve done on this show is technically a covid interview and people are always asking me like, oh, what are you hearing from workers? What happened? How are folks faring after covid? And I was like, there are a lot of answers to that question, but I feel like one of the answers I always come back to is this country is not prepared for the crisis in healthcare and education that we are going through. That was greatly exacerbated by Covid.
Nicki Horvat:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I wanted to ask if you could speak a little more to the issues that y’all were raising over and over again that you weren’t getting responses from management that ultimately led y’all to wage and win this unionization campaign last year.
Nicki Horvat:
So safe staffing is number one pretty much across the country. They maximize their profits by not staffing safely. Basically it’s like the basic concept. And so that is always our number one priority is making sure that nurses, you’ll hear the nurse to patient ratio, which is how many patients are assigned to one nurse. And we have so much research data that shows that high nurse to patient ratios lead to worse patient outcomes, poorer patient satisfaction, higher nurse burnout, increased risk for medical errors. And so you look at that data and you’re like, yeah, obviously nurses should have lower nurse to patient ratios. And logically yeah, you’re like, duh. But common practice is no, let’s give the nurses as many as we possibly can to maximize their profits.
Maximillian Alvarez:
This is the business school brain genius idea that every corporate boardroom has in every industry is let’s squeeze more work out of fewer workers…
Nicki Horvat:
Exactly.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I mean, I hear this from workers on the railroads. I hear this from retail workers at Macy’s or dollar stores who are systematically understaffed and there’s got to be a reason why this keeps cropping up in industries around the country. And I just wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to for you and your coworkers on a shift on a day-to-day basis. What does this corporate drive to pile more patients onto fewer nurses mean for you on a daily level?
Nicki Horvat:
Yeah. It means that we can’t spend the time or attention with every single patient that every single patient deserves. I mean, these are human lives that we’re talking about. And I mean, I said it before that patients should not be treated like commodities. And one of the main issues in this country is that healthcare is treated like a business. And so if you view people like commodities and put a price tag on them, you’re obviously not going to be prioritizing their health and their wellbeing. That’s one of the things that Ascension very clearly shows is that they have the resources to and the power to change the conditions that we work in. They have the money, they have a lot of cash reserves, they have a 41 billion investment arm, which ironically is invested in a lot of companies that exacerbate people’s health issues. But if we prioritize patient care and then we would have lower ratios, but having those higher ratios means that people aren’t getting individualized care. Every nurse is pulled in 5, 6, 7 different directions. If you’re in the ICUs and you’re tripled, you have three patients that are high acuity. That should be two to one is the ideal maximum ratio in ICUs. And most of them are honestly one-to-one with the care that they require. So frequent tripling, which has been happening a decent amount here, should not be happening.
Maximillian Alvarez:
A term was introduced to me a couple years back when I interviewed striking physicians out in the Pacific Northwest where they told me about the “retail health” model and how the more that our healthcare system has been taken over and dominated by corporate entities, wall Street entities, the more that again, it follows the corporate playbook pile more work onto fewer workers, decrease the quality of care to the bare minimum that you can get away with. And I bring that up because I know in the past, whenever nurses or other healthcare workers go on strike or try to unionize or try to raise issues at their job, like educators, they are pitted against their patients. Educators are pitted against their students and saying, oh, you guys are selfish. You don’t care about your patients. So if you did, you wouldn’t be out here on this street corner. You’d be in there taking care of ’em. So what’s your message to folks out there about how and why this is for patients? Because I feel like that may be a, I suspect that’s an easier case to make these days because more and more of us as patients have been feeling the decrease in the quality of care we’ve been getting ourselves.
Nicki Horvat:
Yeah. And I mean I think the answer is twofold to that because yes, there’s a component of we don’t want to be burned out. So there is the personal tie that we want better working conditions for ourselves, but no nurse gets into this field for money. No nurse gets into this field because they don’t like people. We all get into this field because we love people and we want to take care of them, and we want to be able to pour ourselves into helping people in their healing journeys and the amount of moral distress that we feel when we literally don’t have the resources or the bandwidth or the time to do that. And we’re worried that we’re going to make a mistake or that not having the proper time leads to a poor outcome for the patient. That’s a heavy weight to carry. And so prioritizing patients, this is how we do it, this is how we use our voices to advocate. Nurses are the number one advocate for patients in the hospital. So just as we advocate for patients at the bedside, so we’re advocating for them out in the street and showing management that the conditions that they have created within the hospital are unacceptable and that the patients deserve better care.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And this is almost word for word what your colleagues in Massachusetts at St. Vincent Hospital were saying two years ago when they waged the longest nurses strike in state history over very similar concerns. I mean like St. Vincent Hospital is owned by Tenant Healthcare, which is a healthcare giant housed out of Texas. And so they were talking about what it means to have, again, a corporate minded entity like take over their hospital, squeeze their workers, decrease the quality of pay, and they waged a month’s long strike over it and ended up winning. Now Ascension is also a private hospital. Can you say a little more about those conditions behind the scenes that folks average folks don’t see and how this is translating to what y’all are fighting for at the bargaining table?
Nicki Horvat:
Yeah, I think just overall we’ve seen the quality of supplies go down. There’s been shortcuts in supply manufacturers to ostensibly to lower their costs, but then that obviously impacts patient care because cheaper quality supplies mean that IV catheters don’t last as long, so you have to be stuck more or we don’t have the supplies that we need to perform certain tasks. We just went through a four week long cyber attack, in which case we had to deal with paper charting and the chaos of that with very little training, things like that that are just all of the things that we’re asking for are not unreasonable things. They’re kind of basic things that are needed to ensure high quality care. And it’s honestly, this whole process, it’s been kind of mind blowing to me that we even have to fight so hard for things that should be a basic necessity.
I think something else too that happens frequently is not having the other staff that we need to make our jobs easier. So if housekeeping doesn’t come around us nurses act as a housekeeper. If we don’t have a secretary, we have to act as the secretary. If floors don’t have a tech or don’t have enough techs, then nurses act as the tech as well. So not only are we doing the nurse’s primary job for a large number of patients, but we’re often doing three or four other roles that should not fall on us, but end up pretty frequently end up falling on us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and again, speaking to all of that, I know you are exhausted and you were leading this rally this morning, so I got to let you go in a second. I just wanted to ask, yeah, if you could give listeners an update on where things currently stand with bargaining and what folks around the city can do to stand in solidarity with y’all?
Nicki Horvat:
Yeah, absolutely. So right now we’re about six months into our bargaining. We have come to agreements in principle on a lot of the important but smaller issues. And we’re really at a place where we’re tackling our top priorities. So safe staffing, safe floating, which means nurses going from their home units to other units to help with the staffing, our wage proposal, some of the bigger, more substantial items that we’ve gotten pushback on. So today we held the rally to really show the solidarity we have and show the community support we have and to show them just that we’re not afraid that we’re not going to be intimidated and that we’re not going to back down until we win a good contract for our patients and for ourselves. And yeah, I guess what the community can do is to just come out and join us, wear Red talk to your hospital administrators, talk to, we’ve been trying to meet with specifically the Archbishop of Baltimore because we have a lot of Catholic backing. Part of Catholic social doctrine is very pro-union and pro-worker. And one of the things that really guts a lot of us nurses is that Ascension claims to be a Catholic nonprofit and really showcases its mission as a healing ministry of Jesus. And yet the hypocrisy that they show in not following that mission and prioritizing profit over patients is just really messed up and it really, really hurts a lot of us. And so us unionizing and winning a good first contract is a way to hold them accountable to the very mission statement that they say they live up to and to prioritize what should actually be a priority. So yeah, community involvement is always welcome. We always love seeing people in support as people drive by and honk. It’s super empowering and just really, really helps the efforts.
Crowd chants:
We will be back! We will be back! We will be back! We will be back!
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our guest, Nicki Horvat for taking the time to talk with me, especially on such a busy and intense morning. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out all the great bonus episodes that we publish for our patrons over the years and go explore all the great work that we are doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Agriculture is rife with labor violations and abuse, but thanks to a new rule that went into effect June 28, the industry’s most vulnerable migrant H-2A workers now have better protections to organize against unfair treatment from American employers. The H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program allows American employers to bring migrant workers to the U.S. with visas to perform temporary or seasonal…
In the summer of 2011, Victor Ramirez was working in a Walmart warehouse in Mira Loma, California, when he suddenly fainted. When he came to, he was lying on the floor, confused about what had just happened, with his head aching terribly. While he didn’t receive any medical attention — his boss only told him to go home if he didn’t feel well enough to keep working — he knew that this sudden bout of unconsciousness must have been triggered by the relentless heat in the warehouse.
“When it’s hot outside, it feels even hotter within the warehouses, because of all the machinery,” Ramirez told Grist in Spanish. “If it’s like 110 outside, then it’s like 10 more degrees inside.” The heat was exacerbated by a lack of water and poor air circulation inside the warehouse.
Later that summer, he once again felt similar symptoms. He was flushed, profusely sweating, and his head was hurting. This time around, he knew these were signs of heat stress and told a supervisor, who asked Ramirez why he was “acting dumb” and questioned why he wasn’t working faster. In both instances, no one offered emergency aid or even recommended he go see a doctor. (Walmart declined to comment on Ramirez’s experience, stating that the site was operated by a third-party, Schneider Logistics. A spokesperson for Schneider Logistics did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.)
“I’m nervous, for myself and my daughter,” said Ramirez, whose family relies on his wages to pay their bills. He now works at another warehouse, but the 55-year-old is constantly worried something might happen to him because of dangerous heat exposure on the job. Inadequate access to water, limited air conditioning, and cavalier attitudes about heat exposure are common in his industry. Ramirez’s fear is reignited every year when temperatures start rising and summer rolls around.
“Pay attention to the workers,” Ramirez said. “We are what matters.”
As of this month, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, is one step closer to creating America’s first-ever national heat stress rule for workers. The agency, which announced it would begin the process of drafting a federal heat rule three years ago, submitted a proposal on June 11 to the White House Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, for review. It’s a critical step that signals that the rule could be finalized relatively soon — but legal experts and labor advocates worry about upcoming legal, bureaucratic, and political challenges to OSHA’s rulemaking process, especially in an election year. A Trump victory in November could spell doom for any federal heat stress rule — and even without an administration change in 2025, OSHA’s rule may be subject to legal challenges in the courts.
Extreme heat is the deadliest extreme weather event, with a threat level that’s intensifying because of climate change. But no national regulation exists to shield indoor or outdoor workers from heat. Ariana Drehsler / Getty Images
Experts, advocates, and panels hosted by the agency suggest the standard could mandate worker and employer training on how to recognize and treat symptoms of heat stress, a process that allows workers new to an area to gradually adapt to hazardous temperatures, and a temperature threshold that triggers heat illness prevention programs that require more frequent, longer breaks. OSHA has previously stated that the rule’s mandates could begin to take effect once the heat index approaches 80 degrees Fahrenheit, Bloomberg Law reported.
Such a rule could be transformative. “OSHA regulates the entire workforce,” said Cary Coglianese, the director of the Penn Program on Regulation and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “Heat affects every outdoor worker and some major industries — whether it’s construction, travel, transportation, I mean, you name it.”
According to Coliagnese, the draft proposal going to the White House marks the beginning of a review process that may take about 90 days — although it could be longer or shorter. “A lot depends certainly on how much of a push there is within the administration to get a rule out,” said Coglianese.
The White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment on when it will finish the review. A spokesperson from OSHA said in a statement, “Heat is a serious workplace hazard that threatens the health, safety, and lives of workers every year,” adding that enacting a federal heat standard is a priority for the Department of Labor. “As of Tuesday, June 11th, the proposed rule is with the Office of Management and Budget for review, and we are one step closer to giving workers the protections they need and deserve.”
When the review has concluded, details of the proposed rule will be publicized, at which point the public will be given at least a 60-day period to submit comments to the agency on the rule. Coglianese warns that a rule with such wide-reaching impacts will mean OSHA is likely to receive plenty of comments.
Once the comment period is over, OSHA will need time to reflect on and address any issues raised by the public. How long the agency takes on that “is a function of the comments that come in, of their priorities, and maybe of just how vexing some of the issues are,” said Coglianese. After OSHA has an updated draft, another White House review follows; if all goes well, the rule is then finalized and published on the Federal Register.
OSHA’s latest progress in this process is welcome news to many advocates that have invested years into fighting for heat protections — like Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli, a senior grassroots advocacy coordinator at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Xiuhtecutli participated in a working group that made recommendations to OSHA to help inform the proposed rule. But he worries the rulemaking process may drag on well beyond this year.
“It could be a few more years,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I think the Biden administration is interested in making this happen, so I hope that they hurry up and do it.”
The recent politicization of extreme heat is reflected in experts’ predictions of the future of a long-awaited rule to protect outdoor and indoor workers across America. Aaron Schwartz / Xinhua News Agency / Getty Images
Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas who went on a one-day thirst strike last year to call attention to the urgent need for worker protections, agrees that when it comes to extreme heat, time is of the essence.
“We need this heat protection, as soon as possible. We need it yesterday,” said Casar. He added that he has confidence in the Biden administration in “getting this done right and getting it done quickly.”
But the yearslong battle wrought by workers and advocates to get a national heat standard on the table now faces a looming hurdle: the forthcoming presidential election.
In Coglianese’s opinion, it’s unlikely that the rule will be finalized before November, or even by next January. He added that, if Donald Trump takes office, he will likely put a hold on any federal rules that have not yet been finalized. Even if a federal heat rule were to “squeak through” at the end of Biden’s term, Congress would have the authority to nullify the rule under the Congressional Review Act — and Coglianese expects that Trump would approve such a nullification. (The Trump campaign didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.)
Advocates share Coglianese’s concerns. “[If] Biden loses the election, then it’s going to linger there indefinitely, or it could just be killed,” said Xiuhtecutli. “I hope that it continues to move forward speedily, because people’s lives depend on it,” he said.
However, other communities have gone in the opposite direction. In Phoenix, a citywide ordinance was adopted in March mandating heat safety plans for all companies contracted by the city.
California is the latest to do so, having just passed a law to enforce heat protections for indoor workers that requires employers to provide breaks, cooling areas, and water when the indoor temperature reaches 82 degrees F. If the temperature exceeds 87 degrees F, companies may also be required to install cooling devices, adjust work schedules, provide more breaks, and slow down workers’ production pace. Tim Shadix, legal director at the California-based nonprofit Warehouse Worker Resource Center, describes it as the “most comprehensive” set of indoor heat protection regulations in the U.S. “Obviously when the rubber hits the road will be in how employers respond to it, and how it’s enforced,” said Shadix.
But Shadix is hoping the OSHA rule will go further than the California rule by setting lower temperature thresholds that trigger heat exposure requirements. Shadix considers California’s thresholds “way too high” and thinks a lower federal threshold “would be a very good thing for workers.”
However, Xiuhtecutli, from the OSHA working group, doesn’t expect the proposed federal rule to include a national threshold for temperatures. “They may leave that up to be determined by region,” he said. The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a 1984 decision known as the “Chevron doctrine” that allowed federal agencies to more easily regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and other issues. The upending of this precedent diminishes the administration’s ability to enact policy changes via federal regulations, which suggests that passing a national heat standard for workers could be open to more legal challenges.
Coglianese describes the road to finalizing a federal heat standard as “an uphill battle.” Still, in his view, the case for federal protections is becoming more and more obvious. “I think, in the long game, the heat is coming. The politicians trying to fight this are probably going to be ultimately on the losing end.”
In the meantime, he asks, “How many lives will be lost from extreme heat?” In 2023, a record 2,300 people across America died from heat-related causes, and this summer could be even hotter than the last. “I hope that we can take steps to reduce that number, and my guess is that most Americans would probably feel the same way,” said Coglianese.
Florida just saw the hottest May ever recorded in Miami — the heat index was “off the charts” according to the Miami Herald. The water temperature at Virginia Key set record temperatures for 12 consecutive days, and in late May it was as warm as it would normally be in late July. It seems like it will be a long summer in Florida. By May 30, there were already 12 daily heat index records set in…
“Southern Brazil is facing its worst climate tragedy ever,” Latin-America-based journalist Mike Fox wrote from Brazil for the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) in early May. “Unprecedented floods have impacted 1.4 million people and forced more than 160,000 people from their homes… The images are shocking. Downtown Porto Alegre, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, is underwater… On May 2, a dam collapsed, unleashing an over 6-foot-high wave and worsening flooding in the area… Although the tragedy is a natural disaster, experts have pointed out that the lack of preparedness on the part of state and local officials may have contributed to the devastation. According to one report, Porto Alegre slashed funds for flooding prevention over the last three years and didn’t spend a cent on it in 2023.”
In this episode, we talk with Mike about his reporting trip to Southern Brazil, the devastation he witnessed firsthand, and the conversations he had with poor and working-class people who have borne the worst impacts of the floods and who continue to bear the greatest costs of man-made climate chaos.
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.
Michael Fox:
I am Michael Fox, freelance reporter based in Latin America and the host of Under The Shadow Podcast.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, all right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership within in these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network because there are so, so many. And please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to.
And please support the work that we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to hear more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I am very excited to have the one and only Mike Fox with us on the pod today. Mike is an incredible reporter, an incredible human being, a dear friend, even though we’ve never met in person, and he is one of our kick ass collaborators at The Real News in this extended Marvel universe of journalistic superheroes we’ve got here. Mike is a heavy hitter. If you follow the Real news, you already know Mike’s incredible work. Over the past couple of years, we’ve teamed up with Mike and the great folks at the North American Congress on Latin America or Nala to produce two vital, wholly unique, highly produced and hard hitting narrative podcast series.
The first one, Brazil on Fire was released to coincide with the lead up to the high stakes national elections in Brazil in 2022. In that series, Mike took listeners on an intense and incredible journey to understand Brazil’s turn towards fascism under President Jair Bolsonaro and how the US helped push it along. And the series culminated in an examination of the reelection of the leftist former President Lula and the failed January 8th invasion of Brasilia by Bolsonaro supporters. The second series that we’ve co-produced with Mike and Nala is called Under the Shadow, which you heard him mention up top. And we’ve been publishing that throughout this year. We’re about two thirds of the way through the first season right now, and it’s fucking incredible. Pardon my French. It’s Under The Shadow is an investigative podcast series that really takes listeners across Latin America straight to the scenes of some of the region’s most devastating revolutionary and historic moments.
And in season one, Mike has been diving deep into the past of Central America uncovering the history of US intervention and its lingering effects in the region today. And I cannot recommend this series highly enough. It’s kind of weird being on the production and publishing side for this series, but at the same time, I’m also just a Supreme fan and I’m always bugging Mike because I need my fix and I always need those new episodes. But those episodes, as you guys know, if you’ve listened to any of them, take a lot of work to put together, which is why if you guys want to hear more of them, you got to support Mike’s work. You got to support the work that we’re doing at The Real News and you got to support Nala. And speaking of Mike doing incredible work and traveling wherever he needs to go to report from the front lines of struggle, we’re having Mike on the show today to talk about a serious and important story from Brazil that you guys have probably heard about over the past month in a report that he published with NLA on May 8th.
Mike writes, Southern Brazil is facing its worst climate tragedy ever. Unprecedented floods have impacted 1.4 million people and forced more than 160,000 people from their homes. As of May 7th, at least 95 people have been killed and 130 people remain missing. The images are shocking. Downtown Porto, the capital of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande Deseo is underwater the water level in the cities. Gua River surpassed the historic 1941 flood levels by more than a foot and a half after days of heavy rain with more extreme rains. Forecasted experts say the flood waters could remain for at least the next 10 days. On May 2nd, a dam collapsed, unleashing an over six foot high wave and worsening flooding in the area. President Luis Iio Lula, the Silva flew over the disaster area on May 5th with Rio Grande’s Governor Eduardo lte. The following day, Lula asked Congress to declare a public calamity in the state which would open up additional government spending.
LTE says the state will need a type of Marshall plan for reconstruction, although the tragedy is a natural disaster. Experts have pointed out that the lack of preparedness on the part of the state and local officials may have contributed to the devastation according to one report Puerto Allegre slash funds for flooding prevention over the last three years and didn’t spend a cent on it in 2023. So that’s what we’re here to talk about today. Mike himself was there in Brazil reporting on these horrific floods and the fallout from them. And we are actually going to be publishing a video report, so you guys can see that devastation at the Real News very, very soon. But we wanted to get Mike on to take our listeners there and help us understand basically how bad this is what Mike saw and felt and talked to people about and what working people in Brazil are going through right now as the climate emergency continues to worsen. So Mike, thank you so much for joining me on the show, brother, it’s so great to have you on the pod. And I want to just shut up with all that kind of context up front and turn it back over to you and ask if, yeah, you could kind of take our listeners to the front lines where you were in Brazil and just sort of help us understand what you saw, what’s going on down there and how these disastrous floods are impacting our fellow working people in Brazil.
Michael Fox:
Thanks so much, max. Boy, what a great intro. I need to take you with me everywhere. I really appreciate it. Yeah, so I was in Alegre in kind the regions around Porte in the very end of May for about five days. This is a region I know really well. I used to live in Puerto Legree about two blocks from the Waba River. My wife is from SA Le Paulo, which is kind of a town of 220,000 people close to Puerto Lere. 80% of the town was impacted, over half of its residents were evacuated and including the mayor who I interviewed, and you will see him in the video story I’m doing for The Real News because he lost everything as well in his home. And actually there’s this crazy reality because when he first came to this town 30 or 40 years ago, he was part of a movement.
He arrived during a flood and he was part of the movement that fought the build the floodgates and the flood protection system in Aldo that then helped protect the town, but which was still engulfed with so much water, and it was actually neighboring town where the water came in past their dikes and he sent people to the neighboring town to shut their floodgates. So it’s this crazy, crazy story, and I was there. The flooding began, the start date of all this is seen as April 29th. So when I did that story for Nala, it was about a little over a week, week and a half after that. And when I was there in the end of May, so we’re talking an entire month later, you still had entire neighborhoods that are underwater areas that, and I don’t mean a little bit of water. I mean if you were walking through the water, it’s over your head and just shocking, shocking realities.
There’s roughly 50,000 people who are still in shelters. The numbers in that article that you quoted from, I think it was like 1.5 or 150,000 people have been pushed from their homes. It’s now been 600,000, 2.3 million people have been impacted across the state. 90%, more than 90% of the municipalities across the state have been impacted by the flooding and the rains. And just to put this in perspective, because hard to understand when you talk about states like, oh, it’s a state, the state of Hi in Brazil, it’s the southern most states, so it’s borders, Argentina, borders, Wai. It’s 15% larger than the uk. So we’re talking about big, it’s a very big size. And yeah, it was the worst climate disaster ever. The response from the federal government, Lula’s government has been unprecedented. The local governor, Eduardo Lei had said that they would need, I think you mentioned a Marshall plan for the region and said that the total cost of recovery would be somewhere around 4 billion US dollars.
Lula has already allocated 10 billion to it. In fact, former president who is now the head of the Bricks bank has already said that they would be providing another billion US dollars in aid to the region. Lula has already said he wants to build homes for every single family that’s lost one. And so it has, while at the same time as it’s been the largest climate disaster, tragedy the country’s ever seen, the government response has been unprecedented. And that’s been extremely important. Obviously I can’t even imagine so many people I spoke with when we were there were just like, I can’t even imagine if Bolsonaro was still in power, what this would look like. It’d be whitewashing and just kind of being left people to defend for themselves. And then a bunch of Twitter bots would be talking about how great Bolsonaro is. At the same time, I’ll just say, and I did a story for Al Jata a couple of weeks ago about the intense amount of fake news.
We haven’t seen this level of fake news since the 2018 election of Jir Bolsonaro fake news in the most part, attacking Lula’s government or trying to push out disinformation to make it seem as though Lula’s government isn’t doing anything or that Lulus government is blocking aid to regions or that Lulu government is trying to get in way or that Lulu is trying to get in away. And it’s all because this is this moment where so much is being done so much in the way of donations and things and so much attention is focused on this. And so you’ve seen this right wing campaign to try and undercut the potential benefits in terms of approval. What this could mean for Lula and obviously in Hubert, and Hubert traditionally is kind of a Bolsonaro right wing area. If you listen to Brazil on fire, then that is a large population descendant from European, descendant German, Italian and whatnot.
But it also has this really deep organizing route. If you remember Port, that’s where parts of story budgeting began back in the late eighties. And then since the early two thousands, they’ve been voting in people on the right or the center. And so there’s this really interesting moment where we could see the shift back to supporting Lula and supporting the pt, particularly in the midterm elections that are happening later this year. But part of that, the voting in of people in the center, in the center has meant that those folks, largely climate deniers, whatnot, have been gutting environmental protections across the state. And that has led obviously to this, or it has been part of why this tragedy was just so, so bad. But I’ll just say really quick on the ground, like I said, it’s still really intense. People are traumatized and they’re afraid not just for now.
Finally, we’ve had many clear days without rain. The water level of the Waba River has been dropping. It reached 5.33 meters above the normal level, and that’s been historic high. It’s now dropped back down to lower than three meters. It still is high, but in most neighborhoods, the water has been leaving, but it still is flooded in many other places. Really, the big concern for many people is what things look like for September. September is traditionally the big rain, the big flooding month. May is not. This is one of the driest months of the year. So the reason why this happened now is this combination of El Nino together with climate change together with deforestation in the center of Brazil and the Amazon that kind of created this atmospheric blockage over the state that wouldn’t let the rains flow up into other places of Brazil.
They kind of just sat on top of Huber and just sold and just dumped their rain for days and weeks. And so that has been this perfect storm together with the cutting of environmental legislation, the deforestation along the river banks, the building and the permitting of construction along those river banks, which has kind of channeled the river. And so when the water’s funneled into port and the Yba River, then they just rose to unprecedented levels, but it still is a terrifying situation. Adivan Nazi, the mayor of ald who I interviewed is talking about it could take 10 years, a decade for full kind of reconstruction of the state. And many people are concerned that this type of flooding is going to continue. We’ve never seen before. It might not be next year, it might be the year after that, but it’s very likely we’re going to see this way more often. What climate change does is it makes climate disasters more and more often.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and no, you’re right. And it’s like, yeah, this shit’s only going to get worse people. And I mean, again, that’s what we keep telling you. That’s what the folks we keep talking to keep telling us. So we got to do something. And I want to circle back in a second to kind of how we’ve in fact been doing the opposite we’ve been making, at least at the state level, at the industry level, we have been pressing the gas pedal to the floor in the exact wrong direction. But I want to hover on that point about who this is impacting the most, who is suffering the consequences of this because this connects to where the show working people has gone over the past year and why instead of interviewing more folks about contemporary shop floor struggles and unionization efforts like I’ve traditionally done in years past, I have now become obsessed with interviewing workers living in and working in what we call sacrifice zones in the US and around the world starting in East Palestine, Ohio where the train derailed and folks have been poisoned by corporate and Wall Street greed and left abandoned by their government to residents of South Baltimore who are living amidst a toxic cocktail of industrial pollution coming from coal cars in the CSX rail terminal trash incinerators.
All of this just blasting them in the faces in their lungs. One resident told me that she knows so many people walking around with oxygen tanks in South Baltimore, literally 20 minutes from where I’m sitting right now. So I bring this up because in many ways the point is the same. And in fact, sacrifice zones are not just limited to areas where industry has polluted the residences around certain factories and plants like sacrifice zones, like functionally mean areas where people live that we have just effectively abandoned to the elements or to industry or to government pollution. Let’s not forget the Department of Defense has more Superfund sites than any other industry in the United States. And so climate sacrifice zones are very much a thing, and this is one of them. And there are plenty that exist here in the United States around the world. I mean, look at Pakistan.
I mean half a Pakistan’s been baking for years. That is effectively a zone that the world has more or less deemed ripe for sacrifice. We’re not going to do anything to change the conditions that are making it unlivable. So I say that all to say is that why are we talking about this on a show called Working People where we interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams and struggles? Because who the fuck do you guys think are living in these zones? Who are the working people who are trying to make a living and trying to raise their families in these areas and now they can’t because their homes are underwater? So that’s the connection that we’re trying to make here on the show, on the Real News by drawing the connections between our different areas of reporting is that your life as a working person does not end when you leave your job.
You are a working class person living in a working class reality and living in an area like this where you are for so many reasons, put on the front lines of sacrifice that is tied to your class position, your ability to combat that, to survive it, to carry on afterwards are directly impacted by your class position. So I really wanted to draw that connection. I’m talking to Mike on the day that I am going to South Baltimore to cover a protest action by residents living in that sacrifice zone while we’re here talking about residents living in a climate sacrifice zone in Southern Brazil. So Mike, I wanted to just ask if you could say a little more about the folks that you were talking to. What are their lives, what are they saying? What are the things that they are worried about right now as they try to pick up the pieces?
Michael Fox:
Yeah, thank you Max for making that connection. Before I go to what people are saying, I just want to draw attention to this study that came out just this last week, and it was put together by the National Science and Technology Institute and the observatory of Metropolises in Brazil. And they basically took a map of the major flooding areas and then a map of the poorest communities in those regions, and they laid them on top of each other and they just matched perfectly. So it is very clear that the hardest hit communities were the working class communities, were the poorest communities. And you see that by going to different shelters across the city. I went to several, but one particularly in South Leopoldo is this massive gymnasium and you have basically 500, 600 people that this is their only option. I used to live in this gymnasium with everybody, and that’s one thing kind of in the days just after a flood disaster. But folks there understand that they’re going to be there for months if not six months, if not maybe a year. Like I said, the federal government has said they want to build homes for everybody, but that’s going to take a really long time. And so the folks there just have their backs against the wall. A lot of people, they had jobs, low wage workers, whatever, but they’ve lost those jobs or they can’t get to their employment or they’re just trying to barely get by.
It’s completely pushed back on the working class in hi grand in that entire area. Don’t forget Max, that in Brazil, roughly 40% of the population works in the informal sector, roughly 40 million people. And so now the federal government has said it’s going to actually, in order to support small businesses and businesses in the state, it’s already said that it’s going to be providing minimum wages for the next two months for workers in the formal sector. But those people that might be vendors, street vendors, workers in the informal economy and whatever they might be, you’ve just lost your income and there’s just no way of getting that back. Fishermen up in the ilias, which is this area that is one of the most hardest hit neighborhoods of Porto leg, and I spent a day there going and visiting these homes, I mean, first off, your entire means of financial support has been just wiped off the table.
Second off, your home has been inundated to even over your head. It’s just now starting to recede, but you have to gut every single thing you have ever owned. So you’re taking that out of house, you’re ripping it in front, you’re putting it in front of your front stoop or the streets so that the city can come by and clean everything up, and then you’ve got to clean that out. The other thing that is a major concern is leptos, posis. Leptos. Posis is a bacterial disease. It’s caused by the urine of infected animals like rats and things like that. And during flood times, this bacteria, I mean it gets in all the infected flood waters and everyday folks are just trying to get by. You’ve been in those waters for weeks. So we already have eight deaths, so we have 2000 potential cases, suspected cases across the region, and now people are finally being able to go back in.
But you’re talking, you have this just contaminated sludge of mixed flood waters from the river and then sewage and feces from the town, which has all been flooded. And so it’s just this terrible, terrible, perfect storm. And that’s the thing is what is the next couple of weeks? What do the next couple of months look like? And that’s the big question, right? Because it’s one thing, like I said, the disaster is kind of slowly starting to come to an end, but tens of thousands of people are still living in shelters. You have, Lula was talking about you might have to build homes for as many as 200,000 to 250,000 families. The numbers are just massive. And where do we go from here when your means to be able to survive your means, to be able to support yourselves and your families has just been wiped off the table.
The main public market in downtown Alegre, usually there’s about 110 different stands in this main public market. 50,000 people passed through this market on an average day, and it’s been inundated underwater. When I was there two weeks ago. I mean it smelled like putrid the entire, it was going to take days and weeks to get the whole thing gutted. And that’s the reality across the entire. So it is an utter devastation. And the people who are the hardest hit are the working class families. The people who are the hardest hit are the poor communities I was speaking with this one guy from is if you saw any of the images from the days after when this has happened, you saw these kind of boats, motorboats bringing people in, picking people off kind of the rooftops and bringing this to this area where it kind of looks like there’s this road that kind of carves upward and they would drop people off and go back out.
That was canas. I don’t have the figures of how many people were impacted, but it’s well over half the town. It might be close to 70 or 80% of the town had to be evacuated. So he was one of those people that his home, even when I was there about a week and a half ago, his home was still completely inundated. He was like, I can take you there. You can see it. It’s over your head. And the thing is is that it’s like you have this tale of two cities right now, max, where the city that’s above water in many cases, it’s almost as if nothing has happened. You still have stores, you still have restaurants, people are going out. In many cases, those areas, if they didn’t have electricity and water the entire time, it came back relatively fast within the first week or two weeks.
The other side of the city is just devastated, just completely devastated. And there’s some towns outside of Puerto Legge in the mountains that have just been entire neighborhoods just been wiped. They don’t exist anymore. Lulu was there last week walking through one area and you see the images and just Lulu is walking over what used to be rubble. There’s just nothing there. But what this guy told me who used to live in Canoa is that in Brazil, it’s as if this disaster for the first week or two, it was all the headlines. Everyone talked about it. And now it’s kind of becoming the story on the second or third pages, it’s leaving the front headlines, but he’s like, look for those of us who have been impacted, this isn’t over. This hasn’t ended. This is just beginning and it’s going to last for months and it’s going to last for years.
And so that was really, really profound, really deep. And I want to say one thing, max, there was a really interesting experience that I got to spend two days at an occupation of people who had been in shelters across alegre who said they weren’t treated well. And so they came together and they occupied an abandoned building. And I thought that this was just amazing and fascinating people taking this situation and saying, no, we are going to take action. We’re going to do this ourselves. And so they occupied this abandoned building, no electricity, no running water, but every single person I talked to said, this is our lifeboat. This is our means to go forward. And every single one of them was from a poor community whose house either doesn’t exist anymore or who they’re going to still have to wait weeks to just get in and then gut everything and start over anew.
And this was their way forward. And they were doing that, their communal kitchen. They each had their own little apartments. And in fact, the last day I was there, they had just received donations of mattresses and clothes and they were super excited. Now, three days later, you had the owners of that building and that building has been abandoned in downtown Port Legge for 12 years. And the owners had called for their eviction and that the local police and a judge had moved into try and evict them from the building. And then there was negotiations that were happening. So I mean, again, this is capital. This is like we’re the powerful, and you can’t be in my building even though that is actually using that building for what that is, the public good. That’s what it should be used for. But that was just such a powerful, powerful experience of people taking their lives back and saying, no, we can create change ourselves. And in fact, there were other people talking about, oh, we need to replicate this. Brazil is one of those places where the occupy movement and the occupation movement for housing has been extremely important traditionally, historically. But that was really powerful.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we’re going to link to another great report that Mike did for us in the past on the landless workers movement who doing just that, taking buildings and saying, this is ours now, motherfucker. Yeah, we’ve also published incredible documentary reports from Puerto Rico and folks there doing the same thing after the hurricanes there. And they’re like, look, yeah, this building is owned by white investors from the north or rich people in our own country and our own people are living on the streets or can’t afford to live in the homes that they grew up in. Something’s got to give here and the climate’s getting worse and pushing more people into the precarious position of being current or potential climate refugees. Again, get ready for more of this because we are thoroughly in the age of manmade climate change. We are continuing down the road of increasing manmade climate chaos, and that’s where, and we’re not taking the necessary steps writ large to really prevent or mitigate that, let alone radically reform our society in a way that could save our shared planet and what’s left of our shared society.
But that’s a topic for maybe another full podcast, but I want to, with the time I’ve got, man, circle back to that question of how we got here. Obviously there are many big and small answers to that question, but I wanted to give us the frame of looking first at Brazil, kind of picking up on the reporting you did at Brazil on fire. You looked at BOLs NATO’s policies, particularly his just gross exacerbation of the deforestation of the Amazon and all the climate effects that come with that. But as you mentioned, there are other things here that really speak to what we’re dealing with in the United States, like states in the southwest where you traditionally don’t have a lot of concrete are dealing with flooding like this because when you have heavy rains and that water doesn’t seep into the ground and it goes into these concrete canals, it creates flood zones.
Or right now everyone’s been talking about the kind of decaying infrastructure and the pipes bursting in Atlanta and the floods that that’s causing the boil water advisories that working people there are dealing with just folks in Flint and Jackson, Mississippi, so on and so forth. So the reason I’m drawing these comparisons is that that infrastructure doesn’t decay overnight. I mean those are policy decisions that are made over and over again to disinvest, to deregulate maintenance and protective measures are always seen as too costly until you end up with a situation like this where the costs are in the tens of billions. So I wanted to ask in the local context what could have been done to prevent this or what has been done to sort of exacerbate the effects, but also even zooming out farther, what has your work in Brazil told us about how we as a planet have gotten here in the climate emergency?
Michael Fox:
Yeah, I mean on the local level, this is one of those really interesting situations where Puerto Lere had a plan. 1941, like I said, was this historic flood. When I used to live in Puerto, you would walk through and see the images of the flood and in different restaurants they’d be like, oh, remember the flood? It was a thing. It was a thing you talked about because it was the biggest natural disaster up until that point. So over the next 30 years, they developed a flood protection system. It went online in 1970 and it was supposed to protect the city from flooding up to six meters. What is that? 18 feet over normal. In this flood, the water rose to 5.33, so it didn’t even reach the six meter mark. But the problem was is that that system was just gutted in recent years. You mentioned it that I had mentioned the article that particularly in the last three years, I mean they spent $0 on maintaining the flood prevention system last year, and then in the previous two or three years they’d been already decreasing that number.
But we’re talking about the lack of maintenance and repair for the system going back for the last 10 years, 15 years, this could have in Puerto eg at least, because in some of the other towns that were just entire regions wiped away, they don’t have that same flood prevention system. That’s kind of another situation. But in Puerto Lege, all of it could have been prevented. They had the system and they did not maintain it. They didn’t repair it. So what you saw were floodgates, which just didn’t close. They got stuck, right? Pumps were not working or areas where they should have been pumping the water up, but it was actually letting the water in. You had in the first of this thing, there are these images of firemen and police who are carrying sandbags to shore up the dikes and levies. You don’t have to do that.
Not in a city like Porto leg that already has its flight prevention system going back 50 years. This is not something, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You just have to make sure it’s not going to fail in times of crisis and they couldn’t do it. And here’s the worst thing is this was not the first flood the city had over the last year. This was the third or fourth. So you had a massive flooding that was going on. Now this was the worst obviously, but I think it was last June, you had the high floods last September. The city was hit massively as well. So this is the third or fourth time just in the last year. So it was like if the city didn’t wake up for the other ones, oh man, we really got to get our shit together really. So that’s why you had a couple of weeks ago, different groups and organizations calling for the impeachment of Mayor Sebastian Melo, just saying, listen, you just failed this completely.
Now of course he has his people and city council and they wouldn’t even put it up to a vote. And still people are pushing for this. And in talking with local business folks and social organizations and workers, people across the city are like, it’s asinine. Obviously this guy fucked up and he cannot remain in power, but you also have this at the same time, I talked about this fake news generation going at the same time, but that’s on the specifics. It was a failure by the city and by the local state government that failed alegre, and that is why it flooded this time. And that is an unmitigated disaster. It needs to be kind of cried from the rooftops there. These Brazilians are very humorous and particularly online. And there was this meme going around where it was like, now is not the time to point fingers.
It’s the time to put people in jail. That was what the meme said is pointing at the mayor saying, you screwed up. We have a problem. So that’s on kind of the extremely local level of peg. But part of that is also, this goes back to the question of who are the financial interests behind all of this? Who’s behind this? Sebastian Melo and many other sectors of particularly allied with Bolsonaro in the center had been talking about the actual removal of the flood protection system because it’s a big wall in downtown and they’re like, oh, that blocks the view, whatever else. So they’ve been talking about, we got to get rid of this thing, we don’t even need it. Why is it there? And financial interests have been really in favor of trying to throw money at the waterfront. Same thing we’re talking about the inner harbor style stuff.
When I was in Puerto negative 15 years ago, there was this whole waterfront that they wanted to develop with this whole big revitalization project, exactly like Baltimore’s inner harbor. And that was the push. And they actually did a referendum, and it was with the referendum that they blocked that and they were able to build housing and then something else, whatever else in those areas because big business wanted to completely open it up, privatize it, and then build waterfront shops and really cush stores, whatever else. And they still did part of that at the port, and it was just totaled. I drove by there, we sailed by there and we motored by there in a boat when I was there and it’s like one of the worst areas of destruction. You see they have this little Ferris wheel and it was like done this really cute little and it’s just total completely total.
The restaurants, the waterfront was the water filled up to the rooftops, but that’s the vision. That’s the capital vision. How are we going to make money off of this? It’s not how are we going to protect the city? How are we going to protect those most in need? Now the bigger vision for the region is, like I mentioned, the deforestation in the Amazon and the hugely dry high temperatures in the center of Brazil. This caused this atmospheric blockage. So of course that Bolsonaro helped push that helped to open up the doors for the deforestation in the Amazon right now at the same time as you have this intense flooding in Hi Panal, which is supposed to be one of the largest, if not the largest swamp lands in the world right now is super dry. I mean super dry. And the water that fell in hi was heading, it should have gone there.
It that’s where it’s supposed to go. And so you have this perfect storm of all this together at the same time. You mentioned before Max, how the rainwater is kind of just pouring off the concrete and just pouring off. The other thing that causes that, what they talk about here is the IMP zone. It’s called the waterproofing of the soil. That’s what happens when you have monocropping and you open up areas, you cut forests and trees and you open up areas, particularly in the region for soy, for soy development. That’s been growing obviously all across Brazil, but in particular in and so major areas there near the headwaters of all where these rivers and stuff where all the flooded have now been cut, have opened it up for soy. So when the rains fall there, they just wash right off and they pull kind of the top soil and they just wash right into the river.
So that obviously makes things worse. And then the gutting of environmental legislation, Brazil is really, really good environmental legislation, but they’ve been gutting it in recent years and also in certain terms, allowing local municipalities and cities to decide how much of that environmental legislation they want to use to actually protect the borders of the rivers and the sides of the rivers, which should be floodplains. Okay, if it’s in the floodplain, we’re going to let it go. We’re not going to build right here. But in a lot of different areas, they’ve completely opened it up. There’s a store, a department store called Haan that’s owned by Luciano Hang. And you might remember Luciano Hang Max because as I did some reporting on this in 2018 and the lead up to NATO’s election, he was the one that was forcing his employees to vote for Bolsonaro in the lead up to the 2018 election.
So he’s a big pro Bolsonaro businessman in Santa Catarina, and he’s got these Haan department stores. They build one of these right in the middle of the floodplain in the hillsides of hugs. And there’s these images where the river literally is engulfing both sides of it. It was completely washed away. You just don’t do that. But it was approved because there’s interest there because there’s financial. Yeah, great. Yeah, do it great, awesome, fantastic. Whatever you want. That’s the reality of where money talks and then yeah, let it roll, let it roll. And that is what’s just added to it’s compounded this tragedy and made it worse than you could possibly imagine. And to be honest, the major concerns are what this looks like Avi for Huron Soul and for the flooding Huron Se. But also don’t forget, like I said, the rains in that region are supposed to be going to elsewhere in Brazil.
So these are the same rains that should be hitting the rest of Brazil. They should be rejuvenating forest elsewhere. So the rains in here, solar are causing greater drought elsewhere, and we can’t forgets a tit for tat. This is all combined, it’s, it’s a larger ecosystem problem and we can’t totally mess with one without messing everything else. And it has a global impact. And that’s the thing, people when you talk about the Amazon, you’re like, oh man, the Amazon, but you talk about Southern Brazil, you’re like, oh yeah, that’s too bad. It’s really raining there. But no, actually what’s happening in Southern Brazil is related to the Amazon. You can’t talk with one about the other.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and to just again, drive home that point with a very, very sad stake to the heart. I was reading this article over the weekend from the Guardian headline is Venezuela loses its Last glacier as it shrinks down to an ice field. The sea ice is disappearing, the jet stream is about to collapse. I mean, that is also going to impact fishing. It’s going to impact everything, and you are not going to save yourself from the impacts of it. And you’re sure as hell not going to just be able to wish away the reality staring you in the face, but yet that seems like what we keep doing by building developments where they shouldn’t be department stores where they shouldn’t be ignoring literally every warning sign and then dealing with these massive costs, human, financial and otherwise afterwards and saying like, well, none of this could have been prevented, but here’s all our money going to cleaning our ass when we could have been helping to prevent this in the first place.
Michael Fox:
Yeah, absolutely. And to tie it back to this podcast, max, I was speaking with a lot of people, obviously across the region, but in the islands it was really, really profound because the islands, like I said, this neighborhood of Pegge, it’s across the way from the historic center of Port Legge. It’s about a kilometer across the Waba River, and it’s this archipelago violence, it’s largely fishing area. And of course when it rains, it gets flooded a little bit, but people are just used to that, but not at this level. And a lot of people I talked to, they said, we’re just not going back. There was one woman in particular who her husband works in the Marines, or I guess her husband works in the Brazilian navy who lives out there. And she said, there’s too much loss. We’ve suffered too much loss. We are concerned for what the future will bring.
She’s lost a neighbor to Leptos Posis. Their entire house has had to been gutted. And she’s like, we’re just not going back. And that is the same reality for many, many people in the island. Some people will return obviously, but she’s just one of thousands of climate refugees here in Southern Brazil. Now, those refugees, they might not go to Wai Argentina. There might be internal refugees within Brazil, but they are going to be moving elsewhere and looking for higher ground. There was one woman who I met, she’s 20, she moved recently from a town inland that just got devastated by these reigns. She’s been living in kind of a lower section of alegre and she’s like, I can’t stay here. I have to go to higher ground. So also these areas within Puerto in Al and Kaa Elias, what does that mean for the low lying land when that’s now under threat for future flooding?
Because we mentioned, okay, it might not happen next month and it might be a couple of years because this particular type of flooding tends to happen in the end of an El Nino process. We’re seeing the end of an El Nino, we’re starting a La Nina, but the cycle comes back again and people are saying, I’m getting out. I got to leave. So we’re seeing the price of real estate and homes, people that they’ve lived their entire lives, it’s plummeting. And so not to mention the devastation that’s been caused to everything they own and the fact that in many cases they want to get out, but they can’t because having to spend their entire savings. So the rising poverty that we’re going to see, and we already are seeing in that region is real, but also the hit to the local housing market. And I don’t mean the housing market for big business and for the elites, but I mean for everyday folks who this is their home and now they’re like, if I stay, I don’t know when the next flood’s going to come.
There’s real trauma max. And that’s one of the things that was really, really profound. There was fear and trauma. I did a story about this for Tier two world a couple of weeks ago about just the level of every time it rains a little bit, people are like, oh God, is this going to be another one? It is going to rise back up. What’s happened over the last month is the water levels would start to drop and then you’d have more rain and then you’d have rain, and then it started flooding in areas where it hadn’t flooded before because of torrential rain. And then it would start to drop a little bit again. They’d have more rain. What happened last week? Now it really looks like things are clear for the next couple of weeks, but okay, fine if you don’t have rain for a couple of weeks, but then the next time it rains in a couple months.
And like I said, September is the rainy season, so it’s like rains will come. That’s just what happens. But now people are scared and that trauma runs deep. And even though in many of these shelters they have health departments and doctors and psychologists who are trying to help people, we’re talking about an entire region of 2.3 million people that were impacted, and even more millions than that, that watch this entire thing happen and that runs deep. So I think that’s one of those layers. We oftentimes, we’re talking about crisis and we’re talking about tragedies and climate tragedies and whatnot, and it’s often you’re talking about kind of the tangible of the home that’s lost all the furniture that’s lost the lives, the real lives that are lost, the people that have to pick up and leave. But underneath is this deep seated trauma that will last for years and decades and sometimes lifetimes for people.
Like I said, when I was living in EG in the two thousands, they were still talking about the 1941 flood, 70 years later, this they’ll be talking about for a century, unless this continues to happen, in which case they’re going to be talking about the new one and the new one and the new one, a new one, a new one. And this is the new world that we live in unless we can wake up. And that’s the thing that I just want to mention this, max, when I was there talking without Ivan Azi and he’s this mayor, I actually first interviewed him 17 years ago. He’s the mayor of Pol, the town that my wife is from. I interviewed him in 2007 for a documentary I was working on about participatory budgeting and participatory democracy in Latin America. It was called Beyond Elections. And people who can find it online, it’s still there on YouTube.
But I interviewed him because they had done this budgeting process and here I had to come back and I was interviewing him 17 years later and he said, boy, I missed those days obviously. I asked him, what is your story? What is your message that you would like to impart? You would like to cross other people. And he says, I want people to understand that if we don’t wake up, this will continue. And it’s happened here for us, but it’s going to happen everywhere else. And so we need to wake up. And what’s scary, and I think really concerning Max, is that we all know this. You and I were talking about this I guess about a week ago. It’s no longer the canary in the coal mine. It’s not the canaries that are dropping dead. It’s people in the coal mine. It’s like we’re beyond that point. We get it. Everybody understands it. And yet, until you are personally impacted, it’s still out there. It’s still is. Oh yes, Southern Brazil or whatever, or Egypt or whatever’s happening right now. It’s that thing over there until it hits home and then you’re like, oh, I wish I’d known. I wish I’d realized. We need to understand how it’s connected to the bigger picture and the role that we have
Maximillian Alvarez:
To play. I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put, brother. And it’s like the thing that is overwhelming me right now is just thinking about all the different contexts in which I’ve heard working people express that same level of fear and trauma and foreboding about the future. I’ve heard it from fathers whose children were killed in school shootings who thought that would never happen here. And then it did. And every parent, every community that’s gone through that has said the exact same thing. And that trauma of course will never go away. I’ve heard the same thing from families in East Palestine, Ohio who say that their kids still get A-P-T-S-D response when they hear sirens or when they feel a train coming by and they’re worried, is this going to derail and am I going to live through that nightmare again? Right. I mean, like you said, my family and people I know back in California feel that fear and trepidation when we see smoke in the hills because the fires have been getting worse every year to say nothing of the fires in Hawaii and what folks there must be feeling after this past year.
This is the kind of compounding trauma that more and more of us are sadly understanding on a visceral level because it is coming for us. That is the takeaway message. And if you listen to this show, if you listen to the work we do at the Real News Network, you guys know that the people from those areas who we lift up their stories, we find them, we talk to them, we give you access to them and their experience, what they keep telling you and us is don’t wait for it to happen to you. Don’t do what we did. You have to be proactive about fighting this. And whether it’s the floods that more and more of us are going to be dealing with, whether it’s the kind of climate refugees who are going to be showing up in greater numbers at our southern border, and the sort of fascistic means that our government is using to ramp up our border security and expel people who are being displaced from climate effects that we here in the United States are directly and greatly contributing to.
Like this is all a dismal, terrible cycle that we have to be the ones to get ourselves out of. And I could talk to you about this all day, brother, but I know I’ve kept you long enough. And I want to round out by asking if you could just tell folks a little more about where they can find you and your work, because you’re always doing so much, not just for us at The Real News Network. You are a phenom out there covering the important stories that need to be covered from across Latin America. It really is an honor to work with you, brother, not just because we get to talk about critical stories like this and share your great work video and audio, but because it genuinely feels like we’re on this team that is trying to fight to save the world before we got no world left to save. So tell folks where they can find more of your work and what you got coming up and then we’ll wrap up.
Michael Fox:
Thanks, max. The best place for folks to find me is on my Patreon, patreon.com/m OXM, Fox, or you can just go to Patreon, type in Michael Fox. I’m trying to link to every story that I do there, and I’ve also just launched a new kind of personal podcast. The idea is to get really personal with my reporting. And so each, every couple of weeks I’m going to do almost like a postcard from the field. And the idea is to walk listeners through what I’ve been up to, what I’ve been digging into, what I’ve been researching, and talking about, what that means, what it feels like, what I’ve been grappling with. And that’s specifically for my Patreon supporters. And it’s a way of helping me to continue to fund my reporting everywhere I can. So I’ve just launched that this week, that new, the Patreon’s been up for about a year, but I’ve just launched this new podcast that you can find it there.
And then of course, links to all my other stories. I’m on Twitter, I’m on Instagram. Usually my handle is M, Fox something, M Fox, us M Fox, us. If you look up Michael, Fox M Fox, you’ll find it. But that’s kind of the place I’m trying to send all of the other, anybody interested. I’m trying to send him there as a way to kind of house everything. Right? In the last few years, I felt like it’s all kind of dispersed. Where is all how to find me. I have a website or I had a website and then I have this WordPress website, which I really enjoyed. And then three or four years ago, it stopped updating and every time I tried to update it with add new information to it, it wouldn’t let me save it and it would save it incorrectly, and I can’t get it updated. So now it’s just this dead site of weird old information about me and I can’t fix it. It’s terrible. So I’m going with Patreon for now, so that’s the best place to find me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guest, Mike Fox for talking with us today. And I especially want to thank Mike for all of the important work that he’s doing, not just for the Real News Network, but everything he does it is so good and so, so important. And you guys should definitely go support Mike on Patreon if you can. And of course you should be listening to and supporting the work that we’re doing together to produce Under the Shadow with Nala, which you can find links to in the show notes for this episode. And you can binge all of Under the Shadow and Brazil on fire on any podcast player. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People.
And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got waiting there for our patrons, and go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Human rights activists have criticized organizers of the 2024 UEFA European soccer tournament for forging sponsorship contracts with Chinese companies including Hisense, BYD and Alibaba, whose supply chains have been found to use Uyghur forced labor or which have contributes to the surveillance of Uyghurs.
Advertisements for the companies appear in arenas and in material related to the tournament, which is being hosted by Germany from June 14 to July 14.
“Unfortunately, the lure of Chinese money has been too strong for many of those who could possibly receive that money. It’s been too strong for them to resist, regardless of the fact that many of those companies are embroiled in forced labor and have major issues in their supply chains,” Executive Director of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, or IPAC, Luke de Pulford said.
“So I think it’s greed, unfortunately, over fundamental rights,” he said. “That is the basis of the problem here.”
A March 2020 report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, or ASPI, found evidence that 82 well-known global brands, including Hisense, China’s largest television manufacturer, and electric car manufacturer BYD, used parts produced by Uyghurs living and working in conditions that strongly suggested forced labor.
Alibaba, whose unit Alipay is a sponsor, offers facial recognition services to its cloud customers that enables them to detect Uyghurs, according to IPVM, which tracks video surveillance around the world.
RFA contacted Hisense, BYD and Alibaba for comment on Tuesday by had not received any response by midday Wednesday.
Luke de Pulford, executive director of Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, speaks at a rally for Hong Kong democracy at the Marble Arch in London on June 12, 2021. (Laurel Chor/Getty Images)
Since 2017, China has rounded up an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in Xinjiang and transferred them to concentration camps, where they have been forced to work on nearby farms and factories.
China denies the human rights abuses and says the camps were vocational training centers and have since been closed.
‘Take this seriously’
When contacted for comment about the selection of corporate sponsors, the UEFA media department said it “takes this topic very seriously.”
Organizers “have been adamant that UEFA EURO 2024 shall be a sporting event that commits to human rights as a contributing factor to the success of the tournament,” it said in a statement.
“Together with all relevant stakeholders, a framework and processes designed to uphold and protect human rights at the tournament have been created and will be implemented for everyone involved in the tournament,” it said.
But there was no UEFA comment specifically about the Chinese corporations.
An ad for Chinese television maker Hisense appears in the background during the UEFA Euro 2024 match between Austria and the Netherlands at the Olympiastadion in Berlin on June 25, 2024. (John MacDougall/AFP)
De Pulford said unless pressure is placed on them, Chinese companies will continue to exploit Uyghur forced labor.
“I hope that something changes, but it’s not going to change without noise and a lot of campaign,” he told Radio Free Asia. “So let’s hope that human rights, due diligence regulations, when they really come in, manage to affect something of a sea change. And it’s not going to happen without a concerted cross-party international campaign.”
Governments need to pressure companies in this regard, said Ghaiyur Qurban, the Berlin director for the World Uyghur Congress.
“We condemn this action of the UEFA committee. We believe that the mixed attitude of Western governments on human rights issues has led to a decrease in the awareness of such international companies and money driven institutions to act according to human values,” he said.
“We still believe that the responsibility of the governments is serious in the occurrence of such situations.”
Translated by Martin Shawn. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Adile for RFA Uyghur.
If you’re dreading summer on the job this year, you’re not alone. Every month last summer was the most scorching on world record. Trapped under heat domes, dozens of metro areas busted their longest streaks ever of highs over 100 degrees. Phoenix afternoons were over 110 for a month straight. On asphalt yards nearly hot enough to melt, bonus-hungry managers forced workers to keep up the usual pace.
This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump told a Las Vegas crowd earlier this month that, if elected, the “first thing” he would do would be to end the IRS practice of taxing tips as part of workers’ regular income. “For those hotel workers and people that get tips, you’re going to be very happy,” he said. Labor advocates were quick to call it out as unserious pandering, particularly in the light of hostility toward efforts to provide those workers a livable basic wage.
Unfortunately, Trump can count on a general haziness in the public mind on the impact of “tipped wages,” more helpfully labeled subminimum wages. And that’s partly due to a corporate press corps who, through the decades-long fight on the issue, always give pride of place to the industry narrative that, as a Chicago Sun-Times headline said, “Getting Rid of Tipped Wages in Illinois Would Be the Final Blow to Many Restaurants.” And often lead with customers, like one cited in a recent piece in Bon Appetit, who proudly states that he only tips 10%, half today’s norm, because it’s what he’s always done, and “if servers want more, then they should put the same effort in that I took to earn that money.”
As president of the group One Fair Wage, Saru Jayaraman is a leading mythbuster on the history, practice and impact of tipping. CounterSpin talked with her in November 2015. We’ll hear that conversation again today, when much of what she shares is still widely unexplored and misunderstood.
Photo credit: Asian Pacific Environmental Network.
A familiar scene played out in the city council chambers of Richmond, California on May 22, 2024. For the last 20 years, since members of the anti-Chevron Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) first got elected to the council, any measure before that body affecting the city’s largest employer and business tax payer has been hotly debated.
To rebut the resulting complaints about pollution and arguments for stronger health and safety protection, the $290-billion company that operates Richmond’s massive 122-year-old refinery deploys its own defenders. They include refinery managers, public affairs people, leaders of non-profit groups funded by Chevron, and leaders of conservative Building Trades unions, which represent workers employed by contractors for the oil industry.
The latest battle lines have formed around a proposal to impose a new excise tax on fossil fuel products from a facility that generates, according to one RPA analysis, about $2 billion a year in profit for the company.
A refinery tax?
This Richmond Refinery Tax Act, proposed by two RPA leaders on the council, would generate an estimated $100 million a year for programs serving the city’s 110,000 residents. Chevron’s current annual tax bill is about $50 million, providing about 15% of Richmond’s total tax revenue. But the city currently faces a budget shortfall of $34 million in the next fiscal year.
Speakers for and against the measure packed the council chambers that Tuesday night in May. Among those in favor was Sandy Saeteurn, a Richmond resident and APEN member. She accused Chevron of “continuing to pollute our air, our environment, our health” and argued that the tax hike would “make sure they’re investing in our city, investing in our residents, and the future of our community.
Many other community speakers echoed her comments, but Chevron spokesperson Caitlin Powell countered them in a written statement. Powell called the refining tax “a hasty proposal, brought forward by one-sided interests,” that would hamper the company’s ability to “to create a better quality of life for Richmond residents.”
Organized labor spoke, per usual, with more than one voice. Harry Baker, representing Service Employees Local 1021, which has a Richmond city hall bargaining unit, told the council that “we strongly support the polluters pay initiative. It’s not just a plan. It’s a necessity.”
Timothy Jefferies, representing the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, weighed in—as the building trades unions invariably do—on the company’s side. “We’re not against clean air,” Jeffries explained. But he argued against any hasty action on the proposed ballot measure because voter approval of it might adversely affect refinery jobs and all the other economic benefits that Richmond “enjoys because of those jobs.”
Adversaries to allies
Richmond’s latest controversy involving Big Oil—and its local friends and foes—reveals the main political divide explored in the anthology Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement(New Press, 2024). The collection began as a project of The Forge and was compiled by former Forge editor Lindsay Zafir, now academic director of Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice at CUNY, and Jeff Ordower, North America director for 350.org, It brings together more than a dozen case studies of environmental justice campaigns which have grappled with the challenge of enlisting labor allies and overcoming union objections to reducing fossil fuel extraction, transportation, refining, and use.
The editors call them “spark stories—from the front lines of the climate crises” that can help other organizers figure out how to bring workers and communities together to build “the movement and power we need to win a just transition” that will benefit us all.
Their contributors include “blue-green” coalition builders like Norman Rogers, second vice-president of United Steel Workers (USW) Local 675 in southern California, Jose Bravo, executive director of the Just Transition Alliance (JTA), which has been trying to bring union members and environmentalists together since 1997, and Tefere Gebre, former executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, who now works for Greenpeace,USA.
Other voices in the collection hail from North Bay Jobs With Justice, APEN, CBE, the Bay Area-based Climate Workers, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, state-level or multi-state groups like Native Movement, Climate Justice Rhode Island, Good Jobs, Clean Air New Jersey, and the Center for Coalfield Justice, and the national networks such as the Green Workers Alliance, Labor Network for Sustainability.
Not all of these projects have survived the fickleness of foundation funders or the shifting winds of union politics. Brooke Anderson, a former organizer for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, spent five years nurturing Climate Workers, a cross-union, rank-and-file formation of mainly low-wage workers backed by the Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project. Summing up the lessons of that experience, she describes how hospitality workers and port truckers “who had contributed the least to ecological erosion and had the least resources to shoulder a just transition were asked to sacrifice the most to make their industries more ‘sustainable.’”
In her chapter, Anderson recounts one victory of particular significance, locally and nationally (although it remains subject to litigation). This was the labor-community fight against a coal export terminal in Oakland. She writes:
“When it was proposed, many in labor deferred to the building trades, which supported the project. However, once unions with members in the path of the coal trains—often lower-wage, Black and Brown members—spoke out against the project, it put labor’s position back up for grabs. We eventually moved much of labor to oppose the terminal and the city of Oakland, followed suit, rejecting the proposal.”
Asian-American activism
In Power Lines, well-deserved attention is given to APEN, which has rallied Richmond residents against Chevron for three decades, from its base among Laotian refugees and other Asian-American immigrants. Ordower and Miya Yoshitani provide a useful overview of this organizational history; the book also features an interview with APEN co-director Vivian Yi Huang and Amee Raval, its research and policy director, conducted by Yoshitani, who was APEN’s long-time executive director
As noted by Ordower and Yoshitani, APEN has had some success building relationships with oil workers in Richmond who are direct employees of Chevron. Their USW Local 5 represents workers at several other refineries in Contra Costa and Solano Counties. In the last decade, it has struck two of them, including Chevron’s facility for ten weeks in 2022, the longest walkout there in 40 years. During each of these national or local contract fights, local environmental justice groups joined strike picket-linesand rallies, with Greenpeace even deploying several protest boats around Chevron’s mile-long pier on the Richmond shoreline.
After the dispute ended, Local 5 vice-president B. K. White and four co-workers were fired, in retaliation for their strike activity and White’s aggressive public advocacy for refinery safety measures. While negotiating a settlement of his discharge case, White decided to retire from Chevron, after 29 years. He took a new job as public policy director for Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez, the longtime Chevron critic now pushing for a “polluters’ tax.” According to the mayor’s chief of staff, Shiva Mishek, White’s role in the mayor’s office is “to help us lead ‘just transition’ work and support union labor and workforce development in Richmond.”
An adversarial relationship
As Ordower and Yoshitani report, environmental justice groups like APEN have had “a more adversarial relationship” with conservative craft unions which, in 2015, even blocked a Contra Costa County Labor Council resolution in support of Local 5 strikers at a refinery in Martinez, CA. They are affiliated with the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California (SBCTCC), which speaks for 500,000 workers. Its affiliated unions often back management positions on refinery expansion or taxation, undercut campaigns for workplace safety led by the USW, and resist stronger environmental protection for “frontline” communities.
The longstanding rift between the two wings of refinery labor—and the fifth column role played by the trades–is recounted in my book, Refinery Town: Big Oil, Big Money, and the Remaking of an American City. It was on dramatic display several years ago when the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the powerful industry lobbying group funded by oil and gas companies, held its annual policy and strategy meeting at a swank beachfront resort in Orange County. The two-day event featured a keynote speech by then State Building Trades Council leader Robbie Hunter, president of Iron Workers Local 433 in Los Angeles.
As a fellow presenter at the conference (on a panel about the concerns of refinery neighbors), I saw Hunter get a standing ovation for his lunch-time address to several hundred oil industry managers and contractors, lobbyists from Washington and Sacramento, and friends in the state legislature. The labor leader spent nearly an hour praising Big Oil and ranting about the “enviros and NIMBYs and all the usual groups that just say ‘No’ to everything” that leads to more hiring of building trades members to do refinery maintenance and modernization work.
According to Hunter, Richmond was ground zero for such obstructionism because its “city council got taken over by people who didn’t reflect the community.” As a result of this political shift, he reported, Chevron is now constantly assailed by “groups with an activist agenda” who are “looking for any excuse to shut down these plants.” He pledged that his organization would continue to work with Chevron so it remains “the neighbor the city wants.” (For its part, WSPA has joined the opposition to Richmond’s proposed ballot measure, arguing that “any additional local taxes or regulatory programs could make [Chevron] operations more challenging and expensive, which could lead to higher costs at the pump for all.”)
An oil worker’s concerns
Norm Rogers is another southern California union official who has had to address rank-and-file concerns about the impact of refinery shut-downs—but in a different way than Hunter. As he explains in a chapter called “The Dream and the Nightmare,” 4,000-member USW Local 675 “is very much tied to its history as a local under the former Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers” that was aligned with the late Tony Mazzocchi, a pioneering labor environmentalist and job safety advocate who served as national secretary-treasurer and legislative director of the OCAW.
Local 675 joined a union coalition called California Labor for Climate jobs which, according to Rogers, “successfully lobbied the state for a $40 million fund for displaced oil and gas workers a $20 million fund for displaced extraction workers.” At Marathon Oil, a Local 675 employer, an on-going “conversion to renewable diesel has already resulted in significant job losses…which is especially challenging for older workers who are too close to retirement for retraining.”
The funding obtained from the state is designed to support laid off workers, where possible, through retraining programs, plus early retirement and wage replacement, and other services. Yet, as Rogers suggests, this is little more than a pilot project in light of California’s plan to reduce crude oil production to 166,000 barrels a day by 2045.
“Currently, my refinery alone produces 360,000 barrels a day,” Rogers reports. “Refineries across the state produce more than one million barrels a day. The plan that’s currently in place doesn’t fully address how we could reduce production so dramatically or what the consequences of doing so would be—including loss of union jobs.”
By grappling with realities like this, Power Lines helps deepen the debate about how to unite and fight for a “Green New Deal”—or any better deal than the status quo, which will leave millions of workers at risk in the hottest summer ever in the U.S. As Power Lines contributor Todd Vachon points out in a similar book, Clean Air and Good Jobs: US Labor and the Struggle for Climate Justice (Temple University Press, 2023), creating “a pro-worker clean energy economy” requires turning “just transition” rhetoric into reality, on a much larger scale. If most fossil fuel workers believe they will end up on the trash heap—like underground coal miners or rust belt factory workers before them—business unionists will have little trouble rallying them, in Donald Trump fashion, based on that fear.
Rather than becoming allies in the fight for a stronger social safety net for displaced workers and a sustainable future for all of us, they will, in a fashion very familiar in Richmond, be mobilized by their own unions and employers to protect the power and profits of corporate America.
Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement, edited by Jeff Ordower and Lindsay Zafir (The New Press, 2024), 217 pp.
The most common jobs in the United States are home health care aide, retail salesperson and fast-food and counter worker, which are all tied for first place on a long list of professions tracked by the government, according to analysis of federal data by The Washington Post. From caring for the elderly to serving the lunch rush, people who work these jobs are bedrocks of the everyday economy.
The Luddites, who smashed machines in the 19th century, in an organized effort to resist automation, are often portrayed as uneducated opponents of technology. But according to Blood in the Machine author Brian Merchant, “The Luddites were incredibly educated as to the harms of technology. They were very skilled technologists. So they understood exactly how new developments in machinery would…
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.
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