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.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
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.
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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.
Baltimore has become what many consider to be ground zero in the emerging “solidarity economy” and the formation of worker-owned, cooperatively run businesses. There’s something important going on here, and there’s a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space—people who are living, breathing proof that there’s another way to run a business, that there’s another way to run our economy, and that there are other ways we can treat work and workers. At a recent event hosted by the Baltimore Museum of Industry titled “Work Matters: Building a Worker-Owned Co-op,” Max moderated a panel including workers and representatives from Common Ground Bakery Café, Taharka Bros Ice Cream, A Few Cool Hardware Stores, and the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED). He talked to them about how they came to work at these different co-ops, how their businesses transitioned to more cooperative models, and they dig into the nitty gritty of what working at a co-op looks like, what it takes for workers to democratically run a business, and the real challenges, limitations, and rewards that come with this kind of work. Panelists include: Vince Green (Taharka Bros Ice Cream); David Evans (A Few Cool Hardware Stores); Craig Smith (A Few Cool Hardware Stores); Sierra Allen (Common Ground Bakery Café); Christa Daring (BRED).
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music…
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership 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, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network.
And please, support the work that we are doing here at Working People, because we cannot keep going without you. Share our episodes with your co-workers, leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and 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 sent to your mailbox every single month. Just go to Patreon.com/workingpeople. That’s Patreon.com/workingpeople. Hit the Subscribe button, and you will immediately unlock all the amazing bonus episodes that we publish every month and all the bonus content that we put out for our patrons over the past six seasons of the show.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and we’ve got a really cool episode for y’all today, which is actually a recording from a Kick-ass live event that I recently got to moderate at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, which is just such a great museum. If you’re in Baltimore, you got to go check it out. So the event was called Work Matters: Building a Worker-Owned. And you guys may recall that back in 2021, we had my former Real News colleague and amazing journalist, Jaisal Noor, on the show to talk about this recent surge in worker-owned cooperatively run businesses in the US, especially here in Baltimore, which many considered to be ground zero in this emerging solidarity economy.
There’s really something going on here, and there’s a lot that we can all learn from our fellow workers who are in the cooperative space, people who are living, breathing proof that there is another way to run a business. There is another way to run our economy, and there are other ways that we can treat work and workers. And that also means that there are other ways for workers themselves to come together to collectively improve their lives in and outside of work. Obviously, as you guys know, we talk a lot about unions on this show and we talk about the ways that unions are and have been and can be and should be a crucial form of worker organization and a necessary vehicle for building and exercising collective worker power. But there are other types of organizations too, other things that working people are doing to improve their lives and the lives of their co-workers, like forming worker cooperatives.
And that’s why I was absolutely thrilled to be asked to moderate this panel, which included workers and representatives from Common Ground Bakery Cafe, Taharka Brothers Ice Cream, a few cool hardware stores or formerly Ace Hardware, and the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy. And we talk about a lot of stuff on this panel. We talk about how they came to work at these different worker co-ops, how their businesses transition to more cooperative models because that kind of thing doesn’t happen overnight. And we also dig into the nitty-gritty of what working at a Worker co-op looks like, what it takes for workers to actually democratically run a business instead of the bosses. And we also talk about the real challenges limitations, but also the rewards that come with this kind of work.
So I hope you guys enjoy this conversation as much as I enjoyed participating in it. Thank you once again to all of the amazing panelists who participated in this event, and thank you of course to the wonderful folks at the Baltimore Museum of Industry for hosting it and for inviting me to be part of it. I’m really appreciative. So here it is, our panel conversation on building a worker-owned co-op, today.
(singing)
Auni Gelles:
So the BMI has long been known for its original artifacts and immersive galleries that share a rich history of the people and industries that build Baltimore. Now we’re launching Work Matters, a series of in-person discussions on the legacies of labor and what those mean for workers today. Grounded in history, the series engages attendees in meaningful conversations about the past, present, and future of work in our city. You are here at the second program in our series, and the third program will take place in January about bakery workers.
So today we are joined by Maximilian Alvarez, editor-in-chief of the Real News Network, who will moderate this discussion, as well as our five esteemed panelists who will introduce themselves as they share their experiences. We anticipate this discussion will last for about an hour. And afterwards, you’re welcome to join us in the lunchroom across the hall for some ice cream provided by Taharka Bros Ice Cream. The museum is open until four o’clock today, so you’re welcome to look around afterwards. And I’d also like to draw your attention to our current temporary exhibition called Food for Thought, which is spotlighting food service workers in Baltimore City Public Schools. Check that out if you haven’t seen it yet, because it will only be up through February. And we also have two school groups on site today, so if you hear a little bit of noise, they’re excited to learn about work. All right, without further ado, over to you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Thank you so much, Auni. Thank you to everyone here at the Baltimore Museum of Industry. I just wanted to quickly start by really giving a shout-out to the BMI and giving a shout-out to all of you for being here. This museum rocks. And it’s such not only just in terms of the subject matter, super fascinating, but in terms of the approach, the thought that goes into how folks here are curating the information, the history that they want to pass on to the next generation. There’s a real bottom up spirit to the displays and that’s why we’re all sitting here, right? The spirit of Howard Zinn lives in the BMI and it is an honor to be a part of it and an honor to be a part of this incredible panel where we’re going to be talking to folks around our city who are doing things differently at work. And there’s a lot that we can learn from that, and I think there’s a lot of hope in the work that they are doing.
Because who here has worked crappy low wage jobs before? Yeah, okay. For everyone listening, that was basically everyone in the audience, myself included. I have spoken about this many times on my podcast working people, the work I do at the Real News Network and beyond. But this is where a lot of my work grew out of was my experience, as a low wage worker in America. And whether that was in restaurants, retail, warehouses, factories, like so many other people in this country, when I was working those jobs, I had no idea there was an option beyond stay and take the crap I was getting or leave and try to find a better job. Those are the only two options that seemed possible to me.
I did not know there was a secret third thing like unionizing your workplace. I did not know there was a secret fourth thing, like turning your workplace into a cooperative worker owned business. That was so far away from my mentality at the time, that feels criminal. But I think that having spent so many years talking to working people about their lives, their jobs, their dreams, their struggles, I think so many of us have a deep hunger for something else, something different.
And we all recognize, as our society continues to crumble, as the world continues to spiral out of control and as the grip of the people at the top on power gets tighter and tighter, more of us are asking ourselves, is this the only way things can be? Is this the most efficient, moral, right way that things can be? And I think it’s really, really incredible that I’m sitting here at a table of folks who are not only thinking that but are doing something about it. And I think we’re all coming to this at a time when, as I said, the world is in a very dismal place. And I think what we are seeing in the largest sense is what happens when we entrust power and decision-making in the hands of a few, whether those be folks in Washington, whether those be our bosses and the shareholders that invest in our companies. If we give over the maintenance of our society to them, this is what we get.
We need more bottom-up control over our world. We need more democracy in our world, and that starts in the workplace. And so that’s what we’re going to talk about today. And I could not be more honored to be joined, as I said, by folks who are doing this every single day. I’m going to let them introduce themselves to y’all here. But we’ve got a range of folks from Taharka Brothers Ice Cream, which we all know and love. Taharka Brothers Rocks. We’ve got the Baltimore Roundtable on Economic Democracy, which is doing vital work to make other worker cooperatives happen. We got folks from Ace, we got Common Ground, who y’all just had an incredible story of buying back the store, turning it into a worker cooperative.
So I want to hear about all of this and I’m going to shut up and just kind of throw the first question at our panel and then we will have time for Q&A later. So if you have questions, please do don’t forget them.
Okay, so first things first, human cooperation is as old as humanity itself. I want to start there. But the concept of a worker-run business and a cooperative workplace is still, I think, quite new and foreign to most of us, and I imagine it was the same for all of you at one point in your lives. So let’s start there. Let’s go around the table and have each of y’all first introduce yourselves, tell us a little bit about the kind of work that you do, and then talk us through your individual paths to entering the world of worker cooperatives.
Vince Green:
I have a loud voice regardless. Can everyone hear me perfectly fine? Good. Well, I’m Vinny. I’m one of the worker owner from Taharka Brothers Ice Cream. I’ve been with Taharka Brothers as long as I was able to have a worker permit, I’ve been working with Taharka Brothers, actually my first job, I’ve been doing it since I was 15 and nine months. I’m now 27 years old, so it’s been going a little bit over a decade. It was a long journey of us transitioning to be a co-op, when we first started. A lot of people don’t know the original story of Taharka Brothers before it was even a ice cream company that everyone loves. It all started off as a nonprofits. Nonprofit, the name is called Sylvan Beach. Sylvan Beach was a nonprofit. They were down on Presstman Street where they focused on the rehabilitation of just young men re-entering the free world, the best way you can say it.
They had guys living on the top floor making ice cream on the second floor. They ran the coffee shop on the first floor. They ran that all the way up till about early 2000s. Then the economy crashed and the founder, Sean Smeeton, had no idea what was his next step. So his idea was when everything went empty, he met a young guy named Mike Prokop. Mike Prokop is one of the owners with us on board now. He was in a foster care program. Literally, he was just looking for a bed to stay in. That bed came into a transition of the big idea of why won’t we just turn this business into a business where young adults are hands-on and learning the business. This was way before co-op was really even the main idea. It was just the big idea of just teaching the youth of today’s generation the skills of running a successful business.
So fast-forward that, I got on board as a freshman, maybe 2010. The company still was trying to figure out things. We always had the big idea. BRED used to always come over like, “Hey, should be a co-op. It’s the perfect option for you.” We did a ton of workshops and different stages of our. And then right, I think it was 2019, right before the world just shut down on us, we finally got the status of how a co-op could work for the Taharka Brothers. 2019, that’s when we finally was able to remove Sylvan Beach as the owners of Taharka Brothers.
And during that time, when we first switched over, we started off with six owners. Long story short, now we are still a thriving business, but we’re still trying to understand of how to be a co-op. A co-operate, employee owned company has so many different layers like an onion, and day by day, we’re still trying to learn the ups and downs and how things work, how can you make sure every voice is heard. Even the people that are not employee owners just yet, how can we put them in the correct tunnel so they can get to the point with all the other owners of being owners and shareholders of the business?
But it’s a daily grind. Especially with our business strategy, we’re kind of growing faster than what we can expect. And then with the small team, with the skills that we have, it’s kind of limited. But BRED is our best friends, so they are lifesavers and a lot of things with just advice and financial assistance. So day by day, we’re just trying to learn and keep growing and hopefully we can have as many employee owners. Our main goal is to create social change with our employees, and that’s giving them high wage jobs, good opportunities and just doing the damn thing, pretty much.
Christa Daring:
Thanks, Vinny. I appreciate all the love. My name is Christa Daring. I’m the executive director of BRED, the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy. We are a local peer fund of Seed Commons, which is a national CDFI, that is tasked with financing and providing high-touch technical assistance to cooperatives and businesses that are interested into converting into cooperatives. I first discovered Red Emma’s in 2004 when they opened two blocks down the street from my high school when I was a senior. And I just started hanging out there being kind of a layabout punk kid and I was like, this place seems pretty cool, I wonder if they’ll let me wash dishes. Back in that time, Red Emma’s was an all volunteer run project. I moved away for college and when I came back in 2011, rejoined Red Emma’s as a worker owner.
I was part of that process of moving from the tiny little basement on St. Paul Street to our big expansion on North Avenue. I was at Red Emma’s as a worker owner until 2017, and now I’m back at BRED, instead on the other side. Having taken a lot from the experiences of us trying to gain financing for our expansion. When we were ready to move to North Avenue, we went to our credit union and we were like, “Hey, we need about $60,000 for improvements on this space.” And they’re like, “Great, who’s going to undersign the loan? Who’s going to be the guarantor?” And we were like, “Oh, that doesn’t really make sense for us.” And they’re like, “Okay, we’ll find the four people with the best credit and the most assets.” And we’re like, “Well, that really doesn’t work for us either.”
And so to make a very long story, somewhat succinct, we ended up working with The Working World, which was a loan fund based out of New York City, and we sort of convinced them to start lending in Baltimore. And from that, and with Baltimore Bicycle Works and Red Emma’s and a few other local partners, BRED was formed from that as an ability for co-ops to come to us. And we provide non-extractive financing. We do not check people’s credit, we do not take personal guarantees. If there are assets to the business, we might put that as a security, but otherwise we are not coming to take people’s homes if they don’t make their payments. We are making our loans purely on the veracity of the business plan and the overall impact that the business is having for the workers and on their neighborhood.
David Evans:
Hello, I’m Dave Evans. I’m the manager at Federal Hill Ace Hardware. I’ve been there since the opening. I actually helped put it together back in 2007. Luckily, I’m a retired firefighter and my wife at the time was like, “You need to get a job. I’m tired of telling everybody I’m with a retired firefighter, and they think I’m with a 65-year-old man.”
So I went looking and I knew as a young man, I wanted to help people and I looked in the paper and lo and behold, there was a hardware store opening in my old neighborhood. And I was like, wow, this is fate. So went and applied and luckily for me, the owner was this woman named Gina Schaefer, who was an amazing woman who actually is the one that found out how to do the ESOP and decided to sell the company to us all. It was very odd at first, I have to say. At first, you don’t really see the results. So when they came to us and everything and said that we’re going to be employee-owned, I really was like, okay, what’s that mean? But until you actually see it, it makes a big difference. And I’m very happy to be working at Ace Hardware. If anyone’s been to Ace, it’s a place where the customer service is outstanding. And that’s just near and dear to my heart. I don’t really have anything else to say.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wait, I got a really important follow up, though. Do you guys also have a store cat at your location?
David Evans:
Yes, Decker. I adopted Decker in 2010. He is now 16. He is infamous, he is famous. We’ve been in paper twice now. We have socks. I think we’re up to three pairs of socks that everyone comes and buy. I think we have two candles. He makes more money for the store than some of the product that’s in my store. And he has wood starter, fire starters. So we do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s cool.
Craig Smith:
Yes, we have Brandon our cat. And so my name is Craig Smith. I’m the CEO of A Few Cool Hardware Stores. We’re a group of locally owned Ace Hardware stores in DC, Maryland and Virginia. And we have three stores right here in Baltimore. So how I came to be involved in Ace Hardware was I’ve been in the retail hardware business for about 23 years. And a couple of years ago, someone knocked on my door, named Gina Schaefer and… sorry, can you hear me okay or did someone want to get in there? We don’t want to lock anybody out here.
So a couple of years ago, Gina got in touch with me and asked if I would replace her as CEO of the company, and also she wanted to have one of my stores in her chain. So basically I sold my store and then we became employee owned.
It’s a little confusing. I’m not sure if it is for anybody or maybe perhaps just for me. We kind of double dip in this business a little bit. We are a co-op, because of our relationship with Ace Hardware, but then we’re also an employee stock ownership plan because of our own particular company as an ESOP. But with Ace Hardware we have the affiliation of being a co-op as well. So there’s a lot going on there, but we’re glad Gina got in touch with Dave and got in touch with me and it’s been a wonderful time to be a part of this company, A Few Cool Hardware Stores.
Sierra Allen:
Hi, my name is Cece, so I’m the youngest here from what I can tell. And so I am not a Baltimore native. I’m originally from Virginia. I am 21 years old. I left home at 18 years old and my graduation year just so happened to be 2020. So I did not get graduation, did not get home. And so I was a little lost, worked a couple different places. I worked at this Jewish bagel shop, I worked at a Starbucks and it was my first time kind of getting out because I’m by myself at this point. And then I came across this coffee shop and I got to know everybody slowly. And we really have a kind of family oriented environment. A lot of places say that, and it’s always a red flag for me when I’m applying for a job when they’re like, “This is a family environment.”
But I got introduced to these people and I fell in love with everyone. We became very close friends. And then this year, about five-ish months ago, the owner at our job, we were in the process of unionization and he just closed shop. Out of nowhere, he just closed the store. The managers had no idea what was going on, and they got a phone call three minutes before we were told. And then we got a random paragraph that was like, “Hey, closing permanently. Never again.” And then I was just like, oh, okay. So all of us were super sad, but we immediately kind of thrust into action and through the help of BRED and some financial loans as well as a couple of us educating ourselves on everything, we were able to reopen. And we’ve been open for going on three months now. I think we just hit the two month mark. So going on about three months. Yeah, it’s been a bit of a stressful process. Everything happened fairly fast and people were surprised with how fast that we opened, but we’ve been doing pretty good.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just to clarify for the audience, y’all bought the store back?
Sierra Allen:
Yes, we did.
Maximillian Alvarez:
With BRED and reopened as a co-op.
Sierra Allen:
Yes, we did.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s incredible. So I want to dig in more to the weeds here because as folks could already tell from the first go around the panel, just like businesses themselves vary, a worker co-op can mean different things and look many different ways depending on the people, the business, et cetera. So I wanted to ask our great panel, what does it mean to you, to be part of a worker cooperative or part of a more democratic work structure or involved in that work and how is that different from what the rest of us are used to and what you were used to before that. Let’s talk more about what actually goes into making a worker and keeping it going. Let’s lift the hood. What do you think are the daily practical realities that folks on the outside just don’t see here?
Vince Green:
I’m first in line because my seat… but it’s perfectly fine with me. That’s a very good question. I think with Taharka Brothers, what makes us being a co-op excels for us is what we call it, the GAF meter of how much you care about the company. The company could have went under so many occasions. We had this little loan thing called Funbox where we just had to hit it every week just to cover payroll. And the company at one point in time, it was a very small crew. That’s kind of why at this moment, we’re down to only three owners. That’s the story for another go around. But is everyone putting it what we call the shoulder to the boulder of pushing the company to keep going further. Even with our employees that are not owners at this moment when they are on board, I always joke around every paint y’all school, it all matters because it goes to the success of the company.
At this moment right now, we just got approved for a loan and we have a new factory getting built. With the help of BRED, these employees, they’re able to see the growth and the scaling of the company. And as the company grows, the lifestyle and opportunities that you’re able to offer our employees, they grow and also with the owners. So it’s more appealing to become an owner of Taharka Brothers. So you’re not just slaving for what some people will say, just for a paycheck. But you know this might be residual for a lifetime thing. When you have awards of best ice cream in Baltimore and you knowing you’re scooping every paint and every person you run into, you’re able to have pride in saying you’re one of the owners of Taharka Brothers, this big movement that is making some shake in the city. Especially hearing co-ops, it is great to hear and be on board of these things because like you said, it’s like the family fellowship of trying to connect and grow together, but it’s also you hold one another accountable for what they are responsible for.
So it’s not like come to work and I don’t know what to do. It’s like you come to work with your A game and you coming to push the company to the next level and you hold your own self accountable. It’s not like you come in to work and you waiting for your boss to walk in and give you your day by day schedule. Even for our employees, that’s not owners yet. They know. They walk in there, they have their shift lead, but the shift lead might not even be a owner, but they just take so much responsibility and the groundwork of building a company, they’re able to just come in and knock everything out and create their own schedule.
We have different committees where they can help create flavors and do all these other things. And then when you see it come into a reality, that was your hard work that made that thing happen. So instead of just a big company where you get all the things from a corporation, “Hey, this is the new flavors,” and “This what you’re going to make,” and “Shut up or you’re going to lose your job,” I feel like everyone has their hand in a pot. And it helps the company grow, when someone goes back like, “Oh, that ice cream that everybody loves, I made it. I’m the one that came up with the flavors.” So it’s pretty cool.
Christa Daring:
From the BRED perspective, one of the things that we always boil this down to is the crucial part of a co-op is it’s one member, one vote. And you can spend a really long time in a business, you can invest a lot of money in a business. But in a co-op, you’re still, even if you invest more money, you don’t have more say in the company. There’s some nuances around the sort of financial rewards for being there longer, but I’m not going to get into that. But really the crucial part is that each person is going to get a say in what the business is doing. That doesn’t mean that every single person votes on where to buy the milk because that would be untenable. But it does mean that there is access to the decisions of the business for every person who is a worker owner there.
And that’s really necessary to make workplace democracy and also in control of not just the sort of day-to-day business and what are you going to do, but ultimately the profits of those businesses. What a traditional workplace is going to do is you’re going to work some amount of time. That work will produce some amount of value to the business, and then the bosses or the owners are going to decide what to do with that profit. That could be a change in your wage, that could be buying something else and expanding.
But in a co-op, people are going to make those decisions together. And that’s what we really talk about with economic democracy. We’re creating greater wealth. Co-ops create greater wealth in their communities. People keep that money in their communities. And co-ops were pretty resilient to Covid. That’s not saying that there wasn’t a lot of struggle, that there weren’t cuts, that there weren’t some losses. But because, as Vinnie is talking about, everyone is coming in every day and they have a personal stake in the business themselves, it’s not just one person who can get burned out. Even if you have the most beneficent boss, one person who has to come in every day and shoulder that responsibility, it’s just not going to be as resilient as a whole group of people who see this as their livelihood and the lifeblood of their community.
David Evans:
Could you repeat the question for me one more time?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Just opening up the hood. What does this look like for y’all in practice? Does it work? You said yourself, you were a little skeptical at first and that the results weren’t immediately. That’s the same for all of us. Most of us have never been in this situation. So yeah, just talk a little more about what this looks like on a day-to-day basis, what the benefits or challenges are to having this kind of approach to a business.
David Evans:
So what I think is for us, it’s going to be on different levels, from a manager to an employee to assistant manager, it’s all different, to back office to CEO. For myself, I do feel like I have a little bit more, say more power. Craig’s come to me-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, he does.
David Evans:
He’s come to me many times where in the past, not really, not so much. I do feel like there’s more hands-on than… but our company was different anyway. Like I said, I was very lucky to work for the company that I worked for. Gina Schaefer and that crew are all just magnificent to work for. I didn’t really have the bosses that were jerks, and I’m very, very, very, very blessed. But I could see where now versus then is a little bit different then. So like I said, when they first said it to me at the meeting, there was no change. I just went right back to work and it was just like, it was nothing.
It wasn’t until I saw, so we get stocks… so in ESOP we actually get stocks every year. So when I saw that and I saw, okay, my hard work gives me this. So then it was like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Now I see what I’m supposed to be doing. So for me, it’s inspiring everyone else who now becomes one, because it takes two years for us. So your first year is you’re gaining ground, and then you have the plan year. And your plan year, you have to stay for that year, work so many hours, and then boom, at the end of that year, you’re now 20% invested and you have this much stock. So when you get someone to that level, then that’s when you have not power, but whatever, they see it too. And then they want to work harder and they want push and promote knife sharpenings or paint sales or anything like that. So it’s way different when you’re pushing this for your value at the end of the year versus for someone else’s money. And that’s the biggest thing for me.
Craig Smith:
That was put very well. So our company has a history of, it’s about 20 years old. It’s got a history of being very progressive, very accepting, very philanthropic, and we try to take that theme, kind of putting it into becoming employee-owned because I believe that goes hand-in-hand with the type of company that we were. And just kind of a brief overview. I know we mentioned Gina Schaefer several times and you all might be like, “Who is Gina Schaefer?” So Gina Schaefer was the founder of the company, founded it 20 years ago. Also held my position as recent as about seven months ago. So I’m pretty new here as well. But what she did, which is very interesting to me, and also really what drew me to this position is she said, “I don’t want to own this company anymore. I want an exit strategy.” She and her husband, Marc Friedman, own the company.
So I call us a big small company, a big small company that’s pretty successful. What do you do? How do you sell that? There could be other groups of hardware stores that might want to buy, there could be a venture capital firm that might want to buy it. But she said, ” don’t want to do any of that because who knows what’s going to happen after I do that.” And Gina has a great relationship with a lot of our folks, especially key folks like Dave and didn’t want to do that. So instead, she decided to go with an employee stock ownership plan, which is basically selling the company back to the employees at no cost to them.
And there’s a lot that goes along with this, and it can be a little fairly complicated, but Gina made it happen with her husband and we’re really glad she did. And that gives someone like Dave, knowing that he is an employee owner, to maybe go that extra mile to stick around a little longer. We don’t want to work people too much, obviously we want to be fair, but the kind of things you were just alluding to, just really willing to put it on the line for your store and for your business, and that’s something that we really believe in.
Sierra Allen:
For us because we work in coffee, we do baking and we do coffee, our days start fairly early. I wake up between three and four A.M. every day. I took a nap yesterday and woke up at three. So essentially, it’s a lot of hard work that goes into it as far as, especially since we’re new. So we’re getting down the logistics of everything. It’s constantly thinking about the business. So I’m planning hot chocolate bombs for Christmas, and I already have ideas that I’m putting together for Valentine’s Day. And so it’s a lot of time being spent just constantly thinking about the business, but also knowing that you have the support of other people because we also have committees and I just came with a vengeance about cross-contamination and wanting different pictures. And so we have different committees as far as beverages, as far as baking, as far as communications, and getting stuff like this out.
Because I originally didn’t see myself as a social media type of person. And here I am doing podcasts and I’ve done a couple of interviews. So it just gives a nice breakdown. Everyone has a space. We are made up of multiple neurodivergent personalities, and so we go to everyone’s strengths and what they do best. Although I’m a social media person and I’m kind of a public person, I’m also very good behind the scenes. And so I do scheduling and things like that.
And we also are just overall there to support one another. I feel like when you work in certain companies, you don’t always get that special care that you would with a co-op. And so because all of these people are like my friends, we all care about one another. So it’s been a rough couple of months with losing our jobs. And then I’ve lost a couple of family members and I have the support of everyone around me, so I’m able to do my job, but also we have backups. So if I can’t do scheduling, I train someone else to do scheduling as well. And so you have that support and it works a little differently than if all of the responsibility was on you. So it’s a nice balance for us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell, yeah. So I could talk to y’all for two more hours, but we only have a few minutes left. So we’re going to do a kind of final round around the table in a second where I want us to sort of zoom out a bit and take stock of where we are in the city with this. Is this a movement? What was it? Bloomberg two years ago said, if you’re trying to start a worker cooperative, Baltimore is probably the best place to do it. There’s something really interesting there, and there are other cooperatives around the city. So I wanted to ask how y’all see yourselves in this larger environment? Do you see the struggle for democratic ownership and operation of our workplaces as being connected to the other worker struggles we’re seeing around the city? I’ve interviewed Starbucks workers or moms workers in Hamden, the Baltimore Museum of Art folks, the Pratt Library folks. There’s a lot of union efforts going on as well. So are these things kind of part of something bigger?
And if there are any kind of final thoughts you guys wanted to share with the audience before we go to Q&A. But I wanted to underline that point, Cece because it’s so important and it shows that mental shift that y’all are making that so many of us haven’t made, right? Because I remember one of my favorite interviews I’ve done on my show was with a service worker in New Orleans who is also a political organizer, community organizer. And they explained to me, they’re like, “I think that service workers make the best organizers because here are the skills we have to practice on job. We got to code switch, we got to deal with people coming into the shop at different points of their day. Maybe they just had a bad meeting, maybe they’re really happy.” You got to manage a lot of relationships in that time, and that can translate so well to political and community organizing.
And it was such a light bulb moment for me, because I was like, oh yeah, we could be thinking about how to maximize people’s skills and what they bring to the table, like y’all are talking about. Instead of just our boss saying, “We need a warm body to perform this task eight hours a day, I don’t care who it is, I don’t care what their skills are, if they can do that, they get this wage, that’s it.” Hearing y’all, it just seems like that’s so wasteful. There’s so much more all of us can offer. And if we had more control over the decision-making process, imagine how much better our businesses could be, our community, our world, so on and so forth. You see where I’m going with this.
So yeah, with the final five minutes we got before Q&A, I just wanted to do a quick round around the table and ask if there are any more points like that, that y’all wanted to raise, the challenges, the benefits of this, what you would say to folks out there who are maybe thinking of starting at worker and yeah, just how you see yourselves in the larger atmosphere right now of worker struggle in the city and beyond. So Vinny, let’s start with you and we’ll close it out.
Vince Green:
That was a lot of great things you just mentioned, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate just a little bit. I learned ownership is not for everyone and that’s a hard gut buster for some people. It is great to always put your skills, but like I mentioned, we started with six owners. I’ll just give you an inside scoop of Taharka Brothers, lift the hood up. So we had six owners when we first came to a employee owned. It’s a grind. It takes a lot of ownership, it takes a lot of responsibility. It takes a reality check of who you are and what are your skills, and growing as a company. It’s not for everyone. So we have 45 employees and if I ask half of my employees, they are perfect with their 18.50 wage and they go through a Monday through Friday schedule and they’re happy with it.
The ownership, it’s a lot. When my freezer cuts off at two in the morning and it’s 30 degrees outside and you got to walk into a -20 degree freezer to go put some tubs up, it’s not for everyone. And I think when you can accept that and when people can understand their strengths and then when they acknowledge that and then they can grow together. And then that’s when you can create change.
But I feel like when you just say, “Hey, we all like this one common good and we can start a co-op,” it’s possible. But to grow and be successful, I think you have to have that mirror, you have to look yourself in the mirror, it’s like, do I have what it takes to grow together and take the pride out of the situation and to grow with the people that comes from different backgrounds, understanding and help grow the company.
And even just becoming, like you was mentioning the Enoch Pratt Library and other union things, I feel like if they was able to take parts and pieces of how co-ops work, of the different committees that we have. So I know with Taharka Brothers, we have a flavor committee, we have a social change committee, all these different committees that makes people feel more involved. But then co-ops would be more normalized just so it can go into that everyone can work with this. So it was not just like a one particular business program that can only work for a co-op. If you can take the bits and pieces out of it and apply it to your day by day, I think it would be great for other businesses to learn and grow from other co-ops.
Christa Daring:
One of the things we talk about at BRED a lot is cooperative save jobs. I think we’ve seen that certainly with the Common Ground experience. That was a group of people who were going to lose their jobs, and it was 11 weeks from the notice to the time that you reopened. And that was a lot of really, really hard work that they put in with some assistance from us, but mostly them being like, we are committed to doing this and we’re going to keep our jobs. And a lot of what I heard from them at the time as a group was like, we are an asset to this neighborhood and it’s important to us to remain an asset to this neighborhood. And I think I hear that in everyone’s stories. It’s not just about keeping the jobs, it’s also about stabilizing communities and stabilizing economies.
One owner can just decide, “You know what? I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. It’s not fun for me anymore,” and pull the plug. But that’s not what we see with cooperatives. We see even when they do close, this is an arduous process as they go through deciding not just what’s it going to mean for them as individuals, what is it going to mean for the neighborhood? And I think that’s just really crucial and we see cooperatives as a vehicle for building democracy. It’s not just that people get to control the means of production as it were, but they also get to practice that and see how it could potentially scale. The United States is a democracy, but it’s so diffused that it’s not something that we can see a direct line to and that’s what cooperatives let people do.
David Evans:
So I agree with you, being an owner or a manager owner is not for everybody. But for me, because I get to see the dividends at the end of the year, it makes it worth a little bit more. So when you have to do them hardships and you have to fire people or discipline people or do all that kind of stuff.
But I was going to quit. I don’t know if you know that. I did tell you that. Yeah. So I was ready. I was like, “Man, I have 15 years in retail.” I was like, “Man, I think I’m almost done.” And then Gina busts out with this, “I’m going to sell the company.” And I’m like, “What? Wait a minute. I was about to tell you I was going to leave. You can’t do this to me.” So now it’s re-inspired me. It’s kind like re-energized me and now I can’t leave. I have to see this all the way to the end. I have to. There’s no way I can leave now.
So for me, if there’s more companies like that, if it can do it to me, I literally was like, I’m done with retail. I’m so tired of customers and dealing with all these people and all this bullcrap. If it could do that to me, then how many other people would it inspire to want to work harder, to want to do co-ops, to want to open more businesses? And then on top of it, when you come in my store, you can see, I don’t want to call it the love, but you could feel like these people want to be here, most of my employees, want to be there and enjoy working there, love the store, love the cat, even the community. So for me, if more people would open up and we could get more co-ops and more ESOPs and everything, it just would be better for everybody, more employment, better wages all the way around.
Craig Smith:
That was very well put Dave. Dave is a tremendous manager and we’re happy to hear him and you just freaked me out by saying that, but don’t worry, I’ll get over it. Just a couple things real quick. Thank you to the museum for having us here. I did notice there was a pharmacy exhibit. I grew up working in a pharmacy, starting when I was 12 years old that my father owned. So I have a long history of pharmacies, so that was really fascinating to me. I was telling Dave all the boxes, this is Neosporin, this is, you got Tootsie Rolls, it’s really cool.
So to found the whole thing, my dad would’ve gone insane if he saw this. So I’m very impressed with the two folks on the end, not to mention I’m impressed with you Max as well. But to accomplish what you’ve had at your ages, I’m really astounded and very impressed. And especially with a situation of things falling apart and you putting them back together, that is not what we had to do. That is an entirely different story. So thank you for doing that and congratulations. And I’m almost wishing we took a loan from you. It probably sounds a lot easier than what we did.
Sierra Allen:
There’s still time.
Craig Smith:
But the financial aspect, that’s just such a huge piece of the puzzle. And although a lot of this is very engaging and it makes you feel good, a lot of this comes down to dollars and cents at the end of the day. And to have a service like that is great. I will say just from my perspective, being an employee-owned company, that’s not going to solve all your problems. What you have to realize is you still have to do the work, you still have to put your nose to the grindstone self to put the key in the door in the morning. All those things still need to be done. However, we are very fortunate that we are employee-owned. We’re about 30% employee-owned right now, and within the next five to seven years, we want to be 100%. And it does take some time to get there. But however, it does help tremendously in engagement.
This is engagement in real life right here. This engagement from me, this is a big reason why I joined the company about seven months ago because we were employee-owned. Retention, recruitment, just feeling like you can do that extra thing, it really helps quite a bit. And I know the point was made, it is not for everybody. It’s true. I can’t sit here and tell you every person we have on our roster is going to be an employee owner and is fully engaged. That’s just not true. It’s not always everybody. It’s not for everybody, but I want it to be for most people. And I think with the type of company we are, it is for most people that we have and it will be for the people that come on in the future.
Sierra Allen:
So I totally agree that it’s not for everyone. Our business, it’s been open for about 20 plus years. And so one of the major things for us was that this was a pivotal part of the community and people came here… they come here when they’re frustrated. I’ve had one of my favorite customers come in crying and then I just give them a pastry and I sit there and talk. We had connections with these people and so we had a medical emergency. I think someone had a seizure and we caught them. These people matter to us. And because this is not a corporation, and these are people that we personally see every day, they matter. And so it creates that relationship with them to where we’re like, you know what, these people matter and we want to work hard so that we can stay open.
But at the same time, like I said, I do wake up at three every day. I was up when you sent your email at 12, and I read it at 12 A.M., because I was responding to another worker about their scheduling. And so it does require a lot of hard work. It’s constant thinking. I have next year mapped out with things that I want to bake. And we had to do a little bit of everything. Because I bake at home, I’m a pretty decent baker at home. But I also bake in the store. And so that requires, I’m baking, I’m doing barista stuff, I’m making sure I’m engaging with customers. I remember people’s names. Sometimes you have to be an emotional support person. And so we have about 20 workers and about half of them are employee owners. I think we have about 25 workers and about 12, 13 are employee owners.
And everyone has their own place, but it’s not meant for everyone because it does require a lot of your time, a lot of your energy, and it’s something that you really do have to make that mental switch to be like, okay, now I have to change this because I am one of the youngest there and I’m bossing around 30-year-olds. And I’m like, “No, you did that wrong. That’s not organized.” And so you do have to be able to put yourself in a position to be uncomfortable sometimes because these are my friends, absolutely. But you also got to do your job. And so it really isn’t meant for everyone. But if you are ready to make that shift, it’s very good to do it with people that you trust.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for our incredible panel, y’all. Okay, so we got 10, 12 minutes for questions. Yeah, please. So what we’ll do, since we’re still recording is please ask your question. I’ll repeat it into the mic toss to our panels. Okay, so the question was, yeah, let’s talk a little more about what the heck it looks like when an owner says, I’m leaving the company.
Vince Green:
So that would be for me. So with that situation, each employee owner, they all have a capital account with their shares that they gain. So however much that their capital account has gained, there is a situation where you can… if a buyout to the company came that you can get your entire capital account cashed out, or there’ll be a small payment that it’ll be broken down for your stocks to be paid back to you. But you do lose your shares once you decide to resign. So it’s not like you can work at Amazon and still keep your shares at Taharka Brothers and maybe Taharka Brothers blow up and you cash out with millions dollars. No, that won’t work. So when you decide you are deciding to sell your shares back to the company and then there’s a payout for it.
But unfortunately, the employees kind of copped out too early before a capital account could really grow to excessive amounts. I think right now they’re probably only getting about 10 bucks a month. But that’s how business is scaling, the cost of goods and how profitable the company is. Inside scoop, Taharka Brothers, this was our first year being a profitable company just because of all the overhead that a company goes through. Ice cream is very tough. So this year, with all the expanding and redeveloping of how the company’s working, it’s our first year of actually without just breaking even, we are actually profitable and capital accounts are starting to build up for each of the owners and future owners that comes on board.
Speaker 8:
Do you all see [inaudible 00:56:52] cooperative as an alternative to unionizing. Could you just talk more about the difference and why you chose to go the cooperative route, as opposed to the union route?
Sierra Allen:
We actually chose the union route, and we happened to be forced into like, okay, now we’re going to cooperative. We were in the process of unionizing a couple of the people like moms and the Starbucks, everyone you mentioned, we are friends with them. So we know those people personally and have had some workers actually work hours there. So the unionization process helped us to be able to have the resources to form the cooperative. So we do believe in the union route as well, because like we said, cooperatives aren’t for everyone. And if you are just getting treated better at your job and you like it, then that works perfectly fine. But for us, we were in the process of unionizing and then boom, closed. And so we were just like, okay, we don’t want this business to close and now we’re going to fight to keep it open as a cooperative.
Christa Daring:
And I will say Red Emma’s was a member of the IWW for a long time as a cooperative as well.
Craig Smith:
I’ll just speak for us. Because I believe the very progressive nature of our company, we haven’t had a whole lot of experience with folks wanting to unionize. But the nice part of being an ESOP and having employee owners is there’s actually a lot of boxes we have to check as a company, someone like myself has to check running. It is a federally regulated program. So there’s a lot that goes on with that?
We have a trustee. We don’t just want to be stewards of your business, which I’m sure everybody is, but we have to be. And we cannot not be stewards of our business in a positive way, in a financially healthy way. So that’s another benefit to the folks that are in our stores that work in our stores because we are going to take care of their money because we want to and we have to.
Abby:
My name is Abby, I’m at [inaudible 00:58:56] University. I’m an educated. I’m curious [inaudible 00:58:59], you were saying you didn’t know there was a secret third option or the secret fourth option. And so I teach in resource development. I study teams and leadership. How would you guys have wanted to learn about this? How do I push this now to my students? It’s not in my textbooks. How would you have me educate people about this secret fourth option?
Sierra Allen:
Because I’m young and I am neurodivergent, I like to do hands-on things. So in terms of school, specifically music always helped. But I just know that maybe little plays and things like that where you actually get to see how it works out rather than just reading it. Because I like to read, but not everyone likes to read. And so having something to look at to be like, okay, this is how this works and this is how it would work if I existed in this space, is most helpful for me and a lot of people that I know that I work with.
Vince Green:
I will add to that. I’m in BRED’s apprenticeship program. Co-ops been existing for, like you said, it’s a humanitarian thing. But there’ve been co-ops before these great co-ops. So there’ve co-ops that has been united with the African-American groups. I am terrible at quoting names and things. But if you can just do a deep dive of how co-ops has always been existence and showing examples and then showing the updated examples so you can go through a past tense to a present. So looking at comparing it to the co-ops that we have up here, visiting them co-ops. My best experience, I always think is having honest conversations. I always like to go to the Ace Hardware.
I recently, before we even started this panel discussion, I was saying to Ace Hardware, I was just at your store and I never knew you guys was co-ops until I went to your store and I was talking to one of your employees, and I learned more about each other. I do that with almost every co-op I meet like, “What’s your bylaws? What’s my bylaws? How do you get started? What was your losses? Like cross-examining one another and hearing the stories. I think that’s the most unique thing is hearing those stories, meeting those people, walking in the environment and getting the feel of it. I think everybody loves field trips, so I think that’s the best way is just getting hands on, meeting those people, hearing the stories. That’s the best way. I’m not a textbook guy, I can zone out so easily. But love being engaging.
Craig Smith:
Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s a real challenge. The answer is it’s hard to teach people what it is and how it works. It took me a while as well. Even as an Ace Hardware store, we’re a co-op, but I’ve spent the last twenty-some years trying to explain to people what a co-op is and what that even means. We’re not Target, we’re not a corporation. So just real short in nutshell, collectively, the people that own Ace Hardware stores, the retailers, own the whole company, and we’re a purchasing co-op, not necessarily employment co-op.
So like I said, we took it a step further and made an ESOP. I try to use sports analogies. I know that doesn’t work for everybody. But to someone like Dave, we’re talking about it and it’s like a three year plan. You join our team and you’re learning the playbook. You don’t understand what’s going on on that year one, but you’re earning time with your team. Year two, you’re on the sidelines, you’re actually getting a salary from the team, but you don’t get the money yet because you’re still learning, you’re on the sidelines. Maybe you have a headset on, a clipboard, but you’re not playing yet.
Year three, you’re on the field, you’re playing. You get all that money that you earned and it goes into an account for you. So that trail is kind of what leads into you having those shares. And actually, in our program and in ESOP, it doesn’t cost anything to the employees. It’s based on the financial health of the company. And so that’s kind of how to explain it. I even brought infographics here that I was looking at, making sure I’m saying the right things. We are always looking for another way to say it and another way to explain it well. But I’m always open to suggestions. And I know sometimes when I use the football analogies, people are like, what the heck are you talking about? But I have to realize I’m in Baltimore, so probably people do.
Christa Daring:
One thing I just want to add. So BRED hosts an annual event called the Co-Op Jumpstart, which is that in theory, someone could come in the morning and say, “I have an idea for a business,” and by the end of the day, they would leave with all the tools to jumpstart that business. We have a bunch of different exercises that we do in that, but it’s really collaborative and I think that’s crucially how all of this works, is people bouncing ideas off of each other, poking holes in the analogies and making sure that everyone’s clear on that. And sometimes a lot of what we do at BRED is just like, here’s how to read a balance sheet, here’s how to make a break even, here’s how to do your business model canvas, which are just some of the hard skills that are hard to receive otherwise.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I just wanted to chime in here on two things too, because on the media side, one way that we want to help is to try to provide y’all and others with real world examples that people can see and hear and hear directly from folks on the front lines like we’re doing here. So I would point folks to some of the reports we’ve done at the Real News Network. My former colleague, Baltimore native, legendary journalist, Jaisal Noor, did an incredible series two years ago on how worker cooperatives in and outside of Baltimore fared through COVID-19. So he looked at the Evergreen in Cleveland, looked at a home healthcare cooperative network in New York along with Red Emma’s and Joe Squared and other places here in the city. And he talked openly and honestly about the benefits and the challenges, and we hear directly from folks describing those challenges.
So I’d say those are a great resource, but also as a former educator myself, I feel a lot of sympathy for your position because so much of what we do at the college level is essentially undoing the damage that K through 12 has done to our students. And I would just blow that up in a more general sense because our task is to undo the relentless social conditioning that all of us receive just by living in this country. I say this all the time, a lot more happens to us at work than just the work we do on our shifts. There’s a lot of conditioning that happens at the workplace. We are made into subjects who are taught to accept that we are generally powerless when it comes to making decisions at work, that there are undemocratic hierarchies with people at the top, making decisions with labor laws that are so screwed that we could get fired like that for looking at a manager wrong, or for no reason at all.
And so if you go through life experiencing that, you’re going to become the subject that they want us to be, which is compliant, which is someone who accepts those hierarchies. And that’s not just going to stay in the workplace. You’re going to take that with you. You’re going to accept that our leaders, our governmental leaders are also kind of at those top of those hierarchies that we don’t really have the right to question or challenge, yada, yada, yada.
And so that also happens at K through 12. From the beginning to the end, unless, I don’t know, you go to a Montessori or something, you are practiced in the experience of being at the bottom of a hierarchy, accepting undemocratic norms. And so I think the answer to the question is just however we can try to get ourselves, our pupils, our fellow workers, to question that, to say that’s not the only way it can be. And in fact, there are folks like this doing and practicing an alternative, that all is important, that all helps. So we’re probably out of time, but I just again, really wanted to thank our incredible panel and ask if we could give one more round of applause for them.
I also wanted to once again, thank the BMI and give one more round of applause for this great museum. Please support it however you can. Okay, that’s it. Bye. Thank you.
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. One last time, I want to thank the Baltimore Museum of Industry for hosting this awesome event and for letting me be part of it. And of course, thank you to all the panelists for sharing your incredible stories and insights. And thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you guys back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon right now and check out all the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there waiting for you and our patrons.
And also, go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle here in the US and around the world. You can 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 Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Speaker 11:
When my [inaudible 01:09:34] no longer see, I live on. Yes, I live on. Wherever we go, we’re going to roll the Union on the song. I live on. Yes, I live on. Wherever hungry, where are we, just as hungry as hungry can be. I live on. Yes, I live on. While mean things are happening in this land is [inaudible 01:10:01] song I live on. Yes, I live on. Wherever the book mean things are happening in this land is red, I live on. Yes, I live on.
Wherever this [inaudible 01:10:15] of me is showing, I live on. Yes, I live on. If I have help to make this a better word to live in, I’ll live on. Yes, I’ll live on. When my body is silent and in some lonesome grave, I’ll live on. Yes, I’ll live on. When my songs and poems are read, I’ll live on. Yes, I live on. Some days from this earth I’ll be gone, but I live on. Yes, I live on. When I go, [inaudible 01:10:51], I’ll live on. Yes, I’ll live on. We may not be remembered by everyone, but I’ll ive on. Yes, I’ll live on. I may not be number one, but I’ll live on. Yes, I’ll live on. Years may come and years may go. And to them all [inaudible 01:11:20], I’ll live on. Yes, I’ll live on.
[inaudible 01:11:25] we believe in and who’s sincere. And for this reason, I pass it on to one behind me that we have picked up the [inaudible 01:11:33] where we left off. And for that reason, we have come to let you know that the cause to live on. Oh yes. Yes, we live on.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
In January 2023 teamsterlink.org opened its virtual doors to give Teamster members, officers and supporters a place where they could share information and opinion about anything related to the union. Members are encouraged to register anonymously so that criticism of leadership happens in an honest way without fear of retaliation. Teamsterlink shares many if not most of the union’s PR releases and, unlike the IBT’s official publications and media platforms, members can comment on everything and comment they do, creating dozens of discussions along the way.
Teamsterlink was the first to report on the reaction to President O’Brien’s trip to Mar-a-Lago and the subsequent $45,000 (the maximum allowable) contribution to the RNC. Teamsterlink members reported on the dozens of staffers (reports of up to 180 people) fired on day one of the new administration by email with no warning, no severance and healthcare cut immediately. Not exactly the kind of thing you would expect from a union, is it? But teamsterlink also published comments from those that puzzlingly found this mass discharge of workers acceptable. Our objective has been to allow members to express even bizarre opinions without censorship.
This free speech has not gone unnoticed by the phony reformers that occupy the IBT Building in Washington DC. The O’Brien IBT realized this was not just rank and file teamsters’ members but also teamster officers who were contributing to the forum, officers capable of forming an opposition slate. O’Brien has apparently considered this a significant challenge to his PR operation particularly since the three operators of the forum site are Teamster retirees, former officers and long term, nationally recognized activists. When unleashing an army of trolls just increased the discussion as word of the forum spread, the IBT shifted their response to a legal strategy.
Nixon Peabody is a law firm that brags about their ability to bust-unions. They have impressive clients, including Donald J Trump, a list of union hating corporations, anti-union politicians and Sean O’Brien and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Nixon Peabody on behalf of the IBT is claiming ownership of the word Teamster and virtually any extension of that word. On behalf of the IBT their demanding teamsterlink cease and desist, threatening legal action knowing we could never match the resources of the IBT. This claim is being made now even though there are literally dozens of examples of the word “Teamster” and the teamster logo being use for decades throughout the US and Canada.
Case in point. Teamsters for a Democratic Union for decades and until they endorsed Sean O’Brien for President was considered the conscience of the labor movement and the watchdog of the IBT. How things have changed. As one teamsterlink poster said “there has never been a time in my membership where there is less accountability to the membership of the union then right now.” Teamsters for a Democratic Union, once considered the watchdog is now the propaganda wing of the O’Brien IBT. Ignoring any controversies and apologizing for everything from O’Brien’s “mistake” in taking credit for 206,000 nonexistent new members to justifying the $2.9 million settlement of a racial discrimination case involving 13 fired organizers of color. Has TDU been threatened for use of the word “Teamsters” in Teamsters for a Democratic Union? They’ve used the word and logo for decades as have many other entities. Yet only teamsterlink has been singled out demanding we cease and desist.
Old Teamster hands are really not surprised by any of this, we know who Sean O’Brien is. The forum creators have more than a combined 100 years of membership in the Teamsters, we’ve seen plenty. Now we see wholesale firings, crawling down to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the Trump ring, lying about growth, hiring PR firms to “sell” contracts to members and now hiring union-busters to threaten and intimidate retirees and stifle free speech.
Labor movement supporters around the country applauded the election of a “reformer” when O’Brien was elected in 2021. There were high hopes that the new Teamsters could lead a labor revival. One has to wonder how long it will take for the Sara Nelsons, the Bernie Sanders, the well-meaning progressives to understand what’s happening at the Teamsters and finally admit, they all got played.
The post Can 40 year Teamsters call themselves Teamsters? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.
Last year saw more large strikes across the U.S. than any other year this century so far, new data finds, backing the idea that the labor movement is undergoing a renaissance after being in decline for decades. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data released Wednesday, there were 33 major work stoppages beginning in 2023, the highest number of strikes since 2000, when there were 39...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Starbucks workers in 21 locations across 14 states are filing to unionize on Tuesday, marking the highest number of stores petitioning to join Starbucks Workers United (SWU) on a single day in the union’s history, the group says. The stores filing for a union Tuesday are located across the country, from Long Island, New York, to San Jose, California, with other filings coming from Arkansas...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Ralph is joined by labor activist Gene Bruskin to discuss how labor leaders are joining with Progressive lawmakers to demand a ceasefire in Gaza, and the true meaning of solidarity. Then Ralph welcomes Rick Perlstein— historian, chronicler of American conservativism, and author of Nixonland—to explain Donald Trump's iron grip on the Republican Party.
Gene Bruskin is a veteran of the labor movement as a local union president, organizer, and campaign coordinator for numerous local and national unions. He has done extensive international labor solidarity work, including with Iraqi workers and unions, and is a founder of US Labor Against the War. He is also a member of the National Labor Network for a Ceasefire.
Never in the 140 year history of the labor movement—starting with the A.F.L. formation in 1885—has there been such a broad-scale resistance to U.S. government policy in the middle of a conflict like this. It's just never happened before.
Gene Bruskin
The labor movement has to understand that there's a lot of contradictions in the Democratic Party and we cannot allow the party to define our interests. And on foreign policy, the idea has been long time proposed in the labor movement that our national interests require us to do “this” kind of foreign policy or “this” war… But really what we did in our organization U.S. Labor Against the War during the Iraq War—where we actually built real solidarity with Iraqi workers and brought them all over the country here—was we said the national interest of the corporations is not the same as the national interest of the average worker.
Gene Bruskin
Someday we will see that when unions endorse Democratic presidents, they make demands in return. They should not have simply endorsed Biden—as the U.A.W. did, and others—without demanding a public commitment.
Ralph Nader
Rick Perlstein is a historian and chronicler of American conservativism. He is the author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, and Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980.
These feelings of dispossession, of vulnerability, of weakness really get at the darkest and most easily-manipulated parts of the human mind that are based on the most primal fears. Stuff like fears of snakes, fear of cockroaches, fear of dark things that go bump in the night. And those are there in our brains, they're in the lowest parts of our brains. And what the Republican Party has been doing for decades… is they're exploiting that animal part of the brain in order to aggrandize their own power. And it's really, really scary. And one of the things that makes it, again, so scary is it is precisely not amenable to rational persuasion.
Rick Perlstein
The Democratic Party is not the kind of party that says, “Wow, we can use this and sustain these things that we were able to put in during an emergency to shore up our power forever.” Instead, as soon as they had the chance, they took them away.
Rick Perlstein
In Case You Haven’t Heard with Francesco DeSantis
News 2/14/24
1. On Monday, the Senate voted through a mammoth $95 billion foreign aid package furnishing American assistance to Israel, Ukraine, and Taiwan. Beyond arming Israel however, this bill also bans funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, or UNRWA, one of the key agencies providing relief to Palestinians in Gaza – even as starvation in Gaza deepens to lethal levels – and removes previous requirements that the president inform Congress of additional weapons transfers to Israel. Voting against the bill, Senator Merkley of Oregon said “The campaign conducted by the Netanyahu government is at odds with our American values & American law…I cannot vote to send more bombs & shells to Israel when they are using them in an indiscriminate manner against Palestinian civilians.” In another speech, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said “Kids in Gaza are now dying from the deliberate withholding of food. In addition to the horror of that news, one other thing is true, that is a war crime. It is a textbook war crime. And that makes those who orchestrate it war criminals.” Yet, despite correctly identifying the Israeli starvation campaign as a war crime, Van Hollen voted in favor of the arms package. The bill now moves to the House, which failed to advance it just last week. House Speaker Mike Johnson has gone on record saying he opposes the package because it does not address immigration at the southern border.
2. In Michigan, a movement is underway to deny Joe Biden the state’s delegates, by encouraging voters to check the box for “uncommitted” in the upcoming Democratic primary. So far, over 30 Democratic elected officials in the state have cosigned this movement, including Mayor Abdullah H. Hammoud of Dearborn and Representative Abraham Aiyash, Majority Leader in the Michigan House. This list is expected to grow as Biden’s untempered support for Israel puts Michigan Democrats on increasingly perilous footing. More information is available at ListentoMichigan.com.
3. If you’re a Hulu subscriber, you may have seen the pro-Israel propaganda the streamer has been running. Put simply, the ad – created by Israel’s National Public Diplomacy Directorate – begins like a tourist ad for Gaza – using AI-generated images – and then shifts to showing the reality on the ground there, ascribing all blame for conditions in Gaza to Hamas, with no mention of the fact that Israel has blockaded Gaza and turned it into what major human rights groups call “the world’s largest open air prison.” With this ad running constantly, locals in Los Angeles have mobilized to protest Hulu’s offices, a rare escalation that the company would be wise not to ignore. This from Vice.
4. Two stunning stories on Boeing: in an LA Times article, Ed Pierson – a former Boeing senior manager – is quoted saying “I would absolutely not fly a Max airplane...I’ve worked in the factory where they were built, and I saw the pressure employees were under to rush the planes out the door. I tried to get them to shut down before the first crash.” Joe Jacobsen, a former engineer at Boeing and the FAA, said “I would tell my family to avoid the Max. I would tell everyone, really.” Meanwhile, the American Prospect reports that the lawyer who exposed Epstein’s sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta has sued the Department of Justice, in an attempt to force disclosure of what is in the Deferred Prosecution Agreement reached by Boeing and the Trump administration following the 737 MAX crashes. We hope this recidivist corporation finally gets its comeuppance.
5. The Federal Communications Commission has issued a rule banning AI-generated voices in robocalls. Specifically, the commission expressed grave concern about the potential for manipulation of voters in the upcoming presidential election. AI-generated voices in these calls would likely be capable of deceiving voters into thinking that public figures had endorsed a particular candidate when they have not.
6. Gothamist reports at least 70 current and former employees of the New York City Housing Authority have been arrested on bribery and corruption charges. According to the report, “superintendents, assistant superintendents and other NYCHA officials accepted more than $2 million in kickbacks from contractors in exchange for over $13 million in NYCHA business across at least 100 developments.” These corrupt bureaucrats manipulated no-bid contracts in a “pay-to-play” scheme to grant these contracts to contractors that paid them off. Federal prosecutors are calling this “the largest single-day bribery takedown in the history of the justice department.”
7. According to More Perfect Union, “Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont says his state will purchase $1 billion of residents' medical debt for just $6.5 million. Then he will cancel it all, abolishing medical debt for 250,000 people. This is the first time a state has forgiven medical debt at a massive scale.” This demonstrates what is possible for Democrats at the state and federal level. No excuses.
8. UFCW Local 400 reports that the FRESHFARM workers have ratified their first contract. This marks the culmination of the first-in-the-nation successful farmer’s market unionization effort. Among other provisions, this contract includes “Higher wages…Vacation time…Improved workplace conditions and safety standards…[and] Grievance and arbitration procedures.” Yuval Lev, a market operator who was on the union’s bargaining committee said “We’re proud to codify these hard-fought gains in this historic contract and continue doing the work we love to serve the community.”
9. VOX reports the U.S. has been pressuring Mexican President AMLO to help stem the flow of migrants across their northern border. But, signaling that Mexico will no longer blindly do the bidding of the United States, AMLO has demanded certain conditions from the U.S. if they want his help. These include “suspending the US blockade of Cuba, dropping all sanctions against Venezuela, and giving work permits and protection from deportation to at least 10 million Hispanic people living in the US.” Yet, this eminently reasonable set of demands is considered a non-starter within the Washington foreign policy consensus.
10. Finally, Pope Francis has responded to conservative critics blasting him for allowing the church to bless same-sex marriages. Speaking to Italian newspaper La Stampa, Pope Francis said “No one is scandalized if I give my blessing to an entrepreneur who perhaps exploits people: and this is a very serious sin. But they get scandalized if I give it to a homosexual….This is hypocrisy!”
This has been Francesco DeSantis, with In Case You Haven’t Heard.
This content originally appeared on Ralph Nader Radio Hour and was authored by Ralph Nader.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Current workplace fatality figures, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in December 2023, show that on-the-job deaths in the United States have jumped significantly, reaching their highest level in ten years. The results, obtained as part of the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries (CFOI), analyzed information collected over the course of 2022 — and documented a notable 5.7...
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on Feb. 13, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
Four months into Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza that has killed over twenty-eight thousand Palestinians, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) — the US labor federation whose member unions represent 12.5 million workers — issued a statement on February 8 urging a negotiated cease-fire to end the violence.
The move came after over two hundred US unions and labor bodies — including national unions like the United Electrical Workers (UE), American Postal Workers Union (APWU), United Auto Workers (UAW), International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), National Nurses United (NNU), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), National Education Association (NEA), Communications Workers of America (CWA), and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) — had already made cease-fire calls of their own. Many unions, especially at the local level, have also expressed solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement.
With the backing of the AFL-CIO and the nation’s two largest unions (NEA and SEIU), support for a cease-fire is now the mainstream position of the American labor movement. Given US labor officialdom’s history of providing substantial political and material aid to the state of Israel — along with its frequent partnering with US empire (which I examine in my forthcoming book, Blue Collar Empire) — this is a remarkable development highlighting the power of rank-and-file organizing to push union leaders on critical issues, and signaling the possibility of building a more internationalist labor movement.
Now, the task for rank-and-file members who successfully organized to get their unions to issue cease-fire statements increasingly is to translate that commitment into concrete action to stop what the International Court of Justice considers Israel’s plausible acts of genocide. Across the US labor movement, networks of pro-Palestine workers are continuing to organize to get their unions to cut economic ties with Israel, put pressure on political candidates and elected officials, and interrupt the flow of union-made weapons and research to the Israeli military.
“I thank our UAW members for speaking out and pushing us to come out in support of a cease-fire,” Shawn Fain, the UAW’s president, said at a December 14 press conference. “It was the right thing to do.” Fain and the union’s International Executive Board had voted to endorse a cease-fire two weeks earlier, after several locals and UAW Region 6 and Region 9A had already done so — efforts that were encouraged by the newly formed national rank-and-file group UAW Labor for Palestine.
SEIU’s national leadership similarly called for a cease-fire following months of grassroots member organizing. Last fall, multiple SEIU locals around the country began signing onto a widely circulated labor movement cease-fire petition, and the SEIU-affiliated Starbucks Workers United issued a Palestine solidarity message on October 20 condemning “the occupation, displacement, state violence, apartheid, and threats of genocide Palestinians face.” SEIU members with the rank-and-file group Purple Up for Palestine began circulating a petition urging the union’s leadership to demand an end to US military aid to Israel.
By mid-December, SEIU’s largest affiliate — the 450,000-member 1199 SEIU — adopted a cease-fire resolution. Finally, on January 22, SEIU president Mary Kay Henry released a statement on behalf of the union’s two million members calling for a cease-fire and for “a sustained end to decades of occupation, blockades and lack of freedom endured by the Palestinian people.”
Within the NEA, several locals and statewide affiliates like the Oregon Education Association and Massachusetts Teachers Association endorsed the labor movement cease-fire petition last fall. This apparently prompted the national leadership of the three million–member union to issue a statement on November 7 that seemingly urged a cease-fire but deliberately avoided using the word. “Regardless of what you call it, the killing of innocent people must stop,” the NEA statement said.
Soon after, rank-and-file NEA members with Educators for Palestine started a petition and sent an open letter to the union’s leaders demanding they more clearly support a cease-fire. On December 8, NEA president Becky Pringle tweeted that “the need for a ceasefire in Gaza is growing” and said “there is no tenable military solution to this crisis.” A spokesperson for the union later confirmed to me that “President Pringle’s call for a ceasefire is the position of the NEA.”
It also took months of rank-and-file pressure for the AFT’s executive council to unanimously pass a resolution on January 29 favoring a “negotiated bilateral cease-fire.” AFT president Randi Weingarten has long been one of the most pro-Israel voices in the US labor movement. Last fall, as several AFT locals like the Chicago Teachers Union and state affiliates like AFT-Oregon signed onto the labor movement cease-fire petition, and as some of the union’s members and locals criticized AFT leadership’s pro-Israel positions, Weingarten called for a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza.
On December 13, a group of rank-and-file AFT members interrupted Weingarten at a public event in New York to demand she and the rest of the union’s leadership call for a cease-fire. A few weeks later, Weingarten tweeted that she now supported a “bilateral, negotiated ceasefire” — the same position the union’s executive council would formally adopt at the end of January.
Although several locals of other unions like UNITE HERE, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) have called for a cease-fire, the national leaders of those unions so far have not followed suit. The national leadership of the 1.4 million–member Teamsters has also been silent on the bloodshed in Palestine. In early November, the rank-and-file group Teamsters Mobilize (TM) brought a cease-fire resolution to the annual convention of the reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union. But the measure, which also urged an end to US military aid to Israel, met resistance at the convention and was tabled. TM has since turned the resolution into a petition for rank-and-file Teamsters and supporters to sign.
After the AFL-CIO-chartered Thurston-Lewis-Mason Central Labor Council in Washington state unanimously adopted a cease-fire resolution on October 18, the national AFL-CIO stepped in to overrule the measure because it did not align with the federation’s position at the time. Nevertheless, other central labor councils around the country soon passed their own cease-fire resolutions, including the Western Mass Area Labor Federation, Austin (Texas) Central Labor Council, and San Antonio Central Labor Council. The resolutions in Austin and San Antonio led to the Texas AFL-CIO becoming the first state labor federation to adopt a cease-fire measure in late January, followed by the national AFL-CIO’s own cease-fire call a little over a week later.
Many Palestine solidarity activists in the labor movement want their unions to go beyond cease-fire statements. They point to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, as well as to a call to action issued by a coalition of Palestinian trade unions on October 16, which urges organized labor around the world to oppose military aid to Israel and not to manufacture or transport arms for the Israeli war machine. The call has been taken up by unions and union members in countries like Belgium, Japan, the UK, Colombia, Italy, Australia, and Spain.
For US unions like the UAW — which has thousands of members in weapons factories making the bombs, missiles, and aircraft used by Israel, as well in university departments doing research linked to the Israeli military — the Palestinian trade union call to action is particularly relevant. When the UAW’s national leadership came out in support of a cease-fire on December 1, they also voted to establish a “Divestment and Just Transition Working Group.” The stated purpose of the working group is to study the UAW’s own economic ties to Israel and explore ways to convert war-related industries to production for peaceful purposes while ensuring a just transition for weapons workers.
Members of UAW Labor for Palestine say they have started making visits to a Colt factory in Connecticut, which holds a contract to supply rifles to the Israeli military, to talk with their fellow union members about Palestine, a cease-fire, and a just transition. They want to see the union’s leadership support such organizing activity.
“If UAW leaders decided to, they could, tomorrow, form a national organizing campaign to educate and mobilize rank-and-file towards the UAW’s own ceasefire and just transition call,” UAW Labor for Palestine members said in a statement. “They could hold weapons shop town halls in every region; they could connect their small cadre of volunteer organizers — like us — to the people we are so keen to organize with; they could even send some of their staff to help with this work.”
On January 21, the membership of UAW Local 551, which represents 4,600 autoworkers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant (who were part of last year’s historic stand-up strike) endorsed the Palestinian trade unions’ call to not cooperate in the production and transportation of arms for Israel. Ten days later, UAW Locals 2865 and 5810, representing around forty-seven thousand academic workers at the University of California, passed a measure urging the union’s national leaders to ensure that the envisioned Divestment and Just Transition Working Group “has the needed resources to execute its mission, and that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim workers whose communities are disproportionately affected by U.S.-backed wars are well-represented on the committee.”
Members of UAW Locals 2865 and 5810 at UC Santa Cruz’s Astronomy Department have pledged to withhold any labor that supports militarism and to refuse research collaboration with military institutions and arms companies. In December, unionized academic workers from multiple universities formed Researchers Against War (RAW) to expose and cut ties between their research and warfare, and to organize in their labs and departments for more transparency about where the funding for their work comes from and more control over what their labor is used for. RAW, which was formed after a series of discussions by union members first convened by US Labor Against Racism and War last fall, hosted a national teach-in and planning meeting on February 12.
Meanwhile, public sector workers in New York City have begun their own campaign to divest their pension money from Israel. On January 25, rank-and-file members of AFSCME District Council (DC) 37 launched a petition calling on the New York City Employees’ Retirement System to divest the $115 million it holds in Israeli securities. The investments include $30 million in bonds that directly fund the Israeli military and its activities. “As rank-and-file members of DC 37 who contribute to and benefit from the New York City Employees’ Retirement System and care about the lives of working people everywhere, we refuse to support the Israeli government and the corporations that extract profit from the killing of innocent civilians,” the petition states.
In an election year when President Joe Biden and other Democratic candidates will depend heavily on organized labor for donations and especially get-out-the-vote efforts, rank and filers are also trying to push their unions to exert leverage on the president by getting him to firmly stand against the ongoing massacre in Gaza. NEA members with Educators for Palestine are calling on their union’s leaders to withdraw their support for Biden’s reelection campaign until he stops “sending military funding, equipment, and intelligence to Israel,” marching from AFT headquarters to NEA headquarters in Washington, DC on February 10 to assert their demand. Similarly, after the UAW International Executive Board endorsed Biden last month — a decision that sparked intense division within the union — UAW Labor for Palestine is demanding the endorsement be revoked “until [Biden] calls for a permanent ceasefire and stops sending weapons to Israel.”
As the rank-and-file organizers in these various unions understand, while statements calling for a cease-fire are significant in themselves, they are ultimately only tools to facilitate further organizing and action. Through its collective power, there is much more the labor movement can do to stop the unfolding genocide in Gaza and to push for peace, freedom, and justice for Palestinians and working people everywhere.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Maryland public university graduate students and faculty are demanding collective bargaining rights from the state government for the 20,000 public academic workers currently denied the right to join a union. Maryland currently has a Democratic majority in its legislature as well as a Democratic governor. Jaisal Noor reports from Annapolis.
Videography / Post-Production: Jaisal Noor
Sen. Ben Kramer: What is it they are afraid of? They know the facts are that they are not treating the workers with the respect and the dignity that they should be doing.
[Crowd chanting]
Lenora Knowles: I’m living paycheck to paycheck. It’s definitely not a living wage. One life crisis away from not being able to pay rent.
Jaisal Noor: Fed up with low pay and poor working conditions, over 50 professors, graduate students, and their supporters rallied for the right to join a union.
Linda Foley: Even at the University of Iowa, for goodness sake, they have collective bargaining rights for grad assistants. We should be able to do that here in Maryland.
Reporter: Maryland denies the over 20,000 professors and grad assistants it employs collective bargaining rights — But supporters hope this is the year that’s going to change.
Maryland has a Democratic trifecta and supermajority in the state legislature; almost all other state workers can join a union.
Sen. Jill Carter: For better outcomes for our students, for better input into the academic process, for equity, for ending disparities, for fair treatment, access to resources, all those reasons, we need collective bargaining.
Jaisal Noor: University officials argue that grad assistants can’t unionize because they are students, not workers.
Ivy Lyons: You are a worker. You clock hours, you take time out of your day, and you are compensated for that work. If we understand what work is and we understand the value of work for faculty and staff, then we should also understand the security, the things that they need to survive.
Jaisal Noor: Grad students at Johns Hopkins, a private University based in Maryland, overwhelmingly voted to unionize in 2023.
Justin Otter: Strong academic unions mean better conditions for academic workers. Strong academic unions mean students get the best education possible. And I’m here today because your fight at public Maryland universities is our fight at Johns Hopkins.
[Crowd chanting]
Jaisal Noor: Union benefits extend beyond better pay, benefits, and working conditions.
Luka Arsenjuk: It’s important to know that it would improve the conditions of grad students and faculty, but it’s also really important to stress that it would improve the higher education
Marcus Johnson: This is a simple democratic right. The state of Maryland is a super majority of Democrats.
Jaisal Noor: In this critical election year, organizers say it’s incumbent Democrats deliver to working people.
Marcus Johnson: It’s on the fundamental platform of the Democratic Party for this election year. Our state is out of step with them. And so it really is incumbent on these legislators to step up, do their jobs, and support collective bargaining.
Jaisal Noor: For The Real News, this is Jaisal Noor.
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This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
