A wildly successful, illegal three-day strike by the Andover Education Association in November has reverberated statewide for educators in Massachusetts. The lowest-paid instructional assistants got a 60 percent wage jump immediately. Classroom aides on the higher end of the scale got a 37 percent increase. Members won paid family medical leave, an extra personal day, fewer staff meetings…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On Jan. 13, a second march on Washington in solidarity with Palestine will take place, following the record-breaking mobilization this past November. Conditions on the ground in Gaza have drastically deteriorated since the first national march, and the urgency of taking action has only increased. Input from labor has also only grown since last fall, with major unions like the UAW throwing its support behind a ceasefire. Yet for many, the question of solidarity with remains a distinct issue from what some see as the core concerns of the labor movement. SEIU rank-and-file members Emma Mae Weber and Ryan Harvey speak with The Real News on why they’re attending the march on Washington, and why they think the voice of the labor movement is sorely needed on the issue of Palestine.
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.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. It has been three months since the October 7th Hamas-led attacks in Southern Israel culminated in the brutal killing of over 1100 people, including nearly 700 Israeli civilians, hundreds of security forces and dozens of foreigners. Hamas forces also captured around 250 hostages from Israel during the attack. Since then, however, over the past three months, Israel’s scorched-earth assault on the Gaza Strip has wrecked a kind of devastation unseen in the 21st century. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 23,000 Palestinians have now been killed in Gaza since October 7th. The majority of them women and children with countless others still buried under the rubble. Nearly 90% of Gaza’s population have been displaced from their homes.
With each passing day, more Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza, more bodies are being blown apart and buried under the rubble. The world has borne witness to a genocidal military campaign and an ethnic cleansing happening in real time to clear out Gaza once and for all and every day, every hour, it feels like the chance to stop one of humanity’s most inhumane crimes is slipping through our fingers. This is prompting activists and people of conscience around the world to take direct action to try to disrupt the war machine themselves and to try to force a ceasefire and an end to the Israeli occupation. On November 4th of last year, for instance, the largest pro-Palestine rally in US history took place in the heart of Washington D.C. when over 100,000 people rallied to demand an immediate ceasefire and an end to the violent 75 years Israeli occupation of Palestine. I was actually there on the ground with my fellow journalist, Jaisal Noor, covering the demonstration for The Real News. And if you have not already, I highly recommend that you take a few minutes to watch our on-the-ground report from that demonstration, because it was really, really powerful.
And this Saturday, January 13th, 2024 demonstrators from across the country will once again descend on the nation’s capital for the March on Washington for Gaza. Co-organized and co-sponsored by Code Pink, the American Muslim Task Force for Palestine and many other organizations. And today we’re going to talk about labor’s role in this fight, and we’re actually going to talk with some of the workers and unionists who are going to the demonstration on Saturday as workers and unionists and people of conscience. Listen, as we’ve talked about many times here at The Real News Network, labor has a long and proud tradition of using worker power to fight against war, genocide and apartheid around the globe. Let us not forget the heroic actions taken by members of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union who protested apartheid in South Africa and even refused to unload South African cargo at ports here in the United States.
Sadly, over the past three months, organized labor in the US has been moving slowly when it comes to taking an active stand against the destruction of Gaza and the slaughter of Palestinians. Now, that is not to discount the brave and necessary actions that certain national unions, local unions and rank-and-file groups have taken over the past three months and even before to stand against the violence of Israeli occupation like the United Electrical Workers, the United Auto Workers, Starbucks Workers United, and so on. But sadly, again, those groups are largely the exception than the rule, or at least that has been the case over the past three months but it hopefully looks like that is changing.
And again, I want to introduce our incredible guests today who are going to talk to us about their role in fighting the violence of occupation, ending the madness of the destruction of Gaza, and why they as workers and unionists feel compelled to attend the March on Washington for Gaza this Saturday. So I could not be more honored to be joined today on The Real News Network podcast by Emma Mae Weber. Emma is a Milwaukeean and a member of SEIU Local 500. That’s the Service Employees International Union Local 500, and she is also a union steward. We are also joined today by friend of The Real News and a previous guest on The Real News, Ryan Harvey. Ryan is a Baltimorean, an organizer, and a member of SEIU Local 500 as well. Emma Ryan, thank you both so much for joining me today on The Real News Network.
Ryan Harvey:
Thanks for having us.
Emma Mae Weber:
Yeah. Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I really appreciate you guys making time for this. I know you’ve got a lot going on and we are recording this just a few days ahead of this big march planned for Washington on Saturday. And so I want to jump right into it here. And I want to go around the table and have y’all introduce yourselves in more depth than I was able to do just now. I wanted to ask if you could tell our audience a little more about yourselves as rank-and-file workers. What kind of work do you do in your day-to-day life? How have you yourself gotten involved in labor organizing and the labor movement? And also talk to us about how and when you got involved in the current fight for a ceasefire and the longer fight to end the Israeli occupation. And tell us about how those two sides of your lives have converged and come together at this moment.
Ryan Harvey:
Yeah. Well, I can start Max, and thanks for having us again, and shout out to The Real News. Shout out to Baltimore. So I work for Public Citizen, which is a progressive nonprofit founded by Ralph Nader many decades ago. And I work in global trade policy, so pushing for and developing progressive international trade policy and also fighting against neoliberal trade policies wherever it rears its head. I’m not speaking today on behalf of my employer, but I’m also a member of a union. Our staff is unionized through SEIU Local 500 as you said. And our union represents a lot of educators and a lot of nonprofit workers, some grad students, adjunct professors. We represent non-teaching staff at Montgomery County Public Schools. We represent adjunct professors and grad students at American University. We represent adjunct professors at Goucher College, McDaniel, Micah in Baltimore, at Howard University, Georgetown, and a bunch of other places, as well as places like Media Matters, Oxfam, Public Citizen, ActionAid, and a number of others. So that’s who we represent.
And before I pass it over Emma for your intro, I’ll just say that what we’ve been part of, we’ve formed a little group. I wouldn’t say little, there’s a lot of us called SEIU Local 500 Rank and File for Palestine. There’s a bunch of groups like this around the country from different unions who are I would say largely part of a generation who have been brought into the labor movement as young people or as young adults and who look to not only to our union leadership nationally and locally, but also to ourselves and our colleagues as members of unions. We see unions as being a lot bigger than just what’s in our contract and what the union means for us as workers. We also think about it as a venue of democratic … What’s the word? Like building democratic pressure.
These are organizations that represent people. They’re made up of members. They’re democratic bodies. And we live in a country and a world that’s sorely lacking in real democracy. We see these venues as things that we should be able to organize within and use as forums through which people can express and … Not just express their opinions, but actually impact policies where something like what’s happening in Gaza with the US role … I mean, it’s wildly unpopular. So these are venues through which that can be expressed and something can be done about it. So yeah, Emma Mae, what you got?
Emma Mae Weber:
Yeah. Wow. I feel like Ryan really summed up a lot of what we are working on as a rank and file group of SEIU Local 500. I am relatively young. I’m a young worker. I’m a young unionist. I’m 24. And I’m a media researcher. So part of what I think really activated me in all of this is part my job is seeing this on TV over and over again, and I know that I’m not the only one. I know most people are seeing this on their screens over and over again, and I’m not someone who can separate pieces of myself like worker or organizer or activist into separate categories. To me, those really all make up who I am.
So the natural progression of that is that my union organizing is going to be representative of the fact that workers should be standing with the people of Gaza because an attack to one of us is an attack to all of us in my eyes, and as workers, we stand with the working class people from across the world. I got into organizing union work relatively recently, I guess with my age. But as soon as I was able to join my union, I did and became a union steward and am also doing union organizing here in Milwaukee. Because I’m not East Coast, I am in the Midwest, and we do a lot of organizing work around a ceasefire here in Milwaukee as well and the calls coming from the labor movement here in the Midwest. So that’s a little background about where my union organizing comes from.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. And I want to circle back to how this rank and file group within y’all’s own union came together and the kinds of conversations that y’all have been having about the group itself and about the upcoming demonstration in DC this Saturday. But before we get there, Emma Mae, I just wanted to follow up on that point that you made because that’s why I phrased the question the way that I did. But you put the answer so beautifully where you said, I’m a full person. I’ve got these different sides of me that I can’t just separate into these neat little boxes like worker, activist, or what have you. And I think that’s the case for all of us. And that’s why I find it so frustrating like when I go to the largest pro-Palestine march in US history back in November. And the way that mainstream media pundits and even a lot of politicians in DC talk about a demonstration of that size is they talk about the people who make up that massive crowd as if they’re all professional activists. As if we’ve all just come out of some Antifa basement or that we sit in an organizing circle and only come out when there’s a demonstration and then we go right back to where we were before.
But when I was there talking to people on the ground, I was like, these are just regular people. These are UAW union members, these are high school students, these are retired workers. These are just people who have come out to make their voices heard and to show their elected leaders and to show the world that they stand against the slaughter of Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza. But they’re just regular people like us. It’s not as easy to divide the sides of ourselves, worker and organizer, activist and so on and so forth into those neat little boxes. But I do still think that the ways that we’re trained to think about ourselves puts those barriers in place. And unions are a perfect example. People look at unions, they hear what Ryan’s saying about the importance of organized labor, and they may think, yeah, that all sounds great. But they should only be focused on the working conditions in their given shop or the conditions of their members. Getting involved in “politics” is beyond the scope of what organized labor should be and workers and union members should concern themselves with as workers and union members. Maybe they can concern themselves with that stuff on the weekends.
That’s what I was trying to get at. I just wanted to toss it back to you both and ask if you had any more to say on that front, like how we can talk to people out there about how and why our status as people who work for a living laboring in the gut of empire, how that is in fact connected to the struggle for the liberation and health and safety of all working people around the world and an end to war and the destruction of other people.
Ryan Harvey:
Yeah. Look, if your yard keeps flooding because the river keeps flooding and you keep cleaning the water out of your yard, at some point you’re going to ask why does it keep flooding? Everyone’s yards are getting flooded. No one’s going to be like, “Hey, hey, whoa. Stay in your lane.” You don’t have to do acrobatics to connect these things. The conditions that most people are fighting for in their lives, often through a union, sadly too often not through a union, is for a life of dignity. It’s for enough money to be able to go to the grocery store and not have to check your bank account. To have healthcare, to own a home. To not have your car breakdown become a crisis that could significantly change your life. These are basic things. They involve money, they involve resources. And the thing underlying all of that is the drastically unequal distribution of the wealth that our society generates.
And it’s very, very public right now. The Biden administration was saying, “Oh, don’t worry. We can definitely afford two wars.” At this time when food costs are skyrocketing. Again, there’s no acrobatics involved. It’s directly connected. Our government prioritizes going to war and making sure that arms contractors make huge profits, that their friends in power are protected around the world through the mass killing of civilians if need be, and the basic needs of people at home and especially around the world just go unmet for generation and generation and generation. And then when people are angry about it, we are baffled at how unprecedented it is. Why are all these people so upset? So that’s the context that we’re in. In terms of as union members, the language we use matters. I try to avoid using the words like activist when describing groups of people doing something. I try to use words that describe them as regular people. Because I’ll let you all in on a secret, activists are also regular people.
I’ve been in many an Antifa basement in my musical career. I believe that’s my most frequented venue.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think Ryan and I met in an Antifa basement.
Ryan Harvey:
And I’ll let you in on another secret, those people are regular people too. I have friends I grew up with in the punk scene who became engineers, electricians, nurses and doctors and teachers and folks who work in the food industry, bartenders, whatever. People you interact with every day. Postal workers, etc. But the words we use do matter, and the ways we identify do matter. With what we did through our local is we were all really frustrated about this and trying to think where are ways that we can put pressure on our government to stop supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine. We have an obligation to do it. So we started looking for different ways, and one of those ways was through our union.
So we realized that our local hadn’t signed on to the national petition for a ceasefire. Folks at my organization started talking about it. We heard that folks at other organizations were talking about it within our local, and so we all started talking about it together. We sent a big letter signed by over 100 members of our local to our leadership. We did some organizing and our local signed onto the ceasefire, which is awesome. We’re very appreciative of that. And now we’ve are keeping the ball rolling so we’ve put out a call for a labor contingent to join together this Saturday in DC at the big March. 12:00 noon at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue right by the rally site. Because want to network with other unions and other rank and file caucuses like we’ve built so that we have a stronger voice, especially on the issue of Palestine, but also on other issues that overlap with that. So yeah, Emma Mae?
Emma Mae Weber:
Yeah. You stole a lot of what I was going to say right out of my mouth, so that was really great. But I guess thinking a lot about the terms, going back to the idea around the words that we use and how we identify ourselves, I think what you all were talking about before of the way that we get identified, especially with the term is activist is meant to isolate us and is meant to make people who might not be sure if they should join in, if those are their people, because it’s like, oh, it’s this other group doing this thing instead of the people who I can identify with. My fellow neighbors, my coworkers. And that’s what’s so important I think in showing up as workers, especially with this action, is because we’re not marching as specific titles in our accomplishments or what we stand for specifically with a political identity, but necessarily just standing within our identity as workers and as community members. But if they just said that a large group of community members was outraged instead of a large group of activists, I think people would probably be a little bit more interested in what’s going on because maybe they would identify more with us then.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s very powerfully put and should be a lesson learned to all of us about the words that we’re choosing to describe these kinds of things. And the ways that we are preventing ourselves from identifying with our fellow human beings and fellow workers because of those categories. We don’t have time to get into a whole large discussion about that, but obviously that is playing a huge role here in many respects. What are the psychological and emotional and existential barriers that we have been conditioned to put in place to prevent us from seeing a Palestinian murdered in their homes, their families displaced as anything other than a fellow human being, a neighbor, a fellow worker. Someone who is flesh and blood like you. That is enough. That’s all you need to know. The nationality, the religion, the gender. So many of these other categories that have been used through mainstream media coverage, through the political discourse about Israel-Palestine, the cumulative effect is giving people innumerable excuses to not empathize with their fellow man.
And for that reason alone, we should be intensely critical of the ways we are taught to see others and ourselves, whether we’re talking about labor struggles happening here in our own country or humanitarian crises happening across the world that we ourselves as taxpaying Americans, as working Americans are directly implicated in because as has already been mentioned, the United States is endlessly and unconditionally funding and supporting and abetting this genocidal violence. But in that vein, I want to … Because I know I only have about 10 minutes left with y’all. Ryan, you started to pick up on this already, but I just wanted to ask in case there were any additional details that y’all wanted to share about how the rank and file group of Local 500 members of which y’all are a part, this contingent that is going to Washington D.C. This Saturday to take part in the March on Washington for Gaza. How did this group come together? What kinds of conversations were y’all having as fellow union members about why you needed to take a stand and how this was something that you all wanted to do as a group?
Ryan Harvey:
Yeah. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. To keep in line with the conversation we’ve been having, it was a very normal thing. We just talked to people and said, “Hey, do you know anybody over at Oxfam? Hey, do you know anybody over at Georgetown? We’re all in the same union.” It’s like organizing 101. It’s about relationship building. It’s about connecting with people and finding people who are … I don’t want to say it like the tip of a spear, but people who have a network. So for anyone listening who’s like, whether you’re at a workplace that isn’t unionized and you’re thinking about maybe building a union, same principles. If you’re in a union and you want to organize your colleagues and fellow union members to get a better contract or on something like what we’re doing like a caucus on a particular issue or whatever, same exact fundamental stuff. Talk to folks, get a sense of where people are at, come up with an idea.
I think having what we call a vehicle in the nonprofit world. Having a vehicle, like a sign-on letter. Something that you’re asking people to do. A first step. An excuse to open that conversation. A survey. Anything like that. Sometimes we start way too big when we start things and then we inevitably fail. So figure out an entry-level thing, a big umbrella that you can form through which you can have those conversations, then you have them and you are up front with people about what you’re trying to do. I think we did that. And I think that it worked really well and we’re connected now. And so you keep the ball rolling. That’s what it is. The end goal of organizing is not to win your campaign, it’s to stay organized as people, wherever that is in the society. The more organized people are, the more power we can exert on those who have power over us, and the more we can then negotiate power, which, let you in on another little secret, that’s democracy. That’s what the country’s supposed to be all about, so it shouldn’t be that controversial.
Emma Mae Weber:
Yeah. I guess I’ll say this is actually the first time Ryan and I have really worked together and really the first time that I’ve been in contact with different units from across our local in general. And of course the main focus of what we’re doing right now is about calling for a ceasefire. But because we’re all organizing around that, the other cool thing that’s coming out of this is that we’re building those pathways and those connections with each other that we’re going to be able to continue to lean on as we continue to organize with each other. And so I’m in a group here in Milwaukee of a whole bunch of young workers and young unionists, and I spoke about this with them and how when you start a campaign like this, it is about the focus of that campaign, but it’s also getting those wheels turning on connection and relationship building. And those are things you can continue to use and fall back on as more things come up, as your contract needs to be strengthened, as you’re facing bigger and bigger issues at your workplaces. So it’s twofold, and it’s been great working with Ryan. It’s been great working and meeting all these other people in my local. And it’s all because we realized that something needed to be said from our union, which is great. I am really proud of the people I get to call my union siblings.
Ryan Harvey:
And it doesn’t need to be a hostile … The thing about being organized is that when you have power, whether it’s a small degree of power like what we might have or a larger degree, you can have different kinds of conversations with people with different amounts of power, and it’s not as awkward. When we pushed on our union leadership, yeah, there was an uncomfortableness about it because this is my union leadership. I want them to come to bat for me when we’re negotiating contract. We’re in a relationship. But our perspective is not we’re trying to be a pain in the ass. It’s like we’re trying to strengthen our union. Actually, we are members of the union and according to the polls, a lot of people think that what’s happening is really, really wrong and want something done about it. So we have to think of ourselves like actually, we’re helping. We’re trying to help. We’re trying to make our union something that more people want to be part of, to see a reflection of themselves in. And also union colleagues of ours who are Palestinian, who have family in the Middle East, et cetera, who are feeling abandoned, we’re also helping make this a place that folks feel comfortable wearing that button and turning out to rallies and whatnot.
So there is an uncomfortableness when you organize, especially when the people that you’re going up against might even be people you respect. They’re friends or whatever. But that’s what organizing to build power does. It allows you to say, look, we can still be cool, but all these people that are with me, they want something in particular and I’m telling you what it is and what are we going to do about it here? So I think that’s a very important thing for people to understand. You don’t have to hate the people that you’re organizing in proximity to. Sometimes you do, and that’s fine as well if that’s how it is. But we’re trying to act in a democratic fashion and we’re contesting things that are very important in our life, and sometimes those conversations are hard, and we have to be prepared for those.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, again, I think both of you very beautifully, powerfully put. And I know I got to let you both go in a few minutes here, so I just wanted to build on that, turn it into a final question here. For other workers, unionists, regular people who are listening to this right now, this is going to be published on Friday, January 12th ahead of the march on Washington for Gaza. So folks are listening to this considering going to the march itself on Saturday, or if they can’t make this march, but are considering taking a more active role in this through their union or beyond, I just wanted to ask what your message would be as members of this rank and file contingent of Local 500 members who are taking that step, who are organizing amongst your union siblings to make something happen here and to use your power as workers and union members to fight for good, to fight for peace and justice.
What would your message be to folks out there who are listening to this about why they should do the same, even amidst a McCarthyite scary situation that we’ve got here in the United States where people are being repressed, people are being fired from their jobs, people are being ostracized within certain social circles. If you could speak directly to folks about that, what would your parting message to them be? And any final thoughts you have on the role that workers and organized labor in general can and should be taking in fighting for peace and ending this madness?
Emma Mae Weber:
Yeah. This is going to sound very Gen Z of me, but don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that you are the only one who cares about a ceasefire, you’re the only one who cares about unionizing, and you’re the only one who wants X, Y, or Z. The biggest thing is identifying the folks that are on the same page as you and making sure you hang onto those connections because the pushback they want … Using the ominous they. But a lot of folks in power want people who are trying to take back their power or trying to reclaim their worker power to feel as if they’re alone. And the whole point of a union, the whole point of organizing is to really rely on the community and the connections we’re building. So you’re not alone. We’re doing this work together and just continue to try and remind yourself that you are not the only person who feels the way you do in your workplace.
Ryan Harvey:
And in terms of speaking to the situation in Gaza and in Palestine, I’ve heard people say … Not a lot of people, but saying like, “Oh, what, so you guys want Trump?” It’s like, dude, we may be very angry at Biden right now, we absolutely do not want Donald Trump to be the president again. What we are trying to do is hold this administration and these politicians to their standard that they set out when they said this is going to be the most progressive administration in history. Whatever. It’s like, okay, well then freaking act like it. If your approval rating is tanking and you’re losing young voters and you’re losing Arab and Muslim voters, it’s because of your policies. It’s not because of the rhetoric that we’re using out on the streets. Get out there. If the unions and union leadership are concerned about the political situation, then speak about Gaza and support a ceasefire.
We are trying to put the Democratic Party onto the right track on this and not on the wrong track where they are. And I’m not speaking for everyone in my crew or anything, but unions are largely supporting Democratic Party candidates. We’re trying to change what the Democratic Party’s position is on this because they’re in power right now in the White House. And there’s people who seem to be very aloof to what’s happening on the street, on the ground where the voters are in relation to what’s happening in Gaza. And it’s very serious. The implications domestically and internationally are very serious. But they’re nowhere near as serious as the implications of what’s actually happening on the ground in Gaza. This will have repercussions for a very, very long time. It will involve the US military, it will involve US money. It will involve a whole bunch of militaries around the world for decades if this isn’t righted soon, in a very honest way. And if you want any proof of that, just look at Afghanistan or Iraq for the last 40 years and what the wreckage of these kinds of conflicts that go unresolved that are often tied to U.S. geopolitical interests and the cowardice of politicians and other power brokers, including union leadership in the United States who failed to do something effective about it when it needed to happen. It’s a gift that keeps giving and it’s not a good gift.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is Ryan Harvey. Ryan is a Baltimorean, a longtime political community and labor organizer, and a member of SEIU Local 500. And Emma Mae Weber. Emma is a Milwaukeean and a member of SEIU Local 500, as well as a union steward. They are both members of the rank and file labor contingent of SEIU local 500 members that will be attending the March on Washington for Gaza, which once again will take place in Washington D.C. this Saturday, January 13th, 2024 in Freedom Plaza. The march begins at 1:00 PM Eastern Time and is scheduled to go until 3:00 PM Eastern Time. And Ryan, Emma, just one more time, can you give our listeners the details about where the labor contingent will be meeting on Saturday as well?
Ryan Harvey:
Yeah. It’ll be at 12:00 noon. It’s going to be at the Navy Memorial. There’s an Archives Navy Memorial Metro stop right there. It’s on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s just a couple of blocks southeast of the main rally. So we’ll be there at noon and we’ll march up to the rally together around one.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Ryan and Emma Mae for joining us today on The Real News Network. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you to you all for listening. Thank you for caring. As we say all the time here at The Real News Network, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something and you can do something to stop this. So please, whatever it is, keep doing what you got to do, bring more folks into the fight and keep supporting the work that we are doing here to cover those who are fighting that good fight. Because we need your support to keep doing this work and to keep bringing y’all more important coverage and conversations just like this. So please, before you go, head on over to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter of our work today. It really makes a difference. For The Real News Network, this is Maximillian Alvarez signing off. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This week, the Biden administration’s Department of Labor announced a significant change in a federal labor rule that classifies United States workers as either independent contractors or full employees. The new policy, published Wednesday, January 10, would make an increased number of freelance workers across many industries eligible for full-employee status…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Yahoo (1/4/24)
This week on CounterSpin: The journalists at Yahoo Finance tell us that a Connecticut McDonald’s charging $18 for a combo meal has “sparked a nationwide debate” on escalating prices in the fast food industry. The outrage, readers are told, is “partly attributed” to a recent raise in the minimum wage—which has not yet gone into effect. Spoiler: We never hear about any other “parts” “attributed.” Businesses like McDonald’s, the story goes, “have already raised their prices in anticipation of the wage hike.”
Were there any other responses available to them? Don’t ask! We’re moving on—to how it isn’t just that poor working Joes will have to pay more for a Big Mac, but also there will be layoffs…of fast-food employees. We meet Jose and Jim, who say they thought higher wages would be good, “considering the decline in tipping and increasing living costs.” Alas no, Yahoo explains: “The reality was harsher. The wage increase, while beneficial for some, has resulted in job losses for others, leading to a complex mix of gratitude and resentment among affected workers.” The takeaway: “The debate over the appropriate balance between fair wages and sustainable business practices remains unresolved.”
The piece does go on to lament the mental stress associated with economic uncertainty—not for owners, evidently—and the wise counsel that those troubled might consider “establishing a substantial savings account and making smart investments.”
Elite reporters seem so far removed from the daily reality of the bulk of the country that this doesn’t even ring weird to them. A raise in wages for fast food employees means fast food employees have to lose their jobs—that’s just, you know, “economics.” Union, what? Profiteering, who? The only operative question is, which low-wage workers need to suffer more?
We get a different view on raising the minimum wage from Sebastian Martinez Hickey, researcher for the EARN (Economic Analysis and Research Network) team at the Economic Policy Institute.
Tipped worker (cc photo: Daveblog)
Also on the show: A largely unspoken part of media’s wage conversation is the whole sector of workers whose pay rates are based in…enslavement. Yeah. In 2015, CounterSpin learned about tipped wages from Saru Jayaraman, co-founder of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United and director of the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. We hear part of that relevant conversation this week.
The post Sebastian Martinez Hickey on Minimum Wage, Saru Jayaraman on History of Tipping appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
The California Faculty Association (CFA), representing 29 thousand faculty at the 23 campuses of the California State University (CSU), held a series of rolling strikes against the largest public university system in the United States in December. The union has been engaged in contract reopener talks in advance of a full contract battle later this year. The union has demanded a 12 percent pay…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A group of 33 Senate Democrats is pressuring over a dozen major auto manufacturers not to interfere with their workers’ union campaigns as the United Auto Workers undertake a historic drive to unionize at every non-unionized automaker in the U.S. On Wednesday, lawmakers sent a letter to the CEOs of 13 non-unionized auto manufacturers with U.S. plants, urging them to agree to neutrality agreements…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This is a lightly edited transcript of “The Best of CounterSpin 2023,” originally aired on December 29, 2023.
Janine Jackson: Every week, CounterSpin tries to bring you a look behind the headlines of the mainstream news—not because headlines are false, necessarily, but because the full story is rarely reflected there. The voices, the communities, the ideas that are not front and center in the discourse of the powerful, but could help us move toward a more equitable, peaceful, healthy communal life.
Many—most—conversations we need to have, have to happen around corporate news media, while deconstructing and re-imagining the discourse that they’re pumping out day after day.
CounterSpin is thankful to all of the activists, researchers, reporters and advocates who appear on the show. They all help us see the world and one another more clearly, give us tools to make a better future, and offer other resources once we understand that we can’t believe everything we read.
You’re listening to the Best of CounterSpin for 2023, brought to you by the media watch group FAIR.
***
Just about a year ago, lots of people were traveling, or trying to, on holiday and vacation trips. Thousands of them found themselves stranded in airports, their flights canceled, their luggage who knows where, and airlines utterly unresponsive to their complaints. Beyond chaotic, it was confusing in a country where the rhetoric is all about the customer being king, and getting what you pay for. In January 2023, CounterSpin spoke with Paul Hudson, president of FlyersRights, a nonprofit that organizes the consumer rights of airline passengers.
Paul Hudson: “The airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money.”
Paul Hudson: The intention of the PPP programs and some other bailouts of the airlines, which altogether involved about $90 billion, was that you would keep the staff on the payroll so they would be ready when pandemic ended to restore traffic, and they wouldn’t have to go from a cold start.
But the airlines, unfortunately, are only incidentally in the transportation business. They’re primarily, especially their executives, in the business of making money. If that meant reducing their payroll through other means, that got around the intention of the law—and there was no real oversight by the federal government on money—that’s what they did.
And they continued to pay, in some cases, dividends. They paid large bonuses to CEOs and top executives. Some of them also did stock buybacks to keep their stock price up, while their profits, of course, were dwindling to nothing.
The reforms that we’ve been promoting pretty much have been ignored by DoT, which is the only regulator of the airline industry. And, as a result, things have gotten worse and worse.
For example, you would think there would be some requirement to have a certain level of backup or reserve capacity, for personnel as well as equipment. But there is none. There is no requirement, and some airlines actually have negative reserves. So even on their best day, they cancel 1 or 2 percent of their fights. It’s profitable to do that.
Another example is that there is no requirement that they maintain any level of customer service. Each airline sets their own goals about that, but there’s no enforcement. And they just say, “Well, I’m sorry.” They don’t answer your phones. They don’t have the personnel to do it.
And the area that’s most crucial, which is pilots: We have a shortage of pilots. Pretty much everyone agrees with that; except perhaps the pilot union, that wants to leverage the situation, says there is no shortage. But the airlines are simply not recruiting the pilots they need, and haven’t done so for years, especially for regional airlines. They don’t pay them nearly enough.
And the proposals that FlyersRights made, going back to June of this year, about 17 of them, have pretty much been ignored by DoT, at least until recently.
***
JJ: In a year that called for and saw a great deal of organized protest, one focal point was Cop City, a militarized police training complex being built on Atlanta’s South River Forest, over and against community opposition. An environmental activist known as Tortuguita was killed in a hail of police bullets, while, as an independently ordered autopsy revealed, they sat cross-legged with their hands up.
Kamau Franklin is founder of the national grassroots organization Community Movement Builders, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We talked about Cop City with him in March, starting with the history of the land itself.
Kamau Franklin: “This is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.”
Kamau Franklin: That land, in terms of it being a forest before the invention of Cop City, was promised to the adjacent community, which is 70% Black, as a recreational and park area, particularly as the land reforested itself over time. Park areas where there were supposed to be nature trails, hiking available, parks available.
And when the idea of Cop City arose, from the Atlanta Police Department, the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, all of those plans were scrapped immediately, without any input from that adjoining community. And instead they decided to move forward with this idea of Cop City.
This is a perfect illustration of how the state, vis-a-vis the city, the state government and even, in some ways, the federal government, operate in tandem. And a lot of times, most of the time, it doesn’t matter what party they are, but operate in tandem at the whim of capital, and at the whim of a, relatively speaking, right-wing ideological outlook.
And, again, it doesn’t matter which party it is we’re talking about. It doesn’t matter whether or not those folks are Black or white, but an ideological outlook that says overpolicing in Black and brown communities is the answer to every problem.
And so here in particular, you talked about the process. This process of developing Cop City came after the 2020 uprisings against police violence, the 2020 uprisings that were national in scope, that started after Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and, here in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks were killed by the police, and it caused a massive uprising and movement across the nation again.
The response by the authorities here in Atlanta was to push through their plans on building Cop City, to double down on their efforts, again, to continue the overpolicing of Black communities, particularly here in Atlanta.
Atlanta is a city that is gentrifying at an astronomical rate. It’s gone from a 60% Black city to one that’s less than 50% in only a matter of 20, 30 years, all of that under Black leadership.
It’s a city that, in terms of those who are arrested, 90% of those who are arrested in Atlanta by the police are Black people; its jails are filled with Black people.
And so this is a city that doubled down on police violence and police militarization after these uprisings.
***
JJ: If baristas on strike were surprising, Hollywood writers on strike were downright shocking for those who vaguely imagine that these are dream jobs for which the only appropriate response is “thank you.” We got a window on a world of people who are, at the end of the day, workers, from Eric Thurm, campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. He wrote an informative piece on the historic writers and actors strike for GQ. One topic we touched on was AI—not the science-y, techno aspect of it, but the power part.
Eric Thurm: “Every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”
Eric Thurm: Technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts. Because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.
And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.
And so, of course, the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.
And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying, as much as possible, to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.
And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.
I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.
***
JJ: Corporate journalists still invoke, and many people still believe in, a vision of an intrepid, independent press corps that is speaking truth to power. The sad extent to which that is not true was spotlighted painfully in June, when CNBC‘s Andrew Ross Sorkin hosted a chummy interview with Chevron CEO Mike Wirth. CounterSpin heard from Emily Sanders, editorial lead at the Center for Climate Integrity and founder of ExxonKnews, who saw it as emblematic of a larger—and, let’s acknowledge, historically environmentally devastating—media failure.
Emily Sanders: “The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas.”
Emily Sanders: Mainstream media have had a very hard time connecting climate change to oil companies, and their decades of pollution and deception about the harms caused by fossil fuels.
And when you see coverage of deadly heat waves and wildfire smoke, for instance, there’s often no mention of things like how the major oil companies are still spending millions every year lobbying to delay the transition to renewable energy, or how Chevron, the world’s most-polluting investor-owned oil company, is currently pouring even more money into increased fossil fuel extraction and production, after making record profits last year.
So it’s also not a coincidence that mainstream media is so far behind on this. The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation about our reliance on oil and gas, what needs to be done about it and what the obstacles really are to addressing climate change.
And that goes back to at least the ’80s and ’90s, when oil companies began placing ads and advertorials, or ads disguised as news editorials, in major outlets like the New York Times and the Washington Post, that downplayed the reality of climate change.
And even today, as we learned from last year’s congressional investigations and hearings into the industry’s disinformation, companies like Exxon, Chevron, BP and Shell are still running advertisements that look like articles in the country’s biggest news outlets, promoting things like algae and so-called natural gas as climate solutions. So they’ve really used the veil of journalistic credibility to help disguise their misleading and deceptive advertising for quite a while.
And we’re seeing that, not just with advertising, but with some reporters themselves still failing to name the source of climate inaction, and still unable or unwilling to recognize and call out disinformation, sometimes even parroting fossil fuel industry framing about how we can’t move off oil too quickly, or how Big Oil is working on ways to solve climate change, despite that they’re causing it, without actually challenging those misconceptions.
***
JJ: August 2023 saw the 33rd anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And Joe Biden, while acknowledging that disabled people still face discrimination, led with the sort of rhetoric that politicians and news media generally use, claiming that it’s
hard for younger generations to imagine a world without the ADA, but before it existed, if you were disabled, stores could turn you away and employers could refuse to hire you. Transit was largely inaccessible.
That rang weirdly out of touch to many, including our guest, Kehsi Iman Wilson, co-founder and chief operating officer of New Disabled South.
Kehsi Iman Wilson: “In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement.”
Kehsi Iman Wilson: In no social movement is a victory, whether minor or major, an indicator that there need be no additional social movement—or political movement, for that matter.
And when we’re talking about disability—disability rights, disability access, certainly disability justice—so much of the real, lived experience of disabled people contradicts a lot of President Biden’s opening statements.
For example, when you talk about “couldn’t imagine a world where there was inaccessible public transit”—there’s still inaccessible public transit for the majority of disabled people. And unless you’re in the privileged few who can afford paratransit services, where they’re accessible where you live, things even as basic as access to sidewalks is still a major issue.
We’re dealing with so many infrastructure issues in this country, and, as we know, any issue doubly or triply impacts disabled people.
We’ve seen, and we continue to see, a spate of laws being passed across counties, across states, making it more difficult to access the ballot box—for example, getting rid of drop boxes, ballot boxes. But when you do that, you are not only disenfranchising, effectively, large portions of people of color, of people who live in rural areas, but disabled people. And that’s not talked about.
***
JJ: Media like the Washington Post got the positive vapors this year about the scourge of “organized retail crime.” The Post called for an aggressive federal crackdown on people stealing from grocery stores, etc., even after the National Retail Federation acknowledged that the data they had put out about the impact of such theft was bogus.
If elite media cared about theft, of course, they’d be tracking a different story: companies stealing straight out of the paychecks of employees struggling to make ends meet. We talked about wage theft this fall with Rodrigo Camarena, director of Justicia Lab and Co-creator of ¡Reclamo!, a tech-enabled initiative to combat the problem.
Rodrigo Camarena: “In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage.”
Rodrigo Camarena: Wage theft is so common and so ubiquitous that we don’t really consider it in our day-to-day lives. But, like you mentioned, it’s this huge problem. It’s actually the largest form of theft, when you compare it to burglaries, armed robberies, motor vehicle thefts combined.
And it happens whenever a worker is deprived of the wages that they’re owed lawfully. So that could mean not being paid a minimum wage, not being paid overtime, having deductions from someone’s paycheck made, or just not paying someone; they show up at the job one day and the person that hired them isn’t there anymore. Failing to honor sick leave or other benefits is another form of wage theft.
In some sectors and industries, it’s more likely for you to be a victim of wage theft than to be paid your full wage. And it’s a problem that disproportionately impacts low-wage workers, women and immigrants, and in particular undocumented immigrants, who often don’t feel like they can stand up for themselves, or request what they’re owed lawfully, because of their status.
So I think there’s a lot of misinformation about your rights as a worker that might prevent people from standing up for themselves and defending these rights, but this is part of the challenge in addressing this problem.
***
JJ: You might not guess it from coverage, but Covid-19 did not magically disappear in 2023. People continued to get sick and to die in the US and around the world. And drug companies like Pfizer continued to make hay from that sickness and death. Peter Maybarduk brought us an update in October. He’s director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Group.
Peter Maybarduk: “Drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money.”
Peter Maybarduk: Pfizer has more than doubled the price of its Covid-19 treatment Paxlovid—nirmatrelvir plus ritonavir—to the US government from around $530 a course up to $1,390 for a list price now. And that despite the fact that Pfizer’s already made $18 billion off this drug in global sales. And they’re raising the price right at a time when it hurts most, because will, obviously, to fight and to fund pandemic response has diminished greatly, and the US government is transitioning its response to the commercial market.
So there’s very limited public resources now, in the United States and around the world, to ensure continuity of treatment. And in order to make up for the loss of volume, Pfizer has decided to increase prices, but that’s going to suppress demand further; that’s going to make it harder worldwide to access Covid treatment for people that need it.
In many ways, Covid-19 is a pandemic where prescription drug corporations have determined who receives what treatment or vaccine when, at least at a population level, at a sort of country-by-country level. And health agencies have been on the receiving end of that; they haven’t always known what price another country’s paying, they haven’t known what’s their place in line, the terms and conditions.
And, of course, global health authorities haven’t been able to effectively prioritize and indicate that we must prioritize population A, B and C, in these ratios, in order to end the pandemic as quickly as possible. Instead, drug corporations have really been in the driver’s seat, working privately, secretly, on their own logic’s terms, of where they can make the most money, or what public relations and pandemic concessions they want to make. And, unfortunately, that’s continuing here in this case.
***
JJ: Many people’s worst fears when they learned of Hamas’ October 7 attack in Israel have been borne out and beyond in subsequent weeks. The moment called for context— historical, social and human. But that has been largely missing, at least in most major US media. We talked about how an absence of understanding of the present impairs our ability to move forward with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies
Phyllis Bennis: “If we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future…we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context.”
Phyllis Bennis: Resistance, including resistance violence, never just happens out of thin air. It happens in response to something. It happens in the context of something.
And if we’re serious about preventing acts of violence in the future, understanding the acts of violence that have already occurred, we have to be prepared to do the hard work of looking at context, looking at root causes, something that at moments of crisis— which, for Israelis, this is clearly a moment of unexpected crisis, but for people in this country as well—it’s crucial that we take those hard steps to figure out what gives rise to this. Because otherwise we’re simply mouthing platitudes of condemnation.
Condemnation of violent attacks on civilians is completely appropriate. Some of the acts of some of the Hamas militants were in complete violation of international law, and should be condemned.
And it’s also true that they didn’t just happen. They happened in the context of 75 years of oppression of Palestinians, decades of an apartheid system. The lives of the people in Gaza, the 2.2 million people who live in that enclosed, open-air prison, if you will, one of the most crowded places on the face of the Earth, have lived under a state of siege that was imposed by Israel in 2007.
So all of those things have to be taken into account to understand—not to justify, not to ever justify—the killings of civilians, the killings of children and old people; unacceptable, should be condemned; and we have to understand from where that comes, why these things happen. Otherwise, we have no basis to figure out a strategy to stop the violence on all sides.
***
JJ: And as Israel’s siege of Gaza goes on, to the increasing horror and outrage in this country and around the world, some powerful figures in politics and the press have turned their sights on those who would protest the bloodshed. The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens told readers that opposition to Israel’s violence was evidence that US progressives are, at bottom, antisemitic. Because if Jewish people oppose racist policing, for example, Black people should “trade back” uncritical support for the State of Israel.
It’s a cynical view of coalitional social movements, but there’s no reason to believe it’s going to be the vision that wins the day. CounterSpin heard a very different story from Sonya Meyerson-Knox, communications director at Jewish Voice for Peace.
Sonya Meyerson-Knox: “As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it.” (image: Zero Hour)
Sonya Meyerson-Knox: The belief that none of us are free unless all of us are free, it’s not just a slogan. It’s absolutely, I think, the only way that any of us are going to have the future that we’re trying to build.
Look at all the polls, including the ones that are coming out right now. A majority of US voters, and the vast majority of Democratic voters, are all demanding a lasting ceasefire, and most of them want to see US military aid to the Israeli government conditioned, if not stopped entirely.
And yet none of that actually appears on the pages of the New York Times. It treats the Palestine movement, and those of us who stand for Palestinian freedom and liberation, as though we are somehow an anomaly, when in fact we are the vastly growing majority.
As long as there’s been the concept of a State of Israel, there have been Jews that have been leading opposition to it. The American Jewish population, let alone the global Jewish population, is not a monolith, and it never was and it never will be.
And that’s one of the things I think that makes the Jewish community so strong, is our long cultural and historical understanding of ourselves as a place that values debate and introspection and proving your sources, and then doubting them and challenging them and researching them, and coming back to the discussion and teasing things out, over and over again, along with, and this is especially important to the younger generation, I would argue, that are coming up now as young adults, the idea of social justice, of tikkun olam, repairing the world.
When I was growing up, as a kid, I thought being Jewish meant that my grandparents were union supporters and Communist activists, and I thought that’s what being Jewish was. And not everyone has that particular background, but so many of us have absolutely been raised to the idea that part of what it means to be a Jew and to practice Judaism, not just once a week or twice a week, but every day, constantly, is this commitment to trying to make the world a better place. And increasingly, like we’re seeing right now, that has to include Palestine, that has to include what’s happening to Palestinians.
***
JJ: That was Sonya Meyerson-Knox. Before her you heard Phyllis Bennis, Peter Maybarduk, Rodrigo Camarena, Kehsi Iman Wilson, Emily Sanders, Kamau Franklin and Paul Hudson.
And that’s it for The best of CounterSpin for 2023 is only a sample of the valuable conversations it’s been our pleasure to host this year.CounterSpin is produced by the media watch group FAIR, and you can find decades of CounterSpin shows and transcripts at FAIR.org. The show is engineered by Reilly Bair and the one and only Alex Noyes. I’m Janine Jackson. Thank you for listening to CounterSpin.
The post ‘We Have to Do the Hard Work of Looking at Context’<br></em><span style='color:#000000; font-size: 23px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1em; font-family: 'Open Sans','sans-serif'; padding-bottom: -10px;'>Transcript of The Best of CounterSpin 2023 appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
This post was originally published on Real Progressives.
Nearly two dozen states and several municipalities across the U.S. are set to increase their minimum wage levels for workers in the new year. Sixty-five jurisdictions in total, including 22 states, will see minimum wage increases starting on that date. A majority of those jurisdictions will see their rates go up to or higher than $15 per hour. Three other states, as well as 22 other localities…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Unions across the United States have begun to shift from a long history of supporting Israel to condemning the Israeli occupation of Palestine amid growing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, where Israel’s 80-day assault has killed over 20,000 people. As ceasefire demands from teachers to Starbucks workers are published across the country and a major march led in part by union organizers in New York…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Looking for something positive to celebrate on New Year’s Eve? Consider lifting a glass to the hardworking people behind these inspiring victories of 2023. More than half a million American workers walked off the job this year. In October, companies lost more workdays to strikes than in any month during the past 40 years. Big 3 auto workers, Hollywood writers and actors, Las Vegas and Los Angeles…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Major contract fights in 2023 at UPS, the Big 3 automakers, and Hollywood studios set the tone for next year’s contract campaigns. Impressive gains and increased transparency got members of other unions asking, “Why can’t my union be like that?” The bar will be high. Many of the contracts expiring next year date from before the pandemic, and before inflation started taking a bite out of paychecks.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Unions, Jewish groups, and other organizations led a march in New York City Thursday night to demand a cease-fire in the U.S.-backed Israeli war on Gaza and pressure their members of Congress to stop taking campaign cash from pro-Israel lobbyists. Members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A; American Postal Workers Union (APWU); United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers (UE) Eastern…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
From October 4-6 of this year, the US experienced the largest healthcare worker strike in our history, when over 75,000 workers with the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions went on a three-day strike against the healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. Then, on October 13, after warning that more strikes could be coming if a deal wasn’t reached at the bargaining table, healthcare workers scored a major victory and reached a tentative agreement with Kaiser, which the union membership, accounting for over 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers across the country, voted to ratify in early November. As the Coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions stated in a press release upon the contract ratification, “In a historic victory for frontline healthcare workers, more than 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers have overwhelmingly voted to ratify a new contract that will bolster patient safety, make critical investments in the healthcare workforce, and set a higher standard for the healthcare industry nationwide. Approved by a margin of 98.5%, the four-year contract is in effect from October 1, 2023, to September 30, 2027, at hundreds of Kaiser facilities across California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.” In this mini-cast, we speak with Meg Niemi, President of SEIU Local 49, and Audrey Cardenas, a benefits support specialist at a Kaiser dental office in Oregon, about how Kaiser healthcare workers took on the bosses and won this new contract, and what that is going to mean for workers and patients alike moving forward.
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.
Meg Niemi:
My name is Meg Niemi. I’m the president of SEIU Local 49.
Audrey Cardenas:
Hello, I’m Audrey [inaudible 00:00:25]. I am a fees and benefits support specialist for Kaiser Permanente in the [inaudible 00:00:29] Hillsborough area. And I’m also the CIC for the bargaining team.
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, please support the work that we are doing here at Working People by leaving positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, sharing these episodes with your friends and coworkers, and becoming a paid subscriber to the show on patreon.com. If you head on over to patreon.com/workingpeople, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/workingpeople and hit that subscribe button. You will get immediate access to all the great bonus episodes that we published over the years and continue to publish for our beautiful subscribers.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really exciting mini cast for y’all today. Now, you may not have heard about it, although I really hope that you did, but from October 4th through October 6th of this year, the US experienced the largest healthcare workers strike in our history, went over 75,000 workers with the coalition of Kaiser Permanente Unions, went on a three-day strike against the healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente. Then on October 13th after warning that more strikes could be coming if a deal was not reached at the bargaining table, healthcare workers scored a major victory and reached a tentative agreement with Kaiser.
Which the union membership accounting for over 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers across the country voted to ratify in early November. As the coalition of Kaiser Permanente Union stated in a press release upon the contract ratification, “In a historic victory for frontline healthcare workers, more than 85,000 Kaiser Permanente workers have overwhelmingly voted to ratify a new contract that will bolster patient safety, make critical investments in the healthcare workforce, and set a higher standard for the healthcare industry nationwide.
Approved by a margin of 98.5%, the four-year contract is in effect from October 1st, 2023 to September 30th, 2027 at hundreds of Kaiser facilities across California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia.” Now, as Reuters reported on November 9th, “The new contract includes across the board wage increases, totaling 21% over four years, an increased payout for employees under a performance sharing plan and commitments to address a staffing crisis including increased training, education, and mass hiring events.
The new deal also has protective terms around subcontracting and outsourcing of work and a one year accelerated hiring process by the hospital system, the union said. The union had accused the company of failing to address a prolonged staffing crunch that has left employees feeling overworked and underpaid while compromising patient care. New minimum wages will reach $25 per hour in California for union represented employees over three years and $23 per hour in other states where the hospital chain operates.”
Now, as we always do here on Working People and at the Real News Network, we’re going to take y’all to the front lines of struggle and talk to the people on the ground fighting the good fight to hear directly from them about what that fight entails, what they’re fighting for, and how we can all help. And I could not be more honored and excited to have Meg and Audrey on the show today to talk about a rare bit of good news for once. We’ve been covering a lot of really depressing stuff, but here we have a really inspiring story.
So let’s dig in and let’s talk about how Kaiser healthcare workers took on the bosses and fought and won this new contract and what that contract is going to mean for workers and patients alike moving forward. So Meg, Audrey, thank you both again so much for joining us today. I really, really appreciate it and I want to talk all about this. I want to hear from your perspectives what it’s been like being part of this incredible struggle. But before we do, since I’ve got you both on the line, I wanted to just take a step back first.
Because I don’t think we can have this conversation until we give people a sense of just what healthcare workers are going through in this country. I published a book of interviews with workers that I recorded during year one of COVID. I’ve been interviewing workers on this show, Working People, breaking points all throughout COVID. And I feel like one of the things that I try to communicate to people who ask me like, what are workers thinking? What are they going through? What are you hearing?
I’ll give some standard answers, like people are struggling to afford the cost of living. Our bosses are raking in record profits, but we’re all struggling to make ends meet. That is a pretty generalized condition for a lot of workers in this country. But I also have been telling people, listen, I have not spoken to a single healthcare worker in the past three years who hasn’t told me some version of we are in the midst of a crisis. Healthcare workers are burned the hell out. We are losing healthcare workers.
We are piling more work onto fewer people. The quality of care is going down, the quality of life for workers is going down. This is a slow moving crisis that we are not prepared to address. So I wanted to ask just for you two to talk directly to our audience right now, from your respective vantage points as healthcare workers and unionists, what have you and your fellow healthcare workers been going through these past few years?
Meg Niemi:
I’m really glad to hear us talk about what the pandemic was like for healthcare workers. And in a lot of ways, we’re still experiencing it on the front lines of healthcare. I know I got a call yesterday that one of the hospitals we represent is at max capacity. They’re trying to find additional beds. It just hasn’t stopped. And I think back, a number of people were able to work from home, shelter in place, and healthcare workers showed up every single day during the entire pandemic. And they didn’t only show up every day, they worked double time, they worked overtime, they worked weekends.
And I think about one of our bargaining team members, Megan Mayes, and she’s a registration representative at a Kaiser hospital. And this is a story she shared in the course of Kaiser bargaining to Kaiser management to try to make real what was going on for her. She’s a mom. She has two kids. During the pandemic, she was asked to work by Kaiser and asked to work extra shifts, and she felt an obligation to do that. To one, be there for her patients and be there because she knew our community needed her in a way that other people couldn’t be there.
And she also wanted to be there for her coworkers, to make sure that people were supporting each other. But it was scary. I mean, this was a time we didn’t have a vaccine. The frontline healthcare workers didn’t even have the proper protective equipment in most cases, were absolutely being exposed. But she showed up, worked those extra shifts. Well, in the meantime, her kids were out of school and at home. Who’s watching the kids, right? This whole question of who was taking care of those kids.
So later, she’s actually had to pay for private tutoring to help her kids get caught up because she was there taking care of patients. And in the midst of all of that, we saw inflation just take off, cost of gas, groceries, fuel to get to and from work. And as working families who are not making big salaries, our members are folks who are CNAs, registration reps, a lot of folks making about 20 bucks an hour trying to make all of those ends meet. And she shared in her story that her family couldn’t afford to buy chicken breast for two years because it was too expensive and out of reach.
She’s frugal and saves every penny. And so that is still going on for healthcare workers. All of these pressures, short staffing, the need to work overtime, the fear about the communicable diseases that they face on the job. And then coming out of that pandemic, being told by their employers that they’re heroes, that they’re doing amazing work. But then coming in and saying, “I want the pay, and I want the benefits that show that respect in a concrete way.” And time after time, the Kaiser example is exactly right, we have to…
Meg Niemi:
And time after time, the Kaiser example is exactly right. We have to fight for that rather than employers meeting the moment and saying, “Thank you for your work. We’ve been profitable during this whole period of time, and now we want to share those profits with you.” And turn it over to you, Audrey, to talk about as a frontline healthcare worker, how you experienced it.
Audrey Cardenas:
Yeah, so I work in the dental field. So we have dental offices that are through Kaiser Permanente. And because we were so limited on supplies and how to serve our communities and all of our patients and our workers and keep them in place, we shut down. We have 21 dental clinics in the Northwest and all of them shut down so that we could help support the hospitals and clinics the best of our abilities and salvage any of our PPE equipment that we needed for the hospitals.
And so a lot of our teams were shuffled around to help keep the hospitals clean with our EVS workers, our housekeeping, or to go into food and nutrition and help get food delivered to our patients. So it was a huge change in what they were used to. It was scary for them. We had folks who had to stay in hotels and wouldn’t go home because they were working in the hospital and they had never been exposed in that kind of an environment because they were coming from a dental clinic.
And so there was just so much change, so much of a scary world that they were coming from myself coming from. We were already experience short staffing prior to Covid, and as we went through Covid, it just got worse and worse. And then when we were kind of pulled out of that emergency situation, then we thought, okay, we’re going to have our healthcare workers come back. Our clinics were going to open up full capacity and whatnot. That didn’t happen in the sense of our staffing. We had our patients coming full force, but we didn’t have the staff to support the patient needs.
So that is something that they were still experiencing post Covid. And so I know on a personal level, I have a child who was diagnosed with a life-threatening complication where he chokes when he eats things or drinks things. And we got that diagnosed probably, I want to say maybe the beginning of this year, after months and months of the prior time trying to meet with doctors and doing a lot of Zoom meetings instead of in-person because of the pandemic, because of the lack of staff availability.
And the specialty told us this is a very serious condition that needs to be taken care of. We need to get him scheduled for surgery so that he has a long life ahead of him. And knowing that it was a priority, they didn’t have staffing to support the surgery. So they told us we had to wait six to nine months. And mind you, during this process, my son’s, at the time, he just turned 13, but he was 12 and he was getting infections all the time, on antibiotics, on steroids, all things that can be long-term affecting him.
And so that was even after Covid. He still was waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting. And luckily, we recently just barely about a month and a half ago I want to say, that he finally got scheduled to actually be seen, but he had already been seen by multiple specialists. And it just goes to say how short-staffing we are, and I’m a worker. And so I see that firsthand as a worker how short-staffed we are with our patients. Like I said, I’m in dental, so sometimes we have to tell our patients, “Yeah, you have to get this cavity filled, but we don’t have schedules until another six months from now.” So then now that cavity turned into a root canal or possibility of losing that tooth.
So I’m seeing that as a worker, but then I’m also seeing it as the patient, as the mother of my son going through all of this short-staffing as well. So as Meg had mentioned, we were all deemed heroes, but when it came down to it, once we were all out of this, we were just looked at as, okay, show up, show up, show up. We’re going to keep asking you to put in more work, put in, do more. Here’s more, so-and-so didn’t show up today. So now you need to take on that load and take on that load. And the patients keep coming because our community still needs to be served.
And so our ask always has been patient care first because as Kaiser Permanente employees, we are also the patients. Our families are also the patients. So we are being affected as employees and as patients themselves.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I know this is going to be an important point when we talk about the contract fight, so we’re going to return to that in one second. And I will try to spare listeners my usual rant, but you guys have heard me talk to folks about this crisis of deliberate understaffing and how it is a scourge, a profit-maximizing, worker-squeezing scourge that is affecting industries across the board. It is what railroad workers were telling us all last year that there’re greedy wall Street-led companies that are making more billions than they ever have, and shareholders are getting more payouts, bigger payouts than they’ve ever gotten. At the same time that they’re cutting their staff, they’re cutting corners, they’re cutting their operating costs every single year and piling more work onto fewer workers. Workers have less time to do the necessary track and card maintenance. They’re exhausted.
And then you get things like East Palestine, Ohio or you get things like the “shoplifting” like spree that we’ve been seeing across the country. If you guys watched our live stream at the Real News Network recently, where I spoke to Macy’s workers who went on strike in the Pacific Northwest, they had a pretty crucial point to make, which is we are being understaffed in these stores, and so we are being made a target for shoplifters because we’re not properly staffed, we don’t get proper security. And so we’re like sitting ducks Dollar stores are like that. Chipotle stores are like that. Every customer has walked into somewhere in the past year and notice, wow, this place seems really understaffed and these workers seem really stressed out. Then when you look around and you see that everyone is feeling that way, you got to start to ask yourself, where is this coming from? Is it the “No one wants to work crap,” or is there something else going on here?
And so again, I want to talk about how that came to a head in the contract fight itself and how y’all fought to get those safer staffing levels and why that was so important? I did just want to make one comment, just because I don’t know if it’s something that y’all are comfortable saying out loud, but it’s just something I wanted to share with listeners because it’s something I’ve heard talking to multiple healthcare workers over the past few years, is just also the existential weight of everything y’all have been through. To be the front line of defense amidst a global health crisis when misinformation, disinformation and political polarization enter the conversation. Like getting vilified, getting yelled at, just getting caught in the crosshairs of all the crap that we experienced over Covid-19.
But also just seeing just all that death, all that pain up front and seeing the effects of bad policy decisions, people not taking precautions. All that human misery and pain ended up in the hospitals and healthcare workers are the ones dealing with that. That takes a toll. And then you add on all the stuff that we’re already talking about with being underpaid, understaffed. This is why we call it a crisis.
So I just wanted to acknowledge that and ask folks out there that if you know healthcare workers, tell them you love them. Tell them thank you. Give them some support because they desperately need it and deserve it. Now I’m going to shut up and I want to toss it back to y’all and ask, now walk me through the contract fight itself, because this was a pretty heavyweight battle. So picking up from the last question about Covid to now, how did this all come to a head in the contract fight? What were the major issues y’all were fighting for and just, yeah, give our listeners a sense of what that fight entailed and what it was like for you to be in the midst of it.
Meg Niemi:
Well, I think the Kaiser contract campaign and effort is really a story of being stronger together as union members. And hearing you Maximilian, talk about that. Absolutely, a huge part of this is the passion our members have for their work and coming to the table, like Audrey was talking about, we’re not only Kaiser employees, we’re Kaiser patients and we want to make patient care better.
And our members saw people die. They had friends die. They held the hands of people whose family members couldn’t come in and be with them. You’re right, they had to tell people, “No, you can’t come into the hospital with your loved one. You have to leave them here.” And the impact of the short staffing that started way before the pandemic was a major issue that people were absolutely fired up about trying to address that.
And I think one thing I would just encourage any folks listening to this, is it really is different to have a union and have that ability to bargain collectively with your co-workers about those kinds of working conditions rather than just sit in that terrible situation with no tools to be able to do anything about it.
And the Kaiser Coalition is we’re 85,000 healthcare workers united across Kaiser. You mentioned the states earlier, but-
Meg Niemi:
… across Kaiser, you mentioned the states earlier, but California, Oregon, Washington, the Mid-Atlantic states, and what we were able to bring to the table with that kind of unity and that kind of power is really different than any one of these bargaining units bargaining alone. And top issues were this was about a staffing crisis, and that is how our members have felt it and experienced it, and it was the number one issue we wanted to address in bargaining. And we knew underlying that staffing crisis was a number of issues. One of those issues was the ability to recruit high-quality healthcare workers to train people into the right jobs that are needed because there are literally hundreds of types of skills that are needed to provide care in a healthcare setting and also pay and benefits were a huge part of this to be able to say that healthcare is a place that people felt was worth working in and staying in. And so those were underlying major issues that we wanted to address in this set of negotiations.
Audrey Cardenas:
Yes, I would just add, as Meg mentioned, I mentioned it earlier too, we had a staffing issue prior to COVID, and it only got worse. And one thing that we learned during COVID as workers is that Kaiser staffed us to their best abilities, and we lost coworkers, whether it had been due to COVID or because they just left the healthcare system altogether, but we still kept running. And so when we came back post-COVID, those positions that were left empty never got filled because us workers were still doing the work.
So then when we came to the bargaining, Kaiser Permanente management kept telling us, “You’re overpaid, you’re overpaid, you’re overpaid, and your staffing is just fine. Your staffing levels are fine.” And we would give examples over and over and over of issues that would come up because we didn’t have staff, our patients not being able to be in the clinics or getting their appointments in a timely manner because there was no availability. That’s heartbreaking.
I work, like I mentioned, in our benefits and insurance, and I would work very closely with our elderly community that have senior advantage plans and they have limited income, they have a very specific income, and they’re utilizing their benefits to be seen and can’t because we don’t have the staff to provide them the care that they need, or they are coming in and they have to come back because they don’t have that appointment to complete everything that’s needed in that timeframe. So that was very heartbreaking to see and explain to them, “I’m very sorry, we don’t have availability for you right now,” and them not understanding because we’re open and we’re running. And so that was very hard.
And then when you look at it in the sense of seeing our co-workers, all they want to do is provide, they want to provide the care that our patients deserve. This is why they’re in this industry. They’re healthcare workers. They care about our patients, they care about the community and not being able to provide that because they don’t have the staff to support them. And then as Meg mentioned, there’s lots of underlying issues that help support the staff, but we do know that pay is a big one. We can’t recruit folks if we’re underpaying them and we have someone next door that’s willing to pay them much more. We want the best of the best so that we can provide the best of the best to our communities and our patients. So that’s been our number one struggle is getting our staffing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, so I got to ask, so you’re at the bargaining table, management’s saying, “Ah, you’re overpaid, and your staffing is just fine.” Then bam, how about three days of the biggest healthcare workers strike in US history? What was it like to be part of that, and how did their tune change after that?
Meg Niemi:
I mean, the energy of the three-day strike was incredible. I had the opportunity, I was outside of Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center at the beginning, at 6 A.M. was when our members said that they were going to walk out, and I’m literally in tears to talk about this, but there was members of ours there with their kids, with their strollers, with their family members showed up, making sure that everybody got to walk out of the hospital and join them and be on that picket line and that action line. And most of our Kaiser members have never been on a strike or taken an action like this. And we literally couldn’t even get a picket line up and running because there was so many hundreds and hundreds of people that came out and stood out there.
And I think that, one of the things I was really struck by was the participation in the strike. Almost everybody went on strike, almost everybody came out on the picket line, and that surprised management. They didn’t believe what we were telling them, which was that people were not okay with what Kaiser was offering. It wasn’t enough. It didn’t meet the moment of what people had done. And so people really showed them with their feet by walking that line and coming out there.
But what was amazing was the joy and the passion and the community, that Kaiser workers care so much about each other, they care about their community, the honking, the doctors, the nurses who weren’t on strike with us that were bringing out food and showing that care and concern. And I said to myself, if this company can figure out how to tap into the passion of this set of healthcare workers, they really can deliver the highest quality care, but they’ve really got to listen to their workers. And while we were literally on the strike line management started to bargain with themselves. They started to put out wage offers that were higher than they had offered any of us at the official bargaining table, just thinking that maybe people would come back to work and no one did until the strike was officially over. But after that, they said… Things moved swiftly after our three day strike.
Audrey Cardenas:
I would say that it was such a beautiful moment to be a part of as a worker and as part of our community, as a union worker. I mean, it was absolutely beautiful. Obviously, going on strike is never the first ideal thing we want to do, but it came to that point and to show the support that we had, not only from our workers, but from our communities, it was absolutely beautiful. And it opened the eyes, I believe, to Kaiser management that we are important and we aren’t just making things up to get more or to complain. We deserved more and our community deserved more, and now we’re able to provide them what they deserve and we’re able to get what we deserve as workers. And just, it really truly is a historical moment.
I’ve worked with Kaiser for 10 years, and I know that in the Northwest, we haven’t been on strike since ’97. And as Meg mentioned, many of our workers, this was the first time we’ve had quite a bit, I want to say over 1,000 new employees alone in this past maybe what two years I believe it is. And to see even them being out there and supporting this, not really knowing fully what they’re doing, but saying, “What can I do? How can I support?” Asking those questions, getting involved, just, I can’t even express how beautiful that was. If we had to do it again, I would do it all over again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, baby. Well, and I want to close out by asking about that, because it was frustrating that such a momentous strike and a contract fight admittedly did not get the type of coverage that say the UAW got during the autoworker strike, the Teamsters in the lead up to the UPS strike. But it’s all happening. Y’all were fighting this fight amidst this sort of sea change that we’re trying to cover every week here on the show. Because not only were we interviewing UPS teamsters and autoworkers throughout those strikes, but we’re talking to you guys. I mentioned the Macy’s workers who went on strike, Starbucks workers who are still fighting to get that first contract. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers have been on strike for over a year. We had the Hollywood Writers and Actors strike this summer while y’all were preparing to go on the largest US health care worker strike in our history, tens of thousands of hotel workers in Las Vegas were prepared to shut down the Vegas Strip fighting for their own contract.
So something’s happening here, and it’s something that feels like a broader working class sentiment. That like, “Hey, we are the ones who kept the world going, not only during COVID, but actually for all time,” it feels like people are waking up to that. I think that’s one silver lining to the horror of COVID was, yeah, the bosses were forced to admit how much they need us, society was forced to acknowledge how much we keep things running and not the people in the boardrooms who got to ride it all out in their second or third home, but I digress. The point being is that something’s happening here and y’all are a critical part of it.
So I wanted to ask how you see this struggle in the larger sweep of worker unrest and worker fight back that we’re seeing in this country. So that’s a more general question, but then I guess on the more specific side, what is this new contract going to mean for you all and your co-workers and for your patients moving forward? I guess, just any final words you wanted to share about what you won, why it’s important, and what it’s going to mean for the industry and for Kaiser workers moving forward.
Meg Niemi:
It was really incredible to be on strike with…
Maximillian Alvarez:
… moving forward.
Meg Niemi:
It was really incredible to be on strike with 75,000 healthcare workers, as you said, the largest healthcare workers strike in the country, and to see people who literally had started days before the strike a new job and then came out and joined the picket line. I’m really inspired by young people and folks that are coming into the workforce who are saying, “Nope, we’re not going to put up with these kinds of conditions and we’re willing to take direct action.” I think it’s been a huge part of when we’ve made strides forward as a working class in this country. I think it is part of people are just squeezed by corporate greed in this country. No matter how hard they’re working, it’s hard to get by. With the high cost of gas, groceries, rent, or mortgages, it is really difficult. And I think being part of a union and part of the labor movement is a key way that we can upend some of that corporate greed and workers get their fair share.
In this example with Kaiser members, what we were able to accomplish with those 85,000 members total together was, we did make huge progress and we got Kaiser management to say yes to a lot of things they had said no to for a really long time. Wouldn’t have happened without the strike. Some of those things include wage increases that are bigger than we’ve ever won across the board. Wage increases for healthcare workers, we think that’s critical to retaining staff. We got big investments in education and training for current employees to be able to move up the career lattices in the healthcare field, as well as recruit friends and family to come into the healthcare industry.
Kaiser was trying to subcontract out to non-union hundreds and thousands of jobs, and we got a commitment that they will not subcontract out those jobs and to that job security. Those were critical things that we advanced. And I hope, Audrey, when you talk as well about how you experienced the strike, but also talking about some of the work you did because we’ve seen a lot of work move remote during the pandemic, but the job security for remote workers is really not the same. And Audrey really played a key role in helping advance some of that, so I hope she’ll share about it.
Audrey Cardenas:
Thank you, Meg. So yes, I did work on getting us a work from home agreement. What that really means is that there’s a little bit more security for folks who are working from home. We have folks who’ve been doing it for five plus years. They’ve made their life around working from home. So in the event that someone was to be called back, we have some security around that. They can go to school and take some extra classes so that they can apply to another position that would still keep them working from home versus maybe having to move closer to a facility. So that was a big win. And then we were able to get some reimbursements for internet use and phone usage that we know that has increased, especially since the work from home. A lot of schooling is now remote. So those companies have raised their prices, which we’re working families, we’re not making millions of dollars to where internet is a minimal thing. It could be a big deal for some of our families. So we’re able to get some reimbursement increases on that.
You mentioned what is this doing for some of these families, some of our workers or all of our workers that are impacted by this contract? One thing that stands out for me is, when we were doing our ratification vote, we had this amazing tool that kind of gave us an estimate of what someone’s wage increase would look like, whether it had been the minimum wage increase or any kind of differential that they may qualify for. One lady was absolutely in tears. She was EVS worker, so she’s one who keeps our hospitals running. She’s keeping everything clean. She said, “I can retire now.” She was locked into some benefits that she … I want to say she was in her late 70s and she’s working well over full-time, 40 hours, picking up extra hours to make ends meet, rarely seeing her family because she was working so much. The facilities are 24-hour clinics, so she was picking up whatever she could.
We knew that that particular classification was on the lower pay scale, and they worked very, very hard in what they do. They’re really a key component that keeps our clinics, hospitals, all of our facilities ready to go to bring in our patients, and they were well underpaid. So to see that joy on her face, that she was going to be able to maybe cut back some of her hours to be with her family and now look forward to retiring instead of stressing out saying, “I can’t retire yet because I still can’t make ends meet,” that was what it was about.
All the fight that we put in. I know that I was part of the bargaining team, so I was traveling back and forth and going to the table, national and regionally, but that’s what it was about. Not myself, but for all of our workers that deserve so much more and have so much key play in how our hospitals and clinics run, to see them actually be noticed and actually get what they deserve, to be able to spend time with their family and not have to be picking up all these additional hours or extra jobs on the side outside of Kaiser Permanente.
(singing)
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
2023 was marked by symbiosis between the labor and climate movements. Workers across industries and geographies loudly declared that a world in which their safety and well-being are disregarded is even more dangerous to them and to others in a time of energy transition and climate crisis. After decades of hesitancy, several major unions recognized an urgent need to organize those who will do the hard work of decarbonizing the nation’s economy. It doesn’t hurt that public sympathy, and policy, has grown friendlier toward them. As a result, calls for a just transition rattled union halls and corporate offices as organized labor enjoyed one of its most active years in recent memory and environmental organizations, long uncertain about where unions stood, found new allies.
“The choices and solutions are not really gonna work unless labor is involved with them,” said Dana Kuhnline, director of Reimagine Appalachia. It works with union leaders and environmental grassroots groups to bring good jobs to coalfield communities that need them. “I think that’s a lesson climate activists really have to take to heart.”
The reality of a warming world was a central concern for UPS, Amazon, and airport workers who demanded, and in many cases won, concessions protecting them from extreme heat. But the biggest gains were made by the 150,000 members of the reinvigorated United Auto Workers, or UAW, who made a just transition a key demand in one of the most high-profile strikes of the year. Though the union’s primary demands concerned wages and sick days, no small amount of negotiating focused on the looming transition to electric vehicles. Workers wanted to ensure the factories that will make that happen for Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis will be union shops, with wages and benefits equal to those provided at traditional auto factories. Forty years of internal organizing brought UAW to a place where it was willing and able to address energy transition, whereas in previous years, its leaders had gotten fidgety at the idea.
Autoworkers were right to be concerned. Many of the sectors making decarbonization happen are not unionized (this is particularly true of Asian and European automakers with factories in the United States). Salaries also run lower on average than those paid by fossil fuel industries, where good pay and benefits were hard won, often with union contracts written in the blood of workers from more contentious times. Yet many workers in those fields remain hesitant about the coming changes — California oil workers, for example, have been far less supportive of policies supporting the energy transition. That’s why many labor experts considered it a big deal when UAW overwhelmingly approved a contract that will deliver higher wages, assure its members a role in the EV transition, and possibly lead toward greater unionization of the auto sector.
“The UAW strike showed the vision a lot of people have been looking for,” said J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “The way you have power is through money or through people. We’ll never have as much money as the fossil fuel industry, so we need people.”
It’s also given a public face to work that’s happened all year in meetings and negotiations between unions, climate activists, public officials, and employers. In many of the nation’s fossil fuel communities, clean energy projects — often buoyed by federal incentives that require employing union workers — have embraced organized labor. In West Virginia, for example, the United Mine Workers and United Steelworkers signed contracts with battery factories. Solar Holler, which will install photovoltaic panels throughout the state, is working with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers to create apprenticeship pathways and a measure of long-term job stability.
Labor leaders and climate organizations are jumping at the possibility that a skilled workforce with a strong training pipeline could bring jobs to struggling fossil fuel communities. Union involvement, they said, will ensure that those jobs remain local, as opposed to going to an out-of-state contractor, and offer competitive wages.
“Our main concern is local hire, and getting the people that have been affected by this economic transition from coal,” said Beau Hawk, who works for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters with an organization called Labor at the Table. It strives to represent labor interests and ensure funding from the Inflation Reduction Act and bipartisan infrastructure law is spent in the communities where it’s most needed. He said the organization hopes to build a solid apprenticeship infrastructure and ensure long-term job security that will buoy communities in which the instability of the fossil fuel industry has left wide gaps.
Environmental organizations became vocally supportive of labor this year, with Sierra Club, Greenpeace, and others supporting the UAW’s calls for a just EV transition and vaunting union contracts in the energy transition space as they advocated for climate policy.
“We need both movements to create pressure and we need legislative changes to really capitalize on that,” Cha said.
As the excitement of the year winds down, Cha says, the only way to codify labor’s victories is to increase funding to the National Labor Relations Board and integrate labor standards into the green energy buildout. While the IRA heavily encourages using unionized labor for federally funded infrastructure projects, incentives are not the same as mandates. Michigan has taken some steps in this direction, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer signing a policy package that created an energy transition office and guaranteed union jobs for clean energy workers.
Without such action, Cha said, many trade unions — representing many of the carpenters, welders, electricians, and other laborers who are sorely needed in the race to build the infrastructure of the energy transition — may not trust the renewables industry to provide for them.
Meanwhile, United Auto Workers is setting its organizing sights on 13 automakers that have so far been resistant to union campaigns. Even as the UAW announced its win last month, Toyota factories in Kentucky and Alabama had already raised their base wage to $28 per hour. A nascent union drive has started at Tesla, a notorious union-buster. Hyundai, which operates electric vehicle battery plants in the South, has said it will raise factory pay beginning next year. Solar workers in New Jersey, fed up with unstable, seasonal labor and low pay, asked the UAW for help. “These are the jobs of the future,” the effort’s leaders wrote in an op-ed. They vote on their union this week.
On Monday, UAW president Shawn Fain visited Chattanooga, Tennessee, to support a renewed campaign at Volkswagen, where two failed unionization attempts cast doubt on labor’s chances with foreign automakers in the South. Thirty percent of VW employees have signed on, a move reportedly met with intimidation by the company, and Fain delivered a letter to management indicating it is on notice for illegal union-busting. That’s in line with the tough and ambitious tone the UAW has taken this year.
“We may be foul-mouthed, but we’re strategic,” Fain said in October. “We may get fired up, but we’re disciplined. And we may get rowdy, but we’re organized.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In 2023, organized labor became core to the climate movement on Dec 20, 2023.
This post was originally published on Grist.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Dec 18, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
Major contract fights in 2023 at UPS, the Big 3 automakers, and Hollywood studios set the tone for next year’s contract campaigns. Impressive gains and increased transparency got members of other unions asking, “Why can’t my union be like that?”
The bar will be high. Many of the contracts expiring next year date from before the pandemic, and before inflation started taking a bite out of paychecks. Some unions took concessions, like creating lower wage and benefit tiers, that members are ready to fight to undo this time around.
Two contracts covering 25,000 AT&T wireline workers expire in 2024. One, covering 9,000 Communications Workers (CWA) members in California and Nevada, is up April 6; the other, covering 16,000 workers in nine Southeastern states from Florida to Kentucky, expires August 3. The union hopes to improve conditions for the second-tier workforce of installation technicians who earn lower wages and have worse work rules, such as mandatory weekend overtime.
AT&T workers in the Southeast struck for five days in 2019, their first time since a national strike in 1983. “When we bargained it, it was actually a good contract,” said Chris Walterson, president of CWA Local 3122 in Miami. But with inflation ballooning in the meantime, “we actually lost money because we did a five-year deal.” He said members will be looking to make up for what they lost in wages, and fighting AT&T’s ongoing efforts to make workers pay more health insurance costs.
A separate contract expires February 23 for 7,000 CWA members at AT&T Mobility (wireless) in the Southwest.
The contract covering 30,000 Boeing Machinists (IAM) in Washington state expires September 12. Members are still fuming over the mid-contract concessions that Boeing demanded—and got—a decade ago by abruptly threatening to move production of its new plane, the 777X, elsewhere. In response, the IAM’s national leadership reopened bargaining—with no ability to strike—and agreed to give up the pension and allow a big shift in health care costs from the company to the workers.
Members voted that deal down the first time, but a revised version squeaked by with 51 percent on January 3, 2014, locking in the concessions for 10 years. (Many veteran union members were on holiday break and missed the vote.)
Furious members passed an amendment to the IAM constitution in 2016 requiring that the union conduct a vote of the local membership before engaging in any more mid-contract talks.
This time around, workers hope the tight labor market gives them the upper hand. The company is still recovering from the 737 MAX scandal when faulty design caused two deadly crashes. “Boeing’s not really in any position right now to play games with us,” said airframe mechanic and steward Patric Boone. “The 777X is so far behind, and they’ve got all these promises to deliver in 2024.”
One consultant told the Seattle Times the union could be seeking 40 percent wage increases over four years, “the market rate” in aviation following big wage increases for American, Delta, and United pilots. Machinists at Spirit Aerosystems, a key Boeing supplier in Wichita, Kansas, struck for six days in June and won a 31.5 percent increase over four years plus cost-of-living adjustments.
Many members want to restore the pension and end weekend mandatory overtime. The union is also seeking a commitment from Boeing to build its next jet locally.
Critically, the union will finally have the ability to strike again. District 751 even set up a special payroll deduction in 2019—five years before expiration—encouraging members to set aside $50 per paycheck in individual strike funds.
The union will hold a “prepare to strike” rally and strike authorization vote July 17 at the Seattle Mariners’ stadium.
(For a thorough overview, see the article by Dominic Gates in the Seattle Times, As Boeing Machinists contract talks near, union savors new labor power.”)
American Airlines flight attendants are still negotiating; their contract expired in 2019. The 26,000 members of the Association of Professional Flight Attendants have seen no raises since before the pandemic. At the end of August they voted to strike by 99.47 percent.
Meanwhile 19,000 Southwest flight attendants, represented by Transport Workers (TWU) Local 556, voted down a December contract offer that included an immediate 20 percent wage increase. They’ve been negotiating for five years.
“Flight attendants are letting managements know that they are not going to take what management could have gotten away with in the past,” said APFA President Julie Hedrick. The union is demanding a 33 percent raise; American has offered 11.
United and Alaska flight attendants, members of the Association of Flight Attendants (CWA), are also in negotiations.
The master contract covering 7,000 Auto Workers members at Daimler Truck North America expires April 26.
The contract includes three North Carolina Freightliner plants where workers assemble and make parts for semis and medium-duty trucks. It also covers the largest school bus manufacturing site in North America: 1,700 workers at Thomas Built Buses in High Point, North Carolina.
North Carolina is in the midst of an industrial boom, with construction underway on Toyota’s flagship North American electric vehicle battery plant; an EV assembly and battery plant owned by Vietnamese carmaker VinFast that’s set to employ 7,000; a Boom Supersonic jet factory in Greensboro; and more.
School districts are ramping up their use of electric buses (an increasing focus of Thomas), encouraged by subsidies in the infrastructure bill. “The question for us is, what is the company going to do to retain labor and make it worthwhile for us to stay?” said one UAW member at Thomas.
Production workers there start between $18 and $21 an hour, with top pay $24-$27 ($29 for skilled trades). The Freightliner scale is slightly higher.
For Freightliner truck workers, another big issue is job security. Daimler Truck has two big assembly plants in Mexico, and has wrenched past concessions by threatening to move more work there. The UAW won the right to strike over plant closures at the Big 3 and over investment commitments at General Motors and Stellantis; could the union win similar or better language at Daimler Truck?
The two main pattern-setting contracts covering 60,000 film and television crew workers expire on July 31.
Members of the Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) came close to striking in October 2021 over dangerously long hours and low pay. At the time, a majority voted against the union’s largest contract, the Hollywood Basic Agreement, but it passed thanks to an electoral-college-style ratification procedure.
Members frustrated with that outcome recently launched the Caucus of Rank-and-File Entertainment Workers (CREW), pushing for a stronger contract fight and one-member-one-vote union elections.
The writers and actors strikes put IATSE members out of work for four months in 2023, which could make it hard to strike—though the studios will also want to avoid another stoppage, giving the union leverage.
The contract covering thousands of TV and film musicians (AFM) expires in May.
The six-year master contract between the International Longshoremen’s Association and the alliance of ocean carriers and terminal operators (USMX), covering 17,000 East and Gulf Coast dockworkers, expires on September 30.
President Harold Daggett—one of the highest-paid union leaders in the U.S., pulling in $800,000 as head of the ILA and “president emeritus” of Local 1804-1—has vowed not to extend the contract past that date. He told members to prepare for a potential coastwide strike for big wage increases and to fend off automation. He’s also telling members they need to work faster to thwart automation, telling a meeting of local officers in November, “I need the bosses of this union to be bosses and stress to your locals that if you want a good contract, you have to get 32 moves per hour.” That’s the level Daggett said the union has promised USMX.
There has not been a strike on the East and Gulf coasts since 1977. Last year, West Coast longshore workers (ILWU) won 30 percent over six years plus a big bonus package. The ILA’s wage scale and pension payments are much lower than their West Coast counterparts’.
Two big contracts are up in 2024: the Postal Workers (APWU) agreement covering 220,000 postal clerks, maintenance workers, drivers, and retirees expires September 20, and the contract covering 100,000 Rural Letter Carriers (NRLCA) expires May 20.
New tech is an issue. APWU has won important job protections such as a no-layoff guarantee for anyone with six years’ seniority—they also cannot be forced to move more than 50 miles if their job is cut. But the Postal Service is pushing consolidation and automation, which could threaten jobs, even if it’s by attrition. “We’re facing a new generation of high-speed, highly capable parcel-sorting machines,” said Seattle APWU member David Yao.
For the rural letter carriers, a big issue is a new route evaluation system that cut pay for many. Rural carriers are salaried, not hourly, with their pay based on how long a route is supposed to take—often a bewildering underestimate. “It feels like you need a degree in engineering to figure out the numbers—it’s all these algorithms,” said Dave Staiger in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The hours have gotten longer as the job leans towards more packages, fewer letters.
The city Letter Carriers union (NALC) is still in negotiations, and the contract may be headed for arbitration. Acute understaffing and the low-paid entry-level tier are big issues.
Postal strikes are illegal, though it took 200,000 workers breaking that law in 1970 to win the right to collective bargaining.
A strike is “on the table more so than in the past” for 28,000 workers at Michigan grocery chain Meijer, says UFCW Local 951 President John Cakmakci. Their current deal expires February 24. Workers want wage increases, additional paid time off, and an affordable medical plan.
“I’ve been doing this as a full-time representative for almost 40 years,” Cakmakci told Crain’s. “It’s never been quite this optimistic for labor.”
The Teamsters’ five-year contract with Budweiser brewer Anheuser-Busch expires February 29. In negotiations so far, the union has already notched two big wins: forcing the company to restore retiree health benefits and end a two-tier health insurance system imposed during the last round of bargaining. The contract covers 5,000 Teamsters at 12 breweries.
Two big teachers union contracts expire next year: Chicago (25,000 members) on June 30 and Philadelphia (13,000) on August 31. The Caucus of Working Educators, a reform group within the Philly union, is demanding paid parental leave and an end to punishing workers for using their earned sick time.
The contract covering 700 janitors who clean Target, Best Buy, and other big stores in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area expires February 28. Workers are pushing for eight paid holidays (they currently get none) and more vacation time.
The janitors’ union, Service Employees Local 26, has lined up its other contracts to expire early next year as well, including ones covering 1,000 airport workers, 4,000 commercial office janitors, and 2,500 security guards. Several other Twin Cities locals are also working under expired deals or have agreements that will expire by the spring; among them are teachers and support staff in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools and Metro Transit bus drivers.
In addition to all the expiring collective bargaining agreements, workers who have organized unions at companies including Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, and Chipotle continue their fights for a first contract in the face of ongoing stalling and lawbreaking by their employers.
Have a contract expiring in 2024 (or 2025) you want to tell us about? Write to dan@labornotes.org.
The article has been updated to more accurately describe the wage scale at Freightliner.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone, when the kings and princes are home, when the shepherds are back with their flocks, the work of Christmas begins: to find the lost, to heal the broken, to feed the hungry, to release the prisoner, to rebuild the nations, to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.
— Howard Thurman, theologian and civil rights activist
The Christmas story of a baby born in a manger is a familiar one.
The Roman Empire, a police state in its own right, had ordered that a census be conducted. Joseph and his pregnant wife Mary traveled to the little town of Bethlehem so that they could be counted. There being no room for the couple at any of the inns, they stayed in a stable (a barn), where Mary gave birth to a baby boy, Jesus. Warned that the government planned to kill the baby, Jesus’ family fled with him to Egypt until it was safe to return to their native land.
Yet what if Jesus had been born 2,000 years later?
What if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, Jesus had been born at this moment in time? What kind of reception would Jesus and his family be given? Would we recognize the Christ child’s humanity, let alone his divinity? Would we treat him any differently than he was treated by the Roman Empire? If his family were forced to flee violence in their native country and sought refuge and asylum within our borders, what sanctuary would we offer them?
A singular number of churches across the country have asked those very questions in recent years, and their conclusions were depicted with unnerving accuracy by nativity scenes in which Jesus and his family are separated, segregated and caged in individual chain-link pens, topped by barbed wire fencing.
Those nativity scenes were a pointed attempt to remind the modern world that the narrative about the birth of Jesus is one that speaks on multiple fronts to a world that has allowed the life, teachings and crucifixion of Jesus to be drowned out by partisan politics, secularism, materialism and war, all driven by a manipulative shadow government called the Deep State.
The modern-day church has largely shied away from applying Jesus’ teachings to modern problems such as war, poverty, immigration, etc., but thankfully there have been individuals throughout history who ask themselves and the world: what would Jesus do?
What would Jesus—the baby born in Bethlehem who grew into an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day (namely, the Roman Empire) but spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire—do about the injustices of our modern age?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked himself what Jesus would have done about the horrors perpetrated by Hitler and his assassins. The answer: Bonhoeffer was executed by Hitler for attempting to undermine the tyranny at the heart of Nazi Germany.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn asked himself what Jesus would have done about the soul-destroying gulags and labor camps of the Soviet Union. The answer: Solzhenitsyn found his voice and used it to speak out about government oppression and brutality.
Martin Luther King Jr. asked himself what Jesus would have done about America’s warmongering. The answer: declaring “my conscience leaves me no other choice,” King risked widespread condemnation as well as his life when he publicly opposed the Vietnam War on moral and economic grounds.
Even now, despite the popularity of the phrase “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) in Christian circles, there remains a disconnect in the modern church between the teachings of Christ and the suffering of what Jesus in Matthew 25 refers to as the “least of these.”
Yet this is not a theological gray area: Jesus was unequivocal about his views on many things, not the least of which was charity, compassion, war, tyranny and love.
After all, Jesus—the revered preacher, teacher, radical and prophet—was born into a police state not unlike the growing menace of the American police state. When he grew up, he had powerful, profound things to say, things that would change how we view people, alter government policies and change the world. “Blessed are the merciful,” “Blessed are the peacemakers,” and “Love your enemies” are just a few examples of his most profound and revolutionary teachings.
When confronted by those in authority, Jesus did not shy away from speaking truth to power. Indeed, his teachings undermined the political and religious establishment of his day. It cost him his life. He was eventually crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be.
Can you imagine what Jesus’ life would have been like if, instead of being born into the Roman police state, he had been born and raised in the American police state?
Consider the following if you will.
Had Jesus been born in the era of the America police state, rather than traveling to Bethlehem for a census, Jesus’ parents would have been mailed a 28-page American Community Survey, a mandatory government questionnaire documenting their habits, household inhabitants, work schedule, how many toilets are in your home, etc. The penalty for not responding to this invasive survey can go as high as $5,000.
Instead of being born in a manger, Jesus might have been born at home. Rather than wise men and shepherds bringing gifts, however, the baby’s parents might have been forced to ward off visits from state social workers intent on prosecuting them for the home birth. One couple in Washington had all three of their children removed after social services objected to the two youngest being birthed in an unassisted home delivery.
Had Jesus been born in a hospital, his blood and DNA would have been taken without his parents’ knowledge or consent and entered into a government biobank. While most states require newborn screening, a growing number are holding onto that genetic material long-term for research, analysis and purposes yet to be disclosed.
Then again, had Jesus’ parents been undocumented immigrants, they and the newborn baby might have been shuffled to a profit-driven, private prison for illegals where they first would have been separated from each other, the children detained in make-shift cages, and the parents eventually turned into cheap, forced laborers for corporations such as Starbucks, Microsoft, Walmart, and Victoria’s Secret. There’s quite a lot of money to be made from imprisoning immigrants, especially when taxpayers are footing the bill.
From the time he was old enough to attend school, Jesus would have been drilled in lessons of compliance and obedience to government authorities, while learning little about his own rights. Had he been daring enough to speak out against injustice while still in school, he might have found himself tasered or beaten by a school resource officer, or at the very least suspended under a school zero tolerance policy that punishes minor infractions as harshly as more serious offenses.
Had Jesus disappeared for a few hours let alone days as a 12-year-old, his parents would have been handcuffed, arrested and jailed for parental negligence. Parents across the country have been arrested for far less “offenses” such as allowing their children to walk to the park unaccompanied and play in their front yard alone.
Rather than disappearing from the history books from his early teenaged years to adulthood, Jesus’ movements and personal data—including his biometrics—would have been documented, tracked, monitored and filed by governmental agencies and corporations such as Google and Microsoft. Incredibly, 95 percent of school districts share their student records with outside companies that are contracted to manage data, which they then use to market products to us.
From the moment Jesus made contact with an “extremist” such as John the Baptist, he would have been flagged for surveillance because of his association with a prominent activist, peaceful or otherwise. Since 9/11, the FBI has actively carried out surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations on a broad range of activist groups, from animal rights groups to poverty relief, anti-war groups and other such “extremist” organizations.
Jesus’ anti-government views would certainly have resulted in him being labeled a domestic extremist. Law enforcement agencies are being trained to recognize signs of anti-government extremism during interactions with potential extremists who share a “belief in the approaching collapse of government and the economy.”
While traveling from community to community, Jesus might have been reported to government officials as “suspicious” under the Department of Homeland Security’s “See Something, Say Something” programs. Many states, including New York, are providing individuals with phone apps that allow them to take photos of suspicious activity and report them to their state Intelligence Center, where they are reviewed and forwarded to law-enforcement agencies.
Rather than being permitted to live as an itinerant preacher, Jesus might have found himself threatened with arrest for daring to live off the grid or sleeping outside. In fact, the number of cities that have resorted to criminalizing homelessness by enacting bans on camping, sleeping in vehicles, loitering and begging in public has doubled.
Viewed by the government as a dissident and a potential threat to its power, Jesus might have had government spies planted among his followers to monitor his activities, report on his movements, and entrap him into breaking the law. Such Judases today—called informants—often receive hefty paychecks from the government for their treachery.
Had Jesus used the internet to spread his radical message of peace and love, he might have found his blog posts infiltrated by government spies attempting to undermine his integrity, discredit him or plant incriminating information online about him. At the very least, he would have had his website hacked and his email monitored.
Had Jesus attempted to feed large crowds of people, he would have been threatened with arrest for violating various ordinances prohibiting the distribution of food without a permit. Florida officials arrested a 90-year-old man for feeding the homeless on a public beach.
Had Jesus spoken publicly about his 40 days in the desert and his conversations with the devil, he might have been labeled mentally ill and detained in a psych ward against his will for a mandatory involuntary psychiatric hold with no access to family or friends. One Virginia man was arrested, strip searched, handcuffed to a table, diagnosed as having “mental health issues,” and locked up for five days in a mental health facility against his will apparently because of his slurred speech and unsteady gait.
Without a doubt, had Jesus attempted to overturn tables in a Jewish temple and rage against the materialism of religious institutions, he would have been charged with a hate crime. More than 45 states and the federal government have hate crime laws on the books.
Had anyone reported Jesus to the police as being potentially dangerous, he might have found himself confronted—and killed—by police officers for whom any perceived act of non-compliance (a twitch, a question, a frown) can result in them shooting first and asking questions later.
Rather than having armed guards capture Jesus in a public place, government officials would have ordered that a SWAT team carry out a raid on Jesus and his followers, complete with flash-bang grenades and military equipment. There are upwards of 80,000 such SWAT team raids carried out every year, many on unsuspecting Americans who have no defense against such government invaders, even when such raids are done in error.
Instead of being detained by Roman guards, Jesus might have been made to “disappear” into a secret government detention center where he would have been interrogated, tortured and subjected to all manner of abuses. Chicago police have “disappeared” more than 7,000 people into a secret, off-the-books interrogation warehouse at Homan Square.
Charged with treason and labeled a domestic terrorist, Jesus might have been sentenced to a life-term in a private prison where he would have been forced to provide slave labor for corporations or put to death by way of the electric chair or a lethal mixture of drugs.
Indeed, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, given the nature of government then and now, it is painfully evident that whether Jesus had been born in our modern age or his own, he still would have died at the hands of a police state.
Thus, as we draw near to Christmas with its celebration of miracles and promise of salvation, we would do well to remember that what happened in that manger on that starry night in Bethlehem is only the beginning of the story. That baby born in a police state grew up to be a man who did not turn away from the evils of his age but rather spoke out against it.
The post The Deep State’s Persecution of Its Most Vulnerable Citizens first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Video game workers picketed the 2023 Game Awards in protest of sizable layoffs. Some 8,000 workers were laid off in the industry this year, despite record-breaking projected profits of $180 billion for 2023. The picket, organized by the working group Game Workers of Southern California, marks another step forward in the fight to organize workers and unionize the industry. TRNN Associate Editor Mel Buer speaks with organizers on the conditions in the gaming industry and current efforts to hold companies accountable.
Production: Mel Buer
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:
Hey, folks, welcome back to another episode of the Real News Network podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer. Before we dive into today’s episode, I wanted to take a moment to thank you, our listeners, for sticking with us as we work hard to bring you the independent journalism that you know and rely on. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we don’t put our reporting behind paywalls. Year after year, we’ve relied in part on your generous donations to keep the lights on and keep our shows running. If you love what we do and want to support us in our work, please take a moment and head on over to therealnews.com/donate. For our year’s end fundraiser, we hope to raise $150,000 so that we can keep bringing you the news coverage you trust in 2024. From now until the year’s end, every dollar you contribute will be doubled.
Mel Buer:
Pitch in 25 bucks and we receive 50. Donate 500, and we receive a staggering $1,000. If you start a monthly donation today, our generous donor will match your donation for an entire year. Your ongoing support will have multiplied impact every month. Also, if you’d like to stay up to date on the important stories that we’re covering, sign up to our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up, and follow us on your favorite social media. We have incredible things planned for the new year, so you don’t want to miss a moment.
Mel Buer:
As I’ve noted in previous episodes, 2023 has been a banner year for labor organizing in the United States. As groundbreaking organizing is splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country, over the last few years, we’ve seen a marked increase in public support for union campaigns seeking to organize previously unrepresented industries.
Mel Buer:
In the games industry, a number of union campaigns have kicked off in the last 18 months, including organizing drives at Activision Blizzard and other game studios, as well as a very welcome neutrality agreement at Microsoft, where the company has promised not to interfere in any union organizing campaigns amongst its workers. However, the situation in the games industry is pretty dire. According to recent reporting by Nicole Carpenter at Polygon, the games industry expects to rake in record profits to the tune of over $180 Billion. Yes, billion dollars. After releasing a number of blockbuster video games since the start of 2023.
Mel Buer:
All that money hasn’t translated into better working conditions for the workers, however. Over 8,000 workers have been laid off since the start of the year. It’s against this backdrop that workers have redoubled their efforts to keep the conversation going and offer resources to one another that might help them in their efforts to win union representation in their shops. On the West Coast, game workers formed a working group called Game Workers of Southern California, whose chief aim is to coordinate direct actions, share information with new and existing game workers, and shed light on the workplace abuses in the game industry.
Mel Buer:
Just last week, organizers formed a picket outside of the Video Game Awards, where they passed out leaflets about the rounds of layoffs in the industry and sought to educate attendees on the need for unions at their favorite studios. For this week’s episode, I sat down with a number of organizers from Game Workers of SoCal to discuss working conditions in the game industry, the need for organizing in tech, and the importance of white-collar unions in the wider US labor movement. Here is that interview.
Mel Buer:
So yeah, whoever wants to start, if you want to just introduce yourself, maybe say what your role is within the video game industry, and how you got into organizing with Game Workers of Southern California. Whoever wants to start.
Kelsey:
Yes, I’ll start. I’m Kelsey, I’m a game programmer, a generalist in that field, and I’ve been organizing with Game Workers of SoCal since before it was Game Workers of SoCal. It used to be Game Workers Unite, and the Los Angeles and Orange County chapters merged at one point, so we’ve been active in some capacity since more or less, what, 2018? 2017, 2018?
Stephen:
Yep, that’s right.
Kelsey:
And a couple of us has been through it from the start.
Julie:
I could go next. I’m Julie and my role in the gaming industry is usually a QA tester, but I’m trying to do UXUI, but in the meantime, I’m also working on independent projects. And I started at Game Workers of Southern California… I knew about it, but I was organizing a previous union during the time, but then during the pandemic, I had more time to connect with more people virtually, and I just wanted to know, “How do you organize virtually?” And Game Workers of Southern California has been very helpful with that, and then I just started getting really into it as I meet more people, and then I joined more pickets, I started to really feel that solidarity with everybody, so that’s why I’m still here today.
Stephen:
Yeah, let’s see. I’m Stephen, I’ve been a programmer in the game industry for about five or six years now, coming up on. I joined this org in various forms, I think early 2019, I had just gotten laid off and was very angry about it and was just looking for anybody who was doing anything about it. And this was the only place I could find where people were really talking about actual action to improve the industry instead of just paying lip service to “things will get better eventually,” which is what I kept hearing. So, within GWSC and its various forms, gosh, I think I’ve mostly done communications and public interview stuff, and then just going to lots of whatever type of direct action we have.
Roland:
Yeah, I’m Roland, I have been in the game industry for about same as Stephen, around six years I think. And I came in from the Trump era of [inaudible 00:06:25] disorganizing coming in from DSA. And yeah, I’ve been a part of Game Workers of Southern California when it was Game Workers Unite LA, and I’ve been on the steering committee of it for almost about as long, maybe for about three years of it. And yeah, this is just where I feel like the most effective work I could do is one that’s closest to my work in my own passions for creating games. It’s the closest place where I can make a tangible difference in not just my lives, but in all the lives of the people I respect. So yeah, I’ve been in the game for a while, along with all my friends here.
Mel Buer:
Great. Thanks for taking the time out of your day to sit down with us and shed some light on this industry. The one thing that I’ve noticed a lot with my audience is that, a lot of folks who listen to this podcast maybe aren’t familiar with these types of industries, particularly when it comes to the various offshoots of media and entertainment. So, it’s been really good to be able to bring folks on to talk about the working conditions in industries that maybe from the outside look like white collar industries that maybe don’t need the organizing. That’s often what I get, what I hear, when it comes to organizing in tech, or organizing any sort of media adjacent places where they say, “Well, you’re not working in a factory. Why do you need a union?”
Mel Buer:
So, I think a good place to start here, is to just help our audience understand what the working conditions look like in a general sense. What does the industry look like? Are most workers operating in a sort of independent contractor basis? Do folks attach themselves to large studios and try and organize within those studios? Or what does a typical working day look like for a general game worker? If you can boil it down as much as possible.
Stephen:
I think that all of the things you mentioned definitely apply. It’s that inconsistency that makes a lot of these actions very difficult to organize around. Our game labor activism in general has taken a shop-by-shop approach to organizing, because we can’t do basically, currently at least, what folks like SAG-AFTRA and other trade unions will do, where they organize everybody in a field. We’re starting shop-by-shop, and those lines between disciplines can get pretty fuzzy, programmer, designer, artist, that you’re not always clearly in one or the other. In some cases, because of that ambiguity, you get a lot of some of the overwork that will come from this. If you can basically do three things, then your employers can fire folks who specialize in a field, get people who maybe know a little bit of it, and suddenly you’re doing their work in addition to yours.
Mel Buer:
I guess I’ll just add there that, what that does is, they can cut labor costs if one person knows somewhat how to do three jobs instead of having three people know very well how to do one job each, right?
Stephen:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Mel Buer:
And I’m sure that contributes to this culture of, you hear about it sometimes, when I sit outside this industry, you hear about these long days or working days and days and days on end to get a product out the door. And you only ever hear about this well after the game is released that it was a God-awful nightmare to try and get it done. So, I can see that, is that one of the chief concerns is that, because of this tightening of labor, the overwork, and the expectation of working far longer hours than should be expected, I guess, is a big concern that you have that you organize around?
Julie:
I feel like every studio, for me, that I’ve worked with or I’ve talked with have different concerns. I think the biggest topic right now is also remote. Since I’m a woman myself, more women are going to talk to me about things that bother them. So, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that, sexual harassment is a huge deal when they were in office, and remote is something that really helps them feel more safe. They could turn off their cameras if they feel uncomfortable, there’s options for that. Not only that, but talking to parents as well.
Julie:
They have said of how remote has helped them balance work and life a bit easier, because on the road, some parents are driving from LA all the way to Orange County and that’s like an hour, and then they have to mix ain picking up their kids and have to organize all these different schedulings, it’s not very doable for a parent. So, another thing as remote is a very strong one, sexual harassment is very strong that I run into quite often. Crunch culture, I feel like a lot of companies have addressed a lot sometimes, so I’ve noticed that it’s something that companies have tried to fix, but they’re not completely perfect, but I will say remote work is the hottest topic at the moment.
Kelsey:
And I will add, I’m a trans woman, and something that has been a perennial problem that is just never going away is… How do I put this? It’s like the customer base has been whipped up into a frenzy of bigotry. There have been numerous articles on that throughout the years, but it’s also sometimes, not always, but sometimes it’s the other employees themselves, and bosses tend to take their side instead of whatever marginalized group is being targeted, be it by race or gender or sexuality or ability or lack of. So, that’s something that’s always a low simmer as well.
Mel Buer:
To get a better sense of the size and scope of the games industry, since we’re talking about specifically organizing in Southern California. How many shops, roughly, do you get a sense of that you’re trying to organize? How many people, what is the breakdown there?
Stephen:
Yeah, those numbers fluctuate a lot. I think we’ve seen a lot of different stats that seem pretty broad. Some of that just comes from, “Okay, what do you define as the LA or Southern California area?” But a lot of it comes from what Julie was talking about with remote work, where the company that I work at is based in LA and has 200 odd employees, but most of them do not live here, with remote work and whatnot, and that does make some of the organizing more difficult, because your in-person organizing is very straightforward.
Stephen:
You can walk up to somebody and talk to them. Remote organizing, while it has some advantages, can be really difficult to work with and you don’t have as much of that in-person comfort and friendliness with folks, you don’t have a lot of those natural or organic interactions, which is a great way to build the trust that you need to actually do very risky union work, when you’re asking people to compromise, potentially, their job security, potentially be blacklisted from the industry if their names were to be leaked. You really need to build that trust, and remote work, while it provides a lot of benefits, can also make that part pretty difficult.
Mel Buer:
Is that a pretty big concern then, blacklisting from the industry? Do you find that studios are likely, not overtly, but certainly keeping an eye on the type of union organizing, that pushback, that retaliation is…
Stephen:
Yeah, absolutely. I just personally know several people who have been fired, and while there’s not an official industry blacklist, it certainly seems like they’re having a much harder time getting hired afterwards. So, concern for that type of safety, especially with at-will employment, meaning you can be fired for any reason and then they can say that it’s any other reason. Poor job performance describes the firings of a lot of union friendly folks that I know who, for some reason, didn’t seem to have poor job performance before they were fired.
Kelsey:
Although I would say, on the other hand, there was a better Activision Blizzard King organizer, Jessica Gonzalez, who there were companies who were actually reaching out to her because of her union organizing. So, it’s not necessarily 100% you’re never going to work in this industry again risk. It’s there that some bigger companies maybe, but there are some union friendly studios out there.
Mel Buer:
They would be at least willing to notice the see change and not try and push against what is an inevitability of unionization in the industry. I think that’s great.
Roland:
Yeah, I’ve always been a little suspicious of the idea of an industry-wide blacklist. It always struck me as something of a scare tactic similar to that of a permanent record. You might run into an instance where a recruiter from Riot might be talking with a recruiter from Epic who talks with people from Blizzard, and if you have these personal connections and they might know of your activity, but I don’t think there’s an official, organized blacklist because of situations like Jess’, situations where people were hired because of their union organizing experience, that makes them a real team builder, a leadership person, that some companies find appealing.
Mel Buer:
I would imagine that there wouldn’t be an official blacklist, because any retaliation for union organizing is illegal, so having that official list would… If someone found that, that would be quite a bombshell and it would be extremely unwise, frankly stupid, on the part of any studios who would be willing to maintain that in any official capacity. That is just a very neat paper trail to some pretty serious NLRB charges. But Julie, I want to circle back around here and really dive a little bit more into the specific working conditions that you were discussing, particularly as it relates to remote work.
Mel Buer:
We’ve had some pretty intense conversations since 2020 about the utility of remote work, the ability for workers to be able to work from home, not only because it does help parents save on child care, there have been studies that show that working from home and not having to commute 45 minutes to two hours every day does a world of difference to your wallet, to your mental health, with the obvious trade off that there’s not as much community that you can build among your co-workers. I’m the only remote worker on this side of the country at the Real News, so all of my organizing as a union organizer with my shop is via Zoom, which has its benefits, but also kind of sucks sometimes, because you’re right, you can’t walk into an office to get a question answered or to discuss something that is relevant to your organizing. So, there are trade-offs there.
Mel Buer:
But in terms of what you are hoping to… I find it interesting and kind of sad that, at this point, the only way to force a culture change in cutting down the sexual harassment of women in the workplace, is that women have to remove themselves from the workplace via remote work arrangements in order to feel a measure of safety. And you tend to hear sometimes on the internet and sometimes just in various Reddit forums about the toxicity that exists in certain studios, and that has been blown open in the last couple of years about sexual harassment and really horror stories that happen in some of these offices.
Julie:
Mm-hmm. (affirmative)
Mel Buer:
And I guess as organizers, do you feel that organizing around this remote work arrangement as a sort of stopgap to that sexual harassment is… How do you feel about that being an arrangement, I suppose?
Julie:
I guess, for me, at first I was like… Because sexual harassment was a big thing when I noticed in office. Things are silent, you could catch people glaring, some people talking on the side saying, “Oh wow, she’s looking so good in that tight dress.” You can hear that in person and it’s disgusting, and as a woman, that stands out to me a lot more. But also, doing remote, I was able to… It was kind of hard, I will admit. It is a little hard to notice more abuse in the company, but then there are signs there. And I’ve also talked to people online, we have virtual hangouts, and that’s when I started to find out more.
Julie:
I didn’t realize accessibility. Accessibility was such a huge topic for me in 2020 when I found out some of my co-workers have wrist problems and working at home has really helped cut down that driving, little maneuvers they have to get to work. We had a co-worker who was in a wheelchair. He commute to work three hours total, because he uses the bus. There are so many things that you can fight with remote, that I find it doesn’t have to be just sexual harassment, there’s so many other elements that other people are not talking about. It’s just, as a woman, that’s something I hear every day, is sexual harassment. It’s such a big topic in my life.
Mel Buer:
There’s a wide benefit to at least allowing the option of remote work and organizing work.
Julie:
Yeah, giving people options is good, because some people also need to be in office to work, but that doesn’t mean that fits for everybody. If you’re telling everybody to fit in one mold, that’s very ableist of you.
Mel Buer:
Right. Yeah, I think it’s a great thing to organize around. As someone who has lived and worked in white collar industries my entire professional career, both in academia and in news, having the ability to set up a home office and be able to work remotely, with the caveat that I could go into an office if I want to, I can walk onto a campus if I’m not teaching in person and still be able to have that space. It’s really important, and it really does help normalize that sort of accessibility that, prior to 2020, we really didn’t have any conversations about. And I think of all the horror and tragedy that came out of 2020’s pandemic and the subsequent years, normalizing remote work has been one of those things that’s been really helpful, I think, particularly in organizing white collar industries, like arts industries, like the games and entertainment industries.
Mel Buer:
Kelsey, I also wanted to come back around and continue this conversation just about the importance of this kind of organizing for organizing members of the queer community. You brought up a really good point, that there are, and you yourself have experienced that, for all of the movement towards acceptance, there is still a pretty large portion of the audience that you are designing games for that are fantastically, shockingly, maybe not so shockingly, post-gamer gate, bigoted. And how do you see organizing, like this organizing that you’re doing with Game Workers of SoCal, as a space to be able to, if not immediately start some sort of see change in how studios treat the reaction to this bigoted section of their audience, but at least begin that conversation. What is the importance of this kind of organizing for that kind of work?
Kelsey:
Well, I would point to a recent tentative agreement that Tender Claws Human Union recently reached with their employer, Tender Claws, where they actually have specifically outlined anti-bigotry measures and support for trans employees. So, that’s the end goal right there, is material gains that allow people to essentially stabilize, because all these forces are destabilizing in some way for individuals and the group as a whole. To have that solid base really allows people to come back and regroup, and push forward for further change that needs to happen.
Mel Buer:
It’s fantastic.
Kelsey:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
That’s great to hear.
Kelsey:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
And being able to have those sort of contracts as templates for further organizing activities is really great. It’s once someone can set that precedent for that language, it becomes a lot easier to be able to introduce that language shop-to-shop. So, fantastic. Cool.
Stephen:
Oh, actually, now that you mentioned that. This is a great way to loop back to one of the earlier questions you were talking about, why this work? This is work that is supposedly a very well-paid desk job, that type of thing, why are we organizing here and not factory workers? It’s basically that any gain in labor anywhere in the economy, means gains for everyone else. As we’ve been doing our own organizing work, we’ve both supported and been supported by, I think at this point, dozens of other labor groups from across… Not even across the industry or tech sector or whatever, just everywhere. We’ve worked with Medieval Times workers, with Stripper Strike, all these people who are not from games, but we are helping each other out, going to each other’s strikes for…
Stephen:
We mentioned the Game Awards demonstration. That was a double-booked tonight. Right after that, a lot of our members went to Stripper Strike Action. So, I think as you get more people working in labor organizing, getting experience with this building precedents with contracts. Until I saw the Tender Claws contract, I didn’t even know that was a thing you could ask for, I hadn’t even thought of it. So, once that precedent is established in one industry, one group, one field, you can start exporting that, both in precedent and in labor organizing force to other orgs.
Mel Buer:
It’s been really heartening too, prior to me writing about factory strikes, like the Kellogg’s strike in 2021, all my experience with union organizing was as a labor organizer with the IWW. And so, I have gotten the cool chance, and I’m sure you guys have seen it too over the course of the last 5, 6, 7 years of seeing absolutely no real popular consciousness of labor organizing in any sort of meaningful way beyond maybe a short clip in the back of a newspaper about a particular strike. You just didn’t really hear about it. You know what I mean? Unless it was big, splashed on the front page, 2008 Writer’s Strike kind of thing, where it’s treated as a joke and a hindrance to your daily routine, so on, so forth.
Mel Buer:
Even in just the last three years, we’ve seen an absolute explosion of what the labor movement could be capable of, and scores of new and younger members, people that are the Gen Z and the Gen Alpha, who are really, really excited about what a labor union can do for you and really breaking new ground in labor organizing that some of the old guard maybe just didn’t want to touch. And I think particularly when it comes to white collar tech industries, we’ve seen what the gig industry has done to these industries, what it’s done to freelance writing, what it’s done to these design and tech industries, what it’s done to the freelancers and contractors who try and get paid by Google, these massive, giant companies that have dominated a workspace and exploited every imaginable loophole that we, at some point in the past, allowed to be opened even wider.
Mel Buer:
We’ve seen what that’s done to the state of work in white collar tech. We’ve seen what that’s done to the state of work in tech design. And it’s not great, and it leads to just a race to the bottom, exploitation in wages, obviously these working conditions are horrible. And to be able to see folks say, “No more, we’re done. We’re done with this particular chapter.” Let’s take this momentum and move it into something that can not only provide a real material difference on an individual basis, but improve the industry that you love to work in and make better products that are more entertaining, that do not break the backs and minds of the people who create them.
Mel Buer:
I’ll get off my soapbox, but it always makes me giggle, kind of darkly in a dark humor kind of way, that we’re not asking for much, we just want the ability to have a say in the direction that an industry goes, because we put so much of our time and our lives in it. And there’s always that group of people that just don’t want to cede that power, purely on the basis of they just don’t want to give it up. It’s not like it’s a money issue. It’s not like it’s any of that. They got plenty of money, very clearly. They’re spending millions of dollars in seven years on developing blockbuster video games. So, it’s not like they don’t have it, it’s just they don’t want to cede that power to the workers who are actually producing that product in the first place.
Mel Buer:
Okay, I’m off my soapbox. Feel free to just add to the conversation, because I think this is a really important one that our audience can identify with.
Kelsey:
You mentioned something about all the new organizing that’s happened since 2020 and it’s shaken up these old guard unions. That was something that was funny to me, because as someone in the games industry, new organizing was just like, that was the only option. There were no unions in the industry five years ago. I’ve been hearing recently, UAW recently announced their plan for a bunch of new organizing and that was considered almost like a break with tradition, it’s like this radical new idea of organize new companies that aren’t already unionized. It’s just mind-blowing to me that that was a new thing for these unions, but meanwhile, we’ve got almost a whole generation who’s excited about new organizing.
Mel Buer:
A lot of these older business unions, and you can pull up audit pages and there are people way smarter than me who have done this in my field, fellow News Guild members, journalists who have pulled up the paperwork from these filings of how much money unions take in, the dues that they have, and what they use those dues for. And ideally what these unions should be doing, is they should be putting a significant portion of their dues toward new member organizing in shops that haven’t been organized yet. And it’s like a monstrous nebulous problem, where it’s not just about the fact that they haven’t allocated resources, it’s that union density is the lowest it’s been since they started recording membership. We’re down to like 6% union density, which is extremely low. So, there’s not a lot of dues to begin with, to be able to push that towards new organizing.
Mel Buer:
So, what they do, is they tighten the belts, they stick to the contracts that they have, they try to maintain control and to maintain the internal organizing that they can do without trying to seek out new members. And we also have a second, larger problem, which is that a federal legislation that’s been in place for decades, is specifically designed to make new organizing extremely difficult. Loopholes in worker friendly legislation from the ’40s have been exploited, and over the decades have more or less successfully punched a hole in the ability for unions to organize.
Mel Buer:
What’s so freaking exciting, is that this new generation took all this into consideration and said, “We’re going to do it anyway, and let’s see what we can do.” And so, what you see in the UAWs, you saw the work of almost a decade of reform movements, which is how Sean Fain is leading some of the most exciting organizing in the UAW. The UAW is also one of the only big unions that’s created chapters for things that have nothing to do with auto working, which is how we have the student unions that the UC system has here in California. It’s how we have all sorts of some… The Freelance Writers Union used to be attached to the UAW, which it’s its own entity now.
Mel Buer:
So, there’s a lot of really interesting organizing that the UAW has done in the past that they’re now just like, “Let’s go. Gung ho.” The first big strike that they had, they were extremely successful-
Julie:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
… after Fain got elected, and that was because a bunch of radical, mostly younger workers, militant-ass workers, rank and file workers said, “We’re done with business as usual, let’s do something different.” And that’s what I’m seeing in game organizing too, where these young, militant-ass workers are saying, “We are done trying to work within the system that’s not working for us, and we’re going to organize ourselves, and we’re going to do what we can to really fill that gap.” And maybe that’s something, Stephen or Julie, you want to comment on in terms of just the state of white collar tech organizing in general.
Julie:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
There is a giant gap in terms of representation, union interest in terms of larger… Barring, say, maybe I don’t know, the CWA taking an interest in some of this, these projects and organizing these shops.
Stephen:
We love that, yeah.
Julie:
Yeah, I love CWA. They have been very helpful for a lot of my organizing in general as well. But yeah, you’re right. I think when I first started organizing, it was really hard to organize, because I came from an education medical background, so copying into the game industry was a different experience. We have free snacks, we have desk, and I get to clock out a certain time of day. There is pros and cons from all the industries, but what I like to tell my coworkers is that, privileges runs out. It just runs out and you got to protect yourself, you got to see those patterns. And I’ve been very thankful to see more union story articles, good and bad, just to prove and have more evidence of why this can work out for a lot of us.
Stephen:
Yeah, we’ve definitely felt that dramatic shift in just general acceptance of labor. Some of that’s been over the last decade with a lot of really good organizing work, but some of that is even… It’s been happening fast enough that we felt it within the last three years. Our Game Awards action a few days ago, the reception we got there was largely warm and friendly, we had people who already knew a lot of our talking points that would come up to us asking about things that, a few years back, nobody would’ve even heard of. So many conversations with people who were excited or were encouraging us. And a couple of years ago, that was not the situation we got. Confusion and hostility was the default reaction we would get from people.
Stephen:
And the crowd at the Game Awards, it’s game developers and folks who play games, so it’s not just that developers or just that gamers were mad, everybody seems to be shifting an opinion on this, and that’s incredibly exciting. You talked about the writers’ strike earlier as a joke, compare the reception to the 2008 writers’ strike to this one, where my friends were treating it like a sports game, like, “Okay, we want our team to win this, we’re going to support them however we can, we’ll go out to these strikes, we’ll organize, post, whatever.”
Stephen:
And that energy is really exciting, it’s why I think the total percentage of the game industry that’s unionized right now is pretty low. Most folks do not have union jobs and it’s going to be a while before we get to that, but the ideological playing field, we have won that. People, pretty much across the board, at the very least acknowledge that these are all problems, whereas three, five years ago, you would not have gotten that.
Mel Buer:
That’s a huge piece of it. A lot of what this is, is a messaging game. How can you effectively convince potential new organizers, or potential new members that what you’re offering is a solid compromise or a solid solution to longstanding problems? It does help to have that more outward facing goodwill toward the concept itself, and I think that’s a real generational shift, I think those of us in the younger spaces have, for most of our adult lives, been met with total BS when it comes to economic conditions, social society. We could run the list.
Mel Buer:
For me, I’m on the younger side of the millennials, I’m 31, so graduating high school into the worst of a recession, and then starting college in the last gasps of a horrible decade of war, and now coming out of grad school, which was an attempt to brighten my situation, into a pandemic and the ensuing years of inflation and horror that is our economic situation, and never really feeling that stability.
Stephen:
I think a lot of the kids we talk to have… It’s funny, when I was in school, and I think when a lot of the rest of us were, the attitude we would get was like, “If you want to get in this industry, you need to fight, everybody you see is your competition, you need to be working crazy hours and not talk back to your boss under any circumstances. If you’re dealing with harassment, you need to deal with it. All of these things, and because it was a dream job and that makes you very easy to exploit when that’s how these schools train you.
Stephen:
But now, we run a university outreach program where we go to various game dev programs and talk to the kids there, and we barely need to do any work at this point, they’re already on board most of the time. And that shift from even five years ago, of this feeling that you will be exploited and if you’re going to be in this industry, you just have to deal with that, to there are people fighting for change and you should join them, is the message they already seem to have when we get there. That is huge.
Mel Buer:
Right, the idea that it doesn’t have to be this way. And it’s such a huge portion of the American working public really works in these types of industries, and these types of industries are by and large ununionized at this point. And to be able to not discount the importance of this type of subsection of entertainment in white collar work is really, really important. And really working to change, it’s going to have a ripple effect, really. And because the games industry is so ubiquitous to so many people’s lives, meaning the video games that we have in our houses, you can see behind me on the shelf here, are all the video games that we play, and it’s just part of the entertainment of sitting down after work.
Mel Buer:
And I think being able to also say, “God, how cool would it be to say, ‘This is a union-made video game?’” This is a product that is made by unionized workers, who went home every day proud of the work that they did, and did not have to suffer through asinine, ridiculous working conditions in order to put that product out, I think is going to be really exciting to see. Roland?
Roland:
Oh, yeah, just wanted to point out, that is a line item in Tender Claws’ contract, that they include the union logo in the credits of a game, so you might be seeing that soon enough.
Stephen:
And I would guess that’s probably going to lead to a slight bump in sales, especially for the folks who are excited about this stuff. You see union-made, like, “Oh yeah, I’ll check that out, that’s cool.”
Mel Buer:
Yeah, it’s a good selling point for bosses who might be reticent. And maybe because these companies are often helmed by slightly younger executives, as far as my understanding of it as an outsider, that might mean that they’re more willing to start that conversation than to just shut it off entirely.
Stephen:
Yes.
Mel Buer:
And that comes down to hoping that they have a soul.
Stephen:
Well, if you get everybody on board, they don’t need to have a soul.
Mel Buer:
That’s true. They just got to sign on the dotted line, that is true. Well, I think this is great. I think maybe the last thing that we can talk about here as a rounding out of the conversation is, we’ve touched on the action that you did this last week, the picket, and the response to that. What are you hoping, as a working group, that you can accomplish? What are some of the goals that you’re hoping to accomplish as you pull that momentum from last week’s action into the new year and into a new couple of years of organizing after the insane 2023 that Southern California had for union actions? What do you think?
Roland:
So, again, how do I sound?
Mel Buer:
Great.
Roland:
Cool. I guess in full transparency, 2023 was a rough year for us, it was a rough year for the entire industry. Internally, our group also saw the same layoffs that we were protesting about, and that hooked us on our back foot, especially in a historic year like this, it felt almost like we were unprepared for this moment in history. But that didn’t stop us from reaching out to other unions and other industries from making connections with the actors, with the strippers, with Medieval Times, with the writers. If you unite here, even the hotel and culinary workers, I think our strength as an organization is how we connect the game industry with a wider labor movement. And them showing up for us on Thursday is just huge, a vivid illustration of how not alone we are in this fight.
Roland:
So, in 2024, I imagine that we want to continue that, we want to show game developers… Show where we are in the wider labor struggle, and show how the rising tide lifts all boats, and that’s where I see our organization, where our working group going, is making that connection between games and the wider labor movement.
Kelsey:
Yeah, I would also say, with this recent victory from Tender Claws Human Union, and Sega is on the horizon, Activision Blizzard is on the horizon, I think that’s going to energize us to also organize within our own industry a bit more too, and connect the ranking file of each of these unions that normally don’t get to talk to each other so much. So, connecting within our industry and between industries.
Kelsey:
Just want to add one more thing, going around back to something Stephen was talking about earlier, how even if we’re white collar workers, if we unionize, that helps other people unionize. If other people unionize, that helps us too. We had our pamphlets that we were handing out, and right on the back, what you can do, number three, no matter what industry you’re in, if you can also organize, talk to your coworkers, and unionize your companies as well, that helps everyone else who’s trying to organize.
Stephen:
Yeah. And I think, finally, Roland talked about the layoffs. That is something that everyone has been hit by, even if we weren’t laid off. We had layoffs at our companies, we had our friends laid off, I can’t remember all of the times this year I’ve had people ask, “Hey, my friend just got laid off, or I just got laid off, do you have any open positions at your company?” And I have to respond with, “Sorry, we just went through our own round of layoffs.” That is a radicalizing moment, where everyone in this industry is living in fear of losing their jobs, even if their games are wildly, critically, and commercially successful.
Stephen:
And I think that has shown a large majority of the industry how fragile our positions here are. How without organizing with our coworkers and folks all throughout the industry and other industries, that we can lose our jobs, our healthcare, the things we built up over decades, overnight, and we won’t even have any understanding of why it happened. That is going to push people into organizing, because they will start to see it as the only way we can get that stability, and I do really believe that is the only way we can get that stability.
Julie:
And if anybody is curious on the data, vogameslayoff.com has some really good data that makes you feel less crazy, that literally every month, almost every week, there was a studio that did layoff, and that website doesn’t even include everybody as well.
Mel Buer:
I’ll make sure to post that link in our description so that folks can see the extent of the state of the industry and why this work to try and unionize it is so important. That is all I have for you folks today. Before we head out though, where can we find your work? Website, social media, if folks are interested in joining or working with the group, what’s the process for getting ahold of you?
Stephen:
Yeah, I think our social media handles are unique across each platform, but if you just Google Game Workers of SoCal, you’ll find us on Twitter, we have a website with a lot of information how to get involved, sign up. Yeah, I think we’ve got a link there that we can get to you.
Julie:
Yeah, Kelsey just linked one there.
Mel Buer:
GameWorkersSoCal. That’s GameWorkersSoCal.org. So, I’ll put that in the description, we’ll make sure all that gets linked for you guys so that you have a direct line from my audience to you. Thanks so much for taking the time today, and please come back on anytime, open invitation, to just come and talk about the state of your industry or adjacent and related industries. You’re welcome to come on and talk about anything that you care about, any news in this sector, and any organizing you’re doing in the future.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at the Real News Network podcast. Once again, I’m your host, Mel Buer. If you loved 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. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can find me on social media, my DMs are always open, or send me a message via email at Mel@TheRealNews.com. Send your tips, comments, questions, concerns, or episode ideas. I’d love to hear from you. Thank you so much for sticking around, have a Happy Holidays, and I’ll see you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
In this special international episode, we get the chance to talk to folks in Brazil about the farmworkers who are being trapped in slave-like conditions, and about a truly radical new government program that is trying to break the cycle of enslavement and exploitation. As Vitor Filgueiras, Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Bahia, writes, “Between 1995 and mid-2020, more than 55,000 workers were removed from conditions analogous to slavery by the Brazilian State, without any indication that there has been a reduction in this type of criminal exploitation of labour in the country. On the contrary, many workers are repeated victims of extreme exploitation.” As we discuss with Filgueiras himself in the second half of this episode, there have been numerous past efforts to liberate farmworkers from these slave-like conditions, but if workers don’t have other means or opportunities to economically sustain themselves, they are at high risk of falling right back into this exploitative system to make ends meet. And that is why the project “Vida Pós Resgate” (Life After Rescue) was created in 2017 through a partnership between the Federal University of Bahia’s Faculty of Economics and the Federal Labor Prosecution Office for the 23rd Region. The program is designed to take the fines that employers are forced to pay for violating workers rights and use that money to buy land, tools, seed, and other necessities for rescued farmworkers to develop self-sufficient farms that they own and operate themselves. While the program is still in its early stages, if it is successful, it could have wide-ranging implications for working people in Brazil and beyond.
In the first half of this episode, with Vitor Filgueiras translating, we speak with Marcos and John, two farmworkers who were rescued from slave-like conditions and are now among the Life After Rescue program’s first participants. In the second half, we speak with Filgueiras about where this policy came from, what it will take to make it work, and about the fight to return the land and the means of production to the people. Special thanks to Mike Fox for editing assistance.
Additional links/info below…
Vitor Filgueiras, Delta 8.7, “Slave-Like Labour in Brazil and the Vida Pós Resgate Project“Reuters, “Brazil Rescues Hundreds Held in Modern-Day Slave Conditions“Dom Phillips, The Guardian, “‘Fewer People Will Be Freed’: Brazil Accused of Easing Anti-Slavery Rules“Matt Sandy, Al Jazeera, “Heartache and Suffering: Slavery in Brazil” Working PeopleYouTube channel
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.
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 do support the work that we are doing here at Working People so we can keep growing and keep bringing you all more important conversations every single week. You can write a positive review of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, which really, really helps us out. You can also share these episodes on your social media, and share them with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members.
And of course, the single best thing you can do to support our work is become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. Subscribe for 10 bucks a month and you will also get a print subscription to the amazing In These Times magazine. Just head on over to patreon.com/workingpeople. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/workingpeople. Hit the subscribe button, and you will immediately unlock all of the great bonus episodes that we publish every month and all of the bonus episodes that we’ve put out for our Patreons over the past six seasons of the show.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a really special, really important, international episode for y’all today. I want to jump straight into our episode today, which I am incredibly proud and excited to share with y’all. I got a really special opportunity to talk to folks in Brazil about the slave-like conditions that many farm workers have been subjected to there and about a truly radical new government program that is trying to break the cycle of enslavement and exploitation.
As Vitor Filgueiras, Professor of Economics at the Federal University of Bahia wrote in a December 2020 article that we’ve linked to in the show notes of this episode, “Between 1995 and mid 2020, more than 55,000 workers were removed from conditions analogous to slavery by the Brazilian state without any indication that there has been a reduction in this type of criminal exploitation of labor in the country. On the contrary, many workers are repeated victims of extreme exploitation.”
Now, as I discuss with Vitor himself in the second half of this episode, there have been numerous efforts to liberate farm workers from these slave-like conditions. But, I mean, if workers don’t have other means or opportunities to economically sustain themselves, then they are obviously at high risk of falling right back into this exploitative system just to make ends meet for themselves and their families. And that is exactly why the project, Life After Rescue was created in 2017 through a partnership between the Federal University of Bahia’s Faculty of Economics and the Federal Labor Prosecution Office for the 23rd region in Brazil.
And so Vitor continues in this article, “To sustainably combat slave labor and allow survivors and their families the ability to resist exploitation, the Life After Rescue Project seeks to facilitate self-sufficient rural production. This production should be implemented preferably in survivor’s places of origin. The acquisition of land as well as purchase of other necessary tools for production and distribution can be carried out using funds from public civil proceedings or from the terms of conduct adjustment pertaining to lawsuits or extra judicial procedures related to inspection activities carried out by the Federal Labor Prosecution Office and the Secretariat of Labour Inspection.”
Now, your eyes may have glossed over on that last part, but I want to just take a second to underline it in bold red pen because it’s really important and actually really radical what this program is proposing to do. And what this program is designed to do is actually take the fines that employers are forced to pay when they break the law, when they violate workers’ rights, when they entrap workers in these slave-like conditions and they get fined for it, they get taken to court. This program is taking that money and using it to buy land, tools, seed, and other necessities for the liberated farm workers to own and operate themselves and to develop that land into self-sufficient farms. I mean, that is one hell of a program. And if it is successful, I mean just imagine what this kind of approach to labor and land policy could look like here in the US or in other parts of the world.
So, again, in the second half of this episode, you’ll hear my one-on-one conversation with Vitor Filgueiras about where this policy came from and what it will take to actually make it work and why it’s so important that it works. And in the first half of the episode, you’ll hear my conversation with Marcos and John, two farm workers who were rescued from slave-like conditions themselves and are now among the Life After Rescue program’s first participants. I got to record that interview with Marcos and John from across the hemisphere, and we were able to do it, thankfully, because Vitor was there with them sitting in this remote community center in rural Bahia using his computer so we could talk and translating between English and Portuguese for us.
Now, the audio from that first segment isn’t great, so I really apologize for that. But I am sure that you’ll all agree that the very fact that we were able to do this interview at all with Marcos and John after everything that they’ve been through is pretty incredible.
Without further ado, without any more from me, here are my conversations with Marcos, John, and Vitor about the radical and necessary fight in Brazil to liberate workers from slave-like conditions and to return the land and the means of production to the people.
Well, Marcos, John, thank you both so much for joining us today on the podcast. I really, really appreciate it.
Vitor Filgueiras:
They thank you, too, for the opportunity.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, it’s really an honor to get to talk to you guys from so far across the world. And I know that our listeners really want to hear more about you and what you’re going through down there in Brazil. I wanted to just start by asking if you could introduce yourselves to the listeners here in North America. Tell us about your life, tell us where you came from and tell us more about the kind of work that you’ve been doing.
Vitor Filgueiras:
He’s saying good morning to the [inaudible 00:08:56]. He’s also said that he’s really happy to be talking to you as well.
He’s from state of Bahia, the name of the city is Conceição Do Coité, northeast of Brazil.
He used to work here, in the regional. He used to work the warehouse packing and dispatching bottles, different drinks. And then at some point he was called to go to Rio Grande do Sul, outside states in Brazil South, the most southern states of Brazil. And he went there.
John is also from here, he’s also from Conceição Do Coité, Bahia. And as Marcos, he was grown up in the rural area and he has always worked in the rural area, gathering and working with animals such as goats.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can I ask if you guys could say a little more about what life is like in these rural areas in Brazil? When you’re born there and you grow up, how do you make a living and what are the economic prospects like for people like you?
Vitor Filgueiras:
He was saying that it’s normally a peaceful life and he works on a daily basis in casual jobs. For example, nowadays, he’s working helping truck drivers going around the cities on the northeast of Brazil.
He say that things are a little tough regarding the economics life because there are very few opportunities to work. Normally when you find something it’s like casual jobs or working on a daily basis one place, then the other place. There isn’t many corporations. The economic life here is hard.
John say that what Marco said that what happens in these, it’s very hard the opportunities here and the life here is normally tough.
There is a main rural production here, I mean product, it’s a root from Brazil that’s used for different purpose. It’s called sisal. I can translate it using Google here just in a second. But the production of sisal does not guarantee good living conditions, quite the opposites. And also, it’s a very dangerous working process, because they use old and unsafe machines process. It’s a root called sisal.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to talk about the conditions on the farms in a second, but I also wanted to pause really quick and ask if you guys could say a little bit about life outside of work, where you come from. Because on this show we try to really remind people that workers are not just the jobs we do, we’re human beings with families. So I wanted to just ask what you do, where you find joy and where you find meaning in life outside of work in these conditions.
Vitor Filgueiras:
He really likes to play soccer with his kids in the rest time or otherwise, they like to play video games at home as well.
He say that during the weekends, he really likes to go for a swim in the river and to drink a beer as well. [foreign language 00:14:53]
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk about the situation that rural workers are enduring on these farms, because that’s why we’re really here because I think the world needs to understand the slave-like conditions that you and others have had to endure. Can you just explain for people who didn’t know that this was happening, what the state of things is for farm workers in rural Brazil right now?
Vitor Filgueiras:
He was here in Bahia, northeast of Brazil. He was invited to go to a grape farm in Rio Grande do Sul, South Brazil.
When he was invited, they told him a story saying that they would have good conditions and so on, but when he got there it was completely different.
They said that they would have good accommodation and everything would be nice, but the place that they had to stay was terrible, no aspects, dirty.
The places that they had to go as a bathroom wasn’t separated from the other areas. Everything was pretty much at the same place, the place that they had to rest, the place that they had to eat, to go to bathroom, everything was pretty much just one area.
220 people at the same place.
They told them that they have a normal schedule because of time to work and rest, no days off and so on. But they got there, they had to work all day long from Sunday to Sunday.
They had to wake up 4:00 AM every morning and they had to leave to start working and had place 4:00 AM every morning.
They were obligated to work from 5:00 AM up to 10:00 PM every day.
They were told that they would be able to rest every Sunday, but then they have to work every day, every day without rest. The food was terrible, was disgusting.
Must colleagues of him were beaten there, beaten out. Some of them has broken arms, their arms broken.
Even when they had some work-related accidents or any kind of injury, they were forced to work, otherwise they would get beaten.
Everything that Marcos has said is true. They were together there, so he experienced the same thing.
There was no privacy, no privacy in the accommodation. They were all living at the same place, all 220 workers were eating at the same place. Everything was dirty. They didn’t have proper receiving to take a shower or to make their physical necessities.
The food was terrible. They were served like rice in very bad conditions. And it was exactly the opposite of what was promised for them.
They could only have something different when some of their relatives would send some money so that they can escape for a while from this accommodation place that they were held and buy something different. Otherwise, they had to eat the stuff.
They all had to work. They would be forced to work in every conditions, even if the weather was terrible or it was rainy. And we’re talking about the south of Brazil, so the weather is very different from here. It rains a lot, it’s much colder than here.
If one of them tries to use some kind of medical note, magical recipe saying that they would need to stay at the accommodation instead of go work, they were to be beaten up. So they would be forced to work. Even if they managed to meet a public doctor… In Brazil, you have this free public system. If they were able to attain a appointment and get a note from the doctor saying that they had to stay and get healed, they would be beaten up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
My God, this is horrifying to hear and I’m so heartbroken because I have heard similar stories even here in the United States where you have Guatemalans, Mexicans, migrants from Central America who are living like slaves at the farms where our tomatoes come from. Just for people who are listening to get a clearer picture here, can I ask if you guys could say a little more about the kind of people who end up working at these farms and who owns these farms? Who are the people who are beating and exploiting you?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Almost all of them are from Bahia, from this radio view. This city and other cities here, Conceição Do Coité, it’s called [foreign language 00:22:54] Sisaleira because it’s linked to this product that I was talking about, sisal root, and pretty much all of them, the 220 people are from around here.
They are saying that the farms are from big, actually huge national wine lands. Aurora, Salton, and he is forgetting about the other one, but we’re talking about huge players here in Brazil in terms of wine. They were working on the grape-
There are the main brands and they are also talking about intermediaries, the contracting, the middle guys, [foreign language 00:23:45] and so on examples. So the thing is there are three main brands there, corporations that they produce the grape and they make the wine and they were hired through intermediaries. They were talking about the name of the-
Vitor Filgueiras:
… Intermediaries. They were talking about the name of the intermediaries. And so, they were there working on the lodging, the dispatching of the box of grapes.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:24:16].
Vitor Filgueiras:
Also in the gathering. They were gathering the grapes and loading the trucks and unloading the box with the grapes.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:24:36].
Vitor Filgueiras:
They would pick the grapes, then put the grapes in the box, then load the trucks and then unload the plating that was supposed to go to make the ones.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, can I ask a little more about that? Because on this show we talked to workers about the work that they do and the labor that goes into that. Could I ask if you could just talk a little bit more about what a typical day on one of these farms looks like and how much do you get paid for that?
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:25:13].
Vitor Filgueiras:
We had to go to the place to start working at 4:30, and they would have a specific time to stop. They could grow, like you said, even up to 10 p.m.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:25:40].
Vitor Filgueiras:
When they got there, there is sign-up contracts say that they would be paid once a month. But after the first month, they says that they only be paid when the service would be finished. They would just be paid after picking up all the grape that they were supposed to [inaudible 00:26:06] after the season.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:26:12].
Vitor Filgueiras:
So they are saying that the working days were very similar. They would start working at 5:00 a.m, so they would start working on picking up the grapes, then they would fill the boxes, then load the box, put everything inside the trucks, then go on the trucks through the wine factories and unload the box there, and then starts the process all over again. On a daily basis, they working the… Doing this from 5:00 a.m up even to 10:00 p.m.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What kind of toll does that take on your body doing that kind of work day after day? Does your back hurt? Do your knees hurt? Are you getting sunburned or… I just wanted to ask a little more what doing that work does to you as a person?
John:
[foreign language 00:27:20].
Vitor Filgueiras:
All the body, he say that everything hurts. Everything hurts.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:27:29].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He say that also they would take their mobiles, their cell phones from them in order to allow them to talk to their families.
Marcos:
[foreign language 00:27:48].
Vitor Filgueiras:
They couldn’t sit. They could not sit. They would have to stay up all day, so the back hurts a lot. Also the knees. But like he said, he was very stressed here that all their bodies would hurt.
John:
[foreign language 00:28:13].
Vitor Filgueiras:
They are saying that this box that they were talking about, it would be like 77 pounds with kind of 70 pounds in terms of… Because he’s saying kilos in Brazil, so kilos. 30 kilos is like a 70 pound box. So it would hurt a lot. It hurts a lot. They would feel a lot of pain on their backs, also on their necks. It hurts a lot.
John:
[foreign language 00:28:54].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He is saying that they works like machines because everything was hurting. Their ankles also hurting a lot, were hurt, and they would just get at the evaluation points and kind of taking a nap. And then 4:00 a.m., another day, wake up and starts all over again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I’m just… I’m so sorry that you guys have gone through this. And everyone listening to this I know is sending you nothing but love and solidarity, and we are furious that our fellow workers in Brazil are being treated like this. I want to talk about the efforts to rescue farm workers living in slave-like conditions in Brazil. Because I know there’ve been a number of efforts from the government to try to address this situation, and now there’s a new effort that’s more radical and that is going to try to address where the previous attempts have failed. So can you tell us a little more about these past and current attempts to rescue workers from these slave-like conditions in Brazil?
Vitor Filgueiras:
So in Brazil over the last three decades, actually, there’s been a public policy held out by a group of institutions, of public institutions, such as the minister of labor, the federal policy and so on, that they investigate and they go around the country walking and try to catch people being treated like slaves, people forced to work in slave-like conditions. And this public policy has faced many challenge, but it’s pretty stable in terms of working. So we have to admit that this public policy that troubles slave-like conditions is successful at some points in terms of reaching people, catching the situations and rescuing people from slave-like conditions. The thing is that those people, those workers that are rescued, they haven’t been graded, they haven’t been addressed in terms of what to do afterwards.
So the arrest schemes, what’s really important is some feedback, otherwise they keep doing, keep being treated like that. And they normally are from different parts of the country. So the [inaudible 00:32:19] go back home, big oil, big corporation is all obligated. They had to pay for them to go back. The workers normally gets their payments, everything that the company has to pay, they are obligated to pay. But of course it’s a temporary solution and there hasn’t been any other assistance that can deliver something for them in terms of going on in a sustainable perspective, in a sustainable point of view. So I was rescued, that’s very important. What now? What I’m going to do with my life? And what the Brazilian government’s trying to do now is a new public policy precisely trying to give alternatives, sustainable alternatives for those workers.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think that’s great context. I think that that makes sense, right, that if you can still rescue people from these slave conditions but they don’t have another job that can sustain them, they might fall right back into another company that treats them like this. And so, for people listening, this new program is attempting to go a step further and help provide, not only to liberate workers from these conditions, but to then provide them with economic support so that they can live their lives, they can sustain themselves. And so Vitor, I wanted to ask if you could ask these guys to say a little bit about what it was like to be able to leave these terrible farms, leave those slave-like conditions, and where things stand now. What do they hope to get out of this program? What is going to need to happen so that these guys can live their lives?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Just to add on the context, but if it helps, there are data that shows that many of the workers that were rescued, they are rescued more than once, precisely because there isn’t a public policy, a stable public policy to offer them something that’s sustainable, some alternative. And what you’re trying to do now, talking as part of the problem, is precisely to give the means of production for those workers in a way that they what rely on the function of the labor markets in other ways, other terms. As any capitalist societies, you don’t have the need of production, you have to sell your workforce. And when there is no jobs, the person, even if they are qualified for some job, if the job is not there, they’ll starve to death. So the main issue, the main role of this program is to giving the minimum of production for those workers. They can be by themselves without relying on the labor markets.
John:
[foreign language 00:35:50].
Vitor Filgueiras:
There wasn’t anything like that.
John:
[foreign language 00:36:02].
Vitor Filgueiras:
This working group that I was talking about, the federal police, the labor inspections, they got there, the accommodation place at 2:00 a.m. and liberated them, rescued them and he was so relieved.
John:
[foreign language 00:36:27].
Vitor Filgueiras:
It was a huge relief for them when the labor inspectors came and federal police came and told them that that situation was terrible and they wouldn’t allow them to keep standard that conditions, they were relieved. They were thinking about…
John:
[foreign language 00:36:55].
Vitor Filgueiras:
When his working group, federal police, the [inaudible 00:37:04] labor inspectors got there, the security guards of the company told them, all of them, to go to the basements to hide so that they working with the governments wouldn’t see them, but one of them was able to leave the place and this only worker told them that all the others were inside, hidden.
John:
[foreign language 00:37:29].
Vitor Filgueiras:
Which was just one guy. The guy was able to leave the place. They told the federal police, the inspector, that [inaudible 00:37:38] and because of this guy, he went there and found all the workers in the basement.
John:
[foreign language 00:37:58].
Vitor Filgueiras:
Even the police were terrified the situation that they had just found.
John:
[foreign language 00:38:00].
Vitor Filgueiras:
The situation was indeed completely terrible.
John:
[foreign language 00:38:07].
Vitor Filgueiras:
The police had to bodyguard them from Rio Grande do Sul up to Bahia talking about a 2000 miles street.
John:
[foreign language 00:38:27].
Vitor Filgueiras:
So they came in an airplane from Rio Grande do Sul to Sao Paulo, bodyguards by the federal police. Then the federal police arranged a bus to take them from Sao Paulo up to Bahia.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So where do things stand now, what happens now? What…
John:
[foreign language 00:38:56].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He is just expecting that with this project, he wants help to leave the city anymore to working for bad guys like these ones.
John:
[foreign language 00:39:18].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He saying that now that they have just found the association, they are very keen to be able to work by themselves without lawyers, without anyone telling them what to do. And hopefully with some support from the government through educating them and giving them tools, they’ll be able to live freely by themselves in a nice way, a good life.
John:
[foreign language 00:40:09].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He is trusting once again that he is expecting to have a good life and have term enough that he doesn’t need to live once again. And with this association, they’re seeking and they’re looking forward to produce, creates goods to produce milk and meat.
John:
[foreign language 00:40:39].
Vitor Filgueiras:
They are saying that they’re not looking forward to start working. Right now, they are looking for a farm, a place that the program can buy from the association. And when this place is arranged for the association, they are looking forward to create the groups not only for the milk and for the meats, but also to produce cheese and yogurt. They’re looking forward to do this. They really like yogurt and cheese, goat cheese and yogurt.
John:
[foreign language 00:41:30].
Vitor Filgueiras:
Working together without anyone telling the other what to do, [inaudible 00:41:38] not democratically without having us is something that we is really looking forward as well.
John:
[foreign language 00:41:50].
Vitor Filgueiras:
They are saying that they are very thankful for the program, expecting to start as soon as possible, and thanking you, Max, as well for the opportunity. It’s really nice talking to you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Brothers, the pleasure was really all mine. And I just wanted to say again that all of us here in the United States are with you and we hope that you get that good life that you deserve.
John:
[foreign language 00:42:22].
Vitor Filgueiras:
He said that the same to you guys, and he is really, really happy to each of you. And like we say in Brazil, [inaudible 00:42:35]. It’s like, “We’re together.” That’s what he’s saying. Together.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Perfect. That was a great spot to end on, guys.
(singing)
Vitor Filgueiras:
Hello, my name is Vitor Filgueiras and I used to be a labor inspector on the minister of labor in Brazil, now I’m a professor at the Federal University of Bahia, a professor of economics. And currently I’m working on some projects and one of them is called Vida Pos-Resgate, or in English it’ll be like Life After the Rescue.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well Vitor, thanks again so much for joining me, brother, from across the hemisphere. Really, really appreciate it. And listeners, just heard are the conversation that we recorded with these two incredible guys that you’re working with who were part of this really revolutionary program that we’re here talking about today. And I wanted to just make sure, before we ended this episode, that we gave listeners a chance to hear a little more about the deeper context here, and know what they need to know about what makes this current program so different, what challenges lie ahead, and where the program itself came from.
And you’re the perfect guy to talk to about this, so I really appreciate you hopping back on another recording with me. And I wanted to just sort of start there. We talked a little bit about this in the previous conversation that listeners just heard, but I was wondering if you could say a little more about the background here. Because this is not a new problem, workers getting trapped in slave-like conditions, and there have been multiple attempts by the state government to try to address that problem. I was wondering if you could just fill in, for listeners here in North America, some of that history. Tell us about how bad this problem is, how widespread it is, and what attempts have been made in the past to address the scourge of workers being trapped in slave-like conditions in Brazil.
Vitor Filgueiras:
Sure. So, the first thing that we had to keep in mind is that this problem, which means very, very bad conditions for workers, very harsh conditions, like similar to slavery or close to slavery, it’s not an issue that’s particular from Brazil. Any capitalist societies can face and may face this issue if there is no regulation or if the protective regulation. This weak… I’m talking about labor law, I’m talking about labor movements and so on. Because of the disparity between labor and capital, if there is no protective regulation, very bad situations can be seen, and tend to be seen, tend to be registered in the workers’ lives. That’s one main thing that I need to stress. So it’s a potential situation for any capitalist society.
Having that said, in Brazil particularly, we have this terrible background of slavery, a lot of state-based slavery. Our capitalism was based on slavery for over three centuries. So because of that, we have a culture of exploitation that’s maybe even deeper in other countries. But look, it’s not only the rural areas, this program is focusing the rural areas, but it’s a widespread problem. Like I said, if there is no protective regulation from the states or if the labor movement is not strong enough, capital can do whatever its will. And it’s not about money case. It’s not about being bad or being good, it’s just part of the process of seeking profits. There’s a reason in itself. But anyhow, going outside to Brazil, we had this very traditional weak protective regulation by the states and very bad situations…
Vitor Filgueiras:
It’s very bad situations, which we call slave-like conditions, are spread that it’s very hard to estimate how many people are being subject to this kind of exploitation situation. But what I want to say is that for the last three decades, almost three decades, there is a state-based group that is supposed to tackle the problem, making inspections in the fields and the corporations, also taking the case to the criminal courts, to the labor courts, trying to make this kind of practice, so limiting people to slave-like conditions, something that not attractive to the corporations. And this group and this state-based public policy of trying to impose fines, eventually taking lawyers to jail, have faced challenge, but also have been doing some important work in terms of regulating the demands of labor force, regulating the employer.
But there wasn’t any program to give alternative to workers. That the main points. Workers have been rescued from slave-like conditions at least since the beginning of the ’90s [inaudible 00:49:48] in Brazil. But after their rescue, in other words, after that they released from the slave-like conditions, there wasn’t a program to address the problem in terms of, so you are free now, what are you going to do? What are you going to do with your life? So the Vida Pós Resgate program that we announced here is exactly trying to address this problem of the alternative for workers that have faced slave-like conditions and needs for having an alternative for their lives.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and this is such an important development that I think countries around the world can learn from, especially the United States because the progression here is like you said, over three decades, there have been efforts by the state to intervene in this terrible problem of workers being trapped in slave-like conditions. And so the first step is to liberate people who were trapped in that situation, which has happened. Like you said, a lot of people have been rescued. We talked to those guys in the previous conversation about how they were rescued and it was a terrifying story. So, that’s the first step, and that’s an important step of course. But then like you said, if workers don’t have another option to make a living after that, a lot of them are going to get trapped again in a similar situation.
And so I know that one of the steps that was taken after that was to try to give workers some professional training and try to help them improve their stock on the labor market, and then that didn’t work. That wasn’t sufficient enough either. And this is why the program that we’re here to talk about today is so vital and revolutionary because then the next step was, okay, we need to provide material resources for these workers who have been liberated from slave-like conditions so that they can build their own self-sustaining farm. They can live and work off the land. And in fact, we’re going to take the fines from the employers who are trapping these workers. We’re going to take the money that we’re taking from them and give it back to the workers. That’s incredible. Do I have that right? Is that the progression here?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Yeah, Max. Perfect. During the last 15 years, there were some attempts, and there were people that honestly were trying to address the whole rescue problem. In other words, words what should we do to help people that were rescued? And these attempts were linked to the so-called qualification of the workers. So if we qualify them, if they had some training, they can go back to the labor market, everything is going to be all right. And once again, it’s not a specific situation in Brazil, it’s a neoliberal approach to the problem. All over the world, there is the psychological concept that if you train the workers, they will get jobs on the labor markets like-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sorry to interrupt, but there’s a really funny… I mean, it’s really annoying and it pisses me off, but it’s almost become a joke here in the United States because one of the areas where we see this happen is in the parts of the country that used to employ a lot of people in the coal mining industry. And so obviously as the world transitions away from coal energy, a lot of these areas in Kentucky, West Virginia, they don’t have those jobs anymore for people. And so it’s been a question for decades of, what do we do with the people who are living here? And the neoliberal response is like, “Oh, why don’t we train these 50-year-old coal miners to code on their computers so that they can get different jobs?” And it’s like, that’s a nice idea, but that’s going to work for five people. That’s not a systemic solution to the problem.
Vitor Filgueiras:
Yeah, exactly. And it lies on a theoretical points of view, it’s the neoclassical economy. It’s not something new. It’s something very old that suppose that if workers are trained enough, the jobs will appear. So it’s all on the workers, that’s the main issue. It’s like if the supply of labor force, the workers themselves are prepared, they will find some job. And of course it’s at least like it because there is a social monopoly from the capital to decide if the job will exist or not. The investment creates the jobs. If there is no investment by the companies or by the states, there is no job, no matter how qualified, how trained the person is. So in this case, in Brazil, there were some attempts, like I said, in some states because it’s been very, very wide, very comprehensive. It was specific states and they made some trainings and so on.
And we made a research… Actually, Max, we made a research here at the University of Bahia to see how it’s to an extent whether labor markets was in a good situation. When the economy was growing, people that were trained were getting jobs, and people that weren’t trained were getting jobs as well. Even with the crisis then again in 2015, everybody was unemployed, both people that weren’t trained, people that were trained, so something we very expect. I want to stress that some people that were involved had good motives. They were honestly trying to do something. It’s important to try and work this, of course it’s important, but it’s not the main issue that we’ll create the jobs. And it has been an ideological tool in the hands of corporations and neoliberal ideologues all over the world. Anyway, just try to be more direct here, considering also these events here to try to solve the problems from what are these people going to do now after their rescue?
And we saw that it wasn’t working. We developed this idea that [inaudible 00:57:31] works perfectly or is presented. So the idea is very simple. It’s to say, look, why these people facing so bad conditions? It’s simple because they don’t have the news of prediction to carry on with their lives, to have these things and amounts of material sources to live [inaudible 00:57:56] because they don’t have the means of production that they have to sell their labor force on the labor markets. The labor market by definition is who has more power or who has the power inside by definition of the corporations? In other words, if you send back people to the labor markets, even if they get a job, they can face once again very hard situations. It is very bad conditions if the labor market is not well-regulated. If you give them an opportunity to work by themselves through all the means of production, to organize themselves in a democratic way, in other words, without bosses, the employees, without any hierarchy between people, maybe they won’t need to go to the liberal markets anymore.
So the main point of this program is to take people out of the labor markets. It’s to give the opportunity for them to organize themselves and to produce in a democratic way and to emancipate themselves from the liberal markets. So what we do, it’s very simple. Theory, it’s very simple, of course. It’s very complex to implement, but as you get the fines, that it’s companies themselves, corporations pay for labor courts when they are sued. They have to pay fines and reverse these fines for rural associations to produce the healthy food in the original places that the workers come from. Most of the workers rescued here in Brazil, they go from one place or another. They have some kind of local migration.
Not only, but normally they go from the northeast of Brazil to the south of Brazil, so the idea is to get this money from the fines the corporations themselves have to pay and to give not to the workers directly, but to arrange the facilities to help them to build the local, the cities that they belong from, rural associations to produce healthy foods. And from now on, we have dozens of different variables for organizing to make it work. But the main point is exactly what is said, is to let people like the workers to have the means of production, let the workers organize themselves in a democratic way to produce specifically healthy foods, and I can also explain why the idea is to produce health food.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s talk about that a little more. I want to ask about how you got involved in all of this and what it’s been like for you to see this program coming into existence? Because it is a radical program and it does say something about a different approach to the question of governance, like what is a state supposed to do? How is it supposed to serve the people? Like we were saying, I think that in our respective countries, we’ve been dominated by this neoliberal bullshit for so long that we’ve forgotten that there are other ways to organize society. There are other ways that the state can serve the people.
And what is happening over there, it reminds me of things in the 20th century, like the New Deal here in the United States or Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, like land reforms and expropriating the oil industry in the 1930s. That was radical stuff, but it’s like you guys are hearkening back to that. And so I wanted to ask a little more about how you got involved in all of this and what this program says about the current approach to government in Brazil, and what do you think other countries can learn from that?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Yes, Max. It’s almost sensed in Brazil, it’s one of our main historical problems. For our society, is precisely because Brazil has never faced land reform or an agrarian reform. If it’s more specific, I don’t know… How normally you say it in the US? It’s lands reform or agrarian reform?
Maximillian Alvarez:
It depends if you’re in a university or outside of a university, but they very much mean the same thing.
Vitor Filgueiras:
Okay. Anyway, there is a huge, huge concentration of lands in Brazil in the hands of very, very few people, and it explains a lot of bad things that have always happens in Brazil. And regarding slave-like conditions specifically, there are many studies also coming from the state saying that one of the main reasons that explain why slave-like conditions is still very common in Brazil. It’s because there has never been land reform in Brazil. And of course there have been many attempts in many different governments, many different contexts, but it never happens besides very specific situations, but not [inaudible 01:04:31] comprehensive approach. Anyway, so to try to explain how it’s happens and how it’s working. I was a labor inspector, like I said, from the Ministry of Labour, so I used to carry out these rescues.
I had been over Brazil doing it and it was clear, not only visually, while I was lively seeing the stuff happening, but also the data show that many workers are submitted to slave-like conditions, many times the same workers. So as a labor inspector and as a [inaudible 01:05:20] person as well, I was very disturbed with the situation and I was always thinking how we could do something different. And it was very obvious that the lands reform was something that must be done, but it’s very hard to be done because of many reasons. Of course the main thing is political, but regarding law, regarding bureaucracy. And so the idea of the Vida Pós Resgate, this program that we’re talking about [inaudible 01:05:53] came from this very specific spots where I was, then I led the labor inspection and I started to be professor of economics. And actually, I had the idea to make a partnership between the public Minister of Labor. It’s an institution here that it’s a public attorneys regarding labor law so when they sue companies, they take the case to the court and they can direct the resources, the science.
And I was like, well, we could use this money to benefit for this, to make some kinds of land reform. So the main point here, Max, is that Vida Pós Resgate, the program started trying to be in a short scale, of course, some kind of land reform. Exactly that was the idea, that we’ll take the money from their own corporations to facilitate, to make it feasible, the organization of workers to hand them enough productions especially, but not only the lands. So all we did, we made an agreement between the public Minister of Labour and the [inaudible 01:07:16] of the Federal University of Bahia in which we will first make a research regarding the existing public policies that addressed labor conditions and then try to organize and propose actually this program. So that’s what we did. We made the research. We took like four or five years doing this research, and during this research, we started and we developed this program, this idea in how it would work. Of course, everybody can imagine how many variables are inside this kind of program, this kind of researching. And we started 2021, two years ago.
The first two [inaudible 01:08:08], I would say, two different cities of Brazil, this partnership, University of Bahia, public Minister of Labor, and we always have to make some kind of partnership with the local mayor because many specific situations in the local areas have to be carried out by public authority, the municipal, the local authorities. So we got the fines from companies in the labor parts, these two different cities here in Bahia, and the two first projects started, like I said, almost two years ago. Now we have five different projects. The idea is at some point, Max, try to make the program something that will address every situation of slave-like condition. Every rescue we plan, at some point, to propose to the workers if they are interested, if they had the backgrounds that can relate to this kind of public policy, then the idea is that at some point, it’s going to be a comprehensive program that will give the opportunities for organizing workers in rural associations in every rescue.
It’s not happening yet. Today we have five projects, but that’s our plan. And the five projects that we are carrying out right now in this program, in five different cities, are giving us loads of sources, materials to think about in terms of the difficulties, in terms of the problems. I’m talking about the relation between the workers, bureaucracies, training. But here, Max, we’re talking about training for themselves. They have been trained to work for themselves, not to work with other people. And while the program is being carried out, turns out, like I said, we are learning a lot to try to make it more comprehensive. That’s the main idea.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that real quick because I know you’re super busy and I can’t keep you for much longer, but I just wanted to end on that note because like you said, the concept is simple. We’re going to sue these exploitative employers in labor court. We’re going to take those fines and we’re going to redirect that money to help the workers who have been freed from these slave-like conditions to buy their own land, to have the tools or training that they need to cultivate that land, to produce healthier food for their local economies and themselves. That’s a beautiful and simple concept, but making it happen is the difficult part, and we’re very much in the early infant stages of that. And I just wanted to ask if you could say a little more about the challenges that y’all face in terms of making that program a broad reality, but also the hopeful things, the hopeful signs that you’re seeing and where you think things go from here? We should do another one of these episodes in a year and talk about how it’s-
Maximillian Alvarez:
… do another one of these episodes in like a year and talk about how it’s going. But I guess what do you see that… what path lies ahead? What struggles lie ahead to make this program successful in the coming months and years?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Perfect. Well, I think first I have to try to draw, to illustrate, in a very superficial way how the program works so that you can have a more concrete idea of how it works. So the workers, we talk to the workers, that’s where we rescued to see when some rescue happens, we talk to them to see if they are interested to go back home, to work there, to live at their homelands, if they have a rural background, what they produce there, how the economy is built there, how the climates, the ecosystem, environment’s ecosystem is there. You know? Try to see if it’s feasible… feasible to carry it out via the process pose that it’s… we’re on the case. So if we think that it’s feasible, that we can do it.
The second part of the program is to make as many meetings as possible to know better the workers, and to make them know better the program, the proposition, the proposal for what’s going to help them. If everything goes well, we help them to organize a rural association with two main assumptions. There are just two assumptions, obligations that cannot be developed in this program. They cannot use wage work. They ought to be part of the association. They cannot use wage work between them, or bring somebody from outside to make someone to work as an employee. Everyone has to be at the same level in the association. And second, they cannot use any kind of chemical products like Monsanto and so on. We call it Brazil poisons. We cannot use any kind of poisons. It has to be sustainable, at least an organic approach. But if it’s feasible, try to go for our [inaudible 01:14:59] approach. So the idea to be sustainable in a social point of view and democrats way of work, and also in environmental points of view, low use of poisons in this store.
So the association is created and many different things starts to be done at the same time, so simultaneously. First of them of course is to get the money. All the money from the fines, it go to the association. It’s not for the individual, it’s for the association. Of course, the very basic thing here is to buy lands, which is a very hard task because most of the lands in Brazil are not legal in terms of the documents that they state consider to be necessary to make some ways legal. So it’s very hard to buy a farm, a legal farm, in Brazil. In the countryside, it’s very, very high. So it’s one of the main complexities, difficulties of the program, is to buy land. And we have done it. We have done it.
Also in many situations might, it’s interesting, the workers or their families, they have the lands, but these lands are very small and they are not keep it. They need capital if you wish to be productive. So in some cases, what we’re doing is to invest in equipment, facilities, machinery, everything needed in the lens of these earth, these people, these workers.
So well in the beginning, [inaudible 01:17:00] and we had two very different situations. In one situation, we buy the lands and we also will deliver everything that is needed for that land that we bought in terms of seeds, machineries, facilities, whatever it’s needed, products and so on for the production be carried out. In other situations, we make the lands that were already owned by the workers to be productive. So we used the money to capitalize, I don’t know if it’s the right word to say English, but to make these lands productive enough so that they can use their own lands to make in a decent way.
Simultaneously, so we’re talking about getting the money, about getting the lands, or use the lands that already from them, owned by them, and we have to prepare these workers to work for themselves. Now makes… there something also interesting. Because I’m pretty sure in the U.S., there is also this ideological parity of the entrepreneurship. Am I wrong? I’m pretty sure that same fact. It’s all out to everyone.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, we’ve got that here.
Vitor Filgueiras:
Yeah, everyone can be a boss, everyone can be rich. It just depends of your efforts and your view. And of course, it’s completely false because of two main reasons, very basic reasons. First, you can only make you living, I’m not talking about being rich. You can only make now living if you have the means of production. This fair system matures to make that living. You cannot take from nowhere. You know? From nowhere. And this means of production.
And second, what makes capitalism very productive in terms of improving the productive forces, if you will, is that capitalism works through… it functions through collective work, it’s wage work, but it’s collective work. As long as one by one, each one works optimizing the different and not dialoguing with each other. Exactly the contrary. The contracts can be automized, can be individual.
The formal way that corporations are organized, they seem to be fragmented, but by definition what makes capitalism productive and the labor, the workforce to improve is the cost. The production is collective by definition. The centralization of capital is just one very strong evidence of what I’m seeing, of what I’m seeing. But it’s very obvious that we are talking about 300 million company economy. We’re talking about high definition economies that are strong where they have collective arrangements.
Anyway, what’s [inaudible 01:20:41] trying to do about it, is to make this demagogue narrative, this theological narrative of future entrepreneurship, something real. Let’s use this narrative against them and say, okay, let’s promote the entrepreneurship of these workers. Let’s give them lands, let’s give them capital, let’s give them the machines and everything they need to be entrepreneurs. That’s the real idea, if you will, of the program.
So parts of this challenge, if I can say this way, is to prepare them to be in fact, indeed entrepreneurs. But not this individual entrepreneurship, you know, but a collective one. Say, look, you are going to work by yourselves, you’re going to work together. And it’s very hard to do it, as you can imagine. We are talking about people that came from social movements. They’re talking about people that used to live and are living in very difficult situations in a very individualistic society so it’s hard to make bonds between them, for them to create bonds, to create honest links between them. Normally, they’re thinking about the surviving on a daily basis. So it’s hard to make them trust themselves, trust the initiative. It’s hard to make them have this ideal that in this way of I will grow and get things done. It depends on me. Because normally, it doesn’t depend on the person. So there’s a very specific case. It depends on the person, the person, the people, the world, they have still to be the protagonists of the program.
The program is not going to do everything for the workers. It will facilitate. So a very hard challenge is to prepare them, to help them to assimilate, incorporate the idea that they can do it together, that they work together, that everyone will benefit if they work together. We try to do this in many different ways, both building meetings, trainings, courses. We try to and gather as many institutions as listening, to prepare them, to talk to them, and it’s very hard. In other words, I think that it’s most challenge an aspects of the program. It really, of course, also embraces, also reach the technical training. Of course, they’re talking about different stuff. Sometimes, Max, some of them are working with books because of many resource regarding weather, regarding climates, regarding the economic framework of the cities, other are producing cocoa. So depends on the city, on the region, what they will produce.
So the training depends on, of course, what’s going to be produced. And of course, then we have many differences, variables regarding what the equipments will be used, what kind of preparation, what kind of inputs will be needed. And everything has to be added. Otherwise, even if everyone is very engaged, it’s not going to work. Like I said, what the program tries to do is to facilitate this organizations, these associations to produce healthy food. What’s the idea here, Max? It’s not only… Of course, it’s not only this idea of sustainability, this generic stuff that’s normally used by corporations themselves. It’s precisely the opposite.
The idea is producing healthy foods. First of all, you can secure healthy food security so that at least they can exist with healthy foods, but also to try, and that’s a very important aspect of the program… The program starts in the moment of the rescue and it goes back to the moment of the distribution of the products. Because in Brazil, we have a national public policy that makes schools, public schools to buy meals for… the food for the children in public schools, from the small producers, from rural associations. So it’s so called institutional markets. And we are linking the production of these associations to this public policy. So making contracts with the local authorities so that the schools can buy food from these associations. And it’s very important not only because the children will get healthy foods, but also because it can give some income, [inaudible 01:26:31] pay. We won’t rely on markets. You know? Open markets in so on, trying to sell the products.
On contrary, having contracts with public authorities, public local authorities, they can have a regular income that can provide some… It’s going to be easier to sell. Even at these so-called fair trades and so on. But that’s something that we’re thinking ahead and maybe it still happen, but at least this institutional markets, we are looking to get it done as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell, yeah, baby. Well, building a new world out of the ashes of the old is never easy. But I hope in a year, when we talk again, this program is flourishing and more people are involved in it because it’s so important. And I hope that governments around the region, around the world take notice. I hope people listen to this and are inspired by what y’all are trying to do over there. And I’m so grateful that I’ve learned about it, and that our incredible friend and mutual comrade, the great Vina Dubal put us in touch so that we could talk more about this.
So I just wanted to thank you again, brother, for talking with me about this, for setting up the conversation that folks heard in the beginning of this. And like I said, I want to stay on this. I want to check back in and hear how the program’s going. And I guess to kind of round us out, any kind of final words that you had for folks listening to this about why this is important, and what you think they should be on the lookout for in the coming year?
Vitor Filgueiras:
Oh, Max, I truly appreciate the opportunity, the space. I’m willing, looking forward talking to you next year and tell about the failures and the success and what has gone well, what hasn’t. And I’m pretty sure that it’s going to be interesting. And the main point that I want to make here is that the [inaudible 01:29:06] we try to materialize things. You know? And one of the main things that seems to be natural in our society is the wage work organization of production. It seems that corporations are the only way that we can organize ourselves to produce our material needs. And it’s not true. It’s just parts of contexts of humanity.
And some centuries ago, it seems impossible for society to have democratic ways of organizing ourselves. So choosing our leaders, democracy itself was for many centuries putting doubts or horizons like it’s impossible to help. Democracy is an anarchy. We need to have a king, we need to have a spiritual leader. We need to have someone that tells us what to do. And it’s part of democracy, as everybody knows, the construction of democracy was hard, and well, the main difficulty was to convince people that sharing participation in society’s decision was something not only possible, but something that it was good. It was something to be seeked, that everybody has to fight for this, it’s important.
And nowadays, I think that in many parts of the world, people agree that democracy is good. So why not start talking about democracy at the workplaces? Because we decide about our leaders in the political arena once in two years, four years, but we spend most of our life working. Why can’t we decide how the work is going to be done? [inaudible 01:31:22] to be done in a democratic way? Everybody choosing, everybody discussing, debates, and carry out to the production in a democratic way. I think that this kind of project aims bring those debates. It’s not going to be easy. Democracy was not easy to be carried out. It still isn’t easy, but it’s the right way to go. And I think that we can and we need to impose this idea to debate and to incorporate this idea for the workplace as well, for the production of our material needs as well. That’s what we’re trying to propose and to simulate in this program.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
After a historic six weeks on strike, United Auto Workers members ratified new contracts with Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (which owns Dodge/Chrysler). Workers are set to receive 25% raises over the life of their contract, cost-of-living allowances tied to inflation, the right to strike over plant closures, and more benefits in their new contract.
But outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23), New York Times (11/9/23) and Bloomberg (11/9/23), still struggling to report on labor from a workers’ perspective (see FAIR.org, 9/26/23), instead focused on the economy at large or predictive reporting. Throughout the strike, media seemed interested in any story—how the union will wreck the economy, Musk’s potential countermoves, why the EV transition is doomed—that didn’t focus on bread-and-butter gains for union members.
CBS Detroit (10/23/23) didn’t put the big number in perspective—or acknowledge that its source worked for the companies the UAW was on strike against.
Bloomberg (11/7/23, 11/9/23) reported that the work stoppage cost the auto industry billions of dollars. Others mourned the revenue loss for car companies, running headlines about the millions or billions lost (Fortune, 11/30/23; CNN, 10/31/23; PBS, 10/24/23).
Meanwhile, on earnings calls in late October, GM reported that total company revenue was up 5%, to more than $44 billion, boosting profits to $3.6 billion. And Ford assured investors that “our revenue remains strong, up 11%.” As Axios (11/30/23) pointed out, while Stellantis said the labor action cost it $3.2 billion, “it also reported that net revenues so far this year were at $48 billion, up 7% compared to the same quarter in 2022.”
CBS News Detroit (10/23/23) said that economic losses to the nation as a whole had surpassed $9.3 billion, citing Anderson Economic Group, consultants whose clients include General Motors and Ford, who had previously said that even a 10-day UAW strike could cost the US economy $5.6 billion, a line that was parroted throughout the media (Bloomberg, 9/10/23; New York Times, 9/13/23; Forbes, 9/15/23; see FAIR.org, 9/26/23). Even if the strike had cost the economy $9 billion, for perspective, that’s 1/30th of 1% of the US GDP.
As more workers continued to join the strike across the country and tentative deals were made, outlets like the Wall Street Journal (10/30/23) bemoaned rising labor costs. It even went as far (10/31/23) as to warn that high wages were “a potential complication for the Federal Reserve’s fight to lower inflation.”
“Even before the raise they are striking for, Detroit’s unionized auto workers are probably the best paid in the world after factoring in benefits such as healthcare,” said the Journal (10/11/23). “Their employers can afford it for now, but high labor costs box them in strategically.”
However, at the same time, GM CEO Mary Barra bragged to investors about the company’s profitability in an October 24 earnings call (Motley Fool, 10/24/23). “It’s been clear coming out of Covid that the wages and benefits across the US economy would need to increase because of inflation and other factors,” she added.
“These [electric] vehicles have fewer parts, and making them will eventually require fewer workers,” NPR (10/1/22) reported. But it isn’t necessarily so.
In its write-up about Biden taking a “victory lap” in the wake of the agreement, Bloomberg (11/7/23) wrote that “the strike put Biden’s pro-union bonafides up against his clean-energy push” for electric vehicles, because “union leaders and workers worried that push would cost them jobs, reduce wages and favor non-unionized companies.”
A similar piece in the New York Times (11/9/23) said the president made the case for clean energy, even “as many workers fear the president’s climate change agenda could endanger their jobs.” However, later in the same article, reporters Lisa Friedman and Neal Boudette quoted Syracuse University’s David Popp, who studies the economics of technological change, saying that “there doesn’t seem to be a consensus yet on whether” electric vehicles will require fewer workers.
The reporters also floated as a fact that “it takes fewer than half the laborers to assemble an all-electric vehicle as it does to build a gasoline-powered car.” Similarly, there is no consensus or data to back up this claim.
So where did it come from? Ford estimated in 2017 that there could be a 30% reduction in labor hours per unit for electric vehicles. In 2019, Morgan Stanley’s analyst Adam Jonas (CNBC, 3/15/19) said tech start-ups like Tesla and Rivian could build electric vehicles at “a 50% reduction in direct labor…or more.”
Auto executives continue to repeat the line that as EVs have fewer moving parts, they will require less labor. In 2022, Ford president and CEO Jim Farley told reporters, “It takes 40% less labor to make an electric car.” The America First Policy Institute, led by former Trump administration officials and endorsed by Trump himself, put out a widely-cited research report (7/13/23) citing the estimates from Ford themselves in 2017 and Farley’s comments in 2022.
But according to CNN Business (10/6/23), “Several research reports…found little total difference in the labor hour requirements of EV manufacturing compared to gas-powered cars.” For instance, a recent Carnegie Mellon University study (7/13/22) estimated the EV supply chain could require more labor than gas-powered cars when taking other components, such as batteries, into account.
As CNN‘s report demonstrated, such information was readily available to journalists during the UAW strike—and dispelling a false talking point would have been a very useful role for journalism to play. But most were content to simply repeat Ford’s talking point, no questions asked.
A New York Times profile (10/5/23) described UAW president Shawn Fain as “a confrontational figure who vilifies the automakers while alarming Wall Street.”
Media have also struggled to understand this new wave of union activism, often lifting up stories of highly educated or “relatively privileged” “salts“—employees who join a workplace with the intent of forming a union. For example, Bloomberg (4/3/23) calls them “the mostly secret ingredient in a once-in-a-generation wave of union organizing.” Others have made efforts to put a spotlight on specific organizers, like Jaz Brizack or Chris Smalls.
At the UAW, that spotlight was put on the reformist UAW president Shawn Fain and his team. “Led by Fain and a cohort of outside labor activists, [the UAW leadership] drove a campaign that company executives have called acrimonious and theatrical,” described the Wall Street Journal (11/14/23). The paper also found the time to run nearly 1,000 words (11/7/23) on Fain’s “Eat the Rich” shirt. That article followed a 2,500-word piece (10/30/23) about how “Three Young Activists Who Never Worked in an Auto Factory Helped Deliver Huge Win for the UAW.”
Fain was elected UAW president earlier this year by less than 500 votes (Labor Notes, 3/3/23), running against a scandal-ridden caucus that had been in power for decades. Fain won after a rule change let union members vote directly for leadership, instead of leaving the choice to chapter officials.
He brought on a communications expert who worked with Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as a lawyer and a former labor journalist who have both worked with the NewsGuild, among other unions. Like the Wall Street Journal article (10/30/23) that painted the UAW’s leadership as outside agitators, others describe him and his team as “adversarial” or “socialist-aligned.”
However, Fain was elected in the most democratic election of the UAW’s recent history, in a union previously described as having a “legacy of corruption.” Some blame Fain for promising too much to members on the contract, or said his “demands have gone too far,” such as calling for a 32-hour work week at 40 hours of pay for autoworkers. “I want to be clear on this point—I didn’t raise members’ expectations,” Fain rebutted on one of his many Facebook Live posts (10/13/23). “Our broken economy is what’s raising our members’ expectations, and our members are right to be angry.”
The post Corporate Media Reluctant to Report on UAW Victory From Workers’ Perspective appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
On Friday, at a press conference of labor leaders in front of the White House, United Auto Workers (UAW) Region 9A director Brandon Mancilla announced that the international UAW, meaning the entire union, had joined calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and made plans to investigate its ties to the Israeli military. The UAW represents over 400,000 workers in the U.S. (and over half a million retired…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Workers are strategically taking direct action to disrupt fake corporate holidays like “Black Friday” and Starbucks’ “Red Cup Day.” Last week, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, hundreds of Macy’s workers in Washington state walked out in protest of the company’s refusal to bargain a fair contract with the union (UFCW 3000). One week prior to that, on Nov. 16, Starbucks workers at over 200 locations around the US walked off the job on “Red Cup Day” to protest the company’s relentless union busting and refusal to bargain a contract with any of the stores that have unionized with Starbucks Workers United. In this worker solidarity livestream, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez will speak directly with workers and organizers on the frontlines of these struggles, including: Moe Mills, a worker-organizer at Starbucks and member of Starbucks Workers United; Liisa Luick, a longtime sales associate at Macy’s; and Sean Embly from the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000.
GoFundMe: Help suspended union workers make ends meet.
Studio Production: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. After taking a much needed break over Thanksgiving, we are back with another installment of our biweekly worker solidarity live streams here at The Real News. We’ve got a doozy for y’all today. But before we get rolling, I want to just take a quick second to make a candid plea to all of you watching and listening right now. The Real News is an independent viewer supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads. And as you may have noticed, we don’t put any of our reporting behind paywalls. We have a small but fiercely dedicated team of folks who are committed to reporting and lifting up the voices from the front lines of struggle around the world, people fighting for their rights and fighting against exploitation in the workplace. People standing up to defend their civil and human rights against the police and prison industrial complexes and other apparatuses of state repression and surveillance.
People fighting the life shredding madness of imperial domination, colonial occupation, and endless war around the globe. People standing up against racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQ+ hatred, and all forms of bigotry in the US and around the world. People fighting against misinformation and fighting to maintain a free press, people fighting to stop the destruction of our shared planet and fighting for a future that’s still worth living in. You’ve seen our work, you know what we’re about, but we absolutely cannot continue to do this work without your support. And like everyone else right now, we are in a mad dash to raise money here at the end of the year so we can keep bringing y’all coverage of the stories, voices, and struggles you care about most in 2024 and beyond. So please become a supporter of The Real News. Use the donate button on this live stream or head on over to TheRealNews.com/donate and become a supporter today. I promise you it really, really makes a difference.
All right, from Amazon to Macy’s to Starbucks, workers around the US and beyond have been strategically taking direct actions to disrupt fake corporate holidays like so-called Black Friday and Starbucks’s Red Cup Day. Last week, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, around 400 Macy’s workers in Washington State walked out in protests of the company’s refusal to bargain a fair contract with the union that is UFCW Local 3000. As the great Michael Sainato, a longtime real news contributor reported recently at The Guardian, “In 2021 and 2022, Macy’s reported profits of over $1 billion. The company spent $600 million on stock buybacks and paid out $173 million in dividends to shareholders in 2022 alone. The union has criticized these profits and Macy’s Chief Executive Jeff Gennette’s $11 million annual pay package as the company refuses to bargain on wage increases the union is asking for in a new contract.” “We would like them to share some of those profits so we can have a livable wage”, said Azi Domingo, who has worked at Macy’s in Washington for 21 years.
“Macy’s CEO gets $11 million per year while a lot of his workers rely on food banks and some can’t even afford to see doctors because of the low wages and the expensive healthcare.” Sainato continues, “Starting pay in the most recent contract with Macy’s was at or near Washington State’s minimum wage, which goes up to $16.28 an hour on the 1st of January.” “They have worked us to death on skeletal staffing and it’s just not fair,” said Lisa Luick, a longtime sales associate at Macy’s in Linwood, Washington. Lisa continues, “When we see that they’ve made all these billions when they pledge to put money back into the business, they’re establishing 30 new stores. They have the Macy’s Day parade, they have the fireworks. We are angry and even our customers comment on it.” One week prior to that, on November 16th, Starbucks workers at over 200 locations around the US walked off the job on “Red Cup Day” to protest the company’s relentless union busting and its refusal to bargain a contract with any of the stores that have unionized with Starbucks workers United over the past two years.
As Alyssa Hardy reported at Teen Vogue on the day of the strike, “On November 16th, nearly 9,000 Starbucks employees walked out of over 200 stores around the United States in what they are calling the Red Cup Rebellion.” Each year, Starbucks releases a free reusable red cup ahead of the holiday season. And according to Reuters, the release day is one of the coffee brands’ biggest traffic days, but the strike comes after 363 Starbucks stores in 41 states have voted to unionize over the last two years. Starbucks has yet to come to the bargaining table with the unionized shops unless it is in person, which is a central issue in bargaining, some of which were closed in the time since. That is, some of the stores that unionized, as we’ve reported here at The Real News, we’re closed by Starbucks. They claim it’s not in retaliation for organizing, but we’ll get to that later. Alyssa Hardy continues, “Last week, workers filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board over Starbucks’s refusal to bargain around promotional days.”
Now, as we always do here at The Real News, we’re going to take y’all to the front lines of struggle so you can hear firsthand from the folks who are fighting these fights about what they’re fighting for, why it’s important, and what you can do to help. I’m truly honored to be joined on the live stream today by our three incredible guests. We are joined today by Moe Mills, a worker organizer at Starbucks, and a member of Starbucks Workers United. We are also joined by Lisa Luick, a longtime sales associate at Macy’s in Washington State. And we are also joined by Sean Embly from the United Food and Commercial Workers, or UFCW Local 3000, which represents over 50,000 members working in grocery, retail, healthcare, meat packing, cannabis, and other industries across Washington state, northeast Oregon and northern Idaho. Moe, Lisa, Sean, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it. Okay, well, let’s get rolling gang, because we got a lot to dig into here.
These are really important struggles that y’all have been involved in, and I want to make sure that our viewers and listeners hear directly from you about what happened on the days of the actions, what has brought us to this point, and where we go from here. As I said in the intro, what folks in the labor movement and beyond can do to support y’all in these struggles. So to start things off, let’s go around the table and have our amazing panelists introduce yourselves to the great Real News viewers and listeners. Now, obviously we’re not going to be able to cover everything in this first round, but I wanted to ask if y’all could each take about five minutes to just give us a breakdown, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about who you are, your involvement in these struggles, the work that you do, and then tell us about these actions that y’all participated in on Black Friday and on Red Cup Day. So Moe, why don’t we start with you, then we’ll go to Lisa.
Moe Mills:
Yeah, thank you. So my name is Moe Mills. I’m a Starbucks partner in St. Louis, Missouri. I’ve been a partner for a little over four years and a supervisor for two of those years. We’ve got eight union stores in St. Louis, my store has been union for a little over one year. Like Max said before, we’ve got over 360 stores nationally since this campaign started in December 2021, and we’ve seen absolutely no movement on a contract. Eight union stores in St. Louis on November 16th, 200 stores nationally chose to strike over the ULP of Starbucks refusing to bargain regarding staffing for these promotional days. So Starbucks has been under a lot of fire in the press recently for various reasons, and to make up for some of that lost money they’ve been upping the promotional days. Doing huge sales, doing buy one, get one day’s multiple days a week, and not letting partners know until the last minute and not staffing us adequately for these days.
So buy one, get one sounds really, really nice when Starbucks’s drinks are like what, 10, $12 in some areas. But what people don’t see is that behind the line, there are three workers, we’re all struggling. People are not unable to take breaks during this promo in September. Every single Thursday from noon to close drinks were buy one, get one free. I did not take a single lunch. Eventually my store chose to walk out over one of these Thursdays, and then my Thursday shift was completely taken away from me. I lost eight hours a week because they knew if I was there I would walk. But customers also are spending insane amounts of money on these beverages and then waiting in lines for 40, 45 minutes. So it’s hurting the service that customers are getting. It’s hurting the workers, we’re unable to take breaks. We’re working in dirty stores that are under stocked where we’re not getting all of the product that we need so no one leaves happy except for Starbucks, who is just making more and more money during these record-breaking profit seasons.
So on the 16th we struck over that ULP of them refusing to bargain around those promotional days, and that was our largest national strike yet. It was super successful here in St. Louis. Like I said, we’ve got eight union shops and all of them shut down. So it was a really, really big win for us here. I’m really proud of the work that we’ve done and hopefully this opens Starbucks eyes a little bit more. I know it’s starting to open the customer’s eyes, it’s hurting customers almost as much as it’s hurting the workers. And now that we’ve got the customers on our side, I don’t think it’ll be long before Starbucks meets us at the table.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, kudos to y’all for holding the line for this long while you have been literally facing a relentless corporate crime wave for two years. We’re going to get to that in the next section, but I just wanted to quickly follow up on that last point and ask them what it was like on the ground that day, what you were hearing from customers. Because I was in Chicago during Red Cup Day, the sacred holiday of Red Cup Day, and I was in a hotel getting ready for a conference. I overheard on Today on NBC one of the hosts say, “Oh, you may have to walk past a picket line to get your Starbucks today.”
I screamed in my hotel bathroom. I was like, “No, you fucking won’t. Do not cross a picket line.” Pardon my French but it just made me so angry and it made me realize that we still have a long way to go in terms of overturning the anti-worker, anti-union sentiment that is broadcast relentlessly from corporate media. But I just wanted to ask if you could say a little more about the action on the day, what you were hearing from folks, what it looked like on the ground, and then we’ll toss it to Lisa.
Moe Mills:
Here in St. Louis, it was overall pretty positive. There’s always a few customers that are frustrated that they can’t get their $12 drink and don’t really understand, but for the most part, we are able. Customers are stopping and asking us what’s going on and asking us, they’re like, “Should I stop going to…” That’s what is hard for me that Starbucks doesn’t see is there is a reason that people make Starbucks a part of their daily routine. There’s people that want to do their homework there, take their meetings there, make that a place they want to be, and it’s the workers. You know what I mean? We are the ones making those drinks that they love. We’re the ones creating the cafe environment that they want to be a part of, that they want to spend their time and bring their friends and family.
So naturally, when a customer pulls into a drive-through or goes to park and go into a cafe and they see their favorite barista that makes their drink for them every single day holding a picket sign that says, “No contract, no coffee,” they’re going to ask questions. So for the most part, I would say it’s been pretty positive. I’ve gotten to connect with a lot of my favorite customers who I know their names, I know their families, when they walk in the store, I’m already making their drink because I know exactly what they want. So we have the relationships with them and it’s been really easy to just explain to them what’s going on, and they’re absolutely appalled. They’re like, “Okay, well I will be back tomorrow and I’m excited to see you and I’m excited to know how the strike…”
Moe Mills:
I’ll be back tomorrow and I’m excited to see you and I’m excited to know how the strike went. So yeah, for the most part, there’s always a handful of people that are just excited to cross a picket line for some reason. But for the most part, our customers are really, really cool and are always down and they drive past the store. They see us with their picket lines, they honk and they go make their coffee at home.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, yeah. There will always be a certain percentage of boot lickers who think it’s funny to cross a picket line to get your seasonal latte. To those people, go fuck yourself. But Liisa, I wanted to toss things over to you and ask if you could introduce yourself to the livestream. Tell us a little bit about who you are, the work that you do, and how long you’ve been doing that work. And yeah, take us to the action on Black Friday. Give folks the lowdown on what happened that day, what it felt like, and what you were hearing from your fellow workers and people passing on the street.
Liisa Luick:
Yeah. So my name is Liisa Luick and I’ve been working at the Alderwood Macy’s for almost 16 years. I’m currently in the men’s department. I’m a sales associate, and I would like to pleased to say that on the 16th I had the day off and I went out and joined the Starbucks picketers and we had tremendous support in Everett. So it was a lot of fun and a good warmup too Black Friday, which is we had, as you say, we walked off the job for Black Friday weekend. It was a three day ULP strike, unfair labor practice. And the reason for unfair labor practice was because in May I had been suspended for three weeks without pay for calling 911 on a known shoplifter. And this was after calling management and the police, of course, I follow… Excuse me, management and what we call asset protection, loss prevention is probably what you know it as.
And it was a tremendous strike. It was just as Moe says, we had tremendous support and it was really exciting and it was hard. It was cold, but it was very bonding. My coworkers, we had coworkers from three stores, Bellingham, South Center, and Alderwood, and we were out there from 3:00 in the morning until 8:30 at night. The store to shorten its hours, so we didn’t have to go 24 hours, but we had a lot of honking, A lot of people didn’t go in on Monday after the strike was over. One of my longtime customers, he’s a Boeing shop steward, he and his wife came in, he says, “Is it okay to shop now?” I said, absolutely, “Please come in now and thank you for respecting our strike.” He says, “Not only do I respect your strike, but I put your picture up on my wall because this is so inspiring.” So that was kind of high praise really for us, and for me.
But as Moe says, we know our customers. It hurts us not to be there for them on those days, but to have them support us just means the world to us and to understand. And they see the theft and the violence that happens and they are bothered by it. So this is not new to our customers to see why we are striking. And anyway, we kicked off our strike with a presser and a parade down at South Center, which was really fantastic, and I hope there’s footage of that. In contrast to the Macy’s Day parade, we had our own balloons, our Macy’s workers Strike Parade with balloons and speakers and a Cher impersonator and really great attendance. Many, many locals from around the area and from around the country came both to our presser and to support us all weekend as far as way as Denver, Colorado came to the Bellingham strike. So that was, again, really inspiring. It’s amazing how bonding this has been across the board for unions and for workers.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. I think every point or another, I think that should be a staple, just like Scabby the Rat showing up on every picket line. That’s awesome to hear. And I want us to dig in the next round into the contract negotiations, the working conditions, the things that, as you touched on, pushed y’all to this point. But Sean, I wanted to bring you in here and ask if you could kind of talk about the same thing, but from the union side, tell us a bit about yourself, the work that you do and your involvement with the Macy’s workers. I think a lot of folks probably just learned recently that Macy’s workers were unionized, right? So give us a little backstory there and tell us a bit more about yourself and what it was like for you on the day of the action.
Sean Embly:
Sure. A little bit about myself. I’ve been a member of this local since 2009. I started out in warehouse work in a meat department working for local 81 that merged in a local 21, which is now part of local 3,000. I got involved in my union around the paid safe and six day legislation and raising the minimum wage in Washington State, which we eventually were successful at in 2016. And I’ve been on staff for about eight years now. Had a myriad of different roles, worked in healthcare grocery with our packing and processing workers, retail. My involvement from the Macy’s side is really about supporting the retail workers that have been rising up and saying, “Enough is enough. We’re not going to take these working conditions anymore. We’re not going to take these low ball offers from the employer anymore.” We’ve been at the table with Macy’s since last February, last winter negotiating.
And they have just continued to treat the workers poorly, not respect labor law. They are offering incredibly low wages, demanding takeaways in the contract. At one point our local had a lot more Macy’s. We had almost 1,500 workers all up and down the I5 corridor in Western Washington. Now we have three stores. Macy’s has closed down stores over the years to consolidate their footprint. But as Lisa said, this is part of their strategy to expand into smaller areas across the United States. They’re still a very profitable company and they can certainly afford to pay their workers better. And so I think this fight had been brewing for quite some time, a number of contract cycles where Macy’s has continued to come in with disrespectful contract offers not step up and create safer workplaces like workers were demanding, not take the concerns from their workers seriously. And so eventually you have a choice.
You can continue to take the mistreatment from a company or you can stand up and say, no, we’re not going to do this anymore and we’re going to fight to get a better workplace, to get a better contract. And that’s exactly what workers decided to do on Black Friday when they walked off the job and had a huge impact. We made Macy’s restrict their hours on one of the most profitable weekends for them. That alone was a huge impact. We had overwhelming majority of workers out on the strike line, some just deciding to stay home. Customers were not crossing the picket line. And then once that worked, couldn’t get checked out because all the workers were outside on the picket line. So it was a very powering action from my point of view. And talking to workers, they felt good about it. And I think we’re coming out of the three-day unfair labor practice strike in a strong position with more workers willing to step up, feeling more confident about their power.
And you heard Liisa and Moe talk about it a little bit, the relationships that retail workers, service workers have with their customers, that’s what makes the company money. And you have these companies coming in and completely disregarding those relationships with customers. They don’t view workers as a valuable part of their business and think that they can just hire anybody to do the work. When you have years and years in some cases of forming relationships with customers and getting those customers to come back into the store, come back into Starbucks, come back into Macy’s, and they don’t appreciate that. They think that people are disposable and interchangeable and don’t honor the expertise that the workers bring to the table to make their company profitable.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I think that’s really powerfully put. And I mean, it is so depressingly consistent with the stories that we cover here every week on the real news. I mean, we are talking to workers and organizers like yourselves week in, week out. We’ve been talking to Starbucks workers from all over the country since the historic Buffalo victory two years ago, that momentum. Beyond that, we’ve talked to workers at the stores in Ithaca that were closed in suspected retaliation for becoming the first city in the country to have all Starbucks locations unionized. Now all those Starbucks locations are gone. The one in Washington, DC, the one in Seattle, all the workers who have been retaliated against, harassed, fired, descheduled, under scheduled. So they lose their healthcare benefits, just this relentless attack on workers’ rights that Starbucks has been doing in broad daylight. And it is absolutely maddening.
But also what you were saying, Sean, like the other trend that we can hear coming through the stories of workers in industries that appear so different on the surface, but are experiencing so many of the same dynamics that you just described. It was the case with railroad workers last year, more work being piled onto fewer work while the companies cost cut and corner cut year after year, while shareholder dividends, stock buybacks, and executive pay and profits are through the roof. So the workers are pissed off and run into the ground. The customers are pissed off. Communities like East Palestine are being destroyed because of all these cost-cutting Wall Street led measures. But that’s also happening in it’s part of the business model of dollar stores that we’ve talked to workers at dollar stores who are being left with one or two people to manage an entire store, and the shelves are a mess.
People are defecating in the aisles, shoplifting, and a lot of those workers can’t even control the air conditioning in their own stores. And yet the company is raking in huge profits and it is making a conscious decision like Chipotle is, like Starbucks is, like so many other jobs are to understaff people, to pile more work onto fewer workers, to squeeze as much as they can and pocket the difference. This is a economy wide problem that we are hearing in the stories of workers who are going on strike, who are trying to unionize their shops, so on and so forth. But then there’s also the other side of just how incredibly difficult and needlessly difficult it is in this country, “the land of the free for workers” to exercise their right to unionize in the workplace, that is a right. It is not a privilege. It is not a special category.
It is a goddamn right. And yet when workers try to exercise that right, they get fired, they get subjected to harassment, they get management down their throats, they get put in captive audience meetings, their stores get closed, like the bosses can break the law left and right. And the mechanisms of accountability that we have in this country are so minuscule that Starbucks can literally go for years. Like Amazon can go for years, other companies can go for years without bargaining in good faith like they are legally required to do with workers who are exercising their rights. They can just keep not obeying the law. Just like the Pittsburgh Post Gazette owners are. Those workers have been on strike for over a year now, and the owners can just keep not bargaining in good faith and hope that workers lose their homes and leave for another job. This is ridiculous.
So let’s talk about that. Let’s take a step back and give people a bird’s eye view of these two crucial struggles at Macy’s and Starbucks. Let’s remind people about where this all started and what it’s all about. The key issues that workers have been rallying around that have led them to unionize, that have led them to form a union and try to negotiate with the company. What are the issues around wages, working conditions, safety, so on and so forth that y’all are fighting for at Macy’s and Starbucks? And what has been going on in the past year or two years in regards to bargaining with Macy’s and Starbucks, or as we’ve discussed, the lack of bargaining at Macy’s and Starbucks. So Moe, let’s toss it back to you. Give us a sort of bird’s eye view and talk to us about what brought us to this point.
Moe Mills:
Yeah, so at my store, we filed to our Petition to Unionize in May of 2022. And that came after just mostly our experience through the beginning of the pandemic. So just lack of COVID precautions, intense short staffing on floors, keeping the store open even when there would be COVID scares in the store. And this is coming from a background of my store at the time was mostly-
Moe Mills:
… in store at the time was mostly comprised of single parents or people who had multiple children at home, just like a lot of parents providing for a lot of children. And we were scared. I’m not a parent myself, but in my store, we were scared. People were scared to come to work and bring that home to their families. Starbucks was not letting us tell customers to wear masks. We stayed open, our cafes were full of unmasked people, and we were dropping like flies. We were getting burnt out.
We would get sick, go on a temporary COVID leave, come back to a store where half of our coworkers were gone because they had COVID. So that was really scary. And on top of that, I think the pandemic taught Starbucks like, “Okay, we can make just as much money as we made pre-pandemic with half the amount of people on the floor.” I think they liked that it didn’t hurt their bottom line, whether or not it hurt us. And since 2020, we’ve noticed them intensely cutting labor. So it’s not that there aren’t workers, this, quote, unquote, “labor shortage or worker shortage” does not exist. We are here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The, “No one wants to work any more crap.”
Moe Mills:
No. My store has plenty of partners, we are well staffed, well-equipped to man our floors. We are intentionally getting under scheduled. Starbucks does not want to pay the workers. And it got to the point where this, on top of all of the COVID stuff, it got to the point where I had fellow supervisors of five, six years of tenure who had children at home who rely on the health insurance. And have to work 20 hours a week to maintain their health insurance got cut down to as low as 12 hours a week. And I lost their benefits. And we had to start a food pantry in the back of my store to make sure people were getting fed. And if people are not getting enough hours to access the benefits that Starbucks promotes left and right and also cannot feed themselves or feed their children, that is an utter failure on the company’s part and it’s shameful.
So that’s what drove us to organize. So we filed in May of 2022, won our election in August of 2022. And since then, it has been interesting. We’ve had one bargaining session in which Starbucks blocked out about 15 minutes in. And that has been all the traction I have seen with bargaining. I know their current tactic is to… they have a website that they like to push to employees, both union and non-union as well as customers. That tells everyone that it is Workers United that is not bargaining in good faith. And that Starbucks has taken steps to set up bargaining sessions and get them scheduled. Recently, we checked the website just to see what was going on and our two newest union stores in St. Louis, it said that they both had scheduled and confirmed bargaining dates with Workers United. And we have received absolutely no contact.
Our union staffers don’t know what they’re talking about. The store managers don’t know what they’re talking about, and none of the partners have heard anything. So Starbucks is at the point where they’re just lying and saying that they’re bargaining and saying that they’ve had all of these sessions and no one has seen any movement or heard anything. And in the meantime, they’re still cutting our hours. They’re still pushing out workers. I have two workers in my district in St. Louis that just got put on a paid suspension that aren’t receiving pay all over them, refusing to serve a customer that was verbally assaulting them. So Starbucks is doing anything and everything that it can to push us out and essentially starve us in the meantime while they stalemate on this bargaining.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Well, I’m going to start screaming my head off, but people have already heard enough of that. So let’s cut that out and toss it to Liisa. Liisa, give us the background from your side. As you said, you’ve… Oh, it looks like your phone is turned again, sorry.
Liisa Luick:
I just turned [inaudible 00:34:45].
Maximillian Alvarez:
But if you could, like you said, you’ve been at Macy’s for many years. You’ve seen a lot of changes in Macy’s and the retail industry pre and post COVID. So tell us a little bit about… give us more of the backstory to the kind of working conditions of folks like yourself at Macy’s. What that job entails, what led to this union effort and what the key issues in bargaining are that have pushed y’all to the point of going on strike on Black Friday weekend.
Liisa Luick:
So again, Moe really touched on this about the COVID Pandemic, the COVID era. And our employers learning how to… it was okay to work with fewer people and then, “Oh wow, the profits went up with fewer people.” And so we’ve just been horribly and chronically understaffed. And I had actually gone on two years ago with the New York Times, there’s an article where I have outlined all of this that they published. Because yes, retailers, excuse me, businesses learned real fast, “Hey, we can get away with having fewer people to work and this is great and let’s keep going.” So in our bargain right now or in our store right now, they have been… we’re bargaining.
Macy’s actually is bargaining that they would like to be able to hire more people for the holidays, for more days that aren’t part of the union. And we have said no. We are now looking at working the holidays with just our staff. They’re not hiring anybody. There’s a few holiday hires and that is it. And so we’re going to have to do these long holiday hires, holiday hours on just our staff alone, which the last three days or two days has been daunting. Since COVID in the last few years, which has been different from previous years. We have seen a rise in theft, which has given us a rise in violence and assaults. Yes, things were better in the old days, we did not have this condition, but we do now.
And now we have to deal with it. Even on the strike lines at South Center, we had a couple of situations as recently as that. We have a culture now in our company that’s very heightened of intimidation and retaliation. It’s been very difficult, nobody wants to call anyone, management or anybody about anything because for fear of retaliation. So it’s been a huge problem. And we also have had less… well, again, less staff. So we have customers, as you said, defecating in the aisles. Now, last week was horrible. I couldn’t believe it. Three separate instances where normally we didn’t use to have these problems, or at least hardly ever. It’s just very much a changed time. So we are one of our key components, certainly that’s dear to my heart, that we’re pushing.
And the reason that we struck is for safer conditions, safer for us and safer for the customers. We need increased security. It needs not to be asset protection who… Because that is Macy’s answer is, “Well, we’ll just get asset protection, more asset protection.” Well, they just guard the merchandise. They don’t guard us. And in one instance, probably over a year ago, my colleague and I were again helping some known shoplifters. They had huge knives. We waited on them before. But anyway, this time they came in with huge knives and they were becoming visibly irritated. We became concerned. And actually when they came in with the weapons, I called loss prevention who came. And when the thieves became more agitated, loss prevention came over to me and said, “Hey, we’re leaving. It’s too dangerous for us.” They didn’t bother to call anybody. They just left.
Maximillian Alvarez:
God, this is too dangerous for us. Good luck.
Liisa Luick:
Yeah, that’s exactly what they said and they took off. And Elizabeth and I looked at each other and we’re stunned. We couldn’t believe this. And it’s been the same message ever since. We have as workers confronted management and asset protection about, “Well, hey, what are you going to do about the situation?” This has happened three times. First time was actually over COVID at our morning rallies and the store manager, the asset protection manager, and another manager on different occasions, but at morning rallies every time said the exact same thing, which was, “Well, you risk your life every time you leave your house every day.” So they want to take no responsibility for any of this. And we got that loud and clear.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow. So again, I am about ready to explode. My head’s about ready to explode because I’m so angry hearing this. And I just wanted to make that kind of footnote for viewers and listeners. You already heard Moe address one of the other media tropes that we heard a lot over the past couple years. This ghoulish chorus of politicians and Chamber of Commerce boot liquors saying, “No one wants to work anymore.” That was the exact line that they used to cut off the vital pandemic era, social safety net provisions, like the extended child care benefits, the eviction moratoria, the pause on student loan payments, the stimulus checks. All of that was thrown out on the kind of relentless chorus of people claiming without evidence that no one wants to work. People are just sitting at home taking these government benefits and they’re not going to work. So we know for many reasons why that is bullshit, but Moe just gave y’all another one, right? A lot of these stores are well staffed, but they’re deliberately under scheduled.
And so when you walk into a store with a help wanted sign, and you’re seeing two frantic people running around with drinks piling up or clothes piling up or things falling over in the aisles. That’s not because no one wants to work, it’s because the greedy companies don’t want to pay people to properly staff those stores. And you as the customer are being hurt by that. And the workers are sure as hell being hurt by that. So that’s one lie that has been given to this kind of corporate narrative. And another one is what you just said, Liisa, I can’t count how many segments I’ve seen on local and national news about crime waves at CVSs and Walgreens and retail stores like society is bedlam. And we need just more and more police on every street corner, predominantly in working class neighborhoods with a lot of poor Black and brown people. That’s where we need to put all these police. But again, just think about the story that Liisa told you, right?
It’s like if you have stores, including Macy’s, that are understaffed, where the workers are under protected, where they’re overworked, you’re going to put those stores… you’re basically drawing a bullseye on those stores for anyone to shoplift, right? You are making those stores and those workers infinitely more vulnerable to shoplifting because of your greedy corporate practices. That is a side of the story that we never hear when the corporate media is reporting on it. So I just really want to underline that for people because it’s a really important point. And Sean, I wanted to bring you back in here because as someone who’s been with the union for many years and who has also seen, I imagine the kinds of changes that Liisa’s describing from the rank and file position. I’m curious to hear how that connects to what you’ve been seeing in other industries that your members are represented in. Put this in context for us as a union organizer, how does this connect to the broader kind of issues that you’re hearing from other workers within Local 3000 over there?
Sean Embly:
Yeah. Every industry that we represent is dealing with this issue, and it’s become even more acute after and during the pandemic where we’re struggling with short staffing across the board. Especially in industries that are dominated by corporate players. It could be grocery, it could be retail, healthcare. We just had a strike a couple of days prior to the Macy’s ELP strike where workers were striking. It was another unfair labor practice strike. But one of the key demands were these 1300 nurses wanted better staffing so they could take care of their patients because patients are not getting the care they need because the company is staffing them so short. And people want to work, they want more hours, but they also need a safe place to work that is staffed well. Short staffing is a safety issue. You don’t have enough staff to run a store, you don’t have enough staff to run a hospital. That is a safety issue. And who takes the brunt of that safety issue are the workers. And then you have the company like Liisa is articulating and Moe articulated, more concerned about the wellbeing of the assets in the-
Sean Embly:
… about the wellbeing of the assets in the store or the customer than their workers, right? They’re more worried about a customer who has a complaint, who might be mistreating a worker than they are about protecting their workers. They’re more worried about protecting the assets in the store than protecting the workers. So this is a systemic issue that we’re seeing across all industries, because a lot of these companies, in my opinion, are focused on trying to extract as much money from the labor of workers as possible by just continuing to cut labor. It is really an asinine idea.
You know what helps drive sales? Better staffing, better customer service, better patient care, that will help drive sales. How many customers are coming into a Macy’s and not getting help and just walking out the door because nobody’s there to help them out? This is a sign of how disconnected these companies have become and how they don’t know what’s happening in their stores. They’re running it based off of a spreadsheet. They’re not running it based off an experience. And that’s why workers need to have a stronger voice in the way that the companies are ran, not just for the benefit of workers in their everyday life and for their own safety and their own dignity and respect, but also for the benefit of the company. If you have more input from workers, the company is going to benefit as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean, it will never not be ridiculous to me. I mean, I understand why, because their ideology is money, their ideology is more money, and that is the singular focus of these executives and shareholders. And so it all kind of comes down to that in many ways. But it never ceases to amaze me that so many companies, including Starbucks and now Macy’s, it’s like, why don’t you just respect your workers’ rights? Why don’t you just not union bust, respect your workers’ right to organize, respect them at the bargaining table, see them as an asset and a way to improve your business. Why do you got to put everyone through this bullshit for years? It’s just infuriating. Every time I see another, it could be a nonprofit, it could be a media outlet, it could be medieval times in Buena Park, but when workers unionize the companies as a knee-jerk reaction, they just try to smash it and it hurts everybody and it hurts the business. It is a horrible look that leaves an incredible stain on the business for years. So why do it? Why not stop?
Anyway, I could go on for that for years, but we got a few more minutes left, and I wanted with the remaining 10 minutes here to go around the table one more time. We’ve talked quite a bit about the kind of common threads connecting these struggles and also the sort of unique aspects to the work that y’all do and the organizing that you’re involved in. So I want in this final round to kind of bring things back to where we are now and what fellow workers, people in the labor movement and just people watching and listening to this around the country, what can folks do to better support y’all and what can we as a movement do to better support each other? Right?
I mean, I’ve preached this many times to Real News viewers and listeners, right? Our role here, and there are many, right? Don’t cross a goddamn picket line. Don’t forget about these workers. Keep sharing news stories and their posts. Just keep them and their memories and their struggles alive. That’s one small thing that you can do.
Let these companies know how you feel about their union busting about their refusal to recognize their workers’ rights to organize and bargain with the company over their working conditions. Just raise your voice about it. That’s one way that you can help. But also, we got to train ourselves to not have the long-term memory of goldfish, because it was really frustrating to see that over the past two years, every time a new Starbucks store would unionize, everyone was cheering on, rightfully so, but then another store would unionize, and it was like we would start cheering them on and we would forget about the previous store where workers were getting retaliated against or where those stores were getting closed, or where as Moe said people were losing their healthcare, right?
They were being descheduled, right? That’s when bosses turn on the screws, and we’ve forgotten about a lot of those stores. We’ve let those workers down, so we got to also just stay committed for the long haul. I think that that’s something that all of us as just regular people, fellow workers and people who are tuned into a media cycle that makes us forget about these stories as quickly as they appear, we got to train ourselves. We got to do work on ourselves to make sure that that doesn’t happen, that we don’t forget about our fellow workers at Starbucks and beyond, people who are still fighting for a contract. And so that’s where I want to end up here. I want to ask you guys what you would say to folks watching and listening, what you would say to other unions, other regular people about what they can do to help y’all, where things stand now and where we go from here? Moe, let’s start with you again.
Moe Mills:
Yeah. I think you said it well. It’s just don’t forget about us. It has been two years and we have not seen traction on the contract, but that does not mean that our movement has slowed to a stop. New stores are filing every day and new stores are winning every day, and I think in two years to have nearly four hundred stores as a part of our campaign and more organizing is huge, and I’m really, really proud of our campaign.
I would also say, if you are a Starbucks customer, if Starbucks is a part of your routine and we’re a business that you patronize on the regular, just talk to your baristas, connect with them, ask them, figure out what stores in your area are union and choose to go to the union stores and let them know, Hey, I’m here because I heard y’all are union.
You know what I mean? Just connect with them and chat with them. See on a store to store level what they need. If you drive past the Starbucks store and you see they’re out there on strike, pull over join the picket line. I’m sure they’ll all have coffee for you. I’m sure they’ll have a sign you can hold. But yeah, just stay looped in. A really good way to stay looped in is to keep up with our social media. Usually there’s our national socials, our Instagram and Twitter, but on a region to region basis, people have social media. So I just make a point to follow the different regions around me, see what they’re up to, keep tabs on what’s happening in their stores, and that’s a really good way to stay looped in.
When there is a store that maybe won their election six months ago, that’s not getting a lot of attention. That’s a good way to see, oh, they just posted that a worker is being pushed out, or they just posted that a worker got fired for having nail polish on, or not having a name tag on or is being discriminated against. That’s a really good way to stay looped into that stuff.
But yeah, just keep tabs on what’s happening, these big national strikes, especially around the holiday season, get a lot of attention from the media. But in the meantime, after the holidays we’re going to go into that post December lull, and we’re still going to be fighting. So just stay looped in and stay tuned and don’t forget about us.
And in St. Louis, there is still quite a bit going on. Like I said earlier, we do have two workers that are on a paid suspension that have not received pay, that have not been able to pay their rent, that have lost access to their benefits. And we’re in St. Louis, we’re raising funds for them right now, so that’s a really good way to support workers that are local to me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Okay. I’m going to toss it to Liisa and Sean around us out, and then we’ll close out.
Liisa Luick:
Okay. First, I would like to give advice as somebody who was retaliated against myself, Moe, contact your state legislature, contact your local politicians, a representative or senator. That’s what I did, and that’s how I managed to start getting paid in addition to my union being awesome and getting me reinstated. But I can’t stress enough when you need help and you’ve been forgotten about trust me, your politicians won’t forget about you because you are a voter.
But I would like to say, which I’ve had to explain to customers before, when they say, “Well, how does this affect me?” Here’s how it affects you, the prices. It’s not inflation, the company raises prices on the merchandise and passes all of this, the cost of theft onto you. $12 cup of coffee. That’s insane. That’s not inflation. Every day at work, I have to call my bosses at least once a day to get permission to change a price, because I’m on a last and final warning still.
And I have to get their permission to change a price for a customer, because the price on the North Face jacket, it’ll say $130, or, hang on just a minute, the price as marked is not the price that is ringing. And needless to say, the prices are going up faster on the merchandise. Then of course, we have staff to change them. So we at the cash registers have to call and get permission to change the prices for the customers. It’s insane. It’s insanity. And all of these prices are being passed on to the customers. So that’s really where it comes from. The bottom line is we as a society and we as consumers are the ones who are paying the price, not just we as workers. And that is the bottom line.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sean, take us out.
Sean Embly:
All right. What you can do to help if you’re a worker, contact a union about organizing. The laws are stacked against workers right now. Why companies pursue anti-union, union busting tactics is because they can get away with it under the law. If we want to make a change, we’re not going to make a change by relying on politicians, relying on laws that don’t support workers and only support corporations. We’re going to make a change by organizing more work sites and standing up and saying, “You’re going to treat us with respect. You’re going to give us a safe place to work. You’re going to pay us a wage that gives us dignity.” That is what you can do to help. Respect the picket line. Stay tuned in with these sites and organize your work site.
And to give folks just a little bit more context about what the Macy’s workers are fighting for. We’ve gotten now what three or four last best and finals from the company. They’re just entrenched in wanting to gut our contract, take away the wage scales, only give 50 cents increases every year with no promise to ever move up beyond just a little bit above minimum wage, take away holidays. They’re refusing even to agree to allow workers to call the local police if asset protection and store management are unresponsive in an emergency situation or violent situation. That’s the total disregard that these companies have for workers. And if you want to help, you got to organize, and you got to stand with your fellow workers to push these corporations to do the right thing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is Moe Mills, a worker organizer at Starbucks and a member of Starbucks Workers United, Liisa Luick, a longtime sales associate at Macy’s in Washington State, and Sean Embly from the United Food and Commercial Workers, UFCW, Local 3000. Moe, Liisa, Sean, thank you all so much for joining us today on The Real News Network. I really appreciate it, and we’re sending y’all nothing but love and solidarity from Baltimore.
And to all of you watching, thank you so much for caring about this. Please tune in every other week for more worker solidarity live streams here at the Real News Network. Subscribe to our YouTube channel so you never miss a video. And once again, please, please, please become a supporter of our work. Donate using the link on this video, or go to the realnews.com/donate. Support our work so we can keep bringing y’all more important coverage and conversations just like this.
Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity Forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Days after unionized workers at the Big Three automakers voted to ratify their new contracts — secured after the United Auto Workers staged an innovative “stand up strike” that lasted six weeks — the union made clear on Wednesday it has no plans to stop its fight for economic justice for thousands of workers at car manufacturing plants across the United States. Urging all autoworkers in the U.S.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Workday on Nov. 27, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
At least $84 Million in Minnesota state and municipal funds earmarked for affordable housing projects have gone towards contractors with records or accusations of worker exploitation, from wage theft to misclassification to labor trafficking to sexual abuse, according to a new report.
Subsidizing Abuse: How Public Financing Fuels Exploitation in Affordable Housing Construction was published on November 14 by North Star Policy Action, which calls itself “an independent research and communications institute.” It was authored by Jake Schwitzer from North Star Policy Action and Lucas Franco from Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).
The report finds that the $84 million sum is made up of $31 million from Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) and $53 million in tax increment financing (TIF), awarded to developers building affordable housing in Minnesota. However, due to little oversight and labor provisions, developers are benefiting from the use of contractors on these projects that cut corners and underpay workers, the report finds.
The report details the story of Arturo Hernandez, a construction worker who was working for Painting America, a contractor based in Hudson, Wis. After being owed three weeks of wages, his foreman put him in contact with Eduardo Venezuela, who insisted on paying Hernandez’s missing wages out in drugs for the worker to sell, according to the report. Hernandez, who testified to the Minnesota State House Legislature in 2019, stated that this happened to other workers on the job site as well.
Painting America is just one of seven contractors the report names as “problem” contractors with both proven and alleged worker rights violations. The researchers have documented Painting America and the other problem contractors as having worked on numerous publicly financed affordable housing projects in the Twin Cities metro in recent years.
The report names three Minnesota developers—Dominium, MWF, and Roers—in the multifamily housing industry that receive the most funds through LIHTC and TIF, while continuing to work with subcontractors with egregious records of worker exploitation.
The problem contractors named by the report go beyond Painting America; they also include: Absolute Drywall in Lakeville, Minn, Environmental StoneWorks (ESW) North Branch, Minn., Wolf Construction Services, Inc, in West Des Moines, Iowa, Merit Drywall in Clearwater, Minn., Stone Pro Masonry in Eau Claire, Wis., and Ed Lunn Construction in Rochester, Minn.
While the prosecution of these sorts of worker rights violations has been historically rare, and often only results in paying a negligible fine, in recent years, more Minnesotan contractors have been prosecuted in court. In 2019, labor broker Ricardo Batres pled guilty to labor trafficking immigrant construction workers, resulting in the first conviction of labor trafficking in Hennepin County. In addition to Hernandez’s case, Painting America faced charges from the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry in 2017 for misclassifying employees as independent contractors and was ordered to pay a fine of $5,000. Misclassification is a common form of wage theft, by avoiding paying benefits, overtime, workers’ compensation, and underpaying insurance costs.
Absolute Drywall was also one of the companies at the center of a massive wage theft case on the Viking Lakes project in Eagan, Minn., and was involved in a sexual assault case of a worker, as reported by the Minnesota Reformer. In June 2023, Workday Magazine interviewed Francisco Lozano, a construction worker who was misclassified and threatened by a supervisor at Absolute Drywall.
The report claims that many of these worker rights abuses are underreported, and that the evidence documented in the report is just the “tip of the iceberg” in an industry with widespread and pervasive worker exploitation.
This reported abuse is taking place against the backdrop of a housing crisis, the report notes. Over the past decade, affordable housing has decreased while the cost of home ownership has doubled. In 2022, there was a 33% increase in evictions over pre-pandemic state filings, impacting both renters in the Twin Cities metro and greater Minnesota alike, the report says.
While state and local governments are investing in new housing development (lawmakers earmarked a record $1 billion for housing affordability in 2023), the report calls for more oversight and labor provisions for developers benefiting from affordable housing tax-credits.
The report argues that while building new affordable housing is key to alleviating the housing crisis in Minnesota, taxpayer-supported development must include labor provisions that protect, not exploit, construction workers, who often have precarious documentation statuses, making them especially vulnerable to abuse and intimidation.
The report concludes with several preventative policy recommendations at the state and local level. First is a call for increased transparency of the use of subcontractors by developers. Currently, developers are not expected to report which contractors they hire on their project. Developers seeking public subsidies should be mandated to disclose a list of subcontractors on projects, the report urges.
Other recommendations include evaluating developers on their commitment to providing family-supporting jobs to the list of criteria when granting tax subsidies, municipal criteria that rewards the use of responsible contractors, implementing worker-driven models such as the Building Dignity and Respect Program, and investing in enforcement of existing legislation and increased worker education.
Several Minnesota lawmakers already pledged support for the legislation advocated for in the Subsidizing Abuse report. Minnesota state Rep. Emma Greenman, representing parts of South Minneapolis, released a statement on X.com (formerly Twitter) stating “We must not tolerate companies that exploit workers, steal wages, and break the law, especially not when the projects are publicly funded. Our communities need affordable housing and expect it to be built [by] workers who are paid a living wage and safe on the job.”
Minnesota state Rep. Mike Howard representing Richfield, Fort Snelling, and a portion of South Minneapolis also showed support for increased oversight and labor provisions advocated by the report, describing the reports of wage theft in the for-profit affordable housing development industry as “jaw-dropping” and calling on the Minnesota State Legislature to “take action to ensure that when we build affordable homes we aren’t doing so on the backs of Minnesota workers.”
With Minnesota’s legislative season beginning in February 2024, the next few months will be key in deciding whether trade unions, worker advocate groups, and supportive representatives will push one of the aforementioned policy recommendations by the Subsidizing Abuse report into action. Given the historic and labor-friendly advances of the 2023 Legislative season, advocates say the stage could be set for change for developers in the affordable housing industry.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Buffalo, New York, has been a key hub within the current uptick of worker-led, store-level union organizing, especially among baristas and food service and grocery workers. From SPoT Coffee to Starbucks, the Lexington Co-op to Remedy House, the city has generated a collection of inspiring union victories and a growing layer of skilled labor organizers. Now, another well-known Buffalo shop may be…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In August of 2022, The Real News spoke with Matt Littrell, a picker at the Amazon warehouse in Campbellsville, Kentucky, and one of the lead organizers in an effort to unionize Amazon facilities in Kentucky. When we spoke with Matt, Amazon had just fired him in suspected retaliation for his organizing activities, citing “performance” issues. Since then, Matt has been dragged through a Kafka-esque legal process to hold Amazon, the second largest private employer in the US, accountable for violating workers’ rights. In this episode of Working People, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez checks back in with Matt to discuss recent developments in that process, including reaching a settlement with Amazon, which the National Labor Relations Board is now challenging, leaving Matt in legal limbo.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
Additional links
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Matt Littrell:
Hey everybody. I’m Matt Littrell. You might remember me from this podcast back in August of last year. Shortly after I was fired by Amazon for organizing at our warehouse with the Amazon Labor Union. Afterwards, I dealt with quite a struggle.
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. So as you guys heard, we’ve got a familiar voice back on the show today. If you guys go back in the archives, you will find our first interview with Matt Littrell, who we are happy to have back on the show today. Although, I wish that we were reconnecting under better circumstances, but we’ll link to that first interview we did with Matt back in August of 2022, where we were talking to Matt literally a week after he was fired by Amazon management at the warehouse he was working at, which was in Campbellsville, Kentucky. And Matt was really becoming a prominent voice and face of this effort to organize Amazon facilities in Kentucky, right?
This was fresh off the historic Amazon Labor Union victory on Staten Island. And we talked to Matt in that episode about his work there at Amazon, what it was like in that facility, what the organizing efforts had been, and then we talked about how the company fired him, allegedly for “performance issues”. But it had all of the trappings and hallmarks of retaliation for engaging in protected concerted activities, i.e organizing in the workplace, which is your right as a worker. If your boss retaliates against you for it, you are supposed to have a system of accountability to help you defend your rights and seek redress through the National Labor Relations Board, all that good stuff, you guys know all about that. We cover it all the time here on the show. But we wanted to bring Matt back on to talk about everything that’s happened since then.
As you heard Matt say, it’s not been an easy road, and sadly, this is very often the case. This is what you guys hear us preach all the time on this show, that we can’t just get excited about a new Starbucks store unionizing somewhere else, and forget about all the fired Starbucks workers, all the people like in Ithaca who had their unionized stores closed, or Seattle or all the people who were getting de-scheduled and losing their health insurance because of it. All the people who maybe voted successfully for a union, whether that be at Amazon or Starbucks or Chipotle, and have their stores closed, have the company not bargain in good faith, never reach a first contract. We can’t just claim early victories here. We got to see these struggles through and we got to take care of one another for, well, in general, in principle, until time immemorial, right? That’s the only way that we can do it.
But in this instance, we also got to make sure that to the folks that we talk to, the struggles that we get invested in, we got to stay invested in those struggles, and we got to stay committed to our brothers and sisters out there. And in that vein, man, I want to toss things back to you and give you the floor again and ask if you could maybe start by refreshing listeners’ memories a little bit. Maybe just, yeah, we don’t have to go through the whole saga that we went into when we had you on the show last August, but maybe just give folks a little refresher on your situation there at Amazon, the work you were doing there, the organizing you were doing there, the conditions of your firing, and then let’s talk about everything that’s happened since, because it’s been quite a roller coaster, as you said.
Matt Littrell:
Yeah, yeah, it has, and I appreciate you having me on today. Like you said, no organizer left behind, and that means we have to be there for each other. And so at the Amazon facility, we started organizing in 2021, roughly a year before I was fired. I didn’t know the Amazon Labor Union back then, but I was starting to get connected to the movement. So around December of that year, we started organizing with one union that was the machinist and aerospace workers. They helped us build our initial organizing committee, but they helped us really devise a strategy. I joined the safety committee. I joined the shift specific safety team, gemba. So I was sanctioned by the employer to talk to employees about protected concerted activities, which are working conditions and their grievances around those working conditions and all that stuff. So I find it very ironic that I was terminated for doing the same thing.
However, I put myself in a spot where, as an Amazon employee, you can’t talk to many people. I put myself in a spot where I could talk to absolutely everybody. So I had the perfect organizing role, and so we gained a lot of steam. The Amazon labor movement was really all behind Amazon Labor Union, full steam ahead. When we got really big and when we had the opportunity to meet Chris Smalls, Derek Palmer, and the executive committee of the Amazon Labor Union, we joined up and we didn’t like being micromanaged by a huge union that was very bureaucratic, that didn’t really have people in Kentucky to help us. So we joined up with ALU, started getting our card signed, started organizing for that election because we thought we were ready.
But I was facing retaliation. I started getting these write-ups, these write-ups for supposed productivity. I had been there a year. I consider myself a professional at that job. I was really great at what I was tasked with, but the working conditions were never addressed. So we continued agitating around things like it being way too hot in that warehouse, things like overstuffed bins that caused injuries to many employees, and of course, our pay because Amazon didn’t pay worth a crap, but a lot of people thought it was better than the median in the area. But I started experiencing all of this retaliation, and in August, those write-ups got to the last one, and I was subsequently terminated. After that, immediately, I pressed charges with the NLRB, adding that to all of my previous retaliation charges, retaliation, intimidation, surveillance, calling the fricking cops on us like they did in June of last year. And that’s where we left off with the show.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. I think that was about it. And man, I’m so angry hearing all of this, and I’m so sorry that you’ve been going through this, because again, this is what it looks like in the trenches, and this is how low management will stoop to stop workers from exercising their rights. It is not an equal playing field. It never is. That is why we have the strength in numbers mentality about unions, because otherwise, this is how they pick us off. This is how the laws are stacked in their favor. The enforcement of those laws is stacked in the boss’s favor, and these are the real human consequences of that power imbalance that exists in workplaces around the country and around the world, so on and so forth. So it’s such a bullshit and a situation to be in, first and foremost.
Then I wanted to just acknowledge that, that we are starting from a place of, Matt was fired for exercising his rights. The whole point of rights is that you have them, that you can exercise them, that they are inalienable, not that your manager can decide whether or not you get to exercise them. Right? So tell us about what happened next. Tell us about, I guess, the developments since then. How have you personally been doing, and has there been any movement in the effort to hold Amazon accountable for this?
Matt Littrell:
Yeah. Yeah, I can definitely go on about that. So immediately after my firing, I applied for unemployment a few days later. One of the first things Amazon did to try and fuck with me was trying to deny my unemployment benefits, and they would keep appealing it every time I would file for payments. So they were keeping me from getting that for half a year. I didn’t start getting unemployment payments until December, but I got it all in one lump sum. So it was already a rough start to the journey of being unemployed.
But then Kentucky went ahead and passed a law that said you could only get 12 weeks of unemployment. That went into effect January of this year. So basically, I was cut off again in March after only getting a little bit, and I’ve applied for so many jobs. People think that unemployed people are lazy or something like that. In southern states, you have to apply for a whole bunch of jobs, and then you have to prove it that you’re applying for those jobs to get anything. But once your name is all over the news for what you did as far as organizing goes, it makes it hard to get a regular job after that.
I was thankful to continue to have the opportunities that organize at Amazon. I mentored a lot of employees, people who were asking me like, “Hey, how do we organize?” So I was just helping these employees go through the same journey as a new person in the labor movement that I went through. And it was an honor to be able to teach people how to organize and get them connected to the right resources and doing this as just an independent person, not working with anybody at that point, really. And then I got involved with a disability justice for Amazon Workers campaign. It was through United for Respect, a 501C3 organization. And for that, they organize Amazon stuff around the country. They even are really involved in Atlanta where they’re supporting the union efforts there. But this disability justice advocacy was on behalf of my partner who is an injured Amazon employee because of the working conditions there.
One of the big thing that we did, we went to DC to do some lobbying. We talked to all kinds of politicians, representatives. We were working with the help committee of the Senate who has their investigation into Amazon that is going on, and it was a campaign of its kind that currently existed. Nobody else was focusing on Amazon employees that are disabled. Nobody was really organizing around better accommodations and making this process fair and equitable for everybody. It was a real privilege to be able to do that, and we made some headway. We started making so much progress in these investigations, getting employees in touch with the health committee to share their stories about what it’s like to be disabled at Amazon and for your accommodations to be rejected and to face discrimination because of that.
And then another thing that I was really excited about was the opportunity to get involved with Starbucks organizing as a customer. Well, not really a customer. I don’t live by a Starbucks, but you know what I mean. Somebody who doesn’t work there. Since I was a part of the DSA and I saw that the Labor Commission was working with Starbucks on these customer solidarity events, Starbucks Workers United, I decided to host a couple of these solidarity events just in the next town over, over in Danville, Kentucky. We made a really big impact. It’s more of a progressive town by Kentucky standards. It’s a college town, liberal arts college. And that was an excellent show of solidarity.
And unfortunately, soon after our first event, I started having to go back and deal with the NLRB. The NLRB, I had been in this process for more than a year by then. I had had the appointed attorney by the board that was representing me, I had him switched over to new attorneys in about February of this year. And then these attorneys didn’t really know a whole lot. They just knew everything that was in my affidavits that was handed over to them, all that good stuff. And they didn’t even meet me until a month out from my hearing. So that’s when they started meeting with me to get prepared for the hearing, go over everything, all that good stuff. And then in September 9th, we had my hearing. A little courtroom that wasn’t at all intimidating. It was like a fiscal court. So it is honestly just like the back room, the back of a courtroom type of thing. It’s just-
Maximillian Alvarez:
So it’s not full on Law and Order style?
Matt Littrell:
No, not at all. I was surprised at how I thought I was going into Law and Order, so that’s why I was surprised at the location and stuff. But it was myself and my counsel and then Amazon’s counsel that were there, and of course, a judge. And you should have seen the look on their faces when Amazon’s counsel sat down and everything, and they saw that huge stack of evidence that we gathered.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, baby, I wish. See, that should be a Law and Order episode. In the socialist utopia, I want to watch a Law and Order where every case is about going after union busters or environment destroying companies and stuff like that. I would watch the out of that.
Matt Littrell:
Yeah. Yeah. Up until that point, up until the last couple of days before the hearing, I thought that it was just going to be a slog fest going to trial and stuff like that. Essentially, I would’ve had to try and prove that they were manipulating the algorithm, so manually doing all of this stuff to me instead of having this excuse that, oh, well, you weren’t retaliated against because it was just the algorithm and the algorithm doesn’t discriminate in our system. And so that was intimidating to do for sure, because you know these judges, I don’t know. A lot of judges don’t understand how TikTok works, and now, I got to learn how to understand an algorithm that Amazon uses myself when that’s not even publicly available. It’s all hidden in Amazon’s cloud computing sector, their AWS. They’re more of a cloud computing company than a retailer, by a long shot. That’s where all their profits are.
So yeah, I thought it was going to be this slog fest. I was nervous going into it, but I was tenacious as hell too. I was ready for this fight in court. I know they were just pussyfooting around everything. When we would subpoena management, they would of course object to that subpoena and then ask for more time to provide evidence, stuff like that. They subpoenaed me a few days before the hearing. So they wanted me to provide an extensive amount of information to them on the day of the hearing, but only gave me three days to do that, which was crazy. So since I didn’t really have labor lawyers that could give me actual advice, NLRB counsel who are appointed to you, they’ll be there for you every step of the way, all that good stuff. But they’re not going to give you legal advice. Not at all. They’re going to try and seem like they’re not coaching you for what you do, so they can’t do stuff in the way that an actual attorney could.
So with all that aim, me having to use unorthodox things, because you talk to a union, you try to get in touch with their labor lawyer, all that stuff. They’re like, we’re not going to represent you because you’re not a member of our union, but you can go over here and pay $300 an hour to this attorney if you really need an attorney. That’s how much labor lawyers costs. That’s still so freaking expensive. I obviously could not afford that, not even close to being afford that. I was struggling to keep a roof over my head. So I had to use AI. I was using chat GPT to direct me to NLRB archives and cases and all this stuff that I could study on my own. And I was using this stuff to learn how to file legal documents in case I had to actually do that on my own, which you always had to check the accuracy of AI, but I was keen to that.
I’m like, okay, just point me in the right direction. I’ll go look at it. I’ll go make my decision about it. Because everything at the NLRB, it doesn’t matter what their policy and stuff is. Honestly, everything is case law. That essentially means that they’re going to start using all of these cases to validate any decisions that they make going forward. So they’re always going to look at a previous case to justify how the procedure goes going forward. And they did that. At the hearing, they were talking about Starbucks cases, all that stuff to justify the fact that Amazon and I had come to a settlement agreement. It was unilateral. I signed off on it, the union signed off on it. Well, Seth Goldstein, the union’s lawyer who for all of his merits, he’s a great guy. He was there for me the whole time, but I knew that he was so freaking busy working 80 hours a week, working on all these different cases everywhere, that I couldn’t depend on him to answer every single question I had.
But yeah, he signed off on it and the judge signed off on it, of course. Unilateral settlements. But as a matter of policy, the NLRB decided to have their general counsel object to it because of arbitrary language, essentially. It didn’t include a default clause, which is something that would allow the NLRB to prosecute the charged party in the events that they don’t follow through with the settlement agreement. And then they objected because it was like a baby thing too, like a tantrum, because the judge had not properly weighed the general counsel’s position. And then the last thing they said was, they tried to say that the clause of confidentiality was too broad, but actually it was just very narrow. The only thing I can talk about in the settlement is I can’t reveal the financial terms. That’s it. I just can’t tell anybody that. That is very narrow. Nothing that restricts you is ever reasonable, but from Amazon’s point of view, it would be pretty embarrassing if I revealed that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. This is how they like to deal with most of their problems, is all these companies, just settle or slap an NDA on folks. Basically keep the ugly side out of public view so that they can maintain this public image and keep all that dirty laundry out of public sight. So just to clarify though, for folks listening, what this essentially boils down to is that you and Amazon reached a settlement. You all signed off on it. It was signed off by the judge, but then the National Labor Relations Board General Counsel appealed that settlement or has challenged that settlement on the grounds that the confidentiality clause is problematic and that there’s another part of it. There’s a technicality that they’re taking issue with because…
But in effect, what’s happening is that the NLRB is keeping you from getting your money. So are they challenging this because they’re worried that Amazon’s trying to… If they can get you to sign off on something that has broader implications for other workers who find themselves in this situation? I guess, are they worried that there’s going to be a case law that could emerge from this somehow that would be ultimately damaging? I guess I’m just trying to understand the rationale here for folks who are listening.
Matt Littrell:
So the only reason I was really given is that they protect the public’s rights, essentially. So the public’s rights are greater than mine. And if I have to fall on the sword and go through this process all over again, then that’s what they’re going to do as a matter of their policy. So yeah, they’re worried about the precedent that it sets, but everything I was going to my actual hearing for was just my retaliation experience. So again, it’s like I just don’t see where they ever had a valid reason to object, if you know what I’m saying.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. No, and that’s so tough, right? Because again, just knowing what I know about the case from having talked to you about it, knowing that there is a settlement, knowing how, as you’ve described, you’ve been really going through really hella shit since then because losing your job can be devastating. And having to go through all of this process, especially without a union lawyer to help you or the resources. Who among us can go just fucking pay $300 an hour to put together our legal defense. Again, it just really highlights how stacked the whole system is in favor of one side over the other.
And it’s tough because, I was just interviewing people who work at the NLRB, a couple weeks ago on this show before what was then an impending government shutdown. And personally, I think it was a really important interview because I don’t think I’ve heard anyone interview like NLRB staffers before a government shutdown about what that is going to mean to them, what it’s going to mean for the caseloads that they’ve got, what it’s going to mean for the union election dates that were going to fall after that, potential government shutdown. Now the shutdown was temporarily averted. We’ll see if that sticks. But even so, we talked about on that episode, it’s like, yeah, the NLRB does really important work. It is perpetually understaffed. It is a constant political football, and it’s been strangled over the past decade without a budgetary increase until last year.
And I talked to workers all of the time who need and rely on the NLRB to actually enforce labor law to hold companies accountable for violating workers’ rights, yada, yada, yada. That’s all important, but still, we got to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. We got to still understand the human costs of the way that this process works and the inefficiencies therein because that’s essentially causing you, after all this long-drawn-out process from before you got fired, right? The retaliation, the write-ups, then getting fired, Amazon fucking with you, and you’re trying to get your unemployment benefits, trying to navigate this legal system more or less on your own. But shout out to Seth for stepping in and helping out. I know that, yeah, he’s been running all over the place. And again, we need as many folks doing that work as we possibly can.
But that’s an all long rambly way of just bringing us back to the literal fact that you had a goddam settlement. You need that money, however much it is. And now the NLRB itself is challenging the terms of that settlement that keeps you in limbo and keeps you from getting that money. So is the hope for the NLRB that you’ll, I guess, go through this process again, still get your settlement, but the language will be a little bit better in the end? Do we even know what that timeline would look like?
Matt Littrell:
Basically, what I think the outcome of the settlement would be… Well, the attorneys that were appointed to me, they’ve been pretty avoidant because they know I am upset and I am tore up about this. I didn’t say anything to them that was mean or anything like that, but it’s just like, yeah, they’re doing this thing now, the appeals process, it’s crazy that they hadn’t made a decision on the appeal when the NLRB makes decisions very quickly about everything else that has happened in the case, whether it was a subpoena, a motion of summary judgments, stuff like that that was filed and the timeline… So all I knew is that the NLRB had 14 business days from the day of the trial. So that’s why the settlement appeal officially went through right before that 14 day mark. So they got around to it pretty late trying to drag it out, and then Amazon and their counsel filed their objections to the special appeal, and there hasn’t been any word since Amazon’s filing.
It’s pretty crazy. The NLRB says that their stated goal is that they’re here to make workers whole. That’s supposed to be their goal. But in reality, if they wanted to tell the truth, they would say their goal is to just merely enforce the policies of whoever the head of the general counsel is, and whatever precedent they set. It’s not like these attorneys wanted to object to it, and they caught me off guard after the trial because they were saying, “Oh, we’re going to have to file a special appeal,” and all that stuff. So this is going to take maybe quite a long time. And I knew that they would raise objections, but I didn’t know that they wouldn’t have this whole process that drags it out. So really, this was all done without my informed consent.
Maximillian Alvarez:
God, man. Well, and I want to try to, because this is so goddam frustrating. I’m frustrated. I can only imagine how frustrated you are with all of this. And Jesus, I can only hope that this moves quickly, that we get the resolution that we need that Amazon not be allowed to just keep doing this to people. Because I guess I want to bring it back there that ultimately, we’re still all here. We’re talking about all of this because Amazon violated your rights. They started all this. They are still the ultimate culprits, but workers like Matt need help. They don’t need people getting in their goddam way. We don’t need more of these delays, and we need a process that’s more accessible to people who don’t have the time, the resources and what have you, and the institutional support to just go through this. The experience of this process is very different for Matt than it is for Amazon and its company lawyers. I guess that’s the whole point I’m trying to make, right?
One side can keep this going for as long as they want there. They got more money than God. The other side does not. Right? So what do we do with that? And I guess that’s where I wanted to end up, man is, we are with you. I know that the folks listening to this, the folks who listened to the first episode that we did are just as frustrated as I am hearing about this. And I know that they’ll want to hear about ways that they can support you, that they can support Amazon workers fighting to unionize what they can do to, yeah, I don’t know, hold Amazon accountable and put pressure where it needs to be put so that you get the settlement that you deserve.
So I wanted to just by way of rounding out, ask if you could, yeah, maybe tell us a little bit about that. What folks can do to help, where things stand now, and I guess any parting thoughts that you want to leave folks with who maybe heard that first interview, they’re hearing this because we don’t want folks to get discouraged, but we don’t want to be pollyannish about the struggles that we face and all the barriers that are put in our way. So yeah, take us out on any final parting thoughts that you got, anything that folks can do and any final words that you wanted to share with folks out there listening.
Matt Littrell:
Oh, as bad as things have gotten, there have been moments that were really empowering for me throughout this. I had comrades that had my back, people that wanted to talk to me and hear my story and to learn from me and just get help for all these things. And I even joined the DSA Labor Commission and started being a volunteer organizer with EWOC, Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. And I’ve taken on a couple of cases to help workers organize, which is, I wanted to finally have the energy to organize in a systemic way. And after the settlement and stuff like that, after that initial day, after the hearing, I was pretty empowered because I didn’t think things were going to turn out so bad. But again, I don’t want people to be discouraged because if you become really good at your storytelling and you make the right connections with the right comrades, then people will be there for you.
People like Max, you donated mutual aid to me several times and had me on your show and did all that good stuff. You were there for me and a lot of people really were there. A lot of people that donated when I needed it the most and really got me out of the immediate pickle for a while. So yeah, there’s these moments that are empowering. In light of things that have been happening in the last week, a bunch of comrades and I got together and we started a group on Instagram where we would all collaborate to make revolutionary content, but especially standing with the people of Palestine.
And it was like knowing that we’re not alone and that so many people all over the world stand with Palestine and are protesting and are getting out there and that are doing the same thing that we are doing, essentially. That’s also really empowering. And really, I’ve seen a lot of things. It can be conflicting with unions because the unions that are involved with making the war machine run are the ones that organize at Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Hallie Burton. They’re all unionized and essentially with one union, machinists and aerospace workers. And unfortunately, that union, I don’t know if they’re coerced into doing this because AFLCIO members have to, as their constitution, they have to stand with all of the political and economic decisions.
But the IEM released their statement, which is like, we support Israel, condemn Hamas. Conversation’s so centered around Hamas. That’s the most annoying thing. These are the Palestinians and them and anybody they align themselves with, we need to be supportive of. It’s a literal genocide going on here. But yeah, the fact that the military industrial complex is unionized means that if these workers were radicalized, that they could absolutely stop the war machine from turning. They can do that. We’ve seen Starbucks trying to sue their union for standing for Palestine. What we as comrades have been doing our part to combat misinformation that is rooted in Zionism, which is going hand in hand with a white superiority disorder.
So going forward, we’re going to continue to struggle. And if you want to find me on social media, it’s at Unionizeamazonky, all of it in one word. You can check out documents over on my link tree and my social media bios where there’s some pretty important things about the Amazon struggle and mutual aid resources. That’s one thing. Learn the power of mutual aid. The biggest barrier that I’ve seen to people wanting to organize is the risk. The risk factor that you’re going to get fired. It’s going to take food out of your mouth and food out of your children’s belly.
And if you learn how to organize your community and your mutual aid, that’ll also translate to the union struggle. Because once people have their needs taken care of, they feel a lot more comfortable organizing. And that’s what I feel my role as somebody on EWOC is to do, or as a mentor to any of these other workers, is to eliminate all of the different tasks you have to do as a labor leader, which would mean alleviating that stress because it’s like working three or four jobs to organize your workplace. Anything we can do to alleviate the stress of that and make sure people’s needs are being met in real time, that’s what’ll get this labor movement on the right track, which I think it is. It has made so much significant progress, but towards a tract of making more systemic change.
Speaker 4:
(Singing).
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Faculty at 23 California State University campuses are preparing to strike. They teach nearly half a million students. After 95 percent of voting members authorized a strike on October 30, the 29,000-member California Faculty Association plans to roll out strikes at Cal Poly Pomona December 4, San Francisco State University December 5, Cal State Los Angeles December 6 and Sacramento State…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
With each passing day, more Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza, more bodies are being blown apart and buried under the rubble, over a million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes. Over the past month and a half, the world has borne witness to a genocidal military campaign to clear out Gaza once and for all, and every day, every hour, it feels like the chance to stop one of humanity’s most inhumane crimes is slipping through our fingers, and the powers that be have shown no interest whatsoever in listening to the thundering calls for a ceasefire coming from governments and mass demonstrations around the world, particularly the Biden administration in the US, the increasingly fascistic Netanyahu government in Israel, and the arms manufacturers and war profiteers who are raking in billions from manufacturing mass death. This is prompting people of conscience around the world, including unions and worker-led groups, to speak out and take action to try to stop the slaughter.
One of those unions is the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys – UAW Local 2325 (ALAA), whose members include legal aid workers at over 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Last week, ALAA members were preparing to hold a vote on whether or not to approve the union publicly issuing a “Resolution Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza, an End to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, and Support for Workers’ Political Speech.” In the lead-up to the vote, union members at different legal aid offices reported strong opposition from management. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” Twyla Carter, Chief Executive Officer of the Legal Aid Society, reportedly told staff, expressing concern that certain donors would pull funding from the Legal Aid Society if the union passed the resolution. Then, on Thursday, Nov 16, as Akela Lacy reports at The Intercept, “attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it “impossible for them to properly do their job as Public Defenders.” Those four attorneys were ALAA bargaining unit members. “On Friday,” Lacy continues, “the court granted a temporary restraining order enjoining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9 a.m. and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.”
In this urgent episode of Working People, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks about this unprecedented attack on union democracy and workers’ free speech rights with three ALAA members: Allie Goodman, an attorney in the Family Defense Practice at Bronx Defenders; Michael Letwin, a former public defender at Legal Aid in Brooklyn for 37 years who also served as president of ALAA – UAW Local 2325 for 13 years; and Dany Greene, who has worked as a public defender for six years, four of which were spent at Bronx Defenders, where they helped found and organize the BXD Union, and who now works at an appellate office focusing on criminal appeals.
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.
Speaker 1:
(Singing).
Allie Goodman:
My name is Allie Goodman. I work at the Bronx Defenders. I’ve been there for three years, and I am an attorney in the Family Defense Practice. I’m also a member of our union. In the Family Defense Practice we defend parents and caretakers against government allegations of abuse and neglect, and also relevant to this podcast, I organize with the Jewish Voice for Peace chapter in New York City.
Michael Letwin:
My name is Michael Letwin. I was a public defender at Legal Aid in Brooklyn for 37 years, for 13 years of which I was president of our union, ALAAUIW 2325. And I’m a co-founder of both Labor for Palestine, which is at laborforpalestine.net, and Jews for Palestinian Right of Return.
Dany Greene:
My name’s Dany Green. I’ve been a public defender for six years. For four years I worked at the Bronx Defenders doing trial level criminal public defense. I helped found and organize the BXD Union, and I’m now working at an appellate office doing criminal appeals, and I also organize with Jewish Voices for Peace.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez and we’ve got an urgent mini cast for y’all today. I’m really, really grateful to have Dany, Michael, and Allie on the show, especially after everything that we are all going through as a society and that they are going through as workers and union members amidst the just devastating assault on Gaza. The humanitarian crisis that is unfolding before our eyes, as you guys well know. You have no doubt listened to the episodes that we’ve published in recent weeks, including the nine-minute conversation I got to have with Issa Amro in the occupied West Bank after he had just narrowly escaped violent settlers who were chasing him in Hebron.
And you heard the three-minute message from Gaza that we received from journalist Mohamed El Saife. Hopefully you’ve been following the work that we’ve been doing at the Real News Network, where I’ve also been interviewing trade unionists in the UK who are forming human blockades around Israeli weapons suppliers. You’ve heard me on Breaking Points interviewing healthcare workers in New York, leading candlelight vigils in solidarity with their healthcare colleagues in Gaza. We’re doing everything we can to lift up the voices of regular people who are taking a stand and speaking out against the genocidal violence. Because with each passing day, more Israeli bombs are falling on Gaza. More bodies are being blown apart and buried under the rubble.
Over a million Palestinians have been displaced from their homes in the past month and a half alone. The world, in that time, has borne witness to a genocidal military campaign to clear out Gaza once and for all, and every day, every hour it feels like the chance to stop one of humanity’s most inhumane crimes is slipping through our fingers. And up until now, it’s really felt like the powers that be have shown no interest whatsoever in listening to the massive thundering calls for a ceasefire coming from governments and mass demonstrations around the world. That’s especially true of the Biden administration here in the United States, the increasingly fascistic Netanyahu government in Israel, to say nothing of the arms manufacturers and war profiteers who are raking in billions from manufacturing mass death.
Now, we are recording this episode on Sunday, November 19th. There are initial reports out today from the Washington Post that we may see, by the time this episode comes out, it is possible that there will be a five-day pause in the slaughter. Again, I don’t want to report on this before it is locked in, but there are reports that there may be a five-day pause based on a US brokered agreement between Hamas and Netanyahu’s government. So we’ll see what happens with that. But the fact remains is that we’ve already lost so much. Palestinians have lost so much. Israeli families whose loved ones were killed on October 7th have lost so much. This is to say nothing of the countless people who have lost so much over 75 years of violent occupation.
And as I said at the top, we’ve been doing our best here at Working People and at the Real News Network to try to lift up the voices of regular people taking a stand, speaking out. People of conscience who refuse to sit idly by while this slaughter unfolds. And our guests today are part of that, right? I mean, we are going to discuss how Dany, Michael, Allie, and their fellow union members with the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys represented by UAW Local 2325. This is New York City’s union of over 3000 public defenders and legal workers at different offices. You may have been hearing over the past couple days about the saga that they have been embroiled in their efforts to release a resolution as a union calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and support for workers’ political speech.
Now, I want to just read extensively from a recent report that came out this weekend by Akela Lacey at The Intercept. We will link to this report in the show notes, but I just wanted to sort of read a number of passages from AKA’s report just so listeners have a sort of baseline understanding of what we’re going to talk about today, because there’s a lot of nuances here that I want to make sure we don’t pave over. And then I’m going turn things over to our guests to really give us the story from their side. Let us know what’s going on over there.
But to give everyone just a common basis of understanding here, Akela Lacy writes in the Intercept, in a piece titled Public Defenders Get Restraining Order to Block Their Own Union from Voting On Gaza Statement. Akela writes, “Five groups providing public defender services in New York City are cracking down on speech about Palestine. Leadership at the groups are pushing back on statements or internal communications that reference the siege on Gaza, and at least one staffer has been forced to resign. Two of the organizations sent cease and desist letters to union shops, considering resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Another group called Staffers Into Meetings with human resources for using work channels to share links about Palestine and proposing to do fundraising for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in lieu of an annual holiday party. Management at several of the offices said statements on Gaza, under consideration by their unions, were jeopardizing funding. pro-Israel activists launched a petition to defund the Bronx Defenders after its union issued a statement opposing Israel’s, “Genocidal intent,” in Gaza.
Public defender offices across the country are already severely underfunded. While most rely heavily on public funding, many also receive support from private institutions including major law firms. Several firms have responded to criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza by rescinding job offers and threatening to curb recruiting efforts at law schools. On Thursday, ahead of the union wide vote on a statement, the Legal Aid Society called a staff meeting. According to a partial recording of the meeting obtained by the intercept, Chief Executive Officer Twila Carter said the resolution’s language was anti-Semitic. Staff could vote how they wanted, she said, but she had an obligation to warn them about the impact on the organization’s work.
Four law firms had already threatened to pull funding from the office over the resolution. Carter said. In discouraging Union members to vote for the statement. She said, “I’m not trying to lose a dime.” Akela Lacy’s article continues. “The legal fight revolved around a statement from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, UAW Local 2325, which covers more than 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Staffers across the four offices, as well as the New York County Defender Services, which is not represented by the union, have been retaliated against, reprimanded, surveilled, and encouraged to oppose the union resolution.
The resolution expresses solidarity with Palestinians, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and demands an end to Israel’s occupation, decrying apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. With a yes vote. The union would also oppose future military aid to Israel and endorse the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.
At the Legal Aid all staff meeting on Thursday, Carter, the CEO, said The resolution was anti-Semitic. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” carter said. “You don’t have to agree, but that’s how some of our colleagues feel in some of our supporters. Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism,” she said. She suggested Jewish readers of the statement might see it the same way Black people would see pro-police sloganeering. “And again, as a Black woman, my closest analogy is hearing how people talk about Blue Lives Matter or other things that land on me differently.”
To wrap up my reading of Akela Lacy’s article, just two more passages here. “Several hours after the meeting on Thursday, attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it, “Impossible for them to properly do their job as public defenders.” On Friday, the court granted a temporary restraining order in joining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9:00 AM and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.”
So that’s what we’re here to discuss. I apologize for the extended intro, but I thought it was important to just try as best as I could to lay out that information, and Akela has already laid it out in more depth than I could here in the intro. Again, we will link to that piece in the show notes. But more importantly, we’re going to turn to our guests who are in the thick of this struggle themselves. So we want to hear directly from them.
Now, Dany, Michael, Allie, again, really, really appreciate y’all coming on the show, especially as you are dealing with all of this crap, and really appreciate you being willing to come on, speak up, speak out, tell us your side of the story. I want to dig into the events of the past week with y’all, but first I wanted to just take a quick step back. Before we dig into the letter and the backlash, the injunction, I wanted to just remind folks a bit more about the kind of work that you do, and get to know a little more about you all and the struggles that you’ve been facing at ALAA over the past year. I’ll be totally upfront with folks and I’ll link to this video in the show notes, but I was at one of y’all’s picket lines in New York City earlier this year. I was invited out, I posted a video from the picket line to the Real News Network account. I even, myself, walked the picket line for a time. So that’s where I remembered y’all from. And then I heard about this current story, so I wanted to just connect those dots for folks listening.
Can we remind people about the work you do at your offices, the union struggle there, and the issues that y’all have been dealing with as workers, as legal aid workers up until October 7, 2023?
Michael Letwin:
So our members work in a number of different agencies, either as public defenders or as other kinds of legal service workers. Public defenders, of course, represent people charged with crimes. And under Gideon v Wainwright, a Supreme Court decision from the ’60s, everybody charged with a crime, at least in theory, has the right to be represented by counsel. So in New York City, there’s no one governmental public defender’s office, what there are is contracts between the city and a number of different agencies, the biggest of which is Legal Aid Society, but also the other groups that we’ll mention here today. And so the members who work in public defense do entirely criminal defense work and of course that is extremely stressful, as you might imagine, especially for the people that we represent who are being subject to the prison industrial complex and the New Jim Crow and all those kinds of things.
But we also have members who do other kinds of work, and some of those are landlord tenant lawyers who represent people who are facing loss of their homes or eviction, we represent either the parents of children or the children themselves sometimes in neglect and abuse cases as well as delinquency cases and a number of our members do immigration work to defend people who are being subject to that whole monstrosity, that horrific monstrosity. So those are some of the areas in which our people have worked and do the work every day. And of course, funding for those agencies is always under threat and never sufficient, and caseloads are always too high. And on top of that, we have to deal with very often anti-union managements of these different agencies. So those are some of the battles that we’re involved with, both on behalf of our clients individually and collectively and for us as union members concerned with justice throughout the world.
Allie Goodman:
As Michael said, the different shops, the different places, the different organizations rather have their own individual unions and we are working on getting all the different public defenders to become unionized. And some of us have contracts, some of us don’t have contracts, so the strike that you’re referencing, I’m not exactly positive which one it was, it might’ve been with one of the specific organizations that was striking at that time. But The Bronx Defenders like many different shops that are in the middle of trying to ratify contracts or are moving forward with different elements that they’re fighting individually, so we have similar overall struggles, but then individually as organizations have different struggles. But overall, we’re all fighting for people and putting people first and that’s why this cause I think is so important to us as well.
Dany Greene:
I can also talk a little bit more to connect our work, specifically why as public defenders we care about Palestine and why this is an issue that matters so much to all of us, and really it’s the same reason we care about justice issues everywhere. We care because this is a genocide that’s happening, and specifically it’s a genocide that’s being supported and legitimized by our government and by our media.
And as public defenders, like Michael said, we represent the most oppressed communities in the US. We see every day how government legitimizes violence against our communities, through courts, through prisons, police deportation, family separation and more, and how that’s supported by the media. And we know that those very same tactics are at work in Israel’s 75-year occupation of Palestine and that that occupation is enforced by Israel’s military and it’s increasingly fascist court system and that it’s supported by US tax dollars. And so as public defenders that see the same things happening to our clients in a different way every single day, and we work in that system, we know that we need to stand against that same structures of oppression when they’re happening elsewhere.
Michael Letwin:
And if I could pick up where Dany just left off, also as union members, those same concerns because the genocide that’s going on now in Palestine and has been going on for 75 years or more since the establishment of the Zionist state is something that unfortunately union officialdom in this country has supported for all these decades, going back in fact to at least the Balfour Declaration in 1917 in which the European colonial powers gave Palestine or promised Palestine to be a future Zionist state. So it’s not a question of whether unions should be involved in this, unfortunately, unions have always been involved in this issue of Palestine, the problem is they’ve been on the wrong side for the most part.
And so as union members now, we are being called on by Palestinian trade unionists who have issued an urgent call for union members in this country, for workers everywhere to stand with them in demanding an end to the genocide, in demanding an end to the occupation, an end to the apartheid state, an end to US weapons for Israel and for workers themselves not to handle cargo for Israel, particularly military cargo. And so we think it’s really essential to respect that picket line and that unions have to respect the picket line that have been set up by Palestinian trade unionists, just as we would respect any other picket line and every other picket line. Our job is to walk picket lines, not cross them. And so that’s what we’re trying to do here with our Palestine resolution in this union and more broadly, is to walk the Palestinian picket line with our Palestinian siblings.
Allie Goodman:
The only thing that I would add to what Michael so beautifully stated, and I know we’re going to get to the specific statements in a bit, but the only thing that I would add is that the call from Palestinian Trade Unions was a specific one that was sent out on the 16th, I believe, of October, a legitimate call from the Palestinian Trade Unions to, “End all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes.” In the ways that Michael spoke about, and just in the ways that in speaking out about solidarity with Palestine and Palestinians generally. And so we think it’s our duty as in all the ways that Michael stated as union members and as people of moral conscience to speak out and to comply with the forms of being in a union and being in solidarity with other union members, and also particularly in the ways in which Palestinians themselves are calling for, because that so often is ignored in how people can show up. And right now we are getting an explicit call from people in Palestine to show up in this exact way.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well let’s zero in on that. Let’s talk about Gaza and what’s been going on over there within the union and these different shops that are part of the union. And I want to just ask y’all, if you could tell us more about the discussions that y’all have been having within your own workplaces within your union, what you’ve been feeling as legal workers and rank and file union members over the past month and a half, and also just as human beings watching all of this genocidal madness unfold in real time. And I want to ask if you could talk more specifically about how the resolution, the statement came together, why y’all felt it was important to put out that statement, what is in it? We will link to the draft in the show notes, but yeah, just talk us through the timeline of how this statement came together and why y’all wrote it the way that you did and what role you think unions can and should be playing right now in forcing a ceasefire and ending this violence and slaughter.
Allie Goodman:
Mm-hmm. A really important and big question. I’m going to actually walk us backwards. I work at The Bronx Defenders and my union specifically came out with a statement I believe in the middle of October, I think it was October 17th or 18th, maybe the 19th. But it was very shortly after the call specifically from Palestinian Trade Unions came out. Some folks at my union drafted a really beautiful statement in solidarity with Palestinians and naming the genocidal violence that’s happening and specifically stating that as people of mortal conscience, but also as workers, we were going to fall in line and follow the lead of Palestinian Trade Unions.
And since that time, we received pushback from all different levels of people, people in our courts. And we can speak more on this later perhaps, but in general, I think that it’s helpful background because after that it became clear that, as we all know, as people who are workers, there is safety and solidarity and safety in numbers and it felt important for the rest of our union to also most importantly speak on the genocidal violence that Palestinians are and have been experiencing for at new rates for the past over 40 days of bombs reigning in Gaza, increased violence in the West Bank, but also for 75 years of colonial occupation, and then also in order to stand in solidarity with our union at the Bronx Defenders and protect us all together collectively.
Michael Letwin:
Allie explained very well the history of this in recent times. I guess I just want to take a step back and start from an earlier point, which is that there’s a long history of more than two decades really of battling around Palestinian rights and the right to even express a pro-Palestinian point of view and an anti-genocidal point of view in our union and especially at The Legal Aid Society, which again, is the largest of these institutions, of the employers. And that history really starts with immediately after 9/11 of 2001 when a number of us started an effort called New York City Labor Against the War and issued a statement less than a week or so after 9/11, calling for what it sounds like to oppose the US war that was going to be unleashed, and that was unleashed both abroad in places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Palestine and also at home in terms of the attack on Muslim people, on people of color, generally, on civil liberties and free speech.
And so in the wake of that, a number of us came under intense attack from within our own ranks of the union, a small number of people, but nonetheless very vocal, who condemned us for taking that position and basically tried to get The Legal Aid Society, the employer, to shut down any kind of advocacy against the war for Palestine. And in fact, for years there was a battle that went on between these Zionist members of the union who tried to shut down any anti-war or pro-Palestinian speech, both at The Legal Aid Society, by the employer, and even went to outside agencies and people to try to get a threat of funding deprived to the agency if they continued to allow and didn’t shut down and totally censor this kind of speech.
And you have to understand, this is an agency where, and in a union, which traditionally has discussed everything in anything under the sun, including on the email system where anything could be said. And yet the one thing that couldn’t be said apparently was Palestine. And that is not true just in our situation, that’s the whole so-called Palestine exception to free speech that is out there. And that is, if anything, the most intense right now as we can see in this temporary restraining order against our resolution being voted on.
So skipping ahead then, however, over the years people persevered and our union continued to speak about Palestine, issued numerous statements to that effect in a defense of free speech. And then finally, in the wake of one of the earlier wars on Gaza, since there’s been so many, since 2008, 2009, in 2022, our union membership adopted a Palestine solidarity resolution, a very strong resolution, which called for BDS, called for the UAW to divest from Israel bonds and which was passed by 75% of the membership voting, which is a huge landslide, far greater than you could ever hope for in almost any situation.
And then more recently before our resolution was brought this year in our local, there was a rank and file BDS resolution that was formulated by other people in other UAW places calling on, in response to the Palestinian call issued on October 16th that Allie had mentioned, and that resolution is a sign-on statement, which calls on the UAW in particular to end its support for genocide and to condemn the genocide, and to divest from bonds and all those other things and join BDS. And finally then on the heels of all of that, and on the heels of October 7th, came this resolution that we’re now being stopped from voting on. And that resolution, again, is very strong, very much in the same voice as our 2022 resolution that was overwhelmingly adopted.
And the point, I think, about all this is that, like throughout society there is such growing support for Palestinians and that Israel has so de-legitimized itself, especially in regard to the brutalization of Gaza. I mean, it’s Guernica all over again. It’s the Warsaw Ghetto all over again. It’s Soweto. It’s any number of places you can think up historic analogies. And it’s so clear that this is genocidal and unjust, and so because of that huge outpouring, and we can see 300,000 people marched in Washington just a couple of weeks ago for Palestine, because of that, the only response that the Zionist or pro-Israeli forces have is to silence and to intimidate and to blacklist and to fire, all the things that are now going on to anybody who speaks up for Palestine.
Because they can’t defend the indefensible. They can’t win the argument. They can’t convince people in a democratic process not to vote for a resolution like this. The only thing they can do is threaten our funding, go to the court to shut down the democracy and to enable Israeli genocide, and that’s what we’re facing here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I really, really appreciate that breakdown. I think it really underscores one of the things that I really wanted to communicate to listeners in this episode, and that we’ve been trying to communicate with other interviews that I’ve been doing here, on the Real News, at Breaking Points, everywhere else. I’ve been running myself ragged trying to cover this as much as I can. But this is a worker issue on so many levels. This is, at base, a humanity issue. We, as human beings, what kind of world are we expected to give to our children? How can we look our children in the face? How can we even look towards a future and think it’s one worth living in where humanity has shown itself capable of just accepting this and doing nothing while our fellow human beings are slaughtered en masse, while futures are stolen, children are murdered and left to die in incubators?
Again, that’s where we got to start, is just from a basic human perspective, from the side of life, we need to be speaking out against this and fighting for justice and peace as much as possible. But also, as you’ve heard from the conversation so far, this is fundamentally a labor issue. Not only because our fellow unionists in Palestine have put out this call to workers and unions around the world to oppose the violence of Israeli occupation, the genocidal onslaught in Gaza, to use our power as workers to bring an end to this madness. And at the same time, everything that we’re talking about here is a worker issue.
Your boss and the sort of… I mean, workers getting censored from releasing a statement, the kind of censorship that we’re talking about. We’re not even talking about the many instances of censorship and repression that we’ve been hearing about for weeks across the country. People getting fired from their jobs, people having promotions rescinded, people getting doxxed, even students getting doxxed just for showing up at a rally, not speaking at it. The pressure, the intense pressure, coming from the donor class and certain members within it to push universities to crack down on free speech as well, right? I mean, if workers and unions cannot harness our collective power to stand up for the right to free speech, what movement do we have left? And so I think that that’s also really important to underline here.
And I want to sort of talk about how this is playing out for y’all, and has been playing out over the past week, kind of building on the great breakdown that Michael gave us. I wanted to sort of ask if we could, again, walk listeners through how this has unfolded. As the statement came together, as y’all were preparing to vote on the resolution to release this statement. And were people at different offices being called in and told that you shouldn’t do this by your employers, and that you’re going to lose funding, and then having a injunction slapped on you like… Like, this is wild. I know I’ve heard about similar things to this, but I was struggling to sort of think of a similar situation where a union was enjoined to not even complete voting on a resolution to release a statement. That’s pretty wild to me. So can you guys break that timeline down for us a little bit more and talk about just the past week specifically for people listening to this?
Dany Greene:
So as Allie explained earlier, our union, ALAA, is composed of 25 different shops. And so various members from those different shops came together to create the resolution and to write the resolution. And then that resolution, once it was written, in support of Palestine, was brought to the joint council. And that joint council consists of leaders from each of the shops who meet on occasions to vote through resolutions and do other union activities. So that resolution was brought to the joint council, and that meeting was on November 14th when the joint council met, and they overwhelmingly voted in favor of bringing that resolution to a wider membership vote. The vote was 108 to 13 to 8. And then they set that membership vote for November 17th. But between November 14th, which was the Tuesday, to November 17th, the Friday, a lot happened, and I can walk us through that.
First LAS, the Legal Aid Society, their management made a public statement and held a town hall meeting for all employees at the Legal Aid Society. That statement was put out on November 16th, one day before our scheduled union vote. And in the statement, and in that town hall, they smeared the resolution. They called it antisemitic, threatened that it would lead to a loss of funding for the organization, and strongly discouraged members from voting in favor of the resolution. The New York Legal Assistance Group, NYLAG, their management also released a very similar statement the following day. So on the day of our vote. In that statement, they again urged members to vote no, they blasted the resolution as antisemitic, and they threatened that it would cause the organization to lose funding.
At the same time as this is all happening on this interference from management, there was a group of four attorneys who are union members from the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County that sued in the New York State Supreme Court to stop our resolution from going to a vote. They filed that lawsuit on Thursday afternoon, and rather than just voting no for the resolution, they resorted to this as an attack on our union democracy.
The vote started as planned on November 17th, the Friday, but 15 minutes before the vote closed and a tally began, a Nassau County Supreme Court judge issued a blatantly unconstitutional temporary restraining order, which barred our union from completing the vote. We strongly oppose the fearmongering that management took place in their attempts to silence us, as well as the blatantly anti-union and anti-democratic actions of just four members preventing this vote from continuing. And I know we want to speak to each of those points more in depth. I believe that Allie can speak a little bit more to funding now.
Allie Goodman:
Thanks Dany. So yeah, I think one important thing is that most of the conversations to get us to stop speaking out on behalf of Palestinians and in favor of justice have been about funding and have been about threats to funding, and as Dany called it, fearmongering.
But it is important to note that funding and money, historically, has gone hand in hand with promoting genocide. People who are in leading roles at universities, funding politicians, people who are in positions of power with the ability to determine who gets money or what gets money often play really big roles in controlling speech and in controlling war and genocide and profiting off of it, as you stated earlier, Maximillian, which was a really wonderful point. And so we’re sort of responding in response to that, first of all. Twyla had indicated previously at a meeting with Legal Aid attorneys that something along the lines of how we wanted to be aligned with law firms, because law firms give us the money to do discretionary things at our different union shops. But we explicitly do not want to be morally aligned with law firms. More often than not, that is not our goal. And I think that’s important to remember, as you keep highlighting, as working people.
And really importantly, we are a group of public defense offices. So the truth is that the government needs us. We are protecting people’s constitutional rights, as Michael stated. Their right to the custody and control of their children, their right to liberty, their right to freedom and justice. And our system of governance requires us, as public defenders, in order to even keep up the veneer or facade of justice in our systems that could only resemble justice with us being in the roles that we are. So conditioning our funding on silence about issues that matter to us is in line with fascism and McCarthyism and we should all take extreme issue and actively fight against this, for ourselves and our clients and for humanity, honestly.
And I, ultimately, and I think we all here, refuse to legitimize the fearmongering around money and funding for that exact reason. Curtailing our rights as union workers and as people, and our First Amendment rights generally, which I know Michael will speak more about, that’s something that we refuse to believe as a legitimate threat. Unless if the government is prepared to accept their status as fascist McCarthyists. And so the problem is not our speech, but their attempts to unjustly intimidate us out of speaking.
Dany Greene:
I also want to talk about the management’s attempts to silence us through their dangerous conflation of antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Many of our union members, including Allie, Michael, and I, are all Jewish anti-Zionists. And LAS and NYLAG specifically, their management has attempted to silence our union in our critiques of Israel by mislabeling them as antisemitic. At the Legal Aid Society meeting, when pushed by members to identify any antisemitic statement in the resolution, LAS management pointed to this language. “One, in the occupation of Palestine, and two, we stand for human rights and against apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
Twyla Carter, the CEO of LAS, called these dog whistles for antisemitism. But they’re not. They’re far from being antisemitic and they’re language that aligns with human rights organizations across the world in their assessment of Israel’s conduct in Palestine. Our resolution expresses opposition to the actions of the state of Israel and those of the United States. And the state of Israel is distinct from the religious or ethnic identity of Jews, and to assert otherwise conflates a government with its people and it’s incorrect and it’s dangerous. Legal Aid Society and NYLAG, in their management, they misrepresented the definition of antisemitism, both publicly and in the workplace, and in doing this, they impeded our work for justice and they’ve endangered our communities. They attempted to silence our union members who support Palestine, again, many of whom are Jewish. We also strongly oppose the statement that LAS CEO Twyla Carter made when she stated that advocating for free Palestine is equivalent to stating that Blue Lives Matter. In our fight for Palestinian liberation, we also fight for racial justice and against antisemitism, and we reject any claim that they’re mutually exclusive. All of these fights for justice go hand in hand and be do them simultaneously.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, that one gets me. All of this gets me, but I’ve seen some shit in my day for management, and this sort of faux progressive weaponization of identity politics and other nominally sounding progressive issues to bust unions, to suppress workers’ rights, that is next level. And I’m speaking for myself here. I’m not speaking for anyone else on the call. This is me, Max, the host, opining on that.
But it reminds me of when we interviewed workers at No Evil Foods, a vegan meat alternative producer in North Carolina a couple of years ago, and the pseudo progressive punk rock looking owners who had tattoos and piercings. I got the recordings from the captive audience meetings they held to bust their union drive, and they were using all these faux left talking points saying that, “We’re a vegan company that believes in a meatless future, and you guys want to unionize with the UFCW who also represent meat packing workers, and so you’re undercutting the mission,” just cherry-picking so many things to ultimately, in the grand scheme of things, the whole goal was to bust the union drive. The whole goal was to strip away workers’ rights.
So I’m not conflating these two instances. I’m comparing them in that regard that bosses can use so many different mechanisms to try to ultimately achieve the same end, which is get their workers to shut the hell up and stay in line and not exercise their own rights. And that is wrong regardless of the situation, but especially in a situation like this where we are literally with our own eyes watching the extermination of a people, and we are being told it’s anti-Semitic to say anything about it. That’s fucking ridiculous. Pardon my French. Again, I’m just speaking for myself. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but I’ve been bottling this up for the past 48 hours after learning about what y’all are going through, and it is blowing my god-damn mind.
And again, we’re talking about a McCarthyite situation here where people are getting fired for even liking stuff on social media. Just the repressive nature of this is so intense, and working people and people of conscience everywhere have to fight against that because if we lose that battle now, if you give up your ability to exercise those rights, you are not going to get them back without a hell of a fight. And so for many, many reasons, everyone listening to this should stand up and oppose what is happening here. Because if it’s not happening at your shop, I promise you it will come to your shop if we all stand idly by and let this happen.
And so I want to end on that note. I wanted to turn things over to y’all one more time. I know that we’ve already gone over a little bit. I don’t want to keep you for too much longer, but I just wanted to ask what happens now? Where do things stand? Again, we’re recording this on Sunday, November 19th. We’re going to try to turn this around for tomorrow as quickly as we can. But as Dany said, a shit ton happened in the span of three days last week, so I’m going to hedge my betts here and say that a lot could happen in the next 24, 48, 72 hours. So I guess what happens now and where do things stand now? What can other unions, what can other workers, what can other people of conscience do to support y’all in this fight?
Michael Letwin:
Well, I’ll just start by saying that the temporary restraining order against our union, silencing our union, on speaking out on a human rights issue and a liberation issue, and an anti-genocide issue especially, is truly unprecedented, at least in modern times. There was a time when there were no free speech rights at all in this country, really, and where unions were even illegal until basically the end of the 19th century and still had to fight all kinds of battles ever since, including battles in which lots of workers were killed by the employers or the state. But in modern times, to have a court of all places in Nassau County Supreme Court, which is the trial-level court in New York State, for them to issue a prior restraint, prior censorship against political speech by a union, or for that matter, anybody else, is just absolutely groundless in terms of the law. It’s a blatant violation of the First Amendment.
The only time I’m aware of in recent times, recent years, modern times, when a court even issued an injunction against the union for making it for speech was around 1999, 2000 during the transit workers’ negotiations in New York City. And I remember going to court with the Transit Workers Union on behalf of our union and opposing a temporary restraining order, which forbade the union, that union, from taking a vote to authorize a strike at the New York Transit Authority. And the basis for that, although that was also blatantly unconstitutional, but at least the grounds for that was that going on strike for those workers is illegal under the Taylor Law in New York State, a horrible anti-union law.
And so that should of course never have been issued. It was like the injunction against the Memphis sanitation workers in 1968 that the court there ordered same time that Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated. But at least, again, they had the hook there, that what was being voted on was to advocate or even authorize what was purportedly an illegal job action. Here, this is purely political speech. And again, not to defend what the court did there, but to say this is even worse, because here all that’s being voted on is something that doesn’t even have to do with collective bargaining directly. It’s not about an issue at work, although actually it is because of the silencing and the censorship. But that’s not primarily even what this resolution was about. And even if it was, we have the right to say so.
So, to have this court issue this injunction, and not just an injunction, but a temporary restraining order, in other words, basically an ex parte that means that we didn’t have the right to be heard before this was ordered, is just absolutely unheard of, and I think it’s very much part of the times that we’re facing now. This is post 9/11 all over again. This is McCarthyism all over again. This is the Red Scare all over again. This is becoming COINTELPRO all over again from the 1960s, the notorious FBI program to attack the Black Liberation Movement in particular. And so it’s essential, we think, to oppose this. We will oppose this. We will not be silenced. As we say in one of our press releases, we will prevail here. We will vote, we will pass the resolution and Palestine will be free, not just because of us, but with our support and our strong intervention to the degree that we can.
And in that regard, I would just ask people to do a number of things. One is… Or actually, Allie, do you want to address this? Okay. Sorry. Let me take that apart. Start back. So we would ask people to do a number of things themselves. One is, if you’re in a union, get your union, bring a resolution to get your union to respond to the call of Palestinian trade unionists for a ceasefire, yes, but not just a ceasefire. For the liberation of Palestine and for the end to the Zionist regime that exists there, and that stops people from being free, so that we have a society in Palestine with liberation for Palestine from the river to the sea with equal rights for all. That’s what we’re talking about ultimately here.
And secondly, to bring that resolution of your union, to get your union to divest from Israel bonds, to call for those different things, to support the BDS movement. And we’d also ask UAW members to sign on to the rank and file UAW BDS statement that’s out there. You can find it online. Whatever union you’re in, to sign on to the Labor for Palestine statement posted at laborforpalestine.net, which upholds the Palestinian Trade Union call. And to take these steps now so that we can look at ourselves in the face, both as union members, as workers, and as human beings.
Allie Goodman:
I’ll also just provide our email that we’ve created alaaforpalestine@gmail.com. alaaforpalestine@gmail.com. If you are in a union, if you’re trying to form a union, everyone should try and form a union. But in general, we would be happy to support other union shops in coming up with statements and figuring out how you too can stand in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions and Palestinians generally, and support Palestinian liberation and liberation for us all.
Michael Letwin:
If I could just add one thing, you may not have use for this, but I just want to call attention to the fact that already, workers around the world are refusing to handle Israeli cargo, in particular, dockers. And even in this country, a couple of weeks ago, a block the boat campaign, which is coordinated by the Air Resources and Organizing Center in the Bay Area, with support of ILWU local 10 dock workers, refused to handle Israeli cargo. It was coming on a Zim line ship into Oakland, and then refused to handle it when that ship fled to Tacoma because it couldn’t get unloaded in Oakland. And this reflects an ongoing block the boat campaign that started in 2014, in which for the past almost 10 years, has kept Israeli ships away from the West Coast. So these are the kinds of actions, the direct actions, that we can be taking in all kinds of ways to support Palestinian trade unionists and Palestinian people generally. Its resolutions are critical and the fight for free speech is critical, but ultimately it’s that kind of direct action by workers at their jobs that can make all the difference.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
