The United Auto Workers announced February 23 that it will provide material support to Mexican auto workers organizing in the independent union movement. As a member of the UAW Executive Board, I’m proud that our union understands how the futures of auto workers in the United States and Mexico are tied together. Our Mexico solidarity project is about empowering our membership to win strong…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Six people are missing and presumed dead after a 984-foot cargo ship hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, causing the bridge’s collapse early Tuesday morning. All six have been identified as immigrant construction workers originally hailing from Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said the crew on the ship was able to issue an emergency mayday call…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Athletes get a lot of shine in conversations about labor in sports, but players aren’t the only workers that make the professional sports industry run. In Baltimore, workers at the Orioles team store organized with UNITE HERE for a decent contract from their subcontractor employer, Fanatics. The Real News reports from Camden Yards, where worker-organizers speak frankly about the conditions they face, and why their vision goes beyond improving their own jobs to fighting for decent work across Baltimore.
Videography: Adam Coley
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Carolyn Easley Brooks:
They say they appreciate our work, but in reality I don’t think they do, because they’re not showing us that they do. We work hard in the store to put merchandise out and to accommodate these things, so we feel like we’re not getting what’s due to us.
(singing)
Dave Zirin:
Hey, this is Dave Zirin with Edge of Sports TV, here only on The Real News Network. I’m here in front of the Orioles Team Store, where workers from UNITE HERE Local 7 are going to be picketing in a moment in protest of the hardball tactics being put forward by management in their effort to secure full time work and decent health benefits.
Now as you’re looking at this you might ask yourself why aren’t the Orioles negotiating in good faith with these workers? Well, that’s where it gets a little bit complicated. The store, as of 2023, is actually owned by a group called Fanatics. The Orioles subcontracted both the Team Store as well as the food services inside. Now the food services company, which is called Levy, has organized with UNITE HERE for a decent union contract, yet Fanatics is playing hardball, and that’s what the picket here today is all about. It’s about saying don’t mess with us. We might walk out on opening day, which is happening in just a few short days, so this is all very, very tense right here at the Fanatics Team Store.
Now you might ask yourself also where is the Angelos family in all of this, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, because even though the Orioles say we’re not in charge of the retail shop, let’s be honest about this. If the Orioles, if the Angelos family, if they made a phone call the labor dispute would probably end in quick order.
Now this is also complicated, because the Angelos family just sold the team to a hedge fund of guys. A guy named David Rubenstein and the Carlyle Group, they’re going to be the new majority owners of the team, but the Angelos family has a lot of influence over this, and if you know anything about their history, they have been some of the few major league franchise owners who’ve been at different points on the side of labor.
Peter Angelos in 1994 actually sided with the players during the players’ strike, to the chagrin of his ownership brethren. Baltimore, the metro area, this is a union town, and we’re going to see that today. We’re going to see people from Baltimore picketing out here because they want to tell the Fanatics store and the Baltimore Orioles that they want decent wages and a decent healthcare contract. Let’s talk to them right now.
If you could say something directly to the Fanatics folks right now, what would it be?
Carolyn Easley Brooks:
I would say we want equal rights. We’re tired of you all keep saying no and not giving us what we need. We are sick and tired of it. You all say it’s your business model. I’m so tired of hearing that’s your business model, I really am, and so are the other associates.
We work hard in this store for you all and we deserve to get our health benefits, we deserve to get our full time hours, and we deserve our wages.
Dave Zirin:
Where are negotiations right now at this moment?
Tracy Lingo:
There’s been some meaningful movement on this hours issue, but I think the real issue is if you come in… Like Carolyn said, they like to talk about their business model being part time work and apparently lower wages, and if you come in with a bad business model and you compromise on half of it, I’m not sure that means what our members need to make up for their business model by accepting lower wages. So we’re really struck on wages right now and on not accepting less than what we get in other places in the city.
Dave Zirin:
So stuck on wages? Opening day is coming up. The baseball world, their eyes are on the Orioles right now, not just Maryland’s eyes, because the team did so well last year. Are there any thoughts about workplace action or information picket on opening day? Is that something that-
Tracy Lingo:
We haven’t decided exactly what actions we’ll take, but we’re hoping to settle this wage issue, we haven’t settled this wage issue, and, as Carolyn said, this group of workers has been incredibly strong and they’re really ready to stand up for themselves and their city, so I would expect that there will be actions on opening day.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. Can you just explain that a little bit more, that they’re not just standing up for themselves, but standing up for the city?
Tracy Lingo:
Well, a big part of the struggle has been not just about what happens with the individual workers here, but what’s the legacy of jobs that we’re leaving. In part of the negotiations the company was asking us to sort of agree to like a concept called red circling, like certain workers who are here would get something, but newer workers would not get that.
That’s something that I think our bargaining committee feels very strongly that that’s not what our union is about. We’re about trying to raise the standard of jobs. You know, Baltimore used to be an industrial city. The city banks very hard on trying to encourage the hospitality industry, and what we say all the time is there’s no reason the hospitality jobs can’t be like the factory jobs that were here in the ’30s and the ’40s and the ’50s.
The Levys of the world, the Fanatics of the world, the Hiltons, the Hyatts, the [inaudible 00:05:41], they’re just as big, and just as powerful, and just as rich, but we’ve got to fight, just like those industrial jobs didn’t get to be good jobs just because the companies wanted to make them good jobs. They got to be good jobs because people organized and fought.
We have to organize and fight to make these jobs good jobs, and that’s not just about what the wages are, but making sure that they’re hiring from the community, making sure that they’re not attempting or making the jobs part time jobs or temporary jobs, that these are jobs that people can really count on.
Dave Zirin:
What can the City Council do to make sure that part time America doesn’t become the way that labor operates here in the city of Baltimore?
Paris Gray:
First it starts with legislation, so we have to think of legislation. We have to work with our state partners as well. We have to make sure it’s top down and that they’re not only protected statewide, but citywide as well. Then we also have to come out with this standup and show our voice, to push people this way and to push on the new ownership and leadership and whoever else that allows this to happen, to let them know, send a clear message, that this is not acceptable in Baltimore City.
Dave Zirin:
What would you say to the owners of the Orioles, because they like to say that they have nothing to do with this? But if you could say something directly to the people who own the team, what would say?
Carolyn Easley Brooks:
I would say this. This is you all’s home. This is you all’s home, and you cannot let a company come in here and take over, when they come in here and take over because you’re hurting us. They hurt you all. You all don’t want no bad publicity, so when you have a company come in here that’s not doing right by these employees that’s making you all look bad. So I say to you all get on Fanatics. Fanatics, you better listen. You better watch out.
Dave Zirin:
So that’s where we are right now. They are asking for the Angelos family to call Fanatics and tell them to get their act together and give them a decent union contract, they’re trying to raise the question of part time America and talking about why part time America simply does not work, and they’re calling for health benefits that actually allow them to live and support a family in the city of Baltimore.
Speaker 5:
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This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
One of Maryland’s most powerful unions has urged legislators to pass a bill aimed at tallying the costs and benefits of tax breaks used to spur development within the state.
AFSCME, which represents 45,000 government workers across the state, submitted written testimony supporting SB 733, Task Force to Study Transparency in Tax Incentives. The bill would authorize a state body to analyze a variety of tax incentives and subsidies that have been used extensively to lure developers to build across the state.
“Tax incentives are a significant tool used by governments to promote economic development and attract investment. However, without proper oversight and transparency measures, there is a risk of misuse or ineffectiveness,” the union wrote.
“Establishing a task force will help ensure that tax incentives are administered accountability and in the best interest of the public.”
AFSCME is the third major union to back the legislation. Previously both the Maryland AFL-CIO and the SEIU, which represents hospital workers, expressed support for the measure.
The bill passed the senate with a 47-0 vote and is now set to go before the Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. Committee Chair Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary did not respond to a request for comment on if she plans to support the measure.
SB 733 was introduced by State Senator Jill Carter. The bill would authorize a task force to gather data and recommend processes to increase transparency and accountability for how tax breaks are used. It would also seek ways to measure how effective the subsidies are and if they deliver equitable—or even quantifiable—outcomes.
Carter said the growing support from unions is a recognition that transparency regarding tax incentives has been lacking.
“If you want to give a tax break to working people, it’s unaffordable,” Carter told TRNN. “But if it’s a developer, there seems to be no issue.”
“We have a moral imperative to do better.”
The incentives in question include a variety of tax breaks with innocuous sounding acronyms like TIF and PILOT. TIFs (Tax Increment Finance) allow developers to invest up to 30 years of future property taxes into construction costs and infrastructure rather than these taxes being paid to the city. PILOTs (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) phase in taxes over time, offering a discounted rate for anywhere between 10 to 25 years.
Both are responsible for incentivizing the bulk of new development in Baltimore.
But the city also must, in part, pay for breaks tied to an array of state programs. Among those are the Brownfields Revitalization credit, which offers incentives to rehabilitate environmentally degraded property, and Enterprise Zone credits, which award breaks to businesses that add jobs and build in impoverished neighborhoods.
This report is part of our ongoing investigative series which delves into the use of tax breaks to subsidize development in Baltimore and beyond. The centerpiece of this series is the documentary, Tax Broke, a film that revealed Baltimore city has granted hundreds of millions of tax breaks to spur growth without requisite transparency.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
One of Maryland’s most powerful unions has urged legislators to pass a bill aimed at tallying the costs and benefits of tax breaks used to spur development within the state.
AFSCME, which represents 45,000 government workers across the state, submitted written testimony supporting SB 733, Task Force to Study Transparency in Tax Incentives. The bill would authorize a state body to analyze a variety of tax incentives and subsidies that have been used extensively to lure developers to build across the state.
“Tax incentives are a significant tool used by governments to promote economic development and attract investment. However, without proper oversight and transparency measures, there is a risk of misuse or ineffectiveness,” the union wrote.
“Establishing a task force will help ensure that tax incentives are administered accountability and in the best interest of the public.”
AFSCME is the third major union to back the legislation. Previously both the Maryland AFL-CIO and the SEIU, which represents hospital workers, expressed support for the measure.
The bill passed the senate with a 47-0 vote and is now set to go before the Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday. Committee Chair Delegate Vanessa Atterbeary did not respond to a request for comment on if she plans to support the measure.
SB 733 was introduced by State Senator Jill Carter. The bill would authorize a task force to gather data and recommend processes to increase transparency and accountability for how tax breaks are used. It would also seek ways to measure how effective the subsidies are and if they deliver equitable—or even quantifiable—outcomes.
Carter said the growing support from unions is a recognition that transparency regarding tax incentives has been lacking.
“If you want to give a tax break to working people, it’s unaffordable,” Carter told TRNN. “But if it’s a developer, there seems to be no issue.”
“We have a moral imperative to do better.”
The incentives in question include a variety of tax breaks with innocuous sounding acronyms like TIF and PILOT. TIFs (Tax Increment Finance) allow developers to invest up to 30 years of future property taxes into construction costs and infrastructure rather than these taxes being paid to the city. PILOTs (Payment In Lieu of Taxes) phase in taxes over time, offering a discounted rate for anywhere between 10 to 25 years.
Both are responsible for incentivizing the bulk of new development in Baltimore.
But the city also must, in part, pay for breaks tied to an array of state programs. Among those are the Brownfields Revitalization credit, which offers incentives to rehabilitate environmentally degraded property, and Enterprise Zone credits, which award breaks to businesses that add jobs and build in impoverished neighborhoods.
This report is part of our ongoing investigative series which delves into the use of tax breaks to subsidize development in Baltimore and beyond. The centerpiece of this series is the documentary, Tax Broke, a film that revealed Baltimore city has granted hundreds of millions of tax breaks to spur growth without requisite transparency.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story originally appeared in Pittsburgh Union Progress on March 19, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Here’s the story of two men. One is a Trump-supporting blue-collar conservative from a small town in rural Ohio; the other is the son of a Mexican immigrant and describes himself as a socialist and a “lefty nut job.” They’ll be getting together later this week, and of course they’ll soon come to blows, right? Or at least hurl insults at each other?
That’s the narrative we’ve all come to expect. You see it on cable news shows, on social media. Division is hot these days.
But in the real world, the one in which trains fly off their tracks and spill toxic loads in America’s backyards, Chris Albright and Maximillian Alvarez recognize they have more in common than that which separates them.
That bond will be on display Saturday, during an event in East Palestine, Ohio, involving local residents, unionists, community activists and environmentalists from around the country. They’re getting together to demand the federal government step in and make certain those affected by the derailment are provided with health care.
The get-together will feature music and a lineup of speakers that includes residents of East Palestine and other communities affected by toxic contamination as well as union organizers and journalists. Initiated by the newly formed coalition Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers, the event runs from noon to 5 p.m. at East Palestine Country Club, 50834 Carmel Anchor Road, Negley, OH 44441 (moved from the First Church of Christ).
Albright and Alvarez met in September during a Harvard Law School “Systemic Justice Teach-In” that focused on telling the story of the Norfolk Southern derailment. Albright lives a half-mile from the derailment site, and his family tale is one of financial stress, social isolation and illness. Doctors diagnosed Albright with a heart condition in March 2023; his cardiologist believes chemicals from the derailment, or stress, likely exacerbated his condition. In May, his wife, Jessica, ended up in the emergency room with what was described as stroke-level blood pressure.
Alvarez, in his job as editor of the independent Real News Network, has covered the rail industry and the aftermath of the derailment. He’s interviewed a number of East Palestine residents.
“When I met Chris and Jess for the first time, I didn’t see Trump voters,” Alvarez said. “I didn’t see race, I saw flesh and blood human beings who were experiencing something devastating and whose needs were so apparent. I just felt connected to them on that level. Once we shook hands and talked, that’s all Chris and Jess saw as well. They didn’t see the piercings and the tattoos. We realized we were kindred spirits who believed in the basic values of kindness and neighborliness.”
Albright admits to being a bit wary when he first saw Alvarez. “He’s got an intimidating look,” Albright said. “But we’ve become friends. I know about his wife, his foster daughter, his parents, his cat. He’s a great human being, one of the great souls I’ve met.”
After that initial meeting, the two worked together in December to organize a 12-hour online video fundraiser for those affected by the derailment. Hosted by Alvarez, the event highlighted residents who discussed the difficulties of living in a contaminated community. Those stories caught the attention of union activist Steve Zeltzer, host of a labor-focused radio program in San Francisco.
Zeltzer talked with Albright and Jeff Kurtz, a retired railroad engineer, union member and former Iowa state representative, about organizing an in-person event in East Palestine that focused on a specific topic: demanding government-funded health care for those in East Palestine and surrounding communities. This could be done by invoking a law allowing President Joe Biden to issue a major disaster declaration and unlocking federal resources for East Palestine’s recovery.
This was something a coalition of East Palestine residents have been seeking for months. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine waited until July to ask the Biden administration to make the declaration. In September, Biden took what some called “baby steps” by ordering the appointment of a dedicated coordinator for the recovery efforts and directed federal agencies to continue holding Norfolk Southern accountable. But he stopped short of making the disaster declaration.
In January, Zeltzer organized a series of Zoom meetings to discuss his idea of an East Palestine event.
“It blossomed from there,” he said. “Other residents, environmentalists, union people got involved — people who want to see the residents get health care. If we can win health care for East Palestine, that will be a real victory for all working people.”
Labor organizers in Iowa committed to bringing a busload of people to East Palestine. Food & Water Watch is chartering a bus to the village, with pickup locations in Pittsburgh and Beaver County.
“I can’t believe how quickly it has moved forward,” said Penny Logsdon, president of the Lee County Labor Chapter in Keokuk, Iowa. She was one of the first to coalesce around the idea and attended the early meetings.
“It just gives everybody confidence it was meant to be,” she said. “We are a very outgoing labor chapter and whenever something has been brought to our attention by one of our members, I’ve never heard, ‘No, we can’t do it,’ or ‘it’s too difficult.’ It’s always, ‘What can we do?’ And that’s the attitude we’ve taken towards this.”
The Iowa connection proved strong. Albright traveled to Des Moines in late February to tell his family’s story during an Iowa Federation of Labor conference. “The people of East Palestine are still experiencing the fallout from the derailment,” he told attendees. “We’re still dealing with everything that happened. There are still people who are sick, still people not working. The media forgot about it, the nation forgot about it, but we’re still dealing with it.”
Kurtz, himself an Iowa resident, met Albright in early October, when the two were guests on a podcast hosted by Alvarez. Afterward, Kurtz’s local — he’s a 40-year member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen Local 391 — collected gift cards and water for East Palestine residents. During a trip east to visit family members, Kurtz stopped by the Albright home to make a personal delivery. The family’s predicament struck Kurtz when he met the Albright’s 8-year-old daughter, Evy.
“That really hit me hard,” Kurtz said. “I’ve got two granddaughters, 8 and 10 years old, and if they were in that position, I’d do everything I could to help them.”
Albright, who describes himself as “just a guy who lives in East Palestine,” has found himself at the center of an environmental disaster that has, at times, garnered national attention. Like a number of other residents, he’s been asked to discuss the town’s predicament on national news networks such as CNN and Fox News. In August, his family’s story was detailed in a New York Times story. But it’s the appearances on the Real News Network, and the connections made there, that resulted in Saturday’s event.
“A lot of people I’ve never met from around the country are stepping up to help us,” Albright said. “It’s amazing. If there’s one positive thing I can bring out of this is the people I’ve met over the course of the past year. People are willing to help even though this hasn’t really affected them.”
Alvarez is a first-generation Mexican American; his father, Jesus, was 8 years old when he immigrated to the United States from Mexico. The Great Recession of 2008 proved devastating to the family. The recovery that followed didn’t seem to apply to them. Alvarez’s father lost the house in which he’d raised his family.
How do people react when they feel mistreated by a political system in which they feel so powerless? Alvarez sees hope in the efforts that have led to this weekend’s conference.
“Even though the circumstances that have brought us together in this fight are horrifying and unforgivable, I see in this gathering the flame we need lighting the way to the change we deserve,” he said.
“Working people — East Palestine residents and people of conscience around the country, union and non-union, young and old, Democrat, Republican, socialists and apolitical folks, labor unions, environmental organizations, community members from other sacrifice zones, journalists and activists — are done waiting for justice, aid and accountability to be handed down from on high, from the government or from Norfolk Southern, and they are banding together and using their collective power to force the issue and make change happen themselves.”
Food & Water Watch has organized a bus to take Pittsburgh- and Beaver-area participants to East Palestine and back. Learn more and sign up at https://www.mobilize.us/fww/event/612933/.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story was produced in partnership with Atlanta News First.
Thousands of warehouse workers across the U.S. are likely regularly exposed to the cancer-linked chemical ethylene oxide. More than half of the country’s medical equipment is sterilized with the compound, which the EPA considers a carcinogen. Ethylene oxide evaporates off the surface of these medical products after they’ve been sterilized, creating potentially dangerous concentrations of air pollution in the buildings where they’re stored.
By and large, the EPA does not regulate these buildings — in fact, regulators don’t even know where most of them are. The Office of Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in charge of worker protection that is known by its acronym, OSHA, has also done relatively little to evaluate worker exposure in these warehouses. But last week, OSHA opened a new investigation into a Georgia warehouse that stores medical devices sterilized with ethylene oxide, raising questions about whether the federal government is beginning to respond more quickly to these risks.
On March 13, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Douglas County sheriff’s office assisted OSHA in executing a search warrant at a warehouse leased by the medical device company ConMed in Lithia Springs, 17 miles west of Atlanta. The surprise inspection was initiated almost two weeks after a Grist and Atlanta News First investigation revealed that workers employed by ConMed had been unknowingly exposed to the chemical. Ambulances were routinely called to the facility as workers convulsed from seizures, lost consciousness, and had trouble breathing.
The workers sued the company in 2020, but the lawsuit was ultimately dropped earlier this year after a judge dismissed some of their claims, citing state labor laws. (Under Georgia law, once employees seek workers’ compensation from the state, they are barred from suing employers separately.) ConMed denies the lawsuit’s allegations that it knowingly exposed workers to ethylene oxide and maintains that no individual medical emergency can be tied to exposure to the chemical. A company representative told Grist that it is “committed to fully complying” with all applicable regulations and conducts monthly ethylene oxide testing for its employees to review.
“Given our many years of full cooperation with OSHA, as well as the fact that OSHA has inspected our Lithia Springs facility five times since 2019, ConMed was surprised by the manner in which OSHA elected to inspect the facility on March 13,” a company representative told Grist in an email.
Ethylene oxide is a powerful fumigant, but it poses significant health risks and is linked to lung and breast cancers as well as diseases of the nervous system. Once medical devices are treated with ethylene oxide, the chemical continues to evaporate off the surface of the product as it moves through the supply chain. While the devices are trucked to warehouses, stored, and then shipped to hospitals, the products continue to quietly off-gas ethylene oxide, putting workers who come into contact with it at risk.
In a new rule it published last week, the EPA said that it will begin regulating toxic emissions from warehouses located on the same site as the sterilizer plants that actually apply the chemical. However, the agency argued that constraints stemming from the regulatory definition of the sterilization industry mean that offsite warehouses will be excluded from oversight. Even if the agency could clear that bureaucratic hurdle, it does not have “sufficient information to understand where these warehouses are located, who owns them, how they are operated, or what level of emissions potential they may have,” in the agency’s words.
What little the EPA knows about the threat from offsite warehouses was gleaned from a study conducted by state regulators in Georgia. That effort initially identified seven off-site warehouses and found that at least one of the state’s warehouses was emitting more ethylene oxide than the sterilization plant that first treats the medical products before sending them out for storage. Federal officials will begin gathering data on warehouses, according to the new EPA rule, and use it to determine whether a completely new regulation governing storage facilities should be developed. Such a process could take years, according to experts who spoke to Grist. All the while, warehouse workers across the country will continue to inhale ethylene oxide, in many cases without their knowledge.
“Up until eight years ago, a lot of people had no idea that the sterilizer facility, which looks like your regular office park facility, was poisoning them,” said Marvin Brown, an attorney with the environmental nonprofit Earthjustice. “Now we have this additional issue of these warehouses that are continuing to poison people, and most people have no idea that they live next to one or work at one.”
Brown and other experts Grist spoke to said the agency could take one of two approaches to regulating warehouses. It could expand the definition of regulated facilities under the sterilizer rule it finalized earlier this month, or it could create a new category of facilities that covers warehouses and develop a separate rule. Both come with challenges.
Reopening a new rule that has already been finalized is tricky, according to Scott Throwe, a former EPA enforcement official who worked on a number of rules that the EPA rolled out in the decade after amendments to the Clean Air Act were passed in 1990. “It’s a huge can of worms,” he said. “Once you open a rule, then you have to fix this and you have to fix this. It snowballs.”
Alternatively, the EPA could draft a new rule entirely, he added, but the agency is unlikely to do that either, because of the sheer amount of effort such a process would take. Throwe said that the EPA’s decision not to include offsite warehouse regulations in its new rule means that the agency doesn’t have either the time, the resources, or the will to tackle those emissions at this time.
“They’re going to declare victory on this one and move on,” he said. “They ain’t reopening that rule unless someone sues them.”
A spokesperson for the EPA said that the agency has an “incomplete list” of warehouses and that it has not conducted any risk assessments of them. As a next step, the agency expects to follow up with sterilization companies that did not provide detailed information about the location of their warehouses in response to a 2021 request. Once those responses are received, the agency plans to conduct emissions testing at some of the warehouses. If the agency decides to pursue a separate rule for warehouses, that process could take four to five years, the spokesperson said.
The rule governing medical sterilization facilities was one of the first industry-specific air quality regulations that the EPA ever crafted. In its amendments to the Clean Air Act in 1990, Congress published a list of 189 toxic air pollutants and asked the agency to develop regulations for each industry emitting at least one of them. Officials published the first standards for medical sterilizers in 1994 with little fanfare, according to Throwe. At the time, regulators and toxicologists were unaware of the true risks of ethylene oxide, which was used to fumigate a range of materials, from books to spices to cosmetics. With the new law giving the agency just a decade to craft dozens of new regulations, officials rushed the process, sacrificing the efficacy of some standards along the way.
“It was like drinking from a firehose,” Throwe said. “Unrealistic statutory deadlines became court-ordered deadlines.”
Drafting new regulations for a polluting industry, regulators quickly learned, was a lot of work. In addition to collecting and analyzing copious amounts of data on a particular type of plant’s emissions and configuration, officials had to consult engineering experts to understand what kinds of technologies they could ask companies to use to control their emissions. Decades later, the process for revising these regulations to better protect exposed communities is no different. It took the EPA almost a decade to publish its new sterilizer regulations, and it did so under a court-ordered due date after missing a previous deadline to update the rule. If the agency were to issue a new rule for warehouses, the time and resource commitment would be steep, Throwe said.
While the EPA is not responsible for worker safety, it has found a roundabout way to increase protections for those coming in close contact with ethylene oxide. Since ethylene oxide is a fumigant, the agency is also pursuing separate oversight under a federal pesticide law. The Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act requires the agency to evaluate pesticides every 15 years and determine where, how, and how much of a given pesticide may be used. In April, the EPA proposed a new set of requirements including reducing the amount of ethylene oxide used for sterilization and mandating that workers wear protective equipment while engaging in tasks where there is a high risk of exposure to the chemical. Since the law applies to all facilities where ethylene oxide is used — not just sterilization plants — warehouse workers could benefit from the requirements once it is finalized.
Some state and local agencies are proactively regulating warehouses themselves. After the Georgia Environmental Protection Division found that one warehouse was estimated to emit about nine times as much ethylene oxide as the facility that sterilized it, the agency began trying to find similarly dangerous warehouses. After scouring the internet and reaching out to companies, the agency identified four warehouses that were emitting more ethylene oxide than permitted under state law. The agency is now in the process of issuing permits and requiring controls for those facilities.
In Southern California, which has a large concentration of sterilization facilities, the local air quality regulator has included requirements for offsite warehouses in a rule that primarily targets sterilization plants. The rule categorizes warehouses into two tiers — those with an indoor space of 250,000 square feet or more and those with between 100,000 and 250,000 square feet. Depending on the size of the facility, the warehouses are subject to different reporting and monitoring requirements. In the course of developing the rule, the agency identified 28 warehouses that fall into one of these two tiers. The agency finalized the rule in December, and larger warehouses will be studied for a year to determine whether they emit significant amounts of ethylene oxide.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline A loophole in the EPA’s new sterilizer rule leaves warehouse workers vulnerable on Mar 22, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
Photograph Source: Geraldshields11 – CC BY-SA 3.0
With SpaceX in the lead, a group of very rich corporations, some headed by billionaires have brought suit arguing that the National Labor Relations Board is unconstitutional. The corporations are SpaceX, Trader Joe’s, Amazon and Starbucks, and their legal case smacks of sour grapes, since they’ve been charged with hundreds of worker organizing rights violations over the years. You don’t have to scratch too far beneath the surface to get other paleolithic goals, besides defenestrating the NLRB, which these companies might likely pursue, such as opposition to the right to strike, to unionize, to the minimum wage and in general promoting the return of the bad old days of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when labor lay crushed and bloodied (and sometimes violently fought back) under capital’s fist. These gigantically profitable corporations haven’t announced these other aims, but that’s definitely the vibe.
Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, the NLRB has a mostly two-pronged job. It prevents employers from committing unfair labor practices and allows for secret-ballot elections among employees who are unionizing. Thus the NLRB is an administrative tribunal that resolves matters arising under the Labor Relations Code; so, like a court, it has power over bosses, corporations and employees. The four corporations currently trying to sue it out of existence find that power intolerable, because clearly, they believe there should be no constraints on their power, that their power over workers should be absolute. That’s what their assault on the NLRB and thereby the whole New Deal labor-management architecture says, and that’s what their abusive workplace behavior says. Dispiritingly, in a similar case, the American Civil Liberties Union, of all groups, is also suing the NLRB, arguing that the agency’s general counsel was unconstitutionally appointed. This in response to the ACLU being charged with wrongfully firing an employee. With friends like these on the left, who needs enemies?
SpaceX’s Elon Musk has a particularly bad track record. He vigorously helped squash a union drive at his 20,000 worker Tesla plant in Fremont, California in 2017 – and later in Buffalo. As In These Times headlined an article February 16, 2023, “Tesla Workers Announced a Union Drive. The Next Day They Were Fired.” Over 30 workers in Buffalo lost their jobs, for partnering with the SEIU-affiliated Workers United. (At the time, the company sent an email to employees banning recording workplace meetings without all participants’ permission – such recordings of illegal management threats and lies had been famously put to good use by Starbucks workers.) These 2023 firings “add to a long record of both alleged and documented labor abuses for Musk and his companies.”
Earlier, in the 2017 union drive, Musk personally attacked an organizer on social media, and called the unionizing effort “morally outrageous.” According to NLRB rulings, Tesla resorted to illegal tactics, committing unfair labor practices like “restricting workers from wearing union T-shirts and a tweet by Musk warning that employees would lose their stock options if they unionized.” Meanwhile “Tesla is facing at least ten lawsuits from former workers alleging rampant racism and sexual harassment, including at the Fremont factory, where workers have also reported more safety violations than at slaughterhouses and sawmills.”
Things are not great at Trader Joe’s either. The NLRB has accused the company of firing a pro-union worker, spreading lies to thwart organizing and illegally retaliating against its employees. According to an October 4 Fast Company reprint of a Capital & Main article, Trader Joe’s has “delivered threats, told people they wouldn’t get raises if they unionized.” The article quotes the union’s communications director, Maeg Yosef: “Despite its progressive and folksy reputation, Yosef said, Trader Joe’s ‘has rolled out the sort of union-busting campaign you might see at Amazon or Starbucks.’”
Union organizing began at Trader Joe’s in 2022. This at a time in the industry when unionized grocery workers number far fewer than they did 40 years ago. Back then, one-third of grocery workers belonged to a union. “Today unionization rates among supermarket workers are half that.” Huge nonunion supermarkets like Target and Walmart are part of the problem. “Since June 2022, Trader Joe’s United has filed 48 charges of unfair labor practices…from firing union supporters to failing to bargain in good faith.”
Unlike SpaceX, Starbucks and Amazon, Trader Joe’s is not owned by a celebrity plutocrat. But its owner is still a billionaire, one that just hasn’t garnered as many headlines as the other three honchos (Starbucks’ founding billionaire no longer owns it outright but is its main individual shareholder). What all four of these corporations and their owners share is a profound antipathy to unions.
Very much in the news in recent years have been organizing drives at Starbucks and Amazon and the corporate, high-profile fights against those efforts. Amazon’s jefe also owns the Washington Post, notable for opinion pieces on such matters as how the minimum wage harms workers. The NLRB says that there are over 250 open or settled cases against Amazon.
Meanwhile, Starbucks’ CEO was on Hillary Clinton’s list to be Labor Secretary if she won the white house in 2016. That tells you all you need to know about HRC – eager to nominate a labor nemesis to run the department supposedly dedicated to labor’s welfare – namely, that she’s as anti-union as the GOP. I mean, in what universe is Starbucks billionaire Howard Schultz considered any better for your average worker than that GOP darling, labor secretary and wife of Mitch “Democracy’s Gravedigger” McConnell, Elaine Chao? They both are lousy choices to
to head an agency entrusted with labor’s well-being and prove that many Dems along with the entire GOP learned a core lesson from Ronald “Fire the Air Traffic Controllers” Reagan: always put the fox in charge of the chicken coop.
Not all companies have responded to union drives with such hostility. Ben & Jerry’s and Microsoft have “tried to start a positive labor-management relationship,” the Economic Policy Institute reported on March 7, in an article arguing that the legal battle to ditch the NLRB relies on “long-rejected constitutional arguments about the agency’s structure.” EPI notes that none of the workers at Starbucks, Amazon or Trader Joe’s have a collective bargaining agreement yet, because these companies “have stalled the bargaining process.”
EPI also observes that at the NLRB “there are 741 open or settled cases against Starbucks…[and] 45 decisions finding that Starbucks has broken the law.” That’s why these companies want the NLRB to have “to spend scarce resources to defend itself.” The NLRB challenges their power; it holds them to account. That’s why it’s labor’s tribunal of last resort, and that’s why we need it to survive this current assault that, if successful, would toss all working people back into the dark times of no rights, toil without end and the capricious, unchecked tyranny of capital.
The post Attack of the Corporations: Are the NLRB’s Days Numbered? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
A group of congressional Democrats has introduced a bicameral bill this week that would establish a federal guarantee for paid time off for workers across the U.S. and end the U.S.’s status as the only wealthy country in the world that doesn’t guarantee the benefit to its workforce. On Wednesday, a group of House Democrats led by Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-Rhode Island) introduced the Protected Time…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Radio Free Asia.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
“In this moment of crisis, we have to understand how the care economy functions.… I think we have to ask ourselves, do we want someone to profit from our pain? Do we want our loved ones to be for sale? I think it is imperative upon all of us to push back on the system of profit from care and to find alternative ways of thinking and doing care,” says author Premilla Nadasen. In this episode of…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Three years of rank-and-file Starbucks worker organizing has produced a historic union breakthrough: a commitment by the implacably anti-union company to bargain a national contract for 10,000 workers and negotiate a process for additional workers to organize. Remarkably, though, this victory came about in part because of a serendipitous boost from the Palestine justice movement. It’s proof of the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday introduced legislation that would establish a 32-hour workweek in the U.S. with no loss of pay, a change the Vermont senator said is necessary to ensure the working class benefits from massive productivity gains and technological advances. A 32-hour workweek “is not a radical idea,” Sanders, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP)…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Dartmouth basketball players have made history by becoming the first college sports team in the US to unionize, shifting the playing field for other college athletes struggling for collective bargaining rights around the country. Dave Zirin examines this major breakthrough at the intersection of sports and the labor struggle in this edition of “Choice Words.”
Studio Production: David Hebden
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Audio Post-Production: David Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
Dave Zirin: And now some choice words. Okay, this is big news. The basketball team at Dartmouth has organized itself into a labor union after voting 13 to 2 to join SEIU Local 560. This is the men’s team. Now in the process, they are educating the seething NCAA that the future of university-athlete relations lies in collective bargaining. The current economy of college sports is, to put it mildly, discombobulated. An unregulated system where players can profit from their name, image, and likeness has upended the revenue-producing sports of football and basketball.
The transfer portal that grants the freedom of so-called student-athletes to switch teams has also created a cultural sea change. In short, shifting power is taking place away from autocratic coaches and athletic directors to the players themselves. And yet there still is that final frontier: unionization and collective bargaining, both of which could build a new and better framework for college sports. You see, here’s the issue; While name, image, and likeness money benefits the famous few and the transfer portal has been a vital reform, both skirt the question of whether these student-athletes are campus workers.
As campus workers, they would, in theory, be free to organize into a union and demand collective bargaining, not just over compensation but other issues that affect so-called student-athletes like medical care, travel demands, and the academic freedom to choose classes without athletic department interference. And this is a smattering of the issues that would surely be brought to the table. Of course, the NCAA and many head coaches have no desire to sit across that table from the players.
They decry unionization as an affront to everything good and holy about amateur sports. But the fortress of anti-unionism that is the NCAA has been breached by the Dartmouth players, and the sooner the NCAA recognizes that this breach cannot be closed, the better for all parties. The NCAA has a choice: They can finally see the benefits of collective bargaining, or they can continue in their fierce belief that sham amateurism will have to be pried from their cold, dead hands. It certainly feels like they’re going the latter root but this is a battle for which the players are ready.
Dartmouth teammates, Cade Haskins and Romeo Myrthil, told The Associated Press, “We stuck together all season and won this election. It is self-evident that we, as students, can also be both campus workers and union members. Dartmouth seems to be stuck in the past. It’s time for the age of amateurism to end.” We need to cheer this victory but we also need caution. It’s not merely the NCAA standing athwart history and saying no to these athletes. Dartmouth University is making its objections very clear as well.
According to SEIU, the administration told players that unionizing could get them booted from the NCAA or even from the Ivy League, heaven forfend. Let’s be clear, this is fear-mongering and we should remember that NCAA scare tactics about a lawless unionized future will indeed be a hurdle, but we would also do well to remember that the NCAA and their political lobbyists have been braying about progressive reforms killing college sports for at least 50 years. First, it was Title IX: The 1972 law providing women with equal access to, among other venues, athletic teams.
That was what was going to kill college sports. Then, it was players being able to opt out of scholarships after signing letters of intent. More recently, it was NIL and the transfer portal bringing godlessness to the land. Yet, with each reform, the profits grow and the popularity increases. So much so that Iowa hoopster Caitlin Clark, the NCAA’s biggest star since Tim Tebow, was tempted with a mammoth amount of NIL money to stay at Iowa University for a fifth year. Expect more of that and expect the college game to be strengthened as a result, with players staying longer and fan interest growing.
While succumbing to collective bargaining would be in the NCAA’s long-term interests, rather than flushing money on lobbyist luncheons and losing lawyers, they’ll fight unionization until the bitter end. This is clearly not about money for them. It’s about power. It’s about anti-labor attitudes at the top of the sport and in Congress. While the NCAA splinters, the players at Dartmouth are finding a new community. Caoimhín O’Donnell, the national spokesperson for SEIU, described the following scene.
He said “At the last game, security workers, custodians, people who worked for the library, were all cheering really loud because we consider the team part of Local 560 now. In the labor movement, we say siblings – Sisters and brothers – Those were our brothers playing ball. It was really nice to see these union members excited. There was a real sense of what the team had done, what the Local had done, and what the members have done.”
For Edge of Sports, I’m Dave Zirin.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Ukraine and its regional allies on March 10 assailed reported comments by Pope Francis in which the pontiff suggested opening negotiations with Moscow and used the term “white flag,” while the Vatican later appeared to back off some of the remarks, saying Francis was not speaking about “capitulation.”
Francis was quoted on March 9 in a partially released interview suggesting Ukraine, facing possible defeat, should have the “courage” to sit down with Russia for peace negotiations, saying there is no shame in waving the “white flag.”
RFE/RL’s Live Briefing gives you all of the latest developments on Russia’s full-scale invasion, Kyiv’s counteroffensive, Western military aid, global reaction, and the plight of civilians. For all of RFE/RL’s coverage of the war in Ukraine, click here.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy hit out in a Telegram post and in his nightly video address, saying — without mentioning the pope — that “the church should be among the people. And not 2,500 kilometers away, somewhere, to mediate virtually between someone who wants to live and someone who wants to destroy you.”
Earlier, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba reacted more directly on social media, saying, “When it comes to the ‘white flag,’ we know this Vatican strategy from the first half of the 20th century.”
Many historians have been critical of the Vatican during World War II, saying Pope Pius XII remained silent as the Holocaust raged. The Vatican has long argued that, at the time, it couldn’t verify diplomatic reports of Nazi atrocities and therefore could not denounce them.
Kuleba, in his social media post, wrote: “I urge the avoidance of repeating the mistakes of the past and to support Ukraine and its people in their just struggle for their lives.
“The strongest is the one who, in the battle between good and evil, stands on the side of good rather than attempting to put them on the same footing and call it ‘negotiations,’” Kuleba said.
“Our flag is a yellow-and-blue one. This is the flag by which we live, die, and prevail. We shall never raise any other flags,” added Kuleba, who also thanked Francis for his “constant prayers for peace” and said he hoped the pontiff will visit Ukraine, home of some 1 million Catholics.
Zelenskiy has remained firm in not speaking directly to Russia unless terms of his “peace formula” are reached.
Ukraine’s terms call for the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Ukraine, restoring the country’s 1991 post-Soviet borders, and holding Russia accountable for its actions. The Kremlin has rejected such conditions.
Following criticism of the pope’s reported comments, the head of the Vatican press service, Matteo Bruni, explained that with his words regarding Ukraine, Francis intended to “call for a cease-fire and restore the courage of negotiations,” but did not mean capitulation.
“The pope uses the image of the white flag proposed by the interviewer to imply an end to hostilities, a truce that is achieved through the courage to begin negotiations,” Bruni said.
“Elsewhere in the interview…referring to any situation of war, the pope clearly stated: ‘Negotiations are never capitulations,’” Bruni added.
The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, Major Archbishop Svyatoslav Shevchuk, said Ukraine was “wounded but unconquered.”
“Believe me, no one would think of giving up. Even where hostilities are taking place today; listen to our people in Kherson, Zaporizhzhya, Odesa, Kharkiv, Sumy! Because we know that if Ukraine, God forbid, was at least partially conquered, the line of death would spread,” Shevchuk said at St. George’s Church in New York.
Andriy Yurash, Ukraine’s ambassador to the Vatican, told RAI News that “you don’t negotiate with terrorists, with those who are recognized as criminals,” referring to the Russian leadership and President Vladimir Putin. “No one tried to put Hitler at ease.”
Ukraine’s regional allies also expressed anger about the pope’s remarks.
“How about, for balance, encouraging Putin to have the courage to withdraw his army from Ukraine? Peace would immediately ensue without the need for negotiations,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on social media.
Lithuanian President Edgars Rinkevichs wrote on social media: “My Sunday morning conclusion: You can’t capitulate to evil, you have to fight it and defeat it, so that evil raises the white flag and surrenders.”
Alexandra Valkenburg, ambassador and head of the EU Delegation to the Holy See, wrote “Russia…can end this war immediately by respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. EU supports Ukraine and its peace plan.”
This content originally appeared on News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and was authored by News – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Early this year, Elmer Perez began his Monday shift at 9 a.m., welding inside a ship at Thoma-Sea Marine Constructors in Houma, Louisiana.
Hours after Perez skipped lunch, his coworkers went looking for the undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. They found him unconscious inside the small space he was working in. The workers removed his body and performed CPR, according to public documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity and the account of a worker who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
Perez, 20, was pronounced dead before 3 p.m., according to the Grand Caillou Fire Department.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating. The Terrebonne Parish Coroner’s Office declined Public Integrity’s requests to release Perez’s cause of death.
What happened to Perez follows a harrowing trend across the country: Workers are killed every year while performing dangerous jobs inside confined spaces. Some have died because of lack of oxygen, toxic gases like argon and fires, to mention a few causes. In 2022, 44 workers died in confined spaces — a 41% increase from a decade earlier, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The same agency issued a 2020 report showing that 1,030 workers died from occupational injuries involving a confined space from 2011 to 2018.
Conditions can turn deadly, experts say, as workers labor in manholes, tanks, crawl spaces and other small areas.
OSHA has an array of regulations intended to reduce the dangers: informing employees about hazardous conditions, posting warning signs at entryways, providing personal protective equipment and ensuring that rescue plans are available in case of an emergency.
A first responder told Public Integrity in a phone interview that basic safety equipment like tools that can detect deadly gas or emergency equipment to pull workers out quickly were not found near the site of the January 22 accident.
Grand Caillou firefighter Oliver Caleb was among the first to respond to the scene. When he arrived, workers were performing CPR. He told Public Integrity that he asked about the safety equipment and was told they “would have to go grab the air monitoring equipment,” but no further information was provided.
OSHA opened a probe into Perez’s death against Thoma-Sea Marine Constructors LLC and G4 Services LLC, the labor broker that hired Perez.
Last year, prior to Perez’s death, OSHA issued a citation and fined Thoma-Sea Marine Constructors $15,625 for failing to cover or guard an opening in the hull while employees were working nearby.
Thoma-Sea Marine Constructors LLC did not respond to multiple requests by Public Integrity for an interview. G4 Services declined to answer questions and directed them to its attorney, who did not respond.
Across the nation, companies have been cited following fatalities in confined spaces in recent years.
In June 2022, two workers died in Arkansas when they climbed into a newly installed sewer manhole for testing. A worker lost consciousness and the second employee tried to rescue the coworker. They both died.
Six months later, OSHA investigators determined the company failed to test oxygen levels in the confined space. The contractor was cited for six serious violations and two willful violations and a proposed $287,150 in penalties, according to OSHA.
And in August 2022, a mechanic entered a propane gas tank in California to spray a valve inside. He died there. Nine months later, the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health fined his employer and its successors a combined $272,250 for serious safety violations.
Marcy Goldstein-Gelb is co-executive director for the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, an advocacy group. She said OSHA has found companies willfully violating safety rules after deadly accidents — especially when the investigation finds that a company failed to establish a confined space entry program, necessary to keep workers safe.
Such a program should include air testing, proper ventilation and adequate space to get in and out, Goldstein-Gelb said.
Confined spaces are very common in agriculture like grain bins, silos and manure pits to mention a few.
In 2022, there were 24 fatal and 59 non-fatal confined-space accidents in agriculture, an increase from 2021, she said.
Goldstein-Gelb said that OSHA has comprehensive rules, but the agency doesn’t have enough resources to inspect every workplace with confined spaces. That’s true for other dangers as well.
“It would take OSHA over a hundred years to inspect every business with a confined space,” Goldstein-Gelb said. “As for the penalties for some employers who are willful and negligent, it’s the cost of doing business — so the penalties are not significant enough.”
Mc Nelly Torres, a Public Integrity editor, contributed to this report.
The post Worker death in Louisiana confined space showcases dangerous trend appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
For millions of freelance workers in the gig economy, delayed and even stolen wages are a routine hardship that leave many scrambling to make ends meet. More than half of all freelance workers have experienced wage theft at least once in their careers, and the majority find little protection or means of recompense from the government. That’s where new “Freelance Isn’t Free” laws come in to protect freelance workers from nonpayment. First passed in New York City in 2017, Freelance Isn’t Free legislation has helped freelancers recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices over the last seven years. Now, backed by organizers at the National Writers’ Union and the Freelance Solidarity Project, local and state governments are looking to enact their own Freelance Isn’t Free laws. The Real News speaks with Eric Thurm of the National Writers Union and the Freelance Solidarity Project, along with Keisha “TK” Dutes of the Association of Independents in Radio.
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back, my friends to the Real News Network podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer. I wanted to take a moment once again to thank you, our listeners for joining us week after week. Without you, none of this would be possible. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put our podcasts on during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday. The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad free independent journalism that you can count on. We care a lot about what we do and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing it. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer of The Real News Network by heading over to the real news.com/donate. And if you want to stay in touch and get updates about our work, sign up for our free newsletter@therealnews.com slash sign up.
As always, we appreciate your support in whatever form it takes. Now over 50 million freelancers participate in the gig economy in the United States, and in 2023 it was projected to generate $455 billion. Many freelance workers work white collar freelance contracts across a number of industries, most notably tech, media and other creative industries. According to one survey, over 50% of gig workers reported to have experienced wage theft at least once in their freelance career. And due to the nature of contingent gig work, it can be difficult to compel employers to pay their freelancers once the project has been completed. Oftentimes, freelancers are left in a lurch after working for weeks or months on a contract and to find themselves unable to reach employers who owe them payment sometimes to the tune of thousands of dollars. That’s where freelance isn’t free, comes in legislation aimed at protecting freelancers from nonpayment by unruly employers First passed in New York City in 2017.
Freelance isn’t Free. Legislation has helped freelancers recoup hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid invoices over the last seven years. Now backed by organizers at the National Writers Union and the Freelance Solidarity Project. Local and state governments are looking to enact their own freelance Isn’t Free Laws with me today to discuss all this are Eric Thurm and Keisha Dutes. Keisha TK Dutes is an audio producer and executive producer educator and on-air talent with experience spanning terrestrial radio online and podcasts since 2005. Her life and audio is all encompassing. Her most recent offering on NPR Life Kit is about how to mind your business, and currently she is helping people bring their podcasts to life via her company. Philo’s Future Media. TK also serves as a board member for the Association of Independents in Radio. Eric is the campaigns coordinator at the National Writers Union and member organizer with the Freelance Solidarity Project. Organizations that have advocated for freelance isn’t free legislation in places like New State and Illinois. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks so much for coming on this morning. Thanks for having us.
Eric Thurm:
Happy to be here.
Mel Buer:
To start off our conversation today, I think it would be important for our listeners to get a better understanding of who and what freelance isn’t. Free legislation is for Eric. Can you give us a brief overview of what this legislation does for independent contractors or freelancers in places like New York State?
Eric Thurm:
Yeah, absolutely. So freelance isn’t free or the various freelance isn’t free. Laws that have been passed across the country establish some very basic much needed protections for freelancers and other independent contractors. That includes people who work in media, but it also includes domestic workers, photographers, people doing really all kinds of different freelance work. And the laws vary a little bit from place to place, but the sort of main tenants are one, you have the right to have a written contract that lays out the terms of your work. Two, you can’t be retaliated against for attempting to negotiate the terms of that work. And three, maybe most importantly, you have to be paid on time for your work, generally speaking within 30 days of completing the work. And then different states and cities have sort of different ways of going after employers for that. Often. When I sort of say that stuff out loud, it sounds really like it should be lower than the baseline. And I think that it often, it kind of is in some ways, but the nature of how freelancers are treated by or not treated by labor law as such that that’s kind of where we’re starting from.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, I mean generally the work, the nature of freelance media work is really interesting. For our listeners who aren’t really aware of how it works, oftentimes it’s per piece or per project. So what happens with freelance work is say for example, myself as a writer, as I was freelancing just even two years ago, if I had an idea for a story, I could do a little bit of work on it and then I could start pitching it to editors. And what that means is I would be sending essentially cold emails to editors at various publications with a pitch that says, hello, here’s my experience, here’s the story that I’ve started working on. Is this something you would like to publish? I’m planning on writing 1500 words or what have you. And the amount of time that it takes for an editor to get back to you can be anywhere from six hours to six months to never.
And that’s the nature of a lot of freelance media work is really not having a sense of any guarantee that your work is going to be accepted. If it is accepted, that’s great. Then you usually negotiate a rate, which for freelance journalists who are writing is normally criminally low. We’re talking cents to a word, even though it should probably be one to two or $3 per word. And then you land on a rate and you work on the piece. Now the rate is that’s it. That’s the money that you get. You could work on a piece of journalistic writing for two to three weeks, turn it in and whatever you have negotiated is the rate that you get. So if you negotiated $400 for it, that’s all in, it’s $400 for two weeks worth of work. And oftentimes publications do not pay upon acceptance of a pitch.
They pay you once they get the piece and they publish it. So it could be anywhere from two to three weeks to however long it takes to go through the editorial process to however long it takes for them to schedule the piece to see your money if they pay you. I was an organizer with the I ww Freelance Journalists Union. We have used the Freelances and Free Act before when folks have not been paid, and it still can take anywhere from six months to a year for a publication to respond to pay its people. And that’s when you’re actually pushing the sort of legal buttons to make sure that workers are getting paid in a timely manner. So for our listeners who aren’t aware that that’s what the freelance media sort of world looks like, it looks like that across the board. I’m sure tk, as a podcast producer, you have very similar sort of things. You’re contracted per episode or maybe per season and you’re paid when that episode airs is my guess, right?
Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Yeah, it depends. Of course. Yeah. I think a lot of people have been a little more, I don’t want to say flexible, just they’ve just been playing with the numbers more lately. So you get maybe per episode, but maybe you get half when half of the thing is done and then the other half when it’s over, or if you have six episodes, they’ll be like, okay, we’ll pay you a little bit upfront, a little in the middle. Literally they’re just making shit up now. Excuse me, whatever.
Mel Buer:
Well, and the process is a long process, right? We’re not just talking about recording something and throwing it up. As someone who prior to research, prior to working here, I did my own podcast, which I will probably never do again because it’s so much work. There’s research, there’s booking talent, there’s doing all that, but there’s also editing on the backend if that’s something that you do as well, and making sure it sounds good. And thank God for the studio here. Many thanks to the Silent Studio partner who’s listening to this because I am not good at it and it’s good work, you know what I mean? It’s work that should be paid and it should be paid in a timely manner. And I’m sure as Eric, as the National Writers Union has probably got its own little whisper network of which outlets are good to work for and which aren’t. And freelancers stay aware of that. And you’re not going to get good work if you’re not going to pay your workers. And just because they’re freelance workers doesn’t mean that you should take advantage of their flexibility. Am I right?
Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Yeah. And I think that Whisper network and when myself and Eric and we were all on a panel not too long ago, and one of the panelists said, the whisper network goes both ways. So as much as we are trying to keep folks informed, there are folks, and there’s always been folks talking about are they difficult to work with? Does she play well with others? And that is, I think what has been keeping this epidemic of non-payment of alive and this shit is more catching than covid. This is the epidemic of nonpayment, y’all. The fact that someone is out there, they’re like, you know what? I’m afraid all the time that even talking on this podcast or panels or whatever, somebody’s going to be like, tk, you don’t want to F with her because she’s going to talk about you or report you or whatever. And I’m like, you didn’t pay. You did the bad behavior. You are the not good guy. And a lot of folks like myself, people that work freelance or anyone with a job that is in the power structure of being the employee, we are scared to death of saying something because we might not work again and how we’re perceived in the industry. So at this point here I
Mel Buer:
Am. Well, and that’s the cool thing about legislation like freelance isn’t free, is that it takes this sort of space where you’re worried that you’re going to be branded difficult for sending too many emails about non-payment of invoices to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars sometimes per person. We’re not just talking about, for me, we’re not just in my work. $400 in comparison is something that I can sometimes work around. But when you’re working on long-term projects or you have a long piece or multiple pieces that you’ve contracted to publish with a certain place and they haven’t paid you for six months to a year, those invoices stack up and it’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of money and it’s a person’s livelihood. And maybe Eric, you can kind of speak more to the finer points of what these legislation, legislation can do to kind of protect workers from a being labeled that, because it takes that sort of bit of, I dunno, the toolbox gets passed to the hands of a city council, for example. You can then point to a law that says, it’s not me saying this, it’s the law saying this. And also just really protecting workers from really souring those relationships because you can begin to pull in other professionals to help you navigate what can be a thorny conversation about money. Right?
Eric Thurm:
Yeah. I think that the law does a lot to reduce that type of friction. There definitely are cases where people are just really intent on exploiting people. And I think that in that kind of case, there’s sort of nothing that you could do to stop people from shit talking because they just are sort of bad actors. But for the vast majority of people in the situation where I would say, not that the employer necessarily is well intentioned, but that where they have sort of convinced themselves that they are justified in delaying your payment, the law really goes a long way in a lot of different ways. And part of that is like you were saying, having people whose job it is to handle that, whether that in New York City, which was sort of the first of these laws that goes through the city’s department of Consumer and worker protection, and there are people whose job it is to sort of help freelancers navigate those situations.
And then in New York State and Illinois, which both passed state laws that go into effect later this spring, that’s both in the Attorney General’s office. And I think that in addition to having people who can help take that heat, one of the really important things that the law does is it gives those agencies the ability to bring together groups of people who are dealing with the same type of non-payment. You were sort of describing the situation of being a freelancer where you’re pitching something to an editor and then they give you the rate and you sort of just do the work. And that is really, I think one of the more common structures of a freelance work relationship where you really only have one contact at the place that’s paying. You don’t know the people that are your coworkers, you don’t know what their working conditions are.
You don’t have a shop floor, so you can’t talk about them, really. And so you could be in this situation where you’re thinking, oh, I just am getting screwed on this. And you have no idea that there are 50 a hundred of other people that are in the same boat, and obviously the employer wants to keep it that way. But one of the things that the law does and that these agencies are able to do is help to put together these groups. So last year, New York City settled, its sort of biggest freelance isn’t free case since that original law was passed back or went into a fact back in 2017, which is for this French publisher called lael. And NWU helped sort of put that group together, and it’s more than I think 40 freelancers are getting paid $275,000, something like that. And that is more than double the amount that all of those people were collectively owed. Some of them hadn’t been paid for years. And it just is a level of victory and a level of people being made whole that you wouldn’t get if people are remained isolated the way that I think that the employer in a lot of these cases would like them to be.
Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Right. And I think isolation is the name of the game, even at a place where they find ways where there is a shop floor or a Slack community where I work with you, but we’re still remote, but we can go on WhatsApp or Signal and talk because I can DM you. But the isolation is so crazy because after I spoke about it the first time, I found out that yet another one of my coworkers from the same place had been in a non-payment or found themselves in a nonpayment issue with the same people. And I’m just like, I wouldn’t have known unless I said something. So isolation is the name of the game, whether it’s via email or just talking lots of language that just makes it sound like it’s just you’re the only person or whatever, and then you start talking and it is way more than one person.
And then I think to the original point of it’s freelance, does it absolve you from doing all the emails? I absolutely not. I think it helps you to have your things in a place that’s official, because it also takes you a while to hear back from the city, the state or whoever, it’s like, Hey, you’re on the record. When your teacher used to say, I’m making a mark in your notebook. It’s the notebook for the jobs, but you still have to be persistent and you still have to find other ways because you’re in queue at that point. Right?
Mel Buer:
Yeah, I think that’s a good point to bring up, particularly in the context of a wider labor struggle. We’ve seen, and I cover a lot of this here at the Real News, we’ve seen a lot of workers who have fought for better wages across industries. And because of the nature of freelance work and the nature of how independent contractors are sort of classified within the broader sort of labor law in this country, you just saw with Prop 22 in California app-based drivers who were fighting for health insurance from Uber because they felt they were classified as employees. And Prop 22 essentially classified them as independent contractors using a service so that Uber didn’t have to pay them, essentially. So you see these companies that are trying to, and in some places succeeding to really devalue the nature of labor rights and law in this country as if they haven’t been doing this for decades.
But it’s really heartening to see, especially in mostly on organized space like freelance creative or white collar work, which is the primary focus of our conversation today, seeing that sort of movement towards better protections for the workers who aren’t possible. It’s not possible to be represented necessarily by a shop floor union because you’re not an employee of that particular shop, a full-time employee classified as. And so it’s good to see this and it’s good to see that it’s from my time in the I-W-W-F-J-U, seeing how it works in New York City to seeing it expand to New York State to Illinois. I think maybe Eric or both of you, if you kind of want to give me some thoughts about what’s the process here, how are we expanding these to other states? Is there a sort of blueprint that other interested individuals want to follow in their own states, in their own cities? Is there a specific way that we can turn this into a bit of an organizing handbook for any of our listeners who want to see that replicated where they live?
Eric Thurm:
So I think that definitely is a huge part of why we are doing this NWU and the Freelance Solidarity Project, the digital media division at NWU led or helped lead the coalitions to get these laws passed in New York State, in Illinois, in Columbus, Ohio, in the city council in Los Angeles. Right now we have active campaigns in New Hampshire and in the California state legislature. So there really is this sort of effort to build a lot of that capacity and to make these protections sort of normal and as much of the country as possible. And in terms of having an organizing template, I really would urge people to get involved in NWU and in the legislative work more specifically, it’s almost entirely member led. And I think that to the extent that there are sort of replicable steps, a lot of that just comes from talking to other people who have been through that process.
And I think that in a lot of ways it’s like whatever the sort of cliche, that’s all unhappy, families are unhappy in the same way, but for local and state legislatures that so much of that work is going where you to learn more about what type of weirdos are ostensibly representing you, and is there somebody who is either willing to be an ally or champion for freelancers or someone that you can at least sort of hold your nose and work with. And then applying both these broader organizing principles and learning more about that specific context. And I think that balancing those things in a lot of ways is also what is happening, what it is like to be a freelancer in general, and that you have the industry that is the same and treats people shit the same way all over, but at any given company or any different section of the industry, it really is helpful to have people who know more specifically kind of what’s up. And I think that one of the really powerful things that we’re doing is trying to bring those things together in each of the campaigns.
Mel Buer:
I think it’s for many of our listeners particularly, I would say probably our younger listeners, have you ever called a representative’s office and just said, Hey, I got a crazy idea for you. Oftentimes phone calls that can happen when I was living in Omaha, Nebraska, I mean, it was a very similar thing where sometimes you can send a DM to your representative on Twitter, you know what I mean? And just say, have you thought of something like this before? This is something that’s happening to me. I voted for you last year, or I live in your district. And being able to open up that conversation and figure out a way to begin to build a coalition around a legislation like this, because Eric, yeah,
Eric Thurm:
Even if I think correctly are pretty cynical about that, I think that one of the most important things to remember is that in almost every case, the people that you are talking to desperately would like to be in front of a local news camera. And so one of the things that you write, it’s like you both are like, we are doing this thing that is meaningful and that will be helpful for constituents and that your constituents want, and that is an opportunity for you to talk about this good thing that you’re doing for people. It’s not just a thing that we’re asking you to do out of the sort of goodness of your heart. It’s a thing that is a sort of set of strategic decisions that you are making as the organizers and that they are making as the politicians. And I think that in a lot of cases, those incentives align at least sort of enough to get this kind of thing done.
Mel Buer:
Fantastic conversation. We’re getting down to the last couple minutes here of our interview, but I wanted to kick it to you, tk, and just get maybe your final thoughts. Is there something that we haven’t really touched on in of organizing this sort of coalition building that you think is important for our listeners to know?
Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Yeah, I think that it’s just, we’re talking about conventional organizing law and stuff like that, but I think it starts even earlier when a company is not paying, you don’t keep doing the work. I think I even fell into that trap. I was like, well, I guess it’s coming. My first red flag was the first payment was late, and I was like, well, because we had a relationship, I actually used to work full-time for them. Then I got laid off and then I was contracted. So I’m like, they’re not going to do, that’s not going to be me. Nope, it was me. And then after that first batch of invoices was four months late, then they just stopped paying at all until January of this year, 2024. So stop doing the work and excuse yourself from the situation. These employers jobs, places you work are not your family and even your family. Some of us will, A lot of people will ice their own moms out before their employers. Listen ice, everyone, everyone’s dead to me now.
But really, the other thing would be if you have the privilege of the bandwidth to refuse or to do certain things, if you are blessed to have an abundance of jobs, do not allow the late guy to just slide. Because I think that’s another thing that a lot of folks do and a lot of folks, they’re just like, that’s not my fight. And I’m like, it is your fight because now you leave it up to a person like me that doesn’t have the privilege of bandwidth to come and be on a podcast to do a panel, but you quiet on the side, didn’t get paid and you’ve moved on. And I’m like, how do you move on from losing thousands of dollars? That’s crazy. The least you could do on the time that you’re now, you already got a new job. I don’t have shit. You need to speak up. I don’t need to be the one all the time speaking up. So if someone’s listening to this and you are like, well, I don’t know if it’s worth it to chase them, you still worked. Chase them. Say something like that is my top number one pet peeve. It’s not even a pet peeve, it’s a peeve peeve,
Mel Buer:
Right? I, and it’s a good lesson I think is really just to say, if you’re getting fucked over, say something. Because it’s the same reason why bosses in regular shops don’t want you talking about your wages because they don’t want you to say anything, right? Because if you do, then other people are going to go, well, hey, that’s actually kind of fucked up. That’s not good. Hold on. We should do something about that. And they can no longer act with impunity, which is a big, big lesson of any podcast that I do on labor is that if you talk to your fellow workers, you can get some shit done. And in this case, you can make laws happen. So thank you so much both of you for coming on. I wish we could have a longer conversation, but you’ll have to come back on whenever you do have the bandwidth tk, we can just talk about freelancing in general or work in general. And Eric, thank you so much for coming on, and I really am excited to see what the NWU is going to be doing in the future. I live in Los Angeles, so seeing the city council pass that freelance isn’t free Ordinance Chef’s Kiss. I didn’t even realize they were doing it. I was very excited to see that happen. So again, thanks so much for coming on guys, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your day.
Keisha “TK” Dutes:
Thanks for having us.
Eric Thurm:
Thank You.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at the Real News Network podcast. Once again, I’m your host, Mel Buer. If you love today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. You can find us on most platforms, including Spotify and YouTube. And if you’re coming to us via YouTube, feel free to leave us a comment and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can find me on most social media. My dms are always open, or send me a message via email at mel@therealnews.com. Send your tips, comments, questions, episode ideas, gripes. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for sticking around, and I’ll see you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Last June, a new federal law granted pregnant people across the country additional protections in their workplaces. But as of Wednesday, those protections have now ended for government workers in the state of Texas. A federal judge in Texas ruled last week that the legislation, known as the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, cannot be enforced in the state because it was passed as part of a spending...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
“Last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life,” a Feb. 6 email from Railroad Workers United reads. “Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville Hospital.” Another email from Feb. 9 reads, “On January 15th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohio.” Then, on Feb. 17, another email: “On February 13th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in North Carolina. Brother Randall M. Howell, 41, of Allied Federation Lodge 563, died following a road crossing incident in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.” Why are railroad workers all over the country dying on the job? And what can be done to stop these needless deaths? We talk with four railroad workers and members of Railroad Workers United (RWU).
Panelists include; Nick Wurst, a freight conductor in Massachusetts, legislative rep for his union local, and currently serving on the RWU international steering committee; Matt Weaver, a member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division-International Brotherhood of Teamsters (BMWED-IBT) for nearly 30 years, legislative director for his union in Ohio, and a founding member of RWU; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 years in the industry, and the editor of “The Highball,” RWU’s quarterly newsletter: and Ross Grooters, RWU co-chair, member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, also serving on the BLET-IBT Iowa state legislative board, with over 20 years in the industry.
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Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Mark Burrows: My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I had 37 years in the industry. My last 25 was with the Canadian Pacific, now the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Southern. Before I retired, I had been a delegate to the last United Transportation convention in 2011 and the inaugural smart transportation convention in 2014, as a delegate from my local 1433 in the Chicago area. I’ve been a longtime member of Railroad Workers United, and am currently the editor of The HighBall, which is our quarterly newsletter.
Nick Wurst: So my name is Nick Wurst. I’m a freight conductor in Massachusetts. I’m a member of SMART Transportation Division. I serve as the legislative rep for my local and then as a member of RWU I also serve on the international steering committee.
Matt Weaver: Hello everyone, my name is Matt Weaver. I am a nearly 30 year member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees of the Teamsters. I am the legislative director for all of our members in the state of Ohio. I’m a proud RWU founding member, and am always looking for rail labor solidarity. Thank you for having me, Max.
Ross Grooters: My name is Ross Grooters. I’m a Railroad Workers United co-chair and a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. We’re part of the Teamsters rail conference. I serve on the Iowa State Legislative board for that organization. I have 20-plus years in the industry.
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. So if you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, then you gotta follow the link in the show notes, and go check out the other great shows in our network. And of course, please support the work that we are doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. You can share our episodes with your co-workers, you can leave us positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and you can become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. If you subscribe for 10 bucks a month, you will also get a print subscription to the amazing In These Times Magazine mailed to your mailbox every month. You just gotta head on over to patreon.com/workingpeople, that’s p-a-t-a-r-e-o-n.com/workingpeople. Hit the subscribe button and you will immediately unlock all the awesome bonus episodes that we publish every month and all the bonus content that we published over the past six seasons of the show.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and we’ve got another great episode for y’all. Today we are diving right back into the topic of workers and working conditions on the railroads. And as you guys heard at the top, we’ve got an amazing panel of folks. Some are familiar to our podcast, if you’ve watched our stuff at The Real News Network. But all incredible people, all doing incredible work over there at Railroad Workers United, a solidarity organization that brings together railroad workers from different unions from all sides of the industry. And they bring community members, people who maybe don’t work on the rails, but who have a vested interest in a better railroad system. So things like East Palestine and Ohio don’t happen, you know, but RWU is out there doing incredible work. And if you guys don’t already, then I highly recommend that you follow Railroad Workers United on all your social media, and you should sign up for their email newsletter, which is where I go to keep my ear to the rail as the great Ron Kaminkow would say. And that’s where I stay up to date on everything that’s happening on the railroads from the workers perspective, not just the CEOs, or the shareholders.
That’s where I started to notice something really grim piling up in my inbox this month. I kept seeing emails from Railroad Workers United with the same subject lines stating: “rail fatality alerts.” On February 6 of this month I got an email that started, “Dear fellow railroad workers, last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life. Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville hospital according to the NTSB and Morgan County Coroner, Jeffrey Chung.”
On February 9, I got another email that read “Dear fellow railroad workers, on January 15, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohio. A National Transportation Safety Board report released February 7 stated “On January 15, 2024, about 5:30am, an Ohio Central Railroad signal maintainer was found deceased by the crew of Wheeling and Lake Erie freight train 21815 on the main track of the Columbus and Ohio River Railroad, east of the new Rumley Road highway railroad gate crossing.”
On February 17, I got another email that began, “Dear fellow railroad workers,on February 13, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in North Carolina. Brother Randall M Howell, 41, of allied Federation lodge 563 died following a road crossing incident in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Brother Howell was a foreman on the T six system production gang, when he was struck by the ballast regulator”.
So why does this keep happening? Why are railroad workers across the country dying on the job? This is really serious. We need to talk about this. And the fact that you don’t hear about this unless you subscribe to Railroad Workers United newsletters is pretty infuriating, in my opinion, as someone who’s in the media. So we wanted to do our part to bring together this incredible panel of folks and talk about this seriously. And I want to start there, guys first, again, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know with your existing schedules just getting us all available at the same time was a feat in and of itself. But also because we’re talking about really important stuff here. And I really, really am excited to get to of break all this down with you guys and let folks know why this keeps happening, what dangers workers on the rails like yourself face every day, and what we can do to help and actually stop these needless worker deaths that are happening to our brothers and sisters on the railroad.
So I want to go around the table and ask if we could start with those three stories that I mentioned in the introduction. I know there have been more. I think I got another rail fatality alert from Railroad Workers United yesterday while we were preparing to do this episode. But I want to at least lift up and honor the lives lost in those three rail fatality alerts that I mentioned. And so I wanted to ask if we could first just go around the table and if we could offer listeners more information about this. What happened? Who were these workers? What were the conditions that led to their deaths?
Matt Weaver:I can give some insight into Randall Howell. H was on a tie gang and he was a foreman. They were at a crossing. There was a flagman on each side of the crossing for directing traffic or stopping traffic. And a servicing team was coming through. A ballast regulator went for a forward motion through the crossing, and came back and dropped the wings of the regulator, I believe. Brother Howell was caught by a wing of the regulator. It’s unforgiving. It was broad daylight. I notified the crew they laid on the horn and said someone just got hit. I can’t speculate on what happened. I have a feeling they’ll blame the dead guy. It’s always ‘blame the worker’ in the rail industry. And well, we’ll learn more but again, it’s an unforgiving industry and with often a lack of manpower. Cutting forces to provide for the business model of precision schedule railroading. We’re trying to do more with less. But often enough, it seems like we’re doing less with less because there’s less freight moving on American railroads than there was perhaps 10 years ago. That’s my insight into that one incident.
Mark Burrows: When these incidents happen, it’s hard to get the actual circumstances of what happened in real time, with the exception of a big incident like East Palestine where we were kind of getting periodic updates from the National Transportation Safety Board. But generally, after they do their investigation, maybe a year and a half later, there will be something on their website. So for instance, the brother who was killed with a cut of 30 cars that hit his engine, without knowing all the details, I think it’s fair to say that speed-up in one way, shape, or form or combination of manifestations, is the common thread. Like Matt was saying, more with less, more production, faster, faster, faster, less workers, pressurised, time sensitivity. They’ve cut back on the training. So the short answer for me is, speed-up is without a doubt, the common thread through all of these incidents. Speed-up is everywhere, in all industries– in Amazon– the victims of speed-up will get repetitive motion injuries and serious back injuries. But on the railroad, the victims of speed-up can get maimed or killed. And then the worst case scenario is incidents like Lac-Mégantic and East Palestine where communities are obliterated.
Nick Wurst: One thing I’ll just add on the situation, I’ve never worked as a signal maintainer, but for the engineer who lost his life in the yard, some of these rail yards can be multiple square miles with multiple jobs working with remote control engines. And these can be countless tracks, where cars are being pumped down into the yard using gravity free rolling, with all the cutbacks, like everybody’s mentioned, it’s also a cut back on the number of people who just have their eyes on the operation at any given time. And in a lot of these cases, it’s sort of impossible to be in a truly safe position. Even if you’re in the clear of tracks, cars pick a switch, and then it doesn’t matter, or bad rail gives out, especially in some of these smaller and less maintained yards. So just, it’s impossible. The cutbacks in safety and training were mentioned and that’s obviously a big factor. And the other thing is, there’s so much about railroading that’s inherently sort of dangerous and can’t be proofed with rules. They try to make it so that if you follow any of these 20 bajillion rules at any given time things won’t happen. But inevitably, something does because at the end of the day, you’re dealing with multiple 100 tons of free rolling cars and physics.
Ross Grooters: I think my brothers are exactly right. The through thread for these three deaths and every other death on the railroad is this demand for speed-up. It is doing more work with fewer workers, faster. The root cause is the economics of it. The railroads have placed a dollar value on our lives, and they’re willing to roll those dice in order to make billions and billions of dollars in profit. And as we’ve seen this speed-up occur more through precision scheduled railroading, which is an operating model to maximize that shareholder value and push those profits. We’ve seen less and less focus on safety and more and more focus on that speed-up and that pushed production. And it’s not just the workers on the railroad who are affected, it is also the public, as we’ve seen with the high profile incidents like last February in East Palestine, Ohio.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well let’s dig into that. Because for folks who listen to this show I think we’ve had enough interviews with railroad workers that I think they get the gist of more the basics than your average podcast listener and I have you guys at Railroad Workers United to thank for that. So we can assume that there’s going to be like some background knowledge here from our listeners about how the industry itself has been changing over recent years and decades, the rise of precision scheduled railroading, the corporate consolidation that’s been going on on the railroads for years to the point that we’ve gone from over 40 different rail carriers down to a handful that have just like incredible oligopolistic power over our supply chain.
And as we saw with the high stakes contract negotiation that y’all were embroiled in two years ago, culminating in Congress and scab Joe Biden and everyone else in Washington DC just like gleefully conspiring to shove a contract down workers throats, and give the rail carriers everything they want. Basically, tacitly and explicitly telling the rail carriers, “Hey, keep doing what you’re doing, because we’re not going to stop you.” That’s what we have been covering extensively on the show, at The Real News on Breaking Points for years now. So I don’t want to make y’all go over all of that again. But I do want to sort of talk about how those changes affect the safety and of working on the railroads.
Because, Nick, you mentioned something that really stuck in my ear, about how at a certain point there is no way to make this job completely safe. It’s like with football, you’re never gonna be able to make football completely safe even if you have great helmets. It’s a sport premised on violence. And as railroad workers, y’all have been telling me for years, these trains are incredibly heavy. I mean, they are incredibly dangerous, and you as a human being are the softest squishiest thing in that rail yard. And you were no match for a massive locomotive or anything like that. So I want to sort of talk about those two sides of this.
If we can go around the table and just talk more about, what do you think folks who don’t work on the railroads don’t understand about just the inherent dangers that you face doing this work regardless? What are the sorts of pressures and dangers and safety measures that you as railroaders just have to work with on a day to day basis given the nature of the work that you do. But then also, let’s talk about how those things have changed over the course of recent years as the precision schedule railroading and this Wall Street-minded mentality has totally taken over the industry, turned it into a profit generating machine for the executives and the shareholders, like Ross was saying, cutting the workforce so they’re piling more work onto fewer workers, making the trains longer, heavier, yada, yada, yada. So let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table. Mark, I’m gonna throw it back to you. But yeah, then everyone else just please hop in after he’s done.
Mark Burrows: Well first, I believe that railroading can be done safe. I mean, yes, under current conditions it is going to work like a potential death trap on a good day. But if the profit motive was taken out of the equation, and the whole priority was to move the nation’s freight safely, so that workers are not compromised, so that the public is not compromised, and so that the freight itself is not compromised, that can be a whole nother discussion, it can be done. That’d be a major paradigm shift, but it can be done. So I just kind of wanted to make that point. And I just want to throw in that precision scheduled railroading gets a lot of attention, and rightfully so. But it’s also just kind of like an oxymoron marketing term for a business model. The speed-up began decades ago. And I can trace it back to the mid-80s. And then precision scheduled railroading in the last 10 plus years has just escalated the speed-up on steroids. I’ll just leave it there for now.
Nick Wurst: I want to just start by agreeing with Mark that railroading can be done safely. But that means safety has to be the number one priority over everything else. And that’s not the case with these railroads. And even providing quality service is not the top priority. Making it look like they’re providing quality service is the top priority. I think there’s a lot to talk about. And one of the things I want to give a little bit of perspective on is, I’m the youngest in terms of seniority, in terms of time on the railroad out of all of us by a significant margin, I think, so one of the things that’s really hammered home to me is there has been an exodus of talent and experience from the rank-and-file of the railroads.
The number of talented, experienced railroaders who knew how to do the job well and safely has been driven down. They’ve been driven out of the industry over recent decades. And what happened was at a certain point, the railroads cut so much, they cut so many jobs and drove out so many talented people, I’m not talking management here, they started trying to fill the gaps with mass hiring new people. I’m one of those people. And every day is a constant reminder of how little I know, and working with some of the people that I do work with is a constant reminder of how much they know and how much that’s not getting passed down. When I went to conductor training, I had four weeks of training at school. Three of those weeks were in the classroom learning rules. One week was doing anything outside, making hitches, throwing switches.
I mean, there’s a reason for rules. I don’t want to suggest that the rules are unimportant. But in terms of hands on work, you got one week, and then when I went to training on the job in my area, when I got back home, some jobs I got maybe a week off. When I started talking with more experienced engineers and conductors, they talked about the fact that most of them, their entry point was as a brakeman where for years they made hitches, threw switches as part of a three man crew. There’s this contradiction of the conductor is now the entry point level for train crew. This is where you start, and also the employee who’s technically in charge of the job. You are in charge of all the paperwork, the hazmat material and everything like that, and you’re the employee who’s on the ground actually making the hitches and everything like that.
When people spent years training as brakemen under conductors, they learned how to do the outside work, making hitches and throwing switches safely and efficiently. They spent years learning how to keep themselves alive and safe before they ever worried about running a job. But now, there’s no more brakemen for the most part. And you start as a conductor. You’re thrown in. You’re running the job, and you’re doing everything else. And so I think that’s one thing. That’s obviously a factor here is that driving out experienced people and trying to mass replace with new people and just chewing through them until they find a few who stick and hopefully make it to becoming sort of experienced employees. There’s of couple other things I could say but I don’t want to take up too much time.
Ross Grooters: I think Nick’s exactly right. I work on a yard job where the age of experience is a year or less right now to hold that job. And it is somebody that’s trying to learn the job and be safe while they’re being asked to perform at an extremely high level and produce. And it’s unrealistic, right? Anytime we see one of these fatalities, what’s happened is layers of protection have been removed. And Nick’s exactly right. You used to have somebody that you were working with an extra set of eyes to be able to tell you to pull your head out of your ass, “You’re doing it wrong,” right? Like, here’s how you do this safely and not get yourself in a bind. So, we’ve got these layers of protection that have just been yanked from the industry and they no longer exist. Well, without those layers of protection to prevent those fatalities, we’re going to see more and more fatalities, or more and more injuries, and more and more incidents on the railroads. And until we back off from that push to production being the sole motive, we’re not going to have a safe work environment. I think, Nick, you said this. I think Mark, you said this. For us to have a safe work environment, it’s got to be the top priority.
Matt Weaver: I’ve listened to my brothers talk and I’ve written down some numbers. One of the big ones to me is that I’ve buried 11 of my co-workers that I actually worked with within 100 miles of my home in the last 30 years. Seven of them had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, two had esophageal cancer, and only three of those guys got to retire. It’s pretty shocking. I heard, and it was only a rumor back then when I was hired in, that maintenance people only live 19 months after retirement at 62. We’ve gone to 60 now, so maybe it’s a little better, but it’s pretty frustrating. Max had said something about 40 or 50 railroads. The numbers I saw was that in 1900 there were 132 class one railroads. Today there are six. It’s like the Monopoly board 101. There’s four on the board, well, we’re at six now. But yeah, here’s monopoly. And the price adjustments come in twos and they demarket so they hesitate to favor less profitable shippers, that kind of thing. Another thing, the number that I saw is lots of railroads are shooting for a 55 percent operating ratio. That’s their goal under PSR. I’m under the impression that McDonald’s or Burger King are shooting for like 80 percent or 90 percent. So the profit margins are astounding. Record profits are lost wages or record profits are the cause of inflation, however you want to look at it. But the whole nation is suffering because of the industry’s cutthroat business model. And like I said before in the interview, I sometimes worry about saying things like that and getting fired again, but got to call him out. There’s no reason that the industry should have so many lobbyists and so much money going to finance politicians campaigns. And America in general is suffering but real labor is suffering far worse at this moment.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right. You guys have heard the cost of this. You have heard the voices of railroad workers themselves, like the folks on this call. But you have also heard other railroad workers on the show. And you have heard time and again, the voices of residents of East Palestine. You have heard on the show, what folks like Chris and Jessica Albright are going through, what Darren and Stella Gamble are going through. You have heard the pain that has been inflicted on this community that did nothing to deserve it. But they are the ones paying the price for corporate greed. East Palestine was an avoidable catastrophe.
And like that’s kind of the point that we’re trying to make here. You could look at something like that and say, well, no East Palestine happened because of a faulty bearing. So that’s what caused it. Or you can say, well, why didn’t anyone catch that in time? Why weren’t car men given more time to inspect that bad car and take it off the rails? Why weren’t the signals being relayed from the hotbox detectors, relayed to the people on the crew sooner? There’s so many questions like that.
Like Ross was saying, the layers of protection that have been removed over the course of this industry change. That’s what, that’s how these things stack up. And so if something does go wrong, you have removed so many of the safeguards that are there to prevent that thing from turning into something going wrong to something going catastrophically wrong for the workers on the rails and for our own communities like East Palestinian. Those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here.
Matt Weaver: Along the lines of those safeguards, so back to the numbers, after World War I, there were 2.1 million members of real labor, 2.1 million railroaders. At the end of the last round of bargaining in 2022, there were 117,500. So, of course, there’s technology, of course, there’s paperwork and machinery, but if anyone is out there working alone, no one’s got your back. If anyone is out there taking a call by themselves, who’s going to call 911. We’re facing this scenario where back to the ages of: we build a bridge, and for every million dollars worth of bridge, we’re allowed to have five deaths. What’s the value of life in this industry? It’s very frustrating.
Ross Grooters: So in Iowa alone, in my career, I went back and looked and 15 railroad workers have lost their lives on the job, including two close personal co-workers of mine. Fifteen in 20 years, and that’s just in one state in the nation. These are all preventable. And in all of our careers, we’ve seen far too many of our union brothers and sisters who’ve lost their lives as victims of corporate greed. And it’s really up to us to fight that they’re not just remembered, but their deaths aren’t in vain, that we’re doing things to correct it. We’re fixing the hazards and not continuing to blame the victims as Railroad Workers United would put it.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that’s really powerfully put. And so I know, Matt, you mentioned the contract negotiations, and that’s where I want us to head here in the final turn. But before we get there, I wanted to pause on on something else that you said about when you’re getting called on to do a job by yourself, and you don’t have anyone watching your back, like I mean, my heart broke reading one of the rail fatality alerts from Railroad Workers United, hearing about this brother on the Ohio Central Railroad, the signal maintainer, who was literally found dead by another crew. Like imagine being in that man’s family, and that is how your loved one was discovered. He went out for work one day. His employer sent him out, it sounds like on a call on his own, gets killed, and his body’s just sitting there waiting to be found. That is not how you treat people. He deserved better than that. This is unacceptable on so many levels.
And I don’t want to ask this question by way of like, it’s a gory details question. I just wanted to ask for folks who are listening to this, what are the types of injuries or potentially fatal injuries that one could sustain working on the railroads, especially as those layers of protection are stripped away. Are folks most worried about getting struck by something? What sides of the job are made more dangerous because of these speed-ups and because of these staff cuts, so on and so forth?
Mark Burrows: I’m sure this is not all inclusive, but off the top of my head, like Nick had said, one loaded car of coal or something can be over 120 tons. So one wrong move, whether it’s a car that ends up being where it’s not supposed to be or something that happens that is not supposed to happen, you can just instantly get crushed. You can have a limb severed. It is just a dangerous environment from the moment you walk in on the job to the moment you’re able to leave in one piece. Like I said, it’s not all inclusive. And then add in being fatigued, working on a 24 hour extraboard, being on call 24/7, going to work on two hours’ notice and you may not have slept for a day and a half. And then other people around you are improperly trained. I’ll leave it there.
Nick Wurst: Going sort of off the top of my head, when I started on the railroad, I actually didn’t start as train crew, I started working in an intermodal yard. And there was a carman, at the time, he’s retired, who liked driving around and showing us all of the missing fingertips he had. I saw a co-worker take gladhands, the airhoses from the hostler truck, came through the back door, hit him in the face, he had to get reconstructive surgery and everything like that.
One of the things that I think is really scary to me, we hear a lot about horror stories where people are sort of killed through impacts or losing limbs or things like that, but there’s the story that came out, I think in 2022, about the brother who died on the job of a heart condition that he had basically delayed going to the doctor for for a long time because he could never manage to keep any of his doctor’s appointments. And that’s something that really gets me is, yeah, I mean, there’s a certain amount of danger and you sort of accept a certain amount of risk when you go to work, but the idea that there can be all of these things building up because of the conditions we work in, all the medical research about what lack of sleep does to people, I used to and still occasionally have nightmares that I’m at work, and it wakes me up in the middle of trying to sleep between shifts, and you start to wonder, how’s my heart doing with all the caffeine that I’m constantly pounding and trying to stay awake and not sleeping? I think I could handle it better if I got killed by being hit by a train or something. But if I just dropped dead in the seat in the cab one day, you know, show up to work, you look fine, and then die part way through your shift from, I don’t know, my heart giving out or something like that, that that one messes with me a lot.
Maximillian Alvarez: That story always stuck with me too. And I believe we’re thinking of the brother Aaron Hiles who Lauren Kaori Gurley reported on for The Washington Post during the high stakes contract fight, and I really really appreciate Lauren for doing that. And that story really broke my heart as well. There’s so much more to talk about here, but I want us to finish on the question of what can be done. The clock is ticking, like I said. By the time we were all doing our interviews together, that was in 2022, we were years into the contract negotiations at that point. By the time that whole mess was resolved, quote, unquote, we were closer to the next contract bargaining period than we were the beginning of the current one that we were in. So 2025 is going to be a chance to really take the fight back to the carriers.
And this is also something I want to impress upon people listening because for so much of that fight, as we got closer and closer to potentially seeing a national rail strike or rail lockout in this country for the first time in a generation, a lot of folks were asking, what can I do? What can we even really do at this point? We don’t work on the rails. It feels like the process is so far out of our reach that we don’t know what to do. So I want to ask, okay, we’re here. It’s 2024, we are looking ahead to the next contract bargaining session, we’ve got much more of the public informed about these issues than we did before, what is currently happening? What are the unions doing? What is RWU doing? Is there anything on the legislative side being done to help stop these conditions that we’ve been talking about for the past hour that are making this work increasingly dangerous for workers like yourselves? And what can folks listening out there do to help?
Mark Burrows: On the legislative side, we know all these politicians after East Palestine had this life changing epiphany that there were some safety issues in the railroad industry. It wouldn’t have been such an epiphany if they’d been reading The Highball and went and signed up for our newsletter, but they proposed the Rail Safety Act, which was very watered down and full of loopholes. But there are a few potentially positive things there. And they can’t even get that done. As weak as it is, they can’t even get that done. That’s part of the overall political problem in this country. What happened to us is just part of the political dysfunction, for lack of a better term.
As far as the unions, one of the things, like Matt pointed out, we’re calling for a real united bargaining coalition that doesn’t cut and run with the first proposal and that no one settles until everyone settles. Railroad workers need to find a way to strengthen our union so that we can more effectively fight and a united bargaining coalition is an important part of it.
And then the public can learn about us and our issues, back us when possible, let your representatives know how you feel, that you support our demands for a safe workplace and a safe working environment, again, which the public has a vested stake in. And then go to our website at railroadworkersunited.org and learn about our call for public ownership. It may seem far-fetched and a pipe dream today, but all movements for social justice started out with an idea and a vision. And that’s one way to get the profit motive out of the equation. And I’ll just leave it there for now.
Nick Wurst: We’ve just passed a resolution that should be going out to the public soon. We’re calling for all of those within rail labor who are interested in trying to have a real fighting approach to the upcoming round of negotiations, to get together and start to discuss what that means. As much as railroad labor likes to pretend that we’re special or we’re different somehow and that we’re insulated from the others, we’re part of the bigger labor movement. And I think we’re seeing some examples of what some relatively militant fightbacks look like, and that they can get results. And so I think that’s obviously the big thing.
And I think Matt mentioned the numbers in terms of the decline of members, but that’s not just direct job cuts, that’s also increases in things like outsourcing and subcontracting to non-union companies. The fact that that decline in our membership has happened, even the recent declines in recent decades, I think it’s criminal, to be totally honest. And I think that we need that real fightback.
So what can the public do? I think people who are in the labor movement have a vested interest in every other union and every other worker’s fight as well. Like Mark was saying, what’s happening to us at any given time is the same as what’s happening in every industry. The same way that we in RWU are trying to put pressure on our unions to fight back, other people can do that as well. And I think one thing, if it comes to it, if it comes to picket lines, if it comes to rallies, if it comes to practice pickets, the numbers that Matt gave makes it pretty clear that we need reinforcements. We need backup. Our picket line plans in my area were looking pretty sparse if it had gone down to the last time.
And I think the last thing I’ll mention, Ross used a really excellent phrase earlier of layers of protection. And I do think that there needs to be a reckoning with the Railway Labor Act, which is the labor law that allowed Biden and Congress to force a contract on us. And I think it’s interesting that one of the other big labor battles going on this year is the flight attendants. The airlines are also under the Railway Labor Act. But when it comes down to it, taking job action, removing ourselves from a dangerous, deadly, unacceptable, work environment and refusing to go back until it’s rectified, that’s the ultimate last line of defense. That’s the last layer of protection. And the RLA makes it so that we don’t have that. I mean, when you really break it down, what it does is it gives these legislators, who have never worked out for the railroad, the ability to order us back into a fundamentally unsafe, unlivable situation. So, I know it’s a bit of a long shot, but while we’re talking about legislation, I don’t think it’s just safety legislation that we need to start thinking about. I think we also need to take a good hard look at the Railway Labor Act.
Matt Weaver: And unfortunately, that scenario leads the railroads into a position where they don’t have to bargain in good faith because they know that Congress will stuff an agreement up our asses. And so railroads don’t come to the table in good faith. Right now we have on-property agreements going on all over the place. I heard last week that the railroads want all on-property agreements to be decided by July 1. We’ll see how that goes. But the bargaining, Max, begins in November with Section six notices. In November, section six notices come out. What we want to change, and many of the crafts have done questionnaires and that kind of stuff to see what the guys want, but if we have a real labor bargaining coalition all together, you know, one for all and all for one, then we can speak as one voice. I was very impressed by being under the AFL-CIO TGD umbrella at the end of bargaining. And actually, I think we did okay, except that there were no sick days and they wouldn’t deal with attendance policies. So that was it. We still have a sequester of real labor of RRB, Railroad Retirement Board, sick pay and unemployment, which has gone on for over a decade. We’re losing money for sick pay and unemployment because Congress unjustly sequestered our pay even though RRB doesn’t affect the national budget. We’ve got bills up, we got bills down, we got more bills in, and they want to address it. Public servants? Come on, I don’t think so. I’m very disappointed in much of Congress right now, because they’re not taking care of the constituents and seem to be taking care of the people who finance their campaigns. Last point was, and it’s a big one, along the lines of what Mark said, if we can’t trust our regulators to regulate, perhaps we need to have nationalization of the railroads. If we can’t make things safe with regulation, maybe we don’t need the rail industry to be a for-profit industry. There’s lots of ins and outs in that and it’s a very touchy scenario, and I was a bit against it for the first few years of RWU talking about it. But, we’re getting nowhere. The STB did nothing. The FRA seems to be doing very little, and our members are dying because nothing is happening. It’s time to step up and take care of the people of this country.
Ross Grooters: Railroads are making billions of dollars and they’re doing so on the backs of workers and the public. It’s an outright theft. And the costs are externalized. We’re the ones that face the potential loss of our lives. The public are the ones that face the potential loss of their lives, livelihoods, and homes. This theft has to stop. railroadworkersunited.org, you can check out all our information about supporting a public ownership campaign. I can’t think of a better way to scare the shit out of the railroads.
And when it comes to bargaining, my brothers Mark, Matt, and Nick all hit the nail on the head, but one thing that stands out to me is that we need to be a bigger part of the labor movement as a whole. And we saw United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain lay down a gauntlet and say May 1, 2028, labor needs to come together and set that date to organize towards a general strike. And rail labor needs to step up and be a part of that. So hopefully people can make rail labor leaders aware of that and say, you need to be a part of this part of this.
Maximillian Alvarez: Alright gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guests, Mark Burrows, Ross Grooters, Nick Wurst, Matt Weaver. And I want to give one more big shout out to Railroad Workers United and all the great work that they do. Go check them out. Go follow them and subscribe to their newsletter. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening. And I want to thank you for caring about this stuff. We will see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then you know what you gotta do, go subscribe to our Patreon and check out all the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there waiting for you and our patrons. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network. If you like the work we do here at Working People, you’re going to love the work that we’re doing across The Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
“Last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life,” a Feb. 6 email from Railroad Workers United reads. “Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville Hospital.” Another email from Feb. 9 reads, “On January 15th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohio.” Then, on Feb. 17, another email: “On February 13th, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in North Carolina. Brother Randall M. Howell, 41, of Allied Federation Lodge 563, died following a road crossing incident in Roanoke Rapids, N.C.” Why are railroad workers all over the country dying on the job? And what can be done to stop these needless deaths? We talk with four railroad workers and members of Railroad Workers United (RWU).
Panelists include; Nick Wurst, a freight conductor in Massachusetts, legislative rep for his union local, and currently serving on the RWU international steering committee; Matt Weaver, a member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employes Division-International Brotherhood of Teamsters (BMWED-IBT) for nearly 30 years, legislative director for his union in Ohio, and a founding member of RWU; Mark Burrows, a retired locomotive engineer with 37 years in the industry, and the editor of “The Highball,” RWU’s quarterly newsletter: and Ross Grooters, RWU co-chair, member of Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, also serving on the BLET-IBT Iowa state legislative board, with over 20 years in the industry.
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Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Mark Burrows: My name is Mark Burrows. I’m a retired locomotive engineer. I had 37 years in the industry. My last 25 was with the Canadian Pacific, now the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Southern. Before I retired, I had been a delegate to the last United Transportation convention in 2011 and the inaugural smart transportation convention in 2014, as a delegate from my local 1433 in the Chicago area. I’ve been a longtime member of Railroad Workers United, and am currently the editor of The HighBall, which is our quarterly newsletter.
Nick Wurst: So my name is Nick Wurst. I’m a freight conductor in Massachusetts. I’m a member of SMART Transportation Division. I serve as the legislative rep for my local and then as a member of RWU I also serve on the international steering committee.
Matt Weaver: Hello everyone, my name is Matt Weaver. I am a nearly 30 year member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees of the Teamsters. I am the legislative director for all of our members in the state of Ohio. I’m a proud RWU founding member, and am always looking for rail labor solidarity. Thank you for having me, Max.
Ross Grooters: My name is Ross Grooters. I’m a Railroad Workers United co-chair and a member of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen. We’re part of the Teamsters rail conference. I serve on the Iowa State Legislative board for that organization. I have 20-plus years in the industry.
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. So if you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, then you gotta follow the link in the show notes, and go check out the other great shows in our network. And of course, please support the work that we are doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. You can share our episodes with your co-workers, you can leave us positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and you can become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. If you subscribe for 10 bucks a month, you will also get a print subscription to the amazing In These Times Magazine mailed to your mailbox every month. You just gotta head on over to patreon.com/workingpeople, that’s p-a-t-a-r-e-o-n.com/workingpeople. Hit the subscribe button and you will immediately unlock all the awesome bonus episodes that we publish every month and all the bonus content that we published over the past six seasons of the show.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and we’ve got another great episode for y’all. Today we are diving right back into the topic of workers and working conditions on the railroads. And as you guys heard at the top, we’ve got an amazing panel of folks. Some are familiar to our podcast, if you’ve watched our stuff at The Real News Network. But all incredible people, all doing incredible work over there at Railroad Workers United, a solidarity organization that brings together railroad workers from different unions from all sides of the industry. And they bring community members, people who maybe don’t work on the rails, but who have a vested interest in a better railroad system. So things like East Palestine and Ohio don’t happen, you know, but RWU is out there doing incredible work. And if you guys don’t already, then I highly recommend that you follow Railroad Workers United on all your social media, and you should sign up for their email newsletter, which is where I go to keep my ear to the rail as the great Ron Kaminkow would say. And that’s where I stay up to date on everything that’s happening on the railroads from the workers perspective, not just the CEOs, or the shareholders.
That’s where I started to notice something really grim piling up in my inbox this month. I kept seeing emails from Railroad Workers United with the same subject lines stating: “rail fatality alerts.” On February 6 of this month I got an email that started, “Dear fellow railroad workers, last Wednesday, a fellow rail worker was gravely injured on the job and lost his life. Our brother Chris Wilson, who worked for Norfolk Southern, was critically injured in its Decatur rail yard Wednesday and died Thursday at Huntsville hospital according to the NTSB and Morgan County Coroner, Jeffrey Chung.”
On February 9, I got another email that read “Dear fellow railroad workers, on January 15, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in Ohio. A National Transportation Safety Board report released February 7 stated “On January 15, 2024, about 5:30am, an Ohio Central Railroad signal maintainer was found deceased by the crew of Wheeling and Lake Erie freight train 21815 on the main track of the Columbus and Ohio River Railroad, east of the new Rumley Road highway railroad gate crossing.”
On February 17, I got another email that began, “Dear fellow railroad workers,on February 13, a fellow rail worker was killed on the job in North Carolina. Brother Randall M Howell, 41, of allied Federation lodge 563 died following a road crossing incident in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. Brother Howell was a foreman on the T six system production gang, when he was struck by the ballast regulator”.
So why does this keep happening? Why are railroad workers across the country dying on the job? This is really serious. We need to talk about this. And the fact that you don’t hear about this unless you subscribe to Railroad Workers United newsletters is pretty infuriating, in my opinion, as someone who’s in the media. So we wanted to do our part to bring together this incredible panel of folks and talk about this seriously. And I want to start there, guys first, again, thank you so much for coming on the show. I know with your existing schedules just getting us all available at the same time was a feat in and of itself. But also because we’re talking about really important stuff here. And I really, really am excited to get to of break all this down with you guys and let folks know why this keeps happening, what dangers workers on the rails like yourself face every day, and what we can do to help and actually stop these needless worker deaths that are happening to our brothers and sisters on the railroad.
So I want to go around the table and ask if we could start with those three stories that I mentioned in the introduction. I know there have been more. I think I got another rail fatality alert from Railroad Workers United yesterday while we were preparing to do this episode. But I want to at least lift up and honor the lives lost in those three rail fatality alerts that I mentioned. And so I wanted to ask if we could first just go around the table and if we could offer listeners more information about this. What happened? Who were these workers? What were the conditions that led to their deaths?
Matt Weaver:I can give some insight into Randall Howell. H was on a tie gang and he was a foreman. They were at a crossing. There was a flagman on each side of the crossing for directing traffic or stopping traffic. And a servicing team was coming through. A ballast regulator went for a forward motion through the crossing, and came back and dropped the wings of the regulator, I believe. Brother Howell was caught by a wing of the regulator. It’s unforgiving. It was broad daylight. I notified the crew they laid on the horn and said someone just got hit. I can’t speculate on what happened. I have a feeling they’ll blame the dead guy. It’s always ‘blame the worker’ in the rail industry. And well, we’ll learn more but again, it’s an unforgiving industry and with often a lack of manpower. Cutting forces to provide for the business model of precision schedule railroading. We’re trying to do more with less. But often enough, it seems like we’re doing less with less because there’s less freight moving on American railroads than there was perhaps 10 years ago. That’s my insight into that one incident.
Mark Burrows: When these incidents happen, it’s hard to get the actual circumstances of what happened in real time, with the exception of a big incident like East Palestine where we were kind of getting periodic updates from the National Transportation Safety Board. But generally, after they do their investigation, maybe a year and a half later, there will be something on their website. So for instance, the brother who was killed with a cut of 30 cars that hit his engine, without knowing all the details, I think it’s fair to say that speed-up in one way, shape, or form or combination of manifestations, is the common thread. Like Matt was saying, more with less, more production, faster, faster, faster, less workers, pressurised, time sensitivity. They’ve cut back on the training. So the short answer for me is, speed-up is without a doubt, the common thread through all of these incidents. Speed-up is everywhere, in all industries– in Amazon– the victims of speed-up will get repetitive motion injuries and serious back injuries. But on the railroad, the victims of speed-up can get maimed or killed. And then the worst case scenario is incidents like Lac-Mégantic and East Palestine where communities are obliterated.
Nick Wurst: One thing I’ll just add on the situation, I’ve never worked as a signal maintainer, but for the engineer who lost his life in the yard, some of these rail yards can be multiple square miles with multiple jobs working with remote control engines. And these can be countless tracks, where cars are being pumped down into the yard using gravity free rolling, with all the cutbacks, like everybody’s mentioned, it’s also a cut back on the number of people who just have their eyes on the operation at any given time. And in a lot of these cases, it’s sort of impossible to be in a truly safe position. Even if you’re in the clear of tracks, cars pick a switch, and then it doesn’t matter, or bad rail gives out, especially in some of these smaller and less maintained yards. So just, it’s impossible. The cutbacks in safety and training were mentioned and that’s obviously a big factor. And the other thing is, there’s so much about railroading that’s inherently sort of dangerous and can’t be proofed with rules. They try to make it so that if you follow any of these 20 bajillion rules at any given time things won’t happen. But inevitably, something does because at the end of the day, you’re dealing with multiple 100 tons of free rolling cars and physics.
Ross Grooters: I think my brothers are exactly right. The through thread for these three deaths and every other death on the railroad is this demand for speed-up. It is doing more work with fewer workers, faster. The root cause is the economics of it. The railroads have placed a dollar value on our lives, and they’re willing to roll those dice in order to make billions and billions of dollars in profit. And as we’ve seen this speed-up occur more through precision scheduled railroading, which is an operating model to maximize that shareholder value and push those profits. We’ve seen less and less focus on safety and more and more focus on that speed-up and that pushed production. And it’s not just the workers on the railroad who are affected, it is also the public, as we’ve seen with the high profile incidents like last February in East Palestine, Ohio.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well let’s dig into that. Because for folks who listen to this show I think we’ve had enough interviews with railroad workers that I think they get the gist of more the basics than your average podcast listener and I have you guys at Railroad Workers United to thank for that. So we can assume that there’s going to be like some background knowledge here from our listeners about how the industry itself has been changing over recent years and decades, the rise of precision scheduled railroading, the corporate consolidation that’s been going on on the railroads for years to the point that we’ve gone from over 40 different rail carriers down to a handful that have just like incredible oligopolistic power over our supply chain.
And as we saw with the high stakes contract negotiation that y’all were embroiled in two years ago, culminating in Congress and scab Joe Biden and everyone else in Washington DC just like gleefully conspiring to shove a contract down workers throats, and give the rail carriers everything they want. Basically, tacitly and explicitly telling the rail carriers, “Hey, keep doing what you’re doing, because we’re not going to stop you.” That’s what we have been covering extensively on the show, at The Real News on Breaking Points for years now. So I don’t want to make y’all go over all of that again. But I do want to sort of talk about how those changes affect the safety and of working on the railroads.
Because, Nick, you mentioned something that really stuck in my ear, about how at a certain point there is no way to make this job completely safe. It’s like with football, you’re never gonna be able to make football completely safe even if you have great helmets. It’s a sport premised on violence. And as railroad workers, y’all have been telling me for years, these trains are incredibly heavy. I mean, they are incredibly dangerous, and you as a human being are the softest squishiest thing in that rail yard. And you were no match for a massive locomotive or anything like that. So I want to sort of talk about those two sides of this.
If we can go around the table and just talk more about, what do you think folks who don’t work on the railroads don’t understand about just the inherent dangers that you face doing this work regardless? What are the sorts of pressures and dangers and safety measures that you as railroaders just have to work with on a day to day basis given the nature of the work that you do. But then also, let’s talk about how those things have changed over the course of recent years as the precision schedule railroading and this Wall Street-minded mentality has totally taken over the industry, turned it into a profit generating machine for the executives and the shareholders, like Ross was saying, cutting the workforce so they’re piling more work onto fewer workers, making the trains longer, heavier, yada, yada, yada. So let’s talk about that. Let’s go back around the table. Mark, I’m gonna throw it back to you. But yeah, then everyone else just please hop in after he’s done.
Mark Burrows: Well first, I believe that railroading can be done safe. I mean, yes, under current conditions it is going to work like a potential death trap on a good day. But if the profit motive was taken out of the equation, and the whole priority was to move the nation’s freight safely, so that workers are not compromised, so that the public is not compromised, and so that the freight itself is not compromised, that can be a whole nother discussion, it can be done. That’d be a major paradigm shift, but it can be done. So I just kind of wanted to make that point. And I just want to throw in that precision scheduled railroading gets a lot of attention, and rightfully so. But it’s also just kind of like an oxymoron marketing term for a business model. The speed-up began decades ago. And I can trace it back to the mid-80s. And then precision scheduled railroading in the last 10 plus years has just escalated the speed-up on steroids. I’ll just leave it there for now.
Nick Wurst: I want to just start by agreeing with Mark that railroading can be done safely. But that means safety has to be the number one priority over everything else. And that’s not the case with these railroads. And even providing quality service is not the top priority. Making it look like they’re providing quality service is the top priority. I think there’s a lot to talk about. And one of the things I want to give a little bit of perspective on is, I’m the youngest in terms of seniority, in terms of time on the railroad out of all of us by a significant margin, I think, so one of the things that’s really hammered home to me is there has been an exodus of talent and experience from the rank-and-file of the railroads.
The number of talented, experienced railroaders who knew how to do the job well and safely has been driven down. They’ve been driven out of the industry over recent decades. And what happened was at a certain point, the railroads cut so much, they cut so many jobs and drove out so many talented people, I’m not talking management here, they started trying to fill the gaps with mass hiring new people. I’m one of those people. And every day is a constant reminder of how little I know, and working with some of the people that I do work with is a constant reminder of how much they know and how much that’s not getting passed down. When I went to conductor training, I had four weeks of training at school. Three of those weeks were in the classroom learning rules. One week was doing anything outside, making hitches, throwing switches.
I mean, there’s a reason for rules. I don’t want to suggest that the rules are unimportant. But in terms of hands on work, you got one week, and then when I went to training on the job in my area, when I got back home, some jobs I got maybe a week off. When I started talking with more experienced engineers and conductors, they talked about the fact that most of them, their entry point was as a brakeman where for years they made hitches, threw switches as part of a three man crew. There’s this contradiction of the conductor is now the entry point level for train crew. This is where you start, and also the employee who’s technically in charge of the job. You are in charge of all the paperwork, the hazmat material and everything like that, and you’re the employee who’s on the ground actually making the hitches and everything like that.
When people spent years training as brakemen under conductors, they learned how to do the outside work, making hitches and throwing switches safely and efficiently. They spent years learning how to keep themselves alive and safe before they ever worried about running a job. But now, there’s no more brakemen for the most part. And you start as a conductor. You’re thrown in. You’re running the job, and you’re doing everything else. And so I think that’s one thing. That’s obviously a factor here is that driving out experienced people and trying to mass replace with new people and just chewing through them until they find a few who stick and hopefully make it to becoming sort of experienced employees. There’s of couple other things I could say but I don’t want to take up too much time.
Ross Grooters: I think Nick’s exactly right. I work on a yard job where the age of experience is a year or less right now to hold that job. And it is somebody that’s trying to learn the job and be safe while they’re being asked to perform at an extremely high level and produce. And it’s unrealistic, right? Anytime we see one of these fatalities, what’s happened is layers of protection have been removed. And Nick’s exactly right. You used to have somebody that you were working with an extra set of eyes to be able to tell you to pull your head out of your ass, “You’re doing it wrong,” right? Like, here’s how you do this safely and not get yourself in a bind. So, we’ve got these layers of protection that have just been yanked from the industry and they no longer exist. Well, without those layers of protection to prevent those fatalities, we’re going to see more and more fatalities, or more and more injuries, and more and more incidents on the railroads. And until we back off from that push to production being the sole motive, we’re not going to have a safe work environment. I think, Nick, you said this. I think Mark, you said this. For us to have a safe work environment, it’s got to be the top priority.
Matt Weaver: I’ve listened to my brothers talk and I’ve written down some numbers. One of the big ones to me is that I’ve buried 11 of my co-workers that I actually worked with within 100 miles of my home in the last 30 years. Seven of them had non-Hodgkin lymphoma, two had esophageal cancer, and only three of those guys got to retire. It’s pretty shocking. I heard, and it was only a rumor back then when I was hired in, that maintenance people only live 19 months after retirement at 62. We’ve gone to 60 now, so maybe it’s a little better, but it’s pretty frustrating. Max had said something about 40 or 50 railroads. The numbers I saw was that in 1900 there were 132 class one railroads. Today there are six. It’s like the Monopoly board 101. There’s four on the board, well, we’re at six now. But yeah, here’s monopoly. And the price adjustments come in twos and they demarket so they hesitate to favor less profitable shippers, that kind of thing. Another thing, the number that I saw is lots of railroads are shooting for a 55 percent operating ratio. That’s their goal under PSR. I’m under the impression that McDonald’s or Burger King are shooting for like 80 percent or 90 percent. So the profit margins are astounding. Record profits are lost wages or record profits are the cause of inflation, however you want to look at it. But the whole nation is suffering because of the industry’s cutthroat business model. And like I said before in the interview, I sometimes worry about saying things like that and getting fired again, but got to call him out. There’s no reason that the industry should have so many lobbyists and so much money going to finance politicians campaigns. And America in general is suffering but real labor is suffering far worse at this moment.
Maximillian Alvarez: Right. You guys have heard the cost of this. You have heard the voices of railroad workers themselves, like the folks on this call. But you have also heard other railroad workers on the show. And you have heard time and again, the voices of residents of East Palestine. You have heard on the show, what folks like Chris and Jessica Albright are going through, what Darren and Stella Gamble are going through. You have heard the pain that has been inflicted on this community that did nothing to deserve it. But they are the ones paying the price for corporate greed. East Palestine was an avoidable catastrophe.
And like that’s kind of the point that we’re trying to make here. You could look at something like that and say, well, no East Palestine happened because of a faulty bearing. So that’s what caused it. Or you can say, well, why didn’t anyone catch that in time? Why weren’t car men given more time to inspect that bad car and take it off the rails? Why weren’t the signals being relayed from the hotbox detectors, relayed to the people on the crew sooner? There’s so many questions like that.
Like Ross was saying, the layers of protection that have been removed over the course of this industry change. That’s what, that’s how these things stack up. And so if something does go wrong, you have removed so many of the safeguards that are there to prevent that thing from turning into something going wrong to something going catastrophically wrong for the workers on the rails and for our own communities like East Palestinian. Those are the stakes of what we’re talking about here.
Matt Weaver: Along the lines of those safeguards, so back to the numbers, after World War I, there were 2.1 million members of real labor, 2.1 million railroaders. At the end of the last round of bargaining in 2022, there were 117,500. So, of course, there’s technology, of course, there’s paperwork and machinery, but if anyone is out there working alone, no one’s got your back. If anyone is out there taking a call by themselves, who’s going to call 911. We’re facing this scenario where back to the ages of: we build a bridge, and for every million dollars worth of bridge, we’re allowed to have five deaths. What’s the value of life in this industry? It’s very frustrating.
Ross Grooters: So in Iowa alone, in my career, I went back and looked and 15 railroad workers have lost their lives on the job, including two close personal co-workers of mine. Fifteen in 20 years, and that’s just in one state in the nation. These are all preventable. And in all of our careers, we’ve seen far too many of our union brothers and sisters who’ve lost their lives as victims of corporate greed. And it’s really up to us to fight that they’re not just remembered, but their deaths aren’t in vain, that we’re doing things to correct it. We’re fixing the hazards and not continuing to blame the victims as Railroad Workers United would put it.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that’s really powerfully put. And so I know, Matt, you mentioned the contract negotiations, and that’s where I want us to head here in the final turn. But before we get there, I wanted to pause on on something else that you said about when you’re getting called on to do a job by yourself, and you don’t have anyone watching your back, like I mean, my heart broke reading one of the rail fatality alerts from Railroad Workers United, hearing about this brother on the Ohio Central Railroad, the signal maintainer, who was literally found dead by another crew. Like imagine being in that man’s family, and that is how your loved one was discovered. He went out for work one day. His employer sent him out, it sounds like on a call on his own, gets killed, and his body’s just sitting there waiting to be found. That is not how you treat people. He deserved better than that. This is unacceptable on so many levels.
And I don’t want to ask this question by way of like, it’s a gory details question. I just wanted to ask for folks who are listening to this, what are the types of injuries or potentially fatal injuries that one could sustain working on the railroads, especially as those layers of protection are stripped away. Are folks most worried about getting struck by something? What sides of the job are made more dangerous because of these speed-ups and because of these staff cuts, so on and so forth?
Mark Burrows: I’m sure this is not all inclusive, but off the top of my head, like Nick had said, one loaded car of coal or something can be over 120 tons. So one wrong move, whether it’s a car that ends up being where it’s not supposed to be or something that happens that is not supposed to happen, you can just instantly get crushed. You can have a limb severed. It is just a dangerous environment from the moment you walk in on the job to the moment you’re able to leave in one piece. Like I said, it’s not all inclusive. And then add in being fatigued, working on a 24 hour extraboard, being on call 24/7, going to work on two hours’ notice and you may not have slept for a day and a half. And then other people around you are improperly trained. I’ll leave it there.
Nick Wurst: Going sort of off the top of my head, when I started on the railroad, I actually didn’t start as train crew, I started working in an intermodal yard. And there was a carman, at the time, he’s retired, who liked driving around and showing us all of the missing fingertips he had. I saw a co-worker take gladhands, the airhoses from the hostler truck, came through the back door, hit him in the face, he had to get reconstructive surgery and everything like that.
One of the things that I think is really scary to me, we hear a lot about horror stories where people are sort of killed through impacts or losing limbs or things like that, but there’s the story that came out, I think in 2022, about the brother who died on the job of a heart condition that he had basically delayed going to the doctor for for a long time because he could never manage to keep any of his doctor’s appointments. And that’s something that really gets me is, yeah, I mean, there’s a certain amount of danger and you sort of accept a certain amount of risk when you go to work, but the idea that there can be all of these things building up because of the conditions we work in, all the medical research about what lack of sleep does to people, I used to and still occasionally have nightmares that I’m at work, and it wakes me up in the middle of trying to sleep between shifts, and you start to wonder, how’s my heart doing with all the caffeine that I’m constantly pounding and trying to stay awake and not sleeping? I think I could handle it better if I got killed by being hit by a train or something. But if I just dropped dead in the seat in the cab one day, you know, show up to work, you look fine, and then die part way through your shift from, I don’t know, my heart giving out or something like that, that that one messes with me a lot.
Maximillian Alvarez: That story always stuck with me too. And I believe we’re thinking of the brother Aaron Hiles who Lauren Kaori Gurley reported on for The Washington Post during the high stakes contract fight, and I really really appreciate Lauren for doing that. And that story really broke my heart as well. There’s so much more to talk about here, but I want us to finish on the question of what can be done. The clock is ticking, like I said. By the time we were all doing our interviews together, that was in 2022, we were years into the contract negotiations at that point. By the time that whole mess was resolved, quote, unquote, we were closer to the next contract bargaining period than we were the beginning of the current one that we were in. So 2025 is going to be a chance to really take the fight back to the carriers.
And this is also something I want to impress upon people listening because for so much of that fight, as we got closer and closer to potentially seeing a national rail strike or rail lockout in this country for the first time in a generation, a lot of folks were asking, what can I do? What can we even really do at this point? We don’t work on the rails. It feels like the process is so far out of our reach that we don’t know what to do. So I want to ask, okay, we’re here. It’s 2024, we are looking ahead to the next contract bargaining session, we’ve got much more of the public informed about these issues than we did before, what is currently happening? What are the unions doing? What is RWU doing? Is there anything on the legislative side being done to help stop these conditions that we’ve been talking about for the past hour that are making this work increasingly dangerous for workers like yourselves? And what can folks listening out there do to help?
Mark Burrows: On the legislative side, we know all these politicians after East Palestine had this life changing epiphany that there were some safety issues in the railroad industry. It wouldn’t have been such an epiphany if they’d been reading The Highball and went and signed up for our newsletter, but they proposed the Rail Safety Act, which was very watered down and full of loopholes. But there are a few potentially positive things there. And they can’t even get that done. As weak as it is, they can’t even get that done. That’s part of the overall political problem in this country. What happened to us is just part of the political dysfunction, for lack of a better term.
As far as the unions, one of the things, like Matt pointed out, we’re calling for a real united bargaining coalition that doesn’t cut and run with the first proposal and that no one settles until everyone settles. Railroad workers need to find a way to strengthen our union so that we can more effectively fight and a united bargaining coalition is an important part of it.
And then the public can learn about us and our issues, back us when possible, let your representatives know how you feel, that you support our demands for a safe workplace and a safe working environment, again, which the public has a vested stake in. And then go to our website at railroadworkersunited.org and learn about our call for public ownership. It may seem far-fetched and a pipe dream today, but all movements for social justice started out with an idea and a vision. And that’s one way to get the profit motive out of the equation. And I’ll just leave it there for now.
Nick Wurst: We’ve just passed a resolution that should be going out to the public soon. We’re calling for all of those within rail labor who are interested in trying to have a real fighting approach to the upcoming round of negotiations, to get together and start to discuss what that means. As much as railroad labor likes to pretend that we’re special or we’re different somehow and that we’re insulated from the others, we’re part of the bigger labor movement. And I think we’re seeing some examples of what some relatively militant fightbacks look like, and that they can get results. And so I think that’s obviously the big thing.
And I think Matt mentioned the numbers in terms of the decline of members, but that’s not just direct job cuts, that’s also increases in things like outsourcing and subcontracting to non-union companies. The fact that that decline in our membership has happened, even the recent declines in recent decades, I think it’s criminal, to be totally honest. And I think that we need that real fightback.
So what can the public do? I think people who are in the labor movement have a vested interest in every other union and every other worker’s fight as well. Like Mark was saying, what’s happening to us at any given time is the same as what’s happening in every industry. The same way that we in RWU are trying to put pressure on our unions to fight back, other people can do that as well. And I think one thing, if it comes to it, if it comes to picket lines, if it comes to rallies, if it comes to practice pickets, the numbers that Matt gave makes it pretty clear that we need reinforcements. We need backup. Our picket line plans in my area were looking pretty sparse if it had gone down to the last time.
And I think the last thing I’ll mention, Ross used a really excellent phrase earlier of layers of protection. And I do think that there needs to be a reckoning with the Railway Labor Act, which is the labor law that allowed Biden and Congress to force a contract on us. And I think it’s interesting that one of the other big labor battles going on this year is the flight attendants. The airlines are also under the Railway Labor Act. But when it comes down to it, taking job action, removing ourselves from a dangerous, deadly, unacceptable, work environment and refusing to go back until it’s rectified, that’s the ultimate last line of defense. That’s the last layer of protection. And the RLA makes it so that we don’t have that. I mean, when you really break it down, what it does is it gives these legislators, who have never worked out for the railroad, the ability to order us back into a fundamentally unsafe, unlivable situation. So, I know it’s a bit of a long shot, but while we’re talking about legislation, I don’t think it’s just safety legislation that we need to start thinking about. I think we also need to take a good hard look at the Railway Labor Act.
Matt Weaver: And unfortunately, that scenario leads the railroads into a position where they don’t have to bargain in good faith because they know that Congress will stuff an agreement up our asses. And so railroads don’t come to the table in good faith. Right now we have on-property agreements going on all over the place. I heard last week that the railroads want all on-property agreements to be decided by July 1. We’ll see how that goes. But the bargaining, Max, begins in November with Section six notices. In November, section six notices come out. What we want to change, and many of the crafts have done questionnaires and that kind of stuff to see what the guys want, but if we have a real labor bargaining coalition all together, you know, one for all and all for one, then we can speak as one voice. I was very impressed by being under the AFL-CIO TGD umbrella at the end of bargaining. And actually, I think we did okay, except that there were no sick days and they wouldn’t deal with attendance policies. So that was it. We still have a sequester of real labor of RRB, Railroad Retirement Board, sick pay and unemployment, which has gone on for over a decade. We’re losing money for sick pay and unemployment because Congress unjustly sequestered our pay even though RRB doesn’t affect the national budget. We’ve got bills up, we got bills down, we got more bills in, and they want to address it. Public servants? Come on, I don’t think so. I’m very disappointed in much of Congress right now, because they’re not taking care of the constituents and seem to be taking care of the people who finance their campaigns. Last point was, and it’s a big one, along the lines of what Mark said, if we can’t trust our regulators to regulate, perhaps we need to have nationalization of the railroads. If we can’t make things safe with regulation, maybe we don’t need the rail industry to be a for-profit industry. There’s lots of ins and outs in that and it’s a very touchy scenario, and I was a bit against it for the first few years of RWU talking about it. But, we’re getting nowhere. The STB did nothing. The FRA seems to be doing very little, and our members are dying because nothing is happening. It’s time to step up and take care of the people of this country.
Ross Grooters: Railroads are making billions of dollars and they’re doing so on the backs of workers and the public. It’s an outright theft. And the costs are externalized. We’re the ones that face the potential loss of our lives. The public are the ones that face the potential loss of their lives, livelihoods, and homes. This theft has to stop. railroadworkersunited.org, you can check out all our information about supporting a public ownership campaign. I can’t think of a better way to scare the shit out of the railroads.
And when it comes to bargaining, my brothers Mark, Matt, and Nick all hit the nail on the head, but one thing that stands out to me is that we need to be a bigger part of the labor movement as a whole. And we saw United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain lay down a gauntlet and say May 1, 2028, labor needs to come together and set that date to organize towards a general strike. And rail labor needs to step up and be a part of that. So hopefully people can make rail labor leaders aware of that and say, you need to be a part of this part of this.
Maximillian Alvarez: Alright gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank our amazing guests, Mark Burrows, Ross Grooters, Nick Wurst, Matt Weaver. And I want to give one more big shout out to Railroad Workers United and all the great work that they do. Go check them out. Go follow them and subscribe to their newsletter. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening. And I want to thank you for caring about this stuff. We will see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then you know what you gotta do, go subscribe to our Patreon and check out all the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there waiting for you and our patrons. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network. If you like the work we do here at Working People, you’re going to love the work that we’re doing across The Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The European Parliament and the European Union Council on Tuesday reached an provisional agreement that outlines new rules banning products made with forced labor.
But an expert told Radio Free Asia the rules would be hard to enforce in Xinjiang – where thousands of Uyghurs are engaged in forced labor – because it places the burden of proof on the EU rather than on China or Chinese companies.
Since 2017, China has imprisoned an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in “re-education camps,” where they receive training in various skills and are forced to work in factories making everything from chemicals and clothing to car parts. China says they are vocational training facilities, and that they have since been shut down.
Camp survivors and witnesses state the Uyghurs faced intense political indoctrination, abuse, rape, torture and even death in the camps.
Western companies have come under pressure to withdraw from their operations in Xinjiang. Last month, German chemical maker BASF said it was pulling out of its joint ventures in the region, and car company Volkswagen says it is reviewing its operations there.
The bill – which needs to be approved by the European Parliament – says that the national authorities or the EU Commission will “investigate suspected use of forced labor in companies’ supply chains,” an EU parliament press release said.
“If the investigation concludes that forced labor has been used, the authorities can demand that relevant goods be withdrawn from the EU market and online marketplaces, and confiscated at the borders,” it reads.
According to the EU agreement, goods found to have been produced by forced labor would be donated, recycled or destroyed.
“This law is ground breaking in the field of human rights. It will prevent forced labor products from entering our market,” said Samira Rafaela, co-rapporteur from the Netherlands. “To combat forced and state-imposed labor, we must work with like-minded partners and become a strong ally in the global fight against forced labor.”
Forced labor has been a reality for too long, said co-rapporteur Maria-Manuel Leitão-Marques of Portugal.
There were an estimated 27.6 million people affected by it in 2021, mostly in the private sector, but also victims of state-sponsored forced labor, she said.
“The deal we reached today will assure the EU has an instrument to ban products made with forced labor from the Union market as well as to tackle various forms of forced labor, including when it is imposed by a state.”
Questionable effectiveness
But the proposed law is weaker than the U.S. Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, or UFLPA, said Adrian Zenz, a senior fellow and director in China Studies at the Washington-based Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.
Because it relies on the EU Commission to investigate forced labor, its effectiveness in banning Uyghur forced labor would be questionable, Zenz said.
“And that means that the European Commission would have to somehow investigate the presence of Uyghur forced labor, which is not possible,” said Zenz. ”Contrary to the American Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, [the EU] did not reverse the burden of proof because the European Council refused that.”
In September, three firms were blacklisted under the UFLPA, bringing total banned firms to 27.
Even in cases where the EU is able to determine that goods were made by slave labor, the EU agreement would be less effective than the UFLPA, Zenz said.
“The AmericanUFLPA can immediately seize goods, stop them from entering, whereas in the European case when an investigation is open, the goods can continue to flow into Europe,” he said.
“I think it's disappointing that the law was not made stronger to counter Uyghur forced labor,” he said. “And this is due to, I think, a lack of understanding the nature of state imposed forced labor.”
Zenz said that the EU member states may also fear economic ramifications of strongly countering forced labor. “They're focused on other interests than on trying to systematically combat the situation in Xinjiang.”
Edited by Eugene Whong and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By RFA Uyghur.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Private equity firms are buying up the US economy and stripping it for parts. From healthcare to education, utilities, and more, massive firms like Blackstone and the Carlyle Group have acquired vast holdings across critical industries essential to the health and well-being of everyday people. Instead of seeking to make these ventures more profitable, private equity firms are more likely to orchestrate to bleed their assets for short-term gains—even if those assets are univerisites, hospitals, or nursing homes. Gretchen Morgensen, author of These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America, returns to The Chris Hedges Report to discuss how private equity came to hold America hostage. This is the second part of an earlier interview, you can watch the first part here.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Chris Hedges: The US economy is being held hostage by a small cohort of financiers who run private equity firms. Apollo, Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts; These equity firms buy up and plunder businesses, piling on debt, refusing to reinvest, slashing staff, and often driving companies into bankruptcy. The object is not to sustain businesses but to harvest them for assets to make a short-term profit. Those who run these firms such as Leon Black, Henry Kravis, Stephen Schwarzman, and David Rubenstein have amassed personal fortunes in the billions of dollars.
The wreckage they orchestrate is taken out on workers who lose jobs, see salaries and benefits slashed, are taken out on pension funds that are depleted because of usurious fees, or are abolished. And on our health and safety, residents of nursing homes, for example, owned by private equity firms, experience 10% more deaths because of staffing shortages and reduced compliance with standards of care.
Private equity owns hospitals and has created a health crisis. Nursing shortages have contributed to one of every four unexpected hospital deaths or injuries caused by errors. The private equity firms do not serve patients but profits. They have closed hospitals, especially in rural America, and they cut back on stockpiles of vital medical devices including ventilators and personal protective equipment. In 1975, the US had about 1.5 million hospital beds and a population of about 216 million people. Now, with a population of over 330 million people, we have around 925,000 beds. 56% of Americans have medical debt, even though many have insurance, and 23% owe $10,000 or more.
Emergency room visits and emergency rooms, often run by private equity firms, contributed to medical debt for 44% of Americans. At the same time, the healthcare system – Because of this slash-and-burn assault – Was unprepared to handle the COVID epidemic, seeing 330,000 Americans die during the pandemic because they could not afford to go to a doctor on time. These private equity firms, like an invasive species, are ubiquitous. They have acquired educational institutions, utility companies, and retail chains while bleeding taxpayers hundreds of billions in subsidies made possible by bought-and-paid-for prosecutors, politicians, and regulators.
Joining me to discuss private equity firms and their assault on the economy is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Gretchen Morgenson, who – Along with Joshua Rosner – Wrote, These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs and Wrecks America. Let’s begin with what they are. They’ve just rebranded themselves, but I’ll let you start.
Gretchen Morgenson: Well, Chris, these are the old takeover titans that we started to learn about in the ’80s, RJR Nabisco was the big deal that focused everyone’s attention on them. They just rebranded themselves into something called private equity. A little bit genteel, sounds like it might be fair – equity being that word. So these are those corporate raiders that were fearsome, and Congress, at that time, was concerned about what they were going to do to the economy. Congress lost interest and went on to the next thing, and they did then go on to – Over the next few decades – Pillage the economy and workers and pensions, as you pointed out.
Chris Hedges: Explain how they work. Because it’s all about debt. And what’s interesting from your book, is they don’t put very much money in. But I’ll let you explain the mechanics of it.
Gretchen Morgenson: Okay. These firms, first of all, raise money for their buyouts. They don’t use a lot of their own money for those buyouts. What they do is they go to public pensions, they go to endowments, they go to the big institutional investors and say, we’re putting together a fund, we’re going to buy-out companies, we’re going to make them more efficient, and then we’re going to sell them in 5-7 years at a profit, and you will be able to reap those gains along with us. But yes, the private equity titans do not put a lot of their own money at stake here. 1%-2% of these funds are typically the private equity firm’s money. So after they have raised the money, they go out and look for companies to buy, and they home-in on companies that have assets they can strip.
Chris Hedges: These are often physical assets that they can sell.
Gretchen Morgenson: Physical assets like real estate. Now, you pointed out that they’ve taken over a lot of retailers. When that was going on, often they would be buying retailers that had either very, very favorable leases or had land underneath their stores that they could then sell at a profit, stripping the company. It’s not about operating the company, as you say, it’s about stripping the assets, extracting the money that they can from it. It’s an extraction business.
So they buy a company, they then find out how they can make it more efficient, which means, usually, firing many people, stripping the assets, selling them off, and sometimes they sell the assets and they get all their money back – Initially, very, very early on in the process – And what’s left is a carcass. What’s left is a company that has now got an enormous amount of debt piled on top of it.
These transactions are funded by debt, but it’s not the private equity firm that takes on the debt, it’s the company they’re buying. So if they buy a retailer, they’ll put a load of debt on that retailer. Suddenly that retailer has way higher costs of operating, which means that then they have to cut costs elsewhere: fire people, and deplete pensions. It’s a game where a very narrow slice of people win and a huge circle of pain of losers is involved. Everybody else is on the losing end.
Chris Hedges: Well, because it’s about short-term profit. You have an example in the book about a nursing home system – This was an amazing story. What they did is they sold the physical buildings that had the nursing homes, and then suddenly these nursing homes had to rent, I think it was $40,000 or something more a month. I’ll let you explain. So they’re not just loading it up with debt but also carrying out policies that physically destroy corporations or businesses before they arrive – You have the story of Samsonite, we’ll talk about the steel mill you write about – That we’re healthy.
Gretchen Morgenson: Absolutely. So the nursing home company that you were talking about, Manor Care, was very well run. The reason that the acquisition was made – And this was Carlyle Group, which is one of the top private equity firms –
Chris Hedges: Let me interrupt because as you point out in the book, like James Baker, they pull in heavyweight political figures once they’re out of office to run these groups.
Gretchen Morgenson: Unlike the other firms which are located in New York and are the Wall Street type folks, Carlyle is based in Washington and it’s much more politically astute and there’s a revolving door with government officials; Very high-powered government officials. Anyway, they bought Manor Care. It was a very well-established, well-run, national nursing home company. They immediately sold the land under the nursing homes and made the nursing homes pay rent.
They took out the equivalent of what they had put into the company. They received that when they sold the land. So they were free and clear. Everything after that became gravy for them, so they weren’t concerned about the profits; They were already in the money, as they say. But the nursing homes suddenly had to pay exorbitant rents and that meant that something else had to give.
Ultimately, what ended up happening was an enormous Medicare fraud that was designed to overcharge Medicare for services to these residents, and the stories are absolutely gut-wrenching. There were some whistleblowers who came forward talking about what they were seeing and the DOJ took the case, but then blew the case. But some of the tales that these whistleblowers told about forcing aged, frail, ill residents to go through an incredible rehabilitation that they didn’t need, in order to bill Medicare for these processes, was shocking.
Chris Hedges: You write about the ER. What are they called? Surprise bills? I can’t remember the term you use. They will hospitalize people who don’t need it. It’s all about money. And then the care is substandard because the staffing is cut.
Gretchen Morgenson: That’s right. That’s right. So ultimately, Manor Care was driven into bankruptcy by the people who bought it, but they didn’t lose because they had done this transaction to buy the land underneath all of the nursing homes.
Chris Hedges: You call these private equity firms – These are your words – “Money-spinning machines.” Before we go into specifics, talk about it. Because the amounts are staggering. Maybe we can talk about the charming, is it Leon Black? These people are bringing in these figures – Billions upon billions of dollars. Talk about the amount of money they’re generating.
Gretchen Morgenson: The net worths of the people running these companies are in the tens of billions. In the COVID years, Steve Schwarzman… He is the head of Blackstone. His net worth doubled during COVID, I think it went up to something like $35 billion or something. Anyway, these companies extract enormous fees for their operation. They extract fees from the pension funds that invest with them.
Chris Hedges: I want to interrupt you. The deal is they get the pension funds to invest because supposedly the pension funds will make a profit. But then as you write in the book, they force the pension funds to pay them management fees. You have cases in the book where they’re not even doing anything, but if I remember, they’re pulling like 10%, a lot of money. And these pension funds, in the end, don’t make a profit.
Gretchen Morgenson: Many times they don’t, sometimes they do. The rule of thumb is called “2 and 20.” So they’ll get 2% of the assets under management as a management fee every year, and then 20% of the gains that they make. So this has translated into a billionaire-making machine for these guys that run these firms. And yes, it’s staggering when you pull back the curtain on some of their practices.
One of them that’s outrageous is when they buy a company, they will often install people on the board of the company to watch over it to make sure that they’re going in the right direction. For them anyway, not for the company, necessarily. And they will charge them fees over a period of time for their management expertise. These fees are generally contracted on a 10-year life, but many of these deals they end up selling between 5-7 years.
That’s the goal, as you pointed out, the short-term nature of this. But the company has to pay for the full 10 years of the fees that the private equity firm is charging them. And that’s money for doing nothing. That’s just one of the tricks of the trade that they do to generate billions of dollars for themselves while they’re impoverishing so many other people.
Chris Hedges: You write that they operate in secrecy with hidden ties to companies they control. The wreckage they leave behind is often difficult to track back to its origins. And I want to raise another point that you do in the book and I thought it was important: Many Americans who are being assaulted this way, know something’s wrong, but they don’t quite know what is wrong. It’s tied to this, almost invisible, hand. Explain that. And then I want you to talk about their political clout because it’s significant. They get the tax breaks, they corrupt the system enough to essentially grease the skids for them to continue to operate.
Gretchen Morgenson: Absolutely. Absolutely. So the secrecy is important. One of the reasons that we wanted to write this book is to let people know how pervasive this business model is.
Chris Hedges: Well, you write at one point that all of us, although we don’t know it, are engaging with private equity firms. So talk about how extensive it is and then talk about that secrecy too.
Gretchen Morgenson: I write in the book, that the coffee and donut that you pick up on the way to work, the child care entity where you drop your son or daughter off, the nursing home where your mother or father lives, it is cradle to grave. You’re impacted by private equity but you don’t know it because these are companies that are buying and selling, but you don’t know who the real owner is behind the scenes. And they like it that way, they want to keep it that way because they operate best in secrecy. They’re private companies. They don’t have to make filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission so a lot of their business and a lot of their practices are hidden from view, and that is by design.
One of the things that could improve our perception or educate people about how pervasive private equity has become is to force these firms to identify themselves as the owners; So it should be the Carlyle nursing home or the Blackstone donut shop or whatever. Just so you are aware of who you are dealing with and whose pocket you’re putting your money into. Now, the secrecy is one thing, the political clout is immense. They have so much money, their tax treatment is an outrage, and many presidents have tried to change it, but have not been able to do so.
Chris Hedges: Explain the tax part.
Gretchen Morgenson: Their fortunes are enhanced by the fact that they pay a fraction of what you and I pay on our incomes every year because it’s called carried interest; It’s not considered ordinary income. The ordinary income tax rate is what, up to 35%? What these people pay is around 21% of the income that they receive from their operations. That’s something that’s been in the books for decades but it has created a skewed system where they make fortunes, billions of dollars. The government loses because they’re not generating the tax revenues that they should on those billions. It’s nuts. Now, the last time someone tried to change this, Kyrsten Sinema was a holdout, the –
Chris Hedges: Because it was good for the people of Arizona.
Gretchen Morgenson: – Lawmaker from Arizona. She received $1.5 million from the private equity world to stand up and say no, and she scotched it. So getting them to pay their fair share of taxes would be a good thing. It would help the government, it would generate more income, and it would take away this unfair aspect of their business.
Chris Hedges: You write, “Routinely lionized in the financial press for their dealmaking and lauded for their ‘charitable’ giving, these unbridled capitalists have mounted expensive lobbying campaigns to ensure continued enrichment from favorable tax laws. Hefty donations have won them positions of power on museum boards and think tanks. They’ve published books on leadership extolling ‘the importance of humility and humanity’ at the top while eviscerating those at the bottom. Their companies arrange for them to avoid paying taxes on the billions in gains that their stockholdings generate. And, of course, they rarely mention that the companies they own are among the largest beneficiaries of government investments in highways, railroads, and primary education, reaping massive perks from subsidies and tax policies that allow them to pay substantially lower rates on their earnings.
These men are America’s modern-age robber barons. But unlike many of their predecessors in the 19th century, who amassed stupefying riches by extracting a young nation’s natural resources, today’s barons mine their wealth from the poor and middle class through complex financial dealings.” These people not just control politicians, but they serve in government. You have several examples of that. So explain a little bit about how they dominate the political system.
Gretchen Morgenson: Jay Powell, our head of the Federal Reserve Board, was a Carlyle executive. They’re everywhere. Again, it’s this pervasiveness. But even if they’re not on the job, say, in the government, they are behind the scenes manipulating outcomes so that their businesses will benefit. They’re so powerful and so wealthy. And you know, Chris, better than anybody, how money is so central, unfortunately, to how our government works. You have not had enough attention to this wealth grab by these people.
The one thing we did have, the activity, the practices were so outrageous that it got Congress to act, and that was on the surprise medical bills that you mentioned a bit ago. This was a creation, the brainchild of a company called Envision, which is owned by KKR. And what Envision did was it went into emergency departments and started running many of those emergency departments in a hospital. It wouldn’t own the hospital, but it ran the emergency departments.
Envision decided that what they could do is they could make the emergency department a separate entity outside of the insurance coverage that the hospital’s patients would normally have. So you’re in your town, you go to the emergency department, you’ve broken your arm or whatever, your insurance – Which covers your normal hospital stay or treatment – You naturally assume it’s going to cover your emergency department bill.
Well, Envision carved themselves out of that so that you would have to pay more. And this was something that was so crazy and impossible to think could happen, that Congress did something about it and changed and curbed the practice. They didn’t eliminate them, but they curbed it. And guess what? Envision went bankrupt after that because its business model required them … Its business model was based on ripping people off.
Chris Hedges: I want to talk about several cases, including that heartbreaking case of the girl and woman who needs constant medical care, but people have to get the book. Let’s talk about, in detail, Noranda Aluminum.
Gretchen Morgenson: Noranda was a company that had a very profitable, very, very well-located aluminum smelter on the banks of the Mississippi River in the Bootheel region of Missouri. Not a wealthy part of the country, but this was a company, was a smelter aluminum production that had 2,500 jobs. Well-paying jobs, good benefits, healthcare, and the company had been there for many, many years. And this was a well-established smelter doing a tremendous business on the Mississippi. They could deliver their aluminum all up and down the country. Great company. Apollo comes in and buys it. And they promise –
Chris Hedges: Let me interrupt you.
Gretchen Morgenson: – Yes.
Chris Hedges: When a private equity firm like Apollo comes in to buy it, it’s not always the case that the company’s looking to sell. Is that correct?
Gretchen Morgenson: Well, the company has to be willing to sell.
Chris Hedges: But aren’t they able to pressure companies to sell against their will or not?
Gretchen Morgenson: Well, it depends. Usually, it’s about money. So if it’s a public company that has publicly traded shares and the shareholders are the ones who will then make the decision about whether the acquisition is made, generally what happens is that the shareholders say, great, I’m going to get a windfall. I’m going to get whatever premium to whatever the stock price was trading at when the acquirer comes in and says, I’ll pay you $10 more a share. Generally speaking, the shareholders say, yay. Let’s do it. Let’s do the deal.
When it’s a private company, you’re then talking about persuading whoever owns it that they are better off taking the money and running. But it’s almost always a premium they’re paying and that gets people’s attention and the owners or the shareholders say yes. So Apollo comes in, they buy the smelter, they promise that they’re going to do right by the 2,500 families whose workers are there, and they immediately load it up with debt. This was a company that did not have a lot of debt, so it didn’t have enormous interest costs. It didn’t have to pay those costs.
Chris Hedges: I want to ask… When they load it up with debt, did they say, okay, these are our assets, and put the assets… That’s how they can get the debt because they’re putting the assets up as collateral?
Gretchen Morgenson: Correct. So the asset is this smelter and this huge infrastructure. And they also had a very low cost of electricity.
Chris Hedges: Just to interrupt again, is that debt used to pay for the acquisition?
Gretchen Morgenson: Yes.
Chris Hedges: Yes.
Gretchen Morgenson: The debt is used to pay for the acquisition, but it again allows the private equity firm to take the money out. They’re loading the debt onto the company itself, not onto the private equity firm. So the company is the one that now has to struggle with the debt costs, the increased interest expense that’s associated with the debt. So Noranda, they load it up with debt. Almost immediately Apollo gets its money out. All of its money is out.
Chris Hedges: Which it wasn’t that much.
Gretchen Morgenson: Wasn’t that much. Maybe six months or something like that. They were able to extract all their money by putting the debt on the company. So now Noranda is struggling under this debt load. Apollo then raises more debt, they ultimately make three times their money on the Noranda purchase. Meanwhile, the company starts to struggle. Not surprisingly.
Chris Hedges: It goes under because it has to service the debt now.
Gretchen Morgenson: It starts to struggle because it has to service the debt. So then Apollo says, wow, this is a problem. We need to negotiate with the state of Missouri’s utility commission to lower our electricity costs or otherwise, we’re going to leave. We’re going to sell the company, take it somewhere else or something. So they negotiate with the utility commission a lower rate, even though it means that the other ratepayers in Missouri have to pick up the slack and have to cover that difference.
Apollo gets the lower rate, it then starts to fire people because it can’t make ends meet. The company is struggling again, the debt is too high, and there may have been an economic downturn. Aluminum wasn’t quite as in demand but it was the debt that was causing the problems. The company ultimately goes bankrupt, but Apollo has made three times its money. So people are thrown out of work. They savaged three different pensions. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation had to come in and bail out three Noranda pensions because of the bankruptcy.
They had ratepayers paying more across the state. Noranda was the biggest taxpayer in this small town in Missouri all of a sudden, the tax base crumbled, and the school teachers had to pay their own healthcare costs. What Noranda owed for the school payments, for its taxes, was not paid because they went bankrupt. So this was a perfect example of the circle of pain that these people create when they make all of the money for themselves. Three times their investment but they harmed ratepayers, they harmed school teachers and school children, they harmed workers, and they harmed pensioners. That’s what we’re talking about.
Chris Hedges: You write, “To outsiders, the buyout firms appeared to be fierce rivals competing assiduously to beat each other out for the companies they hope to acquire. In reality, the firms were cozy collaborators, members of a club that meant richer profits for them and fewer for everyday investors.” Explain how that works.
Gretchen Morgenson: This was an amazing case. It was brought by shareholders or maybe debt holders; I think it was shareholders. But anyway, they turned up some amazing documents in the discovery where they had emails between these big powerful firms that everyone thought were competing to buy companies, KKR, et cetera. The emails showed them to be very chummy. They would say, oh, well, we’ll stand back on this deal. We won’t do this deal. We’ll let you take this deal. You give us the next one.
So it became clear when you have this kind of acquisition, if you have more bidders – If you have two bidders, three bidders, five bidders – The people who own the company who are selling it are going to get a better price because those bidders are going to bid up the price of the company. If you only have one bidder, they’re not competing with anyone else and they’re not going to be raising the cost of the acquisition. So what happened was the shareholders ended up getting less because the other firms had decided not to compete and not to bid up the price.
It was collusion that people had not understood was happening on a regular basis, and it was shocking. They ended up paying a lot of money to settle the case. But it was a real eye-opener about how they are working together to make sure that they don’t have to pay too high a price and that there won’t be tough competition.
Chris Hedges: Isn’t that illegal? Sorry to be so naive.
Gretchen Morgenson: DOJ didn’t think so.
Chris Hedges: Oh, really?
Gretchen Morgenson: Did not bring a case.
Chris Hedges: Okay. I want to talk about utilities. I wrote a book called America the Farewell Tour, it opens in Scranton, Pennsylvania, which had declared bankruptcy, and they were stripping city parking, sewers, and anything they could sell off, which made things worse. It was a temporary fix but rates skyrocketed. You write about Bayonne; Talk about how they’re cannibalizing basic services that were once managed by cities, communities, and the government.
Gretchen Morgenson: You remember the idea that took hold in the ’80s about privatization; That the government doesn’t know how to run anything and we should privatize all of these organizations and services. The private sector knows what they’re doing and they’re going to do a better job – We know that that’s not the case, but in any case, these private equity firms do understand that there is money to be made buying into these kinds of utilities that are necessities. We are not talking about frivolous items, we’re talking about water.
So Bayonne, New Jersey, like many cities in the Northeast, had a decrepit water system. Pipes were bursting and needed help. Along comes KKR and they say, we’ll help you out. We’ll buy this, we’ll give the money to you that you need to refurbish. Let’s make that happen. They did the deal, you can well imagine that the people on the KKR side of the table were pretty shrewd operators, and the people on the water utility side of the table were probably not as shrewd.
What ended up happening was that for the people of Bayonne, New Jersey, which is a working-class town, not a wealthy town, their water rates skyrocketed. And again, it was a situation where this very small group of financiers wind up winning, gaining enormous amounts, and everyone else winds up paying the freight.
Chris Hedges: When you write “skyrocketed”… A 2021 report by the Association of Environmental Authorities, a public utility nonprofit, said “The average annual bill for privately-owned water systems in the US was 60% higher than that of publicly-owned systems. And in privatized arrangements, low-income households spent 1.55% more of their income on water.” So these rate hikes are staggering. They’re very, very high and crippling.
Gretchen Morgenson: Crippling. Crippling. And it’s not like you can say, okay, well, let’s not drink any water today. Let’s not use water to cook our food, wash our clothes, or do our dishes. It’s not a frivolous item.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the social cost. We’ve talked in a microcosm, but what’s it doing to the national economy? How is it affecting us globally?
Gretchen Morgenson: The first thing, and the most important 30,000-foot view, is it expands the wealth gap in this country, it blows that out. So people who are in the lower echelon, the disparity between the rich and poor in this country, is not healthy. It’s unsustainable.
Chris Hedges: Is it unsustainable because in essence, they’re cannibalizing everything?
Gretchen Morgenson: Well, it is unsustainable because you can’t keep extracting money from the middle class and poor people to become billionaires; That’s a recipe for disaster. Capitalism is supposed to, in theory, benefit a wide array of people. It’s supposed to provide prosperity for people to enhance their economic situation. Have a good job. Be able to –
Chris Hedges: But when it’s regulated.
Gretchen Morgenson: – When it’s regulated. Right.
Chris Hedges: When it’s not regulated… You have a term in the book, “a-hole capitalism.”
Gretchen Morgenson: Right. Right. Me, me, me. Right? I, me, mine, capitalism. Where I don’t care about everyone else. It’s all about what I want and what I can get for myself. So it’s the wealth gap in this country that has blown out and I believe these entities are contributing mightily to that. Then, when you get lower down, that’s the 30,000-foot view. When you get lower down, you have these situations where people are personally affected by this.
Whether it’s because the tax base in their town disappears because a company goes bankrupt – That means the taxpayers have to make up the difference – Whether you’re talking about a nursing home where people die more frequently, whether you’re talking about pensions that are depleted because of this, meaning your retirement is going to be less prosperous than you had hoped it would be; These are the stories that you don’t hear about Chris, and that’s why this is important to know.
All the business press lionizing these people and talking about their deals and how they’re this billion and that billion, you never hear about the people on the other side of the transaction. And that’s wrong because there are people on the other side of the transaction and their stories and their voices are important.
Chris Hedges: Well, that’s been the great failing. The failing of the presses, that we’re not telling those stories. Reading your book and seeing that line you have in the book about how people know something is wrong, but they don’t know what exactly is wrong, I read that as a huge factor in the rise of a figure like Trump. I don’t know how you feel.
Gretchen Morgenson: Yes, I agree 100%. They don’t understand finance. And yes, the financiers make it complex for a reason. They hide behind the complexity. They hide behind the secrecy. They hide behind the fact that you don’t know that they own the companies. I’m not blaming people for not understanding it, not knowing what the problem is, because it is hidden from view and they do that on purpose.
But it is pernicious and it is impacting people. It’s causing job losses, it’s causing reduced pensions, it’s causing increased costs for taxpayers, which all contribute to this sense of unease about my future. Am I going to have enough money to retire? Am I going to have enough money to send my child to college? There’s an unease going on that these people are contributing to.
Chris Hedges: You make a point in the book with the surprise bills from the emergency room. The average, if I remember it, was about $600 or something. Well, since they don’t know these bills are coming, these families living on the edge are completely wiped out. This has catastrophic effects and these predatory practices are bleeding, especially with the working, poor, and the lower working class, which you make very clear in the book.
And that has political consequences when it’s not addressed. And it’s largely not addressed because under our system of legalized bribery, in essence, these people own the political class. Not only own the political class but – Especially during the Trump administration – A lot of these private equity people were in the administration.
Gretchen Morgenson: Steve Schwarzman was at Trump’s right hand in many photographs. He was his business advisor. Financial expert.
Chris Hedges: One crook advising another. Great. All right, thanks. That was Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Gretchen Morgenson, author of These Are The Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs and Wrecks America. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team, Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Starbucks Workers United announced on Tuesday that it has reached a “significant” agreement with the company to take steps toward negotiating first contracts for unionized stores after union members say Starbucks has worked to obstruct and delay contract negotiations for over two years now. According to a seemingly joint statement released by both parties, the union and the company have agreed on...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
One year ago, graduate student-workers at Johns Hopkins University overwhelmingly voted to unionize under the banner of Teachers and Researchers United (TRU-UE), which is affiliated with United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers. While workers had much to celebrate with their historic union election victory, bargaining a first contract with the university administration has been another story. On February 20, fed up with what workers say have been disrespectful and insufficient offers from the university administration, TRU-UE members held practice pickets on campus to show the administration what’s in store if more progress is not made at the bargaining table soon. In this on-the-ground episode, we take you straight to the picket line to hear from worker-organizers about what they’re fighting for and what they’re asking supporters to do to help.
Speakers include: Janvi Madhani, TRU Bargaining Committee member pursuing a PhD in Physics and Astronomy; Lyla Atta, TRU organizer and MD-PhD candidate in Biomedical Engineering; Jeffrey Davis, Bargaining Committee member and grad worker studying Physics and Astronomy; Emily Hoppe, Contract Action Team Organizer, School of Nursing; and Zeke Cohen, Johns Hopkins alumnus and City Councilman for Baltimore City’s First District.
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Featured Music…
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Crowd: [Chanting] Union power!
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome, everyone, to this 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 with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and I am reporting from the Johns Hopkins University East Baltimore campus on Tuesday, February 20, where graduate student-workers are holding the first of two practice pickets today. As we previously reported at The Real News, it was a year ago that grad workers at Hopkins held, and overwhelmingly won, their union election, voting to unionize under the banner of Teachers and Researchers United which is affiliated with United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, or UE.
While workers celebrated their historic union victory, bargaining a first contract with the university administration has been another story. One year after their election victory, we are here because workers feel they are hitting a dead end at the bargaining table. So they are hitting the streets, putting on practice picket lines to build a credible strike threat, and to show the university administration what is in store if more progress is not made at the bargaining table soon.
Speaker 1:
It’s so great to see everyone here to start off our very first practice picket. Today, we are out here to show Hopkins a glimpse of what’s to come if they continue to stall at the marketing table.
Everyone out here has their own hopes for what a fair contract will bring us. Whether it’s wages, benefits, transit, protections against abusive advisors, or union shop, everyone has their own hopes for how our lives as graduate workers can and should be better. But we’re here because we know that when each of us tries to achieve these things alone, we’re met with obstacle after obstacle, told it’s simply not possible, and that what we want is unrealistic. But only together are we able to demand tangible improvements to our material conditions.
The administration strives on keeping us isolated, working alone, jumping through meaningless hoops, and navigating arbitrary university structures. For too long, we have tried to appeal to the goodwill of an institution that is fundamentally an exploitative and profit-maximizing hedge fund disguised as an educational institution. We unionize because we know that we will only win the working conditions we deserve together. And this is why we are out here today — We are here because we know the power of the collective and we are ready to use it. We’re here because we are sick of the hypocrisy of this institution.
Crowd:
Absolutely!
Speaker 1:
Hopkins, we are sick of your wellness emails when you won’t provide us with fair wages and benefits that mean we don’t have to spend more than 50% of our incomes on rent, that we don’t have to be afraid that an unexpected health emergency is going to put us into debt, that we don’t have to wait for weeks to access a mental health care provider, and that we don’t have to postpone having kids because childcare would cost our entire stipends and your supposed subsidized childcare has a two-year-long wait list.
We are here because we are sick of the hypocrisy at this institution. Hopkins, we are sick of hearing about how you are a leading public health institution when you refuse to provide evidence-based COVID protections that protect us and our community from an infection that is still killing and disabling thousands.
Crowd:
Shame! Shame!
Speaker 1:
We are sick of hearing about how you’re a leading public health institution when you continue to be complicit in a genocide where people are being killed not only with weapons that are developed from research at this institution, but also from hunger and disease that are easily cured while you remain silent.
Crowd:
[Cheering]
Speaker 1:
For too long we’ve been told that this university cares about us and is here to support us. But time and time again, the university fails to provide even the most basic protections for health and safety, protections against sexual assault and harassment, protections from unfair discipline and dismissal from abusive advisors.
Crowd:
Shame! Shame!
Speaker 1:
Time and time again, Hopkins has shown that the only thing it cares about is maintaining power and profiting off of our labor. So we are here today because we are demanding better.
Crowd:
[Cheering]
Speaker 1:
For the first time in the history of this institution, graduate workers have organized like never before. We have shown that when we are organized, we win. We know our power because we have seen it. After giving testimonials at the bargaining table, we won one of the strongest non-discrimination and grievance procedure articles of all of our peers. After making noise outside of the bargaining table on both campuses, we saw admin raise the stipend for the 40,000.
But that’s not enough. After admin heard from underpaid and overworked research workers, they agreed to guaranteed funding for up to three years in departments that previously had no guaranteed funding. At the leading public health institution, this is still not enough.
Crowd:
Not enough! Not enough!
Speaker 1:
After admin felt the strength of our opposition to the JHPD, we won unprecedented language that explicitly protects our right to gather here today in a labor demonstration without being subject to the violence of JHPD. We know our power because just last week when Hopkins heard that we were organizing for this picket, they immediately scheduled additional bargaining sessions. This is why we have to show Hopkins that thousands of us are united behind a fair contract and we won’t settle for less than what we’re worth.
Our demands are clear; We want union power. We want union power in the form of union shop, fair wages and benefits, and the recognition of our work as worth. But Hopkins continues to stall at the table. They continue to withhold union shop from us. They want to weaken our union by making sure we cannot build long-term union security. They continue to refuse protections against unfair discipline and discharge.
They have also explicitly told us at the table that they recognize our research output as a vital source of income for the university, but they will still not protect our research work in our contract. We cannot accept a contract in which the admin reserves the right to unfairly discipline and discharge us without due process because they do not believe our research is work.
Crowd:
Boo!
Speaker 1:
We unionized for 101 reasons, each one important enough to warrant a union on its own. But fundamentally, we unionized because this is class war and our bosses are working together to withhold our rights as a class because they are a class. The administration has all the money, they have all the power, and it’s in their interest to maintain this power imbalance because this is fundamentally a conflict between our labor and their capital.
And in this fight, what do we have? We have our labor. We run JHU. Our research and our teaching runs this university and we deserve dignified working conditions. The admin is terrified of us because they know just how much it would hurt the university if we were to withhold our labor. Because graduate workers are the lifeblood of academic institutions.
Crowd:
[Cheers]
Speaker 1:
Our labor is the reason this university claims prestige, and our labor is being exploited to line the pockets of admins with millions and record profits. But record profits are unpaid wages.
Crowd:
[Cheers] Yeah!
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:10:04]
Speaker 1:
But record profits are unpaid wages and we’ll not accept the continued exploitation of our labor. Not only are we here to leverage our labor for a fair contract, we are here to build real community power against extractive and predatory institutions like Hopkins. The same systems that exploit our labor are the same systems that disparage the city. Union power is community power.
I am honored to be standing here today surrounded by so many of our organizers, coworkers, community members, and other campus labor unions to show Hopkins that we are united, we are organized, and we are here to fight for the contract we deserve. We will do this again and again and bigger and louder and be more and more disruptive until we create a crisis so huge, they’re forced to realize that their fight is futile. When we’re organized and when we mobilize, we win. We will get fair wages and benefits. We will get protections from unfair discipline. We will get union shop. That’s by asking you this: What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Speaker 1:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Speaker 1:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Speaker 1:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
Thank you all.
Speaker 2:
Thank you all for coming out and making your voice heard. You’re one of the first batch of about 400 more people that are coming throughout the day. I believe the admin will feel this and feel pressure to give us a just and fair contract. I, and many of us at the bargaining committee, we’ve been fighting for the last nine months, fighting for a just and fair contract against our obstructionist and uncaring administration, and we will see them again at the bargaining table on Thursday.
We as the bargaining committee can make our best effort to move the admin in the room, but there is only so much that can be won at the bargaining table. Our power does not come from how eloquently we can tell some deans and lawyers in a conference room that we deserve a fair contract. There is no magic set of words that will suddenly convince the administration to abandon their cruelty and complete disregard for us as workers.
The only true leverage we have is threatening to collectively withhold our labor from this university. They refuse to acknowledge our value to this university and are acting as if our labor isn’t what drives this university. We have reached a point in the negotiations where the only way forward is to unequivocally show the administration that without us, this place grinds to a halt. We need to build a credible strike threat and make it so they can no longer be willfully ignorant of our power. The fact is that you, the members of TRU, have the final say in the contract that we win.
If you want a higher salary, you must build and help us build a credible strike threat. If you want a strong union, build a credible strike threat. If you want better healthcare, help us build a credible strike threat. We have seen time and time again that the university admin moves when they see our power through collective action. Let’s make things simple for them. Let’s all tell Hopkins, here and now, that all of us here and the thousands that make up TRU-UE are ready to exercise our power and demand the contract that we deserve. And if we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 2:
Shut it down! In order to build this credible strike threat, we have a very important meeting coming up on March 5. This is a GMM where we will have all of our voices heard and we will talk about what needs to be done in order to build this credible strike threat. So I have one ask of you: RSVP for this GMM and help us win a fair contract and take all that we deserve from the administration. I’ll be holding RSVP signs. Please pull out your phones now and scan this QR code and register to be at the next GMM. Thank you.
Emily Hoppe:
Hi everyone. My name is Emily Hoppe. I’m a fourth year PhD worker in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. I came to Hopkins for college almost 20 years ago in 2005. After my Bachelor of Arts, I stayed for my Bachelor in Nursing and then I worked as a staff nurse and nurse practitioner. In 2020, I returned to the university to get my PhD in nursing. Spending this much time at Hopkins has made me question a lot of things, including most of my life choices. But if there’s one thing I have never been clear about today, it is that union power is absolutely necessary. It is necessary to make Hopkins change how it treats workers, and that is why they are so scared of our power as a union.
Did you know that nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital tried to unionize? Most recently in 2018. The hospital responded with union-busting tactics such as denying nurses access to break rooms and prohibiting nurses from talking about the union at work. The National Labor Relations Board ultimately found that by taking these actions, Johns Hopkins broke the law. We can see that Johns Hopkins is terrified of union power because unions will force Johns Hopkins to change.
Nurses at other hospitals have used union power not only to achieve fair wages, but also to ensure safe nurse to patient ratios, access to PPE, and reduction of violence within hospitals. These are changes that benefit not only nurses, but the patients and communities that nurses serve. We have an opportunity to make a similarly huge impact at TRU-UE with our collective power. I’m passionate about the work we do at the union for many reasons and I’m going to talk about two of them today.
The first is that we face multiple public health crises that can only be solved by experts whose roots are in the communities of those most impacted by these crises. However, these very same people face unnecessary administration-made barriers to doctoral education. For example, we have a Black maternal health crisis in this country. Nationally, Black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women. It is a matter of life and death that Black women lead the way in ending this crisis, and yet, Black women face so many barriers to doctoral education rooted in structural racism, misogyny, and other social forces that Johns Hopkins is upholding with their actions.
As PhD workers, they are denied time off to attend to care for their own family members, denied adequate pay to be financially secure, and face harassment and discrimination at work. Our colleagues who are best equipped to lead us toward lifesaving solutions also face the most barriers and receive inadequate support in their quest to do so and this must change.
Another reason I am so passionate about our work as a union is that I have witnessed my coworkers suffer from the precarity and inhumanity of our working conditions, and I am certain it doesn’t need to be this way. As a nurse, I donated to a paid time off pool so a fellow nurse could remain at the bedside of her premature NICU baby instead of having to return to work.
Crowd:
Shame!
Emily Hoppe:
As a graduate worker, I have sat with friends who are parents of young children as we tried to figure out where their funding would come from next year; funding that was literally feeding their families. It really doesn’t need to be this way and we have the power to change it.
Hopkins researchers say that housing stability is a core component of health, yet 86% of our members are rent burdened. Hopkins researchers say that food insecurity is associated with lower graduation rates, yet roughly a quarter of graduate students are food insecure. And Hopkins researchers have identified clear evidence that poverty is linked to depression, yet the administration continues to return counter offers on compensation and benefits that are woefully inadequate.
Crowd:
Boo! Shame!
Emily Hoppe:
We need union power to protect workers from exploitation, discrimination, and harassment. We need union power to insist on fair compensation and the ability to become expert scholars without being driven into poverty and debt. We need union power to push back against policies that throw our neighbors under the bus and put our campus community at neighboring communities at risk, including from abuse of power and discriminatory policing. We need union power to create working conditions where we are respected as workers and where we can value our work as work.
Crowd:
[Cheers]
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:20:04]
Emily Hoppe:
The administration seems to believe that a career and scholarship is only for those who are married to wealthy spouses, are privileged with generational wealth, and have no children or caregiving responsibilities. But we have the power to tell them otherwise. We can tell them that we all belong here, that those of us who are struggling to make this work are the ones who most deserve to be here. Let’s tell them about our different, better, inclusive, thriving visions of graduate school where we don’t have to suffer, where we don’t have to choose between visiting our dying family members and being disciplined for time away. Where we don’t have to choose between completing our dissertation and working three other jobs. We are here to demand union power for a better life for all of us. And I am so excited to see it happen and I will strike for it if I have to.
Crowd:
We’ve got the power!
Emily Hoppe:
What kind of power?
Crowd:
Union power!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
And if we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Emily Hoppe:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Emily Hoppe:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down.
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
When I say strike, you say ready. Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Emily Hoppe:
Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Emily Hoppe:
Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Zeke Cohen:
Hey. Good morning everybody. How’s everybody doing? How’s everybody feeling? My name is Zeke Cohen. I represent District One on the Baltimore City Council, and I’m proud to be standing with you on the picket line today. I wanted to come here because I studied at this school. I got my graduate degree here. My wife studied medicine here. She did her residency here. This institution was a leader in the Covid fight. But when you love a place, you reserve the right to criticize a place. And in this case, we need Johns Hopkins to do better by its workers.
And let me be clear, the thing that made my graduate degree great wasn’t the leadership of the institution. It was the working people. It was the janitors and administerial staff. It was the adjuncts. It was the other grad students who were working. It was the workers that made Johns Hopkins great. And it is the workers that deserve an excellent union contract. Let me say this, we are part of a rising tide of organized labor across this city and across this country. And I’ll say this too, I hope we don’t have to strike, but if we do, I will stand here with you on the picket line and represent the Baltimore City Council in supporting the workers in your demands. Let me close by saying this, no matter what, no matter the barriers you face, we deserve a union right here at Johns Hopkins. And I stand with you. Thank you for being out here today, and I look forward to being back in the picket line whenever.
Emily Hoppe:
Sure. Hi, I am Emily Hoppe. I am a fourth year PhD worker at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. I’m also a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, and I’m an organizer. I’ve been an organizer with TRU-UE for about a year now.
Janvi Madhani:
Hi, I’m Janvi Madhani. I’m a fourth year graduate worker in physics and astronomy, and I am a member of the bargaining committee. And I’ve also been organizing with TRU-UE for about three and a half years.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Janvi, Emily, thank you both so much for chatting with me. We are literally standing here on the picket line in front of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, East Baltimore campus. Your fellow grad workers and union members are marching with picket signs about 10 feet away from where we are currently standing. I was wondering if we could start here and just give listeners a sense of where we are and why you’re here and what’s going on, and then we’ll sort of dig back into the story of how we ended up here.
Emily Hoppe:
Okay. We’re at our TRU-UE first practice picket, which is happening in front of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Dome. And we’ll continue on the Homewood Campus this afternoon. And our coworkers have come out here to let the Johns Hopkins administration know that we are organized. We are getting frustrated with contract negotiations, and we are ready to continue to escalate.
Janvi Madhani:
So our core demands are the recognition of our work, primarily our research as work in the contract that deserves contract protections. We also want fair wages and benefits, a fair compensation for the kind of work and labor we provide to the university. And then also we really want a union shop. Union shop means we want long-term union security. And of course, this is something that the university wants to withhold from us in order to weaken our union power here. So yeah, our members are really turning up the heat today and making sure that these three demands come through really clear to the administration.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I always love this as a former grad worker myself. In fact, the only union job I’ve ever had was at the University of Michigan as a grad worker. Shout out to GEO. But this part of the university’s argument always tickled me. Where they say, grad workers aren’t workers. The work you do is not work. You’re learning, you’re getting training. It’s like, all right motherfucker, let’s see how the university does without it then. So I’m just speaking for myself, no one else here, but that part always stuck out to me as ridiculous. And it seems I’m not alone. I mean, it seems like that is the kind of message that y’all are sending to the university, building this strike threat.
I’m sensing echoes here of what we saw over the past year with the UPS Teamsters, with the UAW Auto Workers, building a contract campaign, doing these practice pickets, showing the companies, the employers, what a credible strike threat you have and the strength of the membership because that helps at the bargaining table. I mean, it lets the employer know that you’re serious. So I want to ask, what brought us to this point. The last time we had folks from this union on was a year ago, right when y’all had the historic and overwhelming election where grad workers voted to join or to form a union. So what’s been happening since then at the bargaining table? Can you tell us a little more about what kind of reaction you’ve been getting from the university? What has been the holdup and what brought us to this point here?
Janvi Madhani:
Yeah, so that’s an excellent question. We had this massive victory after the election. We won with 97%. And that really set us up for a lot of power at the bargaining table, knowing that our membership was really behind us and fighting for this fair contract. And since then we started off with our non-economic proposals, including stuff like non-discrimination, grievance procedures, et cetera. And every step of the way we’ve really, really had to fight tooth and nail to win these protections. And it took incredible movement from our membership in order to get them to move the needle on things that we consider basic protections. Like protections against sexual harassment, protections against abuse from advisors in terms of a strong non-discrimination proposal. And so it’s truly just been a membership led effort in terms of making sure the admin has a pulse on how angry our members are, that they’re being disrespected and denied these rights at the bargaining table.
So now we are in this next stage of the contract fight in which we introduced the economic versions of our proposals. That includes stuff like fair compensation and benefits. And we are just being hit with the most incredible disrespect for the kind of labor we do. One, we already talked about the fact that they don’t recognize or research as work. And specifically they want to withhold a fair and due process for disciplining and discharging us, because they believe that research is academic. And what we do is training, and that has nothing to do with a contract. When we know that this is a primary way in which they fire us as employees. And so that’s absolutely not acceptable to our membership.
And so yeah, we’re really hitting this wall with them. And it’s time for us to leverage our labor because ultimately this is a conflict between our labor and their capital. And they want to maintain this power imbalance in which they can continue denying us these rights because it allows them to maintain this power imbalance. And we unionize because we need to have a fair say in our working conditions. And this is our first step in making sure that they understand that this is a real threat and that our members are agitated, they’re mobilized, and we will leverage that labor.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can I just ask one quick question? So I’ve been reading some of the reports about bargaining. Is the university’s main argument that the money’s not there or that you’re not workers and don’t deserve it?
Janvi Madhani:
That’s precisely it. They have told us that their offer of 40,000 with no benefits is incredibly generous for what we do. And that is a…
Incredibly generous for what we do and that is extremely disrespectful, knowing that that doesn’t even cover the cost of living, that doesn’t cover the range of experiences that graduate workers go through in the time at Johns Hopkins. And so they think that you’re being so generous. That’s how deeply they don’t value our work in labor. And so this is not about them not having money. Functionally, they’re a hedge fund who sits on billions of dollars of money and they just don’t want us to have access to that.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]
Emily Hoppe:
Yeah, and I spoke about this earlier, but they really are not acknowledging that people need to eat food, people need to live in houses and without being paid, people who come here are not able to do that unless they have apparently what they think we should have, which is generational wealth and/or another family member who will provide for us while we pursue this eccentric hobby. So yeah, they clearly don’t truly value our work as work. And it also has this very insidious effect of excluding people from academia very directly, I think.
I also wanted to say that during… Well, so Janvi talked about what’s been going on with bargaining. On the organizing side, we’ve been really building up amazing infrastructure and while it is very frustrating to see them stalling at the bargaining table, every time they come back to us with a meaningless counter proposal, we get new members and it’s easier for us to help people to see that the administration does not care about them and will not do anything for them unless they’re forced to. So that’s where we’re finding ourselves, is that there’s just this huge momentum, not only because of the work that we’re doing, but because of the work that Hopkins is doing for us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking of the barriers to different types of workers being able to live and work in academia, again, I remember coming to the University of Michigan, coasting on the savings I’d accrued from working in restaurants in Chicago, spending all of that on my apartment security deposit and a U-Haul. And when I told the university I didn’t have money to get by in Ann Arbor, they told me, “Take out a lot more credit cards or ask family.” That was essentially their response. I just wanted to add that for folks listening to give a little texture what we’re talking about here. In academia, just like non-profits, just like so many other jobs where you are expected to just be grateful that you’re there, that you have a place and yet you’re paid as if you don’t need to have basic necessities like a roof over your head and food on your table. And that’s really what we’re talking about here.
And we are talking on February 20th, as I said at the top, in front of the East Baltimore Johns Hopkins campus. You all are going to be picketing on across town later today. So I wanted to ask what happens next? What should folks in and around the city and beyond be looking forward to and what can folks do to help?
Janvi Madhani:
Yeah, so as Emily said, we are really starting to focus… Organizing our members around building a credible strike threat. Do this out of an absolute necessity and not out of a choice, but they have forced our hand kind of in terms of making sure that our members are now being talked to and organized around this idea of building a credible strike threat. So I think in terms of community support, it really, really helps when we have public facing events like this to see community show up in public and acknowledge that the way we are being treated is undignified and that they stand in support with us.
Emily Hoppe:
Yeah, no, just join us in our readiness to stand up to Hopkins for our members. So the other thing is that we are facing the potential of a strike and we have members who are starting to think about how they’re going to deal with financial crises or other issues that may come up if pay is stopped. And so we are starting a strike fund and if there are organizations in the community who have the resources and want to show support and solidarity in that way, that is another avenue for that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. As always, thank you for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the other awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there for our patrons. And we’ve got a lot more new, incredible bonus episodes coming your way. You guys don’t want to miss it. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing over at The Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever. (Singing)
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:36:45]
Crowd: [Chanting] Union power!
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome, everyone, to this 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 with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I am reporting from the Johns Hopkins University East Baltimore campus on Tuesday, February 20, where graduate student-workers are holding the first of two practice pickets today. As we previously reported at The Real News, it was a year ago that grad workers at Hopkins held, and overwhelmingly won, their union election, voting to unionize under the banner of Teachers and Researchers United which is affiliated with United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, or UE.
While workers celebrated their historic union victory, bargaining a first contract with the university administration has been another story. One year after their election victory, we are here because workers feel they are hitting a dead end at the bargaining table. So they are hitting the streets, putting on practice picket lines to build a credible strike threat, and to show the university administration what is in store if more progress is not made at the bargaining table soon.
Speaker 1:
It’s so great to see everyone here to start off our very first practice picket. Today, we are out here to show Hopkins a glimpse of what’s to come if they continue to stall at the marketing table.
Everyone out here has their own hopes for what a fair contract will bring us. Whether it’s wages, benefits, transit, protections against abusive advisors, or union shop, everyone has their own hopes for how our lives as graduate workers can and should be better. But we’re here because we know that when each of us tries to achieve these things alone, we’re met with obstacle after obstacle, told it’s simply not possible, and that what we want is unrealistic. But only together are we able to demand tangible improvements to our material conditions.
The administration strives on keeping us isolated, working alone, jumping through meaningless hoops, and navigating arbitrary university structures. For too long, we have tried to appeal to the goodwill of an institution that is fundamentally an exploitative and profit-maximizing hedge fund disguised as an educational institution. We unionize because we know that we will only win the working conditions we deserve together. And this is why we are out here today — We are here because we know the power of the collective and we are ready to use it. We’re here because we are sick of the hypocrisy of this institution.
Crowd:
Absolutely!
Speaker 1:
Hopkins, we are sick of your wellness emails when you won’t provide us with fair wages and benefits that mean we don’t have to spend more than 50% of our incomes on rent, that we don’t have to be afraid that an unexpected health emergency is going to put us into debt, that we don’t have to wait for weeks to access a mental health care provider, and that we don’t have to postpone having kids because childcare would cost our entire stipends and your supposed subsidized childcare has a two-year-long wait list.
We are here because we are sick of the hypocrisy at this institution. Hopkins, we are sick of hearing about how you are a leading public health institution when you refuse to provide evidence-based COVID protections that protect us and our community from an infection that is still killing and disabling thousands.
Crowd:
Shame! Shame!
Speaker 1:
We are sick of hearing about how you’re a leading public health institution when you continue to be complicit in a genocide where people are being killed not only with weapons that are developed from research at this institution, but also from hunger and disease that are easily cured while you remain silent.
Crowd:
[Cheering]
Speaker 1:
For too long we’ve been told that this university cares about us and is here to support us. But time and time again, the university fails to provide even the most basic protections for health and safety, protections against sexual assault and harassment, protections from unfair discipline and dismissal from abusive advisors.
Crowd:
Shame! Shame!
Speaker 1:
Time and time again, Hopkins has shown that the only thing it cares about is maintaining power and profiting off of our labor. So we are here today because we are demanding better.
Crowd:
[Cheering]
Speaker 1:
For the first time in the history of this institution, graduate workers have organized like never before. We have shown that when we are organized, we win. We know our power because we have seen it. After giving testimonials at the bargaining table, we won one of the strongest non-discrimination and grievance procedure articles of all of our peers. After making noise outside of the bargaining table on both campuses, we saw admin raise the stipend for the 40,000.
But that’s not enough. After admin heard from underpaid and overworked research workers, they agreed to guaranteed funding for up to three years in departments that previously had no guaranteed funding. At the leading public health institution, this is still not enough.
Crowd:
Not enough! Not enough!
Speaker 1:
After admin felt the strength of our opposition to the JHPD, we won unprecedented language that explicitly protects our right to gather here today in a labor demonstration without being subject to the violence of JHPD. We know our power because just last week when Hopkins heard that we were organizing for this picket, they immediately scheduled additional bargaining sessions. This is why we have to show Hopkins that thousands of us are united behind a fair contract and we won’t settle for less than what we’re worth.
Our demands are clear; We want union power. We want union power in the form of union shop, fair wages and benefits, and the recognition of our work as worth. But Hopkins continues to stall at the table. They continue to withhold union shop from us. They want to weaken our union by making sure we cannot build long-term union security. They continue to refuse protections against unfair discipline and discharge.
They have also explicitly told us at the table that they recognize our research output as a vital source of income for the university, but they will still not protect our research work in our contract. We cannot accept a contract in which the admin reserves the right to unfairly discipline and discharge us without due process because they do not believe our research is work.
Crowd:
Boo!
Speaker 1:
We unionized for 101 reasons, each one important enough to warrant a union on its own. But fundamentally, we unionized because this is class war and our bosses are working together to withhold our rights as a class because they are a class. The administration has all the money, they have all the power, and it’s in their interest to maintain this power imbalance because this is fundamentally a conflict between our labor and their capital.
And in this fight, what do we have? We have our labor. We run JHU. Our research and our teaching runs this university and we deserve dignified working conditions. The admin is terrified of us because they know just how much it would hurt the university if we were to withhold our labor. Because graduate workers are the lifeblood of academic institutions.
Crowd:
[Cheers]
Speaker 1:
Our labor is the reason this university claims prestige, and our labor is being exploited to line the pockets of admins with millions and record profits. But record profits are unpaid wages.
Crowd:
[Cheers] Yeah!
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:10:04]
Speaker 1:
But record profits are unpaid wages and we’ll not accept the continued exploitation of our labor. Not only are we here to leverage our labor for a fair contract, we are here to build real community power against extractive and predatory institutions like Hopkins. The same systems that exploit our labor are the same systems that disparage the city. Union power is community power.
I am honored to be standing here today surrounded by so many of our organizers, coworkers, community members, and other campus labor unions to show Hopkins that we are united, we are organized, and we are here to fight for the contract we deserve. We will do this again and again and bigger and louder and be more and more disruptive until we create a crisis so huge, they’re forced to realize that their fight is futile. When we’re organized and when we mobilize, we win. We will get fair wages and benefits. We will get protections from unfair discipline. We will get union shop. That’s by asking you this: What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Speaker 1:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Speaker 1:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Speaker 1:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 1:
Thank you all.
Speaker 2:
Thank you all for coming out and making your voice heard. You’re one of the first batch of about 400 more people that are coming throughout the day. I believe the admin will feel this and feel pressure to give us a just and fair contract. I, and many of us at the bargaining committee, we’ve been fighting for the last nine months, fighting for a just and fair contract against our obstructionist and uncaring administration, and we will see them again at the bargaining table on Thursday.
We as the bargaining committee can make our best effort to move the admin in the room, but there is only so much that can be won at the bargaining table. Our power does not come from how eloquently we can tell some deans and lawyers in a conference room that we deserve a fair contract. There is no magic set of words that will suddenly convince the administration to abandon their cruelty and complete disregard for us as workers.
The only true leverage we have is threatening to collectively withhold our labor from this university. They refuse to acknowledge our value to this university and are acting as if our labor isn’t what drives this university. We have reached a point in the negotiations where the only way forward is to unequivocally show the administration that without us, this place grinds to a halt. We need to build a credible strike threat and make it so they can no longer be willfully ignorant of our power. The fact is that you, the members of TRU, have the final say in the contract that we win.
If you want a higher salary, you must build and help us build a credible strike threat. If you want a strong union, build a credible strike threat. If you want better healthcare, help us build a credible strike threat. We have seen time and time again that the university admin moves when they see our power through collective action. Let’s make things simple for them. Let’s all tell Hopkins, here and now, that all of us here and the thousands that make up TRU-UE are ready to exercise our power and demand the contract that we deserve. And if we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Speaker 2:
Shut it down! In order to build this credible strike threat, we have a very important meeting coming up on March 5. This is a GMM where we will have all of our voices heard and we will talk about what needs to be done in order to build this credible strike threat. So I have one ask of you: RSVP for this GMM and help us win a fair contract and take all that we deserve from the administration. I’ll be holding RSVP signs. Please pull out your phones now and scan this QR code and register to be at the next GMM. Thank you.
Emily Hoppe:
Hi everyone. My name is Emily Hoppe. I’m a fourth year PhD worker in the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. I came to Hopkins for college almost 20 years ago in 2005. After my Bachelor of Arts, I stayed for my Bachelor in Nursing and then I worked as a staff nurse and nurse practitioner. In 2020, I returned to the university to get my PhD in nursing. Spending this much time at Hopkins has made me question a lot of things, including most of my life choices. But if there’s one thing I have never been clear about today, it is that union power is absolutely necessary. It is necessary to make Hopkins change how it treats workers, and that is why they are so scared of our power as a union.
Did you know that nurses at Johns Hopkins Hospital tried to unionize? Most recently in 2018. The hospital responded with union-busting tactics such as denying nurses access to break rooms and prohibiting nurses from talking about the union at work. The National Labor Relations Board ultimately found that by taking these actions, Johns Hopkins broke the law. We can see that Johns Hopkins is terrified of union power because unions will force Johns Hopkins to change.
Nurses at other hospitals have used union power not only to achieve fair wages, but also to ensure safe nurse to patient ratios, access to PPE, and reduction of violence within hospitals. These are changes that benefit not only nurses, but the patients and communities that nurses serve. We have an opportunity to make a similarly huge impact at TRU-UE with our collective power. I’m passionate about the work we do at the union for many reasons and I’m going to talk about two of them today.
The first is that we face multiple public health crises that can only be solved by experts whose roots are in the communities of those most impacted by these crises. However, these very same people face unnecessary administration-made barriers to doctoral education. For example, we have a Black maternal health crisis in this country. Nationally, Black women are three times as likely to die in childbirth as white women. It is a matter of life and death that Black women lead the way in ending this crisis, and yet, Black women face so many barriers to doctoral education rooted in structural racism, misogyny, and other social forces that Johns Hopkins is upholding with their actions.
As PhD workers, they are denied time off to attend to care for their own family members, denied adequate pay to be financially secure, and face harassment and discrimination at work. Our colleagues who are best equipped to lead us toward lifesaving solutions also face the most barriers and receive inadequate support in their quest to do so and this must change.
Another reason I am so passionate about our work as a union is that I have witnessed my coworkers suffer from the precarity and inhumanity of our working conditions, and I am certain it doesn’t need to be this way. As a nurse, I donated to a paid time off pool so a fellow nurse could remain at the bedside of her premature NICU baby instead of having to return to work.
Crowd:
Shame!
Emily Hoppe:
As a graduate worker, I have sat with friends who are parents of young children as we tried to figure out where their funding would come from next year; funding that was literally feeding their families. It really doesn’t need to be this way and we have the power to change it.
Hopkins researchers say that housing stability is a core component of health, yet 86% of our members are rent burdened. Hopkins researchers say that food insecurity is associated with lower graduation rates, yet roughly a quarter of graduate students are food insecure. And Hopkins researchers have identified clear evidence that poverty is linked to depression, yet the administration continues to return counter offers on compensation and benefits that are woefully inadequate.
Crowd:
Boo! Shame!
Emily Hoppe:
We need union power to protect workers from exploitation, discrimination, and harassment. We need union power to insist on fair compensation and the ability to become expert scholars without being driven into poverty and debt. We need union power to push back against policies that throw our neighbors under the bus and put our campus community at neighboring communities at risk, including from abuse of power and discriminatory policing. We need union power to create working conditions where we are respected as workers and where we can value our work as work.
Crowd:
[Cheers]
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:20:04]
Emily Hoppe:
The administration seems to believe that a career and scholarship is only for those who are married to wealthy spouses, are privileged with generational wealth, and have no children or caregiving responsibilities. But we have the power to tell them otherwise. We can tell them that we all belong here, that those of us who are struggling to make this work are the ones who most deserve to be here. Let’s tell them about our different, better, inclusive, thriving visions of graduate school where we don’t have to suffer, where we don’t have to choose between visiting our dying family members and being disciplined for time away. Where we don’t have to choose between completing our dissertation and working three other jobs. We are here to demand union power for a better life for all of us. And I am so excited to see it happen and I will strike for it if I have to.
Crowd:
We’ve got the power!
Emily Hoppe:
What kind of power?
Crowd:
Union power!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
What do we want?
Crowd:
A fair contract!
Emily Hoppe:
When do we want it?
Crowd:
Now!
Emily Hoppe:
And if we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Emily Hoppe:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down!
Emily Hoppe:
If we don’t get it?
Crowd:
Shut it down.
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Who are we?
Crowd:
UE!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
Union!
Crowd:
Power!
Emily Hoppe:
When I say strike, you say ready. Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Emily Hoppe:
Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Emily Hoppe:
Strike!
Crowd:
Ready!
Zeke Cohen:
Hey. Good morning everybody. How’s everybody doing? How’s everybody feeling? My name is Zeke Cohen. I represent District One on the Baltimore City Council, and I’m proud to be standing with you on the picket line today. I wanted to come here because I studied at this school. I got my graduate degree here. My wife studied medicine here. She did her residency here. This institution was a leader in the Covid fight. But when you love a place, you reserve the right to criticize a place. And in this case, we need Johns Hopkins to do better by its workers.
And let me be clear, the thing that made my graduate degree great wasn’t the leadership of the institution. It was the working people. It was the janitors and administerial staff. It was the adjuncts. It was the other grad students who were working. It was the workers that made Johns Hopkins great. And it is the workers that deserve an excellent union contract. Let me say this, we are part of a rising tide of organized labor across this city and across this country. And I’ll say this too, I hope we don’t have to strike, but if we do, I will stand here with you on the picket line and represent the Baltimore City Council in supporting the workers in your demands. Let me close by saying this, no matter what, no matter the barriers you face, we deserve a union right here at Johns Hopkins. And I stand with you. Thank you for being out here today, and I look forward to being back in the picket line whenever.
Emily Hoppe:
Sure. Hi, I am Emily Hoppe. I am a fourth year PhD worker at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. I’m also a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, and I’m an organizer. I’ve been an organizer with TRU-UE for about a year now.
Janvi Madhani:
Hi, I’m Janvi Madhani. I’m a fourth year graduate worker in physics and astronomy, and I am a member of the bargaining committee. And I’ve also been organizing with TRU-UE for about three and a half years.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Janvi, Emily, thank you both so much for chatting with me. We are literally standing here on the picket line in front of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, East Baltimore campus. Your fellow grad workers and union members are marching with picket signs about 10 feet away from where we are currently standing. I was wondering if we could start here and just give listeners a sense of where we are and why you’re here and what’s going on, and then we’ll sort of dig back into the story of how we ended up here.
Emily Hoppe:
Okay. We’re at our TRU-UE first practice picket, which is happening in front of the Johns Hopkins Hospital Dome. And we’ll continue on the Homewood Campus this afternoon. And our coworkers have come out here to let the Johns Hopkins administration know that we are organized. We are getting frustrated with contract negotiations, and we are ready to continue to escalate.
Janvi Madhani:
So our core demands are the recognition of our work, primarily our research as work in the contract that deserves contract protections. We also want fair wages and benefits, a fair compensation for the kind of work and labor we provide to the university. And then also we really want a union shop. Union shop means we want long-term union security. And of course, this is something that the university wants to withhold from us in order to weaken our union power here. So yeah, our members are really turning up the heat today and making sure that these three demands come through really clear to the administration.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I always love this as a former grad worker myself. In fact, the only union job I’ve ever had was at the University of Michigan as a grad worker. Shout out to GEO. But this part of the university’s argument always tickled me. Where they say, grad workers aren’t workers. The work you do is not work. You’re learning, you’re getting training. It’s like, all right motherfucker, let’s see how the university does without it then. So I’m just speaking for myself, no one else here, but that part always stuck out to me as ridiculous. And it seems I’m not alone. I mean, it seems like that is the kind of message that y’all are sending to the university, building this strike threat.
I’m sensing echoes here of what we saw over the past year with the UPS Teamsters, with the UAW Auto Workers, building a contract campaign, doing these practice pickets, showing the companies, the employers, what a credible strike threat you have and the strength of the membership because that helps at the bargaining table. I mean, it lets the employer know that you’re serious. So I want to ask, what brought us to this point. The last time we had folks from this union on was a year ago, right when y’all had the historic and overwhelming election where grad workers voted to join or to form a union. So what’s been happening since then at the bargaining table? Can you tell us a little more about what kind of reaction you’ve been getting from the university? What has been the holdup and what brought us to this point here?
Janvi Madhani:
Yeah, so that’s an excellent question. We had this massive victory after the election. We won with 97%. And that really set us up for a lot of power at the bargaining table, knowing that our membership was really behind us and fighting for this fair contract. And since then we started off with our non-economic proposals, including stuff like non-discrimination, grievance procedures, et cetera. And every step of the way we’ve really, really had to fight tooth and nail to win these protections. And it took incredible movement from our membership in order to get them to move the needle on things that we consider basic protections. Like protections against sexual harassment, protections against abuse from advisors in terms of a strong non-discrimination proposal. And so it’s truly just been a membership led effort in terms of making sure the admin has a pulse on how angry our members are, that they’re being disrespected and denied these rights at the bargaining table.
So now we are in this next stage of the contract fight in which we introduced the economic versions of our proposals. That includes stuff like fair compensation and benefits. And we are just being hit with the most incredible disrespect for the kind of labor we do. One, we already talked about the fact that they don’t recognize or research as work. And specifically they want to withhold a fair and due process for disciplining and discharging us, because they believe that research is academic. And what we do is training, and that has nothing to do with a contract. When we know that this is a primary way in which they fire us as employees. And so that’s absolutely not acceptable to our membership.
And so yeah, we’re really hitting this wall with them. And it’s time for us to leverage our labor because ultimately this is a conflict between our labor and their capital. And they want to maintain this power imbalance in which they can continue denying us these rights because it allows them to maintain this power imbalance. And we unionize because we need to have a fair say in our working conditions. And this is our first step in making sure that they understand that this is a real threat and that our members are agitated, they’re mobilized, and we will leverage that labor.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can I just ask one quick question? So I’ve been reading some of the reports about bargaining. Is the university’s main argument that the money’s not there or that you’re not workers and don’t deserve it?
Janvi Madhani:
That’s precisely it. They have told us that their offer of 40,000 with no benefits is incredibly generous for what we do. And that is a…
Incredibly generous for what we do and that is extremely disrespectful, knowing that that doesn’t even cover the cost of living, that doesn’t cover the range of experiences that graduate workers go through in the time at Johns Hopkins. And so they think that you’re being so generous. That’s how deeply they don’t value our work in labor. And so this is not about them not having money. Functionally, they’re a hedge fund who sits on billions of dollars of money and they just don’t want us to have access to that.
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]
Emily Hoppe:
Yeah, and I spoke about this earlier, but they really are not acknowledging that people need to eat food, people need to live in houses and without being paid, people who come here are not able to do that unless they have apparently what they think we should have, which is generational wealth and/or another family member who will provide for us while we pursue this eccentric hobby. So yeah, they clearly don’t truly value our work as work. And it also has this very insidious effect of excluding people from academia very directly, I think.
I also wanted to say that during… Well, so Janvi talked about what’s been going on with bargaining. On the organizing side, we’ve been really building up amazing infrastructure and while it is very frustrating to see them stalling at the bargaining table, every time they come back to us with a meaningless counter proposal, we get new members and it’s easier for us to help people to see that the administration does not care about them and will not do anything for them unless they’re forced to. So that’s where we’re finding ourselves, is that there’s just this huge momentum, not only because of the work that we’re doing, but because of the work that Hopkins is doing for us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Speaking of the barriers to different types of workers being able to live and work in academia, again, I remember coming to the University of Michigan, coasting on the savings I’d accrued from working in restaurants in Chicago, spending all of that on my apartment security deposit and a U-Haul. And when I told the university I didn’t have money to get by in Ann Arbor, they told me, “Take out a lot more credit cards or ask family.” That was essentially their response. I just wanted to add that for folks listening to give a little texture what we’re talking about here. In academia, just like non-profits, just like so many other jobs where you are expected to just be grateful that you’re there, that you have a place and yet you’re paid as if you don’t need to have basic necessities like a roof over your head and food on your table. And that’s really what we’re talking about here.
And we are talking on February 20th, as I said at the top, in front of the East Baltimore Johns Hopkins campus. You all are going to be picketing on across town later today. So I wanted to ask what happens next? What should folks in and around the city and beyond be looking forward to and what can folks do to help?
Janvi Madhani:
Yeah, so as Emily said, we are really starting to focus… Organizing our members around building a credible strike threat. Do this out of an absolute necessity and not out of a choice, but they have forced our hand kind of in terms of making sure that our members are now being talked to and organized around this idea of building a credible strike threat. So I think in terms of community support, it really, really helps when we have public facing events like this to see community show up in public and acknowledge that the way we are being treated is undignified and that they stand in support with us.
Emily Hoppe:
Yeah, no, just join us in our readiness to stand up to Hopkins for our members. So the other thing is that we are facing the potential of a strike and we have members who are starting to think about how they’re going to deal with financial crises or other issues that may come up if pay is stopped. And so we are starting a strike fund and if there are organizations in the community who have the resources and want to show support and solidarity in that way, that is another avenue for that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. As always, thank you for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the other awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there for our patrons. And we’ve got a lot more new, incredible bonus episodes coming your way. You guys don’t want to miss it. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing over at The Real News Network, where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The fossil fuel industry touches just about everything. Its most visible effects are pockmarked across the land as coalfields and oilfields, or blown into the air as smoke from factories and power plants. But its economic impacts spread across many sectors and regions. For that reason, decarbonizing the economy will affect more than miners and drillers. The changes will ripple through heavy industries that employ hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of laborers, many of whom may be dislocated by these changes and need help adapting to the post-carbon world.
When President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, many communities with faltering coal mines and oil derricks realized they were poised to benefit from it. The legislation provides billions in tax incentives and grants to help “energy communities” — those towns and counties with brownfield sites, previously dependent on now-shuttered coal mines or coal-fired power plants, or otherwise having high tax revenue from fossil fuel extraction. Such places also must have an unemployment rate higher than the national average to qualify for support. The goal is to provide the incentives these areas, and the residents who live in them, need to attract new industries, particularly those in renewable energy and electrification.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the energy communities eligible for federal help sprawl mainly across Appalachia and the Southwest. However, research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests a large swath of the country is being overlooked by these designations.
Using a new metric, termed “employment carbon footprint” or ECF, the study presents a new method of determining a county-level economic dependence on fossil fuels, in the hope that the government uses the data to more accurately pinpoint communities in need of assistance. Though layoffs and closures of coal mines and coal-burning plants affect thousands of workers, many industrial operations heavily reliant on fossil fuels, including steelmaking, fertilizer production, and refining, may feel some pain from decarbonization, too. To determine where these places might be, researchers calculated the carbon footprint of a number of employment sectors, including agriculture, oil and gas, and construction. They found that areas with heavy manufacturing, but no direct link to extraction, still have a deep underlying dependence on the fossil fuel industry and risk being left behind by the green transition.
According to co-author Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT-Sloane school of business, about half of America’s most carbon-dependent economies don’t qualify for the energy community IRA tax credit — and many of those that do qualify face relatively little economic vulnerability to the coming transition. What’s more, the federal designation does not cover those places, such as Mountrail, North Dakota and Washington, Nebraska, that are so heavily dependent upon fossil fuels for manufacturing and other sectors that they face greater economic vulnerability than many designated energy communities. After Knittel and other researchers calculated the employment carbon footprint of various job sectors, they overlaid them on a map, showing a few surprising downstream effects of decarbonization on the job market.
“For example, if you’re making steel, you’re burning a lot of natural gas and electricity,” Knittel said. “Or it could be you’re making fertilizer, and we make fertilizer from natural gas. So those sectors are not going to be defined as energy communities because they’re not actually extracting fossil fuel.”
The “just transition”, an idea the labor movement developed in the 1970s and ’80s in response to increased environmental regulation, demands that communities facing economic disruption from the downsizing or removal of environmentally harmful industry be compensated with new investment and workforce training. While coal-producing regions of the Rust Belt and Mountain West are receiving tax credits and other benefits to help them through the green transition, large swathes of the Great Plains don’t have a single IRA-designated energy community, despite the high levels of carbon dependence in their economies, which revolve around oil, gas, construction, heavy industry, and agriculture.
“As we transition to a low carbon world,” Knittel said, “energy costs are going to go up and these areas or sectors might be harmed, but they would be missed by the way we define energy communities.”
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing out there for places that might be overlooked by the IRA’s efforts to help energy communities. The study refers only to the 10 percent tax credit available to new projects, facilities, and technologies located in such places. Other programs target regions experiencing declines in industrial employment. The IRA, for example, provides $48 billion to promote advanced manufacturing, much of which may benefit locales outlined in the MIT study. The government also is providing additional support to so-called Justice40 communities — those with concentrated poverty, large populations of marginalized people, and other considerations — to help them make the transition.
Thom Kay, of the labor-and-climate advocacy group BlueGreen Alliance, said there is plenty of funding available, but it’s all very confusing for small communities to navigate. It’s too easy for small pockets of high need to fall by the wayside in Washington.
“The study has provided a useful map for federal agencies who want to get projects into communities that need them now,” he said.
Even so, federal funding is targeted more generally at local and state governments to facilitate industrial development, with less emphasis on resolving the training and employment needs of workers dislocated by energy transition. There are many opportunities out there, “but no clear avenue for these workers to transfer from a fossil fuel job to any of these new jobs in manufacturing or clean energy,” Kay said. If the definition of “energy community” is widened, it may not even be quite enough: This administration, and future administrations, may need to consider what other programs might be need to support workers, rather than simply incentivizing industries to move around and hoping they hire locally.
In fact, he said, the danger may be more that some officials may simply not recognize the need for investment. In places like the Dakotas, where oil and gas remains relatively strong, the economic pressure to change just isn’t there yet, and economic diversification may not be a priority, whereas it’s a more active conversation in Appalachia, particularly since the coal industry’s steep decline in the 2010s. The changes may not be fully present, but they’re coming, and with them, the need for some form of cushion to help workers make the transition.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The IRA will help ‘energy communities.’ But what does that mean? on Feb 27, 2024.
This post was originally published on Grist.
Two of Maryland’s most prominent unions, representing hundreds of thousands of workers across the state, have thrown their support behind a proposed state task force designed to study the widespread use of tax breaks and incentives to spur economic growth and subsidize development.
The powerful labor organizations also sought to expand the scope of the planned task force, proposing amendments to the legislation that would add incentives tied to job creation to the list of tax credits the task force is authorized to study.
The AFL-CIO of Maryland and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents hospital workers throughout the state, urged legislators to pass a bill introduced by State Senator Jill Carter that would authorize the task force to gather data and recommend processes to increase transparency and accountability for how tax breaks are used. It would also seek ways to measure how effective the subsidies are and if they deliver equitable—or even quantifiable—outcomes.
“Maryland SB 733 injects sunlight into an opaque process and finally allows legislators to understand the ways that our tax incentives interact with state revenues and economic outcomes,” Maryland AFO-CIO head Donna Edwards said in written testimony before the Senate’s Budget and Taxation Committee.
“Despite strong support for the aims and purpose of this bill, which seem to largely focus on real estate and commercial development incentives, we believe that its scope of what it defines as a tax incentive is too narrow,” she added.
The Budget and Finance committee heard testimony on the bill Wednesday. State Senator Jill Carter said the legislation would provide data to the public that has yet to be made available.
“The public has the right to know how these incentives are delivering for the people,” Carter said.
“The public has the right to know how these incentives are delivering for the people,” Carter said.
Carter also shared The Real News Network’s investigative documentary Tax Broke with the committee. The film—produced by the authors of this article—documents how redlining, racial segregation, and laws restricting the city’s ability to expand have trapped Baltimore in a cycle of population loss, with the highest percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line in the state. To address these challenges, the city has offered an array of tax credits and subsidies to lure developers to build in Baltimore, promising Baltimoreans that all that money coming out of the city would pay off in the form of spurred “economic development,” new jobs, etc. But, as Tax Broke details, Baltimore’s tax breaks for developers have yet to deliver on many of the promises that were made, and virtually no one is checking (or has the publicly available data to check) whether or not these tax breaks are paying off like city and business leaders said they would. The stated goal of this task force would be to change that.
The list of tax credits the task force will focus on includes TIFs (Tax Increment Finance), which allow developers to invest future property taxes into construction costs and infrastructure, and PILOTs (Payment in Lieu of Taxes), a tax credit that phases in taxes over time, gradually increasing the percentage of taxes owed.
Other credits that will be scrutinized include the Brownfield Tax Credit, which gives developers 5-10 years’ worth of tax credits for remediating otherwise polluted property, and the Enterprise Zone program, which grants tax breaks to companies that build or invest in impoverished communities.
The proposed amendment would add to that list the Job Creation Tax Credit, which offers a $3,000 tax deduction for each new job (ostensibly) created in the state. It would also add the One Maryland Tax Credit, an incentive that reduces taxes for businesses that create jobs in counties that struggle economically. In total, the amendment would add seven tax credits to the list of incentives the task force would be empowered to study.
A review of the bill by the office that drafts legislation determined the tax credits included in the bill had yet to be analyzed recently, save for a 2021 report on the use of Enterprise Zone Credits. The task force would not need additional funding to operate, a fact that Carter said made the legislation a must-pass.
“We are constantly looking for new sources of funding; I think this might be a good place to start,” she said.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Feb. 21, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
While federal data released on Wednesday shows nearly half a million workers last year participated in 33 major work stoppages—the most since the turn of the century—labor experts still stressed the need for more policies protecting the right to strike.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics noted that there has been an average of 16.7 U.S. work stoppages with more than 1,000 strikers over the past two decades, meaning last year’s number was almost double the norm. BLS also said that 458,900 workers joined the 2023 strikes, and nearly 87% of them work in service-providing industries, including 188,900 with jobs in education and health.
In their analysis of the data, also published Wednesday, Margaret Poydock and Jennifer Sherer of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) pointed out that “this is an increase of over 280% from the number of workers involved in major worker stoppages in 2022, which was 120,600. Further, it is on par with the increase seen in pre-pandemic levels during 2018 and 2019.”
Poydock, a senior policy analyst at the think tank, said in a statement that “a surge of workers went on strike in 2023 to fight back against record corporate profits, stratospheric CEO pay, and decades of stagnant wages. From the United Auto Workers to nurses across the country, these strikes provided critical leverage to workers to secure better wages and working conditions.”
Other notable actions include the actors‘ and writers‘ strikes that together effectively shut down television and film production for months. A report released last week by researchers at Cornell University and the University of Illinois—who, unlike the BLS, also tracked smaller U.S. actions—tallied 466 strikes and four lockouts involving a total of 539,000 workers.
“It’s a historic moment for the labor movement,” declared Robert Reich, a former U.S. labor secretary who is now a University of California, Berkeley professor. “Workers are done letting billionaires and corporations hoard all the wealth and power.”
As Poydock and Sherer, EPI’s State Worker Power Initiative director, wrote in their report:
It should be no surprise that workers are taking collective action to improve their pay and working conditions—but we should be asking why it is happening now. The U.S. economy has churned out unequal income growth and stagnant wages for the last several decades. Research shows that unions and collective bargaining are key tools in combating income inequality and improving the pay, benefits, and working conditions for both union and nonunion workers. However, the continued rise in collective action is not likely to increase unionization substantially unless meaningful policy change is enacted to ensure all workers have the right to form unions, bargain collectively, and strike.
The BLS said last month that “the union membership rate—the percent of wage and salary workers who were members of
unions—was 10% in 2023, little changed from the previous year.”
“In the public sector, both union membership and the union membership rate (32.5%) were little changed over the year,” the bureau added. “The number of union workers employed in the private sector increased by 191,000 to 7.4 million in 2023, while the unionization rate was unchanged at 6%.”
Stressing that “the increase in major strike activity in 2023 occurred despite our weak and outdated labor law failing to protect workers’ right to strike,” Sherer argued that “federal and state action is needed to ensure the right to strike.”
At the federal level, EPI supports several proposals. As Poydock and Sherer detailed:
“Right now, only a dozen states grant limited rights to strike to some public sector workers,” the pair also highlighted. “States should also join New York and New Jersey in making striking workers eligible for unemployment benefits.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
China has expanded its forced labor transfer program in far-western Xinjiang – moving Uyghurs from rural areas to work in factories – and plans to continue doing so through 2025, a new report says, warning that it will have far-reaching consequences for the 11-million strong ethnic minority.
Under a program that Beijing says is aimed at poverty alleviation, high-level Chinese policy and state planning documents call for intensified employment requirements targeting Uyghurs, according to research conducted by German scholar Adrian Zenz published in a report by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think tank.
But activists and experts say the program is thinly-disguised forced labor: Uprooting Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities from their homes and forcing them to work in factories producing everything from textiles and chemicals to car parts.
Longer-term, Beijing is using the program to achieve a larger goal, Zenz told Radio Free Asia -- controlling the Uyghur people, undermining their culture and ultimately assimilating them into Chinese society.
“Uyghur society is going to be changed in the long term through labor transfer,” he said. “It's a long-term strategy, and that’s why China is doubling down on it.”
“China is intensifying it because with labor transfer you can achieve cultural assimilation,” said Zenz, director of China Studies at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington.
“You can achieve linguistic assimilation,” he told RFA. “You can break apart communities – traditional communities – and break apart families.”
Corporate scrutiny
The report comes out amid intensifying pressure on multinational companies with operations in the region to cut their ties.
Earlier this month, German chemical giant BASF said it is pulling out of its joint ventures in Xinjiang. That came after a German newspaper in November reported close ties between the labor transfer program and a regional partner of BASF.
Meanwhile, automaker Volkswagen also has told RFA that it is in talks with its joint venture partner, SAIC-Volkswagen, over the future of its Xinjiang operations.
A report issued in early February by Human Rights Watch suggested that Volkswagen may be using aluminum made by Uyghur forced labor in China, and has failed to minimize this possibility.
The United States has called on China to end Uyghur forced labor practices and has enacted legislation to prevent the import of products made with forced labor.
The European Union lacks strict regulations that target goods made with forced labor, but is working on the adoption of a law that would hold large companies to account for their human rights and environmental impacts across their global supply chains.
Separately, Germany has a supply chain law that requires large companies to ensure that their suppliers and partners respect all human rights and subjects the companies to a comprehensive due diligence obligation covering the entire supply chain.
Two systems
Authorities in northwestern China’s vast Xinjiang region operate the world’s largest system of state-imposed forced labor under two systems targeting Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, Zenz’s report says.
The first one is forced labor connected to “re-education” camps, where an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs and others have been detained against their will beginning around 2017. There they received coercive skills training and were forced to work in on-site or off-site factories.
Zenz’s report says that evidence indicates that since early 2020, this policy is no longer active, although authorities still arbitrarily detain Uyghurs and others.
The second separate system, the Poverty Alleviation Through Labor Transfer policy, coercively trains and transfers non-detained rural laborers from the agricultural sector into secondary sector work that transforms raw materials into goods for sale or consumption, and tertiary sector work that involves the sale or trade of services.
The United States and other Western governments have expressed deep concern about the repression and arbitrary detentions of Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang, with some declaring that China’s actions amount to genocide and crimes against humanity.
‘Groundless accusation’
On Feb. 17, at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was asked by an interviewer about the forced labor accusations in Xinjiang in light of the recent company news about BASF and Volkswagen.
“The so-called forced labor is only a groundless accusation,” Wang said in response.
“Isn’t there any right to work for minority ethnic groups such as the Uyghurs in Xinjiang?” he asked. “If you make them unemployed, unable to work, and unable to sell their products under the pretext of forced labor, is this humane?”
Wang said that the growth of Xinjiang’s Uyghur population from less than 2 million in 1955, when the autonomous region was established, to 12 million today was proof that the “so-called genocide is a sheer fabrication and a lie.”
However, the actual Uyghur population in China was 3.64 million, according to official data from the country’s first census conducted in 1953, while Xinjiang’s population was less than 3.4 million. Also, the Han Chinese population in Xinjiang was only 6% in that census but now is more than half as many Han Chinese have migrated to the region.
Wang also said China has safeguarded human rights in Xinjiang as demonstrated by an increase in the average lifespan of Uyghurs from 30 years to 75.6 years, and that religious freedom and ethnic languages and cultures were well-protected by the Chinese government in the region.
Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress, said Wang’s dismissal of allegations of the Uyghur genocide and forced labor signaled “a concerning intent to persist with genocidal policies” in Xinjiang.
“Merely a week prior, one of Germany’s largest chemical companies, BASF, issued international apologies and announced their withdrawal from the Uyghur region due to their association with Uyghur genocide implications,” he told RFA.
“Similarly, other major corporations like Volkswagen face mounting international pressure over their involvement in Uyghur forced labor, with discussions underway for their withdrawal from the Uyghur region,” Isa said. “Given the substantial evidence at hand, Wang Yi's denial of these allegations is untenable.”
Zenz said that there is still personal testimonies and documentary evidence that Uyghur forced labor exists.
“The Chinese think they can openly lie and propagate an alternative reality because they can control access to Xinjiang,” he said.
Additional reporting by Irade from RFA Uyghur. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Roseanne Gerin for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Some 34% of available housing stock in the US is rented by tenants, who number over 114 million people. Among tenants, more than 40% pay over 35% of their monthly income towards rent alone. As wages stagnate and rents rise, the fight against landlords, evictions, and developers becomes more urgent to the class struggle day by day. The Real News speaks with Esteban Girón from the Crown Heights Tenants Union on the housing crisis roiling America and how tenants can fight back.
Studio / Post-Production: David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back, my friends, to The Real News Network Podcast. I am your host, Mel Buer. I wanted to take a moment once again to thank you, our listeners, for joining us week after week. Without you, none of this would be possible. Whether you’ve got our shows on while you’re making coffee in the morning, put our podcasts on during your commute to and from work, or give us a listen throughout the workday, The Real News Network is committed to bringing you ad-free independent journalism that you can count on.
We care a lot about what we do, and it’s through donations from dedicated listeners like you that we can keep on doing it. Please consider becoming a monthly sustainer of The Real News Network by heading over to therealnews.com/donate. If you want to stay in touch and get updates about our work, then sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up. As always, we appreciate your support in whatever form it takes.
Housing in this country is a nightmare. To put it bluntly, over one-third, that’s 34% of available housing in this country is occupied by renters. In California alone, over 5 million people rent their homes and apartments. That’s 13.6% of the available 44 million homes in this country. That’s no small number. The vast majority of renters in the United States are between the ages of 29 and 44, and many of them rent an apartment with one or more roommates. Over 40% of tenants are paying more than 35% of their income toward monthly rent. With wages remaining stagnant and federal minimum wage still at a paltry $7.25 an hour, it doesn’t take long to see how skyrocketing rents create a serious problem for this nation’s working class.
In the past decade, tenants unions, activists, organizers, nonprofits, and legislative bodies across the country have made some strides in restricting the monumental control that landlords have over the market and closing long-exploited loopholes that leave tenants with little to no housing options or even homeless. But the struggle is still ongoing, and there is much work still to be done. With me today to discuss this is Esteban Girón, organizer and 10-year member of the Crown Heights Tenant Union in New York City. We are discussing the dire nature of the housing crisis in this country and what we as workers and tenants can do about it. Welcome to the show, Esteban. Thank you so much for taking some time this morning to talk to me about a very important piece of living in the United States which is our current housing crisis and what individual renters can do to try and alleviate some of the worst landlord practices in this country. So thanks for coming on.
Esteban Girón:
Pleasure to be here.
Mel Buer:
To start off this conversation, I wanted to take a moment to give our listeners a sense of, really, how dire the housing crisis is in this country. From your perspective, organizing in New York City, what sort of conditions are you seeing amongst renters?
Esteban Girón:
Well, I’d say, in the last decade, there’s been this slow but steady degradation of the living conditions that we all happen to live in. In particular, rent-stabilized tenants. Just basic things are not getting done, buildings are falling apart, and at the same, time neighborhoods are gentrifying, and so there’s… Buildings are getting overvalued four or five times over, and they continue gaining value even as they start deteriorating. That’s for the people that are housed. We have a tremendous number of homeless individuals now that are a direct product of landlord greed as far as I’m concerned. Yeah. So the crisis is widespread, and it was before COVID even. So, you can imagine, as with everything else, it exacerbated that. So, yeah. It’s tricky. It’s hard to organize. It’s hard to organize around it.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, I know. From where I’m sitting in Los Angeles, our homeless population is something like 62,000 individuals in the Los Angeles area are currently unhoused. I think a lot of folks are, especially in larger urban areas, feeling the squeeze from continuing to see higher rents. The market value apartments are skyrocketing, and the number of rent-stabilized units are dwindling, really.
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
I’m curious. In your organizing to this sort of wider vein, what are some of the unique challenges that renters in rent-controlled, rent-stabilized apartments are experiencing when it comes to not just deteriorating conditions, but how landlords treat them and what that relationship looks like?
Esteban Girón:
Well, it’s interesting you say that because I think I tend to look at this through the lens of tenant power, and that’s the baseline thing that I guide, at least the work that I do. We made a big dent in that and a big shift in that interaction in 2019 with rent laws that were transformative and once in a generation. It took a lot of effort, had to do a lot of electoral work in addition to the regular organizing work, but we basically closed all, but a couple of loopholes that were decimating our rent-stabilized stock basically. We’d lost something like 300,000 apartments or something. Just insane.
I think there’s roughly over a million, a little bit over a million rent-stabilized units right now, and so we were losing everywhere. We were losing in housing court, we were losing… because the laws were just not conducive to tenants having any sort of power in the relationship. So what we started doing in the Crown Heights Tenant Union, and this is a decade ago, we started finding other ways to get what we wanted. So whether it meant shaming a landlord in the press, or going out, and talking to their neighbors, and passing out flyers in their neighborhood, or any sort of direct action stuff that was not… We weren’t doing anything illegal, but we weren’t really operating as like we’re going to win something in housing court or even in the legislature.
I think that’s always going to be true. Rent stabilization itself was one after a lot of… Well, I mean, actually, initially, it was price control set for the war, but New York City has had some version of that because of every generation, there seems to be a tenant movement that realizes this is the way, and then moves forward from that. So, yeah. That was four years ago. The change has been, like I said, transformative, the fact that we’re not really losing units anymore in the way that we were before. You can imagine like when you have the ability to take a rent-stabilized unit to market rate, sometimes doubling the rent, everything that a landlord does is going to be… like a tenant has a target on their back because they just want them out of there.
So a lot of stuff you can’t even really quantify with data because it’s like how do you quantify how many people just get annoyed with their landlord or get harassed out of their apartment? A lot of self-eviction in this sort of thing. So it was a really dire situation, and it’s been really hard to defend too. Landlords are there right now in front of the Supreme Court trying to get the 2019 rent laws reversed, and they’re still trying to push the legislature, and they’re still trying to build a narrative that makes it out to be landlords are suffering. We know that’s not true, so.
Mel Buer:
Right. I mean, renters are suffering.
Esteban Girón:
Renters are always suffering. Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. You hear some pretty wild stories about the lengths that landlords will go to get individuals to vacate their rent-controlled apartments in Los Angeles which is the thing that I’ve been paying attention to a lot. You hear a lot of stories from the LA Tenants Union about individuals who have scary mob-looking men knocking on their door every day.
Esteban Girón:
Oh, yeah, that happens.
Mel Buer:
Trying to intimidate them to leave, offering absurd sums of money to get them out of the apartments, right? Sometimes as much as $100,000 which is wild to me.
Esteban Girón:
We’ve seen $250,000 for buyouts before. Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Right, and there’s no guarantee you’ll see that money once you leave, you know?
Esteban Girón:
Right.
Mel Buer:
It’s the principle of the matter, right? This rent stabilization is meant to ensure that folks stay housed, right? Landlords are doing everything they can to circumvent those laws and to… I think it’s really important to note that the tenants unions and the legislative efforts that have been happening in New York are an important blueprint for how to work on a wide variety of fronts to protect tenants from these aggressive, manipulative, exploitative landlords. Right? It’s something that can be replicated.
Esteban Girón:
The thing about it that I think makes it interesting is that we realized the value and the need for not just at the building level having some organization, but then being able to translate that into a statewide or even national focus, and that’s… You do the incremental changes within the context of the law, and they’re absolutely necessary, but in no way does it trump the value of just knowing my neighbors and knowing my neighborhood. Both things have to be there, and I think that’s the thing that tenant unions are doing now. I think that’s the thing that we’re doing well is figuring out how to do all those together. Sometimes we mess up, and sometimes we don’t give enough focus to certain things. But overall, I’d say over the last 10 years, it’s really been… Just in retrospect, it’s actually been pretty successful, I think.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. To that point, I mean, in Teddy Ostrow’s most recent article for The Real News, New York’s Tenant Unions Are Playing The Long Game, you spoke on the importance of building community-wide tenants unions to help combat this rising tide of pro-landlord, anti-renter policies. You said, and I quote because I think this is a really important quote for our listeners, “I think the goal of any tenant unionist is, ultimately, a city-wide, neighborhood-wide, statewide tenant union that has sufficient power to be able to force a lot of landlords to do what we want them to do.” Let’s unpack this just a little bit for our listeners because I think it’s a really important piece of this. Right? We have, really, a diversity of tactics in trying to combat these anti-renter policies in order to really stabilize or improve the material conditions of working-class renters which is the vast majority of individuals.
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
The housing crisis is for us and our millennial generation for individuals who are younger.
Esteban Girón:
Oh, yeah. We came into this whole thing. Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. The hope that we have is being able to pay our rent, right?
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
The idea of buying a house is a pipe dream.
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
So what does that mean for us, and why is it so important for renters to organize these tenant unions? What does this do for the strength of a community, for example, or the ability to push back against this exploitation?
Esteban Girón:
So I think one thing to just put out there as a baseline is that I found my way to socialism as a concept exclusively through the work that I was doing as a tenant organizer. It happened fairly quickly, and nothing else made sense in that context anymore. I hadn’t read any theory. I didn’t know any… but I could tell that there was that, that like, “Yeah, this is capitalism gone really bad,” and it was so plain because the way that landlords operate is just like the absolute worst of the worst capitalist. So, yeah. I mean, I think we have organized, in a way, that yes, build community. I remember feeling like this was the first time that I had ever lived in a neighborhood anywhere in my life that I knew so many people when I left the building and that I had a real sense of grounding that I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, and I couldn’t imagine even moving out of my apartment because, of course, once you have a rent-stabilized apartment, that’s the lowest price that you’re ever going to pay for an apartment.
One of the things that we try to get people to do is to just put down roots and just… because what happens in gentrification here in New York, and LA, and other places is that the landlords are able to continue increasing rents by renting to transient younger folks. So if you can get some of those folks to put down roots, then you’re already combating the problem. If you can get folks to not take a $250,000 buyout, that completely shuts down a landlord’s business model, and that’s what we’ve been trying to disrupt because the systems right now are so, so heavily favored to landlords. It’s the way that property works in, really, everywhere in the world. There’s really no borders for this anymore.
You’ve got Blackstone, and Akelius, and huge corporations that are doing the same thing to us that they’re doing in Spain, that they’re doing in Australia. It’s become such a universal problem, and it’s not even just apartment buildings. Single-family homes are dealing with the same thing. So I think the idea of a tenant union, at least for us, and we started in 2000… Crown Heights Tenant Union started in 2013. I joined maybe two months later as part of that, and what we thought would be, and I still believe this is the way, is if we can get a strong local organization and we can get this replicated in different neighborhoods in New York, then we can put together something citywide, and then at that point, try to replicate it in other cities, and then bring it statewide.
The Autonomous Tenants Union Network is all of North America, so there’s some sense of that, but the nonprofits, the way that nonprofits do this work probably worked well at some point in the last 50 years, but it really stopped working, I think, after the financial crisis like that’s… It’s not the same, and the nonprofit model is obviously severely lacking as far as we’re concerned, and we constantly fight against it. We’re not a nonprofit. We’re not even incorporated. We value our independence from not only politicians, but we don’t take foundation grants, for example, because we don’t want to have to do stuff that is not what we actually want to do.
We don’t want to have to answer to anybody in terms of what tactics we’re going to use and all of that, and so that’s the value, I think, of autonomous tenant unions is that the tenants are always guiding. We don’t have staff, and we don’t have a hierarchy, so we are very much… Anybody can be making the decisions, and we’re doing them collectively, and we’re doing it together. If folks are interested in reading about unions like ours, the website is atun, A-T-U-N, -rsia.org, and that’s actually Autonomous Tenants Union Network. What is the Spanish? The RSIA is the Spanish part of that.
Mel Buer:
Mm. Yeah.
Esteban Girón:
It was started by the LA Tenant Union as well. Yeah. I mean, we organized around some points of unity saying that we believe that tenants are… Anybody that’s not housed or doesn’t have control over their own housing is a tenant. That could include people that have a mortgage. That could include elderly folks living in a nursing home. Basically, anybody that does not have control over their own housing. Then, I think a really key thing which Teddy speaks about in the article is reorienting around a tenant as opposed to housing. So we don’t consider ourselves a housing organization because it’s not about feeding into this already existing capitalist system of housing like, “We want to do away with that.” The point is tenant power. It’s within us. So like that. That’s actually a really… It seems like a small thing, but it’s a significant variation from what happened.
So, yeah. We have these… not rules, but just things that we agreed to. I don’t remember how many exactly, how many tenant unions now there are, but we’re in Wisconsin, we’re in Vancouver, we’re in Texas, we’re obviously in California. The two of the biggest ones are LA Tenant Union, and then TANC, which is Tenant and Neighborhood Council in the Bay Area. I actually went to LA last year, year and a half ago maybe for the first big convention that we did for this, and it was just amazing, the fact that I can organize in a building with 50 units in New York City and actually have so much in common with literally a tenant union of 10 people from West Virginia.
That, to me, is the real test of like, “Does this work? Is this replicable? Can we do this in a larger scale?” It is. It really is, but this is… 10 years is not very long in the trajectory of how long landlords have been in charge of all of this and what kind of power they have, but we’re chipping away at it. I think there’s no other way right now. I don’t think that there’s a… Whether it’s the nonprofits or political considerations, I don’t think that, really, anybody has a good answer right now for what to do about the crisis other than organizing from the base up. I think that’s the point, organizing from the base up. There’s been these pushes to have a statewide tenant union before having the base for it, and that’s the opposite of how it should work. I know there’s a lot of parallels with the labor movement too, you know?
Mel Buer:
Yeah, yeah. Teddy talks about this a lot in his article where that you can see these democratic reform movements in various business unions where you are switching the narrative from a top-down organization to one that takes its cues from the bottom-up, and I think that’s a really important distinction to make. I also think you made a really good distinction about the restraints that nonprofit housing initiatives have in building tenant power and actually challenging some of the landlord status quo. You know what I mean?
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
To speak to that, you’re right, I think that there is something… Nonprofits do have to take their cues from what they can and cannot organize for as ostensibly political organizations. There’s a lot of rules for how you get your nonprofit status, and your funding is paramount, and so you really have to pick your battles. What can that particular tool in the toolbox do? Perhaps homeless individual outreach needs more of a boost from a foundation grant than something else, right? I think you are correct as well that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to a housing crisis that is centuries in the making in this capitalist country, right?
You also make a good point, and this is an optimistic thing to maybe hang our hat on here, is that every successive generation seems to have a successful or at least lasting enough legacy of housing movement that responds to the specific conditions of that particular generation. We are experiencing some of the same. You and I both know that housing market has not been the same since 2008, that the same opportunities afforded to our parents 40, 50 years ago doesn’t exist now. So those specific economic conditions are unique to our own shared existence, right? So the solutions to that are going to look a little bit different. I was fortunate enough to spend time with members of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network. I went to the Socialism Conference last year as part of doing this coverage.
Esteban Girón:
Oh, yeah. I was on a panel for that.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. I was there for your panel. Yeah.
Esteban Girón:
Oh, nice, nice.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, yeah. I got a chance to really hang out and see how each tenant union for all of their similarities in terms of what you guys are organizing against or for. Everyone’s got a little bit of a different take on how that works, right?
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
I think of the older elders from Kansas City who are speaking to specific things that are happening in Kansas City, for example, or what the much younger radical activists are doing in LA with the way that they organize their tenant union. There is space there, and if you are stuck under the model of the nonprofit model or the top-down model, that type of variety, that type of ability, the space to be able to fill in gaps as needed from the grassroots level can happen, you know?
Esteban Girón:
The flexibility, yeah, that-
Mel Buer:
Exactly.
Esteban Girón:
The word I’m looking for is not even “flexibility,” but the sort of-
Mel Buer:
Dynamic needs?
Esteban Girón:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Yeah.
Esteban Girón:
The ability to put your feet anywhere that they’ll land, and try new things, and see that things don’t work or see what does work. One more thing about the cross-section between labor and housing is that you’re dealing with, essentially, the same rank and file like the workers are the tenants are the workers are the tenants. That is also, I think, instructive that we’re getting more radicalized folks in the housing movement because within labor, there’s this surge of rank and file organizing. There’s organizations within the unions that are pushing for change, and then you’ve got Amazon and Starbucks, and the newer wave of… the really exciting wave of labor that I think is turning everything on its head.
Even with legal stuff, we face some of the same stuff. There’s a lot of push. I think in California and San Francisco, for example, there’s a push to legalize, in a way, organizing and define what a unit is, and basically, do what National Labor Relations Board does, basically, and we’ve actually pushed against that because that takes away the flexibility. That means that we can’t, for example, organize two families that are living in a home that’s not a big building. Usually, these laws put some restrictions on the number of units and that sort of thing, and it just tries to box everything up in a way that’s tidy, and I think that’s… Ah, nimble. “Nimble” was the word I was looking for, the ability to just… LATU is actually a really great example of that because the variety of types of housing that they organize around is so… I was there for the weekend, and I saw so many different situations that you have to approach, in some ways, very differently, and in other ways, it’s the same thing.
The root is still talking to your neighbor because that’s who’s going to know about what your landlord is doing and getting together with more neighbors because our foundational thing is the rent strike. That’s ultimately what can cause the change, and the rent strike requires that you have some sort of leverage on a landlord just like any strike does, and that’s easier to do in a 50-unit building than it is in a small two-family home, but you get enough two-family homes owned by the same landlord, and you’ve got a rent strike. You can do it.
Yeah, 2008 really changed the… not just all over the country, but the way development would happen here in New York. That’s another area that we are super involved in. There’s this push to build more housing. There’s a very supply-side-driven push from… The acronym is YIMBY versus NIMBY which is Yes In My Backyard. People say that all you have to do is build more market rate housing, more luxury housing, and then the people that are income-eligible for that will take that, and then the poor folks will be able to fill in the housing, and it’s this whole trickle-down… repeat of trickle-down economics, and it doesn’t work.
That’s the thing that changes the neighborhood. That’s what brings the gentrification. So it’s amazing to look back and see all these different things that we had to get involved in. I couldn’t just get involved in my tenant union. I had to start going to community board meetings, and now, I sit on the land use committee of my community board. It’s like you don’t think about having to do those things, but you really got to keep an eye out because there’s just so many forces working together to shut you down and to work around you, and they’re very good at it. They’re really very good at it.
I think what we’re developing now with the Autonomous Tenant Union Network, and we actually have on… I think on March 3rd. Yeah. March 3rd, we have our… We’ve been trying to do an annual conference, and so we’re doing a virtual one this year. Anybody can go to the website, sign up, and a couple of days of workshops with different tenant unions. There’s skill sharing. I look at that, and I think about the possibilities of thinking of something like National Rent Control, or Homes Guarantee, or some sort of model of social housing that would be transformative for the entire population and that we could do that at a… not just the state level, but on a national level.
Again, in my opinion, that requires the ability to have both nonprofits that have the institutional support, that have the money, the staff to do a lot of this stuff. We don’t pay for buses to go to Albany. We hop on the bus with the nonprofits that are paying for it. So there’s a symbiotic relationship that happens there. They take us to Albany, and then we can yell at the politicians in ways that they can’t. We’re going to have to be able to do that on a national level, and some of that already started happening like when the landlords challenged the 2019 rent laws in the Supreme Court. There’s still one case that’s outstanding, and it’s actually my landlord is the person… one of the plaintiffs in that case. Yeah, it’s a mess.
The thing about it was that it threatened LA’s rent control and the Twin Cities’ rent control because it essentially is trying to end rent control as a thing in New York. If that happens at the Supreme Court, that applies to the entire country, and so we found ourselves in a situation where it was like, “All right. Now, we’re all in the same boat. This could affect everybody.” I think we’re close to clearing that. We cleared three cases, two or three cases already that they rejected, and we have one more that we have to get through, but it’s a good indication that this is globalized, nationalized. We’re all dealing with the same landlords, and they’re conspiring against us in much the same ways. So it can be overwhelming. It can be really overwhelming.
Now that you’ve mentioned that, I have this poster. This was made by one of the people that was on that panel, and it says, “Hands off. Decommodify all housing,” and it’s like a cute little… I think that’s what is, now, the next horizon for… For us, we tend to be a little bit more… We tend towards believing that this can be done in a municipal level, at a level of the state actually running and creating this housing. There’s some benefits to things like a co-op or a community land trust that’s jointly owned by the people, but really, at the scale that we need to be able to do it, we need to be able to do it. The city has to be able to do it, the state, the federal government, and not in the way that they did with public housing where they starved the funding for that and crippled it.
I think there’s possibilities to do that. We’re spending the money already. In New York, we were spending billions of dollars in tax breaks to build luxury housing when we could have just been building it ourselves. We have the land. We could have been doing it with unions. So that is the next I think… how we get out of this situation that we’re in with landlords because it might seem like a pipe dream, but there’s no future where landlords exist and tenants still have power. That’s never going to happen. That can’t be what we’re fighting for.
I think that’s the other thing that nonprofits tend to… They tend to focus really specifically on one law, or one housing court, or whatever it is that’s like one little piece of the larger system, and I think that it’s really important that there be part of the movement that is looking beyond that. It’s just like saying like, “When do we win socialism?” Right? You have to have the people that really have in their mind like, “We need to get to that next space.” Then, you have the other people that are pragmatists that are really making sure that as we’re getting to that space, we are still protected, that we’re still able to live and-
Mel Buer:
Yeah. I mean, the struggle continues, you know?
Esteban Girón:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Mel Buer:
Just as a final parting thought before we wrap up. I think what you and your fellow tenant organizers are engaged in is an extremely important part of improving the material conditions of the working class in this country. Despite the struggles, despite the major hurdles and the flaming hoops that everyone has to jump through in order to reach that sort of stability, even in the last 10 years, the work you’ve done is amazing, right? No contribution is too small in furthering this project and moving towards much more equitable, and stable, and beautiful living conditions for everyone in this country, so.
Esteban Girón:
It can happen. It can happen.
Mel Buer:
It can happen, and I really want to thank you for taking the time to come and talk about this. Please come back on the show anytime to talk about the work that your tenants union is doing or work that the ATUN is doing. I will be signing up for that conference. I’m really excited to see the kind of work that you’re doing.
Esteban Girón:
Yeah. There’ll be some Spanish language stuff that a lot of people will be doing. A lot of people… the largest, the one that they’re doing, the biggest right now, and yeah, lots of admiration for what they’re doing. So, definitely, folks should check that out. There’s some really great workshops that are happening and that are really practical. It’s basic stuff. It’s not even like the Socialism Conference where you’re talking about these big ideas. This is like-
Mel Buer:
Overall. Yeah.
Esteban Girón:
This is like, “How do you knock on a door? How do you…” Just the very basic stuff, and I think everyone needs it. I think a great thing is like… to think about Teddy who wrote this article that I didn’t even realize that he was in the union at this point as he was doing this research, and I had met him before. I had seen him at an auction before. Everybody is in this. We’re all in this situation. We’ve got to start realizing that there’s not these clean, defined lines. The working class is broad, it’s diverse, and we are eventually going to win. There’s just too many of us not to, you know?
Mel Buer:
That’s true. That’s a great… yes, a great way to end this. Before we go, where can we find updates with your union, or where can we find the sign-up for the conference?
Esteban Girón:
So, the conference, again, that’s atun-rsia.org, and that’s the Autonomous Tenant Union Network. You can click on the navigation bar there that says, “2024 Virtual Convention.” It’s just a Zoom link that you can register with. For us, probably our strongest presence is on Instagram. You can just type in “Crown Heights Tenant Union,” but also, crownheightstenantunion.org or info@crownheightstenantunion.org. Anybody can reach out. We are very local, but again, if you’re having issues and you want maybe a referral to a group that’s working in your area or just want some advice on something, definitely, reach out to us. We’re here to use whatever we’ve learned in the last 10 years to support everybody in this fight. It only helps us to have people in Wisconsin that are doing this, and so it gets us a little bit closer to where we want to be. Yeah, crownheightstenantunion.org. Please check it out.
Mel Buer:
Great. Thanks so much for coming on, Esteban.
Esteban Girón:
Absolutely.
Mel Buer:
Come back anytime.
Esteban Girón:
Thank you.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at The Real News Network Podcast. Once again, I am your host, Mel Buer. If you love today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. We usually try to put these out every Thursday, so keep an eye out. You can find us on most platforms, including Spotify and YouTube, and if you follow us on YouTube, please be sure to like this video and subscribe. Share with your friends, and if you’d like to get in touch with me, you can find me on most social media, most notably Twitter or X, if that’s your flavor. My DMs are always open, and I check them regularly. Send me a message via email if you’d like at mel@therealnews.com. You can send your tips, comments, questions, episode ideas, gripes, complaints, whatever you’d like. I would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for sticking around, and I will see you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
