Members of the United Auto Workers have overwhelmingly approved a contract that will deliver higher wages, assure them of a role in the EV transition, and possibly lead toward greater unionization of the auto sector. With all of the benefits the pact provides, tens of thousands of people will immediately see their pay rise more than 40 percent, the union said.
The union’s ratification of the pact, by a margin of 64 percent, with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis followed a two-month strike. Though the electric vehicle transition was never an explicit part of bargaining, it ran as a simultaneously tense and hopeful undercurrent through the walkouts, pickets, and negotiations. This contract, analysts say, will allow the union’s 150,000 members to maintain their quality of life as the nation decarbonizes the transportation sector.
“Those are all huge wins,” said Albert Wheaton, director of the Cornell Institute for Labor Studies. “The biggest wins by far have been for the lower paid workers.”
Under the contract, the base wage paid to workers will increase 25 percent while the top wage will climb 33 percent. It also provides cost of living adjustments and eliminates the two-tiered wage system that saw new hires permanently earn lower wages than veterans. Temporary workers will see their pay jump 150 percent, and the pact cuts from eight to three the number of years required to reach the top pay level.
The agreement with Stellantis also provides for the reopening of a plant that the automaker had planned to close in Belvidere, Illinois, and will add 1,000 jobs at an EV battery plant in the same town.
Workers at Ford and Stellantis overwhelmingly supported the contract; the margin was tighter at GM at just 55 percent, according to Reuters and the Washington Post. The union had already secured an agreement with GM to include new EV and battery factories in the contract; similar victories were seen Stellantis, Labor Notes reported, though the union’s win was less pronounced at Ford, where two current EV plants are included in the deal but all future ventures will have to be organized by UAW separately.
Union president Shawn Fein promised on Monday to bring the fight to other automakers.
“The Stand Up Strike was just the beginning,” he said in a statement. “The UAW is back to setting the standard. Now, we take our strike muscle and our fighting spirit to the rest of the industries we represent, and to millions of nonunion workers ready to stand up and fight for a better way of life.”
The strike has already improved conditions at other automakers. Even as the UAW announced its win, Toyota factories in Kentucky and Alabama — a major player in the EV space — had already raised their base wage to $28 per hour. A nascent, not-yet-public 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.
Almost as soon as the contracts were announced on October 31, automakers expressed concern about their impact on EV production and sales. The workers’ gains, analysts warned, could hobble the nascent transition by increasing costs or impacting the speed with which manufacturers could produce the cars. Ford, for example,has estimated the new contract will add $850 to $900 in labor costs per vehicle, according to Reuters. In the weeks since the UAW and Detroit automakers announced the contracts, there have been increasing signs that the relatively high cost of EVs, coupled with softening demand, could slow the transition.
“The auto industry has always been cyclical,” Wheaton said. With new technologies and safety laws, the industry ebbs and flows.
Wheaton said the contracts may provide workers with greater security, particularly the provision that allows them to strike over plant closures, while also allowing union shops to transition from internal combustion vehicles to electrics in a controlled way.
“It helps stabilize those existing plants by saying no, we make parts for both gas and electric cars,” Wheaton said, rather than opening separate factories in an economy that may not fully support them yet. With the elimination of wage tiers, workers at idled plants will also be able to move more easily to other locations without a huge decrease in pay, he said.
Mijin Cha, an assistant professor of social sciences at the University of California-Santa Cruz, sees the strike as the vanguard of labor fights that will characterize the transition away from fossil fuels. She says characterizing the UAW’s win, and any that may follow, in a “jobs versus environment” framework would be a mistake. Policies like the Inflation Reduction Act, while groundbreaking, often benefit private sector companies, not workers, and it isn’t labor, but fossil fuel producers and other entrenched industries, that hampers efforts to decarbonize.
“The greed of the fossil fuel industry is what’s stopping the energy transition,” she said, “not the fact that people want to make a decent wage.”
On Sept 29, union leader Jude Thaddeus Fernandez was killed in his home by Philippine National Police during a labor campaign to raise wages and end government corruption and abuses. Fernandez is the 72nd victim of labor-related killings in the Philippines since July 2016. The Real News reports from Manila.
Producer: Mayday Multimedia, Brian Sulicipan Videographers: Aly Suico, Bane Vicente, Francis Manaog, Kat Catalan, Tel Delvo Video Editor: Mervine Aquino Narrator: Kate Calimag
Transcript
Jerome Adonis, Secretary General, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU): Our call: Justice for Comrade Jude!
Justice for Comrade Jude!
Justice for all the victims of political killings!
Kate Calimag (narrator): Filipino workers, led by Kilusang Mayo Uno (May First Movement), protested in front of the National Police Headquarters in Manila to condemn the killing of veteran labor organizer Jude Fernandez, who was slain on September 29, 2023.
As reported by various labor groups in the country, Fernandez is the 72nd labor organizer killed since 2016. The incident comes despite promises by the Marcos Jr. administration to ensure labor and human rights in the country are respected.
Rafael Provido, Ilaw at Buklod ng Manggagawa (IBM) – KMU: Join the struggle!
“Don’t be afraid!”
Don’t be afraid!
“Join the struggle!”
Kate Calimag (narrator): As a veteran activist and labor organizer who started in the ’70s, during Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s Martial Law, the death of Fernandez sparked protests and statements of condemnation from other sectors as well.
The protesters also noted how reminiscent the brutal death was of the activist suppression during the Martial Law years.
Mong Palatino, Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan): Justice for Comrade Jude!
Justice for all victims of extrajudicial killings!
Justice for all victims of the state’s terrorism!
Kate Calimag (narrator): Fernandez was known to have been crucial in forming the Alliance of Workers in the Province of Laguna, and labor federation Unity of Workers in Southern Tagalog – KMU. Both labor formations are based in the provinces south of the Philippine capital which have dense populations of workers employed by various multinational companies.
Jerome Adonis, Secretary-General, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU): Since starting out as a youth activist, Fernandez immediately decided to help in labor organizing. They formed various formations to broaden the struggle and fight of workers, mainly on issues regarding the living wage. Second, on resisting contractualization (labor flexibilization schemes), third on the issue of decent and safe workplaces. Lastly, the fundamental right of workers, to organize and form a union.
Kate Calimag (narrator): Various labor and human rights organizations launched a factfinding mission led by Kilusang Mayo Uno.
Based on interviews in the community, a group of operatives in plainclothes executed Jude Fernandez. While police reported that the 66-year-old labor organizer fought back, anonymous community members said that there was no exchange of gunshots. The “nanlaban” narrative, or victims allegedly having “fought back,” is eerily similar to the preceding administration’s executions of drug suspects which have been criticized globally for violating human rights.
Because of the mounting number of labor-related harassments, red-tagging, and deaths, various labor groups united to denounce the worsening climate for labor organizing in the country. The labor groups submitted a unified report to the International Labour Organization, which has since given recommendations to the Philippine government.
Since the ILO mission, four labor-related deaths, including Fernandez’s, have been recorded.
Kamz Deligente, Deputy Director, Center for Trade Union and Human Rights (CTUHR): In other cases, labor organizers Ador (Juat) and Loi (Magbanua) have been missing since May 2022. After them, there have been four more cases of extrajudicial killings of workers and organizers. There’s the murder of Alex Dolorosa of BIEN (BPO Industry Employees Network) in Negros Province and the killing of the Fausto family, who were agricultural workers.
It’s still very difficult to organize unions, workers’ organizations or associations. Actually, same goes for any kind of organization, right? It’s difficult because of the continuing and worsening repression and attacks against those who seek change.
We need to address concerns on the right to organize. The Philippines remains in the top 10 most dangerous or worst countries for workers, primarily because of these reasons. Violence, harassment, and other forms of attacks against workers are prevalent. With this recent case of the brutal killing of Jude Fernandez, we see that the Philippine government is not serious in keeping with the image it tries to show the international community, that it is “pro-human rights” that it is supposedly serious in enacting “change.” But we see that it remains much of the same.
Kate Calimag (narrator): The Center for Trade Union and Human Rights cites informal and formal barriers that cause the shrinking unionization rate in the country. Such formal barriers include government policies on labor flexibilization and anti-insurgency. While labor flexibilization policies have been around since the ’80s, new anti-insurgency policies affecting labor, specifically the NTF-ELCAC (National Task Force to End Local Communist Conflict) and the Anti-Terror Law were enacted during the Duterte administration and continued to the current Marcos Jr. administration.
Jerome Adonis, Secretary-General, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU): State and capitalist agents target labor leaders and organizers, like those from KMU, because we are known to fight not only for wages, jobs, rights, but also for political change in the future. Because we believe that even if we get wage increases, we form unions, if the government’s repressive policies remain, it will all be for nothing.
Kate Calimag (narrator): While KMU has vowed to bring justice to the slain labor organizer, various labor groups and student organizations spoke in support and solidarity with Fernandez’s family and fellow organizers.
“The traces you left, we will follow”
“We will rise firmly from where you departed”
“For the traces you left, we will follow”
Kate Calimag (narrator): Fernandez’s remains were welcomed in a church inside the University of the Philippines. A tribute was held to commemorate his contributions to the Philippine labor movement and the national democratic movement.
“…Forge the path!”
“Five workers, add to them ten,”
“When they struggled, grew to fifty”
“Workers, whose hearts are one…”
“Sorrow not, motherland,”
“even if some of your children fall”
“Our fortress of steel shelters us”
“…In our struggle, we will succeed.”
Mario Fernandez, President, OLALIA – KMU: The state seems to think, specifically the NTF-ELCAC, that when they jail, kill, and harass labor organizers, maybe we would stop. But it’s the opposite especially because of the economic crisis, the higher inflation rate. That’s what they fail to see. They only know how to harass us, thinking it would stop us. That’s not normal. That is not the reality. This urges us to press on. Even if they jail and kill older labor organizers, we will not stop. Instead, it only pushes us more to take to the streets and continue the fight.
Lito Ustarez, Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU): Long live Comrade Jude!
It’s been a record year for labor strikes. Hollywood actors recently ended their historic, 118-day walkout. Thousands of auto workers in Detroit are returning to factories after more than 46 days on the picket lines. Their labor unions secured major gains during contract negotiations at a time when companies are struggling to find job candidates.
In December, some of the nation’s lowest paid workers will also gain the power to bargain with America’s largest corporations. Fast food employees, hotel housekeepers and millions of franchise workers are among those expected to benefit from a wonky new federal rule that will make it easier for them to form labor unions.
The National Labor Relations Board recently changed its standard in deciding when two companies are considered joint employers under the National Labor Relations Act, a federal law that grants workers the right to organize. The independent federal agency scrapped a Trump-era rule that was less likely to consider certain corporations joint employers, therefore allowing them to evade responsibility for unfair labor practices and avoid bargaining with union members at their franchisees and staffing firms. McDonald’s is among the companies that have successfully fought such accountability.
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The new rule, approved in October, states that a company is considered a joint employer — and is therefore required to bargain with unionized employees — if it directly or indirectly controls any essential working condition: wages, work schedules, job assignments, disciplinary action, job supervision, hiring and firing and workplace safety conditions. Before, only companies with direct control were considered joint employers.
This change will expand the number of companies that must take part in labor negotiations along with their franchisees or independent contractors. That means the labor board may require Amazon to negotiate with delivery drivers hired by independent contractors. Or it could force major hospitals to bargain with subcontracted staff, such as physicians’ assistants, cafeteria workers and janitorial staff.
Richard Eiker, a fast food worker from Kansas City, Missouri, said that McDonald’s controls nearly every aspect of his job, even though the restaurant is owned by a franchisee. McDonald’s requires them to use specific software to track his productivity, for example, and decides whom he should call when the ice cream machine breaks. His restaurant has changed ownership six times, he wrote to the NLRB.
“Regardless of these ownership changes, my coworkers and I are expected to follow the same rules and maintain the same standards set by McDonald’s corporate, all while losing seniority and access to healthcare benefits with a new employer on our checks,” wrote Eiker, who is a leader in the pro-union group Stand Up KC.
“If McDonald’s can control nearly every aspect of my job, they can and should be held responsible for the maintenance of my benefits and working conditions,” he added.
McDonald’s disagrees. An attorney representing the company wrote a scathing letter to the Board, saying the new rule will “destroy the franchise model” and devastate small business owners who run their own restaurants.
“Franchisees … fear the proposed rule would curtail their independence, transforming owners and operators into middle managers contrary to the franchise model,” wrote Angela Steele, U.S. general counsel for McDonald’s. About 95% of McDonald’s restaurants are independently owned, according to the company.
Outsourcing responsibility
Some of America’s lowest paid workers have struggled to organize in recent years because of what is known as the “fissured” workplace. Rather than have a large number of direct employees working for a single company, U.S. corporations have increasingly evaded liability through a broad network of contracting, outsourcing, franchising and ownership structures.
The restaurant industry is a good example of this. It employs the largest number of minimum-wage workers, and relies heavily on the franchise model. More than 8 million people work for U.S. franchisees, which includes many retail outlets and hotels, according to the International Franchise Association.
Most restaurant workers are low paid, and their job has one of the nation’s lowest union membership rates — 3.6% in 2022.
That’s not a coincidence. Union membership, overall, leads to higher pay. Back in the 1950s, about one in three workers belonged to a labor union. Now it’s one in 10. That decline is partly responsible for growing income inequality in the U.S., research shows. Union workers earn 10% to 15% more than non-union employees with similar jobs and experience, according to an economist at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
The recent small change in wording to the joint-employer rule will likely make it far easier for restaurant workers to unionize.
The latest joint-employer rule is not all that new. It was the standard during the Obama administration. In 2015, the NLRB ruled that waste management company Browning-Ferris Industries was a joint employer of contract workers who sorted its recycling because it had authority over their working conditions. The company sued, but a federal court upheld the labor board’s decision.
Then, during the Trump administration, the Republican-controlled labor board narrowed the definition of a joint employer. Companies were considered a joint employer only if they had “substantial direct and immediate control” over working conditions.
The new rule, approved by the Democrat-controlled labor board, essentially reinstates the older one. Though it only applies to labor relations, the U.S. Department of Labor recently adopted a similar definition of joint employer when determining which companies are liable for wage theft, sexual harassment, discrimination and safety violations on the job, for example.
That change became effective in September 2021. The NLRB’s new standard goes into effect on December 26.
The workers had spent the morning of November 8, 2021, clipping, trussing, and trellising hundreds of thousands of tomato plants that twisted almost four stories into the air. They were inside one of the world’s largest high-tech greenhouses, which sits on more than 60 acres of a former cattle field in Morehead, Kentucky.
As one of the greenhouse workers, who I’ll call Nora, sat down for lunch in the worker canteen, she heard her colleagues whisper about their new task for the day. U.S. Senator Mitch McConnell would be visiting that afternoon to give a speech praising the greenhouse company, AppHarvest. Before he arrived, management had to make sure their Spanish-speaking colleagues disappeared.
“We had very little time,” recalled Nora, whose real name is being withheld because she is subject to a nondisclosure agreement. “We had to get them off the premises and away before he got there.”
Nora watched her coworkers get dismissed, grab their stuff, and leave on white buses bound for a trio of small motels where the largely Mexican contract workers lived four or five to a room. When McConnell arrived, Nora joined her remaining, mostly-white colleagues on the sunny lawn. Their clean T-shirts advertised AppHarvest’s name and logo, intended to invoke both the Appalachian region where they worked and the iconic branding of Apple — Silicon Valley by way of the Middle American upstart.
“We all know the decline of the coal industry only got worse, and so this [AppHarvest] gives us hope,” the senator said, praising the local labor force encircling him. “You are the real leaders, I think, in beginning to fully develop all of Kentucky’s potential.”
It was a familiar message, one that had been touted over and over in nationally televised interviews, public filings, and company reports by AppHarvest’s then-CEO, a Kentucky native and entrepreneur named Jonathan Webb. In 2018, the 32-year-old Webb returned home with the promise of building a dozen high-tech, hydroponic indoor farms across Eastern Kentucky and the surrounding region, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, berries, and lettuce. Not only would he be piloting an advanced form of climate-resilient agriculture, he would also be generating gainful, blue-collar employment in some of the country’s most economically-distressed counties, where he argued that the coal industry’s downfall left a void that could be filled by sustainable industry.
Workers would start at $13 an hour, with hefty productivity bonuses and a track to internal promotions. Then there were the perks: 100 percent employer-paid health insurance premiums for both employees and their families, monthly boxes of farm-fresh produce, and stock options once the company went public. In a region terrorized by the opioid epidemic, AppHarvest also offered jobs to formerly incarcerated people in recovery from addiction.
Webb’s worker-centric pitch raised over $700 million for AppHarvest to get off the ground and catapulted him into the national spotlight, with largely glowing coverage from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and Forbes. It also convinced a number of big names to join the company’s board: Martha Stewart, activist investor Jeffrey Ubben, former Impossible Foods CFO David Lee, and J.D. Vance, the venture capitalist and Hillbilly Elegy author who would later win election to a U.S. Senate seat in Ohio with a Trump-inspired, anti-immigrant message.
McConnell’s speech in Morehead highlighted another major theme in AppHarvest’s advertising: replacing what Webb has called “dirty” agricultural imports from Mexico with safe, nutritious berries, lettuce, and tomatoes from central Appalachia.
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvest’s greenhouse in Berea, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Lettuce grows in AppHarvests’s Berea greenhouse.
Courtesy of AppHarvest
“I like the idea of taking the tomato market away from the Mexicans,” McConnell said that afternoon, according to an employee’s video recording of the event. Some workers looked around in surprise. Others seated behind McConnell rocked nervously in chairs, trying to catch the eyes of friends on the lawn. Applause can be heard in the recording, but at least one employee booed. The moment felt rigid and frail, like a ship just beginning to sink below the sea.
“No wonder they sent the f—ing contractors [home],” one worker said, turning to a coworker off-camera.
The discontent that day wasn’t just about optics, or fairness to the contract workers. It was the culmination of a year of frustration with a company that had promised to deliver both Grade A tomatoes and fulfilling rural employment but was falling dramatically short on both counts. Even as Senator McConnell sang the company’s praises, AppHarvest was already well on its way to a spectacular collapse, the full story of which has never been told until now. The celebrated startup’s demise also highlights the dangers of expanding and relying on high-tech, indoor agricultural schemes that promise shortcuts to making farming more climate-friendly.
A worker in an AppHarvest-branded mask in a greenhouse in Morehead, Kentucky. Courtesy of AppHarvest
A year earlier, Nora had seen a billboard for AppHarvest on a state highway. She was hired after hearing a version of the company’s pitch that promised a strict 40-hour week and the opportunity to advance — something she had rarely found in the service jobs she’d worked since graduating high school. The promise was quickly broken: She was almost immediately told she needed to start working weekend overtime or her job would be in jeopardy. She found that her training in tomato caretaking — planting, pruning, harvesting — left much to be desired, and she and other workers were often confused over their job duties and requirements.
By summer, the greenhouse began reaching dangerously high indoor temperatures, and Nora watched coworkers struggle with dehydration and heat exhaustion. Turnover spiked. Nora developed asthma and anxiety, but she stayed the course.
That same summer, the company told investors that low productivity and high turnover at its Morehead greenhouse had led to a $32 million net loss. Stockholders then filed the first of five lawsuits alleging securities fraud, noting that AppHarvest’s own leadership had repeatedly cited “employee training, turnover, and poor work ethic” as the root causes of the company’s failure to reach profitability.
An AppHarvest employee walks between rows of tomatoes in the company’s Morehead greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
As workers soldiered on over the next two years, AppHarvest’s financial position continued to decline. This summer, lenders started demanding repayment of$182 million. Soon after, Webb was out as CEO, and AppHarvest declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bankruptcy filings show that the company owes over $1.4 million to at least three agricultural work placement agencies that help farms fill temporary agricultural jobs with foreign nationals. In September, Webb was fired from the company altogether. All of AppHarvest’s five facilities in Kentucky — two in Morehead, and one each in Berea, Richmond, and Somerset — are now in the hands of new owners. (In response to a detailed list of questions for this story, AppHarvest’s chief legal officer, Gary Broadbent, said that the company has no continuing operations and was not in a position to respond.)
A new investigation from Grist finds that what went on inside the company from its earliest days bore little resemblance to the sustainable, worker-friendly operation that Webb publicly touted. State documents obtained through open records requests, including complaints to Kentucky’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee, as well as interviews with 12 former employees from both the flagship Morehead greenhouse and corporate office, reveal issues widespread across AppHarvest’s operations. They expose how unsafe working conditions, negligible training that failed to prepare workers for their job requirements, and an unprofessional workplace doomed the company nearly from the start.
Editor’s note: Due to fear of legal reprisal from AppHarvest, all but three former employees interviewed for this story — including Nora, whose name is a pseudonym — requested anonymity to speak candidly about their experiences; AppHarvest employees signed nondisclosure agreements upon their hire, which have no termination date in the state of Kentucky.
Lights glow through the exterior of AppHarvest’s Somerset greenhouse. Courtesy of AppHarvest
Inside the Morehead greenhouse, the heat index could spike to 155 degrees Fahrenheit, according to worker interviews, leading to dehydration, heat exhaustion, and medical emergencies. The stress of the work environment led to panic attacks, ideation of personal harm, and relapses into addiction. Less than a year after the first seeds had been planted, benefits like employer-paid health insurance ended, company stocks plummeted, harvests failed to yield sufficient Grade A produce, and AppHarvest pivoted from uplifting Appalachia’s blue-collar workforce to bussing in workers from outside the region.
“My whole view of AppHarvest was we were all sold on this beautiful pipe dream,” one corporate worker told Grist. “This is sustainable, this is new, we’re going to make it. It turned out to just be a f—ing nightmare.”
Webb claims a connection to Eastern Kentucky through his ancestors: His great-grandfather died in a coal mining accident in Whitley County, where he says his grandmother grew up on a dirt floor. After graduation from the University of Kentucky’s business school, Webb moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked as a contractor on renewable energy projects under the U.S. Army Office of Energy Initiatives. Then, he read about controlled environment agriculture, or CEA, in a 2017 National Geographic story.
He quickly decided CEA could be as important a climate solution as renewable energy or electric cars — and as good an investment. CEA proponents argue both that farming needs to become less climate-dependent in a warming world and that its land footprint needs to shrink dramatically if the world hopes to preserve biodiversity and carbon sinks like forests. Indoor facilities outfitted with careful climate controls could theoretically accomplish this. For inspiration, Webb looked to the Netherlands, where high-tech greenhouses successfully grow produce for export year-round, on a total acreage that’s only twice the size of Manhattan. Without any prior professional experience in farming, he quit his job and founded AppHarvest the next year.
Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO of AppHarvest, speaks onstage during the Concordia Lexington Summit in April 2022. Jon Cherry / Getty Images for Concordia Summit
Webb was hardly alone in his bullishness on CEA. Congress’ 2018 Farm Bill, which expired earlier this year, expanded support of CEA research and development to mitigate food system risks, creating a federal Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production and distributing over $40 million in grants between 2020 and 2022. Over the last decade, the sustainability argument for CEA has helped the sector raise billions of dollars in private investments for a variety of startups.
Unlike in the Netherlands, where indoor farmers have learned best practices over half a century of trial and error, American startups like AppHarvest have overwhelmingly failed to turn a profit, or even break even. The crux of the problem is that roughly 75 percent of the industry’s costs stem from labor and energy. And while traditional agriculture works because it takes advantage of natural conditions, CEA has to artificially produce optimal growing conditions and power them with electricity. In a world still largely powered by commodified fossil fuels — nearly 70 percent of Kentucky’s grid remains coal-fired — that’s going to be prohibitively expensive in most places.
“It’s the fundamental physics challenge of turning fossil fuel energy into food,” said Bruce Bugbee, a plant scientist at Utah State University.
Even as the U.S. CEA market is predicted to be worth $3 billion by 2024, the high costs of running these facilities have accumulated quickly, leading to a domino of bankruptcies and closures over the last two years. Fifth Season, a Pennsylvania-based indoor farm that raised $35 million to sell salad kits in over 1,200 stores, closed without any warning a year ago, turning off its electricity and leaving its lettuce plants to die. In April, the Florida-based Kalera, which raised $100 million and became the first publicly-listed vertical farm in the U.S., filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Then, in June, even 19-year-old AeroFarms, which had raised hundreds of millions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy, though it claims it will continue some operations while restructuring the business.
“People with billions of dollars became aware of this industry and they think it’s the wave of the future,” said Bugbee, “but it doesn’t mean there’s been a scientific shift. It staggers me how much money they’re putting in.”
Without a viable solution to CEA’s fundamental energy dilemma, AppHarvest took increasingly desperate measures to wring profits out of the problem that has plagued agriculture for as long as humans have been farming: labor.
By the time she turned 30, Ahna Baxter’s life had long been dictated by the demanding hours and low wages of jobs in restaurants and factories. But a temporary gig at a vineyard near her hometown of Frankfort, Kentucky, gave her a glimpse of something different. She learned to press grapes into wine; she grew cucumbers and cantaloupe and admired the sunflowers that waved above her head. For the next few years, she dreamt of starting a small farm of her own.
That dream dried up just before the COVID-19 lockdowns. Baxter had just lost both a friend and family member to suicide, and she became dependent on her prescription Adderall to get through the day and alcohol to sleep at night. She abandoned her fledgling agricultural business, Ahna’s All Naturals, and checked into a 30-day rehab program.
As Baxter got back on her feet after rehab, she found comfort returning from work every day in time to tune into Governor Andy Beshear’s evening updates. The televised talks were like Mister Rogers for adults: a familiar voice for Kentuckians dealing with the confusion, loneliness, and grief brought by the pandemic, not to mention everything else Baxter had just been through.
In the summer of 2020, Beshear announced something that revived Baxter’s hope in a future tied to the land: AppHarvest, a nascent company turning heads with its promise of cutting-edge agritech, was hiring in Eastern Kentucky. The startup was offering the highest wage she’d ever made, opportunities for promotions, and training in agriculture. Baxter immediately went online and applied.
Employee badges hang on a wall near AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021, in Morehead, Kentucky. Jon Cherry
About a month later, she got a phone call from AppHarvest and met the hiring managers in Morehead. The interview was unlike any she’d had before. Instead of pressing her on why she would be a good fit for the position, AppHarvest seemed to be selling its vision to her. She thought this overt enthusiasm, coupled with a lack of clarity on basic job duties, was odd, but the opportunity was just too good to pass up. She quit her job as a landscape foreman, sold most of her belongings, and moved her RV to a friend’s backyard for her first month of employment before renting a trailer in the Cave Run Mobile Home Park in Morehead during the fall of 2020. After battling addiction, Baxter thought this clean break could help make a better life for herself and her then-16-year-old son, Eli, whom she’d had at 17.
“I sacrificed a lot, but I felt that this was it,” Baxter told me. “I felt like this was the end all be all. This is the company I’m going to be with forever.”
During orientation — a pep rally-style event with loud country music, cheering employees, and team-building games that lasted roughly a week — employees watched the David Attenborough documentary A Life on Our Planet. They learned that while traditional agriculture leaves soils depleted, their work growing produce indoors could save the food system. But the intricacies of working with tomato plants were largely glossed over during orientation, according to worker interviews. While some managers had formerly worked in indoor agriculture, most workers were new to the industry. Nora, who applied around the same time as Baxter after seeing an AppHarvest billboard go up in Morehead, recalled her husband was suspicious.
“He thought it was a bad idea from the get go,” said Nora. “I fed him the same lines they fed me: It’s a start up, it takes time working out the kinks.” Her husband replied that AppHarvest was either the greatest job ever, or it was going to be the greatest con.
But the company culture was contagious. When Nora and Baxter finally started working as clippers — attaching tomato vines to plastic hooks that hung from the ceiling — they were so excited that they often skipped between the rows of plants. Nora told herself she was making a difference.
An employee gestures among the rows of tomato plants and yellow adhesive bands, used to catch flying insects, in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Then, within weeks of the Morehead greenhouse opening in November of 2020, Nora and her colleagues were told they needed to work overtime.
“Ten minutes before the end of the shift they’d come over and say, ‘Due to a lack of attendance we’re doing work continuance until it’s done,’” Nora remembered. “So either you stay and work, or lose your job. You’d be so worn out and overheated and dehydrated you’d do anything they’d want you to do.”
An internal memo circulated to all Morehead employees the following spring confirms the policy. “At any given time an emergency could require immediate mandatory Overtime,” the document read, while attempting to maintain a sunny tone: “Working in a greenhouse has its challenges and one of them is keeping our Plants Happy!” Nora said that when she complained, her supervisor told her that she “needed to learn to sacrifice.”
But no amount of overtime could compensate for their light-touch training and resulting confusion over how exactly to truss, de-leaf, and prune the hundreds of thousands plants in the greenhouse. Plant diseases took hold. Tomatoes started rotting, resulting in almost 50 percent wasted product, according to the securities fraud suit. The bonuses workers were promised felt impossible to earn. Turnover spiked.
“They took people who had never done this before, threw them in a greenhouse, gave us minimal training on how to do it, and expected us to produce Grade A tomatoes when all we’d done was backyard farming,” said Nora. “No one was ever on the same page. No one in any greenhouse used the same techniques, and I think that was 90 percent of their quality issue.”
AppHarvest employees walk in the West greenhouse in Morehead on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
While AppHarvest’s failings were becoming clear to its workers even in its early months, Webb and other company leaders were still raising money. After 12 rounds of funding, AppHarvest had secured almost $800 million from funders like the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Rise of the Rest, a D.C.-based seed capital firm focused on Middle American startups. By early 2021, it became the first controlled environment agriculture company in the United States to go public, at $35.69 per share. Webb personally got a $1.5 million bonus for the stock listing and $31 million in stock awards. The company’s initial valuation of $1 billion soon grew to $3.7 billion.
One afternoon during the first summer of AppHarvest’s operation, then-55-year-old Janet Moore threw up at least three times from heat exhaustion in the bathroom outside the greenhouse. Other workers recalled seeing coworkers pass out from heat and leave on steel trolleys — or, sometimes, in ambulances.
Though the position was a financial improvement on the $7 an hour Moore once made working on a tobacco farm, the heat inside the greenhouse turned out to be far worse than an outdoor farm. One worker called it “an absolute grueling hell on earth.” Workers were only allowed to leave the greenhouse if the heat index reached 140 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a worker who helped those suffering from heat exhaustion. Another worker said thermometers were covered in gray trash bags or moved to poles where workers couldn’t see a heat index that the medical assistant said once peaked at 155 degrees Fahrenheit. Once the company began having productivity challenges, it seemed like no temperature was high enough to relieve workers of their greenhouse shifts; according to worker interviews, managers would simply alternate workers in 30-minute increments between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse.
Starting as early as August 2020, during construction of the Morehead greenhouse, workers filed eight complaints to the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet for Occupational Safety and Health. Almost half of those complaints, revealed for the first time in an open records request received by Grist, concerned the heat in the Morehead greenhouse and a second AppHarvest greenhouse in Berea, a town about 80 miles southwest. In July 2021, one complaint said workers were laboring in a heat index ranging from 115 to 136 degrees Fahrenheit.
“For the past few days no one has taken any temperatures,” the labor filing reads, adding that the company doesn’t allow workers to go home early, even though they work in direct sunlight and several suffered heat exhaustion. (While no federal heat standard exists for workers, a heat index — what the air feels like when combining relative humidity and air temperature — above 103 degrees Fahrenheit presents “danger,” according to the National Weather Service, while anything over 126 degrees Fahrenheit indicates “extreme danger.”)
At the Berea farm, a July 2022 complaint said that even on high-humidity, nearly 100-degree days, potable water was only available to production workers if they walked eight minutes to an administrative trailer they could only access during breaks. And because non-potable water wasn’t labeled as such, desperate employees had drawn unsafe drinking water into their bottles when safe drinking water was unavailable.
Other safety concerns detailed in the complaints included the sudden onset of nausea, and on two occasions vomiting, when the plants were sprayed with “something unsafe.” Two more complaints said tearing out mold, dust, and insulation from walls caused eye and lung irritation. Employees reported that they didn’t receive respirators, and during the tear-out one team member went to the hospital for breathing issues, according to the complaints.
Another said guide wires holding tomatoes were snapping from the weight of the fruit. “If someone is working the rows and the wire snaps, over 500 tomato plants will fall on whomever is in the [row],” the complainant told the state safety office. In a separate filing, an employee said guide wires broke over three days in February 2023, and that as wires fell there was the possibility of “taking someone’s head off and/or extremely hurting their bodies.”
An employee stands among the tomato vines in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse on June 15, 2021. Jon Cherry
Moore thinks that the repetitive motion of caring for the tomatoes — removing suckers, topping plants, ripping leaves off the bottom stems — led to carpal tunnel in her hands, both of which required surgery. She said her job was threatened if she felt sick from the heat or had to go to a doctor’s appointment for her hands. Moore and other workers also complained of rashes from the heat, plant matter, and gas agents sprayed to quickly ripen the tomatoes. Baxter, in recovery from addiction, relapsed when she drank a beer at a company field party that offered free drink tickets to workers.
While AppHarvest appeared to shrug off worker complaints in its early days, it publicized employees who represented the values that had earned it the label of a certified B Corp — intended for businesses with high standards of performance, accountability, and transparency, especially when it comes to employee benefits — as well as its designation as a public benefit corporation created to generate social good responsibly and sustainably. Erin Mays, who applied for her job at AppHarvest from the Rowan County Detention Center in February 2021, where she was serving her 10th sentence for drug possession charges, was perfect for the role: She was petite but strong, and she quickly took on the task of lowering plants, a job otherwise done mostly by men.
From the start, Mays was infatuated with AppHarvest; she appeared on the company’s Instagram as a “dedicated team member.” She told her family and friends to buy stock in the company, convinced it was the future for her region. Mays also met her now-spouse on the job, and the two were often asked to speak to greenhouse guests.
“We were used as poster kids,” Mays said. “If there were photo ops or people came in, I feel like they would start to use me or Leo because we were big members of recovery in our community. We were outspoken and well spoken.”
But a couple months into the job, Mays relapsed on Suboxone, a medication for opioid use disorder, which if misused can lead to dependency, addiction, or overdose. She remembered that her hiring packet said she could go to treatment and still keep her job. When she asked human resources, however, they said that if she left for rehab, they couldn’t guarantee her job would be waiting for her. And even if a job was available, she remembers being told, she wouldn’t be eligible for six months.
Mays didn’t want to lose her position, so she used over-the-counter pain relievers to work straight through a month of low-grade withdrawals while continuing her highly physical, monotonous tasks in the scorching greenhouse.
An employee looks out over rows of tomato plants from the top of a lift in AppHarvest’s West greenhouse. Jon Cherry
While standing at the top of her cart to lift and lower plants, which could rise up to 20 feet off the ground, she suffered aches and body chills. She would rush to the bathroom with a bout of diarrhea or to throw up. Because she was on the far west end of the facility, the closest bathroom was a porta potty, and Mays would have to be really sure she had to use it before she left — her bathroom breaks were monitored, and she didn’t want to get written up.
Workers said their jobs were at times so difficult and poorly managed that even physically fit and healthy employees could snap. One morning in August 2021 — the very same day that Webb admitted to investors that AppHarvest was staring down a $32 million net loss — Baxter arrived at work to find that she was in charge of more workers without additional assistance. The outside temperature was hovering in the 80s, she said, but the heat index in the greenhouse was 40 degrees higher, around 120 degrees Fahrenheit. She brought in five water bottles she’d frozen the night before to stay hydrated, along with the inhaler she kept in her locker in case of an asthma attack.
She was irritated, and her manager seemed on edge. He told Baxter to make her employees sweep the greenhouse rows differently three separate times. Because of the heat, they were alternating working between the greenhouse and the air-conditioned packhouse every 30 minutes. Her employees were overheated, and they told her they needed to sit down, drink water, and rest. She told them she knew they were exhausted, but to please pretend they were cleaning.
By mid-afternoon, drenched in sweat, Baxter took stock of the bustling greenhouse around her and the list of tasks still on her mounting to-do list. Overwhelmed, she put down her badge and her notebook, cleaned out her locker, and walked out the front door, quitting not only a job but her dream of making her living off the land. She drove home to the trailer she’d moved into only ten months earlier, let her dogs out, sat on the front stoop, and sobbed. That day, AppHarvest stocks fell 29 percent.
Employees and machinery at work at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
By the end of 2021, AppHarvest had earned only $9 million out of a projected $21 million in revenue. The next year, the company met less than half of its most optimistic sales projections. Beginning in early 2023, company stocks that once peaked above $42 per share never again rose above $1. In the spring, AppHarvest claimed it had only about $50 million on hand. Debt had reached $182 million. In order to remain in business, the company needed additional investors to provide an infusion of cash by October, according to public filings.
Workers who convinced family and friends to buy stocks in the company said those who invested lost thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, former board member Jeffrey Ubben “cashed out,” according to the securities fraud litigation, before the company’s problems were publicly acknowledged in August of 2021. He sold 3 million shares at an average price of $16.50 per share, making $49.5 million.
Baxter tried to get her job back, including by reapplying through Indeed. But she said once she walked out, no one ever contacted her again, or replied to her requests to return. Moore said she quit after she was told by the human resources manager that she couldn’t work while taking pain medicine for a back injury she acquired at work, after slipping on a loose mat meant to sanitize workers’ shoes. Other workers left for jobs that demanded less overtime or paid higher wages. Some were fired after being minutes late to work, and some were handed termination notices during mass layoffs. One corporate employee was walked off their job by a security guard.
“Ironically, in the next round of layoffs, I guess the security guard walked himself out because he got fired,” the employee told Grist.In February 2022, half the office staff and all but one employee in the marketing department were let go in a single day, according to another former corporate employee.
Over the course of 2021 and 2022, while AppHarvest let go of costly employees who drained the company pocketbook with high salaries and wages, health insurance premiums, and requests for promotions, the company hired contract laborers who wouldn’t get any of this. In a November 2021 public filing, AppHarvest noted the tightening nationwide labor market, the cost of training a new workforce, and issues of retention: “In order to forestall any potential labor shortfall, we have hired contract laborers from outside of the region to help complete our next harvest.”
Less than a year after opening, AppHarvest began bringing in contract workers, according to multiple statements by former workers, a Rowan County executive, local residents, and a 2021 public filing. The new workers arrived in Morehead each morning on big white buses, according to Nora. They worked longer hours, sometimes not leaving until midnight, after picking up a second shift in the air-conditioned packhouse, according to multiple worker statements. While paid a similar starting rate to the local workers, according to a visa application filed by AppHarvest for its Pulaski County facility, they didn’t receive benefits like health insurance or stock options, according to worker interviews. An open records request from the Kentucky Education and Labor Cabinet reveals that just over the last year, AppHarvest brought in at least 140 migrant workers at $13.89 an hour at its Madison and Pulaski County farms.
Workers were housed in mobile homes and apartment complexes where the number of laborers appeared to far exceed occupancy levels. In Pulaski County, three mobile homes with an occupancy total of 17 were listed as the housing options for 30 workers. In Richmond, a 15-unit apartment complex with a 61-person limit was listed as the housing option for 90 workers. In Morehead, workers have been housed at the Red Roof Inn, Days Inn, and Comfort Inn, where there are no cooking stations and workers sometimes squeeze five into a two-bed room, according to Anne Colbert, a retired physician who runs a volunteer migrant support group in Morehead.
Colbert said her organization first became aware of migrant laborers at AppHarvest last fall, when a volunteer saw a large group at Walmart. A few days before Thanksgiving, Colbert sent an email to Travis Parman, AppHarvest’s chief communications officer, and told him the group was “recently made aware of the needs of a group of Mexican contracted laborers working at AppHarvest who did not have appropriate winter clothing.” Though the volunteers had already gathered winter clothing to donate to the new workers, Colbert pressed Parman on the company’s plans to ensure that the group’s basic needs were met. “We don’t believe these guests should have to rely on donated goods,” she wrote.
Workers at AppHarvest’s packhouse on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Parman responded the next day, noting he was “not the right person” for her to talk to but “close enough,” and promising to consult with other employees and reply promptly. Colbert never heard anything more. Instead, her group delivered bags of apples and oranges to the motels where workers were housed over Christmas.
Last year, Nora typically had 20 or more contract laborers on her team, and about 12 local people. All the greenhouse workers I spoke to who left in 2022 or 2023 said that, by the time they left, contract workers outnumbered local employees. As of this summer, AppHarvest retained more than 450 of these contract workers, paying them approximately $2.5 million each month.
This change in strategy was a complete departure from AppHarvest’s original pledge to hire Appalachian workers and build up the region with reliable, blue-collar careers. “Traditionally, many agricultural workers in the U.S. have been H-2A, temporary agricultural workers, who at best are offered housing and other perks if they’re seasonal,” the company had noted in a 2020 report. Instead, AppHarvest wrote, as a certified B Corp, the company valued collective benefit over individual gain, along with empowering Appalachians and improving the lives of employees and the community. In a 2021 interview, Webb said, “Prioritizing the employee, that’s just simple human decency.”
Jonathan Webb, then-CEO of AppHarvest, addresses employees during a pre-shift meeting on June 15, 2021, in Morehead. Jon Cherry
Harry Clark, the judge executive of Rowan County, said that Webb only reluctantly pursued contract labor when he couldn’t fill positions locally. But his comments run counter to what former employees say they saw and experienced: A former corporate employee said the work Webb did — talking to reporters, appearing on the news, uplifting the Appalachian labor force — was “all about image.” A former member of the marketing team recalled that photographers were told not to take pictures of the contract workers, most of whom were Hispanic, because the company wanted to show it was employing Appalachians, who were largely white. When the former marketing team member visited the greenhouse, they saw few workers in the thick rows of green tomato vines until a Mexican song came over the shared speaker system and they heard laborers sing along.
“He [Webb] was trying really hard to relate to the blue-collar workforce that we have in Morehead,” said the corporate employee. When I visited the greenhouse to report on AppHarvest for Rolling Stone in 2021, Webb called himself a “resident of Kentucky” who lived in his RV on the Morehead construction site while looking for apartments nearby. But the year before, he had bought a 4,000-square foot house for almost $1.4 million in Lexington, an hour’s drive away, which was later the subject of a home makeover featured on HGTV. (Webb did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.)
Mays said she felt she was kept on as long as she was to “keep up appearances that they were giving jobs to Appalachian people.” But she was eventually fired over the phone, just a month after she and her fiance had gotten engaged at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and Webb’s personal assistant had offered to pay for their wedding on company grounds. “We legitimately thought these people were our family and they cared about us,” she said.
After two years with AppHarvest, Nora had a long conversation with her husband. She was miserable at work, and she felt her mental health wasn’t prioritized by her employer.
“I’ve been having these thoughts, and I think they’re dangerous,” she told him. “On the way to work every morning, I want to let go of my steering wheel and wreck it so I don’t have to go in. I don’t want to die, but I want to get hurt enough so I don’t have to work.”
Her husband encouraged her not to go back, but Nora felt an overwhelming sense that she owed AppHarvest her labor and her loyalty.
“A long time after I left I said I felt brainwashed,” said Nora. “Maybe they caught my little bleeding heart, and I wanted to save the world. … I think that’s what hooked us, trying to save the world.”
This spring, the faltering promise of CEA as a planetary savior finally dominoed into AppHarvest. A Delaware-based creditor demanded the repayment of over $47 million, while a west coast investor, Equilibrium, alleged the company needed to repay over $66 million, about a third of the company’s $182 million debt, or risk foreclosure. A third creditor staged a mutiny, threatening to evict AppHarvest from its Berea farm.
By mid-July, Webb left his position as CEO, and the company paid almost $2.5 million to its four-man executive team, which included Webb in his short-lived demotion as chief strategy officer. A week later, on July 23, AppHarvest filed for bankruptcy in a Texas court for all 12 of its affiliated businesses. The next day, AppHarvest received notice from Nasdaq that the company’s stock would be delisted; stocks closed at $0.09 per share. Then, on September 29, Webb was fired “without cause.” His severance package included $125,000 plus health insurance coverage, paid out over six months. (At the time of this story’s publication, he still serves on the company’s board.)
These losses, while staggering and sudden, are not surprising to Bugbee, the plant scientist. To make CEA profitable, he said, human labor has to be replaced with robotics to lower the costs of repetitive tasks like planting and harvesting, which are easily automated.
“We want to believe there’s some magic bullet we’re going to discover and all these [climate] problems will be solved,” he added. “But as a scientist, I feel it’s incumbent upon me to say, ‘Wait a minute. This is not a magic bullet.’”
American policymakers, on the other hand, remain bullish on CEA, despite the recent failures.
“It is unfortunate that AppHarvest has had the challenges that it has. But we know that agritech is a big part of Kentucky’s future, and we need to be at the forefront of it,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s office wrote in an emailed statement attributed to the governor. “Regardless of who is leading the company or who owns the facility, I believe in the end, they will have a bright future; and there are a whole lot of jobs there, so we should all be rooting for it.”
For Nora, it took nine months after she quit to stop crying herself to sleep. Now, she works as a building services technician in Morehead. Other ex-AppHarvest employees are scattered around the town: Some ended up at Buffalo Wild Wings or assembly lines in nearby plastics, cabinet, and barrel stave factories. Mays became assistant manager at the Family Dollar store. Moore went to the Family Dollar Distribution Center down the street from the greenhouse, where a night shift can earn $19.75 an hour. Baxter, who’s been staying at a campground in her RV, which she calls the Dream Capture, is looking for work.
“Other jobs you quit them and you move on. This job I feel like you had to detox from, because after you quit you’re so afraid to say anything because you’re afraid AppHarvest will sue you,” said Nora. “I told my husband I’m tired of hiding from the big, bad AppHarvest. You did me wrong.”
A branded AppHarvest water bottle hangs at the start of a row of tomatoes on June 14, 2021. Jon Cherry
Nora’s worst memory is of her birthday in June 2021, when she had to sweep shattered glass that fell from the greenhouse ceiling. The task triggered nightmares of glass panels that exploded and decapitated her, grow wires that electrocuted her, and tomato stakes that impaled her.
“Any way I could imagine dying in that greenhouse, I dreamt it,” Nora said. In the months before AppHarvest’s bankruptcy, before the facilities were sold, Nora said she felt like when she joined AppHarvest, she’d joined a cult.
“We dress alike, we’re told what to say, what to do, we’re always there, we didn’t have time with family and friends. Our family and friends were AppHarvest,” she said. “How did I not see this? That this was not a good place to be?”
This story originally appeared in Workday on Nov. 14, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
In the late summer of 2021, a group of workers from First Avenue, the iconic Minneapolis music venue, were fed up with low pay, last-minute scheduling, lack of parking, and safety concerns, and wanted to implement some of their own ideas in their workplace. Unsure of how to get it done, the workers decided to first contact Restaurant Opportunities Center of Minnesota (ROC-MN) to learn more about their workplace rights.
Fast forward to November 2: Over 200 bartenders, event staff, and other in-house workers across seven venues affiliated with First Avenue marched on the boss and delivered a petition that included the faces and names of over 70% of staff who want to unionize with UNITE HERE Local 17. About 24 hours later, First Avenue management voluntarily recognized the union.
Workers say the unionization effort was successful, in part, due to the collaboration between the worker center and the union.
Even before formal recognition, workers were confident. Pauli DeMaris, a First Avenue bartender and event staff for the past 18 years, said in an interview with Workday Magazine a few hours before recognition, “We have over 70% majority already on board. So I think, with those numbers, it would be kind of reckless for the club to not recognize us.” DeMaris was one of the workers who first approached ROC-MN, which provided workers with educational trainings about their rights on the job, including the right to organize. Once it became apparent that workers wanted to unionize, ROC-MN then connected the workers with UNITE HERE Local 17.
First Avenue event staff, Maddy Loch, speaking at the press conference held outside First Avenue music venue on November 3. Photo: Isabela Escalona
Whereas unions are often focused on negotiating contracts and engaging existing members, worker centers are able to step into worker education for workers not represented by unions, without the same constraints or formalities that unions must abide by. And while worker centers are able to fill these gaps, workers still have stronger legal protections through unionization—which is more difficult in agricultural and domestic labor industries, where employers are not legally compelled to recognize unions.. As a result, these workers have often turned to worker centers and other pro-worker organizations as an organizing home—including the Coalition of Immokalee Workers in Florida and the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
And in industries where workers have the right to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act, worker centers can be effective collaborators with unions. A notable example in the Twin Cities is the historic collaboration between Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL) and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 26’s drive to organize retail janitors that successfully urged Target Corporation to sign onto a Responsible Contractors Policy in 2014. Other collaborations include the Awood Center, which receives funding by SEIU Local 26 to organize East African workers at the Amazon warehouses, and the Building Dignity and Respect Standards Council between CTUL and construction trades including the Carpenters Union and Laborers’ International Union of North America (LIUNA).
While not all worker center and union relationships have been seamless, in recent years the relationship has been embraced by many prominent unions and worker centers and the victories continue to grow. On its website, the AFL-CIO shares its support for worker centers with a statement that says, “The union movement works to improve the lives of all people who work—not just those who have the benefits of union membership. The statement continues, “All workers deserve fair treatment, respect and a voice at work, regardless of how they are classified by employers or regarded by labor law.”
In an interview with Workday Magazine, Sheli Stein, an organizer for ROC-MN, described the interconnectedness of ROC-MN and UNITE HERE Local 17’s organizing in the food service industry, one of the sectors with the lowest union density, low pay, and high rates of exploitation. “Our goal is to employ as many possible tools as possible to help workers make changes in their workplaces and across the industry,” Stein said. “And we believe the only way to do that is if workers build power that is credible.”
Sheigh Freeberg, an organizer with UNITE HERE Local 17, says worker centers are well-suited with strong infrastructure to provide training and education to non-unionized workers. “We’re grateful working people in the Cities have a real ally in ROC-MN,” he explained over email. “ROC-MN and UNITE HERE Local 17 share a long-term commitment to improving working conditions in the Twin Cities service industry.”
We won’t grasp all the repercussions of 2023’s ‘Hot Labor Summer’ for years to come, but one place where the effects are already being noted is Hollywood. Building on the momentum of the newly-chartered IATSE Local 111, which represents thousands of commercial production workers across the country, production assistants in the Film and TV sector are coming together to fight back against exploitative working conditions in the industry. The Real News speaks with organizers from Production Assistants United to understand the conditions faced by production workers in Film and TV, and how the unionization of these PAs could reshape the politics of Hollywood labor.
Post-production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Yeah, we are recording to the cloud. Mel and I made you a co-host in case I have to step away and you need to stop recording before for any reason. But yeah, you’re good to go.
Sick. Thank you. Okay, so to start off, I have a bit of an open and an intro that I’ve got to get through. Also as a note, because this is a podcast recording, if you misspeak or you misstate something and you need to restate it, just say, Hey, let me rephrase so that our producer has a note so that we can pick the right statement. So don’t worry if you kind of flop up your words, it’s totally fine. Plenty of time to edit this. So, Okie dokie, here we go. Hey folks. Welcome back to another episode of the Real News Network podcast. I’m your host, Mel Buer.
(01:22) 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 the real news.com/donate. Your donations mean more to us than if you’d like to stay up to date on the important stories that we’re covering. Sign up to our free newsletter@therealnews.com slash 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. Peach. Tom, can you grab the cat? I’m sorry. Give me a moment. This is what happens when you work from home. Kitty, come on.
We can’t do. You’re fine. I’m actually dog sitting right now and he was so quiet until about five minutes ago and now he is being a pain. It’s Steven Milani. Yeah, he knows it’s showtime. I mean he always does.
Okay, we’re good. I’m going to keep that cat in the background of that recording. I’m not redoing that. All right. Okay. Here’s the intro. This year has been a banner year for workers in Hollywood’s entertainment industry. Over the summer, the WGA went on strike and won significant gains in their contract and SAG AFTRA is in the midst of tough negotiations. As their strike continues into yet another month, iatse and Teamsters are working diligently to prepare for their own contract negotiations in 2024 with much of their membership expressing a serious need for vast improvements in their own contracts.
(03:27) Actions such as these have been a shot in the arm for Hollywood labor and have dominated media coverage of an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of workers. While these high profile actions do much to expose the inequity and often harrowing working conditions that many workers in Hollywood endure, there are other groups within Hollywood that have felt the exploitation of the industry most acutely and are coming together to do something about it. Just this summer, after over a year of dedicated organizing, commercial production workers won big by what is today? Just this summer. After over a year of dedicated organizing commercial production workers won big by chartering a new local with IE, bringing thousands of previously underrepresented or unrepresented workers across the country into the fold. Commercial production workers only represent a fraction of the production workers who work in the entertainment industry, however, and that’s where production assistant commercial production workers only represent a fraction of the production workers who work in the entertainment industry.
(04:34) That’s where production assistance United comes in with me today to discuss how PAs United is working to organize production workers in the film and television sector are Camille, Ethan, and Sam, who are the group of organizers who started Production Assistance United, which is a movement to unionize production assistance and support staff in film and television. As an editor’s note, some of the workers today have chosen to use pseudonyms to protect their identities. Okay, let’s get into it. First question for many of my listeners, the film industry can kind of be a bit of an enigma. Everyday folks watch movies, tune in to see their favorite shows, but may not understand exactly how these shows get made or how many workers actually have hand in creating ’em. I previously worked on an article over the summer on solidarity across the entertainment industry, and there is a bit of a brief conversation about what it means to be an above the line or below the line worker, but I’m more interested on your sector, the production workers. Can you kind of let folks know how these productions tend to work and where you as the production workers fit into that equation?
Well, I guess I’ll kick it off. Film production and television production, it’s not, at least for us, for below the line production workers and production being a very broad term because we represent, our organization specifically represents PAs from every department. So whether that’s the actual production department, the ad department, art camera, SFX, any of the tens of specifications that we have, all of the workers who work in those day-to-Day businesses of creating film and TV work, extremely long hours, minimum of 12 hours a day. We are actually all, when you ask, when you get a job offer, one of the first conversations you’ll have is like, what’s the rate for 12 hours? Because that is the minimum. You’ll work often specifically for PAs will work far more than that. It’s 16 hours a day is I would say average. It can go up to 18, sometimes 20, and while pretty much every other worker on set or in the production office has a union that they can rely on that gets them better pay, health coverages, benefits, retirement packages, all of that, PAs don’t get any of that. We’re most often paid minimum wage or barely above it. We don’t have anyone to turn to if there’s workplace abuses and frequently we’re left kind of out in the cold without any of those protections.
So for the audience to kind of understand, production assistants are often looked at as the sort of entry level position into working on a set. It’s my understanding that a lot of these workers will then go on to hopefully become producers or move into various other departments, but that isn’t always the case, right? There are production assistants who make that sort of their career. Right. Camille, would you say that’s kind of a good understanding of what that is and how that works?
Yes. So being a production assistant is definitely seen as the entry level position, and it’s an entry level position for pretty much any position on set. Like most people who are working on set in any department are probably going to be starting off as a production assistant at some point. And many departments also like costumes, art, et cetera, also have their own production assistant. So you might start off on set. Then you end up being a production assistant for costumes, and then you actually get into the costumes union. So in terms of being entry level, yes, we do have people who also go on to be producers and directors, all the positions, people always say on set be nice to the production assistants. So not everyone listens, but be nice to the production assistants because they may be your boss someday. However, the barrier with that is definitely being able to survive long enough as a production assistant in order to actually advance. If you want to join, say the DGA and be an ad, that means you have to have 600 days under your belt on a union set. That’s not necessarily easy to get. A lot of people burn out before they’re ever able to get up to that level, and there are many people who never even joined the industry in the first place just because even that entry level, the barrier is so hard to both get into being a set PA and then get out of a set PA that some people don’t even try.
Ethan. So the film and television industry, as you guys have already mentioned, is historically a very heavily unionized industry, WGA SAG aftra, DGA ii, Teamsters, IBEW. Many other unions have participated in the production process over the last a hundred or so years. Why do you think it is that production workers haven’t been included in this union process? Do you think this is just a gap to be addressed or do you think this is something that has been deliberate? What do you think? What do you think?
Yeah, I think there’s a couple of unique difficulties for production assistance specifically. A lot of people end up going into other departments as a production assistant, so you might stay as a production assistant for three to five years, and then you end up in a different department entirely. So it’s one of those things that you have to organize yourself. So I think it’s an inevitable thing. If we weren’t doing it, it would happen eventually, but you have to organize your own self. Unfortunately, nobody’s going to do it for you. So I think that’s part of the reason why it’s taken a little bit of time. I’m very confident in our movement. But yeah, I mean I think there’s also sort of a stigma for PAs that they might not deserve a union because they are,
Continues. Yeah, exactly. It’s of my that you can argue a PA is skilled or unskilled all day, and I disagree with the idea of even arguing with that because it doesn’t matter. All workers deserve union representation in my opinion. So that argument is flawed even to talk about it.
Well, I can imagine that because this position is viewed as an entry level air quotes for the listeners entry level position, but you ended up staying in the job for five to six years and you may get into another union. So why would you need to be unquote unionized? Why would you need to have that space if the idea is to just start somewhere and move somewhere else that has union representation? And I can see that many folks would make that argument. Again, that argument is bull because you do spend five, six years, seven years, or shorter or longer without union representation and working on union sets is my understanding. There’s already a mechanism in place for you to be able to benefit from the sort of things that union contracts allow for and restricting those sort of workplace abuses if you get the chance. So I think this is from my own personal opinion, this is a great thing to see from where I’m sitting. Right.
(13:25) I became aware of your organizing when I came across your Instagram page last summer, last couple of months. Ethan, I think you and I met at a I OS E event halfway through the WGA strike, and you’ve opened your DMS for anonymous tipster to share what their experience has been working on sets enduring. The sort of exploitation that comes with unfortunately comes with this kind of job. I got to tell you, some of those stories are pretty horrifying. Some of the things that production assistants have to endure in order to maintain standing in the industry or even just a paycheck sucks. It sucks.
(14:10) They really do offer a clue into how you as production workers are often exploited by these folks, the people who sign your paychecks or heads of other departments or actors or whoever else, producers and so on. Now you can go into as much or as little detail as you like, but I do think that it’s kind of important for our listeners to understand the working conditions that you’re laboring under and to speak to what these working conditions are. We don’t have to bring up specific stories. I understand how this industry works from where I’ve been sitting, and it’s one of the reasons why you’re using pseudonyms is because sometimes this conversation can be dangerous for future career prospects. But you’ve been conducting a sort of pseudo survey by allowing individuals to send in anonymous tips about what their working conditions are. So could you kind of speak to what sort of patterns are you seeing from, and any of you three, Sam or Camille or Ethan, you can kind of talk about this. What are the kind of patterns that you’re seeing in terms of the working conditions themselves that you feel organizing this union can help improve or stop outright? What are the things that you think are important for our listeners to understand?
I would say that something that’s important to understand, and you see it reverberated through the stories of a lot of the people who are sending in stories to us, is essentially that for us, unionization, there’s a very specific financial motive for us not to be unionized. Films and television, they save a lot of budget on not having us as protected workers. So you’ll see one of the stories that’s told over and over from a lot of people is since we work such extensive hours and they’re okay with us working extensive hours because we don’t have meal penalties the way that other people do, and we don’t get the same sort of lush, we don’t have any sort of turnaround time either. Other unions do. So that means there’s not a required period of time for us ending work to the time we come back to work.
(16:31) So you’ll see a common narrative in a lot of the stories that people send into us. It’s just that they’re tired. There’s a lot of stories of people being like, oh, I am tired. I work like 16, 17 hours. I almost fell asleep on the road. I almost got into an accident. I did get into an accident. I have one coworker from a while ago who actually, she got a concussion on the way into work, and that goes into the entire culture of all of us working long hours. So she got into a concussion when she was in a van that was driven by one of our teamsters obviously. But then when she comes into work, she still has a concussion. She’s feeling the effects of the concussion, but she feels like she can’t go home because of all of the pressures that are put on to us.
(17:20) They save money by also understaffing us as well. And because we don’t have a union, we can’t say that we have minimum staffing guidelines. And that’s another reason that she was afraid to go home is because we also just didn’t have enough staff because they didn’t want to pay us for more staff. So a lot of the stories, it’s the results of people essentially cutting corners on the budget and trying to save money. But when you cut those corners and you try to save that money, it always ends up falling on the backs of the PAs.
Right? So for context, meal penalties are penalties, usually financial that are if you’re required to work through a lunch, for example. Am I understanding this correctly?
Well, a meal penalty is usually used more for how long does it take for you to eat lunch after you started work? Because there’s a required amount of time that you are allowed to go before you eat lunch. And then once you push past that, then you start racking up meal penalties because we’re filming into lunch. Lunch is late, you get more money. However, for production assistance, we don’t get meal penalties. So that’s something that they really like to use for us. So they can call us in as early as they want, so we can be working as many hours. I’ve worked eight hours sometimes more before I’ve actually been able to sit and eat lunch. We don’t get any additional money for that the way that other positions on the crew would. And then in addition to that, we’re not allowed to.
Jump in. Can I just finish this last part real quick? And then in addition to that, they’re also allowed to ask us to work during lunch so they can come up to us or call us over the mic during lunch. And there’s also no repercussions for that. Alright, now I’m done.
I was just going to say that we actually do get a single meal penalty. It is $7 and 50 cents, whereas, so if we go 10 minutes past that six hour point where we’re supposed to have a break, we’ll get $7 and 50 cents and that’s it for the day. It doesn’t matter how much further you go after that, how many more half hours past that break point you go? We will get seven 50 IA members will and I believe SAG members and other people who work on set, they will stack and the meal penalties get steeper and more often as time goes on. So say you meal penalty once at lunch and then you go another, you go way into OT and you do another eight hours after lunch. Everybody else will be getting multiple meal penalties from that. We will just get the single one from lunch and we’ll also be the ones staying much longer after everybody else else’s.
Right. And so note for listeners, just to something else to note for listeners is to drive home this point is that one of the main contentions of I oiss last contract cycle and strike authorization was the concept of letting us rest. So production assistance from what I’m hearing, do not have that minimum turnaround time. And I oi almost struck over the same concept of having 12 hours of rest in between time off and starting up again. And this is a big deal because when you are working 18 hour days, you get off work at 3:00 AM you have to drive sometimes a couple of hours perhaps to get home. That’s a dangerous thing. And then you have to get back up in the morning at 5:00 AM and start work again. This is a big deal for workers across this industry is what I’ve come to learn. And it’s unfortunately not a surprise that PAs are experiencing such the effects of this attempt to try and cut budgets and keep shooting schedules shorter in order to save money. Right. Are there any, Hey
Mel, I was just going to ask, we have another organizer who was interested in coming in the call, is that okay? Or you can say no if it’s going to mess it up, the recording.
(23:22) On the subject of your question though, of kind of themes that we’ve seen in our informal survey stuff, another just related kind of to rest is a very kind of fun classic PA trope, which is not being allowed to sit on set sitting. I personally have been told by producers who have walked by me sitting that it’s disrespectful that I’m disrespecting the crew, I’m not paying my dues. And that’s a pretty common refrain that we’ve heard. So just in addition to the long days and the meal penalties and the no turnaround time, just being told that you’re literally not allowed to be seen sitting because you don’t look like you’re working hard enough is crazy.
It reminds me of working in the service industry. I worked in the bar industry for 10, 15 years while I was going through school and even after, prior to really digging into journalism and the whole concept of if you have time to lean, you have time to clean. There’s no downtime, right? Yeah.
You see a lot of this in just the concept of unskilled work where if you don’t look busy then you’re lazy and you’re wasting the time and the money of the people who pay you, who sign your paychecks, it looks bad to customers or whatever. And obviously that’s bull, obviously that’s not legitimate. The concept of rest at work is really important and it’s certainly something that many folks do organize over and is really important to highlight. So I appreciate that additional sort of conversation about that. Again, it sounds like the working conditions here are not great. And given all of this conversation about what happens on a set and how the PAs fit into this, and also looking at the success of the commercial production workers at the newly formed production Workers Guild, ie one 11, how did you get started? Was this something where you saw their organizing and you were inspired by it and you felt that there was still a gap there that needed to be addressed in terms of organizing in the film and television sector? Or was this something else that you felt you needed to address?
Yeah, I think I can answer that. I think all of us individually have been interested in unionizing production assistance for years. I mean, me personally, years, I’m pretty sure everybody years with Stand with Production and the new local for commercials, it really helped kick us off because it just proves, okay, a big argument before that happened was PAs aren’t something that gets unionized and clearly they’ve proved that wrong. So they were also already unionized in animation. But yes, what ended up happening is we all sort of individually, we part of helping that movement stand with production movement and then once they were officially recognized as a union, they kind of brought us all together. So it was actually them that brought us together.
Let me restart that. I’m trying to get Cleo out of the waiting room. I don’t have that privilege. So if we can’t make it work, then we’ll definitely have to have you back on more as your organizing ramps up. But let’s keep going. So tell us a little bit more about your organization, what you’re hoping to accomplish to alleviate some of the worst of the working conditions that you’re forced to leave or under on set. Do you have a sense of how big your pledged membership is or who shows up to your working events? Give us a better understanding of how it’s been going so far.
I mean, getting numbers is actually kind of our biggest priority right now, getting an idea because there’s never been a real census of how many production assistants there are working in this country. So one of our big things that we’re focusing on right now is outreach and doing things like hosting town halls, getting people involved, getting people to talk to their friends about us and sign our petition, put their name down in interest so we can get an idea of how many of us there are, where everybody is, what departments everyone works in eventually, what studios they tend to work at that sort of deal.
Yeah, I was just going to add on that at the moment, we think it’s probably in the realm of thousands when you actually take all the positions production assistants work in and you move across the country and all the productions we have going on. But yeah, one of the difficulties with that is also how transient our specific position is. You can kind of just jump in and out of being a set. A lot of people leave the industry or they go into other unions. So that’s why we’re really trying to focus on outreach and making people know that we are here and we are trying to unionize.
Have you received any positive response, say from example I as they’ve chartered their new local, have you heard anything from any of the working organizers with that organization or are you thinking that perhaps you would like to just create your own independent union to address these problems? Any response?
Yeah, so the way that we are going about it is sort of with the understanding that it’s not us, the three of us to make those types of decisions. We’re just here to organize and get as many numbers as possible and then it’s going to be the members who will decide how we want it to look like. But yes, all those things that you just said are open and are options for us, ia, our own union, some other umbrella union. Any of those would be great. We really want to just see people, the most people possible unionized.
That’s amazing. I think that’s great. I think it seems to me from my perspective, looking into this industry that really was previously pretty opaque to me as a consumer, the TV show shows up on the TV and I dunno how this gets made, and it seems like movie magic, but you scratch away the pain a little bit and you go, holy crap, there’s a lot going on here and there’s a lot of exploitation that’s happening. And there have been waves in the last couple of years of really dedicated organizing across unions in the entertainment industry, in the film and TV industry to try and really push back against some of that unchecked exploitation that the studios have dumped on everyone’s heads, whether that’s the contract negotiations like WGA or seeing these really important new locals getting chartered or way out on the side of the scope is reality TV actors trying to organize or things of that nature. And I think really most notably what we’re seeing is really dedicated, really intense organizing from below the line workers such as yourselves that really bear the brunt of the gnarly things that happen on set. And I think PAs United really fits right into that in a big way. How do you feel about that? Do you agree? Do you think that’s kind of where you feel you’re sitting in terms of the organizing that you’re doing?
Yeah, I believe that we all think that organizing production assistance is sort of fundamental as we’re moving forward and sort of the greater labor movement going on. I feel like when you look into any sort of the media and press, especially surrounding the striking actors and the striking writers or even the potential strike with I Osse that almost happened a couple years back. You read through those things and all of those exploitations are very real and very clear. However, production assistance are always kind of just left completely out of the article or if we’re referred to it all as usually by a sentence. And when you take that and it’s the way that people get into this industry, it is the way that we’re really supposed to be building ourselves up, especially when you take into account the entire diversity thing of Hollywood as well.
(33:34) When you make an entry level position really hard to get into and really hard to stay in, it acts as its own sort of filter. And when you have that filter there, then it impacts the rest of the industry. So if we’re not being supportive of our workers and inclusive at the very, very bottom of our industry, how are we supposed to change the industry as a whole? And also since we are the storytellers of the country and we push that out into the rest of the world, it’s even more important to make sure that everyone is included and paid well and feels like they’re in a secure place.
Absolutely. Final question here. What can folks outside of Hollywood or even within Los Angeles and ingratiated with the entertainment industry, with film and television, what can folks do to support your organizing efforts? How can we help make this goal of organizing film and television production assistance, production workers a reality for you? What can we do?
I’ll answer that one. I think that, so again, the whole goal is just to get our numbers up. So that’s always going to be the baseline goal. So basically what that means for you, the listener, is to go ahead and tell your friends. If you know anybody who’s in the film industry, most people in the film industry know production assistant. So even if they’re not a production assistant themselves, go ahead and let ’em know. And then also just support unions in general is always a great, and then, yeah, go ahead and follow our page because that helps too, just for people to see that we have a good following. So it’s production assistants United on Instagram, and then you can also go to our website, PAs united.com. We will have fundraising in the future, not as today, but definitely follow the page for updates on that.
Fantastic. That’s all the time we have today. Thanks again for joining us, you three, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me about this, the open invite to come back on the podcast at any time, to talk about your organizing efforts, to give us updates on how things are going, if major things start moving later on down the road and you want to use us on our platform, we are here for you and we absolutely respect and want to see this a success. Let’s do it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
You. Absolutely. Okay, one final outro and then we’ll call it a day. That’s it for us here at the Real News Network podcast. Once again, I’m your host, Mel Buer. If you love today’s episode, be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get notified when the next one drops. You can find us on most platforms for that. If you’d like to get in touch with me, you can find me on social media. My dms are always open, or you can send me a message via email, at mail@therealnews.com. Send your tips, comments, questions, episode ideas. You can yell at me, you can compliment me. I don’t mind. Just shoot me a message. I would love to hear from you. Thank you so much for sticking around and I’ll see you next time. All right. Sorry we couldn’t get Cleo in. I’m not sure what happened with that, but please, next time you guys have some, maybe an event that you’re working on or some organizing updates that you’d like to share with us, shoot me an email. I promise you it’s not going to take as long next time to get you on the podcast. I really appreciate your patience over the last many weeks trying to get
Yeah, I think it’s also, we’re just, we’re all balancing union organizing with the fact that we are also dealing with the impact of the strike on us individually, financially. So we’re all trying to pick up work to keep the lights on, to keep the website up, you know what I mean? Because right now, all of our costs are coming out of our five core organizers pockets. So we’re just balancing the work with the work,
So to speak. Makes sense. I’m doing the same. Our union organizing and unit at the Real News is ramping up too, working on our own contracts. Hey
(38:55) Guys. Yeah, we’ve been union staff for three or four years. We’re unionized with the New Guild, so you’re in good company when you come on the show. That’s awesome. Yeah. Nice. But okay, you guys enjoy the rest of your afternoon. I’ll keep you posted on when this episode comes up. It’s probably going to be at least a week. We’ve got some other episodes in the hopper first, but I will let you know, and I’ll send you a link when we get it up there and you guys can have it to share on your pages, and hopefully this helps.
Yeah, I had an interview with them a couple of months back that unfortunately didn’t go anywhere on my end, which is my problem. I’m probably going to reach back out to ’em and do a legitimate podcast episode. It was originally supposed to be a text piece that I was writing, didn’t pan out with the editor, so there’s more space to be able to work on something for the podcast. Kind of been able to step into hosting this podcast and have a little bit more say so on how things roll. So going to try and reach back out probably next week and hopefully keep this conversation rolling about also the commercial production workers who did a lot of work and
Yeah. Yeah. I got to reach back out and be like, Hey, would you be willing to do that interview again, but for podcast format and see if they’d be willing to sit down with me again?
The Politico, on November 8, published a piece on China-US relations. The article stated, “Voters in a rural Michigan town sent a message to their leaders Tuesday: don’t help China.” The article described this as “a potential warning signal” to President Joe Biden.
During the past year or two, American politicians and media have not hesitated to use the word “help” when discussing relations with China. Used in the past tense, the implication is that the US has assisted in China’s rise, and China is not currently reciprocating, leading to a sense of suffering a great loss. The report discusses the recent elections in Green Charter Township, Michigan, where five local Republican officials were removed from their positions for backing tax breaks for a multibillion-dollar battery parts plant tied to Gotion Inc., a Chinese company.
According to Politico’s report, this move breaks with the traditional view that “jobs equal votes.”
During this political event in a rural town, we observe a shift in the American attitude toward the rise of China. This shift has prompted Washington to adjust its strategy toward China, seeing it as its primary challenger.
Besides creating more than 2,000 jobs in this economically depressed region, this Chinese company’s production and technological capabilities in battery components will help revive the local manufacturing industry and contribute to raising the production level of this industry in the US. But Americans don’t see it like that. To them, America is helping China.
They believe that US investment in China helps China, and allowing Chinese companies to invest in the US also helps China. No matter how the Chinese and American economies interact, the US is helping China.
But who is looking out for the American people, including the residents of this town, who have relied on affordable products made in China for decades? And let’s remember how the profits of American companies in China have contributed to the growth of the American economy.
Of course, this is not to say that help does not exist in bilateral interactions between the two countries, and many stories of mutual help have long been widely circulated on both sides.
However, Americans, particularly US politicians, now approach economic and trade relations with China with the mindset of “I will not help you any longer,” a narrow worldview based on a superior civilization mentality.
The trade war with China, initiated by former president Donald Trump, has reached a point where American voters are concerned about how much the US is paying to maintain its “stop helping China” stance. However, American politicians will not disclose the amount being paid to their constituents.
China’s rapid economic growth has enabled its enterprises to accumulate capital and expand their market size, which cannot be reversed. If mutual investment between enterprises from both countries is increased, it will benefit everyone. However, viewing this cooperation as the US “helping China” will inevitably harm both parties.
China already possesses top-tier technology and high-quality production capacity in electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines and various manufacturing aspects. When Chinese enterprises invest in related areas in the US, it can be seen as China’s assistance to the US. Similarly, many American companies investing in China also contribute to developing China’s manufacturing industry.
It is now the turn of the Chinese people to take a top-down look at those on the verge of falling into the sunset industry in the US. If Americans are unwilling to “help China,” then they must do what Chinese workers are doing:
• Work twice as hard.
• Exert double the effort.
• Surpass rivals through learning, rather than discussing who helped who.
Americans are no longer qualified to view China with a benefactor mentality.
More than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza in the past month, including thousands of women, children, and elderly, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The real number is likely much higher… we don’t know how many people, dead and alive, are under the rubble right now. But we do know that the bombs continue to fall, every day, at rates unseen in the 21st Century.
For the past month, we have been trying every single day to make contact with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, to get their stories on the show so people could hear directly from them. But, for obvious reasons, that has proven to be extremely difficult. Every single time we connected with someone and set up an interview, something would happen, we’d lose touch with them, their phone would stop working, and we’d have no idea if they were safe, if they were alive. One of those people was Mohamed el Saife. Mohamed is an independent video journalist in Gaza, and the last message he sent us on October 15 said, “I am now on the ground, between life and death.” After that, we lost touch with Mohamed for over two weeks, and we feared the worst. Then, on November 9, we got another message. With the tiny amount of internet he was able to use, Mohamed sent us a three-minute voice message from Gaza…
Maximillian Alvarez: This is Maximillian Alvarez for the Real News Network and the podcast Working People. It’s Friday, November 10th, about 5:30 PM Eastern Time in the evening, and it’s raining outside, and I am once again sitting at my desk here in Baltimore, just shaken, devastated.
As I record this, nations and human rights organizations around the world continue to sound the alarm that Israel is committing acts of genocide with its scorched-earth bombing and ground invasion of Gaza, to say nothing of the drastically increasing Israeli military and settler violence in the occupied West Bank. In the wake of the brutal Hamas-led attacks on October 7th that, according to the latest figures, killed around 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers, and led to over 200 hostages being taken from Israel, Israel’s far-right government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has unleashed absolute hell on Gaza, which is a 22-by-5-mile open-air prison where Palestinians have been held captive, killed, and brutalized for decades by Israel’s US-backed apartheid state.
More than 10,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the past month, including thousands of women, children, and elderly, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health. And frankly, the real number is likely much, much higher, because we don’t know how many people, dead and alive, are still buried under the rubble right now. But we do know that the bombs continue to fall every day at rates unseen in the 21st century.
Basic humanitarian aid should be flooding into Gaza right now, but because of the bombing and Israel’s ongoing blockade, it’s coming in drips. People can’t get clean water. Food is scarce. Hospitals are shutting down for lack of fuel. Tens of thousands have been injured by the bombs and the ground invasion. Almost 1.5 million people displaced, and that’s according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. I mean, just before I started recording this, the latest headline that I read from CNN said, “Gaza Hospital surrounded by tanks as other healthcare facilities say they’ve been damaged by Israeli strikes.” I mean… this is an absolute fucking nightmare.
For the past month, I have been trying every single day to somehow make contact with Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank to get their stories on the show so that people here could hear directly from them, because that’s what we do here on this show. We lift up the voices and struggles of our fellow workers, our fellow human beings, and our fellow human beings are being slaughtered en masse right now, and our tax dollars are funding the genocide.
But, for obvious reasons, it’s proven to be extremely difficult to get folks in Palestine on the show right now. Every single time that I connected with someone and set up an interview, something would happen. I’d lose touch with them, their phone would stop working, I’d have no idea if they were dead or alive, or if they were safe. I had no way of knowing.
And one of those people was Mohamed el Saife. Mohamed is an independent video journalist in Gaza. I actually connected with him months ago over Twitter, before all of this was happening, and I messaged Mohamed on October 8th trying to see if we could talk or if he could even send a voice message to me to let people know what was happening in Gaza at that time.
I didn’t hear back from him for a whole week. And then, a lone message appeared in my inbox, and it was very short, and the last line from Mohamed read, “I am now on the ground, between life and death.” That was sent to me on October 15th, and then… nothing. Silence. No posts on his Twitter, no messages. Obviously, I feared the worst, and I didn’t really know what to do. But then, yesterday, November 9th, I got another message. With the tiny amount of internet he was able to use, Mohamed sent me a three-minute voice message from inside of Gaza. Here’s that message in its entirety…
Mohamed el Saife: My name is Mohamed el Saife. I’m a 31 years old video journalist working and based in Gaza City. Since 2014 I was working as a journalist and a video journalist with several media all around Gaza Strip. I covered the 2014 War, and I also covered the 2021 War, and I covered multiple escalations and aggressions in Gaza City.
But this time, and for the first time ever, I feel scared, and I don’t have any way to describe what is happening in Gaza. IDF war planes just decided, out of nowhere, that my neighborhood, which is a residential [neighborhood]—Al Zahra residential buildings—is ordered to be totally bombed and flattened to the ground. I lost my house. I lost my memories. I lost everything that I built and everything that I have.
Thank God I didn’t lose any beloved. I evacuated my family, my beloveds, my sisters, my father, all of them just got displaced to the south end of Gaza, to Rafah, a place that they never had been to.
This is not a war. This is not something that we usually cover. I can’t even understand what is happening at the moment, and what it’s going to be [like] tonight, and how it’s going to be tomorrow.
Thankfully, my family is still safe for the moment, but I can’t guarantee anything more, because even the south is under bombardments nonstop with a majority of massacres and an approximate death [toll] every day, raised from 350 to 700 citizens being bombarded every single night. I just hope one thing here, that me and my family… get out all of [this] just with our own souls and lives. Mohamed el Saife, [inaudible 00:08:44] complex.
When K.S. heard there was a vegan animal rights activist running for mayor in Berkeley, California, her interest was piqued. K.S., who requested to use her initials out of fear of retaliation, was living in Los Angeles but immediately signed up to volunteer remotely. It was the summer of 2020, and she was 23 years old, with a year of post-undergraduate college under her belt working at PETA.
The UAW’s historic Stand Up strike has come to an end—for now, at least. After forty-four days on the picket line, the Auto Workers have reached tentative agreements with each of the Big Three automakers. GM was the last domino to fall on Saturday, October 30, just days after Ford and then Stellantis acquiesced to their own tentative deals.
50,000 strikers have returned to work, and all 146,000 Big Three union members are now voting on the contracts. While it’s up to the workers to decide whether the deals are adequate, one thing is already clear: the UAW has turned the tide on decades of concessionary bargaining.
For this episode, we invited Barry Eidlin back on the show to unpack the gains and wider implications of the UAW’s tentative agreements. Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, who studies class, labor, politics and social movements. He is the author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.
We explore why the agreements may represent a shift toward a “new kind of unionism,” how the UAW’s prospects for organizing the rest of the auto industry may have changed, and what listeners should be following in the rest of the labor movement.
Barry Eidlin: It really speaks to Shawn Fain and the new UAW administration’s commitment to a more class struggle vision of unionism, right? Where that’s really the story of the UAW contract campaign and the Stand-Up-Strike that ensued is one of developing a much more explicit framework of class warfare and that we are fighting not just for auto workers, but for the entire working class, that we are engaged in a class struggle with our billionaire class enemies, drawing these clear dividing lines and mobilizing workers around this broader vision.
Teddy Ostrow: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to The Upsurge, a podcast about the future of the American labor movement.
This podcast covers the renewed militancy of the United Auto Workers, the legendary union that, for the first time in its history this year, struck each of the Big Three automakers at once. That’s Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
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The Big Three have fallen like a house of cards.
As of last weekend, the UAW’s historic Stand-Up-Strike came to an end. After forty-four days on the picket line, the Auto Workers have now reached tentative agreements with each of the Big Three automakers. GM was the last domino to fall on Saturday, October 28, just days after Ford and then Stellantis acquiesced to their own tentative deals.
50,000 strikers have returned to work, and all 146,000 Big 3 union members are voting on the contracts, which are expected to pass. By the time this episode is published, some of them may have already been ratified.
Now, while it’s up to the workers to decide whether the agreements are good enough for them, it’s already pretty clear: the UAW has turned the tides on decades of concessionary bargaining. Indeed, when the union declared that record automaker profits warrant record labor contracts, they were not kidding.
The gains are tremendous. I can’t list all of them in this introduction, and we have an excellent guest to discuss the TAs, but for a taste: we’re talking about double or even triple digit raises across four and a half years; the reinstatement of cost-of-living allowances, or COLA; the abolition of wage tiers across the Big Three; the right to strike over plant closures and other investment decisions; a clear and shortened pathway for temps to be made permanent; and the inclusion of some electric vehicle workers in the union’s master contracts with the Big Three.
Not everything the union had demanded was won. Workers did not win a 32-hour work week, for example. Nor were benefit tiers abolished across the companies, meaning tier two workers will still lack defined benefit pensions and retiree medical benefits. The union has not minced words, however. It’s clear that the intent in future contracts is the gaps once and for all. Given what they’ve achieved in this round, one might be foolish to doubt them.
Beyond the specific contract items, the Stand-Up-Strike has also been just deeply inspiring. For other workers, for union members, and for all working class people, who saw the autoworkers fight and win, with a leadership openly declaring war on corporations, who have been stealing the wealth that we create for as long as we can remember.
There is a lot to unpack about the content of these agreements and their wider implications, so I am thrilled that we got Barry Eidlin back on the show to help us.
Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University, who studies class, labor, politics and social movements. The author of Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, published by Cambridge University Press in 2018, Barry is an expert on the decline of labor unions in North America. But he also has got his finger on the pulse of its potential resurgence.
That’s why I interviewed him on Episode 5 back in April to help contextualize the contract campaign of the UPS Teamsters earlier this year. And it’s why now I thought he would be the perfect guest to unpack what these tentative deals mean for the Big 3 auto workers, the UAW, the wider mostly non-union auto industry, and of course, the broader labor movement.
Now, before we get to the interview I just wanted to inform listeners that after this episode The Upsurge will be taking a short hiatus from our normal schedule. Having produced regular episodes every two or three weeks for nearly a year now, we are going to take a moment to break and develop the next moves for our podcast. We intend to update listeners and especially Patreon supporters in due time.
Alright, on to my interview with Barry Eidlin.
Barry Eidlin. Welcome back to The Upsurge.
Barry Eidlin: Great to be here, Teddy. Thanks for having me back.
Teddy Ostrow: Thank you. There’s a lot to discuss, but first I want to just give you an open ended question—give us your broadest assessment right now of the UAW’s tentative agreements. By the time this posts, it’s possible some of them may have been ratified. What do these deals really mean for the auto workers in 2023?
Barry Eidlin: Yeah, I think, I mean, the first thing to say, obviously, is that these deals are in the members hands now and it’s the decision of the members whether or not to ratify them.
And so I have no position on how members should vote on these contracts because that’s not my call. But compared to what we’ve seen in recent years, this is a major step forward, and union leaders will often talk in terms of transformative victories and what have you. But if you look at what they’ve won here, I think that you can make the case that this is a transformative victory for the United Auto Workers.
And regardless of the vote outcomes, this is an incredibly solid base to build on. They’ve basically made huge steps forward in undoing four decades of concessionary bargaining where they’ve won these contracts that really make some headway in getting rid of tiers. So the multi-tier employment where you have different classifications of workers doing the same job, but getting paid different rates, you have basically the elimination of the perma-temp category, so these workers were classified as temporary, but then work for years. There still are temp workers, but they’re capped at nine months. You have these sizable, across the board wage increases that are much more targeted towards the bottom end of the pay scale.
Then I think we’re going to be talking about it later, but you know, these sort of, not restrictions, but these, interventions in companies investment decisions—so basically sort of expanding the vision of the union. And I think more broadly, what we’ve seen, this is the first time that the UAW ran a contract campaign, and really mobilized members in the lead up to the contract negotiations. So you have a membership that’s just much more engaged now, and, in the event that there’s a sizable no vote, we don’t know how that’s going to turn out, but it will be a result of that mobilization, right?
It’s not that the contract is bad or concessionary, it certainly is not, but it will be because members have been mobilized and their expectations have been raised. And so I think that we’ve really made some serious steps towards transforming what had become a corrupt, moribund union into something that is now, the UAW is now sort of really back out front, as they themselves say, leading the class war.
Teddy Ostrow: I think there are definitely also—we had you on last time to talk about the Teamsters—some pretty similar, but also different echoes about the contract campaign there and the gains that were made. I want to talk about one specific win that you wrote about, one of the biggest wins we saw was at Stellantis. They agreed to reopen and quote unquote, idled, but really closed auto plant in Belvedere, Illinois. This was one of the dozens of plants closed over the past 20 years by the Big 3. And the union also won 5, 000 more jobs at the company, which is remarkable because Stellantis had gone into negotiations planning to actually shed 5, 000 jobs. So this is a really major turnaround and … you did write a great piece in Jacobin Magazine about why this is so important for the workers of Belvedere in their own right, but also more broadly, how this may represent the beginning of some sort of shift, perhaps, in the way the union conceives of its own role in the economy. Can you lay that argument out for us?
Barry Eidlin: Yeah. So I think what we need to consider is that, you know, over the past 75 years, basically since World War II, there’s been this shift in labor’s priorities, and in the UAW, the United Auto Workers in particular, the president in the 1940s through 1970, when he died, was this guy, Walter Reuther.
He assumed the presidency in 1947, but he was the General Motors director in 1945. He certainly had his flaws as a labor leader, but he did not lack in vision, and in sort of having a broader political perspective in his view of what labor’s role was. And he really tried to advance a position where labor was going to play a role, not just in securing better jobs and working conditions for workers, but in actually shaping the economy and the polity, that they would have a key role in doing that. And so in the 1945 negotiations, he had this whole plan that the UAW called Purchasing Power for Prosperity. This was in the aftermath of World War II, where there was massive productivity gains to fight the war, massive inflation, but also, wage restraint, there were price controls too, there was wage and price restraints during the war, and so workers had been worked to death and had been producing like crazy to win the war effort.
And then people were looking to the after war period and were really concerned that they were going to get left behind in the midst of what it was anticipated to be, this huge inflationary surge. And so what Reuther proposed was Purchasing Power for Prosperity, which was a 30% across the board wage hike with no increase in car prices.
So it was basically forcing, trying to force the companies to transfer profits from capital to labor. And this resulted in a 118 day strike against General Motors that won some significant wage increases, but ultimately lost on this Purchasing Power plan. And then as a result, that was the beginning of this sort of like clawback of labor’s momentum.
That was when you saw the Republicans assume a majority in the Congress in 1946, they passed the Taft Hartley Act over President Truman’s veto in 1947. And you get to 1950 negotiations and it’s a much different scenario. So Reuther’s vision is really hemmed in by that point. And so you basically end up with a deal that’s called the Treaty of Detroit, where Reuther was able to get the company to invest heavily in its workforce in the sense of guaranteeing basically widespread job security, pensions, regular wage increases tied to the cost of living, but in exchange gave up that broader vision. They gave up control over the shop floor and gave up control over management investment decisions. Then that Treaty of Detroit pattern basically set the pattern for the post war period where labor basically abandoned its broader vision of trying to play a broader role in shaping the economy.
And while this is just one plant and one union and one contract, what we’re seeing with the move to use the collective bargaining process to force the company to reopen a plant, what I was saying in the article is that this marks an effort to reassert that broader vision for labor and trying to infringe on what has been management’s sovereign right to manage, that we will take care of wages and benefits for workers and some basic grievance procedures and stuff like that, but we relinquish any claims on being able to have a say in investment decisions. And so this is a step away from that and back towards the broader vision. And it’s important to recognize that these plant closings have a devastating impact on communities, right? The company justifies these plant closures by referencing their company’s profitability and other opportunities for investment and it’s sort of this dollars and cents, bottom line calculation with absolutely no consideration, or very little consideration for the path of destruction that these plant closures leave in their wake, or these entire communities that are left devastated, these families that are torn apart. And so I think that reshaping the narrative around who has a right to intervene in company investment decisions, do the people who are going to be directly affected by these company investment decisions have a right to have a say in those investment decisions? And I think that kind of question is now back on the table in a way that it hasn’t been in many decades.
Teddy Ostrow: Another element of the tentative agreements that may be representative of a greater shift in the union is that the contracts, if they’re ratified, will now expire on May 1st or the day before, which is the international holiday of May Day.
And one could say this is perhaps symbolic, but it also is quite strategic, I think. UAW President Shawn Fain has called on other unions to basically line their own contracts up to expire on that day as well. Can you give us a very brief crash course on the importance of May Day, basically so you can help us understand why the union did this, and what it says about the kind of unionism the UAW is trying to influence across the labor movement?
Barry Eidlin: Yeah, I mean, there are practical considerations, just that having the contract expire at the end of April means that workers are on the picket lines in the spring and summer instead of in the wintertime, which is non trivial when you’re talking about a protracted strike situation.
But it’s really the symbolism that’s important here. And I don’t mean symbolic in the sense of meaningless. I mean symbolic in the sense that it means something really important. So May Day obviously is the international workers’ holiday. Some people sort of say that it’s the real Labor Day and that the one in September is the fake Labor Day, but I think we should just have two Labor Days and we should fight for more Labor Days, as far as I’m concerned.
But May 1st is considered this worker’s holiday. It is to honor the martyrs of the Haymarket massacre on May 4th, 1886. I’m not quite sure what the history is of why it shifted from May 4th to May 1st, maybe it has to do with the Pagan holidays of May Day in Europe, I’m not quite sure.
But in any case. In 1887, some members of the Socialist International decided that they were going to designate May 1st as a workers’ holiday, and it sort of held that position ever since. And there’s been efforts in the U.S. to sort of recapture May Day, even though it originated in the U.S. has never really been as big of a holiday that it is in other parts of the world. So there have been efforts recently to recapture that.
But what’s important here with the UAW aligning their contracts to expire on April 30th, with the strike beyond May 1st and inviting other unions to do the same, to align their contracts, it really speaks to Shawn Fain and the new UAW administration’s commitment to a more class struggle vision of unionism, right? That’s really the story of the UAW contract campaign and the Stand-Up-Strike that ensued, is one of developing a much more explicit framework of class warfare, and that we are fighting not just for auto workers, but for the entire working class, that we are engaged in a class struggle with our billionaire class enemies, drawing these clear dividing lines and mobilizing workers around this broader vision.
And so aligning the contracts to expire the day before May Day and then inviting others to do so is a concrete embodiment of that broader vision, right? It sort of is a way to turn that vision into reality because it creates the structural preconditions for having a mass strike on May 1st of 2028 in a way that is, I mean, you will often hear small groups on the left talk about calling for a general strike and it’s sort of in the realm of fantasy, this actually brings that into the realm of a very real possibility, especially if we see other other unions follow suit.
Teddy Ostrow: Right. I remember when I first heard that they are extending the collective bargaining agreement length, before I understood why I was like, oh, usually you want a shorter contract sometimes. And then I understood. No, this is a way to sort of align the labor movement together. It’s another one of those first steps towards influencing a change in the broader movement for the wider working class in the United States.
Barry Eidlin: Yeah, I think so basically. And, and then you ask, well, why is it four and a half years instead of three and a half years?
And I think that what you’re getting at there is really important to keep in mind is that there’s some groundwork that needs to be laid in the next few years, both to get other unions on board with this vision, but also as Fain discussed when they were announcing the contract details to do a lot more to reorganize the U.S. auto industry in the next few years so that the next round of negotiations is fundamentally different.
Teddy Ostrow: That’s a perfect transition to my next question, which is, we’ve talked a bit about this on the podcast, but the Big Three contract fight this year has always been about more than just the Big Three. It’s also about how this sets the UAW up for an existential task, that is, organizing the non union auto giants so that we’re talking about a Big Five, a Big Six. Like Toyota, Hyundai, Volkswagen, Nissan, and of course, Tesla. We saw reporting from Labor Notes that’s now been reported elsewhere as well that Toyota responded to the TAs by raising workers wages and also shortening the progression to top rate. And this was presumably to sort of blunt any desire by workers to unionize their workplace. This is like a common trend that we see across different workplaces and sectors. But also we saw reports from Bloomberg that workers at the flagship Tesla plant in Fremont, California have formed an organizing committee with the UAW.
So I’d like to ask, maybe give us a little bit of background. You know, what is the UAW’s recent track record in organizing these mostly, but not all, foreign auto plants? How might these TAs have changed the environment for the union’s organizing potential? And then also, of course, maybe you should explain to listeners why their ears should perk up a little bit, when they hear that the UAW has set its sights on that Fremont Tesla plant.
Barry Eidlin: Yeah, so I think that what Toyota did is what these so called transplants, these quote unquote “foreign owned companies”, and I say that because, nowadays, the idea that the Big Three are American auto companies is questionable at best. Especially Stellantis, which is headquartered in Amsterdam, I think. I forget. Not the U. S.
But the UAW has failed to organize transplants ever since they started arriving in the U.S. And one of the ways that the transplants have fended off unionization is by matching some of the basic wage packages, at least, of the UAW, and so they’ll give them similar wages.
They won’t get the pensions and the healthcare and stuff like that, but the basic wage rates would be the same and that would often be enough to sort of placate people. And in recent years, the transplants just haven’t had to do much of that because the UAW was giving concessions.
So UAW plants were in many cases, workers in those plants were doing worse than people in the transplant. So there’s no organizing threat there, right? Because why would you join a union to bargain concessions for you, right? There’s just no logical reason for it.
So what Toyota is doing now is sort of a return to past practice in that sense. But I think what we need to be thinking about now is that, now there is a real threat of more organizing and trying to sort of change the balance of power. And I would be much more focused on the sort of bigger automakers like Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, stuff like that, rather than focusing on the Tesla plant, even though, you know, I did tweet out that, I think that it would be hard to think of a single organizing victory at a single shop that would have the kind of symbolic meaning and substantive meaning of organizing Tesla.
The problem there is, in academia, if you’re sort of in labor relations and you take a collective bargaining class, there’s this thing called BATNA, which is the Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. And the problem is that in the case of Tesla, Elon Musk’s BATNA is destroying the company.
He would rather have Tesla disappear than be a union company. He would rather just throw it down the garbage disposal. And if that’s the employer’s BATNA, you’re not going to be able to organize the plant, especially when you’ve got a billionaire with the resources, you know, so as much as I would love to see that, I don’t think that’s the wisest use of the UAW’s resources at this point, whereas you do have these other plants to organize that are very much invested in staying in the U.S. and want to capture market share in the U.S.
One of the things that’s important to keep in mind for your listeners here in this broader context is that despite all the rhetoric of deindustrialization that we’ve heard over the past several decades, the auto industry in the U.S. is still quite vibrant. As I wrote in that Belvedere article, the proportion of the workforce employed in auto, in 2022 is basically the same as in 1983. So we haven’t had auto jobs disappear in the U. S. in the way that we’ve seen, like steel jobs disappear, or textile jobs, for example. Auto jobs, we still make a lot of autos and auto parts in the U.S., it’s just that the sector has been de-unionized. So while the percentage of employment stayed roughly constant over the past 40 years, unionization rate dropped from roughly 60% to 16%.
And that’s because of these transplants that are all non union, the Big Three automakers spinning off their parts plants and others into these non union subsidiaries, all these layers of subcontracting and so on. So the story in auto is not de-industrialization, it’s de-unionization.
And that’s a very different challenge that’s much more tractable. It’s much more, it’s a much more of a doable challenge for the UAW. That’s not to say that it’s a walk in the park by any stretch. Organizing these plants is a huge challenge. But these plants are here. The work’s not all going to Mexico and China like the deindustrialization rhetoric would hold. These companies are in many cases reshoring, they’re bringing more work into the U.S. So that creates this target-rich environment for organizing, basically, but the job is to essentially re-organize the US auto industry, and that’s going to be essential to any long term strategy for maintaining the UAW as a going concern in the coming decades.
Teddy Ostrow: To close out, I want to ask you a somewhat tangential question. You and I have discussed on this show two very important union battles, many of us have considered them to be of this earth shattering importance for the labor movement—the UPS Teamsters and the Big Three auto workers, and you’ve laid out those cases very well.
I’m curious though, moving into 2024 in the United States, where are your eyes and ears moving next? Is it another shiny contract expiration? Is it another sector of the labor force? Should we even be thinking about it in this way? Is it new organizing? Just what should listeners be following in the world of labor, after the UAW contracts are eventually ratified?
Barry Eidlin: Yeah, that’s a really good question. One of the things that’s kind of exciting, but also confusing about the time we’re living in is that it’s hard to know where it’s going to pop off next, precisely because we’ve seen these strikes and contract fights in all different sectors across the economy, right?
It’s not like in 2018 where it was like education workers and you have the red state revolt, which everybody got excited about, but it was really just contained to the education sector for the most part. Nowadays, we’re seeing healthcare, we’re seeing Hollywood, we’re seeing grocery. We’re seeing longshore, you know, we’re seeing academic workers. It’s really kind of all over the place. So there is this kind of contagion effect, and it’s hard to know where that’s going to build up to. There isn’t the same kind, I mean, certainly on the scale of UPS and the Big Three next year, I don’t see anything on that scale where we can just sort of pinpoint that and say, okay, we need to watch that contract.
But there’s going to, there’s definitely going to be part two of the Hollywood battles, so this year it’s been the actors and writers and the next year it’s going to be the people below the line, people who do all the grunt work that makes Hollywood work, who are represented by IATSE. And the Teamsters are going up for their negotiations and I suspect that’s going to be a pretty significant, throw down and then it’s also going to be spiced up by the fact that you’ve got Teamster Western region vice president and motion picture director, Lindsay Doherty, leading the negotiations for the Teamsters.
So that’s certainly going to be something to watch, both for the substantive importance and the entertainment value, And I think, I believe the postal workers are going to be coming up fairly soon, and, we’ve got Mark Diamonstein in charge of the postal workers there.
I think that’s going to be a big fight. So, there are a couple of those, but I think the big thing is just to see whether the momentum and energy that we’ve seen from hot labor summer turn into fiery labor fall. I keep on trying to make that happen. It’s happened to me. We’ll need to come up with a winter one, you know, winter is coming, to see whether that keeps on building. Right. And I think, you know, that’s the question that people always ask me is, like, is, are we in an upsurge? And I keep on saying, there’s a bit of an uptick. But what I will say is that, if we are, if we’re sort of sitting here a year, two years from now in a bona fide upsurge of the type that we saw in the sixties and seventies or in the thirties and forties, that the key necessary elements for that upsurge were taking shape in the time that we’re in right now, and the fundamental condition for the upsurge, if it happens, is this layer of worker led organizing, and we see that taking shape, the headline grabbing stuff at Starbucks and Amazon.
But the organizing that led to the contracts with the teamsters in the UAW was only possible because of the rank-and-file organizing of Teamsters for a Democratic Union and Unite All Workers for Democracy. These rank-and-file movements, you have these workers in other sectors who are rejecting their contracts and pushing for something better.
So there’s a whole layer of independent worker-led organizing that is essential for it because you can’t sort of staff your way up to a labor upsurge. And so that layer of worker-led organizing has to expand and grow if we want to see what we have now actually develop into something more like a true upsurge.
So that’s really the thing that I’m going to be watching more than anything.
On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 8, members of the Teamsters union led a picket line march outside of Amazon’s BWI5 warehouse in Baltimore. Dozens of other union workers and members of the Baltimore community joined the demonstration, which was an extension of the ongoing Unfair Labor Practice strike by unionized Amazon drivers and dispatchers at the DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, CA. “In April, the 84 workers in Palmdale organized with the Teamsters, becoming the first union of Amazon drivers in the country,” the Teamsters stated in a press release. “As members of Local 396, they bargained a contract with Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner (DSP), Battle-Tested Strategies (BTS). Despite the absolute control it wields over BTS and workers’ terms and conditions of employment, Amazon refuses to recognize and honor the union contract. Instead, Amazon has engaged in dozens of unfair labor practices in violation of federal labor law, including terminating the entire unit of newly organized workers…. The Amazon drivers and dispatchers began their unfair labor practice strike on June 24. They have picketed over 20 Amazon warehouses around the country, including warehouses in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey.”
TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez was on the ground at the Amazon picket on Nov. 8 and spoke to: Deion Anthony Steppes, one of the striking Amazon drivers from Palmdale, CA, and a member of Teamsters Local 396; Cristina Duncan Evans, a Baltimore City educator and member of the Baltimore Teachers Union; Taylor Boren, an art teacher for Baltimore Public Schools and a member of the Teachers Association of Baltimore County; and Mike McGuire, a plumber and community member in Baltimore.
FeaturedMusic:
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
TRANSCRIPT
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Group:
Hey, hey, ho, ho, corporate greed has got to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho corporate greed has got to go. Hey, hey, ho, ho…
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to a special on the ground episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and it is about 6:00 PM on Wednesday, November 8th. And I’m currently standing outside of Amazon’s BWI5 warehouse in Baltimore, where workers and organizers with the Teamsters are leading a picket about 20 feet from where I’m currently standing. You could probably hear some of the chants in the background. This picket is an extension of the unfair labor practice strike by unionized Amazon drivers and dispatchers at the DAX8 delivery station in Palmdale, California.
According to the Teamsters in a press release that we will link to in the show notes for this episode, “In April, the 84 workers in Palmdale organized with the Teamsters becoming the first union of Amazon drivers in the country. As members of Local 396, they bargained a contract with Amazon’s delivery service partner, Battle-Tested Strategies. Despite the absolute control it wields over BTS and workers’ terms and conditions of employment, Amazon refuses to recognize and honor the union contract. Instead, Amazon has engaged in dozens of unfair labor practices in violation of federal law, including terminating the entire unit of newly organized workers. The Amazon drivers and dispatchers began their unfair labor practice strike on June 24th of this year. They have picketed over 20 Amazon warehouses around the country, including warehouses in California, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.”
So I am here for the Real News Network and Working People to talk to folks about the ongoing fight by Amazon workers to hold this international behemoth accountable for its rampant labor violations and its repeated attempts to thwart efforts by its own workers to exercise their right to organize.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Yes. Hello, my Deion Anthony Steppes part of the local 396 Laborers Union and also a current but temporary worker for the Palmdale Amazon facility.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. Well man, thank you so much, Deion, standing here and talking with me. I wanted to ask if you could just describe to people listening to this where we are right now, what’s happening just 10 feet away from us right now.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Currently we are in Baltimore and we are here as an extension for the Palmdale Local 396 and we’re trying to do a practice strike for the labor union. And what that entails is just showing Amazon that we as workers are fed up with the guidance that they try to give us and telling us that as we are temporary drivers, that we do not represent Amazon, even though that we wear their uniform, drive their trucks and we deliver their packages while conforming to Amazon safety without getting any of the benefits or respect that we feel like we deserve. Again, we are temporary workers wearing their uniforms, driving their trucks, but we somehow do not represent Amazon, which makes no sense.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, it doesn’t make any sense. But I mean this is how so many of these businesses try to skirt labor laws through contractors, through temp agencies. I was a warehouse temp back in Southern California where you guys are just 10 years ago. I saw how the sausage was made, I was a product of it. And it fucking sucks, pardon my French. But yeah, I mean I think that this has been a sadly under-covered story. Of course, we all know about the historic Amazon Labor Union victory a year ago on Staten Island at the JFK8 Fulfillment Center. We know about the workers in Alabama in Bessemer where I was two years ago when they were in the midst of their own unionization campaign. So those two campaigns have gotten a lot of attention, but you guys successfully unionized as well earlier this year, and Amazon has also refused to recognize the union and has done even worse than that. So can we talk about that? Tell me more about your struggle, the story that was going on over there in Palmdale. I think a lot of folks need to hear about it.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
So what I’d like to tell you is that about six months ago, we as a company decided to join the Labor Union because we felt that we needed to have our voices heard in a way that Amazon should be able to listen to. We believe that all of us who work for Amazon deserve better pay and above all safety. A lot of us go in very unsafe conditions. We get attacked by dogs. We get hit by the elements such as rain, sleet, snow, but also heat. We have been in situations where we have had no AC in our vehicles, but at the same time, especially to work a 10-hour day, walking, running most of the time without being provided necessary water.
And there are some of us drivers, and most people have heard of the famous UPS story where someone died of dehydration in the heat, and Amazon treats us even worse. We are not given what we feel is necessary for our safety even though we are trying our best to uphold the safety guidelines that they give us. So the unfair treatment, the low pay is not where we need it to be. And also because of that, the turnaround rate for Amazon is huge. It’s 150%. Nobody lasts because nobody can deal with the unfair conditions and even though Amazon is making a profit off of us, we’re not giving the respect we deserve. We’re not even considered actual Amazon employees, we are a third party.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right, so you guys technically drive for Battle-Tested Strategies.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Exactly, sir.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right, but you effectively work for Amazon, you’re not making deliveries for another company.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
See, this is how I look at it. If you’re wearing their uniform, if you are driving their truck, if you are obligated to watch their safety videos and follow Amazon guidelines, if you’re talking to customers and telling them, “Hey, we as Amazon representatives are letting you know how this is,” we are delivering their packages, how are we not Amazon employees? It doesn’t make sense in my head. But for you, you try to go through this loophole, as Amazon, a billion-dollar corporation, and trying to screw us over for no apparent reason other than to fill your pockets, shorten ours, and know that, “Hey, there’s going to be another one of you, and we can hire.” So how are we supposed to feed our families? How are we supposed to take care of those that we love? You’re feeding your pockets, we can’t feed our families.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, that is so powerfully put. And again, it resonates because I was told that every Goddamn day when I was a temp warehouse worker in the city of industry. I was told how lucky I should consider myself to have that job. How many guys there worried every day waiting to take that job if fucked up. How I shouldn’t complain, and all that stuff. They just do this all the time. And I mean, we’re literally about five feet away from a giant inflatable fat cat and that feels pretty on the nose from what [inaudible 00:08:47]-
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Oh, that’s just Bezos. I mean, I don’t know if you can [inaudible 00:08:47].
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, I thought that was Jeff himself.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Exactly.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I wanted to ask about that too, because I know I can’t keep here for much longer, but could you just talk about from your side, what does that work look like?? And why did that translate to you guys feeling like you needed a union?
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Our typical day starts as we collect our packages in the facility and then we are given an allotted amount of time to deliver said packages. And during that allotted time, we have to follow, of course basic driving regulations such as vehicle compliance, but also no speeding, no braking, no hitting nobody. But of course we understand those as being the law, but what we don’t understand is having to rush through orders because, as you know, Amazon tries its best to deliver as fast as possible, but that’s not Amazon the company, that is US people killing ourselves trying to get you your packages as fast as possible. We understand that is our job and we understand that you deserve to have your packages, but at the same time, we are killing ourselves. We are running in rain, sleet, snow. We are getting attacked by dogs.
I personally was held at gunpoint because of a situation where I was trying my best to deliver a package in a very rural area, but unfortunately I was seen as an intruder. I am a six-foot four Black man, and I was held at gunpoint saying, “What was I doing on their property?” I was scared for my life.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus man, Jesus. I’m so sorry that happened.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
I have to say, it’s part of the job. And because of that, I luckily was wearing my Amazon uniform, which I’m required to wear, and I was able to get away from that situation. I was able to go back to my vehicle and just say, “This is your package. I’m here delivering. I am not trying to intrude. I’m just trying to do my job, and I know you’re just trying to protect your family.” When I was able to go back, when I was let go from that situation, I think I stood in my vehicle, just panicked, my heart racing, knowing that I could have died in that situation. And again, I have to say that is part of the job.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man, I’m horrified by that. And for Amazon to turn around and say, “We’re not going to recognize you and your coworkers for unionizing and trying to improve our working conditions and have better protections for ourselves in these and other cases, it’s just despicable. And again, this story itself is despicable because you guys unionized back in April and tell me what happened then. Tell me what led to this ongoing strike and how it’s developed over the past few months and then we’ll wrap it up.
Deion Anthony Steppes:
We of the BTS organized to be able to have our voices heard, as I said before. And during that time, we just pretty much decided as a group that, “Hey, we need to get our voices heard. We need to be able to tell others of our story.” And we’re able to… You know what, Amazon would listen to us if we have a powerful voice, which was the teamsters, and they decided, “You know what? We’re just going to end your contract,” just right then and there. And that’s when we decided, you know what? We need to strike. We need to stand up. This isn’t just for us, this is for everyone who represents Amazon, everybody who feels this is unfair. And just like as we are in Baltimore right now, there are so many other facilities who are trying their best to strike and get their voices heard.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you guys have… I mean, you’re here in Baltimore, you work in California, so this is like an extension of that strike from coast to coast. And you guys have been going to other parts of the country as well, right?
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Yes, we have been everywhere from the UK to other parts of the States. I have personally been to Vegas and a lot of my coworkers have been to New York and every such area, just doing our best to extend this picket line, to extend this striking force for the unfair labor practices that Amazon gives to us. So as legally as possible, I would like to say I do not hate Amazon. I respect what they’re trying to do, give packages to the common folk, but we as common workers deserve to be treated as human beings. We deserve safety. We deserve fair pay. We deserve not to be replaced by robots in the warehouse facility. We deserve to have job security. And like I said before, you’re feeding your pockets, but we can’t feed our families.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And Deion, last question, for folks out there listening, what can they do to show support for you and your coworkers and what can they do to show support for all Amazon workers who are trying to exercise their right to organize in the country right now?
Deion Anthony Steppes:
Support the Teamsters Union. Go to your local Amazon, file a complaint, say, “Please help your workers. Please support your drivers. Please support the warehouse workers.” All of us are just trying to do our best to again feed our families and we do our best for you, so please do your best for us.
Male:
No justice.
Group:
No peace.
Male:
No justice.
Group:
No peace.
Male:
No justice.
Group:
No peace.
Male:
No justice.
Group:
No peace.
Male:
No justice.
Group:
No peace.
Male:
No justice.
Cristina Duncan Evans:
My name’s Cristina Duncan Evans. I’m with the Baltimore Teachers Union and we’re here on the picket lines with the teamsters fighting against Amazon for higher wages, and we’re fighting against retaliation and the unfair labor practices.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Cristina, thank you so much for standing here on the corner outside of this massive Amazon fulfillment center here in Baltimore. I thought it was really, really cool to see you and so many other folks from the community marching with the teamsters right now protesting Amazon’s unfair labor practices, its refusal to recognize the unionized teamsters in California, firing the entire unit, to say nothing of its refusal to bargain a contract with the Amazon Labor Union and its labor violations across the board. I just wanted to ask, why as a Baltimore teacher, it was important for you to come out here and be part of this demonstration?
Group:
[inaudible 00:15:34].
Male:
[inaudible 00:15:34].
Group:
[inaudible 00:15:34].
Male:
[inaudible 00:15:34].
Cristina Duncan Evans:
Well, it’s so important because teachers are workers, teachers are members of the union. We know what it’s like to have a boss that takes advantage of you, a boss that retaliates and so we just really wanted to stand with the Amazon workers who are striking. We have family members who work for Amazon, we have students families who work for Amazon, I have former students who work for Amazon and so when I hear that Amazon is doing what they’re doing in terms of how they’re treating their workers, of course we want to support the workers and fight back against this unfair treatment.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I was wondering if you could say a little more about that, because that’s a side of the story that people don’t ever talk about much. But I mean, I see this with my own foster daughter and knowing how many of these young high school students, especially those who are in precarious economic positions, I mean, this is where a lot of them are going to come work. And so how do you deal with that as a teacher when you’re already dealing with, so… I mean, we could talk for days about Baltimore schools, and please tell us how things are going there, but I guess just as a teacher, how do you navigate that knowing that places like Amazon are the future for so many of our young people?
Group:
[inaudible 00:16:47].
Cristina Duncan Evans:
It’s really disheartening and honestly somewhat scary. It really started picking up during the pandemic where Amazon was hiring in massive numbers and seeing students, seeing some of my former students who were going to work for Amazon, hearing back from them about the unfair working conditions, the expectations that they were held to and just rules that really made it hard for them to get stability. The distribution plant is in the middle of nowhere, people can’t get transportation to it. I have students who are working at this place and other distribution plants that are outside the city center, they are spending so much of their wages just to get here to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, this is not an easy place to get to.
Cristina Duncan Evans:
It’s not.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It took me forever to get here.
Cristina Duncan Evans:
And you get trapped in this cycle where you are spending all of your money on childcare, you’re spending all of your money on transportation. Not to mention just the cost of living being so high, you’re working and working and working for nothing. And honestly, we want to educate our students for good jobs. We want their families to have good jobs. We want people to have stability in their lives, and Amazon just isn’t it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Say it sister. I want to let you go now because we still got a picket line going, as folks can hear in the background, but I just wanted to ask how we can make sure that that street goes both ways. What are teachers in Baltimore going through right now and what can working people in the city and beyond do to support you all in this struggle for a better life for all of us?
Cristina Duncan Evans:
Well, one of the things we’re dealing with right now is that our school district just de-certified our career pathways. And without getting too much into the details of it, basically they’ve taken a huge amount of stability away from the teaching force in Baltimore, so we’re just asking people to pay attention to their educator, support educators because we want career educators. We want a career in the classroom. We want the stability from our employers so that we can focus on students. We don’t want to get a second job. We don’t want to get a summer job. We want to pour all of our energy into developing young people, and we want a system that’s stable enough so that we can do that. And right now, we’re not getting that. And that’s what we need support from the community for.
Male:
Union.
Group:
Strong.
Male:
Union.
Group:
Strong.
Male:
Union.
Group:
Strong.
Male:
Union.
Group:
Strong.
Male:
Union.
Group:
Strong.
Male:
Worker.
Group:
Power.
Male:
Worker.
Group:
Power.
Male:
Worker.
Group:
Power.
Male:
Worker.
Group:
Power.
Taylor Boren:
I’m Taylor Boren. I’m an art teacher for Baltimore County Public Schools and a member of TABCO, the Teachers Association of Baltimore County. I am here tonight because TABCO stands in support of our union brothers and sisters. We are in the midst of a contract campaign to compress our salary scale, to increase our career earnings, among other things, including our working conditions. It’s important that we stand in solidarity with fellow union members and those attempting to unionize.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I mean, I think it’s so important to see so many folks like yourself who aren’t with the teamsters, who don’t work with Amazon, but people who are out here literally 20 feet from where we’re standing, blocking traffic from getting into this massive Amazon facility. I mean, do you think that there’s something happening here in the city? Are more folks feeling encouraged to come out to events like this, or have you been part of these kinds of events in the past?
Taylor Boren:
I mean, I sure hope so. I feel like for me, that more so than staying home or reading a book, this is what self-care looks like, is showing up for fellow workers and standing in solidarity with those that need our support. I am excited about the growing labor movement across the country, and I hope it keeps growing stronger.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And can you just say a little more about TABCO for folks who are listening to this? Tell me a bit about your union, the folks in it and the contract negotiations that you mentioned earlier.
Taylor Boren:
Sure. So TABCO is the Teacher’s Association of Baltimore County. We represent all certificated employees in Baltimore County, so not just who you would typically think of as teachers, but also our nurses, school social workers, school psychologists, and more. We are in the midst of our contract campaign. While our contract says that it should be negotiated by November 30th, we have never actually negotiated within that deadline. So this is the first year we are pushing to really get our contract negotiated by November 30th. That way we have our contract negotiated before the Baltimore County budget is decided because if we negotiate a contract after the budget is passed, we’re limited in what we can negotiate.
Like I said, we’re working to compress our salary scale, meaning teachers get to their top earnings earlier in their career. We are negotiating to get more urgent business leave for teachers, which is personal leave, and we are trying to get pay for more of the things we do that are unpaid, like afterschool events, coverages, things like that. So we are continuing to wear Red for ED. We’re going to be wearing Red for ED on November 14th, the next bargaining session we have with Baltimore County. And we are hoping to get more TAs, Tentative Agreements on the table then.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And can I just ask, what can folks around the city do to support you all and what can we all do as working people here in Baltimore to better support our fellow workers, whether they be here at Amazon or teaching in our schools?
Taylor Boren:
Awesome question. I would love to see fellow union members and community stakeholders wearing Red for ED with us on November 14th to support a strong contract for educators. Speaking at the board of Education is powerful. They have public comment slots. They meet two Tuesdays a month. You can show up and speak. Tell them that you support a fair contract for educators, tell them it matters to you. Right now we are also facing a lot of pushback from groups that support book Banning and who oppose BCPS’s current equity policies. So if you can show up and speak up for our students and our educators at board meetings, wear Red for ED on November 14th. Send your pictures to TABCO.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah.
Taylor Boren:
I just wanted to add that it’s also important to me, especially as an educator in this community, that we show up for our students and their families, many of whom are employed here. So fighting for our workers here is a fight for our students and their families and better working conditions and living conditions for them.
Male:
What do we want?
Group:
Justice.
Male:
When do we want it?
Group:
Now.
Male:
What do we want?
Group:
Justice.
Male:
When do we want it?
Group:
Now.
Male:
What do we want?
Group:
Justice?
Male:
When do we want it?
Group:
Now.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Male:
If we don’t get it?
Group:
Shut it down.
Mike McGuire:
So I’m Mike McGuire. We’re on Holabird Avenue in Southeast Baltimore. And I’m a plumber here in town and also do labor and solidarity stuff, a former union member, a former union organizer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And yeah, we just concluded this picket out in front of the Amazon warehouse that we’re standing out in front of. You yourself were walking that picket line. I just wanted to ask if you could tell listeners a bit about what brought you out. I mean, you’re not a member of the Teamsters, you don’t work at Amazon, but why was it important for you to come out and support this?
Mike McGuire:
So I’m out here in solidarity with the teamsters that are organizing and one union’s in Amazon. But I’ll tell you what I was thinking about as I was walking the line was Jeff Bezos paying millions of dollars to get a bridge removed and reinstalled so that his mega yacht could make it out of port because they built it so big that it couldn’t fit under the bridge. And then I’m thinking about folks not being able to make it across the warehouse to go to bathroom breaks in the Amazon warehouses and the contrast is going to fucking kill us. This is an unsustainable… There are a lot of ways that we’re building an unsustainable world, and this is one of them. So in as much as I can contribute, I’m going to.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what is your message, I guess, to other working folks around Baltimore about why they need to come to actions like this and what we can do as a working class in the city and beyond to better support one another in the fight to stop that horrible inequality that you just described.
Mike McGuire:
And the first thing is show up and the second thing is organize. A leader from UNITE HERE, the local here in Baltimore, she just retired. The line that she always gave was, “We already know what happens when we don’t organize, so let’s see what can happen when we do organize.”
And we’ve got multiple crises that we’re facing in Baltimore and the world. And Baltimore is a democratic town, and we have the entire spectrum of politics, gladly not so much as the MAGA right wing, but we’ve got conservatives and liberals within the Democratic Party in Baltimore. It’s a democratic town, we should be doing a lot more work. We should be doing a lot more organizing. City government should be doing a lot more experimentation around worker power, around… I mean, specifically something that they would have the power to catalyze more is worker cooperatives in terms of the model of development that we’re pursuing. But that’s about Baltimore. I mean, it only happens if there are people that are pushing to make it happen. Elections matter most for us if we show up for them. Protests matter, organization happens if we show up for it. The most important thing is show up and then organize, push for a better world.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. And Mike, I guess just a final note, what would you say to folks around the city and beyond who are listening to this about what they can do to get involved?
Mike McGuire:
So we, the popular classes in the United States, are so disorganized, you can do practically anything. You can join a garden club. You can join a union. The most important thing is to not be quiet and not stay at home.
Our enemy, and this is something… When we talk about elections in the United States, we talk about polarization between Left and Right, but the biggest difference is between those that aren’t paying attention and those that are paying attention. So our biggest enemy, I think, are folks that shut themselves down, don’t do anything, don’t pay attention. And even if you’re just going to a community garden and you’re building social networks with folks at a community garden or a book club at the library, you’re building those connections and as crises come up, you have people that you know, that you trust, that you know the strengths and weaknesses of, you can go out and do shit. You can hit the streets. You can organize like during COVID, mutual aid networks where you’re providing meals for folks that can’t get out and get their own meals. I say this all the time, but everything contributes. The enemy is staying at home and not doing nothing. (singing)
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This story originally appeared in The Tribune on Oct. 31, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
‘We know the sacrifices they underwent — some of them lost their jobs…But what struck us most was the fact that members of the labour movement so many thousands of miles away from us felt this sense of commitment to the struggle against racial oppression in South Africa.’
That’s how Nelson Mandela described the brave Irish women of Dunnes Store in Dublin who ended up on strike for three years over their refusal to handle goods from apartheid South Africa. The strike began after shop assistant Mary Manning was suspended for refusing to ring up a grapefruit, sticking to her union instructions not to handle South African products. Her colleagues went on strike in solidarity. For three years, these workers were on the picket line on just £21 a week. Some lost their jobs and their homes. Mandela later told the group of workers that their stand had helped him to keep going during his time in prison.
In Britain, too, international solidarity with those resisting apartheid was prominent. By 1990, 43 national trade unions, including every major union, were affiliated to the anti-apartheid movement. Last week, we highlighted a call for international solidarity issued by Shaheer Saeed, the General Secretary of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions. He spoke about how thousands of workers from Gaza had been detained by Israeli forces in degrading and inhuman conditions, calling on international trade unions for support and solidarity.
Unjust imprisonment without trial was also a feature of the apartheid South African government, and trade unions in the UK historically campaigned for the release of union members in South Africa and Namibia. Solidarity took place on a local level, too: NHS workers in Portsmouth refused to handle South African medical supplies, Ford workers stopped the import of pick-up trucks, and journalists at the International Publishing Corporation persuaded management to reject South African government advertisements.
The rich tradition of international solidarity and anti-imperialism within the British trade union movement extends beyond the anti-apartheid movement.
In 2003, two Motherwell-based train drivers refused to move a freight train carrying ammunition believed to be destined for British forces deployed in the Gulf. Railway managers cancelled the Ministry of Defence service after the crewmen, described as ‘conscientious objectors’ by a supporter, said they opposed Tony Blair’s threat to attack Iraq. And just ten miles away, in the 1970s, shop stewards at an East Kilbride Rolls Royce factory refused to carry out repairs on warplanes belonging to Chile’s air force. And British trade union solidarity with Chileans during the 1973 Pinochet coup was far more wide-ranging. As Owen Dowling highlighted inJacobin, ‘Engineering workers in Newcastle, Rosyth, Glasgow, and elsewhere also refused work on Chilean warships, while dockworkers in Liverpool, Newhaven, and Hull variously boycotted handling goods from or for Chile. The decision of six hundred unemployed Liverpool seamen to forgo work aboard a freighter bound for Chile, in order to uphold their national union’s policy, was celebrated throughout the solidarity movement.’
A call for solidarity
In the midst of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, a broad coalition of more than thirty Palestinian trade unions have issued an urgent call to their international partners to take action to halt arms deliveries to the Israeli military. The call cites previous successful actions by trade unions in Italy, South Africa and the United States, where workers refused to handle Israeli goods and arms.
In May 2021, an Italian port workers’ union refused to load an arms shipment destined for Israel. The workers, members of L’Unione Sindacale di Base (USB) in the city of Livorno, said they would not load the shipment after discovering it was destined for the Israeli port of Ashdod. ‘The port of Livorno will not be an accomplice in the massacre of the Palestinian people,’ they said in a statement.
Later that week, South African dockworkers refused to offload an Israeli ship docked at the Durban harbour. The South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (SATAWU) said the decision came after calls by the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) to refuse to unload Israeli ships and goods from seas and airports. This was not the first time either. In 2009, as Israel bombarded Gaza, SATAWU members refused to offload an Israeli ship.
Yasmin, a trade unionist in Palestine who helped coordinate the call for solidarity, says the British trade union movement has a big role to play in disabling Israel’s war machine. ‘Many of the weapons that Israel is using in Gaza are being produced in weapons factories around the globe. Many of them are transported through international ports. Companies like Elbit Systems, for example, are able to operate out of factories in the UK, France, the US and other places, as well as arms companies based in different countries around the world, shipping and selling their weapons to Israel. These are produced not by machines, these weapons are produced by workers, and many of them will be in trade unions.’
While the call for solidarity has been issued to all ‘counterparts and people of conscience’, it focuses particularly on trade unions in relevant industries, calling on them to refuse to build or handle weapons destined for Israel and make public statements declaring their position.
‘Unions like Unite and the GMB actually have recognition agreements with companies that sell weapons to Israel like Babcock and Leonardo,’ explains Yasmin. ‘These unions can utilise their force and use their members working in these companies to facilitate concrete change on the ground. Instead of saying they want Israel to stop bombing people in Gaza, they can prevent the bombs from reaching Israel in the first place. So trade unions have a big role to play in this. They can refuse to build weapons, refuse to unload weapons from trucks. And refuse to be complicit in genocide.’
While focusing on the arms trade, the call also demands action against all ‘companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege’ including where they have contracts with research institutions and other bodies. Alongside the call for popular action in trade unions, the statement urges trade unions to place pressure on their governments to introduce a formal ban on all military trade with Israel. Samira Abdelalim, a Palestinian feminist and trade union activist based in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip, said, ‘We call on all workers everywhere to stop the brutality practised by Israel. Workers — especially those in weapons factories — must always remember that they participate in creating tools that affect the future of the world.’
Outlining the urgency of the moment, Haidar Eid, a Palestinian trade unionist and activist also living under bombardment in Gaza, highlighted the dire consequences of inaction: ‘If the increasing number of dead and injured amongst Palestinian civilians in Gaza does not convince the international community to impose a military embargo on apartheid Israel now, the world is going to witness the worst genocide of the twenty-first century. It is high time that the international community stood on the right side of history, as it did against apartheid South Africa.’
Nadia Habash, a member of the Engineers Association, Jerusalem Center — one of the signatory unions to the call — explained the hope Palestinians were placing in the international trade union movement: ‘We turn to the global trade union movement because they are the champions of justice, of truth against tyranny. We demand that they raise their voices loudly, take action and put pressure on their governments to force the Zionist occupation to immediately stop the brutal war it has unleashed. They must immediately cease weapons sales which are being used to destroy homes above the heads of children, women and the elderly.’
Ending complicity
Over 8,300 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli attacks since October 7. 40 percent of them have been children. Alongside intensive bombardment, Israel has cut off fuel, water and electricity. The response by both of our major parties has been one of complete and total support for the State of Israel. This emboldened Israel to act with impunity, giving it carte blanche to carry out its genocidal war without limit.
British collusion with apartheid regimes is not unprecedented and neither are the mass movements that have arisen in response to this complicity. Apartheid South Africa was not defeated because politicians, here and abroad, suddenly grew a moral conscience and decided black South African lives matter. It was defeated by masses of people organising in their communities. The British trade union movement was a key part of that movement.
Once again, both of our major parties are not just complicit in apartheid, they are out of step with public opinion. An overwhelming 76 percent of the British public support an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, with only 8 percent against. And yet the leaders of both the Conservative Party and the Labour Party refuse to back this call. This lack of democracy in our politics only underscores the need for British workers and their trade unions to heed the call for solidarity from Palestinian trade unionists.
A number of trade unions representing millions of British workers are doing precisely this. Many senior trade unionists have spoken at Palestine solidarity rallies in recent weeks, and some unions, such as the RMT union, have gone further, calling for an arms embargo.
Some have taken direct action, too. Last week, 150 trade unionists in Kent blocked the entrances of Instro Precision Ltd, a subsidiary of Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems. The group of workers, going under the banners of ‘Workers for a Free Palestine’, are set to hold a meeting in London on Wednesday evening alongside the Palestine Youth Movement to discuss how workers can heed the Palestinian trade unions’ call to action.
Palestinian trade unions end their joint statement with the following words:
‘We ask you to speak out and take action in the face of injustice as trade unions have done historically. We make this call in the belief that the struggle for Palestinian justice and liberation is not only a regionally and globally determined struggle. It is a lever for the liberation of all dispossessed and exploited people of the world.’
The British trade union movement has a rich and proud tradition of international solidarity. History shows us that when those in power fail us, we can use our strength in numbers to fight for change. It’s time to reignite that fighting spirit.
Editor’s Note (10/30/23): This conversation was recorded on Oct. 16. Since then, UAW negotiators and all three of the Big 3 automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis) have reached tentative agreements, bringing the historic Stand Up Strike to an end, at least for now. UAW members will return to work this week while the union reviews the tentative agreements and the membership votes on whether or not to accept them as the terms for a new contract.
Over the past month and a half, United Auto Workers have continued to ramp up their strike at the Big 3 auto companies, calling workers at more plants to hit the picket line. As of today, Oct. 30, the UAW has reached tentative agreements with Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, and the historic Stand Up Strike has been put on pause while the union membership votes on whether or not to accept the TAs as the terms for a new contract. While we have been waiting every day for more updates on the UAW strike as it unfolds in real time, it’s important to remember that the issues within the auto industry—and the economy writ large—that led to this historic moment of struggle have been brewing for decades. In this episode, we talk with Sherry Cothren, who worked for 30 years at Ford Motor Company and retired just before her plant in Toledo, Ohio, closed in 2007. We also speak with Sherry’s son, Jeremiah, an architect turned visual journalist and producer whose primary focus captures vivid histories of human rights, social justice and migration.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Sherry Cothren:
Hi. My name is Sherry Cothren. I am 66 years old. I am a UAW retiree. I worked at Ford Maumee Stamping, it was called at the time. Maumee is a suburb outside Toledo. I was born and raised in Toledo, Ohio, and I started August 22, 1977.
Jeremiah Cothren:
And my name is Jeremiah Cothren. I’m a journalist based in New York City, and I’m also the son of Sherry Cothren. It’s great to have her have in studio because it’s actually the first time I have a chance with Max to actually do an interview with her [laughs], not at the dinner table.
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.
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We got a really, really great one coming out this week that I got to record in Matewan, West Virginia, where I was hanging out with our friends of the show, the great journalist Kim Kelly, Haeden Wright from the United Mine Workers down in Alabama, John Russell from The Holler. It was just a really, really great bonus episode that we got to record while we were all there in person in Matewan to present at the Museum of the Mine Wars in Matewan, West Virginia. So you guys don’t want to miss that, and you don’t want to miss out on the opportunity to support the show. Thank you all so much, and thank you all so much to everyone who is already a supporter. We really, really appreciate it.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I am beyond excited to be sitting down with Sherry and Jeremiah. As you guys know, the United Auto Workers’ strike is continuing. We are recording this on Monday, Oct. 16, and these workers at all Big Three automakers, for the first time in the union’s history, all workers at all three of the Big Three are on strike at once. As we’ve covered here on the podcast, over at The Real News and on Breaking Points, this is a novel strategy that the union, led by Reform President Shawn Fain, is employing called the Standup Strategy.
So even though workers at all three big three automakers (that’s Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors), even though workers at all three of those employers are on strike, not all of the workers at all of those plants are currently on strike. As we know, workers at three plants across the Big Three were called to be the first to strike four weeks ago. And as we speak, the strike is continuing, with potentially more plants being called to join the strike.
And just to give you guys an update on where we are right now, Monday, Ot.r 16, again, things may change by the time you hear this later this week, but what we know right now can be summed up in these two passages I’m going to read from two separate articles. The first one was published at the end of last week by our friends at Labor Notes. This was written by Keith Brower Brown. We will obviously link to both of these in the show notes.
But Keith Brower Brown wrote last week, “Every Friday for the past four weeks, big three CEOs have waited fearfully for UAW president Shawn Fain to announce which plants will strike next. But without warning on Wednesday afternoon, the union threw a haymaker. Within 10 minutes, the UAW would be shutting down the vast Kentucky truck plant. This plant, on 500 acres outside of Louisville, is one of Ford’s most profitable, cranking out full-size SUVs and the Super Duty line of commercial trucks.
“‘We make almost half of Ford’s US revenue right here,’ says James White, who has worked in the plant for a decade. These 8,700 strikers joined the 25,000 already walking the lines at assembly plants and parts distribution centers across the country in the union’s escalating standup strike.”
And so I just wanted to pair that with another passage that is like a postscript to what I just read with Keith Brower Brown with a little more details about which plants are on strike. This was written by Kalea Hall at the Detroit News published earlier today. We will link to this piece as well. So she writes, “Monday marked day 32 of the UAW strike against the Detroit three, which began on Sept. 15 with a targeted plant strike strategy. UAW president Shawn Fain first called out workers at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Stellantis’ Toledo Jeep Plant in Ohio, and GM’s Wentzville Assembly in Missouri. The strike has been expanded multiple times to include all of the GM and Stellantis’s parts warehouses, GM’s Lansing Delta Township Assembly Plant, Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant, and most recently, its profit-rich Kentucky Truck Plant.”
So that’s where we are right now. Shawn Fain and the UAW definitely have a taste for the theatrics, because I feel like we’re all on the edge of our seat, waiting to see who else is going to be called to the picket line. We’re all waiting with bated breath on updates from the bargaining table because, of course, what we ultimately want is for these workers, these retirees, to win the contract that they deserve, and so that is what we are fighting for. That’s what they’re fighting for. So we’re constantly checking our newsfeeds, seeing if there are updates. So that’s where we are right now as of Monday, Oct. 16. And we will, of course, be continuing to share updates with you all here on the pod, on social media, and at The Real News, so stay tuned for that.
But as we hit this moment in the strike, which began on Sept. 15, I think it’s really important to keep hearing from as many voices as we can and to hear from folks who have lived through and worked in this industry. Again, what that work is like, how they have seen the industry itself change over the years, how the union itself has changed, and just really providing that deeper human and historical context to what we’re watching unfold on the streets at these plants right now as we speak.
And so that’s why I was beyond excited when Jeremiah, who I’ve had the honor of working with on other journalism related things, reached out to me and said, hey, my mom worked in the auto industry all her life, and she’s got such incredible stories. Would you be interested in having her on the show? And I was like, bro, of course I’d be interested in having her on the show. Can you come on with me and interview her with me? So that’s why we’re all here.
And so let’s dive into it, because that’s enough from me. Sherry, I really want to get to know more about you and talk about… You mentioned when you got hired, and I’m just thinking about all that has changed in that time and all that you must have seen firsthand. But before we go through all of that, I just wanted to ask if you could tell our listeners a little more about yourself and your path into the auto industry. So walk us up to that fateful day when you got hired and then you walked in for your first shift.
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, absolutely. Okay. I was really excited to start working at Ford Motor Company. [Jeremiah’s] dad, I was dating him at the time, he got me in, and he never let me forget. But anyways, different story. We went in for orientation, and that was really very short. Back then, the orientation was very short, maybe, oh gosh, it wasn’t even a week because they may have just threw us out on the floor after three days. So they basically trained us on safety. We had to wear safety glasses, earplugs, and sleevelets or a long sleeve because we worked with steel and it was just so sharp. Oh my, goodness, it would just cut right through you. And those were requirements that we had to have.
And then when we got started, we had someone train us on the job — Oh, I’m sorry. I got hired as a production worker. And that person works on the line. At the beginning of the line, just picture a huge mold, and then we have a production worker would slide a huge sheet of steel, or metal, whatever, into the mold, and the huge press would come down and stamp it into a certain shape, and then it would travel all the way down the line until it stacked into a packing crate, as we called it.
And back then, the parts were so heavy. Oh my, goodness. Well, you could imagine because they used the real deal. It wasn’t no aluminum, no plastic, none of that. And it was very, very hard work. I would come home every day, I was like, gosh, barely 20. I was really young when I started. And I would come home crying every day, and my mom was like, Sherry, do you really want to do this? But I actually had a plan in my head. I didn’t really want to tell her about it at the time. But anyway, she would put me in a nice warm bath and help me just and talk to me, and she talked me through it.
And the reason why I decided to work at Ford Motor… Well, first of all, let me tell you this before I forget. When I got that check, oh boy, that was sweet [Alvarez laughs]. That sealed the deal a little bit for someone my age making that much money. But my dad, he was an alcoholic, and he was very abusive to my mom, and he would abuse her in front of us as kids. And so I’m thinking to myself that when I get a good job, I’m going to get my mom and my siblings out of here, out of the house. So that actually was my biggest incentive to work at Ford.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, man. And to have all that on your shoulders at 20 is so wild to me. I was a dumbass when I was 20. Pardon my swearing. But even the thought that I would go work at a good union job so that I could help get my family out of such a terrifying situation, my head is spinning just thinking about that.
I wanted to ask a little more about that. So you were the oldest sibling?
Sherry Cothren:
No, actually, I wasn’t. I had three older brothers, and two older sisters, and a brother under me. My older sister, she worked for, well they call it Stellantis now, we called it Jeep back in the day in Toledo, Ohio. She was working for Jeep. But my two brothers, they have special needs, and so they were unable to work and on disability and all of that. And then my brother that’s closest to me, 18 months apart, he enlisted in the military to get away from the abusive situation. Which he told me that years later, because at the time I didn’t know why he left. And so I was like, well, I guess it’s up to me. I just couldn’t bear to see my mom treated that way. And I just watched her cry, that just bothered… Excuse me, I’m sorry. It gets to me a little bit. But yeah, so I was so determined to do that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m tearing up just hearing about it. It honestly reminds me a lot of my family. I remember recording, this is apropos because we’ve got you and your son here, and as I was telling you guys before we got recording, the very first episode of this show I ever did was with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, and we talked about his life. We talked about moving to this country from Mexico, his mom dying when he was six, his dad abandoning his family. They were very poor. They lived in Tijuana in a lean-to shack, and his dad was a migrant farm worker who just one year didn’t come back. But then everything was on their mom’s shoulders.
My dad was so close to my Grandma Josefina, but then she passed away from cancer when he was six. Then on her deathbed, she made my great-grandma, grandma Petra, we called her, promise that she would bring the children to the United States. And she did. It was tough because my tios were split up. They were put in different foster homes. It took many years for them to find each other again. But I didn’t know that growing up because growing up, I was just like, oh, all my uncles and aunts are here, and they love each other, and we hear all these great stories. But it wasn’t until we started doing these interviews that they revealed so much more about the past that was always a part of me and my family’s history, but I just didn’t know it.
And I remember my Tia Tere talking about how hard it was as the oldest when her three siblings were already in the states, she had to stay behind to try to get their paperwork ready, go to Mexico City and all of that. And when my Grandma Josefina was sick, she was the one who had to work to provide for them.
And so I remember recording another conversation after that first one with my dad when my tios said like, hey. Can we all sit down and tell you our side of that story? And I was like, yeah, please. So we sat down, I turned the recorder on, and they’re talking about this. And at one point, we all just started crying because my Tia Tere was talking about how hard it was having all that on her shoulders but how much she wanted to make my Grandma Josefina proud and take care of her siblings.
And what my dad said after that, after we all cried on the recording, — People can go back and listen to it, it’s in season two, it’s called “Mi Familia” — I think my dad said something, he’s like, this is the first time we’ve ever all talked about this. And I was like, for 60 years, you guys have been in each other’s lives, but you… It just broke my heart to think that the opportunity never presented itself or they never felt like they could do it.
So please don’t feel bad at all about getting choked up because that’s hard. What you lived through was so incredibly hard. That’s also what makes that such an incredibly powerful and heroic story because that’s exactly what we don’t think about. The cars that we drive that are symbols of America and American manufacturing are made by people like you coming from situations like this. And that is important. It’s important for people to understand who makes all the things that we depend on. It’s flesh and blood human beings like us. So sorry, I was just very touched by what you were saying. I went on a rant.
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, it’s awesome. Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Jeremiah, I was curious. I want to bring you in here. Speaking of which, when did you, I guess, what was it like for you having a mom who worked in the auto industry, and what sorts of things would you notice or pick up on or hear about as a kid that maybe stand out to you now?
Jeremiah Cothren:
Well, it’s interesting, Maximillian, that how you speak, you talk about how you and your father were able to sit down and do an interview. I just want to say that the story about how my mom really got into working at Ford Motor Company, I didn’t know this until probably three years ago, four years, just before the pandemic. I was doing some work down in New Orleans, and it was my first time in New Orleans, I had a great time. I thought I’d bring my mom along. And it was amazing. We had such a great time. And I remember her and I sitting down at dinner once, and we were just talking about the good old days, and back in Ohio, and what things were like back then.
Now as I’ve developed in my career and as a journalist, I have so many questions as well about my family because as kids, we don’t always ask when we’re younger, and I was always very curious. She shared that story with me. And I have to say that it really touched me because not only have I seen the sacrifices that my mom had to make raising my sister and I, but I didn’t even know the half of it. I didn’t even know the whole story about what she had to do way even before I was even a thought in anyone’s imagination.
And I just want say too, I just want to go back to, yes, my mom did raise my sister and I, so my mom, she was a single mom. So what I saw were the complete sacrifices that she had to make. And even still, supporting her brothers and supporting her sisters, growing up, she’s been like that since day one, or at least since my day one [laughs]. And I always told her, I said, listen, I think your journey is so important for people to understand and to listen to, not only for me because I’m ever so curious about my parents’ decisions and my mom’s choices growing up. But listen, we were born and raised in Ohio, and not everyone knows what it’s like to grow up in the Rust Belt, in areas where there’s heavy manufacturing and things like that. I think people can forget. And I think it’s really important, which is why I love the work that you’re doing, Maximillian, because it reinforces the stories and the human connections that we are here and these stories do matter.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Couldn’t put it better myself, baby. I think that’s beautifully put. I wanted to pick up on that before, Sherry, we go back into the plant. Tell me a little more about that, what it was like growing up in the Rust Belt in an area where industrial manufacturing was so important. I grew up in Southern California, and granted, we do have manufacturing out there, but it wasn’t visible. When I moved into Michigan and lived there for eight years, that was different. That was like, oh, this is part of the identity of this state, and so many people are connected to GM, Ford, or Jeep in ways that hit different to me when I was actually there and could see the impact that it had more so than it ever did for me in Southern California.
So I wanted to ask if you all could set that scene a little bit more as well. What was it like living and growing up in Toledo as an auto worker, the son of an auto worker, and then living through a period of de-industrialization. For folks who have never seen that firsthand, what was that over the course of your lives?
Sherry Cothren:
Do you want me to start first?
Jeremiah Cothren:
Go ahead, mom.
Sherry Cothren:
Okay. All right. So when I was growing up, my dad, he was a union worker. He worked for a roofing company. He was able to support us at the time. My mom, she worked at a department store downtown and for a little bit, but I was so young, I can’t remember how long she worked there but it wasn’t for long because soon after, she became a housewife. I would like to point out, though, that my mom was from the South, and I think growing up in the South, just, gosh, it’s just a different way of thinking, I think. It’s like, stand by your man no matter what happens. Just do what you need to do. I was not having it. That’s why another thing is like, I don’t want to live a life like that. I want a better life and all that.
Anyway, so growing up, yes, it definitely was an industrial town. Glass City, Libbey, Jer, which one is that, Libbey-Owens Glass? Do you remember that one?
Jeremiah Cothren:
Yeah, Libbey Glass, and then there was Owens Corning.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes, Owens Corning. Yes. Thank you. Yes, yes. So that was a biggie back then as well because Toledo is known as a glass city. So that was really, really profitable back in the day. And of course, we had the different plants and all that. To me, it was like a small community back then. I did really well in school. My mom wouldn’t let me go to a predominantly Black school back in high school back in the day, so I had to transfer over to a predominantly white school. Gosh, that was just… If she only knew, that was even worse.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh [laughs].
Sherry Cothren:
I got called the N word, all of that, and it was really, really, really bad, but I pushed through. It was just something I had to do. And again, like I said, I decided to go ahead. I was going to go to college and all that, but once I had the opportunity to get into Ford, I was like, well, this is fast money. Because if I went to college, I had to go a certain number of years and, of course, that would be money, and I wasn’t sure if my dad would help me get the education because my mom wasn’t working and all that. And at the time, looking back, I see that we didn’t really have a lot of money, but my dad was still able to take care… So I have to give him that credit. He kept the food on the table, a roof over our head, all that. It’s just that he suffered from alcoholism.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I wanted to ask really quickly about that if I can. We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to, but I’m thinking about that timeline and what other union workers of color have told me over the past. Because I did not grow up in a union family. I grew up, in fact, in a very union non-sympathetic family in Southern California. And we were first generation Mexican American, so we also had that immigrant type of conservatism, where it’s like we came here, we worked hard, we did it the right way, and we don’t want to be defined by our race. We want to be defined by our hard work. So that was the upbringing that I had.
And unions felt like a thing of the past, something that was important in the old days, the black and white days. But in the ’90s and the 21st century, you just needed to go as far as your feet would carry you.
And yet, then I learned later more about my family and I learned about my Tio Miguel being a Teamster, and learned about other folks in the family who were union teachers. I also would hear little bits and pieces about what that did for Latinos and Black and Brown workers in the 20th century, how those jobs did provide a pathway to a middle class life that they felt wasn’t available in other industries.
Was that part of it, Sherry? Because setting aside all the other things about your father, the fact that he was a union worker at that time, that must have been quite a thing, and then you find your way into union work. What did being in a union mean for you at that point? Was there a strong culture of the union there? Did it feel like, particularly as a woman, as a woman of color, did it stand out as a path to sustaining yourself and your family that wasn’t available in non-union work?
Sherry Cothren:
Yes. Yes, it absolutely did. It gave the security. Now, are you asking when I was a kid or once I started working at Ford?
Maximillian Alvarez:
I guess both. Again, I’m asking out of ignorance because I didn’t grow up with any of this, so I’m curious what the union meant to you as a kid and then as a working age adult.
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, okay. Well, as a kid, I would sit back and watch my dad. He would get up every morning, no matter how bad the hangover was. He had to have some real whoppers, but he would still going to get up of that bed, and go to work every day, and just do the cycle, so I could see the strong work ethic in him. And I know that my mom wanted to, but he didn’t want her to after a certain point. I guess he just wanted her to stay home with the kids and raise us and all that. And of course, and like you said, it is a strong community because in our neighborhood, it was a lot of people that were union workers. Again, it gave us a strong sense of security, which I could see. Even though I was really young, I could see that. Yes. So we were doing pretty good, I guess. Yes.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Yeah. I think I’ll add as well. It was definitely a strong — I’m talking about when I was a kid. Like I said, of course my mom raised me, but also there were my, I’ll call the extended family, mom’s close friends were in the union. They were working at the Ford plant. They were working at Jeep. So the community was tight, and all around, you’ll see my generation, I guess, and what my mom and her friends were able to provide, these jobs and these union jobs really allowed for a lot of upward mobility in a community that otherwise may not give them that same opportunity. And we’re talking … I just remember driving on the highway, you see the massive Jeep plant. It’s massive. I don’t have the figures in front of me about how many people were employed back then with Jeep, but certainly with GM and with Ford, you’re talking large swathes class of the population who really are relying on these union jobs to provide for themselves and to provide for their family. I think we can’t forget that there’s … It’s the person doing the work, and it’s also the extension, which happens to the generations afterward. Whether you’re talking about building wealth for your children or whether you’re trying to talk about how parents can save for college education, I’m a direct product of that because I benefit directly from the hard work from my mom.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I think that’s beautifully put. And again, it’s something that I almost look at with envy later in life. The more I get to talk to folks like you all … I just got back from Matewan, West Virginia. I’m wearing this shirt that I got there at the Museum of the Mine Wars because I was presenting there. And just the sense of history that is there, the pride and what working people lived and died for to get a union, to say that a company, a private company did not have total authority to dictate the conditions of everyone else’s lives, whether or not they had a house or a tent to live in or food to put on the table, the company stores, all the ways that private companies have tried to basically recreate serfdom and keep all of us as these nameless bodies that they can just send into the mines to make them money.
I think I never learned about it in school, but people went to war over that. There was a literal war fought by coal miners and their families in Matewan against the company. That’s bonkers to me. When I first learned that, my jaw hit the floor. And I say all that to say just coming from a place where that was not a part of the history that I knew or identified with to learn about, it was just so incredible, and you can still hear it from the folks there who talk about it.
I want to keep talking about that as we get closer to the current strike and what that means now. We’ve gone through such a period of change where, as I said, with de-industrialization, with the decline of union membership over the past 40, 50 years. It feels like that was all going away, but now there’s something coming back. There’s this energy. People are ready to fight. There’s talk about what are the new industries in the 21st century going to be? Are they going to be those union jobs that allow working people to provide for those families to live a comfortable, dignified middle class life? So I want us to bring that back up as we get closer to the current day strike. But I wanted to just bring us back there to your days working at the plant, Sherry, and ask, remind me again, what was the year you started?
Sherry Cothren:
1977.
Maximillian Alvarez:
1977. Okay. So a lot going on in the country at that point. A lot going on in the world at that point. That’s right on the cusp of this period of “globalization,” which allowed so many manufacturers to pick up shop, move abroad and build factories where they could exploit cheaper labor, yada, yada, yada. But take me back to that time. You mentioned what it was like working in front of the stamper with this huge sheet of metal. I guess just for folks like me who have never seen the inside of an auto plant, keep tugging on that thread. Try to tell us what a typical week would look like for you, what kind of work you did, the folks you’re working with and the memories that I guess stick out to you about becoming a professional auto worker.
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, okay. Well, I guess I can start with the work. Well, I started with the press. We had a press room. That’s where the press would stamp out the parts. Then we had an assembly, we call it an assembly, where we would take those parts from the press room and we put them in a machine, and the machine would weld the parts together and sparks would just be flying all over the place and we would get burnt. And if we stopped the line, we would get into trouble back then. We’ll get to that point. When I got closer to retirement, things were so much better.
But starting back then, they were all about production, production, production. Forget safety. Forget if you’re here. Catches on fire. Oh, well, we’ll replace you. We’ll just keep going. That was the attitude that the company had. But thank goodness, we had a strong union. Oh my, goodness. I was talking to Jer about that the other day.
I feel we had the best union, but that’s how … They really did fight for us as far as helping us to make things more safe because they were so much into production, the quantity of the parts that we had. From each, oh gosh, I’m trying to explain this, from each press, then the part would drop down on to a conveyor belt. That would come up to us and we would grab that part and put it again, like I said, put it in another press and stamp it down and so on and so forth. But we were not allowed to stop the belt, and it was so many parts on the line where the conveyor belt wouldn’t even move, if you can only picture that, because again, they were just so much into production.
And unfortunately, we had a couple of deaths because of the one to go, go, go, go. Don’t shut the machine off. Don’t do this. There were two supervisors. It was so sad. Shortly after I started to work, we had the siren went off like, oh my gosh, someone hurt. So we’ve seen people rushing towards the back where one of the start of the press was where they would … Like I said, it was a huge sheet, and the extractor, you put the sheet in, the extractor would grab the part and just put it in the machine. Oh, gosh.
So anyways, a part got jammed, and a supervisor reached in and tried to unjam the part without shutting off the machine. We don’t know if his boss came down on him because he was our boss at the time. It’s like don’t … But he took it upon himself. He went in there and reached in there. Oh my, goodness. And the machine just came down on him, and all you could see was he was bent over and all you could see were his legs just standing there in the machine. It was the most horrific … And to this day, I still think about that.
And the other supervisor, he got killed because of that as well. But at that time, we were dealing with plastic. We did have the plastic for some parts within the vehicle. When he reached in to try to unjam the plastic and he got caught up. So it was bad. OSHA existed, but oh gosh, it’s pretty tricky as far as that goes. Again, like I said, we had a really strong union, so I really can’t say how it was back then between OSHA because I can’t remember when they actually started.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, even so, there’s always … Whether we’re talking about farm workers or manufacturers, there’s a big difference between labor codes, labor laws and enforcement.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sadly, I hear about this all too often in union shops and obviously especially in non-union shops, the ways that the OSHA regulations are just thrown out the window for the sake of production. Especially when you get people who maybe they’re temp workers like I was at the warehouse that I worked at, and maybe you see a violation, but you don’t want to speak up because you got to put food on the table and your job is so unprotected that you’re not going to say anything.
Sherry Cothren:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
There’s such a huge disconnect. Not to say that OSHA is nothing. We need OSHA. We need OSHA, NLRB. We need all these regulatory agencies to be fully staffed and be able to actually do their jobs. And to be clear, they are not. But I guess the point being is that even if we don’t recall the specifics about OSHA, there’s a big difference between what the codes say on paper and what it looks like on the shop floor.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes, yes. So we had to, what we did … You know what we did though? As soon as our boss turned his back, we would just throw those parts on the floor because we weren’t about to get cut because the parts piled up right next to us, and we could easily have gotten cut, even with the sleevelets on. And so they finally caught on because as union workers, which again, what I loved about the people I worked with, it’s like we banded together. I think that is so important for people to band together because looking back, I wish I should have have went into the union because I wasn’t afraid to speak up. It was some people that I would find myself working next to, I’d be like, “You know what? This isn’t right. I’m going to stop this line.” “No, Sherry, don’t do that, da, da, da,” just like you said, because they’re afraid to lose their job.
But my mom always raised me, it’s like, “Well, Sherry, when you know you’re right, stand up for yourself.” I could always hear that echoing in my ears. That was the thing.
So what we did, we banded together. We finally got together with the union, but oh my goodness, the union and the supervisors, they would be in the middle of the production just going at it, going at it, going at it, just cussing each other because before that, it was before zero tolerance so they could do that. They could get away. We even do it with our bosses, but it all came together. But for a time there, it was really, really bad as far as that goes, as far as them not wanting to look out for our safety.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Did you guys … You said the line had to keep going and going and going, but what happens if you, a very natural thing to do, what happens if you have to use the restroom?
Sherry Cothren:
Okay, yes. We had a person, well, relief person or utility person, we called them that as well. They would cover at least maybe no more than four or five lines at the time. And so anyways, like I said, it would be one person, if we have to go, we would have to get ahold of them. We have to tell our boss, or if we see a relief person walking around because during that time, they would just go around and clean up or salvage parts and all that, but they kept busy as well. But we had to ask to go to the restroom. And a lot of times, woohoo, they did not want to do that. They wanted us to drink water, but yet for our health and all that, oh, stay hydrated but yeah, they did not want us to get off the line. It was bad.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That is, again, sadly something that we still hear about. Everyone knows about the horror stories at Amazon warehouses, these workers who are literally being measured with computerized systems down to the second of how long it has taken them to complete tasks and how much “time off” task they have to the point where people won’t go to the bathroom. They’ll piss in bottles or stuff like that because they’re terrified of that computer telling them that they’re going to lose their jobs. We haven’t addressed the root issues. We’ve only come up with more sophisticated means for exploiting people like the way that we did in the old days, which is wild to me.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I wanted to ask about those tasks, right?
Sherry Cothren:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because if there’s one thing that we know about the auto industry and what we’ve heard from auto workers in decades past, but even now, it’s like you said, it’s an assembly line. It’s a complex machine where everyone is doing an essential part to the point where you are stamping things out of sheet metal to driving them on to the road. A lot of things have to happen in between those things to make a car. And a lot of people have to do a lot of things to make the car up to the standard that you all do.
Sherry Cothren:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And so I just wanted to ask if you could say a little more about that, the parts that are coming down the conveyor belt. You mentioned that they were heavy, that they were sharp, and you’re doing, I imagine, repetitive motions with them. So I guess in your area of the plant, what sorts of materials were you working with and jobs were people doing in that part of the process?
Sherry Cothren:
Okay. Well, I was, like you said, I was working with sheet metal for sure every day. We rarely went over into the plastic area. I think it was like the seniority people were over there, but they didn’t have to deal with all this on the floor and on the assembly line and all that. And I’m sorry. What was the second part that you asked?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just like if you could go back there now and you had a camera and you were looking around. What were the other folks doing? What were the things they were working with at that time?
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, okay. Yes. Okay. So we would be on the line, and then we have the utility person going around and they would make sure that the different, that the floor … because the floor stayed poorly from the machines, of course, and they had to clean that up. And then we had the skilled trades. They had their area because as soon as the line would go down, they would be right there. Bam. It’s like we were like, oh gosh, this is our chance to go to the bathroom or grab a drink, or da, da, da. No, no way. They were just … because that’s what they were told to do. Do not let that line stop.
So anyways, we had to wear these thick, heavy gloves. Just picture a glove and then an extra pad that would go over there for extra protection. And then of course, the safety glasses. And you had to wear the safety glasses because of the environment that we were in. Let’s see. We had the skilled trades. We had the production worker. Oh, and we also had, well, I don’t know what they call them today, but we called them high load drive, I think they call them forklift drivers. And they had a job as well, which I eventually trained to drive, by the way. I was so proud of myself because very few women did that. So I wanted to be one of the first to do it. And so anyways …
Maximillian Alvarez:
My girl is forklift certified, baby.
Sherry Cothren:
That’s right. And everybody were like, “Sherry, you can’t do it.” I’d be like, “You know what? I’m going to show you. Yes, I can.” And I did. Yeah. Anyway, it was just good for me to just get off the line, get away from all that. It was just more freedom and all that. I got to work on the dock, and that was fun. But let’s see.
So anyways, we would stamp out the part and then we would get done with stamping out the part, then there would be a person at the end of the part, I’m sorry, at the end of the line. And there would be a rack, oh gosh, container but made out of … It’s hard explain but it was a heavy container in order to hold the parts, and we would have to stack those in there. And usually, it was the low seniority had to do that because by the time it hits the end of that line, oh boy, that part was just so heavy. So you had to figure out a system to slide it off the belt without really actually lifting the part, just sliding into the thing. It’s like, okay.
And then we would have, oh my goodness, our bosses would be right there just waiting for us to mess up. And that part, we didn’t like but we had to work together as a team because we knew what they were doing. They want to use every excuse to get rid of us because there’s always somebody waiting in line to take our job.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So you felt like at that time, even in a union shop that management was just there waiting for an excuse to get rid of you guys and bring someone else in. So creating that culture of … because that’s what it was like for me in the warehouse with all the temps, like I said.
Sherry Cothren:
Okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I remember we were reminded daily. This was in the great recession, so this is when things were still really bad. And I remember driving to work or being dropped off at work by my mom at 4:000 in the morning, and there was always a group of shadows, silhouettes, standing outside the gate waiting to see if someone didn’t show up. And the managers always reminded us of that. If we ever had a complaint or if we were behind on a shipment, that was the thing they would say, they were like, “We got guys out there waiting who could replace you. We could fire you at the drop of a hat if you guys don’t pick up the pace.”
And I remember, I’ve talked about this on the show before, I still remember at the end of every day, no matter how long we had been there, even if we had been “temporary” workers for six, seven, eight, nine months, which defeats the purpose of calling us temporary, right?
Sherry Cothren:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
They would line us up at the end of a shift after 12 hours. We’d be dripping in sweat, and the managers would walk down the line and they would point to the people they wanted to come back the next day.
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, gosh.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And so I remember I saw guys who had been there for months who had gotten used to always getting pointed at, just the look of shock on their face when they didn’t get the finger pointed at them. And suddenly they were like, “What am I going to do? I got to go back to the agency. I got to try to get assigned somewhere else.” But suddenly the reality of what am I going to do to feed myself and my family, you could see it literally setting in on their face, and I never forgot that. I’ve never forgiven that. It’s just wild to think that you all were going through that same thing with these managers just over your shoulder, just waiting for you to slip up-
Sherry Cothren:
Just waiting.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… so they could get rid of you.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes. And they didn’t want women there to be because we got the really hard jobs. I don’t know what their mindset was, but we definitely got the … There were some women that they did sexual favors, I’m just keeping it real, then they would get the good jobs. It’s just keeping it real. And myself, I didn’t do that. It wasn’t every woman that did that but there were some that did, and we always knew that they were going to get the job, but we didn’t want to just do that. We didn’t want to put ourself in that position. That’s not a good position that we wanted to be in to look at like that. And on the job, on the line, there were things going on, on the line while we were working, but you just kept it moving and just churning. But I’m sure, like you said, it’s that way, I’m sure in other places as well that things go on. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But just to, I guess, ask the obvious, you’re there in this high pressure situation with a line that’s going a mile a minute, that you can’t stop, with heavy machinery and heavy parts that could cut your arm off, crush you. You got to keep your head on a swivel. You’re doing these repetitive motions, so you’re already dealing with all of that and then you got to deal with a bunch of sexist bullshit on the job. Is that what we’re talking about? You still get-
Sherry Cothren:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Could you say a little more about that, what you all were up against at that moment in the late ’70s and early ’80s? How different was it? I don’t know. I like to feel that as a culture, we’ve advanced. Maybe we’ve had a bit more … We’ve come to the realization that you can’t treat other people like that, regardless of their gender. But man, sometimes I hear these stories and I’m just blown away because I was like, that wasn’t that long ago that we were still doing all of this. But you don’t have to talk about anything you’re uncomfortable with. I guess just for folks who are maybe younger listening to this, what kind of sexist environment were you dealing with at that time?
Sherry Cothren:
Oh, okay. Well, let’s see. Well, first of all, like I said, I had too much respect for myself so there was no way I was going to go down that road. And so I would just get ready to just work hard every day. But what I would see is I would see some women, they would sleep with the bosses or let them just feel them up on the line and all that. But I knew that they didn’t like it, but they were just afraid. And like we mentioned before, we talked about they just wanted their job. They needed their job.
But looking back, I would think probably if maybe a few of us could have got together and like, “Look, you don’t have to do that.” But then again, they thought they may not have wanted to work hard like us because it was brutal. It was brutal. I’ve always been small bone and all that. And I remember somebody told me before I even started, “Oh, Sherry, you’ll never make it. You’re too little,” all that. But you do what you have to do. But yeah, it was bad. It was bad.
Jeremiah Cothren:
And if I could just ask too. What was it like when you … So Tamara was my sister. She’s older than me. She was born in 1980. So this makes it, what, three years after you started at Ford, Mom. So what was it like being pregnant with Tam at the time?
Sherry Cothren:
I’m glad you brought that up because I did want to talk about that, Jer. I’m trying to think of everything. Oh, gosh. Now that was horrible. Okay. Anyways, when I first got pregnant with Tam and I was working and all that, and I didn’t tell them at first because we had heard they did not want that. They didn’t want a pregnant lady at a factory. I don’t know it’s because they didn’t know how to deal with that or how to deal with it because obviously, we couldn’t do the hard work and all that, but we had the right to have a baby.
So anyways, when it started getting really bad for me, I just went to the company nurse. And mind you, I say strictly company, you could go in there with your arm hanging out, I’m exaggerating, but anyways, oh, go back to work. But you just really had to be really in bad shape for them to give you an excuse to not work. Right. And when we were off work, let me say this, whenever we took off work for a doctor’s appointment, we had to bring in a doctor’s excuse, but I guess that’s probably for anywhere so that’s no big deal.
But anyway, so when I was started feeling … because we had to stand on our feet. We were not allowed to sit down. I forgot to mention that earlier. We were definitely on our feet all day long, except for the breaks and all that. And so when I went in and I spoke with the company nurse, she said, “Well, Sherry,” she alluded to the fact that, oh, well, you just maybe just quit.” She didn’t come right out and say it, but it’s like, “Well, we don’t have any work for you. You can’t do this.” And so I went and spoke with my doctor, and thank god I had a great doctor.
She stood up to the company doctor, to the company and says, “Look, Sherry can’t do this. Sherry can’t do that, da, da, da.” And she told me that she had my back from the beginning because she had had experiences with different companies like that. She seemed to get really upset. She said it just drove her crazy when we were treated that way. And so she had to cover for me to get off work. We did have the six weeks off and that wasn’t … Well, anyway, whatever, but that was all that we were allowed at the time. I don’t know what it is now. And the bosses didn’t care if the woman was pregnant.
But with you, Jeremiah, I had to stop really early because Jer was a big baby, he just stayed at the bottom so he never turned. I guess TMI, too much information. But anyway, so I had to go to the nurse and get time for that, but they gave me a hard time with you, when I was pregnant with you, Jer. I had the same doctor, thank god, and I fought to get the time off.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Wow.
Sherry Cothren:
Yeah.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Yeah. I didn’t know that story.
Sherry Cothren:
They definitely did not want pregnant ladies in there, for sure.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Again, I’m still just … Again, all the things that were piling up here of what just you as a working person had to deal with on a day-to-day basis to then add on your feet while pregnant. I don’t know how you did it to be perfectly honest with you, but god bless-
Sherry Cothren:
It was god. It was god. Let’s put it … Yeah, god.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay. Geez, man. Like I said, I want us to be walking our way towards the strike. We’re going to eventually, ultimately have to pave over some stuff. We can’t cover that amount of time in just a short recording. But I did want to ask just what it was like for you both to be, again, working in this industry. Your mom is working in this industry. You’re living in the Midwest at a moment of really critical change in the economy that you all were feeling in a very intense way, in the Midwest, in the Rust Belt.
That again was something I wasn’t prepared for as a Southern Californian until I saw it in Michigan, until I saw Detroit with my own eyes for the first time, until I saw Flint for the first time because life still happens. Life still goes on. There’s still people who live beautiful, meaningful lives in these places. There are still families that live and grow and move on. It’s not as if the community is just gone, but it is like you see these hulking facilities that are just idle. You see the traces of the civilization that once was in Detroit that now, yeah, there are still whole neighborhoods that it looks like a bomb just went off. They’re just deserted. They’re gone. And then the more you learn about the rise and fall of the auto city, something in your heart hurts to hear that.
And so I just wanted to ask what you all recall seeing and feeling in those decades, the ’80s, ’90s when all that was happening, when Flint closed down. I guess, Sherry, what was that like for you as a worker? Jeremiah, when did you start picking up on this or did you see it happening anywhere?
I guess I’m just curious if you guys could speak to that because it’s, I think, a fundamental part of the story of the strike that we’re watching right now, right? Because it’s the threat. It’s always been the threat of those plant closures and moving operations to the non-union south or to other countries. That is a fundamental part of why the union has been on the back foot for so many years because it’s like if workers push too hard, if they demand too much, the bosses could always say, “Look, you guys want to be the next Flint? We’ll do that to you if you don’t take more concessions.” And so you get these decades’ long backslide. I just wanted to ask if you could tell us a bit about what it was like to be in the middle of that.
Sherry Cothren:
As far as if it affected our Ford Motor … where I was at at the time?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Did it affect you guys or were you watching what was happening in other states? I guess when did it feel like something was changing in the industry and what did that change look like?
Sherry Cothren:
Well, for me, it started changing when they started outsourcing our work. We just felt that that was just them taking our jobs away from us. I forget what they were telling us as far as that goes, as far as the reason why they were doing it. And I know on their part, they were probably saving tons of money as opposed to paying us for it. That’s when I pretty much noticed that when they decided to start doing that. I can’t really … Jer, maybe you can take over. I cannot think of something else.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Well, I think I’ll just, maybe bouncing off of that, is that there was certainly a dramatic shift in outsourcing the work, whether it went down south maybe to Mexico or down south to Alabama where a lot of the work definitely shift, and that was a drastic and noticeable shift. Whereas growing up, it’s always been the Rust Belt was heavily, even when I was growing up, was doing, the factories were there in Toledo, in Detroit, in Flint and things like that, and then they shifted. And so what that meant was you had a lot of people who migrated to Ohio, to Toledo with hopes of having these jobs, which again, talking about upward mobility, and then all of a sudden they’re announcing plant closures. And Mom, I think you had some really close friends who really came on the tail end of that news when the Ford plant ultimately closed, right?
Sherry Cothren:
They were from New Jersey.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Yeah, exactly. Right. And you could probably speak a little bit more on that, but before I pass it off to you, I just want to say a little bit about after high school, I moved to California to go to college. I did notice that there were a lot of people who really didn’t fully grasp or understand what it was like to be from a really heavy manufacturing town and industry. And I think that was probably the first time that I realized, oh, okay, this is something that’s unique. This is something that’s happening and that’s important in the Midwest, but people don’t know. People don’t really fully understand. And why that’s important is because it has a huge impact on not just the local economy but talking about global trade, and then we could speak further about what happens when these communities are just not of the narrative, of the main narrative. What happens when their voice isn’t heard? What happens when there’s de-industrialization and there’s less economic development in some of these communities?
I’ve been around Ohio a lot, and you go to some of the downtowns that are completely gutted out. There’s not a lot of economic development. And so you have these blighted communities, which are just horrible to look at because you want to think about a thriving community. But you have to also think about where did the families go? What happened to that money that could have been spent within that local community that’s now gone? Where did those families go? Right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I think that’s such an important point, and it brings us full circle back to Toledo even because I was literally interviewing a guy at the Toledo Jeep plant now, who came over from Belvedere after they closed in Illinois. And he was like, “I’m not the only one.” But he described what you were just talking about, Jeremiah. He’s like, “My family was there. To have to move to Toledo by myself and sleep in like a relative’s basement on a mattress while I’m missing my kids. I’m missing my wife.”
Further down in Lordstown, I remember interviewing folks at the iconic Lordstown plant in Ohio on the show. What was that? In 2018 when the layoffs were announced, 14,000 jobs were eliminated, white and blue collar. That was after GM had been turning huge profits that was not the GM of 2008, and they had also gotten massive tax cuts from the government, and they still fired or they laid off all those peoples and they never say they’re going to close the plant. They say we’re going to un-allocate it, so we’re just going to leave it sitting there because if we close it, that would maybe violate the contract. So they come up with all these ways of doing the same thing but calling it something else.
But I think you’re exactly right, Jeremiah. It’s like but the human cost of that has been coming through so much in the stories that auto workers and folks have been sharing with us of just how devastating it is on a personal level to have to uproot your life to all those folks in Lordstown like high school friends. Suddenly they’re all split up because the family has got to move to where the other jobs are, and they may not all be in the same place, but it’s like you drop a nuclear bomb on a community.
Sherry Cothren:
That’s true.
Jeremiah Cothren:
Exactly. And it’s important to understand that these stories have been going on for a very long time. You have families who are moving here and there for the jobs and you have plant closures, and it’s not like that disappeared. So even though people say the Rust Belt, it’s bygone eras, I have to say that we’re still very much there and we’re still very much very proud to do the work and to be a part of these close-knit communities. I just want to highlight that these stories haven’t gone anywhere. The Rust Belt is still very much there and present, and these stories are important for folks who might not know what’s going on in the rest of the country.
And Mom, maybe you could explain a little bit about what happened when you found out the Ford plant was going to close. I think you were close to your retirement then or you had just put in your 30 years.
Sherry Cothren:
Right. Yes, I was getting around to that. You want me to start to talk about that now? Okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Yeah. Sherry, please take us there. Like I said, we can’t cover the whole past five decades, but take us back to that moment because you retired in 2007. Is that right?
Sherry Cothren:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay. So that’s another huge moment in history for this industry that is playing a big part in the strike today because this is when the auto industry was collapsing in on itself. The global economy was about to experience a massive shock wave that it was going to cause just countless families to lose their homes, lose their savings, all that. And this was also when the two-tier system was created. This was when more concessions were really extracted from workers to keep these companies afloat. So take us back to that time, and then we’ll round out by getting your thoughts on the strike. But first, yeah, tell us about when you retired and the plant closing.
Sherry Cothren:
Okay. Yes. I retired in 2007. It was about, because I worked for 30 years and I was very fortunate to get my full benefits, it was about a year maybe before the plant closed, maybe less than that. They called a meeting and told us that the plant was closing. And as Jer mentioned, there was people from all over that had come to our plant to get work because their plants had closed. We had made wonderful family. Friends were from Newark. They uprooted because again, our plant offered them this opportunity. And soon after they get there, oh my gosh, then the plant closes. They were so devastated. I felt really bad for them because they weren’t the only ones. They did have the choice to go to other plants. But again, as you all mentioned earlier, you have to uproot yourself. Either the wife or whomever, they have to go and just leave the others behind until they can just give them a place to stay.
I want to mention as well that before I … Well, okay, let me just put it this way. It didn’t really affect us, the ones that had the 30 years as far as we were pretty much established, I guess you could say that. So we didn’t have to move away, but we did have the opportunity because I was, oh gosh, I was only 50, right, Jer?
Jeremiah Cothren:
Yeah. I think you were 50. Yeah.
Sherry Cothren:
I’m trying to remember everything. But we got the 30 year, but we got a buyout. And once we got the buyout, then we weren’t trying to go to another plant because we would have had to go to maybe Cleveland, away from our homes and all that which again, we had established a life there in Toledo. But there was a lot of people that had to just take what they could get. I really felt bad for them, and they were really mad like, “Why did Ford tell us that? Oh my, goodness.” Because they really, really painted this beautiful picture for these people, but they probably knew they were going to close. I don’t know.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So heartbreaking to hear. And again, I remember that time well. I remember the impact it had on my family and so many others. I get that it was a rough time for all of us. And what your fellow union members have told me over the years is like we gave concessions to keep these companies afloat. We knew that we were in a financial crisis. We knew we had to tighten our belts like I think Chrysler did in the ’80s. It’s something that folks knew was always a possibility in moments of crisis like this. But out of that came this two-tier system. So folks hired after 2007, they didn’t get a pension. They did not get the benefit package that folks who were hired before that did.
Sherry Cothren:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Also, after that, we saw the explosion of temp workers in the plants. And this is a big part of what the UAW is fighting for now, is a shorter pathway to converting temporary workers into full-time employees. The union is fighting for the restoration of defined benefit pensions to try to get those things back because what the companies … And Sherry, you tell me if I’m wrong here, but what I’ve heard from so many people and what I’ve read is that you all were promised that when things got better, when these companies were back in the black, they would repay the auto workers. They said, “Don’t worry. We got you.”
Sherry Cothren:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And then that’s what’s sticking with me, is because then a few years later, workers held up their end of the bargain. They gave those concessions. They worked their butts off. They made these companies profitable again. And then like I said, we still got the GM layoffs. We still get plant closures over 60 in the past two decades alone. And now these companies are making record profits and workers are still fighting to get those benefits back.
Sherry Cothren:
Yes. I’m so glad that they’re fighting so hard. I am so proud of my union brothers and sisters. I really am. And I just hope that … I’ll just say we get everything that they’re asking for, including us retirees. And that’s what you have to do. You just have to keep fighting. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I wanted to, maybe by way of rounding us out here, and Jeremiah, please, if you got any other thoughts, questions you want to throw in here, go for it because I can’t keep you guys for too long, and I appreciate so much you taking the time to chat with me about this. But I just wanted to get your thoughts on the strike that we’re witnessing now because even like I said, on the first season of this show, I got really obsessed with interviewing GM workers during those layoffs because I just felt so heartsick listening to their stories, and I was so mad. As someone whose own family lost so much in the recession, I was so mad hearing these stories of what workers had been through to then see and hear what people in Lordstown, people in Pontiac, people in Oshawa, Canada, what they were going through. Even now, here where I am in Baltimore, there’s the plant out here that got closed.
And so I just remember interviewing so many different folks. And even that was in 2018, 2019, the way that those folks talked about the union at that time, the fire in their belly, their sense of what they were fighting for and what was possible. In just four years, it’s such a radical change. I just wanted to ask. As someone who started working in the ’70s and you’ve seen so much, what has it been like to watch this transformation of the union, this strike unfolding?
And also, as you said, it’s not just you’re watching from the sidelines. Fighting for retirees to get raises in their benefits, which, if I understand correctly, you all haven’t gotten in forever, even though the cost of living has continued to go up every single year. I’m just curious. What has it been like to watch all this unfold for you and any final thoughts either of you want to share to folks out there listening?
Sherry Cothren:
Well, for me, it’s been great to see it because again, like I said, there’s power in numbers. Shawn, yes, he’s a go-getter. He has got that fire. Everybody, it seems like they respect him and all that. I just hope that they get what they’re … They really need the pension. They need everything they’re asking for. And unfortunately, they may not get everything, but come on, they need to be paid more. They need to get their pensions. That’s so very important because I think that social security is great, but having that pension really helps. It really, really does. And I think we deserve it, the people before me, the people after me and all that, and benefits and all that as well. So I just want to say to my fellow union members, you just keep going, keeping on and just stand up for what you believe in.
Jeremiah Cothren:
And I’ll just add, that was beautiful, Mom. And I think I just want to add as well that when we’re looking at some of these CEOs who are making, I think the GM CEO made, what, 29 million in 2022 alone, and we have workers who are still fighting for increases in the base wages, which were frozen in the 2007 negotiations. It’s just another case of just pure exploitation. We have to continue this fight. It’s UAW. It’s across the board where workers are sticking up and saying, “Enough is enough.”
And I will say that, and I just also have to underscore that, this just impacts so many families and the generation after as well. We’re all dealing with the high prices of inflation. We’re all dealing with still some of the vestige of the 2007 financial crisis. That’s actually when I graduated from college and then trying to work-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Same.
Jeremiah Cothren:
… work my way through that. I am super grateful that my mom was able to receive the full pension packages that she did before the plant closure. But the reality is that there are so many people who are not in that position, and it’s completely devastating. It’s hard enough. Exactly. And I just think that it’s so important that we continue this fight because again, I think, again, just looking at the CEO profit and the profits that these companies are making, it’s …
Sherry Cothren:
It’s insane.
Jeremiah Cothren:
It’s really outrageous. It’s decent to ask for a 40% increase in pay over the next four and a half years. I think the latest that had come in, I think it was either Ford or GM said they would offer at 23%. Nothing of course is finalized, but that’s half of what they’re … I think the third quarter company earnings for GM and Ford are going to be coming in the next few weeks so we’re going to see what they’re earning. And it’s remarkable. It’s really striking how much people are pushing profits over people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and maybe … I wholeheartedly agree, and I think that if there’s one lesson, there are many lessons we can learn, but I’m thinking especially in the context of everything we’re talking about, it’s like I feel like in the 21st century, we’re getting second chances at things that caused so much damage in the 20th century. It took union density going from 30% down to 20% for wages to be stagnant over four decades, even though we’ve been working longer and harder. We’ve been more productive than ever. We’ve been producing just these untold profits that are all getting sucked up by such a small few amount of people. I feel like things had to get so bad for people to realize like, oh, shit, we need unions.
We need to be banding together, like you were saying, Sherry. We need to be fighting and harness that strength in numbers to stop that exploitation, to stop that greed, to push back in the other direction and try to reclaim that ability to live well and live, comfortable dignified lives, to have safety on the job. We’re getting another chance at that. And I think what happens next depends on what we do now.
And Sherry, as a veteran in that movement, I just wanted to give you the final word, not just at UAW but the Starbucks workers, the Amazon workers. Kaiser Healthcare nurses just launched the largest healthcare worker strike in the country’s history. Hotel workers in Vegas are getting ready to shut down the strip right now. Hotel workers in LA have been on strike for months. I guess what does that all look like to you as someone who had a career in a union, but also saw that decline in membership, saw the society going in that direction? I guess did you have any final thoughts or words of encouragement to all the folks out there who are fighting for something different about the difference a union can make?
Sherry Cothren:
Yes. Yes. I want to, as I said before, just keep fighting because the union is so invaluable. Oh my, goodness. They can really … You get a really strong union behind you. You can do it. You can do it. Don’t let people say, “Oh no, you’re going to lose your job and all that.” You got to remember, there’s so many people like yourself that want better conditions, better pay and all that. So just remember, knowledge is working with the union and working together as well. Band together. Band together. That’s really important.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
On any given summer day, most of the nation’s farm workers, paid according to their productivity, grind through searing heat to harvest as much as possible before day’s end. Taking a break to cool down, or even a moment to chug water, isn’t an option. The law doesn’t require it, so few farms offer it.
The problem is most acute in the Deep South, where the weather and politics can be equally brutal toward the men and women who pick this country’s food. Yet things are improving as organizers like Leonel Perez take to the fields to tell farm workers, and those who employ them, about the risks of heat exposure and the need to take breaks, drink water, and recognize the signs of heat exhaustion.
“The workers themselves are never in a position where they’ve been expecting something like this,” Perez told Grist through a translator. “If we say, ‘Hey, you have the right to go and take a break when you need one,’ it’s not something that they’re accustomed to hearing or that they necessarily trust right away.”
Perez is an educator with the Fair Food Program, a worker-led human rights campaign that’s been steadily expanding from its base in southern Florida to farms in 10 states, Mexico, Chile, and South Africa. Although founded in 2011 to protect workers from forced labor, sexual harassment, and other abuses, it has of late taken on the urgent role of helping them cope with ever-hotter conditions.
It is increasingly vital work. Among those who labor outdoors, agricultural workers enjoy the least protection. Despite this summer’s record heat, the United States still lacks a federal standard governing workplace exposure to extreme temperatures. According to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, the agency has opened more than 4,500 heat-related inspections since March 2022, but it does not have data on worker deaths from heat-related illnesses.
Most states, particularly those led by Republicans, are loath to institute their own heat standards even as conditions grow steadily worse. In lieu of such regulation, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, through its Fair Food Program, has adopted stringent heat protocols that, among other things, require regular breaks and access to water and shade. Such things are essential. Extreme heat killed at least 436 workers of all kinds, and sickened 34,000 more, between 2011 to 2021, according to NPR. Some believe that toll is much higher, and efforts like those Perez leads are providing a model for others working toward broader and more strictly enforced safeguards.
“We look to [the Fair Food Program] for best practices in terms of how can agricultural employers already begin to implement these kinds of protections,” said Oscar Londoño, the executive director of WeCount, which has been pushing for a heat standard in Miami-Dade County. “But we also believe that it’s important to have regulations and forcible regulation that covers entire industries.”
The Fair Food Program works with 29 farms, which raise more than a dozen different crops, and the buyers who rely upon them. In exchange for guaranteeing workers basic rights, participating growers and buyers, including Walmart, Trader Joe’s, and McDonald’s, receive a seal of approval that signals to customers that the produce they are buying was grown and harvested in fair, humane conditions.
To protect workers, the guidelines require 10-minute breaks every two hours and access to shade and water. The program also extended the time frame during which those things must be offered, from five months to eight, reducing the amount of time that workers are exposed to the worst heat of the year. Growers also must be aware of the signs of heat stress and monitor workers for them. Such steps are vital, particularly in humid conditions, to prevent acute heatstroke and safeguard employees’ long-term health. Repeated exposure to extreme temperatures can cause kidney disease,heat stroke, cardiovascular failure, and other illnesses.
“Having time to rest and cool down is very important to reduce the risk of death and injury from heat stress, because the damage that heat causes to the body is cumulative,” said Mayra Reiter, director of occupational safety and health at the advocacy organization Farmworker Justice. “Workers who are not given rest periods to recover face greater health risks.”
A Fair Food Program educator leads a session at a farm in Tennessee. Courtesy of the Fair Food Program
Such risks were very real for Perez, who worked various vegetable farms around Immokalee and along the East Coast before becoming an educator and advocate. Because most farm workers are paid according to how much they harvest, few feel they can spend a few minutes in the shade sipping a beverage.
“The difficulty of the work makes you feel like it takes years off your life,” Lupe Gonzalo, a member of Coalition of Immaokalee Workers, wrote in a public blog post. High humidity makes things worse, and those who rely upon employer-provided housing often find no relief after a day in the fields because many accommodations lack air conditioning, she wrote.
Abusive conditions can compound the deadly conditions. A 2022 investigation by the Department of Labor revealed poor conditions, including human trafficking and wage theft, at farms across South Georgia. Two workers experienced heat illness and organ failure, and others were held at gunpoint to keep them in line as they labored.
Many were workers holding H-2A visas in a program that has its roots in the Mexican Farm Labor Program, launched in 1942, that sponsored seasonal agricultural workers from Mexico. (Currently, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issues those visas.) Because of their reliance on employers for housing, visa sponsorship, and employment, many workers experience abuse, an investigation by Prism, Futuro Media, and Latino USA found earlier this year.
It doesn’t help that federal labor law, including the National Labor Relations Act, doesn’t cover agricultural workers in the same way it protects employees in other sectors, said James Brudney, a professor of labor and employment law at Fordham University. Additionally, language barriers, fear of retaliation, and workers who come from a variety of backgrounds and cultures keep many from speaking out.
Perez remembers having only bad options for dealing with adverse working conditions: Deal with it, complain and risk being fired, or quit. The Fair Food Program gives workers recourse he never had, and builds on protections against forced labor, sexual harassment, and other abuses it has achieved with workers, growers, and buyers, which have agreed not to buy from farm operators with spotty records, since 2011.
Workers are regularly informed of their rights, and violations can be reported to the Fair Food Program through a hotline for investigation. Heat-related complaints have grown increasingly common in recent years, and often lead to a confidential arbitration process. Such inquiries may lead to mandatory heat safety training and stipulations growers must abide by. Findings of more serious allegations, such as sexual harassment, can lead to a grower being suspended or even removed from the program. Such efforts protect workers, hold employers accountable, and allow the program to know what’s most impacting laborers, said Stephanie Medina, a human rights auditor with the Fair Food Standards Council.
“With the record heat, every summer has definitely, I think, gotten a lot more difficult for workers out there,” Medina said. “I think that is one of the reasons why we put so much emphasis on getting the heat stress protocols together and implemented in the program.”
Growers must report every heat-related illness or injury, which is investigated by Medina’s team or an outside investigator depending on severity. Her team visits every participating grower annually. Many of them go beyond the program’s requirements to ensure worker safety, by, say, providing Gatorade and snacks and regularly checking in on those who have experienced heat-related illness, she said. Workers, too, are being more assertive in protecting themselves, reporting any violations because they know they cannot be retaliated against.
Though no growers or farmer’s associations responded to Grist’s requests for comment, some at least appear happy with the organization’s work. “The Fair Food Program is giving us structure and is a tool for better understanding in a workplace that is multicultural and multiracial,” Bloomia, a flower producer and FFP participant, said in a statement on the program’s website.
Still, some farm workers’ organizations, while supportive of the program’s work, doubt that farm-by-farm solutions will ever be enough to protect a majority of farm workers. Jeannie Economos, of the Farmworkers’ Association of Florida, said comprehensive policy-level solutions are required. She noted that even in Florida nurseries, greenhouses, and other growers of ornamental plants employ thousands of people who are not yet covered by the Fair Food Program. Although they one day may be, federal, state, and local regulations are needed to ensure sweeping safety reforms.
“So what do we think of the Fair Food Program? It’s good,” she said. “But it’s not far-reaching enough.”
Other campaigns are working toward legislative solutions. An effort called ¡Que Calor! in Miami-Dade County, led by WeCount, has been pushing the issue for years, and in many ways is inspired by what the Coalition of Immokalee Workers has accomplished, Londoño told Grist.
“Miami-Dade is on the verge of passing the first county-wide [standard] in the country, and it would protect more than 100,000 outdoor workers in both agriculture and construction,” he said “In the absence of a federal rule, and in the absence of state protections, local governments can play a foundational role in piloting policies that states and the entire federal government can take on.”
¡Que Calor!, has, like the Fair Food Program, been led by workers. Including them in drafting policies can help ensure they are effective because “they know what their risks and the threats to their well being are better than anyone,” Brudney, the Fordham University professor, said
Yet even jurisdictions with strict labor laws can see their protections undercut because they often rely on employees, who may face reprisals, to report violations. Miami-Dade’s proposal skirts that by creating a county Office of Workplace Health with broad powers to receive complaints, initiate inspections, interview workers, and adjudicate investigations.
Amid such victories and a mounting need to protect workers, the Fair Food Program plans to expand its reach. It has cropped up at tomato farms in Georgia and Tennessee; crept up the East Coast to lettuce, sweet potato, and squash farms in North Carolina, New Jersey, Maryland, and Vermont; and sprouted on sweet corn farms in Colorado and sunflower farms in California. Organizers from the Fair Food Program have in recent weeks met with growers and workers in Chile eager to bring its efforts there.
The organization hopes to see its principals embraced more widely, and continues to pressure more companies, including Wendy’s and the Publix supermarket chain, to buy into the effort. Medina says such an effort will require staffing up, but she’s confident in its chances of success.
Many growers willfully neglect the rights and needs of workers, making such efforts essential, Perez said. The need for victories like those already seen on farms that work with the program will only grow more acute as the planet continues to warm. Even if federal heat standards are adopted, Perez believes local worker-led accountability processes will still be needed to ensure growers follow the law.
“What we see the Fair Food Program as is both a method of education and a way to share information with workers about these risks,” he said, “and at the same time as a tool for workers to protect themselves against the worst effects of climate change on a day to day basis.”
This story originally appeared in In these Times on Oct. 25, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
The United Auto Workers have secured a tentative deal with Ford that would end the strike against one of the mammoth automakers making up The Big Three, the union announced Wednesday night.
Earlier in the evening, numerous journalists and publications noted that the tentative deal was likely, and publications like Bloomberg reported early Wednesday evening that the deal had already been made.
“We announce a major victory in the Stand-Up Strike. Today, we reached a tentative agreement with Ford. For months we said that record profits mean record contracts, and UAW family, our Stand-Up strike has delivered,” UAW President Shawn Fain said in a video posted on X (formerly Twitter).
Bloomberg noted that “the breakthrough puts pressure on the carmaker’s two chief rivals to reach deals and end a protracted strike that has already cost the industry billions of dollars.”
The Bloomberg piece, attributing the information to “a person familiar with the negotiations,” also noted that the other two members of The Big Three, General Motors and Stellantis, “are set to meet with the UAW on Thursday.”
About two weeks ago, Keith Brower Brown of Labor Notes reported that the UAW called a strike at Ford’s vast and critical Kentucky Truck Plant after the automaker offered the UAW a package that they said was a mirror image of an offer they had previously made.
Brower Brown wrote that Ford had signaled for some time that they were going to increase their offer, but they didn’t.
“If this is all you have for us, our members’ lives and my handshake are worth more than this,” UAW President Shawn Fain told them. “This just cost you Kentucky Truck Plant.”
And with that, some 8,700 autoworkers walked off the job at the Kentucky Truck Plant. It was a major escalation in the strike and in negotiations with Ford.
Nearly six weeks into its historic strike against the Big Three U.S. car manufacturers, the United Auto Workers late Wednesday announced a tentative contract deal with Ford that includes significant wage increases and cost-of-living adjustments that were scrapped during the 2008 financial crisis. In a statement, the UAW’s leadership said the gains achieved in the deal amount to four times what…
On Tuesday, Sept. 26, protesters affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW), Labor Notes, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD, the rank-and-file reform caucus within the UAW), the Democratic Socialists of America, Latino/a Workers’ Leadership Conference, and Casa Obrera del Bajío gathered outside of VU Manufacturing’s headquarters in Troy, Michigan, to deliver a list of demands in support of 400 Mexican workers in Piedras Negras, Coahuila, who were recently laid off by the company. VU Manufacturing shut down the newly unionized facility along the Mexico-US border in August, while 71 workers were still in their employ.
“They did not want to take the list of demands. They were pretty indignant that we were there,” Zach Rioux, a labor organizer based out of Detroit who coordinated the action on the ground, told TRNN. “They overreacted and started to yell, which, to me, is pretty rich—to be so indignant in a situation where VU has acted so illegally and cruelly towards their workers.”
VU Manufacturing, a second-tier auto parts supplier that produces interior pieces for automakers like Stellantis, GM, Toyota, and Tesla, began laying off workers in April. The layoffs were set in motion back in August 2022, when workers voted against the company-preferred corporate union,Confederacion Trabajadores Mexicanos(CTM), in favor of an independent union, la Liga Sindical Obrera Mexicana (la Liga).
When it appeared that VU was deliberately stalling and attempting to run out the clock on the six-month contract negotiating period stipulated by Mexican labor law, la Liga and the Border Workers Committee, a workers’ center based in Piedras Negras, filed a complaint using the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism of the US-Mexico-Canada-Agreement (USMCA), which replaced NAFTA. The Rapid Response Labor Mechanism allows Mexican workers and their representatives to file a formal complaint against companies believed to be acting in violation of Mexican labor law with the US Department of Labor and the Office of the US Trade Representative. US authorities are expected to then press for an expedient resolution.
This complaint resulted in a six-month remediation plan between VU and la Liga. The remediation plan, agreed upon by Mexico and the US, detailed actions to address VU’s failure to bargain in good faith with la Liga, as well as other labor violations committed by the company. However, workers and activists say that little to no progress had been made when the remediation period ended on Sept. 30—more than a month after VU had already closed down the plant.
On Oct. 10, less than two weeks later, the US Department of Labor announced that their agency has closed the workers’ case against VU Manufacturing, without any sanctions or other disciplinary actions against the company as permitted under the USMCA. Deputy Undersecretary of Labor for International Affairs Thea Lee stated her “disappointment” over closing the case, adding, “we knew employers would not choose compliance in every instance.” The case is now the responsibility of the Mexican government.
The last 71 workers have not received their legally mandated severance pay and have been left without access to company-managed savings accounts. Former VU workers also report being blacklisted from work within the maquilas that employ the majority of workers in Piedras Negras due to their association with the plant.
“The people, the workers, are desperate. They want their money and they need it,” said Victor Sevilla, one of the 71 VU workers who did not receive severance pay. “And the only way that they’re really going to get it is by pressuring the owner of the company in Michigan.” Sevilla also lost access to his company-managed savings account, which he says he was using to save up money for the Christmas holiday.
Despite the recent closure of the case, activists say they are still working to fulfill the list of demands presented to VU headquarters in Troy, Michigan.
The demands cover the immediate needs of VU workers like severance and unpaid wages for the 71 laid-off workers, restitution for two union organizers who were unjustly fired, and an end to the employment blacklist in Piedras Negras, which workers and activists believe is being led by the CTM.
“They did not want to take the list of demands. They were pretty indignant that we were there,” Zach Rioux, a labor organizer based out of Detroit who coordinated the action on the ground, told TRNN. “They overreacted and started to yell, which, to me, is pretty rich—to be so indignant in a situation where VU has acted so illegally and cruelly towards their workers.”
Activists are also continuing to demand sanctions against VU Manufacturing to prevent the company from reopening under a different name and continuing to export goods to the US. Additionally, they are calling for a public forum with labor authorities from Mexico and the US to discuss the lessons of the VU campaign and how the Rapid Response Labor Mechanism of the USCMA can better respond to violations of workers’ rights going forward.
Meizhu Lui, co-coordinator of the Mexico Solidarity Project, said via email: “Neither the VU workers nor their supporters in Mexico and the US consider it ‘case closed’ until justice is done.”
On Oct. 18, former VU workers and activists protested in front of the city government offices in Piedras Negras. “The factories here refuse to give us jobs. We are, apparently, on a blacklist here, in the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila,” said Miguel Ángel Fraga Martinez, a former VU worker. “Even those of us that did receive severance pay, the money is already gone, because we haven’t been able to get stable work.”
The coalition is continuing to organize further actions to pressure the authorities of the US and Mexico.
VU Manufacturing had not responded to activists’ demands before the case was closed.
“If the labor mechanism is allowed to fail like this—and you can only say that this is a failure—it sets a very bad precedent for the future,” said Jeff Hermanson, a longtime organizer in Mexico and the US. “This is a test of the commitment of the labor authorities in both countries to the functioning of this agreement of the labor rights chapter of the USMCA.”
“We work for the same companies. It’s right there, there are GM plants in Mexico and the whole supply chain criss-crosses the border. So, if capital can be on both sides of the border, we should be on both sides of the border,” echoed Rioux.
“I think that means that it’s also a test case for all of us who are supporting the workers, and who are on the side of the working class in the US or Mexico, to stand up and say that we’re not going to let this happen. Companies can’t do whatever they want with workers’ lives,” said Charlie Saperstein, a labor activist and organizer with the Border Workers Committee in Piedras Negras. “I think the protest that happened [on Sept. 26] is a perfect example of that.”
Sean Crawford, a UAW auto worker and founding member of UAWD, has worked for GM since 2008 and was among the first groups of workers to be hired under the 2008 contract, which introduced the tier system.
“Back in 2019, I was a member of UAW Local 598 at Flint truck assembly. And we make heavy duty pickup trucks there. These are the same pickup trucks that they make in Silao, Mexico, where Israel Cervantes used to work,” says Crawford. “So, he led a campaign to refuse overtime in solidarity with striking GM workers in 2019 and I just thought that was fantastic.”
Israel Cervantes worked at the GM plant in Silao, Mexico, for 13 years. He was one of several workers fired for the act of solidarity described by Crawford. After being terminated, Cervantes and the other workers who had been fired formed an organization called Generating Movement (a play on “GM”) to organize workers in the plant, which led to workers not only voting out their existing, corrupt union, but subsequently voting to be represented by an independent union, Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores y Trabajoras de la Industria Automotriz (SINTTIA).
“It’s important for UAW workers to get the sense of solidarity from other countries, such as the solidarity message that was sent from the auto workers in Brazil, as well as the rubber industry workers from Puebla, Mexico,” said Cervantes, adding that workers in other countries understand that it’s important not to give in to the demands of the company by speeding up production or working overtime, to not work against the striking UAW workers in the US.
“We work for the same companies. It’s right there, there are GM plants in Mexico and the whole supply chain criss-crosses the border. So, if capital can be on both sides of the border, we should be on both sides of the border,” echoed Rioux.
Cervantes and Crawford met for the first time at the protest at VU Headquarters. In a moment, linguistically facilitated by Luis Feliz Leon of Labor Notes and captured on video, Crawford thanks Cervantes for his “brave act of solidarity” during the 2019 UAW strike before shaking hands.
“The cool thing about meeting him is, really, he’s just a normal guy like you and me,” Crawford told TRNN after meeting Cervantes at the protest. “And, to me, that just goes to show that these big acts that can really change the world and change the narrative, they’re done by just average working class people who decide they’ve had enough. And that’s pretty cool.”
The United Auto Workers union launched a surprise expansion of its strike against Stellantis on Monday, calling on nearly 7,000 employees at the company’s largest plant to walk off the job in response to the carmaker’s inadequate contract offers. “Despite having the highest revenue, the highest profits (North American and global), the highest profit margins, and the most cash in reserve…
While many union members and other workers are worried and horrified at the mounting war in Israel and occupied Palestine, U.S. unions so far have mostly remained silent. But workers are speaking up and organizing with their co-workers to push their unions on the side of peace and justice. United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 3000 and United Electrical Workers (UE) have sponsored a…
France’s new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, launched the 2023 school year with a thunderous announcement: “I decided it will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” he said, in the name of a preposterous conception of secularism (or laïcité) adopted by President Emmanuel Macron.
This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against.
Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-year-old Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.
Aminata, Assma, Yasmine, Alicia, Hassina, sent home for “non-compliant outfits”
What is an abaya?
The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time.
As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown several types of dresses on TV and asked to identify if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and side-stepped the question, replying that “it depends on the context.”
Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection depend not on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and their supposed religion, something that has only been based on their skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them.”
A traumatic start to the school year
Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year, with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle- and high- school girls being scrutinized, hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, and ordered to partially undress or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono, deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity. This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent of the colonial period.
“Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.
Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police” enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.
One can only be outraged by the criminalization of teenage girls through traumatizing interrogations and expulsions, which take place outside any legal framework and could only be justified by a proper disciplinary procedure. Attal’s office counted the cases of pupils wearing abayas to the nearest unit (unlike the number of missing teachers, a plague touching half the secondary schools, as a Teacher’s Union found out).
Attal even sent journalists a list of the middle schools and high schools concerned, inviting them to cover the start of the new school year there. This showed no regard for the serenity and safety of staff and pupils, sacrificed to the media hype surrounding this new witch-hunt.
The abaya ban has nothing to do with secularism, which is even flouted by this political attempt to unilaterally extend the domain of what is religious. Rather, it is the very thing that the candidate Emmanuel Macron himself denounced in 2016-2017 as “laicism,” this “radical and extreme version of secularism that feeds on contemporary fears”, and which targets Islam exclusively, turning millions of our fellow Muslims into “enemies of the Republic”.
By considering the wearing of simple clothing as a deliberate attack on secularism, a concerted offensive “in an attempt to challenge the republican system,” or even a reminder of the 2015 terrorist attacks and the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing his pupils derogatory “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Macron and his ministers unmask themselves, adopting a discourse that was reserved for the most hateful right-wingers.
By putting tens of thousands of teenagers under suspicion – behind their qamis and abayas – of being “enemies from within,” united to bring down republican values and even of being potential terrorists and by urging us to be “relentless” against these migrants, they are descending into a kind of State conspiracy-mongering that is as absurd as it is abject.
This insidious logic of stigmatization and exclusion was already at work in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools, opposed by teacher unions such as the CGT Éduc’action as it only really targeted the Islamic veil, described as “proselytizing” and “ostentatious” in a grotesque abuse of language that heralded current and future excesses.
Far from turning schools into a protected “sanctuary,” these politically driven measures are spreading racism, sexism and hatred and turning them into a veritable battleground. This alleged desire for emancipation through coercion to impose an arbitrarily defined “republican dress code” on suspicious middle- and high-school girls flouts the concept of equal treatment of pupils and the inalienable right of some of them to choose their clothing style, driving them to angst and failure at school. Will we have to wait for a tragedy to put an end to this “shame”?
Worse still, these vexatious measures may give rise to a whole generation of teenagers — an age that is particularly sensitive to injustice — who have a legitimate distrust and resentment of the institution and its staff, who are transformed into the zealous auxiliaries of a kind of “dress police,” coupled with a “police of intentions” summoned to track down alleged Islamist overtones (which would be both conspicuous and concealed — a very French oxymoron) behind inoffensive fabrics.
The “communitarianism” and “separatism” that are supposedly fought against can only emerge stronger, just like the far-right, which is closer to power than ever thanks to the institutional backing given to its prejudices, rhetoric and fallacious battles, adopted by a dubious “republican arc,” which reaches as far as the French Communist Party.
The real priorities
This umpteenth polemic, validated by docile and irresponsible media echo chambers, and by part of the left, conveniently eclipses from the headlines all the glaring problems from which public education, its staff and users are suffering: shortage of teachers and assistants for pupils with special needs; job cuts and class closures; incessant budget cuts; lack of attractiveness of our underpaid professions; difficult working conditions; overcrowded and overheated classrooms due to under-resourcing of establishments and inadequacy of equipment and premises; international downgrading in terms of achievements; inflation; impoverishment of the population, with nearly 2,000 children on the street and tens of thousands out of schools; and so on.
Instead of tackling these fundamental problems, the government prefers to continue its authoritarian headlong rush and its policy of deliberately destroying public services for the benefit of the private sector. Moreover, this same government will have no trouble presenting the General National Service [a monthly session in military facilities for high school pupils] and the uniform — symbols of its reactionary vision of schooling currently being tested — as a panacea for problems fully of its own creation, with measures which tend only to bring young people into line and divide society even further.
Every individual has the fundamental right to choose their clothing without being subjected to discriminatory restrictions. The abaya ban is an unacceptable intrusion into pupils’ privacy and constitutes an attack on their freedom and personal identity, trampling underfoot the ideas of inclusion, living-together and acceptance of differences that are officially advocated.
The lack of response from teachers’ unions and the civil society to this iniquitous law, which scorns the vocation of educational staff and tarnishes the image of France abroad, speaks volumes about the normalization of Islamophobia in the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights” and the oppression and helplessness of its millions-strong Muslim community.
France’s new Education Minister, Gabriel Attal, launched the 2023 school year with a thunderous announcement: “I decided it will no longer be possible to wear an abaya at school,” he said, in the name of a preposterous conception of secularism (or laïcité) adopted by President Emmanuel Macron.
This “abaya ban” is a serious violation of the fundamental rights of presumed Muslim (i.e., racialized) pupils, who are unfairly stigmatized and discriminated against.
Though he is the youngest Minister of the Fifth Republic, 34-year-old Attal used the oldest and dirtiest trick in the book, namely the politics of scapegoating an oppressed, defenseless minority. Just like his predecessors, who were fond of such nauseating polemics that obscure the real and glaring problems of the French educational system.
Aminata, Assma, Yasmine, Alicia, Hassina, sent home for “non-compliant outfits”
What is an abaya?
The term “abaya” refers to a variety of dresses of varying lengths, which are in no way religion-specific garments, but simple fashion items with a cultural connotation at most. Major brands such as Zara, H & M and Dolce & Gabbana have been making their own for a long time.
As proof of this, when Sonia Backès, the French Secretary of State in charge of Citizenship, was shown several types of dresses on TV and asked to identify if they were abayas and whether they should be accepted or forbidden in schools, she hesitated, stammered and side-stepped the question, replying that “it depends on the context.”
Thus, in a quasi-official manner, the criteria for acceptance or rejection depend not on the garment itself, but on the pupil wearing it and their supposed religion, something that has only been based on their skin color and/or name. At the height of hypocrisy, Attal justified this blatant discrimination by saying that “you shouldn’t be able to distinguish, to identify the religion of pupils by looking at them.”
A traumatic start to the school year
Yet this is exactly what has been happening since the start of the school year, with hundreds, if not thousands, of middle- and high- school girls being scrutinized, hounded, stigmatized and humiliated, even blackmailed, and ordered to partially undress or be sent home for wearing outfits as neutral as a tunic, skirt or kimono, deemed too loose or too covering, as if the suspected modesty was a crime of lese-laicity. This obsession with controlling women’s bodies is reminiscent of the colonial period.
“Aren’t you pretty? Unveil yourself!” Propaganda poster distributed in 1957 by the Fifth Bureau of Psychological Action of the French Colonial Army in Algeria, urging Muslim women to take off their Islamic scarf.
Ironically, such a step places France alongside retrograde countries such as Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan that have instituted a “morality police” enforcing a strict dress code, with the notable distinction that French bans do not apply to everyone, but only to pupils presumed to be Muslim.
One can only be outraged by the criminalization of teenage girls through traumatizing interrogations and expulsions, which take place outside any legal framework and could only be justified by a proper disciplinary procedure. Attal’s office counted the cases of pupils wearing abayas to the nearest unit (unlike the number of missing teachers, a plague touching half the secondary schools, as a Teacher’s Union found out).
Attal even sent journalists a list of the middle schools and high schools concerned, inviting them to cover the start of the new school year there. This showed no regard for the serenity and safety of staff and pupils, sacrificed to the media hype surrounding this new witch-hunt.
The abaya ban has nothing to do with secularism, which is even flouted by this political attempt to unilaterally extend the domain of what is religious. Rather, it is the very thing that the candidate Emmanuel Macron himself denounced in 2016-2017 as “laicism,” this “radical and extreme version of secularism that feeds on contemporary fears”, and which targets Islam exclusively, turning millions of our fellow Muslims into “enemies of the Republic”.
By considering the wearing of simple clothing as a deliberate attack on secularism, a concerted offensive “in an attempt to challenge the republican system,” or even a reminder of the 2015 terrorist attacks and the murder of the teacher Samuel Paty, who was beheaded for showing his pupils derogatory “Charlie Hebdo” cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam, Macron and his ministers unmask themselves, adopting a discourse that was reserved for the most hateful right-wingers.
By putting tens of thousands of teenagers under suspicion – behind their qamis and abayas – of being “enemies from within,” united to bring down republican values and even of being potential terrorists and by urging us to be “relentless” against these migrants, they are descending into a kind of State conspiracy-mongering that is as absurd as it is abject.
This insidious logic of stigmatization and exclusion was already at work in the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools, opposed by teacher unions such as the CGT Éduc’action as it only really targeted the Islamic veil, described as “proselytizing” and “ostentatious” in a grotesque abuse of language that heralded current and future excesses.
Far from turning schools into a protected “sanctuary,” these politically driven measures are spreading racism, sexism and hatred and turning them into a veritable battleground. This alleged desire for emancipation through coercion to impose an arbitrarily defined “republican dress code” on suspicious middle- and high-school girls flouts the concept of equal treatment of pupils and the inalienable right of some of them to choose their clothing style, driving them to angst and failure at school. Will we have to wait for a tragedy to put an end to this “shame”?
Worse still, these vexatious measures may give rise to a whole generation of teenagers — an age that is particularly sensitive to injustice — who have a legitimate distrust and resentment of the institution and its staff, who are transformed into the zealous auxiliaries of a kind of “dress police,” coupled with a “police of intentions” summoned to track down alleged Islamist overtones (which would be both conspicuous and concealed — a very French oxymoron) behind inoffensive fabrics.
The “communitarianism” and “separatism” that are supposedly fought against can only emerge stronger, just like the far-right, which is closer to power than ever thanks to the institutional backing given to its prejudices, rhetoric and fallacious battles, adopted by a dubious “republican arc,” which reaches as far as the French Communist Party.
The real priorities
This umpteenth polemic, validated by docile and irresponsible media echo chambers, and by part of the left, conveniently eclipses from the headlines all the glaring problems from which public education, its staff and users are suffering: shortage of teachers and assistants for pupils with special needs; job cuts and class closures; incessant budget cuts; lack of attractiveness of our underpaid professions; difficult working conditions; overcrowded and overheated classrooms due to under-resourcing of establishments and inadequacy of equipment and premises; international downgrading in terms of achievements; inflation; impoverishment of the population, with nearly 2,000 children on the street and tens of thousands out of schools; and so on.
Instead of tackling these fundamental problems, the government prefers to continue its authoritarian headlong rush and its policy of deliberately destroying public services for the benefit of the private sector. Moreover, this same government will have no trouble presenting the General National Service [a monthly session in military facilities for high school pupils] and the uniform — symbols of its reactionary vision of schooling currently being tested — as a panacea for problems fully of its own creation, with measures which tend only to bring young people into line and divide society even further.
Every individual has the fundamental right to choose their clothing without being subjected to discriminatory restrictions. The abaya ban is an unacceptable intrusion into pupils’ privacy and constitutes an attack on their freedom and personal identity, trampling underfoot the ideas of inclusion, living-together and acceptance of differences that are officially advocated.
The lack of response from teachers’ unions and the civil society to this iniquitous law, which scorns the vocation of educational staff and tarnishes the image of France abroad, speaks volumes about the normalization of Islamophobia in the so-called “Cradle of Human Rights” and the oppression and helplessness of its millions-strong Muslim community.
This week on CounterSpin: Government-supplied food assistance has been around in various forms since at least the Great Depression, but never with the straightforward goal of easing hunger. 1930s posters about food stamps declare, “We are helping the farmers of America move surplus foods”; that link between agriculture industry support and nutrition assistance continues to this day—which partly explains why the primary food aid program, SNAP, while the constant target of the anti-poor, racist, drown-government-in-the-bathtub crowd, keeps on keeping on. We talk with Christopher Bosso, professor of public policy and politics at Northeastern University, the author of a new book on that history, called Why SNAP Works: A Political History—and Defense—of the Food Stamp Program.
CounterSpin231020Bosso.mp3
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, 1911
Also on the show: The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, in which 146 mainly immigrant women and girls died, many leaping from windows to escape the flames, horrified New Yorkers and galvanized the workers’ rights movement. The October 11 unveiling of a monument to those who didn’t just die, but were killed that day, put many in mind of how much still needs to change before we can think of things like Triangle Shirtwaist as relics of a crueler past.
In 2015, CounterSpinspoke with Barbara Briggs of the Institute for Global Labor and Human Rights about Rana Plaza, the 2013 catastrophe that killed more than a thousand workers in Bangladesh, in circumstances that in some ways echoed those of 102 years earlier. We’ll hear that interview again today.
The Americans pulling into the luxury Caribbean resort town of Juan Dolio could have easily passed as tourists. Dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, they set up at a hotel overlooking the Dominican Republic’s southern coast. But the group, which included law enforcement officers from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, wasn’t traveling to enjoy the area’s world-class golf courses and palm-studded white sand beaches.
Trained to target and dismantle terrorist groups and transnational drug cartels, the special agents from Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, were probing something very different: working conditions at the Central Romana Corp., a major exporter of sugar to the U.S., whose top executive is Alfonso Fanjul, a billionaire Florida businessman.
The agents spent days last March secretly interviewing Haitian cane cutters, who were shuttled to the hotel from Central Romana’s sprawling nearby 240,000-acre plantation, where many workers, along with their families, live in ramshackle camps known as bateyes.
In November, months before the HSI agents’ arrival, U.S. Customs and Border Protection blocked imports of Central Romana sugar—which averaged about a quarter-billion pounds a year—after finding evidence of forced labor among its Haitian cane cutters.
But the HSI agents’ inquiry and deployment in the Dominican Republic, disclosed here for the first time, indicates significant new federal scrutiny of the country’s sugar industry. It could also represent a breakthrough in the application of U.S. laws allowing corporations and their executives to be held criminally accountable for labor exploitation in their supply chains.
A series of lawsuits and reports by government agencies, civil society groups, and academics—along with extensive mediainvestigations—have exposed grim conditions that Central Romana cane cutters and their families face, including substandard company housing, often without electricity or running water. In dozens of interviews with Reveal and Mother Jones over the last four years, workers and their advocates have described inadequate protective gear, poor medical care, low pay, chronic debt, and intimidation by the company’s armed security force.
Alfonso Fanjul and his brother Jose “Pepe” Fanjul hold top positions at Central Romana. Their business empire includes the Dominican luxury resort Casa de Campo; major sugar brands such as Domino, C&H, and Florida Crystals; nearly 190,000 acres of Everglades-area cane fields; and the world’s largest network of sugar refineries.
An investigation by HSI that leads to criminal charges against Central Romana or the company’s leadership would be “unprecedented,” according to Kenneth Kennedy, a retired special agent with the division who directed efforts to expand its work targeting forced labor in goods imported into the U.S. “This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains.”
Central Romana spokesman Jorge Sturla declined to confirm the existence of, or comment on, any investigation by HSI. Sturla said Elevate, a labor auditor Central Romana has arranged to consult for the company, had “found no evidence of forced labor.” He declined to provide a copy of its report.
A Central Romana batey. Credit: Pedro Farias-Nardi
A department spokesperson said HSI does not confirm the existence of or comment on ongoing investigations. However, four Central Romana cane field workers confirmed they met with HSI agents earlier this year. The workers, who requested anonymity fearing reprisal by their employer, told Reveal and Mother Jones that agents queried them in Spanish and Haitian Creole about their grueling work, living conditions, pay, debt, medical care, and precarious immigration status. (The vast majority of the company’s cane workers are of Haitian descent, and many are undocumented.) The agents also asked about elderly workers who, lacking access to government pensions, routinely cut cane into their 70s.
“The people from the United States government were interested in improving the situation for the Central Romana workers,” said one man who was interviewed by HSI, who reported having spent 30 years working in the cane fields.
The Homeland Security Investigations inquiry is taking place as Central Romana flexes its muscle in Washington over the export ban. Congressional disclosure reports show Central Romana has paid Akin Gump, which Sturla confirmed was hired for its “experience in international trade law,” to lobby members of the House about the ban. Another payment of $25,000 for lobbying the State Department and U.S. Customs and Border Protection went to the firm of James “Wally” Brewster, a U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic under the Obama administration.
In August, Alfonso Fanjul, the Palm Beach-based president and CEO of Central Romana, sent a letter to former U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.), a longtime ally of President Joe Biden who now serves as a State Department special presidential adviser for the Americas. In the letter, obtained by Reveal and Mother Jones, Fanjul said he was “terribly upset” by the forced labor allegations and asked for Dodd’s help in “requesting (Customs and Border Protection) to lift its sanctions on our company.”
“Chris, we have been friends for a long time,” wrote Fanjul, who has contributed millions of dollars to Democratic campaigns, including Dodd’s. “I am a man of honor. … I would never allow my company to treat our workers in ways that would deserve the treatment we have received from CBP.”
Fanjul’s letter, which refers to Dodd’s previous “help and advice” on the Customs and Border Protection ban, comes from a powerful executive whose millions of dollars in campaign donations and lobbying has helped preserve lucrative price supports for U.S. sugar producers.
Sturla, the Central Romana spokesperson, said Fanjul had sent the letter to combat “disinformation” about the company. Dodd’s office and a State Department spokesperson both declined to comment on the letter, as did a Customs and Border Protection spokesperson.
The letter “gives a rare glimpse into the smoky backroom,” said Andrew Sullivan, a political strategist for No Big Sugar, a coalition of labor, human rights, and environmental groups lobbying Congress to end the price supports. “He says the quiet part out loud, asking his ‘friend’ Senator Chris Dodd to trust him, not Customs and Border Protection. Fanjul is a man used to getting what he wants, and his frustration is palpable.” In light of the longstanding friendship Fanjul cites in his letter, Sullivan called on Dodd to recuse himself from any efforts to lift the ban.
Fanjul’s letter strongly denied that Central Romana uses forced labor, and also cited Elevate’s report, claiming it came to the same conclusion. However, he wrote that the labor auditor recommended steps to improve its handling of “employee complaints,” their “interactions with supervisors,” and “the quality of our worker housing.” Sturla says Central Romana has invested millions of dollars to improve worker housing, but experts on forced labor say those parts of the letter are unintended acknowledgements of some of the issues at the heart of the import ban.
“This letter confirms what other people have been saying,” said Duncan Jepson, managing director of Liberty Shared, an anti-trafficking group. “There are problems in how they handle complaints by workers, governance over supervisors’ conduct, housing and infrastructure.”
Jepson’s organization has partnered with U.S. agencies, including HSI, to combat forced labor throughout global supply chains—and has provided the government with relevant evidence on Ireland’s fishing industry, an Asian palm oil company, Goodyear’s factory in Malaysia, and Central Romana’s operations. Most recently, the group filed a petition with U.S. Customs and Border Protection regarding Firestone Tire and Rubber Co.’s rubber plantation in Liberia. “These are very old industries,” Jepson said, “so their production methods still are very much entwined with the long history of abusive and exploitative labor practices.”
“This seems an opportunity for Mr. Fanjul to lead a program of transformative change at Central Romana,” he added.
But according to Charity Ryerson, executive director of the Corporate Accountability Lab, a labor watchdog group, instead of making the changes necessary to lift the ban, the company has so far focused on fighting it: “Central Romana has wasted the 10 months since the Customs ban was issued pursuing a political escape route rather than doing the right thing: remediating the abusive labor conditions identified by CBP and others.”
As part of his work at HSI, Kennedy helped initiate the agency’s criminal investigation into Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. over alleged labor abuses at its factory in Malaysia. The investigation, which included interviews with overseas workers, was the first of its kind, said Kennedy, who retired from government in 2020. The inquiry was closed without criminal charges after Goodyear reached a settlement with workers last year.
Kennedy said investigators would easily be able to trace Central Romana’s supply chain of raw sugar from its Dominican plantation to U.S. ports. But prosecutors could face significant obstacles to bringing any potential or possible criminal charges, he said, including a lack of legal precedents or political will by agency officials and lawmakers and difficulties in getting victims to agree to testify. “These are some uncharted waters,” he said.
Central Romana has long denied the use of forced labor on its Dominican plantations. In a statement issued in the wake of the 2022 U.S. customs ban, the company insisted it ensured “safe and productive employment” with “appropriate wages, housing and other benefits.” Yet the same statement also pledged to “engage in a dialogue” with Customs and Border Protection. Since then, the company tasked Elevate, which specializes in global supply chain issues, with examining concerns raised by the agency. Central Romana has announced salary increases, applied fresh paint to some bateyes and, as part of what Sturla described as a “multi-year” improvement plan, installed solar panels in some bateyes and demolished others, relocating occupants to “upgraded housing.” But ex-residents of one dismantled community, now living in isolated bateyes with no power, have bitterly denounced the company’s actions. Their former community had been located on a highway and was one of the estimated 10% of the company’s work camps with electricity. According to complaints by residents of two other bateyes, the solar installations are adequate only for charging a cellphone or lighting a single bulb.
While Sturla also cited investments in health care and education for workers and their families, former U.S. officials and sources from nongovernmental organizations said Central Romana has appeared resistant to implementing more expansive reforms that could lead to a lifting of the trade ban.
“Labor rights advocates offered to collaborate with the company to develop an innovative, long-term solution for these workers,” said Ryerson. “Central Romana squandered that opportunity by not engaging in good faith,” declining to “do the right thing and remediate the harmful labor conditions” identified by Customs and Border Protection.
This story was developed in partnership with Mother Jones and with support from the Pulitzer Center. It was edited by Clint Hendler and Kate Howard and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain wore a T-shirt reading “Eat the Rich” and a deadly serious stare when he announced a major development in the union’s monthlong strike: General Motors agreed to include its electric vehicle and battery factories in the forthcoming labor contract. That deal will cover 6,000 employees at four coming GM battery plants.
“We have been told for months this is impossible,” Fain said during the October 6 livestream. “We have been told the EV future must be a race to the bottom. We called their bluff.”
If Fain has made anything clear, it is that he, and the 383,000 people he leads, are not bluffing. In the two weeks since GM’s concession, the union has redoubled its efforts to win similar agreements from Ford and Stellantis. Last week, every one of the 8,700 workers at Ford’s massive Kentucky Truck Plant in Louisville joined the picket line, halting production of the company’s line of Super Duty pickup trucks.
GM’s promise to unionize its EV and battery operations comes after automakers sold 300,000 EVs in the previous quarter, and everyone involved in the labor dispute feels the electric transition is all but inevitable. The strike has increased pressure on the Big Three to include their electrification ventures in the master contracts they hold with United Auto Workers, or UAW. It also could press other automakers to increase pay or agree to unionize if they hope to compete for workers.
Fain has made negotiating stronger contracts, including cost-of-living adjustments and four-day workweeks, a priority since his election in March. He also has castigated the Big Three’s battery factories for their low wages. When contract negotiations stalled, UAW members went on strike on September 14. There are now 34,000 autoworkers on strike nationwide, a number that is likely to grow as negotiations drag on.
Dianne Feeley is a retired autoworker who, like other UAW retirees, remains an active and voting union member. She says the rank and file spent 40 years working toward this moment, a fight that started as years of stagnation and corruption kept the UAW from moving forward. That led to a band of members launching United All Workers for Democracy, which expanded members’ rights to participate in bargaining and helped propel Fain to into leadership. It’s also helped conversations about the EV transition and its impact on workers come to the fore.
“This [UAW] administration has said, ‘Yes, let’s do electric vehicles, but there has to be a just transition.’ Whereas the old leadership, they didn’t even want to hear about electric vehicles,” Feeley said.
Beyond ensuring that the workers assembling electric vehicles are paid the same as those assembling conventional cars, the risks inherent in battery production are a major concern to union members. Safety issues at GM’s Ultium Cells battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, led to the factory’s unionization earlier this year. An explosion and fire there in March prompted an investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Its inquiry, released last week, found 17 violations, including inadequate respiratory protection equipment, emergency showers, and eye-washing stations. OSHA could levy $270,000 in fines.
“We’ve been sounding the alarm for months about Ultium and these high-risk, high-skill EV battery operations,” Fain said in a statement to Grist. “This is dangerous work that deserves to be compensated well.”
Pay at Ultium has risen by $3 to $4 an hour since the union vote in December, even though workers do not yet have a formal contract. The master agreements the UAW holds with General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis await ratification, so none of the union’s recent victories are certain.
“It’s a little too soon to pop the bubbly and have champagne and celebrate, but it’s all good news,” said Arthur Wheaton, director of the Labor Studies department at Cornell University.
The fact GM is ahead of its domestic competitors when it comes to EV battery production played a role in its recent concession, Wheaton said. GM had already planned to phase out gas-powered vehicles by 2035. The UAW’s success at the Ultium plant, and more broadly within GM, could have an impact even beyond union shops, given the ongoing labor shortage and a need to stay competitive when attracting workers, especially when there is some evidence that EV plants will not, as some believe, require fewer workers. Auto industry analysts say any wage increases resulting from the strike will likely pressure large, stridently anti-union manufacturers like Tesla, which pays significantly less than the Detroit automakers, to raise wages in the hope that it forestalls the risk of unionizing.
“If you get a big pay raise for GM and Ford, then many — not all — of the automakers will raise their wages to make sure they don’t get unionized,” Wheaton said. “And you’ll see that in the battery sector as well.”
Workers picket outside the Ford Assembly plant as the United Auto Workers wage an ongoing strike against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis. Scott Olson/Getty Images
GM’s concession was far from assured. The Big Three co-own their battery plants with foreign companies, like Ultium, which GM co-owns with the Korean company LG Energy Solutions. These joint-venture plants are not automatically covered by existing UAW labor agreements, because they are what’s called a “permissive” part of those contracts that do not require either side to negotiate the terms of their operation.
Beyond that, EVs have not had the same focus as other parts of the contract negotiations, despite the central role the cars, and the batteries powering them, will play in the future of both automakers and the men and women they employ. GM, Stellantis, and Ford had consistently claimed that conceding to UAW’s demands would make them less competitive against foreign automakers in the burgeoning EV market.
“That’s why [UAW was] happy to get GM, because they use what they call ‘pattern bargaining,’” Wheaton said, referring to a labor strategy, pioneered in part by autoworkers, that uses prior organizing wins to pressure other employers into take-it-or-leave-it offers. It may also bring the union fight back to an old battleground as EV battery plants open in an expanding “Battery Belt” spanning the right-to-work South, where several foreign automakers, including Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen, operate factories.
The UAW has struggled to organize Southern factories like the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which builds the electric ID.4. In a staggering loss considered a massive failure for the union’s organization efforts in the South, Volkswagen workers rejected union membership in 2019. Fain told Grist that the union has since the beginning of the strike been fielding calls from non-union autoworkers, “from the West to the Midwest and especially in the South,” indicating organizing priorities beyond the current contract fight.
“We’re looking at organizing half a dozen auto companies in the coming years,” he said. “Pretty soon we won’t just be talking about the Big Three — more like Big Five, Big Seven, Big Ten unionized automakers.”
It’s an opportune time for UAW, since Inflation Reduction Act funds are only just now flowing to EV manufacturing. The money comes with stipulations that have been favorable to the union’s cause, in particular incentives for manufacturing everything from solar panels to EV batteries domestically with union labor. Because the allocations are just beginning to flow, many factories aren’t yet online, so hiring won’t start for a while. That gives unions like the UAW time to organize, with help from environmental groups. The Blue-Green Alliance, for example, has worked to bring labor and climate interests together.
“The Big Three have argued that there has to be a choice between paying autoworkers at family-sustaining union wages and benefits, and making the shift to EV production at a pace and scale that will meet both consumer demand and the climate crisis,” said Jason Walsh, the organization’s executive director. “We think that that’s a false choice. They can do both. And the agreement with GM suggests that they now recognize they have to do both.”
Feeley had similar thoughts when she decided to support the strike. She believes the EV transition must be equitable and just — not just now, but decades from now, because “one generation comes to the plant after another.” When autoworkers demand fair treatment and better pay, they do so not just for themselves, but for the children and grandchildren who will build the cars of the future.
