The New York Times (9/19/23) warns that “the strike could inflict collateral damage that creates frustration and hardship among tens of thousands of nonunion workers.”
The first person quoted in the New York Times’ rundown (9/19/23) on the United Auto Workers strike was a lawyer representing management from Littler Mendelson, the go-to firm for big corporations’ union avoidance.
“Right now, unions are cool,” said Michael Lotito of Littler Mendelson. But they “have a risk of not being very cool if you have a five-month strike in LA and an X-month strike in how many other states.”
The article, “Strike Is a High-Stakes Gamble for Autoworkers and the Labor Movement” highlights the “real pitfalls” of a so-called prolonged strike against the big three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis (which absorbed Chrysler). “Stand-up” strikes began at limited locations on September 15, and a week later expanded across the country. Without significant progress in negotiations, more workers continue to join the picket line.
The New York Times‘ decision to platform one of the largest union-busting firms in the country, which currently represents management at Starbucks, Apple and Grindr, among others, is in line with other corporate media efforts to uplift CEOs and shareholders, and stoke fears around economic recession, green energy transition and “Bidenomics.”
Blaming Biden
About 13,000 autoworkers walked out in a limited strike at assembly plants in Michigan, Ohio and Missouri at the stroke of midnight on September 14. The workers are asking for a 36% raise in general pay over a span of four years, the end of a tiered system, a 32-hour week with 40 hours of pay, and a return of cost-of-living raises.
This strike comes on the tail of what some deemed “the summer of strikes,” following Hollywood writers’ and actors’ historic work stoppage, and the last-minute labor deal that stopped thousands of UPS workers from striking. Meanwhile, public support for unions is at a multi-decade high. This may explain why corporations and their allies are working overtime to make sure unions “aren’t cool.”
A Wall Street Journal op-ed (9/19/23) endorses the CEO of Ford’s claim that “meeting the United Auto Workers’ demands…would drive the company out of business.” The Journal story (2/2/23) it links to to document Ford’s woes projects a $9–11 billion profit for the company for 2023.
As Stephen Miran of the Exxon-funded Manhattan Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal (9/19/23):
Strikes by auto workers, healthcare workers, and Hollywood writers and actors demonstrate that key pillars of President Biden’s economic agenda are bad for American industry.
Politicians like Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance took it a step further, blaming the administration and “Biden’s stupid climate mandates” for the strike’s necessity. Bloomberg (9/14/23) bemoaned Biden being left with limited options to avert a strike and called it “a tough juggling act.” Unlike with the rail workers last year, Biden cannot order autoworkers back to work. It seems the media want Biden to be involved in any way they find possible.
While some blame Biden for the strike, or blame him for being unable to immediately fix it, others are ready to condemn union workers for a future Biden loss in 2024. “I worry about the implications for our economy and for President Biden,” wrote Steven Rattner in the New York Times (9/20/23).
Rattner, who is currently managing Michael Bloomberg’s money, was formerly a part of the Obama administration’s auto task force, and was in charge of negotiating the very concessions that helped inflate executive salaries and initiate stock buybacks. Rattner spends 1,000 words fretting about losses to Big Three profits and telling union members to manage expectations, while brushing off the pay gap between workers and executives as par for the course of doing business in America. Meanwhile, the auto industry’s record-breaking profits flow to the salaries of the CEOs of Ford, Stellantis and GM—$21 million, $25 million and $29 million, respectively.
However, as it turns out, workers are on strike to negotiate a fair contract with those CEOs, not Joe Biden. Despite the most pro-union president’s tepid support for autoworkers and calls for them to be fairly compensated, the situation is not what the Wall Street Journal(9/15/23) called “An Auto Strike Made in Washington.”
As union president Shawn Fain rightfully declared, “This battle is not about the president” or the former president. While CNBC (9/18/23) claimed in a headline that Fain “downplays White House involvement in strike talks,” they repeated the basic media propaganda that “the union’s demands would cripple the companies,” uplifting Ford CEO Jim Farley’s statement that his company would have gone bankrupt under the UAW’s current demands. Meanwhile, the Big Three continue to make record-breaking profits, with $21 billion in just the first six months of 2023 and $250 billion over the last 10 years.
‘Billions in damage’
The Hill (9/17/23) failed to note that the “offer” Stellantis made was one the union had turned down before the strike began.
Many articles from corporate media grieve that the UAW members “want a 40% pay increase,” while often obfuscating or neglecting to note that the union wants that over a period of four years (Insider, 8/30/23; Forbes, 9/18/23; Fox, 9/25/23). Some also occasionally float a 46% number, which Jonah Furman of UAW says “comes from compounding, which is management’s way of lying about a reasonable raise.”
The Hill (9/17/23) pounced on the UAW for rejecting a 21% pay increase over 4.5 years, an offer that was notably not new; Furman (Twitter, 9/18/23) clarified that it was not a “fresh offer,” as the union had already responded to it before the strike deadline. Meanwhile, autoworkers’ real wages have fallen 30% over the past 20 years.
Even before the strike began, nearly every outlet cited the labor unrest as something that could “damage the economy” (CNN, 9/16/23), be “painful” for the economy (Wall Street Journal, 9/11/23) or throw the economy, especially in Rust Belt states, into a recession—”Even Brief UAW Strike Seen Causing Billions in US Economic Damage,” read Bloomberg (9/10/23).
A brief UAW strike could reduce US GDP by 0.02%—though that’s not how Bloomberg (9/10/23) chose to report the number.
Bloomberg also reported that a 10-day UAW strike could cost the US economy $5.6 billion. That number, invoked wherever possible, is provided by Anderson Economic Group. As Sarah Lazare noted for the American Prospect (8/23/23), General Motors and Ford are clients of Anderson Economic Group.
The consulting firm also warned that a “Potential UPS Strike Could Be Costliest in a Century.” Further, they published a dubiousstudy asserting that “electric vehicles can be more expensive to fuel,” and released a study in June 2020 that claimed looting during Black Lives Matter protests cost businesses in major cities $400 million, a number picked up by Fox (6/5/20), the New York Post (6/12/20) and others.
To be clear, this $5.6 billion number comes from estimating a 10-day strike of all 143,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) members. Given the stand-up strike strategy, which involves striking a few seemingly random plants at a time, it’s unlikely that all members will be on the picket line anytime soon.
Still, outlets continue to threaten recession, or if they cannot do that, at least mention the strike’s ability to “put pressure on new car prices” (Wall Street Journal, 9/22/23). As the UAW’s Fain noted in a video on September 18, the average price of a new car is up 30% over the past four years. “You think UAW wages are driving up that increase?” he asks. “Think again.”
As the car prices line exemplifies, corporate media love to present the everyday person as a consumer, someone who should be worried about car prices, rather than a worker who should be enthusiastic about labor’s resurgence.
In that vein, while asked on CNN (9/12/23) about the UAW strike damaging the economy, Fain responded:
It’s not that we’re going to wreck the economy. We’re going to wreck their economy, the economy that only works for the billionaire class. It doesn’t work for the working class.
The United States on Tuesday blacklisted three more companies located in China’s Xinjiang region due to their use of forced Uyghur labor, banning American companies from importing their goods.
A total of 27 companies are now explicitly blacklisted under the 2021 Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which also includes a general ban on the import of any goods made even in part by the forced labor of Uyghurs, a Muslim minority subjected to internment in China.
Goods made by Xinjiang Zhongtai Group, Xinjiang Tianshan Wool Textile and Xinjiang Tianmian Foundation Textile will be banned from imports due to their “participation in business practices that target members of persecuted groups, including Uyghur minorities,” said a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security.
The statement quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of homeland security, as saying the U.S. government was committed to policies to “eliminate Uyghur forced labor in the People’s Republic of China.”
“We do not tolerate companies that use forced labor, that abuse the human rights of individuals in order to make a profit,” Mayorkas said.
The three companies all produce textiles, according to the statement, including cashmere, velvet and yarn, as well as industrial salt.
Business advisory
The listing came as the State Department updated its Xinjiang Supply Chain Business Advisory, which has since 2021 advised Americans that if they “do not exit supply chains, ventures, and/or investments connected to Xinjiang [they] could run a high risk of violating U.S. law.”
The update notes that the U.S. government determined that in 2022 “genocide and crimes against humanity continued to occur” in China’s Xinjiang region, and provides details for businesses both about how goods made using slave labor can end up in global supply chains and about how import controls are enacted by U.S. customs officials.
Under the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, all goods produced in the Xinjiang region are legally assumed to have involved Uyghur forced labor unless a business can prove otherwise to customs officials.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Alex Willemyns for RFA.
In August 2022, auto parts workers at VU Manufacturing won a landmark election to gain recognition for a new independent union, the Mexican Workers’ League (La Liga). A year later, after refusing to negotiate a new contract, the company has shut down, leaving 400 workers jobless—and 71 workers without their legally-mandated severance pay.
VU is located in the border city of Piedras Negras, Coahuila, where politicians brag about maintaining “labor peace” in the foreign-owned factories known as maquiladoras. This “peace” is largely mediated by the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), a powerful company-friendly union notorious for signing contracts behind workers’ backs and preventing them from organizing genuine, democratic unions.
At VU, a Michigan-based interior auto parts manufacturer, workers—supported by the Border Workers’ Committee (Comité Fronterizo de Obrer@s)—took on the company, the CTM, and the local political establishment last year to form the city’s first independent union. But in the months after that victory, the company refused to negotiate a new contract, and organizers at VU faced heavy retaliation, including the firing of two leading activists in the plant.
Earlier this year, VU began to slow down production in Piedras Negras, laying off hundreds of workers. By July, VU shut its doors completely, leaving the final 71 workers without any severance pay—even as the company’s supervisors and management collected their full severance on the way out.
Now, workers say the local business elite, in conjunction with the CTM, has instituted a de facto citywide blacklist against all former VU workers, regardless of their union affiliation.
‘A message against all independent unions’
All of this comes amidst a burgeoning independent union movement in Mexico, with workers across the manufacturing sector taking advantage of the country’s 2019 labor law reform and the strengthened “labor chapter” of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade agreement to form independent, democratic unions. Several new independent unions now exist across Mexico, at companies including General Motors, Goodyear, Panasonic, Saint Gobain, and 3M.
However, workers organizing independent unions continue to face major obstacles from employers and company-friendly unions, including stolen ballots, threats of violence, and attempts to buy votes. Genuine worker-oriented unions still remain few and far between.
VU is the only company to have two complaints filed against it under the USMCA’s rapid response mechanism, which allows the U.S. to bring complaints against employers in Mexico who violate workers’ right to organize. Violators can have their tariff benefits suspended or even have their goods denied entry to the U.S.
Given the company’s ultimate refusal to negotiate with its employees, the VU case poses a real test for the provisions of the USMCA aimed at safeguarding Mexican workers’ rights — and for Mexico’s independent union movement more broadly.
Miguel, a worker-activist from VU, sees the obstacles faced by him and his co-workers as a warning against future organizing campaigns in Mexico. “This will be a message against all independent unions in the future,” he said. “If you involve yourself in something like this again, you know what will happen.”
‘We are unemployable’
Miguel, who did not want to share his full name for fear of further reprisals, has been unable to find work since being laid off from VU in June. “When you go to an interview, they won’t tell you why they won’t hire you, but they won’t hire you,” he said. “Legally, they can’t say it’s because you’re from VU. But we all know it’s because we’re from VU.”
In the course of reporting this article, we spoke with more than two dozen former employees from VU, none of whom had succeeded in finding work at other maquilas in Piedras Negras.
“I’ve been looking for work for two months, and no one has talked to me,” said Juan Mares, a worker who was the deputy treasurer for La Liga’s chapter at VU. For applicants from VU, the companies will “push you to the side and talk to other applicants, even though they don’t have experience.”
Elsa, another worker-activist from VU, tried going to a local job fair, where companies were advertising open positions at factories in town. “It looked like a funeral,” Elsa said. “The majority of the people at the job fair were from VU. But they didn’t hire any of us.”
No severance
In Mexico, companies are legally required to pay laid-off employees a severance, equivalent to at least three months’ salary plus extra pay for seniority and benefits. While the first batch of workers laid off from VU received some severance pay, the final 71 workers at the plant have yet to receive anything, two months after losing their jobs. Many of these workers also have not received money that they voluntarily put into a savings account with the company over the course of their time at VU.
Victor Sevilla Peralta is one of these workers. He estimates that he’s due about 75,000 pesos ($4,400) for his three years of service to the company. To this day, he’s received nothing. “There’s a lot of us who still don’t have work, and we all have debts,” said Peralta. “So we’re all waiting for our severance pay, to be able to catch up with our debts.”
Before bonuses, most workers at VU earned the weekly minimum wage of 1,560 pesos ($91). While local labor authorities have placed an embargo on VU’s remaining machinery to help pay these workers’ severance, workers like Sevilla Peralta worry that selling that machinery won’t be enough to cover the pay for all 71 workers. As of this writing, the workers still have not received an update about when they might receive their severance.
Organizing across borders
VU workers produced armrests and door upholstery for vehicles made in the US by Tesla, Toyota, GM, and Stellantis. Parts manufactured in Piedras Negras were sent to other parts companies represented by the UAW, including Adient, Magna, and Yanfeng.
Mexico is by far the leading foreign supplier of U.S. auto parts, as well as home to a growing number of assembly plants producing primarily for the U.S. market. So the conditions of Mexican auto workers are tightly connected to those of their American and Canadian counterparts.
For decades, companies have taken advantage of low wages and the lack of genuine unions in Mexico (as well as the southern U.S.) to lower costs and boost profits. Automakers use the threat of moving to Mexico as a cudgel against U.S. and Canadian unions—as can be seen in Stellantis’s move to shutter its Belvidere, Illinois, assembly plant in February, and move work to Toluca, Mexico. The company is now using Belvidere as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the UAW.
But there have also been stirrings of solidarity between auto workers on both sides of the US-Mexico border. At a GM plant in Silao, Guanajuato, in 2019, five workers were fired for refusing to work overtime in solidarity with striking GM workers in the U.S. The 6,000 workers at that plant went on to form an independent union, the National Union of Auto Workers (SINTTIA), in 2022.
Goodyear Mexico workers, who voted to join La Liga this summer, rallied on September 19 in front of GM’s headquarters in Mexico City in support of the ongoing UAW strike. “If transnational corporations make multimillion dollar profits, workers deserve strong union contracts … and we think that these corporations should provide a wage increase in every country they operate.”
“I saw that the UAW, auto workers in the U.S., are in la lucha (the struggle) right now,” said Lupita, one of the laid-off worker-activists from VU. “Their struggle is for the whole world: the U.S., Mexico, Canada, and other countries.”
U.S. unions and labor activists, in turn, have supported Mexican workers in their efforts to shed employer protection contracts and form new, independent unions, including at VU.
On Tuesday, September 26 at 10 a.m., the México Solidarity Project is organizing a protest at VU’s headquarters at 2151 Livernois Road in Troy, Michigan, calling for the company to pay the workers’ severance and put an end to the blacklist in Piedras Negras—as well as for U.S. labor authorities to sanction the company to prevent it from continuing to export from a new location in Mexico. They will be joined by solidarity activists from the UAW, the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and Casa Obrera del Bajío, a Mexican workers’ center.
In a flyer shared with UAW members in Michigan, organizers for the action emphasized the need for international worker solidarity to improve conditions for all workers, regardless of nationality.
As the fight to end unfair tipped wages heats up in the United States, multiple counties in Maryland are stepping up to lead the charge. Councilmembers at the Montgomery County Council have recently introduced legislation that would phase out subminimum ‘tipped’ wages, and reduce service wage inequality for workers across the county.
“The subminimum wage for tipped workers is still just $2.13 an hour at the federal level,” the One Fair Wage national coalition notes in its fact sheet. Although the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, the practice of paying tipped wages allows employers to pay service workers such as restaurant waiters at lower rates. Tips are supposed to balance out the discrepancy, but for many tipped workers the reality is an income below the minimum wage—and a struggle for survival.
After the Civil War, white business owners, still eager to find ways to steal Black labor, created the idea that tips would replace wages. Tipping had originated in Europe as “noblesse oblige,” a practice among aristocrats to show favor to servants. But when the idea came to the United States, restaurant corporations mutated the idea of tips from being bonuses provided by aristocrats to their inferiors to becoming the only source of income for Black workers they did not want to pay.
In the intervening decades, subminimum wage for workers in the service and restaurant industries have disproportionately prevented women and workers of color from receiving fair, equitable wages.
“Workers have been suffering with the subminimum wage for a very long time, all the way back to Emancipation when the restaurant industry first demanded the right to hire newly freed slaves, not pay them anything, and force them to live on tips,” said Saru Jayaraman, president of One Fair Wage, an advocacy organization dedicated to supporting fair wage initiatives across the United States. “Since 1865, it’s been overwhelmingly women, disproportionately women of color, mostly single moms struggling with the highest rates of poverty and sexual harassment of any industry because they had to put up with so much to get those tips.”
“[Subminimum wage] is a direct descendent of slavery, of Jim Crow, of discrimination against people of color and women,” Montgomery County Councilmember Will Jawando told The Real News. “[Ending subminimum wage] would go right at the heart of an intentionally racist policy and say ‘We’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to make sure that people get paid a dignified and fair wage.’”
“[Ending subminimum wage] would go right at the heart of an intentionally racist policy and say ‘We’re not going to do that anymore. We’re going to make sure that people get paid a dignified and fair wage.’”
The precarious nature of tipped wage work in the United States was made even worse by the economic upheaval during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tipped wage workers across the country were deemed “essential,” working in high-traffic workplaces with few protections. To complicate matters, workers experienced higher instances of abuse, lower tips, and stagnant wages, causing many to leave the industry entirely in search of more stable, better-paying employment. “Your rent and your bills don’t go down every month, but your tips fluctuate wildly day to day, week to week, month to month, shift to shift, season to season,” Jayaraman said. “It’s impossible to plan, save, pay your bills, and that’s why so many people have left [the service industry].”
During the pandemic, some restaurant owners began voluntarily raising their wages to a full minimum wage plus tips to recruit long-term staff, but Jayaraman believes the business-by-business wage adjustment strategy isn’t enough to retain workers. “A lot of restaurant owners have now joined forces with [One Fair Wage] to say, ‘We need this because a lot of us are raising wages, but it’s not enough.’ Workers don’t want to come back unless they’re guaranteed by law a full minimum wage with tips on top.”
“What’s really changed is that workers during the pandemic reached their limit,” Jayaraman continued. “So many left [the industry] and so many more are saying ‘I won’t work anymore unless you pay me a full minimum wage.’”
With the passage of Initiative 82 in Washington, DC, on Nov. 2022, service industry wages in the surrounding area have become far more competitive. Workers now have the choice to find more lucrative restaurant work in DC, rather than settle for lower wages in the surrounding counties. Legislation proposed by Jawando in Montgomery County and introduced Sept. 19 is designed to raise the subminimum wage in the county in $2 increments until it is fully phased out by 2028.
When asked what removing the subminimum wage would do for the people of Maryland, Jawando replied that it would be transformative. “It’s never been more important to have jobs that pay a living wage, a fair wage,” he said.
“I think to say that, ‘we can’t pay our workers a fair wage, and that’s why I can’t be in business,’—that’s just not true, and it’s not fair, and it’s not right”
The proposed legislation in Montgomery County is part of a larger push to end subminimum wage in the state of Maryland. Prince George’s County is expected to introduce similar legislation next month, and state lawmakers first introduced a bill to phase out subminimum wage with Senate Bill 803 earlier this year, but the bill came under heavy criticism by opponents and failed to make it out of committee. There are plans to reintroduce the bill during the 2024 legislative session.
In response to heated criticism of the fair wage initiatives, Jawando says that he believes most of those concerns are specious arguments. “I think to say that, ‘we can’t pay our workers a fair wage, and that’s why I can’t be in business,’—that’s just not true, and it’s not fair, and it’s not right,” he said. “We have to confront the lie that you can’t do it. You can do it, you can be profitable, and pay your employees a fair wage.”
Public comment for both bills introduced by Jawando is scheduled for Oct. 10 at 1:30PM EST.
One of the loudest voices against NATO’s war with Russia is a Bronx man named Jose Vega. He and fellow activists have disrupted events with high-profile liberal Democrats like AOC and Jamal Bowman. On April 25th, Vega broke protocol to challenge the illustrious media panel invited to speak at Columbia Journalism School.
My friends and I confronted the executive editors for @nytimes, @washingtonpost, @latimes, @Reuters on their censorship of Seymour Hersh, Uhuru, Julian Assange, Tucker Carlson, Russiagate..Then the Dean of Columbia and security pushed me to the ground and tried to silence me. pic.twitter.com/Tm1u48n5Xu
— Jose Vega — Vote Vega & Sare! (@JosBtrigga) April 25, 2023
Some of the audience broke silence to shout-down Vega. Police eventually dragged him from the room. Reuter’s Alessandra Galloni, the panel moderator, thanked Vega and moved along without addressing his questions about the bombing of the Nordstream 2 pipeline and the US’s nuclear provocation. This contrived civility is supposed to give the impression that moral superiority lies with the panel. Under the current liberal rules of engagement, some people might never hear an argument for peace or their representatives outright rejecting it.
Liberals like Galloni and AOC use civility politics as a sabotage technique. In their role as de-escalators of conflict and preservers of the status quo, this sect of the ruling class must defang working-class movements. This liberal subclass has less influence and power than the highest members of the ruling class who dictate legislation and run corporations. Being in the middle, these liberals are gatekeepers who learned enough about the struggles of regular people to mimic their language, but their interest lies in the stability of a political and economic system that finds them with above average incomes and quality of life. Being the closest representation of the left, liberals can set the parameters for acceptable leftist opinions and conduct. Liberal gatekeepers call for civility when they might lose control over working-class movements. Breaks from civility can include unsanctioned demonstrations, wildcat strikes, disrupting business or government, and subversive thought.
It was vital for the liberal media to control the way the left thought about the Capitol protest because it had potential to inspire direct action, targeting the ruling elite. Liberals will occasionally support a march to a park, but a protest with permits is only a parade. The media and government described January 6th as an existential threat to democracy. Liberal outrage was extreme. Kamala Harris compared January 6th to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor during a ceremonial anniverary speech. This sentiment was not uncommon, as evidenced by this tweet from a Whitehouse correspondent at Huffington post.
This messaging requires the working class to set aside their differences as if class war is a frivolous disagreement. We are expected to offer sympathy to the governing elite, but the systematic violence legislated into our lives has less gravity.
The working class must have an adversarial attitude toward the ruling class as a prerequisite to having correct analysis and defense. Even in their more mundane policy choices our politicians meet the premeditation criteria for murder. Our government knowingly inflicts hunger pangs on children and shortens lives of the poor. The Child Tax Credit was praised for cutting a third of childhood poverty, but it turned out to be only an advance on an existing tax credit that would be deducted from unwitting filers when they submitted tax returns. Then, the 2022 Child Tax Credit was reduced back to 2019 levels. This revocation demonstrates a deliberate policy-choice to return America’s children to a higher degree of poverty and food insecurity. In light of this, what responsibility should a victim have to their abuser? Protection, reverence, sympathy?
US warmongers have upstaged domestic class-antagonism, endangering the world by provoking other nuclear powers. In NYC, Ukrainian flags are displayed in windows, lobby TVs, and on some dogs. These flags cosign sending unlimited money and weapons so every Ukrainian can die fighting an empire that has shown willingness to negotiate peace. The discourse in the US is relegated to pro-war voices. In places where dissent might spur productive conversation, peace advocates are met with hostility and their manners are impugned.
The liberal disseminates the message of reform only through caution and proceduralism. Liberals protect their middling status by criticizing unsanctioned actions and grassroots movements. Cynicism regarding activism sounds smart because cynicism always does. If you choose not to participate in revolution, you have the privilege of other options, not necessarily the better analysis. With no democratic avenues for the working class to have their demands met, government oppression is the catalyst for violence. Suggesting our government could have launched a terrorist attack on an allied-nation’s energy-infrastructure will alienate you, but this war is not a thought experiment for academic debate. Calm, agreeable discourse only dampens the severity of antiwar concerns. The decorum of town halls and seminars feature a lack of urgency that can only exist thousands of miles from the war front. In this case, civility is the most luxurious of privileges.
Incivility threatens the liberal because it can work. Howard Zinn catalogued a history of successes achieved by rejecting the rules of engagement. He wrote about the hundreds of thousands of workers who left the American Federation of Labor (AFL) unions in 1934 and 1935. Similarly today, union workers are finding their leadership inadequately responsive to the needs of the rank and file. In 1936, Firestone had a sitdown strike that inspired labor nationwide. Courts ruled these activities illegal and the National Guard was deployed. There were forty-eight sitdown strikes that year. Employers gained more control over labor institutions, so rank and file members organized these strikes without approval from union leadership. Taking control of their plants meant they could keep scabs from crossing the picket line. Staying on the shop floor throughout a strike built solidarity as the rank and file organized their own decision-making committees. Employers concluded it was easier to deal with top-down controlled unions than wildcat strikers, so employers made concessions. In 1938 child labor was outlawed and the forty-hour work week was established. History will credit FDR and forget wildcat strikers, some of whom were murdered by police.
Class war has become a fight for self-preservation. Malcolm X’s rallying cry, “by any means necessary,” remains popular. In the decades of white-washing, this line has become purely symbolic when it should be read as instruction. The liberal’s aversion to violence is not moral and universal. They support state-sanctioned violence, propagating war and police brutality. Liberals call for civility to create a buffer between natural enemies, the working and ruling class. They hamper outrage and promote endless petition. For the working class to accept this feckless process, they must see no connection between governance and the violence of poverty.
This week on CounterSpin: An unprecedented labor action is underway as thousands of Midwest autoworkers working for the Big 3—Ford, GM and Stellantis (which used to be Chrysler)—went on strike at the same time. Some things workers are calling for may sound familiar: a pay raise for workers that bears relation to raises that owners have generously given themselves; reinstatement of cost-of-living increases. Others—a shorter work week; the elimination of “tiered” jobs, where some folks are just never on the track for benefits; and a seat at the table for workers in any conversations about climate-related economic transitions—sound downright visionary.
It would be a critical story at any time. But right now, every day brings news—like Australian real estate developer Tim Gurner’s declaring, out loud, in public, “We need to see unemployment rise, unemployment has to jump 40–50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy”—that tells us that the situation isn’t about “the economy working,” but about for whom the economy is supposed to work.
Unionized autoworkers are saying that profits—like the $21 billion the Big 3 have declared in the first six months of 2023—have to mean better conditions for the people doing the work. “We can’t afford it” is a harder message for corporate media to support as unions grow in strength, and as people find other sources than major corporate outlets to look to for explanations about what’s happening.
Lisa Xu, organizer with Labor Notes, is in Detroit right now. We talk with her about this historic UAW strike.
CounterSpin230922Xu.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of depleted uranium and RICO indictments.
The United Auto Workers filed a National Labor Relations Board complaint against Republican Sen. Tim Scott on Thursday for publicly saying striking employees should be fired in response to a question about the UAW’s ongoing and popular walkouts. The complaint, first reported by The Intercept, argues that Scott unlawfully “threatened employees with adverse consequences if they engage in protected…
At 11PM on September 14, just before midnight, a crowd of United Auto Workers members and their supporters began amassing across the street from Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne. A stream of honking cars had already begun exiting the factory gates. Outside the UAW Local 900 union hall, which sits adjacent to the assembly plant, white shuttle vans were humming at the ready—and before long, the picket lines were up.
At midnight, it was official: for the first time in the union’s history, UAW workers at each of the Big Three automakers—Ford, GM, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler)—were striking simultaneously. The union’s new strategy of “stand up” strikes, whereby select locals are gradually called out to strike at their plants, had gone into effect. Two hours prior, at 10pm on a Facebook livestream, UAW President Shawn Fain had announced the union’s first targets.
Just under 13,000 workers have walked off the job so far, disrupting truck and SUV production at Stellantis’ Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio, GM’s Wentzville Assembly in Missouri, and the final assembly and paint departments of Ford’s Michigan Assembly. Thousands more workers are staying home, with more expected to join them, after GM temporarily laid off 2,000 employees at its Kansas assembly plant following layoffs of smaller groups of workers at Ford and Stellantis.
“In the [billionaires’] economy workers live paycheck-to-paycheck while the billionaires buy another yacht… So we’re gonna wreck their economy ’cause it only works for the billionaire class.”
uaw president shawn fain
The UAW’s new, more militant union leadership had been warning the Big Three for months that a strike was coming if a tentative agreement was not reached before the previous contracts expired on Sept. 14. Nevertheless, those threats prompted little movement from the companies at the bargaining table, as evidenced by their austere contract proposals.
It’s hard to sum up all that’s at stake in this contract fight. UAW members are determined to make up for decades of backsliding and concessionary bargaining under previous union administrations, and they’re coming to get back what they’ve watched slip away with each successive contract. To get there, the union is fighting for double-digit raises, for the reinstatement of cost-of-living pay increases, the elimination of wage and benefit tiers, the restoration of company-paid retiree medical benefits and pensions for all workers, job security from plant closures, better work-life balance, and an end to the abuse of temporary employees.
Mirroring the union’s history-altering strikes in the 1930s and ’40s, the UAW’s contemporary fight with the Big Three may have implications for the broader working class. How the UAW fares may set the stage for its existential battle to unionize and raise the standards of the burgeoning electric vehicle and battery industries, which Congress and the Joe Biden administration have supported with hundreds of billions of dollars in government grants, loans and tax incentives, though with few strings attached for labor.
“The shameful part of the EV transition is our tax dollars are financing it, and the companies are taking all the money, like always, and not even taking labor into the equation,” Fain told me on the Michigan Assembly picket line. “Corporations and billionaires get all the money, and working class people are left behind. It’s gotta stop.”
Despite their record profits, totaling a quarter-trillion dollars in North America over the past decade, the Big Three have cried poverty and painted the UAW’s demands as wholly unfeasible. But the corporate negotiators have failed to fully appreciate just how serious the membership is about their demands—and their willingness to get them by force.
UAW members and supporters congregate in front of Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant, shortly after the “stand up” strike began at midnight on September 14. Photo from Teddy Ostrow
In Wayne, some workers joined the line in shock. It was new territory for most Ford workers, who haven’t struck the company since 1978. But surprise was inevitable across the companies. The strike targets were intentionally kept secret by the union, from the members as well as the companies, to stoke confusion among the Big Three and prevent them from preemptively counteracting or blunting the effects of the strike. Indeed, In These TImes reporters confirmed with Stellantis that the company had no idea its Toledo Jeep plant was one of the union’s first targets.
According to President Fain, more, as-yet unspecified locals will be called to stand up and join the strike by noon on Friday, September 22, if deals with the companies aren’t reached.
According to President Fain, more, as-yet unspecified locals will be called to stand up and join the strike by noon on Friday, September 22, if deals with the companies aren’t reached. Meanwhile, the Canadian auto union, Unifor, reached a settlement with Ford on September 20, avoiding a strike by 5,600 workers that would have also put some US production facilities out of commission.
Despite a dizzying mixture of excitement, anxiety, and even some confusion, during the first days of the strike, workers across all three picket lines told me they were ready and willing to fight.
“It’s my first strike, but I’m out here. I feel strong,” Brandi White, an assembly line worker of seven years at Michigan Assembly, told me on the Ford picket line after midnight. Moments after the strike began, White described her mood as “surprised but happy.”
“I feel like we all came together for a bigger cause. We’re all out here struggling, and we’re making it known,” she said.
“It’s a whole history being made,” said Robert Harrison, a forklift driver at Michigan Assembly. “This is for the future. This is a start right here. This is going to open up many doors from our generation on down.”
“I’m anxious to know what the outcome is going to be,” said Adelisa Lebron, who has worked for three years on the engine line at Ford.
Holding a picket sign with her young daughter at her side, Lebron said she was worried about living on $500 weekly strike pay. “I’m a single mom, I have three children, and that little bit of money is not gonna be able to cover what I have to pay,” she said.
Still, Lebron believes the strike is necessary, and she’s angry at the companies, not at the union: “It’s just irritating for people like us who come in here, bust our butts every day, and management—they just don’t care.”
Fifty miles south, at Stellantis’ Jeep-producing Toledo Assembly Complex, workers broke out into cheers when Fain announced on Thursday’s Facebook livestream that their plant was among the first three to be called upon to strike.
Melanie Smith, who’s worked nine years for Stellantis, was on the phone with her mother, a fellow auto worker, who was on her shift in the body shop of the Jeep plant, when the news broke.
“They were going wild, so excited to finally strike for our rights,” Smith said of the workers in the background of her phone call. “Everybody just started screaming.”
On Friday, Sept.15, I drove to the Stellantis complex in Toledo.
I arrived at one of the picketed gates to find about twenty workers standing outside, many of them dancing to hip-hop that was blasting from a speaker. A burn barrel and a mound of chopped wood sat idle, waiting for use during the colder, six-hour night shifts. I saw similar scenes of jubilance at each of the other gates surrounding the plant.
“We’re out here because we want a fair contract, and to get stuff back that we gave up when we helped bail out the automotive industry.”
Samantha Parker, who has worked for ten years in assembly at the Jeep plant, waved her picket sign on the roadside, winning solidarity honks from passersby.
“We’re out here because we want a fair contract, and to get stuff back that we gave up when we helped bail out the automotive industry,” she said.
Parker was referencing the concessions the UAW had given to the Big Three following the bankruptcies, and subsequent taxpayer bailouts, of GM and Chrysler in 2009. That year, to help keep their companies afloat amid a deepening, worldwide financial crisis, auto workers gave up their treasured cost-of-living adjustments (COLA), a fixture of UAW contracts for over half a century that ensured workers’ wages kept up with inflation. When discussing their demand for COLA, workers on the picket line repeatedly referenced the financial strain caused by the previous two years’ unprecedented spikes in inflation.
Two years before the bankruptcies, the union had already established a two-tier system in the ranks as it negotiated away defined benefit pensions and substantial retiree medical benefits for all workers hired after 2007. Second-tier workers instead were given inferior, market-dependent 401K retirement plans, and lower starting and top pay. Eventually, their contracts would equalize pay with tier-one workers, but under an eight-year progression, which workers see as an unreasonably long time to wait to reach the point where they’re earning top rate.
The lack of sufficient retirement benefits is insulting, according to Parker. “We sacrifice so much of our bodies and our time to build Jeeps, and don’t get appreciated for it,” she said. Then she pointed to her left wrist. “I have bilateral carpal tunnel. I just had surgery on one hand and I have to have surgery on my other hand. I have a two-year-old and it hurts to even hold my kid.”
“It’s petrifying,” she continued, “because if my body’s already wearing down now, what’s it gonna be like after I’ve been here for 20, 30 years?”
UAW members at Stellantis hold the line at the Toledo Assembly Complex in Ohio. Photo from Teddy Ostrow
On the Toledo picket line, frustration also centered on the company’s abuse of temporary workers. The number of “temps” exploded across the Big Three after the bailouts, but especially at Stellantis.
Devin Dominique, who works trim on the production line at the Toledo Jeep plant, has been a temporary part-time worker since 2018—something he called “a little bit of BS.”
“This is actually the first sign of relief I’ve had in this company in a long time, because I know that this is one of the only ways that we’ll probably get some of what we want and need.”
At Stellantis, temps’ starting pay is just under $16 per hour, and it taps out around $19. This is a far cry from permanent full-time workers’ $32 per hour top pay. Dominique thinks it’s ridiculous there’s such a disparity between him and permanent workers, because he performs the same work that they do and regularly works 60-hour weeks.
“I believe that every [temp] feels the same way as me,” he said. “I think they all want to be hired in [permanently], and I don’t think it’s too much to ask.”
Both of Dominique’s grandparents worked and retired from the Toledo complex, and he said he would like to do the same. But after five years as a temp, he’s unsure when that will happen as there’s no guaranteed path to him being made permanent. He supports the union’s push for the Big Three to hire all of their current temps immediately and lay out a 90-day pathway to permanent status for any future temporary hires.
I asked Dominique how he felt when he heard his plant would be striking. The father of two said that he was at home when he heard the news.”My girlfriend actually started crying because she’s worried about our bills being paid,” he said.
“But I told her that this is actually the first sign of relief I’ve had in this company in a long time,” he continued, “because I know that this is one of the only ways that we’ll probably get some of what we want and need.”
For most workers on the Ford and Stellantis picket lines, it was their first time on strike. At GM’s Wentzville Assembly in Missouri, however, many among the rank and file had hit the picket line with 48,000 of their union siblings in 2019.
Kyle McLaughlin, who works the frame line for the assembly of Chevy Colorados and Canyons, was one of them. Over a phone call, he explained that he and his coworkers felt much better prepared this time around.
“I definitely feel like the union is communicating better,” said McLaughlin, referring to UAW President Fain’s bargaining updates over Facebook livestreams and the all-around commitment to greater transparency between the current union leadership and the members.
Fain has encouraged non-strikers, with the support of their local leaderships or not, to “stand up” in any way they can– by keeping up the pressure on their employers with rallies or practice pickets, for example, or by refusing voluntary overtime, as some workers have done at each of the Big Three, so as to slow down production.
McLaughlin didn’t like that the previous union leadership held negotiations behind closed doors in 2019. That year, not much was gained to make up for prior years’ concessions. Now, he believes the union is taking harder stances in bargaining, and he appreciates the fact that weekly strike pay was raised from $400 to $500, which will help the strikers financially.
“It’s going to be a lot easier for everyone,” said McLaughlin, and he believes that will put the union in a stronger position to win its demands.
But the changes McLaughlin described reflect a broader shift that has taken place within UAW over the past several months.
For nearly 80 years, until March of this year, the union was run by a single internal caucus. A widespread sense of betrayal from the recent corruption scandals within previous UAW administrations, along with general dissatisfaction with years of backsliding at the bargaining table, convinced a majority of the membership that the union itself needed a change. Aided by the organizing efforts of the rank-and-file reform movement Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), union members were finally able to break the chain. In the union’s first election of top officers, members elected a slate of leaders, backed by UAWD, that promised to take seriously their organic demands, and to hold the Big Three accountable.
The “stand-up” strike strategy is just one of many examples of the current leadership’s break with the old way of doing things. Rather than calling all workers out on strike en masse, the union has targeted specific plants, and is wielding the threat of ramping up economic pain on the companies with further walkouts. The logic is to keep the companies guessing about where the union may strike next, in order to maximize leverage in the bargaining room.
The strategy also helps preserve the UAW’s $825 million strike fund, as members in other plants who may be laid off due to parts shortages can pull from unemployment rather than the union coffers. “I think it’s a new, exciting and creative strategy, and I want to see it work,” said Sean Crawford, a UAW Local 160 member, GM worker at Warren Tech Center, and member of UAWD. “I think it’s more likely to work because we’re going to be able to stretch out the strike and defense fund.”
While many workers praised the new strategy on the picket lines, some non-striking members wished it was total war, with all 146,000 auto workers across the Big Three on strike at once. The union does have a long, proud, militant tradition, after all, and they want to be part of that.
But the international UAW has sought to keep up the energy even among members who are still on the job. Fain has encouraged non-strikers, with the support of their local leaderships or not, to “stand up” in any way they can– by keeping up the pressure on their employers with rallies or practice pickets, for example, or by refusing voluntary overtime, as some workers have done at each of the Big Three, so as to slow down production. Meanwhile, UAWD has revamped the union’s famous “Flying Squadron,” rallying workers from various locals to join the picket lines for solidarity and support.
On the third day of the strike in Toledo, members of UAW Local 14 led a caravan to circle the Stellantis plant in solidarity with their striking union siblings at Local 12. In between laps made by the dozens of honking Jeeps and Chryslers, I spoke with Beth Walls, a strike captain and a ten-year veteran of the Stellantis plant’s paint shop.
Walls explained that she and her coworkers can barely afford the Jeeps they manufacture at the Toledo plant. She pointed to her recently purchased Jeep Compass, which she said was Mexican-made. “We want to be able to buy the ones we made,” said Walls.
I asked Walls what she thought of Local 14’s caravan. “It’s awesome,” she said. The night before, her own local had led a convoy around the plant, which was captured by Labor Notes reporter Luis Feliz Leon. But that Local 14 was doing one in solidarity meant a lot, Walls explained.
“Just hyping up everybody and showing their support – we’re all one big family. We’ll do what we have to do for one another.”
Hundreds of UAW members and their supporters rally in Detroit on September 15, 2023, the first day of the union’s “stand up” strike. Photo from Teddy Ostrow
After my trip to Toledo on strike day one, I sped back to Detroit to make it to the major UAW rally that same afternoon. Hundreds of red-shirted UAW members and their supporters had packed themselves in between the GM corporate headquarters at the Renaissance Center and Huntington Place, where the Detroit auto show preview gala was being held.
In the lead-up to speeches by Sen. Bernie Sanders, union leaders, and a who’s who of Michigan Democrats, the rank and file danced to music belting from the sound system. If not for the content of their chants, and the demands printed on their picket signs, one might have mistaken the event for a celebration, rather than a rally against corporate greed. In a way, it was both.
“I feel inspired. I feel hopeful,” said Crawford of UAW Local 160. “The whole event is poetic. It’s a beautiful day here in Detroit. The sky is blue, and there’s more people than I’ve ever seen at a rally here before.”
“I feel hyped up, like I’m ready to run through a wall, man,” said David Carey, a temp of almost two years in the quality department of Stellantis’ Detroit Assembly Complex Mack. “I don’t think, I know we’re gonna win a good contract.”
“Looking out at this sea of red shirts today, I see power – the power of a united class,” UAW President Fain told the crowd. “In the [billionaires’] economy workers live paycheck-to-paycheck while the billionaires buy another yacht… So we’re gonna wreck their economy ’cause it only works for the billionaire class.”
“We refuse to live in an oligarchy. We refuse to accept a society in which so few have so much and so many have so little,” said Sen. Sanders. “Let us all, every American in every state and this country, stand with the UAW.”
When the speeches ended, UAW President Fain led his members into the streets, and the pumped-up crowd marched on Jefferson avenue.
“This is what the UAW has always been about,” Ryder Littlejohn, a skilled trades maintenance leader at the Ford Stamping Plant in Buffalo, New York, told me between chants. “We’ve always been a progressive, organized union fighting for the working class. And it’s good to see it come back.”
The crowd tightened as the march bottlenecked on the steps of GM headquarters. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder, the steady beat of “UAW! UAW! UAW!” growing louder, Littlejohn turned to me and shook his head in disbelief.
Despite reaping tens of billions of dollars in profits between them over the past five years, General Motors and Ford paid an average combined tax rate of just 1% on total pre-tax income, an analysis published Tuesday by economic justice advocates revealed — as the auto giants claimed they cannot afford striking workers’ demands for better pay. The Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) analysis — which…
Every few years, the public is force fed another manufactured attempt to rebrand the GOP as a party that is “no longer in lockstep with corporate America” and is “newly focused on winning over more of the working class.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) triumphantly announced in Nov. 2020 that Republicans “are a working class party now. That’s the future.” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has repeatedly heralded the Republican party as the most likely space for a “working class multiethnic party” to converge. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) has been auctioning off this talking point to any credulous or complicit media platform that will give him airtime. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in 2021 that “the most significant political change of the last decade has been that the heart and soul of the Republican Party—we are a working-class party now. We are a blue-collar party.”
But it’s easy to claim this mantle when the stakes are low and rhetoric is the only currency. It’s when there are actual points of significant class conflict—when history forces one to pick a side, when the chance comes to actually fight for workers, not just say you’ll fight for them—that this self-styled pro-worker branding is put to the test. And after last week’s United Auto Workers (UAW) strike began in earnest—marking the first time in history the union has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once—it’s clearer than ever that this branding is, at best, entirely hollow and, at worst, deeply calculated.
The talking point every single Republican has been handed, and all who have spoken on the strike have echoed, centers around a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that pits organized labor against climate activists.
First off: Let’s discuss the working-class warriors who have been suspiciously silent. Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. Ted Cruz haven’t mentioned the strike at all.
But what about the Republicans who have issued statements on the strike? All of them “support” it as an abstract thing in their head, yet they are throwing their backing behind a version of the strike that doesn’t exist. And they offer no support for the actual demands of the strikers or the duly elected representatives of the UAW membership.
The talking point every single Republican has been handed, and all who have spoken on the strike have echoed, centers around a cynical divide-and-conquer strategy that pits organized labor against climate activists and reflects entirely partisan, pro-fossil-fuel grievances that in no way represent the demands of autoworkers.
Let’s start with Sen. Marco Rubio. Rubio took five days since the strike began last Friday to finally release a statement. In those five days, though, he apparently had time to introduce a bill that would cut off “’radical gender ideology in healthcare systems,” demand military bases allow screenings of the popular QAnon-adjacent film Sound of Freedom, and pen an op-ed in The Miami Herald on Sept. 14, when the UAW’s contracts with the Big Three expired, about how “American men are falling behind.” That piece laments the decline in good-paying jobs, but somehow manages not to mention the UAW strike, the word “strike,” or even “union” once. How this disillusioned American Man is supposed to achieve economic gains beyond a tax credit and “borrowing” from his own social security fund (a discredited hare-brained right-wing stalking horse) isn’t explained. Rubio’s “working-class” politics don’t have any actual class politics in them, because he is (poorly) trying to fashion a class politics that avoids real class conflict, hence his attempt to indict selected “elites” without indicting the ruling class to which they belong, hence his attempt to subsume the systematic attack on the working class under some ill-defined attack on masculinity and “strong families and cultural values.” He hardly acknowledges class at all. Far from embodying a new political direction for the GOP, Rubio’s schtick is just another example of Republicans finding new ways to launder whatever Heritage Foundation policy points Corporate America approves through political pandering that, if you squint hard enough, vaguely gestures to the material needs of working people before swiftly diverting focus away from the true sources of their material immiseration.
When Rubio finally did say something this morning, it was, like all the other GOP statements, focused mainly on non sequitur complaints about green energy and manufacturing mandates. Beyond simply ignoring the strike, like many of his colleagues, Rubio actually went further and condemned the union. True Friend of the Worker that he is, Rubio went out of his way to admonish the primary instrument of power auto workers have at the most critical juncture of their struggle:
Auto strike is driven in large part by a radical climate agenda that seeks the end of gas powered cars even if it means destroying American jobs
Instead of supporting either union bosses or CEOS we need to support American workers who want policies that protect their jobs, value…
Rubio has claimed for the past three years that Republicans need to “jump start” labor by opposing the actual unions that represent laborers and replace them with company-approved unions. This is a favorite line of the faux-populist GOP set, because it allows them to rhetorically back workers while still being fervently anti-union, which is a requirement of the party and its attendant, ruling-class-serving ideology. Rubio loves to condemn “union bosses” because he’s hoping the average person still lives in 1975 and thinks Jimmy Hoffa is in charge. UAW president Shawn Fain was recently elected to lead the union as part of a reform slate after the UAW held its first truly democratic elections, and the strike itself was voted on directly by the workers last August with 97 percent support. The “union bosses” here were elected by the membership (and the fact that union leaders, unlike bosses, can be voted out by the rank and file is one of many reasons why the term “union boss” makes no sense) and their mandate to strike is virtually uniform. Rubio can’t acknowledge this, though, because it immediately undercuts whatever self-serving point he’s trying to make, so he has to support a group of workers and a slate of worker demands that simply don’t exist in our dimension of time-space.
One need only look at the slimiest of the all of these GOP “populists,” and the one most committed to the bit—Josh Hawley—to see why these ostensibly pro-worker talking points are nothing but vapid partisan pot shots with little to no bearing on the demands of actual workers:
Note how Hawley references “auto workers” here while omitting any mention whatsoever of the union to which they belong. This is deliberate: Hawley doesn’t actually support unions (ie, the tangible, worker-composed organizations that exist in reality right now, fighting for material improvements for the very workers Hawley claims to sympathize with); he only supports an idealized, hardhat-wearing archetype that exists as a branding reference. Hawley continues with vague demands for a “raise,” and “better hours,” but no specific numbers are mentioned. No mention of the 36 percent hike the union is demanding, which would be commensurate with the raises Big Three executives have given themselves since the last contracts were negotiated—a demand that accounts for skyrocketing auto industry profits, inflation and the rising cost of living, and the cuts and concessions the union suffered to keep the industry afloat during the Great Recession. The Big Three have all technically offered “raises” that are still well below the UAW’s demands, and those meager wage increases would seemingly satisfy Hawley’s squishy line about workers deserving a raise. Hawley’s keeping everything deliberately vague because he doesn’t want to upset the automakers that donate to his Super PAC. And he, after all, has a schtick to maintain.
One is welcome to check UAW press releases, public statements, interviews, and other public-facing material: Nowhere does the union or any of its representatives say anything about them having any issues with climate mandates.
Hawley’s “support” for auto workers then quickly veers into total non sequitur, focusing mainly on “climate mandates.” One is welcome to check UAW press releases, public statements, interviews, and other public-facing material: Nowhere does the union or any of its representatives say anything about them having any issues with climate mandates. What they’ve said, and what they’ve said for years, is that any transition to EVs and green tech must be a “just transition” that doesn’t leave American workers behind. As Sarah Lazare detailed in a recent piece debunking this narrative that is becoming increasingly popular on both the right and center-left, there is no tension between good, higher-paying jobs and saving the Earth. “Our tax dollars are financing a massive portion of this transition to E.V. We believe in a green economy,” UAW president Shawn Fain toldFace the Nation on September 17. “We have to have clean water. We have to have clean air. Anyone that doesn’t believe global warming is happening… isn’t paying attention.”
Read Kate Aronoff’s excellent takedown of another faux-populist, Sen. JD Vance (OH-R), which exposes why his talking points, a carbon copy of Hawley’s, are just grafted-on, partisan point-scoring claptrap.
So what the hell are Hawley, Vance, and all the Republicans homing in on “radical climate demands” talking about? Credulous pundits and Beltway rags like Politico take these “Republican concerns” at face value without once mentioning this supposed conflict between labor and environmental requirements attached to the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), as Lazare lays out in detail, is a talking point being fed to our media by the CEOs themselves. The Hawleys of the world are repeating a company line crafted to undermine support for the union and presenting it as a pro-worker position. It’s not. The central demands of the union—significant raises, shorter workweeks, an end to the tier system—are ignored by Hawley in favor of a list of petty partisan grievances that are in no way reflective of what workers are demanding, in reality.
This isn’t to say that Democrats’ responses to the UAW strike have been ideal. One public statement of “support” by Rep. Elissa Slotkin of Virginia is genuinely amusing in its equivocation and feigned solidarity:
I’m looking forward to joining our auto workers on the picket line this weekend. For Michigan’s sake, I hope the strike is short lived. As someone who used to negotiate international agreements, I know that no one should let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And who knows if the White House’s own nominal support will amount to anything ground-shifting in the coming weeks. The UAW, for its part, has pointedly stated that it will not automatically endorse Joe Biden’s re-election run to maintain its leverage, leading to an on-air meltdown by MSNBC Morning Joe anchors interviewing Fain the week prior to the strike:
7 days away from a MASSIVE @UAW strike, @MSNBC@Morning_Joe asked UAW President Shawn Fain BACK-TO-BACK QUESTIONS framing Joe Biden as the "most pro union president in history" and pushing Fain on why UAW hasn't endorsed him yet.
The one thin example Hawley, Rubio, and Cruz like to point to as proof of their working-class bona fides was their vote opposing the Biden administration and Democratic leadership in Congress shutting down rail workers’ right to strike last fall. But their votes came after the passage in the Senate was already a fait accompli—again, it’s easy to vocalize support for workers when the stakes are low, and this oppositional vote was a totally inconsequential and preformative act largely designed to be used as a PR bludgeon later. But Biden and Pelosi’s anti-union, anti-democratic intervention in the rail dispute last year opened the door for Republicans in the Senate to outflank them and rack up a rare, seemingly substantive win for their Republicans-are-the-party-of-the-working-class rebrand. This is what makes the silence—or the bizarre focus on partisan, anti-climate non sequiturs—of Cotton, Hawley, Rubio, and Cruz so illustrative: When the rubber hits the road, when there is a moment of actual class tension and these “populist” senators must choose between the needs of their corporate funders or the working man they allegedly care about, they are either silent or lend support in ways that are superficial and irrelevant. Our media should be pointing this out, making this obvious fact clear, not running another dopey process piece about how the UAW strike is an “opportunity” for Republicans to make gains in the labor movement. Republican support for labor is nonexistent or entirely aesthetic. Reporters should center this fact rather than produce another update on the stale “Republicans are shifting their focus to winning the working class over” trend piece genre that simply, for some reason, just won’t die.
Only 13,000 of 146,000 auto workers at the Big 3 companies are on strike, so far. But others still on the job are turning up the heat by refusing voluntary overtime. At all three companies—Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis — Auto Workers (UAW) members have told Labor Notes about overtime refusals. Many Big 3 plants are hugely dependent on overtime to make up for understaffing.
At the stroke of midnight on Friday, in three automotive factories across the Rust Belt, night shift workers left their posts and poured out onto the streets to join whistling, cheering crowds. TV news footage from the night showed picketers intermingled with cars honking in support as R&B blared from sound systems on the sidewalks in front of the factory gates. For the first time in history, the United Auto Workers union, or UAW, initiated a strike targeting all of the “Big Three” automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which owns brands like Chrysler, Jeep, and Dodge.
The strike marks a breaking point after months of negotiations failed to result in a deal to renew the union’s contract with Big Three automakers, which expired on Friday. For now, the strike covers only 13,000 workers at a General Motors plant in Wentzville, Missouri; a Stellantis plant in Toledo, Ohio; and a Ford assembly plant in Wayne, Michigan. But the three closures could be just the beginning. UAW president Shawn Fain has warned that all 146,000 union workers are ready to strike at a moment’s notice. “If we need to go all out, we will,” said Fain Thursday night on Facebook Live. “Everything is on the table.”
If the work stoppage goes on for more than 10 days, analysts estimate it could cost automakers over $1 billion and hurt plans to push new electric vehicles, or EVs, onto the market.
EVs, and what they mean for the future of union labor in the automotive sector, loom large over the picket line. Automakers say meeting the union’s demands would threaten their ability to compete with non-unionized EV producers like Tesla, adding burdensome labor costs just as they’re making expensive investments in EVs. Workers, meanwhile, worry that billions in EV investments aren’t translating into good-paying, union jobs.
Employees work at the assembly line of the Volkswagen ID 4 electric car in northern Germany on May 20, 2022.
David Hecker/AFP via Getty Images
“It’s our job to organize,” Tony Totty, president of UAW Local 14 in Toledo, Ohio, told Grist. “These corporations don’t wanna share in our sweat equity with the profits we provide them.”
Collectively, the Big Three have committed to investing well over $100 billion in EV manufacturing over the next few years. The companies have also proposed 10 EV battery plants owned jointly with companies including South Korea-based LG Energy Solution and Samsung. Most new EV and battery plants are located in a growing “Battery Belt,” with Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee leading the charge alongside the traditional automotive heartlands of Michigan and Ohio. Many of those states have “right to work” laws that curtail collective bargaining, leading to lower union density and lower pay grades overall. Indeed, the vast majority of the Big Three’s proposed battery plants are nonunion.
To keep union membership strong, protect worker safety, and prevent the EV surge from undermining their bargaining power, the union has asked to include EV battery workers in their national contracts. “Now is really the moment, as the industry starts to take off, to ensure that those jobs can be union jobs,” J. Mijin Cha, an environmental studies professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz who studies labor issues and climate justice, told Grist.
Ford and Volkswagen have estimated that 30 percent less labor is required to build an EV compared to an internal combustion engine car, since EVs don’t require the complex parts needed to build engines and transmissions. Meanwhile, non-union automakers like Tesla and Toyota are gaining an edge in the EV space, and offering substantially lower compensation than the Big Three. Ford has estimated the Big Three’s average hourly labor costs, including benefits, amount to around $65 per worker, compared to about $55 for foreign non-union automakers in the U.S. like Toyota and Nissan. Tesla’s labor costs are even lower — at around $45 to $50 per worker per hour, according to industry analysts.
Auto workers are watching this change with some trepidation, according to Marick Masters, a professor of management at Wayne State University who studies the auto industry and labor. “The shift to electrification both threatens jobs and it also threatens to establish another lower tier of wages in the industry,” he said. The UAW has so far had a string of organizing failures in the South, mostly associated with the region’s large number of foreign automakers, like Volkswagen and Nissan.
Totty, the Toledo-based UAW local president, has advocated heavily for union contracts at new battery plants. He personally welcomes the EV shift. His plant, Toledo Propulsion Systems, received $760 million in federal funding to transform the transmission plant into a plant that makes EV parts. Totty doesn’t believe it’ll take much extra training, or that anyone at the plant will lose their job. “We’re embracing it,” he said. What’s more concerning to him is the power and income imbalance between the people who do the backbreaking work at the plant, and the people who own it.
Among the UAW’s demands for its new contract is a 40 percent raise over the next four years, which it says is equal to the collective rise in CEO compensation at the Big Three over the past four years. The union has also asked for cost of living adjustments, the reinstatement of pensions, a 32-hour work week, and the elimination of a tiered wage system that pays newer employees less for the same work. So far, the three companies have countered with a 20 percent raise. As of Monday, the companies had not agreed to most of the union’s other demands.
In an interview with the New York Times, Ford CEO Jim Farley claimed that meeting UAW demands would prevent the company from investing in EVs. “We want to actually have a conversation about a sustainable future,” he told the Times, “not one that forces us to choose between going out of business and rewarding our workers.”
According to the union, the companies continue to make record-breaking profits, netting over $21 billion in just the first six months of 2023 and $250 billion over the last 10 years. Though the vast majority of those profits come from internal combustion engine cars, with EVs still a relatively small market, the auto companies are already tapping into billions of dollars in federal investments to electrify their fleets.
EVs are central to President Joe Biden’s climate agenda. Through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration has authorized nearly $100 billion in funding dedicated or availables to support growth in the industry’s domestic supply chain. It’s part of Biden’s plan to, according to a recent Department of Energy EV funding announcement, “Create Not Just More Jobs But Good Jobs, Including Union Jobs.” More than $15 billion of that number is intended to support existing factories in the EV transition, in hopes of keeping manufacturing jobs in communities that rely on them. The administration has also made aggressive regulatory moves to push for EVs — under vehicle emissions standards released by the Environmental Protection Agency in April, EVs would need to make up two-thirds of all car sales in the U.S. by 2031.
Masters says that auto companies are responding to this pressure. “The companies,” he said, “are on board, and their train has left the station. They’re going out of the internal combustion engine business.”
Some are calling the UAW strike the biggest labor crisis of the Biden presidency so far. The UAW has not yet endorsed Biden as a presidential candidate, citing inconsistencies between the administration’s push for EVs and its close ties with the labor movement. The union has previously criticized the president for lending billions to auto companies for EV manufacturing without requiring protections for union labor. UAW leaders have asked Biden to hold firm on his promises to deliver union jobs with clean energy investment, or else risk the energy transition exacerbating economic inequality.
The strike will continue, UAW has said, as long as parties fail to reach a consensus. Workers are organizing at Big Three factories across the country, preparing to shut them down if the moment calls for it. Experts say that a long-term strike could seriously hurt sales at the Big Three, possibly giving companies like Tesla a competitive edge.
“The UAW supports and is ready for the transition to a clean auto industry,” Fain said in a release. “But the EV transition must be a just transition that ensures auto workers have a place in the new economy.”
Despite the Biden administration’s decision to terminate the national Public Health Emergency Declaration on May 11, COVID-19 has continued to spread and mutate, leaving millions dead around the world and millions of others chronically ill, permanently disabled, and/or immunocompromised. The pandemic itself, and the botched responses to it by powerful state and market actors (including, and especially, the United States), have inflicted irreversible damage upon our societies, and that damage has been disproportionately felt by marginalized, poor, and working-class people. But the many injustices working people have had to endure during the pandemic, and the many sacrifices we have had to make, have also played a direct role in galvanizing the emerging wave of worker organizing and the renewed labor militancy we are currently witnessing.
“I feel like a lot of people are feeling disillusioned,” said Ari Garcia-Chow, a barista at the Pilsen location of Spoke & Bird Bakehouse in Chicago, Illinois, who played an active role in her shop’s bid to unanimously form an independent union this year called Bakehouse United. “The pandemic, in particular, made it so that we had to reprioritize our lives… it allowed us to kind step back and see more clearly the relationship between the work that we do and the value that we produce.”
Like their industry counterparts and fellow Chicagoans at Starbucks, Intelligentsia, and Colectivo Coffee, Spoke & Bird workers saw unionization as the necessary mechanism for not only securing better pay and working conditions, but for having a real say in how the business operates. “We want a say in how day-to-day operations run… [to] update the menus and express creativity with [the] ingredients [that are] available here at the bakehouse,” Garcia-Chow told TRNN. From the beginning, the workers wanted to be the collective owners of the business. “We’re looking for the means of production,” said Chicago-based baker Jake Chappell. “I would say, at the heart of this union drive, we want autonomy. We want sovereignty. We want to choose our own schedules, our own wages, our own products and prices, we want to be in charge of the place that we make run anyway.”
Congratulations on a UNANIMOUS WIN today to the union workers of the Independent Union BAKEHOUSE UNITED!! @PissandVingrtte Support your local independent union bakery workers in Chicago, IL at the Pilson location @SpokeAndBirdpic.twitter.com/2WJ43BqKwG
When asked what workplace-specific issues pushed Spoke & Bird workers to organize, Garcia-Chow said, “it’s a combination of factors, like employees being passed up for raises and miscommunications with management and ownership.” Chappell specifically recalls when Derek Venhuizen, a well-respected pastry baker, was denied a raise on March 16 of this year. “Once we saw how Derek was struggling,” Chappell noted, “that was the big catalyst.”
Workers have also been inspired by other organizing efforts happening around the country and the rank-and-file militancy that has spread in recent years to industries across the board, from healthcare to Hollywood. Spoke & Bird employees have repeatedly vocalized their support for the numerous ongoing union campaigns happening around them, including efforts by worker-organizers affiliated with Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) and the independent Amazon Labor Union (ALU). According to Garcia-Chow, with respect to organizing at the bakery, “there was a pro-union sentiment from the start.” One can feel that sentiment hanging in the air; as the Bakehouse crew told TRNN, they often indulge themselves in the musical stylings of legendary pro-labor folk singers like Utah Phillips and Woody Guthrie, whose songs can often be heard playing throughout the Bakehouse.
Direct action gets the (baked) goods
Chappell has worked at the Bakehouse for the same length of time as his coworker and fellow baker Venhuizen, a year and a half. “We’re the two most tenured and experienced people in the building,” Chappell acknowledged. Chappell received a wage increase earlier this year; Venhuizen did not. When Venhuizen was denied a raise by management, it became a catalyst for workers across the store to engage in collective action—not only because the crew felt a deep solidarity with Venhuizen and believed he deserved the raise, but also because his situation was indicative of the squeeze other Spoke & Bird employees have been feeling. “Most of us are really struggling to get by,” Garcia-Chow told TRNN. “Derek is having a lot of difficulties financially, [and when] extra workload is added… he shows up, he does the work, he produces that value for the company. But then the compensation gets pushed back. Excuses come. And so it’s like, we’re on the same page about that.”
According to the workers I spoke to, every employee in the Bakehouse unanimously agreed that Venhuizen deserved a raise, as well as back pay equal to the amount that Chappell had received after his raise was approved on March 16.
Although workers had reportedly spoken with management about workplace-related issues numerous times in the past, they claim that their managers had failed to communicate to the owners of the bakery the workers’ latest grievances, concerns, and proposed solutions. After trying multiple times to appeal to the owners and managers and receiving little to no response, the workers were at their wits’ end, and they began exploring and discussing viable strategies for taking action at work to ensure their demands were met. Out of these covert meetings, recalled Garcia-Chow, workers developed an escalation plan “to show solidarity and demonstrate to ownership that we were united in this.”
At noon on Friday, May 26, the entire Bakehouse staff coordinated an “email zap” to flood the inbox of bakeshop owner Scott Golas. This was a form of concerted collective action: with each worker sending an email to Golas at the same time, none could be singled out and reprimanded. Emma, another pastry baker at Spoke & Bird, gave TRNN permission to share a screenshot of the email she sent to Golas on behalf of her coworker Venhuizen:
The workers’ coordinated action worked, prompting Golas to immediately set up a meeting with Venhuizen. As Venhuizen himself confirmed, during their in-person meeting, Golas promised to meet Venhuizen’s demands for a raise and back pay. A week later, Venhuizen received an email directly from the owners of the Bakehouse confirming that he would be receiving a 10% raise, plus back pay extending to March 16. This well-coordinated and successful action provided the Bakehouse employees with a concrete example of collective worker power and what they could accomplish together, and it would become a milestone victory that laid the foundation for what was to come.
Nuts and bolts
Like Amazon workers on Staten Island and Trader Joe’s workers across the country, Spoke & Bird workers are also advancing the trend of workers foregoing representation from established unions in order to build their own independent unions. “I think independent unions have more flexibility in how they can react, how they can plan and how they can move,” Chappell told TRNN. And for those workers who feel an independent union is right for them, while it is by no means an easy feat, the very process of building a union from scratch leaves a deep imprint on all involved. “I think the difference is when people go from being pro-union to actively building and participating in a union,” Chappell added. “There’s a jump that people make.”
Without any formal knowledge of how to properly file to form a union, the Bakehouse workers were assigned a representative from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), who provided guidance and helped them effectively navigate the process. When all was said and done, these bakers took the cake: Each and every employee signed a union authorization card for Bakehouse United. “You can print that it’s unanimous. Everyone’s really proud of that,” Chappell gleefully told me after their big win. The NLRB has certified Bakehouse United as representing the workers on July 31, by holding a formal election the same day. Following certification the owners of the business are required to bargain in good faith.
Emboldened by their successful union drive, Bakehouse workers are ready to wield their collective power in and outside their workplace. For instance, they have plans to use their leverage and collective power to pressure the owners into implementing the terms of newly-proposed legislation in Illinois which would drastically improve labor standards with respect to sick leave. Their plan is to lead by example: first, by merging their store’s current paid sick leave policy with their paid time off policy, effectively giving all workers at the Bakehouse more total hours of paid time off and more flexibility to use those hours when they need to. After securing this policy change within the store, the workers will then work to educate all employees on how to navigate the new policy, then they plan to put pressure on other establishments to follow suit.
When it comes to having a say in their workplace, these bakers and baristas aren’t just looking for a piece—they want the whole pie.
Thousands of auto workers are on strike over pay raises, healthcare and pension benefits. It’s the most aggressive move by the United Auto Workers in modern history, targeting Detroit’s biggest car makers all at once.
Yet none of the union’s demands has grabbed more attention than its call for a four-day workweek. UAW wants the Big Three carmakers to let full-time employees work 32 hours instead of 40 for the same salary. Several news outlets promptly described the idea as “wild” and “ambitious.”
In reality, the move toward a four-day workweek is already underway.
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A hospital, an accounting firm and a hardware supplier are among 20 companies in Brazil that are preparing to switch to shorter workweeks. They’re the first employers in Latin America to take part in a six-month pilot program organized by 4 Day Week Global. The nonprofit group, based in New Zealand, runs the pilot programs, publishes research and advocates for government policies that support fewer work hours for equal pay. It recently completed similar pilot programs in Europe, Canada, the United States and South Africa.
Last week, staff began meeting with the companies in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte and other Brazilian cities. They’re coaching companies on the best way to structure the shorter workweek while also addressing cultural challenges and local labor laws.
“We’ve been thinking about how we can apply the program in Latin America and we think Brazil can open the doors,” said Gabriela Brasil, head of community for 4 Day Week Global. “It’s a big country with a lot of companies that have a presence all over Latin America.”
One challenge is ensuring that employees spend the extra day off at their leisure instead of taking a side job for extra money, she said.
Researchers at Boston College and the think tank Fundação Getúlio Vargas will survey executives and employees before, during and after the program. They will look at productivity, employee satisfaction, stress levels and other factors. Most of the group’s funding comes from the companies that participate in the pilot programs, Brasil said, which pay a fee for the coaching and support.
While 4 Day Week Global has helped normalize the four-day workweek, others have long questioned the effectiveness of working five days a week.
The five-day productivity myth
Working five days a week might be counterproductive. The idea that putting in long hours is better for a company’s bottom line is a myth, according to the International Labour Organization at the United Nations.
“In fact, longer hours of work are generally associated with lower unit labour productivity, while shorter hours of work are linked with higher productivity,” the group concluded in a 2018 research paper.
The late pPsychology professor Anders Ericsson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied top performers in sports, entertainment and chess. Ericsson discovered that the best performers usually practiced in uninterrupted sessions that lasted no more than 90 minutes. They concluded that top performers rarely work more than 4.5 hours a day.
In July, researchers from Boston College published results from the 4 Day Week Global pilot program in the United States and Canada.
None of the companies wanted to return to five days of work after making the change. They reported high satisfaction with productivity, performance and their ability to attract employees. They also noticed an average 15% spike in revenue during the pilot program. Employees also seemed happy with the shift. Seven in 10 reported less burnout and 40% felt less stressed.
A total of 41 companies in the United States and Canada participated in the six-month program last year. The majority of employers — a total of 31 — were based in the United States. Most were small businesses and nonprofits, with a few larger companies, including the online crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.
While the research on four-day workweeks is promising, there is reason to be cautious.
Most employers that have made the switch are small-to-midsize businesses and nonprofit organizations. And the pilot program in the United States mostly involved employees with desk jobs, with fewer blue-collar workers.
There’s also an added challenge for certain businesses, like a hospital, that will need to hire extra staff if their employees are working fewer shifts, said 4 Day Week Global’s Brasil. That’s because they need to have enough nurses and staff to care for patients around the clock. But she is confident that companies will save money in the long run because shifting to a four-day week is linked to lower employee turnover.
“The goal is to bring [a four-day workweek] to everyone, not just white-collar workers,” Brasil said.
Labor unions renew push for four-day workweek
It’s fitting that Detroit’s auto workers are pushing for a shorter workweek. American labor unions, along with Henry Ford, were some of the biggest advocates for limiting full-time work to five days a week.
Ford made the change official for his employees at Ford Motor Company in 1926, cutting work hours, but not pay.
“The country is ready for the 5-day week,” Ford wrote in his 1931 book Moving Forward.
Congress passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, limiting the workweek for hourly employees to 44 hours. Two years later they lowered it to 40.
In 1956, then-Vice President Richard Nixon endorsed an even shorter work week on the campaign trail. He predicted the switch to four days would happen in the “not too distant future.”
The AFL-CIO, which is the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, listed the four-day workweek as one of its key goals a few years ago. The federation’s then-president Richard Trumka told me at the time that unions are “very serious” about the idea, especially as technology makes blue-collar workers more productive.
But U.S. lawmakers have not had success translating the growing support for a shorter workweek into law.
In January, Maryland lawmakers introduced a bill that would give employers a tax incentive to test out a four-day workweek. In April, Massachusetts did the same. Neither bill made it to the house or senate floors for a full vote.
Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives have tried to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act three years in a row. They re-introduced the 32-Hour Workweek bill this year, which would shorten the standard workweek to 32 hours for hourly employees. It never made it to a vote, either.
(Editor’s note: The author of this article is a member of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, which is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America, a member union of the AFL-CIO.)
After the high-stakes contract fight between the Teamsters and UPS, the eyes of labor are now on the contract negotiations currently taking place between the United Auto Workers and the Big Three automakers: Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler). The UAW’s master agreement with the Big Three covers around 150,000 autoworkers, and the current contract expires on September 14. If a tentative agreement is not reached by then, the auto industry could be the next to be rocked by a major strike, and UAW president Shawn Fain has stated clearly that the union is prepared to strike at all three automakers if necessary. What brought us to this point, and what’s at stake in this contract fight (for autoworkers, for the UAW, and for the labor movement writ large)? What are workers demanding, and what role do we all have to play in ensuring they get the contract they deserve? In this panel discussion, we talk with three rank-and-file workers and UAW members from each of the Big Three automakers: Marcelina Pedraza, a Ford electrician in Chicago and member of UAW Local 551; Torice Sawyer, a Stellantis plant worker at the Detroit Assembly Complex–Jefferson and member of UAW Local 7; Nicholas Livick, a General Motors autoworker and rank-and-file member of UAW Local 31 in Kansas City.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Marcelina Pedraza:
Hi, everyone. I’m Marcelina Pedraza, but most people call me Marcy. I’ve been a union electrician for 24 years now, from the southeast side of Chicago, born and raised. I live and work here still, and I’m passionate about workers’ rights and environmental justice. I’m a member of United Auto Workers Local 551, and an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and I’m a mom and a dog owner.
Torice Sawyer:
My name is Torice Sawyer. I am from UAW Local 7 Jefferson North, also known as Detroit Assembly Complex Jefferson. I’ve been there since ’96. I started off as a TPT, I got hired in full-time, 1998. I am part of the rank and file. I work in 9194 in final assembly, which where we call road and narrows. We check the headlights and actually drive the vehicle to make sure that it’s inspection.
Nicholas Livick:
Nicholas Livick, member of UAW Local 31 in Kansas City. In three days, I would’ve been with General Motors for a decade. Where does the time go? I’m passionate about just anything labor related. I’m excited to be here. Thank you for setting up this panel, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome, everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. Please, please support the work that we are doing here at Working People so we can keep growing and keep bringing y’all more important conversations every week. You can support us by leaving us a positive review of the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can share these episodes on your social media, and you can share them with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members. Of course, the single best thing you can do to support our work is become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month.
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My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and I am very excited and grateful to be joined on this special Working People recording. You guys heard, we’ve got my man Nick Livick, we’ve got Marcy, we’ve got Torice. We’ve got an incredible panel of UAW members who are, as you may have heard, in the midst of a critical contract fight with the big three auto makers. We are recording this panel on Wednesday, September 6th. We’re going to try to turn it around as quickly as we can because things are heating up right now. The current UAW Master Agreement with the big three automakers expires on September 14th. Just earlier today, UAW President Shawn Fain said in very clear terms that if any of the big three automakers does not have a contract offer on the table by then, they will see their workers strike. So we’re really coming down to the showdown here. This is a pivotal contract campaign involving a whole lot of workers in a critical industry.
So we wanted to bring Nick, Marcy, and Torice on to give y’all an up-to-date view of what things are looking like from their vantage points, what they are fighting for along with their co-workers in this contract fight, and why it’s so important that all of us rally around them and support them until they get the contract that they deserve. So I’m going to turn it over to our incredible panel in just a second, but as we always do, we want to make sure that our listeners have at least some baseline context to understand the rest of the conversation that we’re going to have today. So I just wanted to read a couple passages from a great breakdown that was published last month at Labor Notes by the great Dan DiMaggio and Keith Brower Brown. Of course, we’re going to link to this in the show notes along with other helpful links for y’all so you can keep reading up on this contract fight and the major changes that have happened within the UAW in recent years, which we’re also going to talk about today.
But just to give y’all some of that baseline context, Dan DiMaggio and Keith Brower Brown write in Labor Notes, quote, “The clock is ticking towards September 14th at midnight when the auto workers’ contracts with the big three automakers expire. The new leaders of the UAW have come out swinging and in quickly growing numbers, members are stepping up to prepare for a strike. The agreements cover close to 150,000 workers at Ford, General Motors and Stellantis.” In early August, President Shawn Fain presented a list of the members’ demands to the companies, calling them, quote, “the most audacious and ambitious list of proposals they’ve seen in decades,” end quote. These bargaining goals are aimed at undoing concessions extracted by the companies from previous Union administrations since before the Great Recession. A major goal is to ensure that the transition to electric vehicles is not used to further undermine auto workers’ standards.
Entering this round of bargaining, the big three have reported a combined $21 billion in profits in the first half of 2023. This comes on top of profits of 250 billion over the last 10 years. Quote, “Our message going into bargaining is clear, record profits mean record contracts,” Fain told UAW members on Facebook live August 1st. Instead of the UAW’s past tradition of targeting just one auto company and bargaining then basing contracts for the others off that model, Fain warned all three companies to consider themselves targets, keeping them guessing about which one may ultimately be struck or whether union members might walk out at all three. In 2019, 49,000 UAW members struck GM for six weeks.
Among the demands Fain presented are eliminating tiers on wages and benefits, plus double-digit raises for all, restoring cost of living adjustments, which were suspended during the Great Recession. Restoring the defined benefit pension in retiree healthcare for all, workers hired since 2007 have neither. Increasing pensions for current retirees, there’s been no increase since 2003. The right to strike over plant closures, a quote, “working family protection program, which means if the company shut down a plant, they would have to pay laid off workers to do community service work, making all current temps permanent employees with strict limits on the future use of temps and increasing paid time off,” end quote.
All right. So that’s just the opening salvo here. Let’s dig in deep to the rest of this historic contract fight with our incredible panelists. Marcy, I want to start with you and ask if we could go around the table as we love to do on this show, we want to get to know more about our fellow workers like how you came to do this work. What was the path that led you to doing the kind of job that you do now? What does that job look like? ‘Cause most of us will have literally no idea what you three do on a day-to-day basis, and we’re hungry to learn about it. So yeah, tell us a little more about your own path into the auto industry, the kind of work that you do, and the kind of issues that you have seen and experienced firsthand that are really at issue here in this contract fight.
Marcelina Pedraza:
Yeah, so thanks for having me again. So as I said, I’m an electrician. I started in construction, but as we know, that can be an on and off again type job where you have to go look for work and sometimes you’re not working for weeks at a time, and you might lose your benefits. So actually, it was back in 2013 or 2012 when Chrysler, at the time Chrysler called me, they found my resume online. They said, “Hey, we need more tradespeople.” I was like, “Where is this plant?” They said, “Belvedere.” I was like, “I don’t know where that is.” They said, “It’s right near Chicago.” I’m like, “That’s nowhere near Chicago. It’s near Rockford.” So anyway, I moved my family in 2013 to move to Belvedere to work at Chrysler Belvedere Assembly Plant, which has now been idled, and it was just for something more steady.
I took a pay cut at first ’cause coming from the outside to the inside, it was a big pay cut, but steady work, great benefits, all that stuff. I was there three-and-a-half years. Then even though I was always back and forth home, coming home to Chicago where I’m from, so then I saw that Ford was hiring, and now I work at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant here on the southeast side, which is right near 10 minutes from where I live. I’ve been fortunate to be there seven years, but I’ve done all kinds of things from babysitting robots, troubleshooting, working on panels, VFDs, there’s a lot. Now I do more preventive maintenance work in the paint department, so making sure all the trades have their work tickets and creating work orders based on what kind of maintenance needs to be done in our department.
So it’s been a lot of learning experience, especially coming from the outside doing pipe and wire. I come to this industry and they’re like, “Oh, what do you know about PLCs?” I’m like, “Well, I had a class, an apprenticeship program, but I never used it on the outside,” but I’ve learned a lot and had robotics training. Yeah, so it’s just been a great experience learning new things. But it’s also, it’s a time where we’re realizing that I’ve been in the UAW 10 years now and this past contract, we’ve only received a 3% raise every two years, so that’s 6% over the last four years. That doesn’t even catch up or it doesn’t even compare to inflation, which has been more than three times that. So when they say, “Oh look, you’re getting this raise or this lump sum bonus,” the bonuses just come and go. That’s why we’re fighting for cost of living allowance, ’cause that’s permanent.
Torice Sawyer:
Well, me as myself, me being at Jefferson North Assembly Plant, I work in final. I’ve worked in all the departments in assembly, trimmed chassis, final, little bit in body shop when I was a TPT. When I began working there in ’96, I actually left another facility that used to build parts for Chrysler and that was the Sebring. I got a phone call from my girlfriend, like, “Hey, my aunt work at an unemployment agency. She told us come down and fill out the app.” I’m like, “Bet.” So we rushed down there, we filled out the app, and it’s been almost 27 years counting the TPT time that I’ve been at Jefferson North Assembly Plant. Back then, we was at minimum wage, and that was minimum, literally, I want to say 7, $8.00 an hour. So when I came to Chrysler, that was such a blessing for me because I had already had purchased a house at the age of 21. So that was like, oh, my God, I was at 12, we started at 12.54, and now the kids starting at 17, $18.
When I tell them when I started at 12.54, they like, “Here? You was making only 12.54 working here?” They really thrown back with that. I was like, “Chrysler was everything back in ’96.” Just to try to get back in the big three, ’cause it was so hard to get it in GM Ford or Chrysler, I remember filling out the app, I put all of it, part-time, full-time, any time, just let me get my foot in the door. So I was very happy to come and work at Chrysler because like I said, back then it just meant everything, and you was not getting that type of pay. I was just almost three, four years out of school, out of high school, and I didn’t immediately go to school, to college. I did have some experience with community college at the time, but with that rate, it was really unheard of. So I felt like working at the big three was like a blessing to me and my family. I have three boys that have come up in the ranks, not at Chrysler, but off our likelihood.
Nicholas Livick:
It’s powerful listening to everyone’s stories. Mine actually starts in the ’60s, my grandfather hired into AMC Kenosha. When that closed down, he got hired into Janesville, Wisconsin. Sorry, I’m battling a little bit of a cold, the kids got me. My mom got hired in, I think she’s a 96er too. Then the recession hit and we were forced to move. Our plant closed, so we packed everything up, and my mom waited until she got her final offer and Kansas City was it. So I was like, “Sure. I’m ready for an adventure. It’s my senior year of high school.” So we moved down here, and then I went back to Wisconsin, went to college. I put my name in there. Like they said, it was impossible to get in. It’s a lottery system, at least it was for me. You’re just waiting to see if your name gets pulled. I finally got called. I was a semester away from my associate’s degree, and I remember sitting at my table just doing the math.
I was like, “Man, I could continue. I could get this degree. I could graduate. I could have all this student debt, or I can go and follow in the footsteps of my family,” and hopefully, I was looking at the past experiences. It was good enough for my grandfather to move his family out of a double wide into a home. It was good enough for my mom to actually buy her first new car ever after she got hired in. These jobs used to be life-changing jobs. It set the standard for not just manufacturing, but all of them, the working class in America. So I got hired in, and I just bounced around. I’ve done just about everything. I’m in general assembly, so we do all the inside of the vehicle. I’ve done material. I’ve been back in body shop. I’ve been a team leader.
Right now, I’m in the pool so I can go to any job in my group, and I’m just pretty much expected to be able to walk on to that job or do that job with minimal training. I could even be removed from my group and sent to another group because I’m a pool guy. So I could go to group one, and it’s the same kind of conditions, you’re trying to free up a team leader or somebody else, get them off the line so they can watch your brothers and sisters or the people in their area. So you’re expected to be able to walk on to this job that would take some people four hours, a day, three days, and you’re just expected to walk on and do it. So I could be doing anything on any given day, and I like it that way. I like to bounce around. Some people don’t like it, but I’ve found through my 10 years as when you get to one job, people don’t realize you’re stuck in the same 10 feet area for hours.
Nicholas Livick:
Same 10 feet area for hours and hours. I mean, your life kind of turns into a Dr. Seuss book, one car, two car, red car, blue car. So I love to bounce around. So that’s just a little bit about me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to actually pick up on that real quick and do a sort of mini round around the table. Because you all are doing such different jobs or you could do a different job depending on what day of the week it is. Right? And so I just wanted to give listeners a sense of what a typical week looks like if there is such a thing for you. Because again, we’re talking about the auto industry. We know in general that it’s hard work, but I still think a lot of people don’t know what that entails. So just to give folks more of a sense of the real day-to-day grind that we’re talking about here, could we go back around the table and just tell me what a typical week looks like for you? How long are you working? What’s your commute like? What does it look like in there? Just give folks more of a sense of what you go through on a week-to-week basis.
Marcelina Pedraza:
Okay. I’ll start. And I wanted to add some other stuff from before that I didn’t say. So you can put this in later if you want. Also, I wanted to mention that I’m a fourth generation union worker. My family, I come from a long line of steel mill workers and railroad workers that worked in the southeast side before the steel mills closed. And basically, just let their community in despair. But a typical week, let’s see, for trades, basically trades, we keep the line running. And production knows when the line stops, management all of a sudden, right away they’re calling for maintenance to come out, whether electricians usually first. And it’s something that we can’t correct, then we might need a millwright or a pipe fitter depending on the problem. And at my plant, trades work 12-hour shifts and it’s usually three or four days a week or five or two days a week. And it’s weird, the weekend. And it’s every other weekend, day or night.
So it could be a long day or a long night. And it could be, you could do anything from just making your rounds, making sure everything’s running correctly, servicing equipment. And during the little breaks, or lunch, or shift change, changing parts, making sure that everything’s ready for the next shift. Or sometimes when something breaks down, they’re on us. All the bosses come from everywhere in the planet seems, and they’re hovering over you, bird dogging us. Why isn’t it running? Why isn’t it running? Seconds is money, and it’s just like every second that the line is down, it’s freaking out. So we could be running around trying to reset a panel, or a robot, or trying to get the ovens back up and running in the paint shop. And some of these conditions are really hot. Most of the plants don’t have air conditioning. I don’t know. Some areas do, but it’s mainly to protect the equipment like in a paint shop. So we could be running to the roof to check the RTOs or working right near an oven, which just because it’s turned off, it’s still really hot around those ovens.
I remember working one breakdown, pretty much every electrician in that department working on this communication issue. And we were there for hours, and they had to bring us water and we were just melting. And over time we were done. We had to change our coveralls. Everyone was just soaking wet. But not every day is like that. It just depends on what’s going on. A lot of these plants run, I know our plant runs 24/7. And there’s hardly any time to do the basic maintenance that we need to do to keep the plant running in an efficient manner. They just want to make cars and produce. And a lot of times they don’t care about the conditions of the equipment. They’re like, “Oh, let’s work a super Saturday, super Sunday.” It’s like, all right, well, where’s our 24-hour time that we have to go in and fix the problems so that you don’t have these breakdowns throughout the week or the next shift even. But they don’t really look into that, I guess.
Torice Sawyer:
Well, for me, I’m over in ’91, ’94, which we call rose and marrows. And I am working, they actually have our plant at critical status, meaning we’re supposed to be actually working Sundays too as production. We only work one production Sunday, thank God, because we’ve still been on 6 days, 10 hours. In my department, we also do reprocessing, meaning the unavailable vehicles that have defects, we actually come in and we have to process those cars through rose and marrows. So if they’re not working on a Sunday, we are canvassed to work overtime on a Sunday in our area. So last month, I believe, yeah, the last two months I could say I had almost worked, and I was counting, about 23 days straight. And I was like, when they come around and ask for overtime or ask could I come in on a Sunday or Saturday if it was an off Saturday. I’m like, I got to turn it down. Because I know at this point my body is going to break down.
I’m just barely just getting over a cold myself, and I know my immune system will just automatically break down. So we are literally, we are working non-stop as well. And we felt like that because they felt like we may strike, they was kind of stockpiling the cars as well. Just trying to build whatever they could build and we’ll get it on the back end. We’ll repair those cars on the back end. So at the same time, you want the money because you don’t know if you’re going to go on strike and you want to try to put money aside. And then I still have a 13-year-old that’s in school, my last Mohican I call him, that I had to school shop for, and things of that nature.
And just going to the grocery store and spending $250 at Costco’s like nothing. And then, I still have to go to Myers and buy some of the stuff that they didn’t have at Costco’s. So I’m spending a good $400 at least on groceries. So I’m appreciating the overtime, but at the same time, I’m getting burnt out. We are really getting burnt out. And I try not to complain, and I thank God for the job, for the opportunity, but at the same time, we are getting burnt out.
Nicholas Livick:
And the nature of my job is I never know what’s going to go on. But when I was a team leader, to kind of tag on what Marcy said, when the moment that line goes down, and it’s a high stress situation. Because the moment your line goes down, the moment a job and your team goes down, management’s right there on the radio and they’re like, “What’s going on at 154? What’s going on at 210? What is it?” And it’s like, I mean, it’s only been like five seconds guys, let me at least get up out of my chair and walk over there.
So you got to just imagine that there’s a never ending stream of work as far as your eye can see, and you’re just sitting there in the same 15-foot footprint, and you’re walking back and forth. And this isn’t like a slow walk. This is, you got to keep up or that line is going down. And if that line goes down, and if it goes down too many times, management’s going to be standing there, bird dogging you watching. So you’re standing there, you’re walking back and forth, you’re probably going to walk 10 to 15 miles a night just in that same 15-foot footprint. You’re going to be adding parts to the car. The jobs at my plant run at about 58 seconds. So every 58 seconds you got a new job, but you can’t even really look at it at the tack time or the job time. It’s more of the load time.
So at our plant, a lot of our jobs are 98% plus loaded. So these are busy jobs. And even the jobs that are less loaded, well, it’s because the management came through with their little stop wash because they’ll do this every year and they’ll time the job. But they shave off half seconds, quarter seconds, and they make the job work on paper and then they stand back and scratch their head wondering why the line keeps on going down. Well, because last year it took me two seconds to do this push pin, and now it only takes me one second to do the push pin. So you do the math. And it’s hard work. There’s a lot of facilities. I’m actually kind of fortunate. My facility is climate-controlled. So during the heat of the summer, it could be 110 outside, and we’re lucky. And the plant’s staying at about 90 degrees, but that’s still hot for physical labor.
You go over to 249, the Ford plant, and they’re not climate-controlled. They’re out there, if it’s 110 outside, it’s 120 in the factory. And they’re getting heat relief breaks. They’re getting, literally, people are wheeling water up and down the aisles just to give people water breaks. I mean, it’s insane that we are in 2023, and we can’t even have basic conditions inside of the factories. And then you think about the dock workers, they’re driving into these semi-trucks that are really nothing more than convection ovens when it’s this hot outside. And then you go in the winter time and then it’s freezing cold. So there’s a lot of things. In my 10 years, before I turned 27, I’m 31 now. Before I turned 27, I had trigger finger, carpal tunnel in both my wrists, frozen shoulder, blown out my back because I was on a job where I was literally bending over 90 degrees.
So you do that for 420 times a night, do that, times that by five or six. And that’s how many cars you’re doing in a week. And my plant’s one of the lucky ones. We do nine-hour shifts. We are only slated to do eight, but we’ve been doing an hour of mandatory overtime. We’ve been scheduled a lot of Saturdays. Right now, the supply chain’s so wonky that they’ve been canceling them, they’ll schedule it. And this is another great thing that management does. They’ll schedule a Saturday and then before the weekend comes, they’re like, “Oh, we don’t actually need you guys.” It’s Wednesday. And it’s like, “Oh, thanks.” I could have gone out and enjoyed the time with my family, but instead, you know. So we can’t have vacations where we’re in there in sweltering conditions. The work has gotten, it’s essentially a speed up because the work has gotten so bad and so busy that even if something as simple as a wire comes tangled to you down the line, the line’s going down.
So it’s really dependent. Everybody needs to do their job a hundred percent every single time. And if you miss something, the next job’s going to go down. And then, that person’s in the hole. So then that person’s trying to catch up. And while that person’s catching up, well, guess what happened to the person down the line from them? Well, they got in the hole. So I mean, it’s just a cascading effect. So that kind of gives you an idea of what it’s like to work the line. It’s hectic, it’s stressful. But you do get your good days where everything just seems to be working and you can just kind listen to your music or audio books. That’s how I’m a big fan of audio books and just kind of zone out because you’ve been out the job for so long that it’s almost like your body’s busy, but your mind’s free.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I’ll tell you one thing, my body’s aching just listening to this. I got a shitty back and a bad knee, and they’re both hurting, listening to you guys talk. And speaking as a former warehouse worker in Southern California, I know what it’s like going into those trucks in the middle of summer. When you say it’s like a convection oven, you’re not kidding. You go out into the sun to cool off after coming out of one of those God damn trucks. And even just hearing this, I mean, I think folks can start to put together why you all just as workers in the auto industry who have such high demands put on you. And your bodies, and your brains, and your coworkers, and the different departments. And the speedups that affect your lives in the ways that you all enumerated. I mean, even just thinking about that, the working conditions and what it does to you as human beings trying to meet those quotas in such a high pressure, and kind of high stakes environment.
Because we’re talking industrial manufacturing. This is dangerous work too. You got to know what you’re doing, keep your wits about you, all that good stuff. So even just from that side, the daily work side, I can see why you all are fighting so hard to get a better contract that will make sure that you’re paid adequately for that. Better protect workers like yourselves who are in that situation. That already makes a ton of sense. But of course, we’re talking about, there’s a lot of other context here behind this contract fight. And I just wanted to kind of lay out sort of how I come to it as an outside observer, just trying to think about from my own advantage point, the changes that have happened to this industry. And I mean, geez, Torice, you can be talking about this going back to the late nineties. You’ve seen these firsthand. I mean, all of you have seen this firsthand, but I’m just speaking for myself.
I remember when the economy cratered in 2008. My family, like so many others, lost everything including the house that I grew up in. That’s where this show started years ago. But I remember those days. I remember the auto industry almost collapsing. I remember the American taxpayers bailing out two of the auto manufacturers to the tune of $80 billion. I remember workers like yourselves taking concessions, giving concessions at that moment, and all of us around the country. It was like, look, we’re in a crisis, we got to tighten our belts. We got to do what we can to keep this ship afloat. That was the mentality we were all in at that moment. And you guys and your coworkers showed up. You did what you had to do to keep the auto industry afloat. And you were explicitly promised by the big three automakers that you would get those concessions back when things turned around, when they were back in the black, when we weren’t on the lip of a volcano facing imminent collapse.
Fast forward a couple years, and like I said, I started this show and the first person I’ve interviewed for it was my dad, Jesus Alvarez. We talked about losing everything in the recession. I was learning more about what workers across the country were going through when I started the show back in 2018. And one of the first big story that I just got obsessed with was the GM layoffs in 2018. I talked to folks in Ohio, I talked to folks in Michigan where I was living at the time. I talked to folks in Oshawa in Canada. People who were telling me that the Monday after Thanksgiving break, people who came back and were told that GM was eliminating 14,000 jobs, including white and blue collar jobs, and they were profitable. This was when GM was back in the black. This was after GM got a massive tax cut from everybody else, every other corporation from these assholes in Washington, like the tax cuts in JOBS Act.
So they get these windfall profits from these tax cuts there. You all made this industry profitable after the great recession. And how were you repaid? With more layoffs, with closures, or idling. They always love to idle plants because they don’t say they’re going to close them. They just say, “Oh, we’re not using it right now.” But it effectively has the same effect. That’s what happened to Lordstown, the storied plant in Lordstown, Ohio. I mean, this what’s been happening in plants all across the country. And right now, we’re talking about an auto industry that is not where it was in 2008. In fact, I’m looking at the great background that Marcy has on our Zoom, including the rallying cry for the whole UAW. Shawn Fain’s been saying it, record profits equal record contracts. So we’ve come a long way from 2008, and I’m just kind of, again, giving my own sort of trying to put the pieces together as I’ve seen it over these past 15 years.
I wanted to turn it back over to you guys and ask just what context do people need to understand what brought us to this point? Why is this contract fight so significant? And I mean, we haven’t even touched on the reform movement within the UAW. You guys took control of your union. You got rid of a one party administration that had ruled for 70 years. I mean, there’s so much that has happened in this time, and I’m sorry I’m talking so long. This is such an important fight that I’m hoping I’m communicating effectively for folks. But I want to turn it back over to you all and ask just like-
Maximillian Alvarez:
… effectively for folks, but I want to turn it back over to y’all and ask, how should we be framing this? What is the context that led us to the point where we could see a major auto industry strike within the next two weeks?
Marcelina Pedraza:
Well, you got me thinking about my story too. So let me take it back even further to the ’70s and ’80s when Chicago made the steel that built our city and the skyscrapers across the country. And when those mills closed in my neighborhood in the southeast side of Chicago, it was devastating for our community. At some point there was, I think, I don’t know, a hundred thousand or so workers in the mills, maybe more, and those companies just left. There’s a great documentary about when Wisconsin Steel closed called Exit Zero by Christine Walley, and my dad worked at Wisconsin Steel and he was laid off and then eventually they just locked the gates and kicked everybody out.
They took their pensions, they took their last couple paychecks. I mean, yeah, I’ve seen what it does to a community, and that’s what reminds me or makes me think about Belvedere. And if I were still working there, I don’t know if I would still be in the plant because there is a skeleton crew of trades in the plant taking things apart and shipping it somewhere. I don’t know where, but it would be devastating to the community of Belvedere. It’s a small town. They rely heavily on all those jobs. And so just in these last few years, workers are getting fed up and we’re tired. We’ve given so much and the companies just keep taking and taking.
And we worked in a global pandemic risking our health and safety for them to make profits off of our labor, and that’s why you’ve seen so many more strikes happening. I was just reading in the Washington Post about this is the most strikes this year since the beginning, since before the pandemic, because it started when… well, most of us went back to work after a couple months, whereas a lot of people, especially the salary workers at Ford, got to work remotely. It’s not an option for most workers and… jumping around a bit, but yeah, it started with the Kellogg strike, I think, and then Caterpillar, John Deere, SAG-AFTRA and just countless CTU, Chicago Teachers Union, huge organizers in the labor movement.
And it’s really making people come together because we shouldn’t just classify ourselves as lower, middle, upper class. I have a family member who thinks that they’re comfortable, they’re upper middle class. I’m like, “Yeah, you still go to work every day, right? Your wife goes to work every day. You’re working for a paycheck. You’re not part of that 1% or 10%, even. We are all working people, we’re all working class,” but corporations and the billionaires want us to fight each other and say, “Well, no, they don’t deserve this. And McDonald’s workers don’t deserve that, or Starbucks workers,” but they’re getting what they want. They’re getting us to fight each other when really we should be fighting them, because there’s more of us than them.
So I was going to add too about… well, issues with the trades, specifically. It seems like with production and trades wages, they’re pretty close. We make probably a couple bucks more an hour? So it’s almost like if sometimes you’re production, you want to get in the trades, you think, “Oh, it’s going to be easy.” It’s not easy, but they’re easier. But it’s a lot of training and they might think it might not even be worth it just for a few bucks more. And right now we’re facing… there’s more trades retiring, the boomers, most of the trades, I think over 50%, are over the age of 45.
So we’re going to need a lot more people getting in the trades. But if these wages stay stagnant the way they have been, nobody’s going to want to do that. But when I started in ’99, it was ideal for me because I went to University of Southern California for two years, couldn’t afford to finish because the school was so expensive, but as soon as I got in the apprenticeship, I was able to pay off my college loans, buy a house, stuff like that. So yeah, these companies are going to have to pay up and to be competitive if they want to have a strong and a good workforce.
Torice Sawyer:
[inaudible 00:44:54] COVID. And it’s before then, but really when COVID happened, when the pandemic happened, people was literally fed up. That was a real kicker, because I just remember how they had Taco Bells open, McDonald’s, all these fast food places open, [inaudible 00:45:22] a pandemic, people dying, you know what I’m saying? Of COVID. And y’all felt like that was important to keep these places open. I literally felt like the only thing that should have been open maybe was the gas station, grocery stores, that was the essential worker.
They included Chrysler workers, GM for… they considered us essential workers. And they was also… I remember looking at CNN saying we supposed to been getting hazard pay, the people even at the restaurant should be getting hazard pay because they was basically taking the risk of going to work every day and catching COVID, you know what I’m saying? So I’m looking like, “Where our hazard pay at?” Because I remember our life had changed. We got the temperature, we making sure we ain’t got a cold and all this crap. We got the plastic dividers that’s dividing us sitting at the table.
When that really happened, and they really expected us to come in, and I remember getting angry when people was coming, running late because you literally was trying to find a babysitter, someone to watch your kids, what you talking about, they tardy? They need to have a babysitter. People couldn’t even take their kids over people houses and the grandmother houses, the grandfather houses because they didn’t want to get them sick. So it was like that really opened people eyes. They didn’t want to work here, they didn’t want to work. Like, “F this job,” you know what I’m saying? Literally. A lot of people didn’t even come back after that because they were so afraid of catching COVID.
But just everything just… they felt like they wasn’t getting enough money. Just everything just start coming in on people and they just felt like they was unappreciated. Of course, the wages is not enough. Ain’t wasn’t nothing enough, as far as I remember, that’s what they told us. “Y’all is killing the unemployment, so y’all need to hurry up and go back to work.” And we literally was even maybe the two months, but that’s what really kicked up all the smoke, even with everything that’s going on, COVID to me really just had people just fed up just like, “Oh, this is not enough.”
You seeing your coworkers die, we were… oh my God, just family members dying, you know what I’m saying? And we just was exhausted. During the pandemic, people literally didn’t come back. They didn’t come back to work and we wasn’t having enough people. The TPTs was literally used every day, supplemental workers, whatever they want to call them. I think of a supplement as a vitamin, but they called them supplemental workers. They literally worked every day because people didn’t come back to work. So I really felt like COVID was the kicker of people just being fed up and not being appreciated and really wanting more.
Marcelina Pedraza:
Getting back to the pandemic, I just remembered that was paying a small mortgage for childcare and a lot of working parents were doing the same. I’m a one-parent household and even with just one kid, I couldn’t leave my kid home alone and they were doing remote or online learning, so I had to pay someone to be at my house, someone that was willing to go into a house where they know that that person that lives there is going to a place every day with thousands of other people, so risking getting sick themselves, and like I said, it was like paying another mortgage payment or a car payment and the little stimulus checks we got here and there, that didn’t really make up for it. But that went on for like a year, I guess? I don’t even know.
Nicholas Livick:
I really think COVID was a great reset for a lot of workers. When you get that time off and you’re at home and you’re rediscovering the people in your life, I mean, my plant was laid off for about eight months and I had just had my son. So for the first eight months of his life, I got to watch him grow. Every single day, he’s hitting a new milestone, and then a month down the road, you’re holding him and you’re like, “Hold on. You used to just cover part of my chest and now your legs are dangling off. What the hell happened here?”
So I mean, I just think it was a really big reset. And another thing that people need to understand is, we’re not complaining. Every single person on this call, this is something that’s really deep within the big three. We might joke around and give each other shit like, “Oh, Ford, oh Dodge,” and all this other stuff. But at the end of the day, we’re really loyal to our companies. We’re really proud to work there. I mean, you go back to the ’30s and when people died, they’d literally get buried with their Ford badge. I mean, we’re really proud of the work that we do. What we’re trying to do is we’re trying to save this industry for the generation coming after us.
When I started in 2012, the starting wage was $15.78. In 2023 at GM it is $16.67. And that’s what your conditions are for two years, which is when you’re a mandatory hire. But if you break time for 30 days, so if you go through pretty much any layoff, your time restarts, and then after you’re hired in, you have an eight-year grow in pay scale. So for 10 years of your life, you’re not at top pay. For 10 years of your life, you’re trying to figure out how are you going to make ends meet? How do you save for retirement when you can’t even afford rent?
If you look at what an average two bedroom apartment goes for in any area where the big three have operations, I’m pretty sure Kentucky, because I did the research for the Members United campaign, Kentucky is one of the only places where you can actually afford a two-bedroom apartment on that wage. It’s ridiculous. So we have a lot of systemic issues that we need to fix in this contract, and a lot of it was what we had already given up, and we did it for the companies.
We did it because of how proud we are of this industry. They came to us and they said, “Look, we’re bankrupt,” and it wasn’t the UAW’s fault. This was poor management. I mean, they’re building SUVs when gas is going through the roof in 2008, and they’re watching all these other manufacturers build cars, and they’re like, “Ah, well, let’s double down on the SUV strategy.” I mean, it was just ridiculous. It was gross mismanagement. But we still gave, and we gave because we wanted to protect the industry. Now, we are going back to these companies and we’re trying to save the industry. It’s not about us. It’s about everyone that’s coming up after us.
If my son or daughter decides to become a fourth generation UAW worker in one of these plants, right now, I would tell them to go anywhere else because it’s not worth it. I mean, the work, the toll it takes on your body, and then if you give 30 years to any of these companies, now they don’t want to give you a pension. Okay, well, I mean, I gave you 30 of my best years. That’s 30 years of missing family events. That’s 30 years of you damaging and destroying my bodies.
And then they also don’t want to give you retiree healthcare because they don’t want to fix you when they broke you. I mean, I can remember growing up, and now that I think about it after 10 years, and as a father, I can put some sense into it, but my dad would only play catch for 5, 10, 15 minutes. And you’re a kid and you’re like, “Come on dad, let’s just keep on going,” and he’s just getting done from work. I finally understand it. These conditions, they need to change.
I mean, we can’t allow multi-billion dollar companies to run people ragged like this. I mean, there’s no reason. You have people working 90 days straight, 12-hour shifts, seven days a week. The longest I ever worked was 21 days in a row, and I was lucky. I consider myself lucky again at that time, because I was in material. But guess what? That’s still 21 days in a row you’re sitting, cranking your back looking backwards because you’re in a factory. The moment you’re not twisted backwards and you’re not watching where you’re going, the moment you take your eye off that aisle, you could kill somebody. It’s that serious.
These plants, I don’t even know how to explain it. This needs to change and it needs to change now, if we can’t win this, if we can’t win this, what’s going to happen to the rest of labor? And as we transition to EVs and they’re about to lose… it takes about 30% less of the workforce. So where’s that 30% going to go? Well, the big three want it to go into Mary Barra’s and Carlos Tavares’s pocketbook, but in the reality, it’s got to benefit the workers.
We got to stop letting these corporations get it away with highway robbery. For example, GM reinstated the dividend at their company. They’ve spent about $5 billion on it. Instead of reinstating the dividend, if they give every worker a raise, it would be about a $7 an hour raise for every single employee for the same amount that they’re given to the shareholders for literally… they don’t even hold a piece of paper, it’s just an electronic share that pops up on their app like Charles Schwab or whatever.
I mean, you push people that care and they truly give a shit about your company, and you push them beyond their breaking point, beyond the normal lengths of human endurance, and eventually, people are going to start to snap. And I think that’s what you’re seeing in this round of contract negotiations. I think that’s what you’re seeing with the reform movement. People just were fed up. They were sick of it. They didn’t want business as usual. They wanted somebody to win a transformational, historic contract.
Record profits make record contracts. It’s a great background, but I mean, it’s the God honest truth. How can we as workers and as a society sit there and talk about the workers’ demands and, “Oh, these are unimaginable demands. We can’t possibly give these demands,” but we never question the CEOs when they’re spending all this money on stock buybacks, when they’re giving their CEOs outrageous salaries, when they’re spending money on the dividends?
I mean, if we really want to be competitive, well, let’s look at our CEO pay and compare it to Toyota. Toyota, $4 million. Mary Barra, $29 million. I mean, it’s not a worker problem. This is a corporate greed problem, and we got to fix it. We’ve got to get back to having responsible corporations, paying their workers decent wages with decent conditions with decent benefits, and getting back to the way unions and labor used to fight and it used to be, because we’ve seen what happens when labor grows complacent. We’ve seen what happens when labor doesn’t fight, and we just got to get back to our roots. And I think that’s what’s happening right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and you make… all of you, I mean, really important points here. And that last one really sticks with me because I’ve been very open about this on the show and elsewhere that I grew up very conservative in southern California. Not a very… in Orange County, no less. That was not a very union-friendly place. Marcy could tell you. It’s kind of dicey, especially if we’re talking about the ’90s and the early aughts.
And the narrative that I always heard as a young conservative with no real connections to organized labor… I had some. On the Mexican side of the family, there were some union workers, but they didn’t talk about it that much, at least not with us. But the whole narrative I was always told growing up, it was based on your industry. It was based on examples like Flint and Lordstown and Chrysler in 1980. And what that narrative was, was unions and union workers got too greedy. They asked for too much, and the poor American auto companies had no choice but to close up shop, drop economic nukes on entire communities, close plants, take-
Maximillian Alvarez:
… economic nukes on entire communities. Clothes plants take those jobs abroad, pay workers in other countries far less, deal with far fewer labor laws and environmental regulations because that’s what they had to do to stay profitable, and businesses need to be profitable, right? This was the common wisdom that I grew up with. Well, first off, we got a lot of problems with that narrative, but I think the point that y’all made is so important where it’s like, why the F are we not applying the same standard to the executives and the shareholders? If they are paying themselves billions of dollars, if they are more profitable than they’ve ever been off your backs, is anyone going to stop and say, “Hey, these vultures at the top are literally siphoning all of the wealth out of our communities.”
They’re not hurting. It’s not the union’s fault, it’s not a worker problem, it’s a corporate greed problem, as Nick said. When are we going to make that turn as a culture? When are we going to apply the same conviction with which we have talked about the decline of the auto industry as a cipher for the problem with unions in this country in general and workers demanding too much? When are we going to apply that kind of standard or criticism to corporate America while they are making billions and billions of dollars? That’s what I want to know, just as an American at this point. I could talk to you guys for hours but I know you’ve got busy lives, you’ve got busy jobs, you’re in the midst of this contract fight, and I promised you I wouldn’t keep you longer than an hour, so if I can just a few more minutes, I want to end on that note of, what happens now? Let’s bring the focus back to the contract.
We haven’t even talked about much the reform movement that led to y’all ousting the previous administration, voting in through the reform, Unite All Workers for Democracy caucus really rallying behind a new administration, winning all the seats that you contested. Before that, passing a referendum that meant that UAW members would vote more democratically for their union leadership, a one member, one vote system as opposed to the previous delegate system, which enabled the previous administration to stay in place for so many years. This is very similar to what we saw play out with the Teamsters. We all know the history of the corruption, the mob, Hoffa. There’s a lot of dark stuff in the Teamsters past, even as it is a storied and important union that has done so much good for working people in this country, but of course it’s got a lot of bad skeletons in the closet as well.
And so, after that all came to a head in the ’80s and ’90s, the Teamsters were forced to have democratic elections within their union, and that is what laid the groundwork decades later for that union to elect Sean O’Brien and their reform slate, and then Sean O’Brien and that new administration coming in rallying UPS Teamsters and saying, “We are turning the tide. No more concessionary bargaining, no more of this working us to death crap. We are coming back to get what is ours,” and we just saw them win a historic contract. There’s always more fighting to do, as we know. There’s always more that we need to get back. The contract is not perfect, but it’s a shit ton better than what Teamster UPSers have been getting for many, many years. Y’all are in a similar situation. We know that the UAW leadership has been rife with corruption. The FBI just did a multi-year investigation that landed multiple leaders, including two former UAW presidents, in prison.
That’s bad, but what I want people listening to understand is, that doesn’t just mean you give up on the union and you say, you know what? I’m just going to trust my employer to treat me nicely. I’m going to put all my hope in my boss because my union leaders are corrupt. No, you take hold of that union. You fight with your coworkers to make it better and to better represent you. That is what UAW members did. That’s an incredible feat. They got one member, one vote, and then they used that new voting system to vote in this reform slate with Shawn Fain as UAW president. Now he, with the members who are rallying behind him in this contract fight are ready to go to the mat and say, “We’re not taking more of these concessions. We’re not sitting idly by while y’all rake in record profits and pay out shareholder dividends and all that crap. We are coming back for what’s ours.”
I wanted to just smush that in because the reform movement discussion, we could do a whole other podcast on that, but I want to make sure that folks understood. It’s been mentioned by our great panelists, I just wanted to give y’all some of that context before we hit this final question, kind of a rapid fire round around the table, then I promise I’ll let everyone go. I just wanted to ask if we could go back around and highlight any key issues that you want listeners to focus on, like what is this fight really about? What are the issues that y’all are prepared to go on strike over? And most importantly, what can we all do? Within the labor movement and beyond, what can working people do to stand in solidarity with y’all if a strike happens or not?
Marcelina Pedraza:
That’s a lot to unwrap there. Let’s see. First of all, I’m just so glad of the transparency from our newly elected leadership. I think they’re doing a great job at getting the rank and file fired up. We mean business now. Right before this, we had our practice picket at our union hall. We have another one coming up this Friday, so I would urge people to support us. If you see us on the picket line, support us if you can, give us a honk. Donate to our strike pantry, pass out some gas cards, whatever you can to support. Workers just need to support each other. We’re all fighting for decent living wages and conditions. Coming in after 2013, I’m not considered a legacy employee, but because I’m trades, I didn’t have to start at a lower tier, but I don’t have a pension, I don’t have lifetime medical.
These are issues that are important to me. Obviously we all need huge wage increases across the board because we see what profits these companies are making, and it’s time for them to give back what everyone has lost these over a decade now, 15 years almost. So yeah, like I said, support our pickets, our contract. Let’s not fight each other over, “Well, you shouldn’t make this,” or, “You should just be happy you have a job.” I hate reading the comments on any of the union posts that I see, I try to ignore it. But if you’re fed up, then organize the union in your own workplace, whether it’s an office or a factory or a store. You deserve better wages and benefits too. I’ll leave it at that.
Torice Sawyer:
Well, I’m happy you did mention the reform one member, one vote. That was the best thing since sliced bread. I can say that because I used to be in leadership and I did consider our former presidents and VPs as my superiors. That was such a slap in the face in what we endured, and it was vital that we had a one member, one vote pass. I am so happy that we have Shawn Fain as our president and the rest of the IEB board that did get elected. What people had to realize, these individuals was part of the rake and file just months ago. They was in these plants. They had endured everything that we’re talking about, have talked about for this past hour. They knew everything that we experienced. So, it is so important that these individuals are in these positions that they are in, and that’s why this contract will be epic. It will be epic.
Record profits, record contracts. That’s the sum of everything what Shawn’s been saying. We are not trying to be greedy. We just asking for our piece of the pie. We do not care what the CEOs are making. Just think, if they will give us a couple of million of dollars of what they’re getting a year of their $24 million salary and gave it back to the members, that would be epic. We’re not asking for much. All we asking for is our due diligence. And I do have a pension, but I do want my brothers and sisters that came in there after me to have a pension because even the ones that have a pension, they didn’t even realize. I had to tell a full-time worker that has a pension, I said, “They don’t get nothing when they leave, literally.” And she’s like, “What you mean?” I said, “They don’t have dental, glasses. They don’t have nothing. They just quit.” And she was like, “Oh my God.”
This last week, I’m telling someone this. So, that’s the division that this has caused and that’s why it’s so important for them to get a pension also. Their bodies are hurting just as our body hurting. My feet ache. When I get off the car, I have to calm down and just sit in a car for a minute because my feet is hurting. Their feet are hurting, their back’s going to be hurting, they’re not going to be able to see, they may need dentures. This is what we are talking about. Yes, we had to go back and say, “Hey, we not going to offer pensions,” but they did make a deal and say, “Hey, once we do better, we going to give back.” Now, all that then went out the window and they just want to say, “Oh, we just got these workers and this is what it is.”
No, this is not what it is. This is not what it has to be. We all are one big family in the UAW and if we get pinches, they need to have pinches too. [inaudible 01:12:15] everything that we are asking for, we are not asking for much. We just asking for a little. And I love to come back because it was so much that needed to be said as well, but I love Shawn Fain and I thank him for everything that he is out there trying to do, and I pray for his mental health because this stuff is not easy, mentally, physically, none of it. I pray for all of our union leadership. Thank you.
Nicholas Livick:
Yeah. If you think your union’s not working, UAWD, TDU, we have proven that you can reform your union, you can transform your union. Your union is not the leadership, you are the union. The rank and file is the union. The union is not an outside entity, it is you. If you have a problem with it, step up and change it, and you can change it in a really big way. How can people support us? There’s the obvious things, like come down to our picket line and talk to people. I told you this, Max, on our last interview. At my plant, that’d be 2000 different stories, 2000 different reasons of why people are standing out there. But more importantly, if you really want to support us, if you really want American manufacturing to exist, we got to buy union-made products that are built here.
You got to support your communities, and you got to check your VINs and make sure they’re not built somewhere else. If you want these jobs to stay here, if you want these jobs to be good for the next generation, that’s a really big part of it, is supporting union labor, supporting hardworking people like those on this call and the 150,000 of us across the nation. And it’s so much bigger than just us because for every job in the auto planet, it supports seven… I’ve seen numbers, seven to nine jobs outside of it. That’s in the supply chain. So, you got your suppliers and all of these people depend on this industry. This is over a million jobs we’re talking about that’s going to be affected if we go out. So come down to our picket lines, support us, talk to us. We’re not unfriendly people. We’re everyday people like you, like the person that you wave hi to as you’re driving down the street. You know, you give them the two-finger, the three-finger wave, whatever your choice is, on the steering wheel?
We’re just like you. We just want our fair shake at the table. We want these jobs to be good paying jobs and we want corporate America to stop fleecing the workers. That’s what this is. Shawn always says the talking heads say class warfare, but it’s only class warfare when the working class people start stepping up. And I’m sorry if you can hear my son in the background. It’s getting to be his bedtime and he wanted to come down and say hi. So, I thank you guys for coming. Thank you, Max, for having us on. There’s so much, we could sit down and we could probably talk for five hours. There’s so much that can be said about this fight and what it’s going to mean, and I can’t wait to read the analysis of it from Labor Notes and everything else in the future, and The Real News Network, and see what you guys have to think about it, but I appreciate you guys and thank you for having me.
Marcelina Pedraza:
Thank you again for having me as well. And honestly, I didn’t even know about this podcast, but I am a subscriber to In These Times, so I get the magazine at home, a hard copy.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, In These Times rocks, baby.
Nicholas Livick:
Thanks, Max.
Torice Sawyer:
And I will subscribe as well and start supporting your podcast. I think this a wonderful communication piece for the working class and for everything that you’re trying to do, so I would love to support you as well.
Nicholas Livick:
Hey, while everyone’s here, is it okay if I share a little screen grab of all of us sitting here and say, “Get ready for an awesome podcast that’s about to drop,” and tag y’all on Twitter?
Torice Sawyer:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, sure. Well, let me stop the recording real quick.
Two days before their contract expires at midnight Thursday, the United Auto Workers (UAW) are poised to strike the Big 3 automakers — General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis — to recoup concessions made over the past two decades, end tiers, boost wages, and fight for a shorter workweek and other quality-of-life demands. The auto companies are preparing for a strike, given the UAW’s new fighting…
During the difficulties of this recession, recent grads like me are facing a tough job market. Gen Z is already credited and criticized for its impact on the workplace. As I scroll through LinkedIn, I’m flooded with endless articles dubbing Gen Z as disruptive, challenging and demanding at work. And maybe for good reason: From preferring remote/hybrid work, to pushing for shorter work weeks and…
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has filed a complaint on behalf of a former Amazon worker alleging that the company’s nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) are overly broad and restrict workers’ rights. In its filing against the company, the NLRB notes that Amazon required employees from its drone project to sign NDAs that would limit the ability of workers to openly discuss with one another…
This story originally appeared in In These Times on Sept. 11, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
CHICAGO – Wearing a red United Auto Workers (UAW) t-shirt, Anastasia Gibson, 48, is warm and polite, quick to flash a broad smile. But her anger rises when she talks about her sacrifices to Ford, which made $10.4 billion in profits in 2022. Gibson works 10-hour shifts and injured her back on the job in 2021. “They don’t value anything we do. They want us to get as many cars off the line as we can.”
Such anger was palpable among the roughly 200 workers who gathered alongside Gibson in the late afternoon of September 6 outside the UAW Local 551 union hall in far southeastern Chicago, not far from the Indiana border. They were there to practice rallying and chanting for a picket line, in preparation for a possible strike as soon as midnight on September 14, when their union contract with Ford expires.
The golden sunshine slanted down on the crowd as it chanted, “Record profits equal record contracts!” Speakers addressed the crowd, among them Congressman Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.) and UAW Region 4 director Brandon Campbell, who proclaimed, “All they care about is their wealth and power. They’re too damn rich!”
Some of the union’s top demands are cost-of-living adjustments, an end to wage and benefit tiers based on hiring date, and an end to the mistreatment of temporary workers.
“When I took this job, it was not a traditional job for women. I love my job. I have pride. I want them to show they have respect.”
Those demands apply not just to Ford but to all the “Big Three” automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis North America (the parent company of Chrysler and Jeep). UAW’s contracts with all three, covering some 146,000 workers, run out at the same time, a momentous opportunity for joint labor action across employers from a union that recently saw a big shift in leadership. Reform challenger Shawn Fain won the union presidency in March, calling for a new era of militancy, more democratic decision-making and new organizing.
Fain has struck a confrontational stance towards the Big Three automakers — and the wealthy class overall—criticizing the greed of corporate executives and making bold demands, like a 32-hour work week with no reduced pay. Other demands Fain has presented to all of the Big Three include enhanced profit sharing, improved wages, more paid time off and the right to strike over plants closing.
And as the Biden administration subsidizes a boom in electric-vehicle manufacturing, the union also wants a just transition to ensure electric vehicle jobs are good jobs and do not drive down labor conditions.
Workers at the Local 551 rally underscored the key demand to cap the use of temporary workers, who make lower pay and are the lowest tier of workers, used by the company to suppress labor costs. UAW wants to temporary workers to become permanent workers after 90 days, with full benefits and profit sharing.
Under the 2019 contracts that are about to expire, it takes two years for a temporary employee to convert. This feels like an eternity for Erron Hall, a temporary worker who started at the Chicago Assembly Plant in late November 2022, and is making just $16.67 an hour. This wage is difficult, he says, with the “cost of living going up.”
“This is my first time dealing with a strike,” Hall says, holding a sign that says “United for a Strong Contract,” and wearing one of many red shirts in the crowd. “It’s something new.”
Other picket signs read “End Tiers: No 2nd Class Workers,” reflecting another top issue for workers. Those who were hired following the 2007 contract suffered lower wages and poorer benefits, including the complete loss of pensions, which were swapped out for 401(k) accounts. The union wants a full restoration of pensions, a big issue for picketer Karla Hayes, a metal finisher who has been working at Ford for 13 years, starting after they took pensions away. “I’m 58 with no pension,” she says.
“When I took this job, it was not a traditional job for women,” Hayes continues.” (Overhearing this, her coworker, 39-year-old Robert Desmond, chimes in to say, “She does one hell of a job!”)
Ford workers Robert Desmond, Karla Hayes and Robert Kacher get strike-ready at the UAW Local 551 union hall in Chicago on Sept. 6, 2023. PHOTO BY SARAH LAZARE
“I love my job,” Hayes says. “I have pride. I want them to show they have respect.”
UAW is also calling for more holidays and paid time off, which would be huge for Gibson. In her 11 years at Ford, Gibson says she has missed “tons of things” with her six children — awards ceremonies, field trips. She’s hoarding days off in hopes of making her son’s high school graduation this spring.
Polling shows that UAW workers have the overwhelming support of the public. A Gallup poll released on August 30 found that “three in four Americans … side with the United Auto Workers in their negotiations with U.S. auto companies.”
Ford worker Robert Kacher, 39, is a self-described “news junkie” who voted for Fain in the UAW presidential election. He read the poll online, but felt it viscerally when he marched in the Labor Day parade in Lowell, Ind. The crowd went wild when they saw the UAW contingent, he says. “They were very supportive of what we were going to do.”
Some of this community support is organized. The Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America mobilized members to attend another “practice picket” on September 8.
UAW Local 551 also attracted at least one international supporter. Helene Cavat, a teacher from France, happened to be visiting friends in Chicago the week of the practice picket, and decided to trek out to show her support. She is an active member of France’s General Confederation of Labour, and wanted to show her solidarity. “We need more international exchanges,” she tells me.
While the outcome of contract talks remains uncertain, the workers gathered outside of the Local 551 office are clearly preparing to strike if needed. After the rally, workers clustered together to talk logistics with a strike captain. Flyers announced where non-perishable food and toiletries can be dropped off, to help relieve hardship for striking families. The mood was urgent and friendly, a combination of getting serious business done and catching up with coworkers.
Numerous workers I talked to say they are ready to do what’s necessary, in a struggle that has profound implications for their lives. “This place works a number on your body and soul,” says Anthony Romero, a 32-year-old worker at the Chicago Assembly Plant and a veteran of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “That’s why I’m here.”
Gibson describes herself as “injured for life” from her 2021 workplace back injury, and estimates that a majority of her coworkers are in a similar position. “People here have carpal tunnel, rotator cuff injuries, back injuries. The work is hard and strenuous. There is wear and tear.”
Anastasia Gibson works at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant inspecting the assembly line, checking and fixing things like connections, plugs and wires.
For all that, the money just isn’t enough, she says. “We are all really struggling. We’re in tough times. Prices are high. Going to the grocery store, you have to pick and choose what you eat.” Striking would make money even tighter, but she says she is ready.
But Fain’s public call for a 32-hour work week, whether it’s won in this contract or in the future, is her north star.
Right now she works 10-hour shifts, four days a week, some of them overnight. It takes her a full day of not working to unwind, she explains.
“For me it would be amazing,” she says. “It would allow me to get some rest.”
This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a non-profit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.
“The Republican Party is the most dangerous organization in human history,” says Noam Chomsky. It seems like a ridiculous statement. “Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth? Not that I’m aware of.” He has a point. Even the Nazis didn’t want to destroy civilization itself; they wanted to kill millions of people and dominate civilization, not bring it to an end. The Republican Party is much more ambitious, and more nihilistic: it is the capitalist id, or rather the capitalist death instinct, adopted as the organizing principle of a vast political force. Profit over people at all costs, including acceleration of global warming—not to mention demolition of organized labor, the welfare state, the regulatory state, progressive taxation, public resources like education and transportation, and the whole legacy of the New Deal. For Republicans even more than Democrats, enslavement to the business oligarchy is the highest good.
This being the case, one might be perplexed that “postliberals” and other conservatives who pride themselves on their concern for “the common good” do not devote all their energy to defeating Republicans and organizing a popular movement for social democracy. In fact, they tend to do the opposite: they praise and endorse Republicans (especially pseudo-populists like Donald Trump, Josh Hawley, and J. D. Vance) while denouncing the “progressives” or “democratic socialists” who are struggling to build movements that will defend the common good and repair the social fabric rent by hyper-capitalism. On issue after issue, from protection of the environment to the resurrection of labor unions to the dismantling of psychopathic mass incarceration, it is organizers on the left, not the right, who are actually trying to conserve society. In this sense, it is leftists who are the true conservatives.
The political attitudes of most postliberals are approximately those manifested in Patrick Deneen’s new book Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future. It’s a very flawed book, as I explain in a forthcoming review. Here, I want only to note the incoherence of its political stance, which is that of right-wing postliberalism in general (as opposed to left-wing postliberalism, such as Adrian Pabst’s). As in his earlier book Why Liberalism Failed, Deneen deplores the atomization of modern society and the decline of community, stability, family, and traditional norms of social obligation. But he blames this social crisis on “liberalism,” a constellation of ideologies (some of which, historically, are mutually contradictory), rather than the material social relations of capitalism, as Marxists have done since the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In Marx’s famous words, “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned…” Since capitalist class structures are the real basis for a way of life—an atomized, profit-obsessed, consumerist, hedonistic way of life—postliberals have gotten the very name of their philosophy wrong. It should be called postcapitalism, assuming the goal really is to create a cohesive, communal society.
What a postcapitalist world would look like is hard to imagine, but it would at least do away with the antagonistic and exploitative production relations that are ultimately responsible for the atomization postliberals lament. Ordinary people would control their work, in the form of worker cooperatives and democratic government coordination of large industry (possibly still in a market-oriented economy). The 1912 platform of Eugene Debs’ Socialist Party isn’t a bad place to start. If the notion of some degree of “government planning” seems unrealistic or tyrannical, we should remember that even today, the U.S. government engages in economic planning on a colossal scale, for instance through its subsidies to high-tech industry, its trade and tariff policies, its military procurement programs, and its regulation of all sectors of the economy. During World War II, in fact, government planning was remarkably successful, leading to full employment and setting the stage for the prosperous 1950s and 1960s. We don’t live in a true market economy.
Instead of taking their “communitarian” values to their logical, anti-capitalist conclusion, however, most postliberals remain on the level of culture, identity politics, and other half-measures. Deneen, like his co-thinkers Gladden Pappin, Chad Pecknold, Adrian Vermeule, Yoram Hazony, and others, advocates restrictions on immigration in the hope that this will somehow shore up the national community and protect wages. (He disregards the fact that the presence of undocumented immigrants and refugees stimulates the economy and creates jobs.) He argues that we have to renew the “Christian roots of our civilization” by making politics “a place for prayer” and reinfusing religion into public and private activities. Broadly, “an ennobling of our elite,” such that it is selflessly concerned with the well-being of “the people” and “work[s] to improve the[ir] lives, prospects, and fate,” will revitalize society and community. He fails to explain how such an ennobling of the ruling class can ever occur in the context of advanced capitalism, characterized by the global hegemony of unfettered greed.
In fact, Deneen even deprecates social democracy and its “progressive liberalism,” claiming without evidence that redistribution of wealth to workers has “led to extensive damage to the broader economic order.” He seems unaware that postwar social democracy, created through overwhelming pressure by unions, socialists, and communists, was the closest modern society has ever come to protecting families, communities, and social stability.
It isn’t hard to criticize the idealism, political naïveté (as if class conflict isn’t endemic to capitalism!), and historical ignorance of postliberalism. But the basic incoherence of the ideology is that its attacks on liberalism and the left, and its defense of conservatism, only serve to empower the forces most dedicated to sabotaging the very values postliberals claim to uphold, values like “national resilience,” “common purposes,” and the “social covenant.” Republicans and business reactionaries love to keep the political focus on things like the decline of religion, the ostensible immigrant invasion, and the excesses of liberal identity politics, so that they can go on smashing the working class, appropriating most of the world’s wealth, privatizing and atomizing society, and destroying the prospects for human survival. Postliberals are in danger of being useful idiots for the most insatiable sociopaths on the planet.
Will it be denied that the Republican Party is as bad as all this? Consider the evidence. Donald Trump is supposedly a populist, someone trying to turn Republicans into the party of the working class. It turns out that his administration, like all Republican administrations since Reagan’s, was utterly slavish to the most misanthropic sectors of business. His NLRB waged an “unprecedented” attack on workers’ rights. He weakened or eliminated over 125 policies that protected the country’s air, water, and land. His budgets savagely slashed benefits for low-income Americans, continuing a longstanding Republican practice. All this is the exact opposite of protecting the “common good” that postliberals say they value so much.
What about the great “populist” senators Hawley and Vance? They give, at best, tokenistic and rhetorical support to the working class: neither has even cosponsored the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, and Hawley, according to the AFL-CIO, has almost always voted against the interests of workers. Vance, a venture capitalist, finds it much more congenial to spew racist “great replacement” nonsense—an identity politics of the right—and blame those with a low income for their own failures than to actually do anything to help the latter. If this is the record of Republicans who present themselves as pro-worker, it isn’t hard to imagine how bad establishment Republicans are.
Perhaps the greatest crime of the Republican Party is that it is almost rock-solidly opposed to even the mildest proposals to address global warming, which threatens not only working people but all life on earth. The sweltering summer the world has just experienced will likely be seen as a gloriously mild one thirty years from now, when wildfires are raging everywhere, ocean levels are much higher, and whole continents are descending into chaos. The Republican plan to address the coming cataclysms is…to make them worse. Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for the next Republican president, calls for “shredding regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants, dismantling almost every clean energy program in the federal government and boosting the production of fossil fuels.” The inadequate Inflation Reduction Act, which provides $370 billion for investment in clean energy, would be repealed. Allied nations would be encouraged to use more fossil fuels, and the National Security Council would be forbidden to consider climate change worthy of discussion.
Nihilism on this scale, an explicit embrace of something close to species-suicide by a major political party, is unheard-of in history. It is collective criminal lunacy, worse than Nazism, as Chomsky rightly notes. And yet how many postliberals, how many conservative proponents of the traditional values of family, community, and morality, are strongly speaking out against it, against this brazen threat to all families, communities, and morality itself? Their priority, rather, is to denounce “critical race theory” and keep out immigrants, as if that will heal the country.
Postliberals claim to favor policies that support marriage and family, singling out for praise Hungary’s initiatives to offer paid leave for parents and financial incentives for three or more children. They also support government spending on large infrastructure projects. So why didn’t they aggressively lobby Congress to pass Biden’s original Build Back Better bill in 2021? This bill, which couldn’t pass because of Republican opposition, would have been an immense boon to working families through its investments in childcare and preschool, paid family and medical leave, community college, child tax credits, physical infrastructure, affordable housing, health care, and environmental protection. It was the most ambitious measure in generations to repair the social compact and encourage family formation. Not a single Republican supported it.
It is hard to imagine that any party has ever been more committed to destroying families than the Republican, yet the self-proclaimed defenders of family values aim their ire at Democrats. However bad Democrats are, they are the party responsible for the New Deal, for Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, for the almost-passed Build Back Better bill, for Biden’s NLRB that is as supportive of unions as Trump’s was hostile towards them. We should recognize, then, a perhaps unpalatable truth: since Republicans will never do a single thing opposed to the interests of the billionaire class, the only hope for the United States is to keep them out of power at the same time as popular movements are pushing Democrats to the left. Had the Democratic Party won a few more seats in the Senate in 2020, transformative laws on voting rights, union organizing, family welfare, and environmental protection that were passed in the House might have been enacted. It was a tragic missed opportunity, but, with the defeat of Republicans and the election of leftists, such opportunities can appear again.
Postliberals can contribute positively to politics, but only if they follow the recent example of one of their own: Sohrab Ahmari, who has written an impressive book on corporate America’s plunder of the working class, entitled Tyranny, Inc: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty—And What to Do About It. Ahmari still seems to have some illusory hope regarding the likes of Hawley, Vance, and Marco Rubio, who wouldn’t be in the Republican Party if they really wanted to help people. (Token populist moves shore up their voting base.) But at least Ahmari has apparently realized that the battle against liberal identity politics is less important than the battle for a left-wing economic agenda—and in fact that the right-wing crusade against wokeness sabotages the struggle for workers’ rights and a livable future, since it empowers Republicans.
One hopes that more postliberals will, similarly, come to their senses.
Whenever there are workers in America standing up for themselves and going on strike against their employer, there is, inevitably, someone in the media hand-wringing about the harmful impact workers standing up for themselves will have on The Economy. But a recent piece by Sarah Lazare, co-published by Workday Magazine and The American Prospect, exposed a glaring conflict of interest for American media’s favorite go-to source when centering the “economic losses” of potential strikes. Here are just some examples of major headlines based on “studies” of how certain impending or potential strikes could harm “the economy”:
Looming auto workers strike could cost $5 billion in just 10 days, new analysis says https://t.co/78yv3zLRre
If the United Auto Workers decides to strike against the "Big Three" Detroit automakers when the current contract expires next month, it could cost the U.S. economy more than $5 billion. https://t.co/mBhLHgp025
A 10-day UPS strike would cost the economy more than $7 billion and be the costliest work stoppage in at least a century, according to a new study by Anderson Economic Group, which researches labor disruptions. https://t.co/9XBdjSJW9c
UPS and the Teamsters have reached a tentative deal on a new contract, potentially avoiding a strike. A labor stoppage could have crippled US supply chains and been a multibillion-dollar hit to the economy. https://t.co/voj3yeN6PCpic.twitter.com/5W8tLvTYEK
A recent analysis by the @AEGEconGroup found that a rail strike could cost the U.S. economy $1 billion in its first week—disrupting supply chains and potentially worsening inflation. https://t.co/KSA8EJWcmo
A US freight rail strike could cost the US economy $1 billion in the first week of the strike, according to a new analysis from the Anderson Economic Group https://t.co/b0F9MFq9hnpic.twitter.com/zNIAqYoO8y
All of these stories have one thing in common: each revolves around a “study” providing the ostensibly neutral analysis, and in each case the “study” was done by Anderson Economic Group, a consultancy firm that counts among its clients a veritable murderers’ row of corporate America, including companies central to industries that would be impacted by the very strikes AEG is supposedly quantifying the “economic impact” of.
One recent AEG study, widely cited in the press, found that an auto workers strike could cost “$5 billion in just 10 days.” What none of the media outlets that cited the study disclose, Lazare notes, is that Ford and General Motors—two of the Big Three auto companies involved in negotiations with 150,000 United Auto Workers on a new contract—are listed as business clients of Anderson Economic Group.
Isn’t this conflict of interest relevant? Shouldn’t that information be disclosed about the supposedly authoritative source throwing out these Big Scary Numbers about how much the public will be harmed by strikes? Apparently these outlets don’t think so.
Within the world of pro-labor media, a popular retort to scary headlines about strikes and their devastating impact on “the economy” is, “Well, of course, that’s the point of strikes.” This is true to an extent—the point of a strike, by definition, is to cause economic damage to an employer until they come to the bargaining table. But it’s worth considering that not challenging these vague, blanket, corporate-manufactured scaremongering talking points about how much “the economy” is going to be “crippled” is bad for labor messaging, especially when conveying the stakes of a massive strike. After all, there’s a reason why corporate America is laundering this fearmongering through consultancy firms like Anderson Economic Group and uncritical media outlets, and it’s not because they want to let the public know how Badass and Cool striking workers are. They are doing it to erode public support for labor disruption and, more precisely, to put pressure on Washington to intervene on the side of Capital in the event of a prolonged strike.
By tossing out Big Scary Numbers about how much striking workers will harm The Everyman, our media is doing the heavy lifting for executives who have the advantage of inertia and incumbency.
Rather than focusing on what is “lost” or how much “the economy” (see: you and your friends) will be “harmed” by a strike, it’s more useful to lobby our media to do two things:
(1) Stop putting the onus solely on the striking workers, or at least focus as much attention on the stubbornness of management, who are equally, if not more, responsible for a strike occuring and the “economic losses” that result. Why is the strike always presented as the first mover in the timeline of “economic disruption”? As if workers alone are the ones responsible for disrupting an otherwise-doing-fine economy, as if companies themselves do not force workers to the picket line with their own rampant “disruptions,” from years of foot dragging and bad-faith bargaining to spying, retaliation, labor violations, and destructive business practices that hurt everyone in the economy but the owning and shareholding class.
(2) Even if one grants that certain harms could potentially result from a labor action, frame them as short-term, and focus on what is gained by labor action. Historically, strikes have ushered in tremendous gains for both the workers on strike and the working class more broadly, but observing contemporary strikes through such a lens is something our media are loath to do. Most wouldn’t even know where to start, if indeed they were committed to asking the same questions of corporations that they ask of workers and unions.
How does one quantify the benefits of a strike, for instance? Well, not surprisingly, there isn’t a legion of well-funded “economic groups” mysteriously at the ready to offer these figures to America’s reporters. (At best, outlets will account for workers’ contract wins, but what those wins mean for their daily lives and for “the economy” is seldom explored with the same fervor as the “economic damage” a strike will do.) Such benefits are more difficult to come by, because propaganda that suits the interests of striking workers is, by definition, far less funded than that which speaks, in Business Press-ese, about class-flattening “economic impacts.”
But one can try anyway. One recent example, based on just the threat of a strike, saw major “economic impact” for workers. UPS teamsters recently extracted an end to a second-tier, full-time position known as “22.4,” and a provision that bans UPS for mandating package drivers to come in on their scheduled days off. Existing full- and part-time UPS workers will get a bump of $2.75 an hour this year, and $7.50 over the duration of the contract (though part-time wages still lag behind full-time wages.) And 15,000 part-time jobs will be converted into 7,500 new full-time ones. According to the union’s general president, Sean M. O’Brien, “UPS has put $30 billion in new money on the table as a direct result of these negotiations.”
Granting that this figure is correct—or at least partly correct—one is compelled to ask: Where were the headlines leading up to the UPS strike that read, “UPS Strike Could Lead to $30 Billion in Gains for UPS Workers”? Where was the headline saying, “Threat of Strike Could Lead to Billions More in the Hands of the Working Class”? No such headlines were published because this type of “economic analysis” is seen as taking sides, whereas generic claims about strikes “harming the economy” are seen as neutral and objective.
And this is a central problem: Well-funded corporations have time on their side. Their strategy—as evidenced by recent comments from Hollywood studios about “starving” creative workers—is to wait workers out and try to win the propaganda war. In the case of auto workers, ostensibly neutral metrics like “costing the economy $5 billion every 10 days” works to bosses’ advantage. They assume the public will grow tired, blame the workers, and politicians in Washington will do the same. It’s a classic example of Howard Zinn’s adage that one cannot be neutral on a moving train. By tossing out Big Scary Numbers about how much striking workers will harm The Everyman, our media is doing the heavy lifting for executives who have the advantage of inertia and incumbency.
As auto workers gear up for a major showdown with the Big Three automakers, where contracts are expiring on Sept. 14, media outlets should stop regurgitating the same tired Anderson-Economic-Group-generated Big Scary Number of Economic Losses and try to frame the conflict as something with upside for those at the lower rungs of society.
What’s the “economic impact” on working families when a strike leads to massive concessions from capital? How do these actions benefit workers as well as the working class more broadly? Are well-resourced reporters at CNN, Vox, and CNBC asking those questions? Are they seeking out those studies, asking their team of researchers to crack those numbers? And if not, why not?
Where are the “economic groups” ready with numbers about the health outcomes of better healthcare or any healthcare at all? Dental care for the workers and their children? What is the “economic impact” of greater dignity, safer working conditions, less sexual harassment? Where is the study quantifying the mental health benefits of better job security, higher wages, and more paid time off so a worker can see their son’s school play, or attend their mother’s funeral? Why is the only metric we ever hear about couched in these abstract, Big Scary Numbers about “economic losses” of strikes, but none of our media giants like CNN or NBC can take the time and money to figure out how strikes can benefit workers?
As auto workers gear up for a major showdown with the Big Three automakers, where contracts are expiring on Sept. 14, media outlets should stop regurgitating the same tired Anderson-Economic-Group-generated Big Scary Number of Economic Losses and try to frame the conflict as something with upside for those at the lower rungs of society. What is the “economic impact” of the strike on the striking workers? How did the $30 billion extracted in the last major labor conflict with UPS possibly translate into gains for auto workers? How does increasing working standards and wages for auto workers help workers in other industries? These are far more interesting, original, and relevant questions than simply tossing out more mystery numbers commissioned by Corporate America about how much workers standing up for themselves will “crippled the economy” for a confused and half-paying-attention media consumer.
On one Sunday morning in early August, rank-and-file UPS workers with the Teamsters began trickling into their union hall in East Providence, R.I. The workers greeted each other and picked at a spread of donuts and coffee before taking their seats. Nearby, a cardboard box of tubes and an unpackaged stack of posters sat unnoticed.
The members of Teamsters Local 251, which represents more than 1,100 UPS workers in Rhode Island, had been using these materials to make protest signs for “practice pickets” at their UPS facility. After contract negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS broke down July 5—and it increasingly looked like the union might strike—workers ramped up their organizing efforts across the country to send a strong message to the company: We will strike if we have to.
After contract negotiations between the Teamsters and UPS broke down, workers ramped up their organizing efforts across the country to send a strong message to the company: We will strike if we have to.
The pressure appeared to pay off. On July 25, just a week before the contract deadline, the two sides returned to the bargaining table. Within hours of sitting down, the Teamsters announced they had reached a tentative agreement with UPS, temporarily stopping what would have been one of the largest single-employer strikes in U.S. history. On July 31, in a nearly unanimous vote, two representatives from each of the union’s participating UPS locals met in a committee meeting and endorsed the agreement. (Louisville Local 89 originally chose not to endorse the tentative agreement because of an unresolved issue, but later reversed its decision.)
At that point, the UPS Teamsters membership had just under three weeks to vote on the temporary agreement.
If approved, the deal would, among other things, abolish a two-tier wage system for delivery drivers; end forced overtime on drivers’ days off; create thousands of new full-time jobs; eventually equip the package car fleet with air conditioning and other heat protections; and provide raises and an extra paid holiday. But there were some things the union had wanted that it didn’t completely secure.
So on this particular early August Sunday, Local 251, much like other locals across the country, was taking time to meet with membership and discuss the temporary agreement, to review what they had won and what they didn’t, and to decide whether to send their leadership back to the bargaining table for more—or perhaps to stop bargaining and strike.
Text messages and phone calls with members across the country revealed a diversity of opinion and ambivalence. Priorities, expectations and reactions varied by region, by local, by facility, by worker.
It was not immediately clear how the hundreds of thousands of Teamsters across the union’s 176 UPS locals would vote on the tentative agreement. No single local could tell the full story. Text messages and phone calls with members across the country revealed a diversity of opinion and ambivalence. Priorities, expectations and reactions varied by region, by local, by facility, by worker.
After spending a few days with Local 251, it became clear that many of these UPS workers’ thoughts were not as cut-and-dry as the blunt viewpoints that had been amplified online or in mainstream media. Workers I spoke with approached the decision critically. They considered it individually—how the contract would affect themselves and their families—but also collectively—whether it was good enough for their coworkers, the union and the broader labor movement.
As labor sociologist Barry Eidlin observed in a Jacobin article, despite the major gains won by the Teamsters in the tentative agreement, the idea of completely averting a strike was disappointing to some. A vocal activist segment of UPS Teamsters who emerged (it was difficult to gauge how large of a group it was), Eidlin explained, “felt that a strike was necessary not only to win more at the bargaining table, but to send a message to UPS and to galvanize the broader public.”
Despite their complex—and sometimes contradictory perspectives—the more than a dozen workers I spoke with from Local 251 were generally supportive of the agreement—and their views were largely reflected in the contract’s eventual approval.
On August 22, the contract was ratified by 86.3%.
Back in Rhode Island on that early August Sunday, the roughly 70 attendees took their seats in several rows of foldable chairs, and the meeting began. It was the first of three such contract review sessions the local would hold over the next couple weeks. Members watched attentively, several scribbling notes with key information.
Local 251’s principal officer, Matt Taibi, who spent much of the previous four months in Washington, D.C. as a member of the union’s national negotiating committee, started the meeting with a disclaimer: no contract is perfect, he said, but they felt they had secured the best deal they could. Taibi urged respectful discourse and noted that, while he and the rest of the local leadership were recommending a “Yes” vote, members should vote how they wish.
There was some sense that they were trying to be measured, but overall there was an unmistakable air of triumph from the union leadership. Matt Maini, one of the union’s full time representatives, colored the session with battle stories from inside the bargaining room. The room erupted in cheers at each win and cascaded into boos and head-shakes when union leaders presented the concessions that UPS had initially demanded.
Speaking into the microphone with a cool pride, Taibi conceded that they had failed to make gains on two of the membership’s key demands: First, reducing the progression, or the number of years it takes full-time workers to reach their top wage rate. Second, getting UPS to pay for the company-branded socks that drivers are required to purchase should they decide to wear shorts on a hot summer day. The latter shortcoming earned a round of laughter in the hall.
UPS Package car driver and Teamsters organizer Corey Levesque stands in front of the Local 251 union hall in East Providence, Rhode Island. Photo by Teddy Ostrow
After the presentation, a few members raised their hands with questions. One driver wanted to know whether his wages would be cut if he’s forced by the company to work in the warehouse. Another asked who will get priority for the facility’s new full-time jobs. The meeting began and ended less like a contract review session and more like a celebration.
“Overall, I like what I see with the contract,” William Dempsey said immediately after the meeting.
Dempsey, who has worked eight-and-a-half years at UPS and was one of the few part-time workers at the meeting, makes $20 per hour and would make $28 by the end of the five-year contract—a 40% increase—with the deal.
“As a part-timer, I still have to have a second job and I go to school too,” Dempsey explained. “So that won’t change, but a little extra money in the paycheck always helps.”
“$25 an hour minimum would’ve been nice,” he continued, “but, I mean, you can’t get everything.”
“As a part-timer, I still have to have a second job and I go to school too,” Dempsey explained. “So that won’t change, but a little extra money in the paycheck always helps.”
Dempsey added he hadn’t read through the full contract yet and wasn’t sure how he was going to vote, but he was leaning toward yes.
Jose Ortiz, who has worked for two years at UPS driving tractor trailers, wasn’t as impressed. “The money is good, but I wanted a two-year progression,” he said. Even working one of the highest paid jobs at UPS, Ortiz believes that, with this contract, it would take too long for him to reach his top wage. “Everything is going up. It’s not enough to survive.”
Whether workers won enough in the tentative agreement was a debate playing out across the Teamsters since it was announced. As expected, the union’s international office sang its praise across social media, through its UPS Teamsters phone app and in the ensuing media avalanche.
“We’ve changed the game, battling it out day and night to make sure our members won an agreement that pays strong wages, rewards their labor, and doesn’t require a single concession,” Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien declared in a July 25 press release. “This contract sets a new standard in the labor movement and raises the bar for all workers.”
Chief among the agreement’s advancements is the abolition of a despised two-tier wage and protection system among delivery drivers. It was the introduction of this concession in the 2018 tentative agreement that spurred many rank-and-file Teamsters, with the help of the reform union movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), to organize a successful “Vote No” campaign on the contract that year. The UPS Teamsters membership rejected the deal by 55%, but the union leadership, helmed then by James P. Hoffa, ratified it anyway using an undemocratic loophole in the union constitution. That loophole has since been struck from the books, ensuring that, this year, a simple majority vote couldn’t be overturned.
This 2023 deal, which members ratified with an unprecedented 58% voter turnout, was the culmination of the Teamster’s year-long contract campaign that became one of biggest stories in the world of work. It also reflected the longer-term organizing by the TDU, which has aimed to push the union out of pro-business complacency and into a more aggressive stance toward bargaining and organizing nonunion shops.
Jose Ortiz, who has worked for two years at UPS driving tractor trailers, wasn’t as impressed. “The money is good, but I wanted a two-year progression,” he said.
“The contract campaign was a model,” Rand Wilson, who was an organizer on the UPS campaign with TDU, tells me. “The scale of it; the steady drumbeat; the utilization of new technology … It yielded the best contract that people have seen in a very long time. It sets the standard now.”
Workers in other companies are taking notice. According to Luis Feliz Leon’s reporting in Labor Notes, workers at Amazon, who the Teamsters are actively trying to organize, are already setting their demands higher. “The UPS workers have raised the standard, and we know that’s going to put pressure on Amazon from outside,” one Amazon worker told Feliz Leon.
The Teamsters’ success has appeared to embolden and inspire workers in other industries as well. The United Auto Workers have erected their own practice pickets in several states to build strength for its current contract campaign with the Big Three automakers. The contract for nearly 150,000 auto workers at Ford, GM and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) expires September 14. Much like the Teamsters did, the union is demanding the abolition of wage and benefits tiers in the workforce. The union’s militant leadership has also indicated a massive strike is on the table.
While the Teamsters declared the July 25 deal “the most historic tentative agreement for workers in the history of UPS,” members on the shop floor, in union halls, and on social media shared much more complicated sets of praises, criticisms, questions and concerns.
Elbe Lieb, who has worked part-time at UPS for 27 years, says she wasn’t sure how many other part-timers have dug into the tentative agreement at her hub in Bloomington, Ind., but that some have voiced strong opinions. “I think the big thing for some of them was that they were maybe kinda hoping for a little more money and wishing that the benefits kicked in sooner,” says Lieb, who is a shop steward with Local 135. But overall, she explains, most appeared happy for a raise.
“As time progressed after the TA [tentative agreement] was released and people had a chance to settle their emotions, people have been generally positive,” according to Chris Wallace, who was a second-tier package car driver out of Teamsters Local 89 in Louisville, Ky. “The conversations I’ve had recently, encouragingly, have tended to center on where we want this union, and specifically this local, to go in the coming years.”
Wallace adds: “Who do we see emerging as leaders, or potential stewards? What will central issues be for not only enforcement of this contract, but what we want to see in the next one? How do we build trust among one another?”
While TDU celebrated the tentative agreement, some of its activists were among the layer of Teamsters who would have preferred a strike. “We were prepared for a strike. … When workers are ready, strike action is always favored,” wrote Sean Orr, a package car driver in Chicago and co-chair of TDU, in a reflection on the national solidarity campaign by the Democratic Socialists of America. Orr also co-chaired DSA’s Strike Ready campaign. “Workers who are ready will win more through a strike,” he continued, “not just in terms of wages or benefits, but in terms of nerves of steel and self-awareness of our strength as workers.”
“Workers who are ready will win more through a strike,” Orr said, “not just in terms of wages or benefits, but in terms of nerves of steel and self-awareness of our strength as workers.”
Over two days at Local 251, I spoke with workers in various positions and of varying seniority. Despite some misgivings, these workers’ opinions about the tentative agreement were mostly positive. Nearly all of them were relieved to have at least temporarily avoided a strike. None could name more than a handful of their coworkers who stated that they were openly voting no. The passage of the national contract by a wide margin suggests similar situations around the country.
Some at Local 251 were undecided, but mostly because they were still unfamiliar with the entire agreement or because they were waiting for UPS’s quarterly earnings report, which some said might influence their decision.
“I’ve been trying to get perspectives from everybody,” said Corey Levesque, a package car driver who is temporarily doing full-time organizing work for Local 251. “Is every issue going to be addressed in the contract? No. But that’s why you continue to mobilize and organize people.”
As Brian Roberts spoke, he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head. The ample grays of his short hair match the color of his v-neck. He’s 53 and might be ready to retire in a few years.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “What I like personally is I get an extra week’s vacation.”
After the meeting, I sat down with Roberts, who started as a part-timer at UPS in 1989. Now a “shifter” in the tractor-trailer department, moving trucks around the parking lot all day, he’s nearly 35 years in. Because of the New England region’s supplemental agreement to the deal, if it all passed, he’d earn one more week of paid vacation.
In previous contracts, he said “that’s something we never got.”
“Everything was givebacks,” he said of previous agreements. “We went from the concession stand being open to now the concession stand being closed.”
UPS yard shifter Brian Roberts (center) sits in a Local 251 office used by package car drivers and organizers including Corey Levesque (left) and Patrick Leonard. Photo by Teddy Ostrow.
He believes the July 25 tentative agreement is a sea change: “We all worked during the pandemic, and they made record profits. It was nice that, you know, we’re getting our fair share.”
“It’s not perfect, but the money’s good. …The language to me is more important,” Roberts continued. “I like having a good raise, but you don’t wanna lose some of the protections that you have under the language, and the language—it looks pretty good.”
The abolition of wage tiers among drivers was the big win, according to Roberts. He doesn’t believe there was anything left worth striking over—though he would strike if the union called for it. But he added that a handful of people wanted to strike no matter what.
While some workers believed the union had enough leverage to squeeze more out of the company, Roberts worried the union could wind up worse off if they voted the tentative agreement down. His opinion seems like it may have resonated with that of writer Sam Gindin, who, in a recent essay in Jacobin, argues that a post-deal strike may not have been as effective as some hoped.
“It is one thing to strike over matters of principle like refusing concessions or a monetary offer that lags inflation and other settlements,” Gindin writes. “But it is quite another when it is too late to credibly launch a fight over principle, and the size of the wage package is comparatively good.”
“In such circumstances, the demand for ‘more’ comes up against the cold calculation of losing weekly pay for an uncertain period, to win what would at best likely only be marginal increases.”
For the principal officer of a local reputed to be among the most militant in the union, Taibi radiates an unlikely calmness. Sitting for a late lunch at Chelo’s in East Providence, he wears a blue Teamsters polo, tucked into his gray slacks. He speaks quietly, but confidently, and we order half-chickens and ziti—a knock off, Taibi explains, of Wright’s Farm’s famous family-style chicken dinners.
“It’s been positive, for sure,” Taibi says of his members’ reaction to the tentative agreement. “There’s just a lot of folks that—particularly people that have been around a while—see the overall gains as being better than any previous contract.” But Taibi concedes “there is some disappointment in not gaining certain things that [members] saw as important.”
Taibi has been a member of TDU since he started as a part-timer at UPS in 1999, and he is a proud Teamster. His pride for his local, which he’s led since ousting the old guard in 2013, can be found on the vanity plate of his personal Ford Escape: “IBT251.” In 2021, Taibi ran on the same slate as O’Brien and won a spot on the union’s international executive board as vice president of the Eastern region.
“It’s been positive, for sure,” Taibi says of his members’ reaction to the tentative agreement. “There’s just a lot of folks that—particularly people that have been around a while—see the overall gains as being better than any previous contract.”
Indeed, Taibi was among those who were infamously kicked off the national negotiating committee in 2018 after opposing the introduction of the driver two-tier. His members largely backed him then, and voted 85% against that deal. Based on the earlier review session, it appeared they would back him again—but this time, in support. (According to Taibi, Local 251 would go on to vote 92.53% in favor of the national agreement, with a 55.36% turnout.)
But Taibi concedes “there is some disappointment in not gaining certain things that [members] saw as important.”
He says some members wanted more time off, for example, but argues that not winning those things is not the same as a concession. “[The disappointment] is not saying, ‘We gave something up.’ It was, ‘We should have had more,’ which—hey, I’m all in favor of making improvements everywhere you can. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna get ’em every time.”
“I do believe it is historically speaking,” he says, “a big win.”
But winning at the bargaining table is only the first step, Taibi says. After the deal’s ratification, the union will have to go to war with the company on the shop floor.
“A big part of moving forward is enforcement, strengthening our membership at the shop floor around issues,” he says. “It’s needed because UPS—they want their money, they want their profits, and they’re gonna try to get it over people’s sweat.”
Teamsters Local 251 in Rhode Island. Photo by Teddy Ostrow.
When I emailed UPS to ask how they plan to ensure the contract is enforced, and to respond to a number of claims in this article, a UPS spokesperson directed me to future “public presentations” on September 12 by the company’s CEO and CFO, who would then answer several of the questions I posed.
Even after such a long contract campaign and such tense negotiations, Taibi says there are pressing fights on the horizon for both the Teamsters and the larger labor movement.
“The big elephant in the room is Amazon, and other competitors,” Taibi says. “As a union, our obligation is to bring some equity into the whole industry.”
“A strong contract at UPS,” he says, “is a good sign for workers to say, ‘This is how important it is to be a Teamster,’ and, ‘To be union is what lifts up standards.’”
The next morning, I meet Ronnie Buchanan at the union hall.
A week earlier at work, Buchanan, who delivers packages at UPS, had tried to catch a falling, 93-pound package, and stressed a muscle in his neck. When I meet him, he is out on workers’ compensation and getting ready to go to physical therapy. This isn’t Buchanan’s first injury at work. He still gets Cortisone shots in one of his shoulders from another injury, and he has scars from a dog that bit him fiercely along his route.
Injuries aside, Buchanan says the job’s been worth it. Before he joined UPS, he was earning $18 per hour at a moving company. Before that, he worked in kitchens, pulling in only about $280 a week as a dishwasher. He had no insurance, so he never went to the dentist, and drove an unregistered Subaru he describes as a “shitbox.”
But in 2020, when he started as a second-tier driver at UPS, his life changed. He made more than $20 per hour and received a full suite of benefits, including a pension. He could help support his mother and, for the first time, could buy nice gifts for his nieces and nephews.
During our interview, Buchanan, a charismatic 33-year-old, wears a gray Teamster sweatshirt with union buttons adorning the chest’s equestrian graphic. He sits clutching a rolled-up copy of the New England supplemental agreement, which he waves around as he speaks.
“To be honest with you, I was hoping for a strike,” Buchanan says. “Not for a long one, but just to let the supervisors know that our job is not easy. They don’t know what we’re going through. [They] haven’t sat in a 140-degree truck all day, going in the back, sweating, dripping sweat on the ground, tripping over boxes, lifting TVs, couches.”
But Buchanan adds he’s going to vote yes on the agreement because of what it does for him as a second-tier driver. “Getting rid of the two tiers—that really kind of changed the whole game for everybody. … You know how happy I was to hug my mom and say, ‘Listen, I made it’?”
UPS Teamster package car drivers Ronnie Buchanan and Alec LaFazia stand in front of a local Rhode Island Portuguese restaurant frequented by UPS workers. Photo by Teddy Ostrow.
With the ratified agreement, Buchanan will eventually earn a significant raise as the tiers collapse. Even better, he suspects he’ll be subjected to much less excessive overtime.
“I don’t care about the money; I want to see my family,” he says. “I want to go spend time with my mother.”
Buchanan looks down intimately at the agreement. “I appreciate this contract,” he says, his voice softening. “I love everything about it. … You gotta take wins with losses, you know what I mean?
“You can’t count your dollars; you count your blessings. And this thing right here was a blessing. I’m gonna vote yes because, as a driver, this contract is good for me. … I can’t speak for part-timers, I can’t speak for people inside the building cause I don’t do that job,” he says. “If they want to vote no, that’s their decision. That’s why we’re Teamsters. We have a voice. If you wanna voice your no vote, voice it.”
Later that afternoon, four brown package cars sit in the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts on Gano Street on the east side of Providence. They park here every weekday between 2:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. On this Monday, with temperatures in the mid-70s, if the ground weren’t wet from the morning rain, the drivers would likely have been playing their usual basketball game at a court adjacent to the lot.
On this Monday, however, they remain inside for their lunch hour. “This has been the East Side crew’s hang out for a long time now,” says Jack Warren as he sips on a large iced coffee. “It’s an oasis from the madness—probably since they built this Dunkin’.”
By “madness,” Warren means the stress of his work and that of his brown-uniformed colleagues. They are package car drivers out of the East Center in Rhode Island’s single UPS facility in Warwick, and they are also shop stewards of Teamsters Local 251. They talk about the changes coming to their workplace.
Package car driver and Teamsters Local 251 shop steward Jack Warren sits in his UPS truck in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot in Providence. Photo by Teddy Ostrow.
Soon these “East Siders,” as they’re referred to in their local, may have to cut their meet-ups short. Due to demand by UPS Teamsters in the region, union leadership negotiated with the company, in the New England supplement, a tentative reduction of drivers’ lunch time, from one hour to a half-hour. While some drivers demanded a shorter lunch so they could theoretically finish work earlier, more senior workers—like Warren, who has worked at UPS since the mid-1990s—aren’t happy with that change. But when Warren looks at the bigger picture, he says he can’t complain.
“It’s not enough for me to say I’m gonna vote no,” says Warren, who is the chief steward of Local 251’s UPS Teamsters. “Overall, I think it’s a great contract.”
Speaking between bites of his lunch, Adam Deneault says he already voted yes on the national and supplemental agreements. “Based on what I have read, I’m satisfied with it,” the driver of four years says. “Is every contract perfect? No. It’s never gonna be. You know, you always get a give and take.”
The next day, I set out to meet Brian Hardy as he finished his 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. shift at the UPS warehouse in Warwick. The morning came and went, and Hardy, who’s a part-time preloader, was still at work.
On this Tuesday, for the second time in two weeks, the belts that carry packages to the delivery trucks had broken down, causing a massive back-up of volume. The warehouse workers were forced to wheel stacks of packages on carts or motorized “trains” to the trucks. This process took hours longer than if the belts were functioning.
When I catch up with Hardy by phone several days later, I ask what he thinks of the tentative agreement as a part-timer. “It felt nice to be appreciated,” he says in a slow candor.
For decades, part-time workers like Hardy were largely neglected by union leadership. Real wages declined under inflation. Now, Hardy believes the union is moving in a positive direction. “This is the first step in repairing all of them other bad contracts,” he explains.
“What I like about the new language is the fact that guys that have been there,” he says, “get certain pay increases for longevity and service time.”
In the new tentative agreement, part-time workers will immediately get “catch-up raises” of up to $1.50 more per hour. Because Hardy has worked 11 years at UPS, he’ll get $1 extra on top of the $7.50 general wage increase across five years.
“It means after work, I can be home more,” says Hardy, who drives for Lyft when he’s not at UPS. He says the raises will help him pay his bills, which have gone up “astronomically” over the past few years. With high inflation, “every day I lose money that I used to make more than two years ago,” he adds. “And we worked through the pandemic. All of us worked.”
Hardy says he was also relieved to see his benefits maintained or improved. “Our pensions have grown. We still retain our medical and our dental and our vision. And as a full-custody father, that’s a big expense in America right now,” he says. “It gives me a certain level of ease to know that my children get proper medical care.”
Hardy likes the flexibility UPS and Lyft give him to spend time and take care of his two daughters, so he’s not looking to go full-time. But the lack of full-time jobs for part-timers is a problem, he explains. The tentative agreement’s 7,500 new full-time warehouse jobs will be a big help. “That is a good thing so that you can have an opportunity to move up,” he says.
I ask Hardy whether many of his co-workers shared his opinion about the tentative agreement. “It’s like a mixed review, but overwhelmingly a lot of people like the contract,” he says.
Most of the opposition he’s heard has been online. Indeed, many part-time workers around the country took to social media to express their no votes during the weeks of voting.
Some felt the union had enough leverage to hold out for a higher starting pay—which, at $21 per hour, they believed wasn’t adequate—and to reject a lower wage tier that would be established for new hires. Despite the union’s assurances, some workers in specific regions weren’t convinced that UPS couldn’t take away their market-rate adjustments—the starting wage increases UPS offers in competitive markets—meaning they could receive wage cuts at any moment.
“I voted for the contract because I’ve been there a long time,” Hardy says. “I’ve been there through the tougher times, when some of these contracts were just bad contracts. That’s why I understood what Sean O’Brien was trying to do and what he was fighting for.
“[O’Brien] actually stood by his word and it actually felt nice that someone stood up for you.”
When I ask what Hardy thinks of part-timers who want more out of the contract, his voice turns stern. “Everyone wants more. Everyone does. … Everyone has a right to be heard,” he says.
“I think it’s gonna pass because it helps out a lot of people in certain regions,” he says. “Since I’ve been in the company, this is our best contract.”
Five minutes after we end our call, Hardy calls me back.
He’d forgotten to tell me his favorite part of the contract: Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday. “That right there, that was the biggest win of the contract if you ask me,” says Hardy, who is Black. “Sometimes victories aren’t won financially. They’re won morally. [The union] wanted to make me and others like me feel included.”
“I know for me and mine, now, I can take that option to observe it with my children,” Hardy says. “I never thought in all my years I’d see it happen, but it just happened.”
In a week’s time, the United Auto Workers may launch a strike of 150,000 of its members if the Big Three automakers – Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) – fail to meet the workers’ demands in a new contract by September 14.
You see, the Big Three made a quarter trillion dollars over the past decade. And with non-union electric vehicle and battery manufacturing on the rise in the United States, this may be a make or break moment for the union. So, with a more militant leadership at its helm, the UAW is demanding more than they have in a long time: serious wage increases; the elimination of tiers; the return of pensions, COLA, and retiree healthcare; and a 32-hour workweek.
For this episode, we unpack the auto workers’ demands, their stakes for the auto industry and the broader working class, and the burgeoning EV transition. We also explore how during this round of negotiations, the union is doing something it hasn’t done in a very long time. Inspired by the Teamsters, the UAW is conducting a contract campaign, with rallies, practice pickets, and all.
To discuss all this and more, we spoke with two UAW activists in Metro Detroit. Luigi Gjokaj was an assembly worker at Stellantis since 2010 and is the newly elected vice president of UAW Local 51. Jessie Kelly is a skilled moldmaker at General Motors and alternate committeeperson at UAW Local 160.
You’ll also hear from auto workers in Metro Detroit and Chicago, who attended rallies and practice pickets to drum up unity before the strike deadline.
Jessie Kelly: That’s what’s at stake. It’s making sure that my son doesn’t have to go through the same struggles that I went through, doesn’t have to go through working 80 hours a week and missing out on his children’s life to make sure that he can somehow secure an opportunity just to have a middle class life, but still live paycheck to paycheck.
Luigi Gjokaj: Well, we’re not asking anymore. We got sick of putting our hand up and asking and asking, and now all these hands are balling up into a little fist and we’re saying, “No more.” I mean, how do you have someone with $20, $30, $40 million compensation trying to tell me or one of my union brothers or sisters working right next to me, that, you know what, the $18 an hour they’re making is enough?
Teddy Ostrow: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to The Upsurge, a podcast about the future of the American labor movement.
This podcast previously focused on the unprecedented labor fight this year at UPS. But now, we’ve shifted our focus to the renewed militancy of the United Auto Workers, the legendary union that in a week’s time may launch a strike of 150,000 of its members at the Big Three automakers. That’s Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis, which was previously Chrysler.
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.
And quick reminder: This is a listener-supported podcast. So please, if you want it to keep going, head on over to patreon.com/upsurgepod and become a monthly contributor today. You can find a link in the description. We cannot do this without you.
On to the show.
Shawn Fain: These companies have made a quarter of a trillion dollars in the last decade, the thing that they drive for is corporate greed. That’s what this is all about.
Teddy Ostrow: If you’re an Upsurge listener, you may remember that voice. That’s Shawn Fain, the new, militant president of the United Auto Workers union.
Shawn Fain: When 26 billionaires have as much wealth as half of humanity, 26 people have as much wealth as half of humanity, we have to turn this system upside down. That does not work for people, period.
Teddy Ostrow: And that was him talking to me at a July 15th rally in Long Island for the UPS Teamsters, who in a little over a month would go on to ratify a contract that reaped significant concessions from the package giant.
Fain was there in solidarity, but his own union had just started high-stakes negotiations of their own. That is, for the contract that covers nearly 150,000 UAW members at the Big Three automakers nationwide, which expires on September 14. And almost immediately, it became clear that the corporations didn’t want to play ball.
Shawn Fain: I’m gonna file it in its proper place ’cause that’s where it belongs, the trash ’cause that’s what it is.
Teddy Ostrow: You can’t see it but that was a Facebook Live clip of Fain throwing the contract proposals by Stellantis, which were riddled with concessions to the company, into the trashcan. He did the same with Ford’s proposals just a couple weeks later.
And just last week, the union filed unfair labor practice charges against Stellantis and GM for failing to bargain in good faith.
See, the Big Three automakers, as Fain told me, made a quarter trillion dollars over the past decade. Yes, a trillion with a “T.” That means they’ve more than recovered from the bottoms they hit during the Great Recession, when the union acquiesced to several rounds of concessions to prop up the companies.
So with a more militant union leadership at its the helm, the UAW is demanding more from the profit-flush Big 3 than they have in a long time.
That includes wage increases of over 40%, in line with the increases the companies’ executives saw over the last four years. A big one: the elimination of wage and benefit tiers, much like the Teamsters demanded and won at UPS.
And among several other important demands, they’re also looking to reinstate defined benefit pensions, retiree medical benefits, and cost-of-living wage increases that go up as inflation does. All of those are benefits UAW members used to have, but they’ve been taken away over the past 15 years.
So in the past couple weeks, UAW members hit the ballot box and authorized the union to call a strike by 97%. And the leadership has indicated that they may be willing to strike all three companies at once, if their demands aren’t met.
Shawn Fain: We’re gonna get it done, we’ll get it done by any means necessary.
Teddy Ostrow: That means 150,000 autoworkers may be hitting the picket line, as soon as next week. September 14th is the strike deadline.
Now, this is a big deal. With non-union electric vehicle and battery manufacturing on the rise in the United States, this feels like a make or break moment for the union. How will the union expand its membership, improve working peoples’ lives, if its existing members are on the back foot?
We’ll unpack more context in future shows, but in this episode, we’re focused on how during this round of negotiations, the UAW is doing something it hasn’t done in a very long time: a contract campaign.
Shawn Fain: We’ve got 25 days to the deadline, so I got a question for you: Are you ready to rumble?
Teddy Ostrow: For this episode I spoke at length with two UAW activists, Jessie Kelly and Luigi Gjokaj, about the workers’ demands, and how union leaders and rank-and-file are organizing the membership to unite around them.
But in preparation for the interview, I spoke to workers around the country: in Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Louisville and Buffalo. Some of them even sent me audio from local actions, but all of them told me the same thing: They’ve never seen anything like this at their union.
Here’s Paul Davidson, a Local 212 union steward at Stellantis, who attended a large campaign rally in Metro Detroit.
Paul Davidson: The unity is breathtaking. Yeah. We need to get this back going. It’s good to see unions are getting back strong again and doing what’s necessary by showing unity.
Teddy Ostrow: Inspired by the Teamsters, autoworkers even set up practice pickets in several states.
Chants: Just practicing for a just contract.
Teddy Ostrow: And lots of workers are getting involved in the union for the first time. In Chicago, Ford assembly worker Danny Morales explained:
Danny Morales: I was basically motivated to currently get involved with the union. I’m a member of the strike committee here at Local 551. I was inspired by the Teamsters with the way they were able to band together and fight. And win themselves a better contract. So I’m looking for that exact same fight with my brothers and sisters to get what we deserve.
Teddy Ostrow: To discuss all this and more, I was lucky enough to speak with two UAW activists in Metro Detroit who have been putting in the work to prepare their union family to strike — if they have to.
Luigi Gjokaj is the newly elected vice president of UAW Local 51. Before then he was an assembly worker at Stellantis since 2010. Jessie Kelly is a skilled trades moldmaker at General Motors and alternate committeeperson at UAW Local 160, which is kind of like a shop steward for those unfamiliar with the lingo.
Jessie, who is a member of the Unite All Workers for Democracy caucus, was actually on strike for 40 days in 2019 with 40,000 of her GM coworkers, an action she explains in our interview didn’t really win much for the union. This time could be different.
We cover a lot of ground in this interview, and if you want more context before hopping in, I do encourage you to go listen to Episode 5 of The Upsurge and our July 13th bonus episode with UAW leaders Brandon Mancilla and Dan Vicente.
Jessie Kelly and Luigi Jo Kai, welcome to The Upsurge.
Luigi Gjokaj: Thanks for having us.
Jessie Kelly: Thank you so much for using this platform to draw attention to our fight.
Teddy Ostrow: To start, can you guys just briefly introduce yourselves? Tell us your story, your automaker in the union, you know, what positions have you held, where and in which local unions.
Jessie Kelly: So I started 14 years ago at the Warren Tech Center. I started as a temporary on-call housekeeper with a unit called Airmark, which is a third party unit. I worked my way up through different sectors of the UAW. I ended up being the committee person for Airmark, and then I sat as a trustee on the executive board for Local 160.
Inside Aramark, I was a housekeeper, and then I was an industrial painter, and then I was maintenance. And then I took a temporary position inside of General Motors. I worked for both Aramark and General Motors for three years before I finally accepted a full-time position at General Motors as an apprentice. And now I am a skilled trades mold maker inside of the Plaster Shop.
Teddy Ostrow: And Luigi.
Luigi Gjokaj: I started in 2010 as a SVR, which stands for Summer Vacation Replacement. so when we first got hired in and got the email that, “Hey, you’re gonna work for Chrysler,” it was as a summertime, basically after 119 days, you were let go, you were just a summer replacement.
And once we got there, they actually told us after our 119 days, we’d be full time, I kind of started off like any other regular worker would, just kind of came in, did my job, went home, didn’t care too much to get involved with things like the union and stuff. I was like, I’m kind of one of the guys that just does his job every day.
I don’t need my union. And my favorite phrase to tell people is, “You never think you’re gonna need your union until you need your union.” And it was actually, I didn’t actually need them. Someone else did. And I had brought awareness to a situation that was going on and really saw what the power of collective bargaining and having a union can do.
‘Cause you know, being a non-union person my whole life, previous to that, even though my grandfather had worked at Chrysler for 30 odd years, it was so different from non-union shops. You could call your steward, they could come correct the action. It wasn’t just arbitrarily “You go do this ’cause I told you so,” it was like, “No, there’s a contract. You’re gonna uphold it. You’re gonna abide by it. And if you don’t, there’s a grievance that’s gonna be written.” And that’s kind of what sparked me wanting to get involved a little bit.
So I ran for the executive board, at Local 7, which is Jefferson North Assembly Plant, affectionately called JNAP. And at the time we were building the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Dodge Durango, after winning a term on the executive board, I transferred over to the Mac assembly plant and they were the first new plant built in Detroit in probably 30 some odd years. They were gonna be doing the Grand Cherokee, the new model, after the EO and Fiat merger, which became Stellantis. But I’ll probably not call it that. The rest of the podcast, it’s still Chrysler. Once I got there, I was appointed as the backup committee person, because we had some Covid related issues that had hit at the time when Covid was just about to start ravaging the whole country and shut the whole place down.
I spoke up real loud about what was going on, and the committee person at the time was like, “Hey, this is a kindred spirit right here.” A guy who’s gonna speak out and not be afraid, you know, to put it all on the line, was the backup committee person who was acting as shop steward. And then I ran for vice president and I am the newly elected vice president of my Local. So, real excited about that.
Teddy Ostrow: What we’re dealing with here and what I want to talk to you guys about is something we haven’t seen from the United Auto Workers in a really long time, certainly in my lifetime and decades, maybe you guys too. And that’s a contract campaign. We saw this quite triumphantly at the Teamsters Union at UPS this year. We covered that very heavily on this show. When this posts, we’ll roughly be a week out from the September 14th contract expiration, and strike deadline at the Big Three automakers.
Can you guys unpack for me what you’re doing right now? I know you guys are really hard at work, busy organizing across locals within your region, but also more broadly across the union. You’re organizing the rank-and-file for a contract campaign, and as I’ve been told, you know, the UAW has a culture of abiding by a strike.
You guys will strike if you’re called for one, but not necessarily this grassroots organizing culture, which it seems that you guys are trying to cultivate right now. So maybe in explaining this contract campaign, you can compare this to what you’ve seen in prior contracts too.
Jessie Kelly: Okay. So it’s such an intricate question. I wanna make sure to do it justice because you’re absolutely correct. We have never, ever seen a contract campaign before. I’m a third generation UAW member. My mom was extremely involved, especially at my local, Local 160. So I walked my first picket line at five years old. I’ve seen the newspaper strike, so it was kind of ingrained in me. I remember being a member of General Motors in 2019 when a strike was called, and I was bestowed with the responsibility of saying, “Get everything together the week prior to the contract deadline in case we go out on strike, but we’re not gonna go on strike, so it’s gonna be fine.”
Right? Like, just get together everything that you can just as an in-case so we can show the international union that we’re checking the boxes and everything’s okay. I go, okay, I’ve never been on a strike myself. So I said, okay, I do some rough scheduling. I do some rough, like Google doc-ing, whatever it may be.
And I remember even calling up the officials saying like, “Should there be a strike come Sunday, we’re gonna need you to do this.” And they laughed, right? They’re like, “Okay, we’ll see you at work on Monday.” And no one believed it. And then all of a sudden, boom, my president, my chairman go down and they get told we’re going on a national strike.
Every single plant is going out, all 40,000 members. And I’m the chair of communications at my local. So, I remember telling people through the text messaging system, a national strike was called, please report at the hall at this time. Tomorrow we’ll discuss what we’re gonna do.
And people were just in shock. And then there wasn’t any communication coming down either. So we called the national strike. There was no plan, there was no communication. Nobody knew what they were striking for. And it’s hard to build that solidarity and create that momentum and keep everybody going, especially for what ended up being a 40 day strike when you are not even sure what you’re striking for.
So the idea that this time around we have a member’s demand list and we know exactly what we’re fighting for. We have the ability to set our membership up and educate them on the things that we’re fighting for prior to the expiration of the deadline. It’s so different in such a positive way, and it really is building like this sense of grassroots efforts and solidarity that I’ve never seen before inside of the UAW. I have seen it at the Detroit newspaper. I have seen it in UPS, but I’ve never seen it at the UAW and I think they’re ready for it. I think it’s a very positive change. All of my members are telling me like, this is crazy to know exactly the things that we’re asking for prior to the expiration.
Teddy Ostrow: Right. Thank you so much for setting that up like that. Luigi, what, what is that translating to in terms of actions in the union? What are the kinds of things you guys are doing, to organize the workers and get them ready?
Luigi Gjokaj: I mean, piggybacking a little bit off of Jessie there, we’ve never seen this kind of mobilization, this kind of action and this kind of support from the top down. Whereas previously it was kind of from the bottom up, right? We got our top international president, the leader so to speak, of the entire UAW, talking to us every single week like we are right now.
I mean, you didn’t get that kind of access before. He’s doing Zooms, he’s doing Facebook live. I know for our Vice President, Richie Boyer, who’s the lead for the Chrysler Division, is doing a weekly update on, “Hey, here’s what’s going on.” I mean, I’ve never felt this kind of enthusiasm in the UAW and it’s Chrysler, GM, Ford, white, black man, woman, doesn’t matter, immigrant, non-immigrant. Like, it’s all walks of life. And we all have this common brotherhood, sisterhood, and just this unity of, “Hey, we’re going to get what we should have never, ever, ever lost.” And it has a feel, honestly, like the sixties, like everything comes full circle.
Well, we’re not asking anymore. We got sick of putting our hand up and asking and asking, and now all these hands are balling up into a little fist and we’re saying, “No more.”
I mean, how do you have someone with $20, $30, $40 million in compensation trying to tell me or one of my union brothers or sisters working right next to me, that the $18 an hour they’re making is enough?
Maybe it was 30 years ago, but the cost of milk, since that’s what everyone always talks about, has gone up. The price of everything has gone up. Price of their vehicles continue to go up, but my wages remain stagnant. and people are fed up now. We’re not just taking it as, “Okay, no problem.”
We’ll wait. Another contract. We kept hearing that in our career. How many times did we hear that? “Oh, you guys will get there eventually. Don’t worry, you won’t get in this one, but you’ll get it in the next one and you’ll get it in the next one.”
We were in a position where we were hurting, right? The company was hurting. And who did they ask to take the blow for them? The worker. They didn’t ask the CEO, they didn’t ask the stockholder, they asked the American taxpayer. “Yo, take this hit for us and we’ll make you guys whole. We’ll do the right thing.” And they didn’t. And now we’re kind of like, “Yo man, 12, 13 years in, we’re gonna get everything back that we never should have lost.” And we’re not actually asking for a hell of a lot more. We’re just asking to be made back even.
Teddy Ostrow: And just so people understand what you’re talking about there, the Big Three automakers, I believe all three, beginning in 2007, there was sort of this concession that created tiers in the contract that new workers would not receive pensions and they would not receive retiree healthcare.
This was worsened over time, especially as then Chrysler and GM filed for bankruptcy and were bailed out. Ford narrowly avoided it, through a loan that it had secured earlier. However, it was just concession after concession to sort of prop up these companies that had basically gone down under, so as you said, the taxpayer, but also the workers who really had to take the fall.
You were talking, Luigi, about all this solidarity that you’re seeing and, and that is being built, right? You guys are putting that together. You guys are doing the organizing work to make that happen for this contract campaign. So I wanna hear about the rallies that have been going on over the past couple weeks. The practice pickets, 10 minute meetings. What are the ways that you guys are actually on the shop floor, in the union hall, getting people to get on the same page for the first time in a very long time.
Jessie Kelly: We’ve seen UPS and we’ve seen the practice pickets and I had never seen anything like that. I’ve seen rallies before. I had seen contract campaigns, but I had never seen actual physical signs of saying like, just practicing for a just contract. And I remember like being at my house and just scrolling through Facebook and a picture came up of a UPS driver, and he was holding a sign that said, just practicing for a just contract.
And I was like, “Whoa, this is incredible. This is like honestly the cutest thing that I have ever seen.” And I like cried, right? Like I cried real tears and I was like, this is so lame. But I was like, that is adorable. We need to do that. Like we need to do that. We need to build solidarity. I remember in 2019, some of my members had never been on a strike line, so you are asking them to, like Luigi said in earlier, to play the Super Bowl when they never even went through the tryouts, right?
You’re like, boom, boom, strike. Go out there. win us a good contract when you’ve never even tried this out before or like flexing your muscles before you even went to the gym. so when they were doing that, I was like, “Wow, what a way to bring solidarity and recognition and just an understanding of, ‘this is what we’re gonna do eventually if we have to.’”
Not only that, you’re showing the company that you’re willing to do it and that you’re willing to do it on your own time. I’ll work a 10 hour shift, or I’ll work a 12 hour shift and I’ll still go out there with my brothers and sisters because that’s how important it’s to me. I think that that’s very eye-opening to everybody, and it was just thrilling to see.
When I seen and I was like, “We have to do this. We have to adopt this method. This is fantastic.” We wanted to do that and that my particular event ended up turning into a rally, which was phenomenal. We had a rally at region one and I think like…
Luigi Gjokaj: That was the first rally I’d seen like that ever.
Jessie Kelly: Yeah. Maybe a thousand people. I think it was a thousand. It might have been over.
Luigi Gjokaj: It was a thousand.
Jessie Kelly: There was a lot of people.
We walked out there together and it was just packed. I mean, people were under trees and they were on the hill and I was like, “Whoa.” Like. They’re ready. That’s such an amazing thing and an amazing feeling. Even to just look out and see everybody in their red on a Sunday and during like a Woodward Dream cruise weekend where they could be out cruising their car and instead they’re there at a rally.
It was just incredible. And the day prior I did an educational class at my hall, preparing my members for a strike. And 300 people had shown up to that. And like even one of my own committee men were like, “Don’t do it that day. You’re gonna get six people tops.” And I remember we walked into the hall and they were like, “Whoa, there’s like 300, 400 members here.”
Because they just wanna hear about what’s gonna happen. They wanna hear what we’re gonna fight for. They wanna hear why they think that we can win this fight. And so it was just like having those two days in a row showed me that like, our membership is ready. Like Shawn Fain said, they’re fed up, right?
I knew I was fed up a long time ago, but like, it’s just this incredible realization when you realize everybody is just as mad as you are and they’re ready to fight for it. It builds something inside of you where you’re like, “I’m not alone on the ship. We’re all ready for a different standard of living and we’re all ready for a different life…”
And I mean, if that’s not solidarity, I don’t know what is. And if the union isn’t collective action, it’s nothing else. Right? That’s what the whole premise of a union is, is just collective action, and they’re ready to join in collective action and win this. So it’s incredible.
Teddy Ostrow: And I think that was really evident, not only at the rallies we saw, which I believe were in Chicago, Metro Detroit, Louisville as well.
But in the practice pickets. And I know Luigi, you led a practice picket, in Detroit, with your local, maybe it was involving more locals than just yours. Can you talk a little bit about that? What, what was that like?
Luigi Gjokaj: So I forgot exactly how we came up with the idea. but it definitely came from the UPS practice picket. That’s where we first saw it, and I was like, “Oh my God, this is genius.” It’s, like Jessie had said earlier, I’m like, we’re scrimmaging before the big game because we have so many members that have never been on strike.
So, you know, it’s always like, well, what do you do during the strike?
Some people are like, “Oh, you just walk around in the line. It’s real easy. There’s nothing to it.” Well, I can tell you secondhand, right? Because she can tell you firsthand what it’s like from day one to week one to week three to the rain, to worrying about the snow to being cold as hell at night. I know secondhand what it was like seeing the enthusiasm.
The stuff happened on the first days and, and [we were] like, “wow, I didn’t realize that would happen.” Oh man, I thought the cops would be on our side because they’re union too. And instead they’re over there harassing the people for exercising their freedom to picket, to strike, to speak.
And it was just like, “Wow, man. Like, I’m glad I’m here to see this [at a] boots on the ground at ground level so I know what to expect if we’re up next.
With the practice picket, what UPS did was awesome. I think it was great. They got a really, really good contract without having to go through a strike. So when I brought this to my local, to my membership about a practice picket, people were just so on board.
You had a lot of people that weren’t, some of the older folks, [saying] we don’t need to do that. And it’s not gonna be a kind of same thing like Jessie ran into in 19, all of a sudden, bam, strike. What do we do? So I didn’t want that to happen. You know, having spoken to her about her experience, I wanted it to be better.
So I got with some of the other mouthpieces in the plant, some in leadership positions, some not. And this thing turned into something bigger than I could have imagined. I mean, it started off as a regular local practice picket rally. And at the end of the day we had the international president over there, and supporters from multiple locals.
The neighborhood when they saw us marching was honking their horns and waving at us and cheering us on. It made every single news station locally, nationally. I mean the Wall Street Journal’s writing about it, CBS News, Fox. I mean, they hit everywhere. And I think it probably was playing in France where our CEO’s sitting in his chateau.
I’m sure it was hitting at the mansion, the second mansion that our COO had in Mexico that, “Hey baby, east side of Detroit, the heart of Motor City is alive and well, and we’re ready.”
Teddy Ostrow: Awesome. Yeah, thanks for going through that. It seems like you guys aren’t only doing practice pickets, like you said, it’s rallies, even down to like the small stuff. Not every local is necessarily on board with doing some of these bigger actions, but rank and filers are taking it upon themselves to, before a shift or on a break, you know, taking 10 minutes to speak to coworkers, 10 people, 15 people, 30 people about the demands. As I’ve read in places like Labor Notes and I’ve spoken with Chris Budnick down in Kentucky, it really just seems like people are getting involved, in a way that just hasn’t been seen in a very long time.
I wanna turn to the issues. You guys have rattled off a couple already, but let’s turn to the issues and to the stakes of this fight for you guys, for auto workers, and not only UAW members.
So first, can you guys break down what are the union’s major demands? I know there’s a lot of them, but maybe start with what are the most important ones, to you guys personally, to people in your plants? And really just help listeners understand what the stakes are for workers’ lives and their wellbeing to solve these issues, to overcome the concessions of the past decade or more?
Jessie Kelly: Okay. Yeah. So let’s talk about it. What’s at stake is everything. Not to be so dramatic, but what’s at stake is literally everything. So, I can speak for me. I graduated high school in 2008. I immediately entered the workforce. My mom, although a union member, had three daughters and as a single mom, and could not afford to send us to college.
So, I entered the workforce as NAFTA was in full force inside of the metro Detroit area. So there was zero opportunity for me. I just knew I needed to have a job, so I did whatever I could to secure a job. As I told you earlier in the introduction, I went through so many different ostracized departments inside of the auto industry because even though my mom at 17 could go and join General Motors and make a good middle class living as being a groundskeeper, that wasn’t an option for me and it wasn’t an option for my siblings.
So for me it looked a lot like a third party housekeeper making $11 an hour and being a temp and being an on-call and all of these little ostracized pockets that are just exploiting workers to make the corporations more and more money. and so that’s what’s at stake. It’s making sure that my son doesn’t have to go through the same struggles that I went through, doesn’t have to go through working 80 hours a week and missing out on his children’s life to make sure that he can somehow secure an opportunity just to have a middle class life, but still live paycheck to paycheck. I mean, I’m a lot luckier than most people in my generation, and I still live paycheck to paycheck even though I am doing better than everybody else.
That’s a really sad reality of where the generation that we’re living in and the challenges that this generation faces. So, that’s why I’m so dramatic when I say what’s at stake, it’s everything. Like I said at the rally, like for my son’s generation, it’s not about protecting the American dream or fighting for the American dream. It’s literally like resuscitating it from the dead. It’s up to us to make sure that that’s a reality for the next generations. That they have the ability to have opportunity, that they have the ability to have a hobby, that they have the ability to do more in life than just wake up and work from the moment they’re awake until the moment it’s time for them to sleep.
I don’t wanna see that for him, and I don’t wanna see that for any of our children or any of our future generations, and I don’t wanna see that for us. So this fight really is about that and it’s about the middle class as a whole. Because if we don’t win now we’re, we’re gonna continue to lose and we’re gonna continue to have a race to the bottom
So that is how big this fight really is. So we’ll talk a little bit about the member’s demands and so I’ll take some, and I think Luigi, you can take some, so we’ll start with eliminating tiers on wages and benefits.
This is a big deal. They found a way to make us pitted against ourselves. The fact that you can do the same exact job next to somebody and make half of the amount of money and a quarter of the benefits, it’s just not okay. It’s just not what’s right. There’s no loyalty in that. And we’re loyal to these companies every single day.
We’re loyal to these companies. We drive their products. We show up to work. We do the best that we can. We risk our health and we risk our time and we’re loyal to them. And they’re saying that you are not even worth half what the person next to you is worth and we’re not gonna give you benefits. And I think that in society we get really caught up in how much somebody makes in their hourly rate.
And we’re fighting for so much more than that. When I was a temp, I made half as much. My health insurance was only 25 percent as good as theirs. That’s a problem because just because your attempt does not mean that you’re not risking your health just as much as the person next to you.
I was breathing in the same toxic chemicals. I was doing the same backbreaking work, but I wasn’t allowed to have the same health insurance. That’s a huge problem. So that’s one of our top ones. Substantial wage increases. This is for anybody in the working class, period. Inflation has rapidly grown and we need to be on par with that.
Our standard of living, like I said, went down 13% since our last agreement. We can’t afford the same lifestyle that we could afford four years ago. So we deserve the same wage increases that we know our CEOs are giving themselves. Restore COLA, the cost of living adjustment.
So that’s just that our wages are protected from inflation. So there’s a quick calculation that can be done every three months like we’ve seen inside of John Deere that says, this is how much more you need to make to just have the same standard of living that you had three months ago. And that’s all we’re asking for is our wages to be protected against inflation.
Defined benefit pensions for all workers and reestablished retiree medical benefits. and this is where I get into reciprocated loyalty. We’re very, very loyal to these companies and we give our whole lives to them. And I mean, I’ve genuinely given my whole life to General Motors and missed out on three years of my son’s life, giving my life to General Motors while I was a temporary employee.
And all we’re asking for in return is that when it is time for us to be done, that they’re loyal to us and that we can retire and we can have health insurance when we retire. And we’re risking our health for them for 30, 40, 50 years, however long we stay in these plans. And we just wanna make sure that after all of that time and all the things we were exposed to and all of the backbreaking work that we still have health insurance when we retire.
I mean, it’s not that big of an ask, it’s just reciprocated loyalty.
Teddy Ostrow: Just to pause there for a second, the retiree, medical benefits, the pension, these were offered to workers who began their work at these auto companies before 2007 and they were taken away.
This is part of the many, many tiers that we’ve seen at these companies that are pitting workers against each other. I also think it speaks to something you alluded to, Jessie, which is that these jobs, some of them harm your body, with life altering injuries…Maybe we could just linger on that for a bit, and get to some of the other demands as well. But can you just speak to that, what this job is like in the plant?
Luigi Gjokaj: So I got seven nice holes in my arm from a workplace injury and, thankfully because I had a union steward and a union safety rep, it was documented as a workplace injury.
Initially they did not want to say it happened at work. Even though there were witnesses there, there was safety protocol in place. This rack was supposed to have been fixed. There was a documented problem rack. They just didn’t want to have the comp claim against the plant. and had it been a non-union workshop, a lot of things could have happened, and trust me, they try like hell and unfortunately sometimes get away with it, even in union shops. but that injury happened to me a little over four years ago. Before that I was a professional boxer and mixed martial artist. So you know, that training is rigorous. You put your body through hell.
I’d never had surgery before in my entire life. Broken nose, a couple scratches, maybe some stitches here and there, but I never actually had to have complete reconstructive surgery on a body part. And that’s what happened, just from somebody not following the protocol that they were supposed to at work.
I wasn’t able to hold my daughter for the first two weeks of her life in this right arm. My strong arm. I had a one and a half year old at the time, so my kids were about 13 months apart. So I was grabbing the one year old in one arm. And, you know, my daughter’s crying. I can’t get her outta the bassinet, I gotta set him down, and then he’s crying. Gotta pick her up, put her in one arm. And it wasn’t my fault. It was the company’s fault. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do. Right? They want me to come into work every single day, do my job, right, every single day. And I’m not even gonna get an ‘attaboy, a pat on the back. And I don’t want that. We really don’t. We’re not asking for a lot.
We’re not selfish people. I’m not expecting to come to work every day: “Oh, thank you for coming to work. Thank you for doing your job.” Just let me do my job and let me go home. The way I came in, in one piece and that day it didn’t happen, and I still got lingering injuries that happened here to here and there.
But you know what? We battle on, we truck on, we do what we gotta do. And I think that’s kind of like the theme for the whole thing. We just want to be able to keep on keeping on. And the way everything is right now. I mean, we barely got our heads above water. Now. Where do they expect us to go after 30 years of that? I’m 13 years into it. I went in as the best shape of my life. Mind you, as a professional athlete, I’ve got 17 more years. I don’t know what the residual effects of the job are gonna have. So if I give you 30, you should be able to give me a pension.
Teddy Ostrow: Jessie, you were talking about loyalty, and Luigi, you’re talking about working at a company for 30 years. To do that sometimes, even if you’re able to do that, we have auto workers who are moving 1, 2, 3, 4, I don’t even know how many times because of these companies closing plants.
It’s more than just a plant. It’s more than people just losing jobs. This is almost the closure, the sort of devastation of entire communities. And I think it’s something like 65 plant closures between these three companies in the past 20 years. What are you guys demanding with regard to this? How does this affect people?
Luigi Gjokaj: So when a plant closes, it devastates an entire community. We don’t gotta look any further back than Belvedere assembly, right?
That plant kind of was responsible for the entire town in one way or another, right? The workers got their wages from the plant, from working at the plant. The city got some tax increase from taxing the workers’ paycheck. ‘Cause remember they gave incentives to the corporation, right?
So corporate welfare is cool, right when they want it. But notwithstanding that they got their wages from the company, then they go out and spend that money at a local diner at the grocery store, at the movie theater, take the kids out to the park to an event, and that money stays within the community, and everyone thrives in one shape or another. If you look at the Great Recession…when these plants were idled to one shift or to a skeleton crew, it’s not really running as much. Everybody felt it. Everybody in metro Detroit, ’cause we’re an automotive town, right?
We’re an automotive state. Everyone in Michigan felt it, it might’ve been a recession everywhere else, but we were going through a depression, you know, here in the metro Detroit area, and it had a ripple effect across the entire country. I think right around that time, people started realizing how important manufacturing was, and we started looking at the raw end of deals we were getting.
And it was directly from the corporations, right? Because they’re not gonna just shut down a plant and cut their own throat and all of a sudden say, you know, this profitable product we have, we’re just gonna stop building it. We’re done. No. What they do is they move it somewhere. They can build it cheaper.
And then you displace all those workers, whether it be you move it to a different state and have people trek halfway across their country, uproot their lives and their families, and tell them, well, if you don’t go to this plant here, then you can just consider yourself terminated, right? ‘Cause we’re getting a better tax incentive over here.
Or they’re uprooting the entire plant and the product as they did in Belvedere, in Illinois, and they’re now building it in Mexico, right? Nothing against my Mexican automotive brothers and sisters over there. We’re fighting for their wages as well, right? We want them brought to our standard of living as well, right?
Because if we’re making the same amount of money now, they can’t whipsaw us across the country, across the continent, It’s one thing to whipsaw internally amongst each other. It’s another when you can do it across the border because of how laws are structured.
Another thing I’d love to just touch on, and I know I’m kind of jumping around here. It moved to Mexico and the price of that vehicle never went down. Not one penny, actually, as a slap in the face to the American consumer. It went up. Why?
Because the company has a built-in cost of living. They have their own version of COLA, move it somewhere else, charge a little more every single year. When we came in as tier twos, as temporary workers, that half pay. Okay. The price of that vehicle never went down. It kept going up and going up and going up and going up.
It is the literal definition of, of runaway corporatism and corporate greed. It’s just to maximize the profits and squeeze as much blood out of that rock as you can.
Jessie Kelly: So I just wanna talk to that a little bit too, because I just want the listener to imagine themselves, waking up tomorrow in Youngstown, Ohio and hearing that Lordstown is closing down, you’ve given 30 years of loyalty to General Motors inside of Youngtown, Ohio. And you wake up and you hear this, you hear the blazer, instead of going to Youngstown is gonna go to Mexico and they’re shutting down, or I’m sorry. ‘Cause they get real creative with language, so they’re gonna allocate your plant.
‘Cause that doesn’t mean we’re, we’re shutting it down. We’re just gonna allocate it so that we’re not legally liable for the repercussions of our actions. So we’re gonna allocate the plant and all of those workers wake up and they find out they don’t have a job tomorrow, and they’re like, “Okay, I have to follow my job.”
So they’re left with a decision of leaving the only place that they’ve ever known and leaving their spouse, and leaving their children possibly and uprooting their whole entire lives and the whole life that they built, even though they always did the right thing, right, they graduated and they got a job and they were loyal to a company and they always did the right thing.
And it didn’t matter that they did the right thing. They have a decision to make, “Do I move halfway across the country to keep my job and keep my pension and keep my health insurance and be able to provide for my family, or do I stay here and rot because there’s nothing left in this community for me.”
So they say, “I’m gonna leave. I’m gonna follow my job, and I’m gonna go to Missouri, or I’m gonna go to Arlington, or I’m gonna go to Detroit.” So they’re like, “Let me put my house on the market.” Well, now their house just depreciated in value $65,000 overnight because everybody else just put their house on the market too, because everybody else has to follow their job.
It just decimates entire communities. I know for Youngstown there was even like talks about closing the public school system because there was gonna be no more tax dollars to be able to provide the public school system inside of that community because General Motors made a decision on an executive board to allocate the blazer strictly to Mexico where they could exploit the workers instead of to Youngstown where they had legacy costs.
And when we say legacy costs, we’re talking about just the cost of a worker.
So one of our demands is that we can strike over plant closures. We need the ability to strike over plant closures because there’ve been 65 plant closures amongst the Big Three. And those are 65 communities that have been destroyed by a simple decision and an executive board to stay competitive and to make Wall Street happy.
Luigi Gjokaj: Yeah. I mean, where else would it make sense that someone can tell you, I’m gonna take something away from you, but you’re gonna keep building it until we’re ready to transition it outta here. No, you’re gonna take it away. Guess what? I’m gonna make it hurt. I’m gonna withhold my labor because you can’t force me to work.
Gimme the ability to withhold my labor from that company so they can’t keep sucking the well dry, because at some point it’s the snake eating its own tail. This is gonna kill us all eventually at some point.
Right? Who the hell’s gonna keep buying this stuff when there’s no more money to buy it? I mean, the auto industry was created by the workforce, right? They paid them enough money to be able to afford the product they bought.
Teddy Ostrow: Right. One of the ways. One of the methods through which they, they sort of, gouge their prices and keep up their profits is by hiring temps temporary workers. and this brings us to, I think, another really key demand. And Jessie, I know you were a temp. Can you share what that was like and what you guys are trying to do with regard to temps?
Jessie Kelly: Yeah. So that, that brings us to another one of our members’ demands, and that’s to end the abuse of temp workers. I was a temporary employee for three years. I equate that to like literal hell on earth. The three years that I spent as a temporary employee were the most miserable three years that I’ve ever spent as a working person inside of America.
So one of the reasons why I say it was so bad was because you had absolutely no path or no means to an end of when that was going to end for you or when you would achieve the goal of no longer being a temporary employee. And it was just abundantly clear and abundantly understood and accepted that you were an exploited worker for the benefits of the people next to you.
One of the hardest things about being a temp worker was that you were only allowed, three days of time off for the whole entire year. And that was three unpaid days of time off. And so, I was a temp for three years, one of the years that I was a temporary employee. I had the unfortunate circumstance of my grandmother and my aunt dying in the same year.
And, when my grandmother died, I took a day off for her visitation and I took a day off for her funeral because you do not have the protections as a regular employee of having bereavement time. So that counted as two days out of my three days, I was allowed off for the whole entire year. Three weeks later, my aunt died, unfortunately.
And, I remember I went to my boss and I explained my situation. I said, I know I just took these days off, but I gave you a death certificate. I gave you an obituary. You know, my grandma died. Unfortunately, my aunt has died now too. And I would really like to be able to take her viewing off and her funeral off.
And he said, “No, you can only choose one of those days. You’re a temporary employee, you can only choose one of those days.” So I said, okay. So I took the funeral off because for me it felt more important than the viewing. But I remember being at work that day, and I’m welding pre-production vehicles, and I’m just so upset.
I was just so angry. I’m thinking, you know, like, I came in here for the last three years, every single day for the last three years, and I’ve sacrificed that time with my family and I’ve sacrificed that time with my son. And they won’t even say, “Okay, you had a death in your family and you’ve given the proof and you’ve given the records to prove this,” and you can’t even take that time off.
That was so frustrating and I still made it through and I said, okay, it’s gonna be worth it because maybe it ends up with a full-time position. and I remember six months later, I got influenza B. We were still in the same calendar year. So now I have influenza B and I call my supervisor and I say to him, I have influenza B and I just went to the emergency room and I’m very sick and I’ll bring you all of my documentation to prove that I have influenza B.
But I don’t know if it’s good for me to come into work and give everybody else influenza. And he said, “No, you’re a temporary worker. We’ve already had this discussion. You have to come to work.” So I remember I pulled up a trash can next to a pre-production vehicle and I’m spot welding a car.
And as I’m spot welding the car, every couple of welds I have to throw up into a trash can. And I had to do this because if I didn’t, I was gonna lose my job and I was gonna lose the opportunity that I just spent three years trying to achieve. And for me it worked out okay because for me, I went to an apprenticeship and I don’t even wanna say okay, I just wanna say it’s semi worked out.
I was given an opportunity to have a job where I can live paycheck to paycheck [unlike] the other 400 temps that I was with…all of them being laid off overnight. One day all 400 of them walked into a room on a Monday one day after I got my apprenticeship, and they just said, “Sorry, we don’t need your services anymore.”
After some five, six years of being a temporary employee and spending 40 to 60 hours dedicating their lives and showing loyalty to a corporation just to get an opportunity, got walked off of the job site. And I’ll always remember that day because, although I was spared, most of my friends were not.
And they walked them out to their car and they wouldn’t even let them say goodbye to their union brothers and sisters.
That’s the type of thing that we’re fighting for. It’s disgusting. And those are the types of things that made General Motors’ record breaking profits that no one talks about.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. Yeah, I mean it’s just, it’s unbelievable…I’ve heard about someone working six years as a temp, and I know that one of the demands that some people are calling for is to just hire the temps. All the temps right now, and perhaps, you know, if you work 90 days as a temp, that’s the cutoff, you get hired as a permanent worker.
One last demand that I really want to cover, ’cause I think it’s super important not just for auto workers, but as a precedent for the rest of the working class and other unions, is a 32 hour work week at 40 hours pay. This is something that the UAW called for in the 1930s. Why is this so central?
Luigi Gjokaj: I mean, to people who think that a 32 hour work week is crazy, I mean, it was crazy to talk about a 40 hour work week. At what point do we categorize what is and isn’t insane. You know, at the time when they came up with the 40 hour work week, it was eight hours of work, eight hours of sleep, right?
‘Cause we gotta sleep and eight hours to do whatever the hell you want. And I think everyone’s earned that just as a human being. I mean, we’re so bad about doing what I want to do for eight hours, right? We were all so quick to and excited to grow up and become adults so we could do what we wanted to do, right?
And then we had to get jobs and we were like, “Oh, I can’t do what I wanna do. I gotta do what they want me to do.” So what’s wrong with negotiating? The amount of time that I’m gonna spend you telling me what I have to do, right? Because it’s a necessary evil. We all gotta work, right?
Anyone who thinks that auto workers just working a 40 hour work week have never stepped foot inside of a plant, you got some places that’ll have a 40 hour here and there. That’s not the case. We’re not working 40 hours. What’s wrong with doing better?
Jessie Kelly: I wanna talk a little bit about the 32 hour work week too.
We live in a society where technology has disproportionately only advantaged the rich. Over and over and over again, we see that technology has benefited them and the 1% and never benefited us. So we have to worry about our jobs and we have to worry about being laid off because we have AI or we have virtual reality, or we have technology that has overtaken the jobs that we live [off of] and who gets rich off of that.
But the CEOs, these huge corporations, and never us, we don’t get to reap in the benefits of technology growing as a society. We just watch everybody else reap in it. So we eventually have to come to terms where a 32 hour work week is the norm, because if we don’t, we can’t keep everybody gainfully employed.
Because of global warming, we have to transition into EVs. We know this. Maybe EVs aren’t the ultimate answer, but it is the answer today. Unfortunately when we’re talking about the transition into EVs, we’re also talking about losing 40% of the components that it takes to make an internal combustion engine to an EV.
Which means that the people that make those components, their job ceases to exist. And we should celebrate that as a society, right? We should celebrate that and we should say, “Wow, look at us like we’ve realized this, this huge problem that we have in society, and we’ve come together collectively to find a way to remedy this situation.”
And that’s through electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines. That’s gonna help with global warming and it’s gonna help with this, you know, green initiative that we have going. But we don’t look at it that way. The companies, they take it and they use it as a mask to be able to exploit workers more, and they take the technology and they take the advancements that we have, and they use it as a means to undercut the worker and just make more money.
And so all of us together should say, wow, it takes 40% less components. Let’s go down to a 32 hour work week. Let’s spend more time with our families. Let’s have a better work life balance. Let’s be able to be there for the children and be there for the next generation and do all of these things. But instead, they’re saying, “We’re gonna lay you all off and we’re gonna make more money on the fact that we’re dealing with this crisis inside of society.”
And that’s problematic.
Teddy Ostrow: I’m so glad you brought in the EVs ’cause that’s exactly where I was gonna go next, which is to talk about the stakes for the greater auto industry, which is in change, right?
We are seeing a change in this country’s manufacturing makeup, massive investment spurred by government legislation, all being sort of funneled into this green transition. But it doesn’t really seem like it’s very much a just transition as, as unions and other labor advocates would hope it to be.
And the UAW has kind of taken up the mantle of trying to push for equity across the industry as the EV industry ramps up. We just saw an interim wage agreement at the GM Battery Factory in Lordstown, at Ultium cells where folks got around like $4 wage increases, I believe two to $4 wage increases,
But the leadership framed it as really just the start, because the goal would be to bring these jobs up to the standards of the regular combustion engine jobs themselves, right? The UAW is trying to improve. So I just wanted to maybe give you guys a chance to talk about the stakes for the industry and what’s going on at these new jobs at EV factories.
Luigi Gjokaj: To me, the biggest BS I heard with the whole electrification thing is that, “We have to pay less because [there are] less components and it’s a battery now that’s operating the vehicle.”
There’s this narrative that they’re trying to paint with, “Oh, it’s an easier job. It’s less components, it’s gonna require less people.” But at the end of the day, we’re circling back to what I said, right? Full circle. They’re paying less and still gonna charge more.
Go look at a mine in the Congo, and you tell me that it’s fair what they’re doing over there to get the product that they need for their EV, the lithium.
Go look at a lithium mine. Go look at a cobalt mine. Find out what they’re paying those people, right? If anything at all, they’re paying rock bottom prices for this technology, And yet you’re gonna sit there and charge more.I don’t know what kind of people they got writing their script, but it is absolute fiction and it is absolute fantasy in every sense of the word.
Jessie Kelly: You can’t sit there and say your material costs and your labor costs and your this cost and your that cost, and you know, we gotta keep the cost low, and yet you just made $12.4 billion in a quarter. Okay? In a quarter. That’s more money than most communities are gonna spend in a lifetime. Yeah. So let’s talk about Ultium’s interim deal. I’m glad for them. I think that I agree with Shawn Fain when he says it’s just a start, but taking a $16.65 an hour job and turning it into a $19.65 an hour job is not the answer. It’s not the means to the end. It’s not a win, for anybody.
It’s better than it was, but it’s not a win. And that’s why I’m really glad that he said it’s an interim deal.
And he’s not even patting himself on the back or anybody else on the back. He’s saying this is just what they were owed so far. And this is just the start to even begin to talk, because that’s correct. Those people deserve so much more because they are the future and because they are going to take our society in a positive way, and they’re going to secure our future in ways that really matter for our next generations and saving this planet and we owe them so much more than like a wage that will literally put you on government assistance.
It’s sad. It’s sad that General Motors did that, but to just build upon Luigi’s point: these are propulsion jobs. It doesn’t matter what source that General Motors is using to propel a vehicle. It’s just propulsion jobs. And so if we have already won inside of negotiation tables from decades to decades to decades, that this is the standard of living for a job that creates a propulsion system for a vehicle.
Why are we going back on that? Why do we have to re-win things that we’ve already won?
They’re just using it as a means to exploit more workers and to get more, and to make more record breaking profits. And that’s what it all ends up being inside of America, is that in order to sustain a competitive market, in order to do better than you did the quarter before, you have to take from somewhere.
And so what they’re doing is they’re constantly taking from the bottom, and that’s why we’re living in a society where that gap is growing. The 1% is getting smaller and we’re getting larger and we’re dying, right? The bottom half is dying while they’re getting richer and richer and richer and it’s sad and we need to draw attention to that.
Teddy Ostrow: We covered so much ground, thank you guys so much for doing this with me. I have to ask you though, in a last lightning round, because I know a lot of people are wondering this: are you guys gonna go on strike, you think, come September 14th?
Luigi Gjokaj: We need to do what we need to do.
Jessie Kelly: We’re gonna do what we need to do.
Teddy Ostrow: Well, we’ll see what you guys do. Jessie, and Luigi, thanks for joining me on The Upsurge.
Jessie Kelly: Thank you so much for having us.
Teddy Ostrow: Thanks for having us. You just listened to episode 14 of The Upsurge
Special thanks to Luigi Gjokaj, Danny Morales and assembly line worker and UAW Local 22 member Chris Viola for contributing audio clips to this episode.
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Bob Batz Jr., who has been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette since October 2022, and Bethany Anne Lind, a SAG-AFTRA actor who has been on strike since July 2023, speak with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez in a worker solidarity livestream. From logistics and auto manufacturing to higher education, hospitality, and entertainment, workers across industries are fighting back against corporate greed and exploitation, and fighting for the dignity and security they deserve. If we want to see workers win these fights, however, and if we want to see the labor movement grow, then we need to mobilize and sustain support for them.
Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino, Kayla Rivara
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
Good. There we go.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome, everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us.
From logistics and auto manufacturing to higher education, hospitality, and entertainment, workers across industry are fighting back against corporate greed and exploitation and fighting for the dignity and security that we all deserve.
In the past year alone, we have seen major strikes, unionization efforts, and high stakes contract fights at UPS, at the University of California, performers at Medieval Times, locomotive manufacturers at Wabtec in Pittsburgh represented by the United Electrical Workers just ended their two month strike with a new contract.
Meanwhile, thousands of hospital workers at Kaiser Permanente just voted to authorize a strike. Hollywood writers, of course, with the Writers Guild of America, have been on strike since May. Let’s not forget, unionized Starbucks workers around the country who have yet to reach a first contract at any store continue to take collective action to combat the company’s rampant union busting.
Also, workers at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland are currently on strike. Hospitality workers with UNITE HERE have been on strike at hotels across southern California.
All eyes are currently on the United Auto Workers, as they negotiate their master agreement with the Big Three automakers. Their current contract expires on September 14th. It is very possible that we will see a strike in the auto industry later this month.
Something is happening here. The class war is heating up. Everyone wants to know where things will go next, but as we always say here at The Real News Network, we all have a role to play in shaping the outcome here. All of us have a stake in these struggles. What happens next depends on what we do right now.
If we want to see workers win these fights, and if we want to see the labor movement grow, because the more that we win, the more that other folks will be emboldened to get into the fight, then we need to mobilize and sustain support for them until they achieve victory.
As exciting as it is to see big potential strikes on the horizon, like at UAW and Kaiser Permanente, we cannot forget about our fellow workers who have been on strike, and who have been holding the line for months or even longer.
With so many strikes and workers struggles taking place all around us, we need to maintain continued, consistent, up-to-date coverage. We need to be checking in regularly with our fellow workers who are holding the line. We need to hear directly from them about these struggles, how they’re developing, and what they need from us to keep fighting and to win.
That is why moving forward, we at The Real News Network, are committed to hosting these worker solidarity livestreams every other week. Earlier this year, we were doing them once a month but, clearly, the need is greater and we are going to meet that need.
We will be bringing y’all more voices from the frontlines of struggle. We’re going to be bringing together panels of folks involved in these different struggles, so you need to watch this space.
Like we did ahead of the potential Teamsters strike at UPS, we’ve got an all-UAW panel coming later this month, ahead of what could be a potential auto industry strike.
Today, we’re going to get things rolling with another special panel with some folks who have been holding the line and need our support. I just want to stress to everyone watching, first of all, thank you for being here, thank you for caring, and if you want to donate to the strike funds for the strikes that we’re going to cover today, we have links in the show description to this livestream that you can go to and you can donate right now. Please share the stream, share those links, do whatever you can to show support.
All right. Let’s get to it. Today, I’m honored to be joined on the livestream by Bob Batz Jr., who has been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette since October of 2022. I’m also joined by Bethany Anne Lind, a SAG-AFTRA actor, who has been on strike, since July 2023.
Bob, Bethany, thank you so much for joining us today at The Real News Network, I really appreciate it.
Bob Batz, Jr.:
Thank you for having us, Max. Thanks for remembering us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You got it, brother. We are here to the bitter end. We will not forget about y’all, and I am begging folks, as I already did, and I’m going to keep doing throughout this livestream, please, please, please do not forget about our fellow workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, WGA, SAG-AFTRA, Medieval Times, so on and so forth. We can make this happen. We can keep the pressure up, but we cannot forget about them.
Speaking of not forgetting, I know that there’s still a lot happening in the country and beyond right now. The news cycle never ends. I wanted to take this first round as an opportunity to just refresh everyone’s memories about these two crucial struggles, the SAG-AFTRA strike and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette strike, which involves multiple unions, and, as I said, has been going on since October.
Bob, I want to start with you, and I want to ask if we could first just reintroduce yourself to the great Real News viewers and listeners, tell us a bit about yourself, and could you give us just a rundown of what led us to the point of this strike. We’re going to talk about what it’s been like for the many months that y’all have been on strike in the next round but just before we get there, let’s make sure everyone has the context that they need to remember what brought us to the point of these strikes at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and SAG-AFTRA actors across the Hollywood industry. Bob, take it away.
Bob Batz, Jr.:
It’d be my pleasure. Feel free to interrupt or guide me. I’ll try to keep it brief.
One of the difficulties about our strike is it goes back years before it was actually a strike. It’s very complicated, it’s multiple unions, as you said, Max, but my one beginning point to our strike is I’m a longtime journalist, I’m a feature writer, an editor, a photographer, a content producer, I’ve worked in Pittsburgh since the mid-’80s, I’ve worked at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, which is a major daily news operation here for 35 years, something like that, 30 years.
I’ve got a 16 year old son, and my last contractual raise is older than he is. Workers in Pittsburgh haven’t got a contractual raise since 2007. Fast-forward to 2017 when our last contract expired, and this is for multiple unions, because we bargained together back in the day, so you have people like me that write and edit, you have people who drive the trucks, the Teamsters here in Pittsburgh, you have mailers, you have pressmen, and you have advertising workers. Those are the five unions at the Post Gazette that are all in this together.
Our last contract expired in 2017. We tried to bargain, we tried to come to a deal, year after year on that. We’ve always come to deals over the past decades, that our union has been around for 67 years, we always came to deals, sometimes that meant giving up a lot of concessions, millions of dollars of concessions and we did that, we got it done. Other unions did the same thing.
This time, the company said, “We are at an impasse” in 2020. “We can’t bargain anymore. This is how it’s going to be. We’re going to impose conditions on you guys”, and so there’s not much we could do about that. We had conditions imposed on us. We lost a lot of the things that we had bargained for over decades, so did the other unions. We were still trying to get contracts done, reach agreements, and in October of 2022 … It’s bad when you have to go back a year on your strike, again, don’t recommend it. Bethany, you’re, at least, in 2023 still.
In the fall of 2022, this company decided that it wasn’t going to pay an agreed upon $19 increase in these other workers’ healthcare plan. They wanted to put them on the company plan that we, journalists, had already been put on, just forced on, basically, when they imposed conditions.
These other unions went on strike in early October. We did not. The journalists did not even know we’re like a sister union to, especially, the CWA unions, because we’re a unit of the CWA as well. We were in the middle of a federal case, basically, with MLRB on our own issues that we had with this company, and we thought we were going to be successful on that. It was a very odd wrinkle at the start of our strike where we’re like, “We love you, brothers and sisters, but we’re not going … We support you but we’re in the middle of trying to help us all with this federal case, so we’re not going to go on strike yet”, but we joined them on October 18th on our own unfair labor practice issues.
I worked until noon on that day, finished my Sunday section and my stories and my photographs and did them as good as I always could, and then I went downstairs and put on a picket sign. I told my bosses, “You know where I’m going to be at noon, because that’s where I have to be.” That’s put me where I am right now, like you said, almost 11 months ago.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, it’s just wild, to me, and I would highly recommend for folks who want to know more about the Post Gazette strike, you can go back and watch previous livestreams that we’ve done, including one with Bob as well as one of his coworkers.
We also did a great extended interview on my podcast Working People, which we publish here at The Real News, with Bob’s colleague, the great Steve Mellon. If you haven’t listened to that, you can go onto The Real News, find that, and listen to that conversation. I also had Steve and Bob on for a segment at Breaking Points, one of my Art of Class War segments there, so you can go watch there.
The info is there, I’m begging y’all to go take advantage of it, because the more you learn about this strike, I promise you, the more pissed off you’re going to get, especially with the papers’ owners.
Before we toss it to Bethany, I just wanted to ask about that, Bob, if I could, because it’s something that y’all have mentioned before, that the media industry is not doing great, in general. National Geographic just laid off all of its staff. We have been seeing these newsrooms close, like the Texas Tribune, solidarity with all the laid off journalists who just got the terrible news last week about what’s happening to that paper.
It is a bloodbath across the industry, but this is a trend that we are seeing, a mindset from the owners that is destroying the Fourth Estate, essentially, like a vital pillar of democracy is a free press. Our free press is dying under the weight of corporate greed, a busted advertising model, so on and so forth, so I just wanted to ask, we don’t have to go into the deep history here but could you say a little bit about how the trajectory of the paper itself has changed with the new ownership in recent years?
Bob Batz, Jr.:
We’ve talked about this before, Max, that’s certainly true. The industry has its struggles and it has for a long time now, but it also is rife with corporate greed. A lot of these local newspapers, including last week and the week before, are getting bought out by venture capital firms that make them smaller and sell their newsrooms and squeeze every bit of money out of them that they can, and that’s something different than changing readership habits, and advertising models.
In our own strike, and this is one of the things that’ll piss you off about our strike, especially if you’re in it, is at the so-called bargaining table, the company will say, “This isn’t about money. This isn’t that. It’s not that we can’t afford to give you healthcare. It’s not that we can’t afford to give you raises. We’re just not going to do it. That’s not something we’re willing to do. That’s not an economic concession that we’re willing to make.”
We’ve had that line given to us so many times over all these years, that our company has its challenges, but our company is bigger than just the newspaper and it owns a whole bunch of cable TV outlets across northern Ohio that make shit tons of money.
There’s money there for some of this stuff. In our case, and this is the case with some other strikes, this strike that’s cost the company millions of dollars, and who knows what the non-monetary costs have been to their brand and to its reputation, but the strike could have been settled for $70,000 could have paid for these other workers’ healthcare costs for a while.
The things that we’re asking for, which we’ve been very public about, they’re written down, we haven’t changed that, they’re very affordable. Again, I think our strike is actually one of the ones that is a very good exemplar of corporate greed, and they don’t even try to lie that it’s about money. If you’re in the media industry, it’d be very easy to do that but they don’t say anything except we don’t want to pay you, we don’t want to give you this, we don’t want you, and that’s what we’re dealing with.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re going to get to this later, but the NORB has always ruled that the owners of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette are bargaining in bad faith, that they are not actually fulfilling their obligations as employers according to labor law in this country, but, apparently, in this country, that doesn’t mean jack shit. You can just keep stonewalling at the bargaining table, you can keep refusing to bargain, you can keep waiting your workers out, hoping that they starve, that they lose their houses, that they have to move and find other jobs, and, ultimately, in my personal opinion, I think the owners of the Post Gazette have made it very clear that their end goal is to crush the unions. They don’t want to be a union newspaper. They would like to demoralize and, ultimately, decertify these unions, so that they could, effectively, do whatever they want.
Again, I’m speaking for myself. That’s just what I have gleamed from watching what these owners have been doing throughout this strike, and even before.
Speaking of corporate greed, and speaking of another side of the media and entertainment industry, I’m super excited to have Bethany on The Real News for the first time today, because a lot of folks have been asking us about what’s going with the Hollywood strikes.
As we know, writers, Hollywood writers with the Writers Guild of America East and West have been on strike since May, and they were joined by their industry coworkers in the Screen Actors Guild earlier this summer for the first time in 60 years.
The last time the actors and writers were on strike together was when Ronald Reagan was the president of SAG, so that should give you an indication of how seismic this moment is.
Bethany, I wanted to bring you in here and ask if you could start by introducing yourself to the good livestream viewers and listeners. Tell us a bit about how you got into acting and what your experience has been like in the industry. As best you can, because I don’t want to put it all on you but just give us a bit of a refresher on what led to y’all in SAG hitting the picket line and joining the WGA on this strike.
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yeah. Thanks for having me. SAG-AFTRA is a member of 160,000 people, so it’s a huge union that encompasses people who work as principal performers but also background performers and stunt performers and dancers, so it’s an enormous union that needs a lot of things, so I speak, for myself, as a member but not in any official capacity, obviously.
Yeah. I started as a theater actor, and I live in Atlanta actually, so I am not one of the Hollywood elite, if you will, but I started acting when the film industry came to Georgia, because tax incentives were passed here and a huge industry just sort of exploded here about 10 years ago and …
Bethany Anne Lind:
… exploded here about 10 years ago, and it was a great way for me to get my foot in the door without having to go to a place where I didn’t really feel like I wanted to live. I get to live in a place that is home to me. So leading up to these strikes, it’s been really, really fascinating. I’ll just go over a few of the main points of what we’re fighting for, but there are a lot, because what’s been happening in the last, really since that strike 60 years ago, is just a stripping away of needs and rights for workers in the film industry as a whole, but as an actor, particularly today.
One of those things is what we call scale, which is the base rate that they are allowed to pay us as actors, which a lot of people know is a thousand dollars a day or four to 5,000 a week depending on the contract, which sounds like a lot of money if actors were working five days a week, 50 weeks a year. But we’re not, or at least not for pay that often. A lot of our work is being sent on auditions. I’ve never done the numbers on how many jobs I actually book per audition that I tape because I think it would be too depressing, but there’s a big difference between how many auditions you’re taping and how many jobs you have. So I might spend a week taping three or four auditions for larger roles where I’m spending a full work week researching, memorizing, setting up my home studio, which I now basically have to have or pay someone to tape me, and I wouldn’t obviously be paid for that work. All I’m doing is sending that in for them to decide if they want to hire me or not.
So that base rate, that scale is very important because it has to hold you for a long time often. And another number that gets thrown around a lot, but I think it’s important, is we have to make $26,470 a year to qualify for health insurance. And that’s not even enough to live on in most of the markets where we are, or probably anywhere, where we are filming. And only 12.5% of SAG-AFTRA actors qualify for health insurance every year. So the amount of money that people are making most actors in SAG-AFTRA, it’s not a living wage.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Can I hover on that for just one second?
Bethany Anne Lind:
Please do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because I want to drill this home for everyone watching. Because it’s been… We don’t have to get into this right now, I just want to be upfront with people watching and listening is that, you guys know me here on The Real News for my podcast Working People for my segment at Breaking Points, I try to cover as many labor struggles as I possibly can. And I’m generally really encouraged by the way that… Workers’ struggles, our fellow workers fighting for their livelihoods, the dignity that we all deserve, fighting against corporate greed. This manages to, I think, bridge a lot of political divides. It enables people from different sides of the political spectrum, different backgrounds to come together in a sense of common struggle because we realized that we all work for a living.
And there are, as the great speech in the movie made once, since we’re talking about Hollywood says, I’m paraphrasing, but, “There are two kinds of people in this world, people who work, people who don’t.” You work, they don’t. The people at the other end of the bargaining table, whether that be at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette or the Hollywood Studios, they’re on one side, the rest of us are on another.
But I give all that preamble to say that I’ve been very disappointed and am frustrated with how much the culture war bull shit has infected people’s brains, and I have found it very hard to get people to show as much solidarity for the writers and the Hollywood actors as they show for other struggles like at UPS, the UAW, so on and so forth. And I understand there are reasons for that. There are a lot of parts about Hollywood that we don’t like. I promise you writers and actors don’t like that stuff too, and they’re getting screwed by the same people. But I really want to drive home what Bethany just said, because obviously Hollywood has a huge cultural impact, and we associate Hollywood with the superstars like Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, yada, yada, yada. But what Bethany just said is that less than 15% of SAG-AFTRA members make enough to even qualify for healthcare, which is, what was the number again, 24,000?
Bethany Anne Lind:
$26,470. [inaudible 00:25:04].
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s poverty. That’s the poverty line. So the vast majority of members of this union aren’t even reaching that threshold. So before you jump into the live chat or go talk to your friend about how this is all just a bunch of rich, elite actors, take that point to heart. And you’re going to learn more about this struggle because I’m about to shut up and toss it back to Bethany, but I just wanted to make that point.
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yeah, I think that’s so interesting because I’ve been encouraged overall because I was afraid when this strike started that the media was going to be by and large just covering movie stars, who by the way, don’t particularly need the union. They negotiate way above scale, and they bring their own negotiating power to the table. It’s working class people like me who need my union to fight for me. But there is a lot of having to perform a degree of success even before you have it that I think also works against us in times these where… I’ve been to plenty of red carpet events where I spent a chunk of my paycheck to rent a dress and gotten my picture taken, and it looked like I was a very successful person, and in that moment I am. And success means all kinds of things besides money, of course, but there is a degree to which you have to perform success in order to achieve success. And so it’s really hard to remind people that that performance isn’t always what’s actually happening in one’s bank account.
But I’ll go back to some of the… Just a couple other points that we’re fighting for. One of those things is residuals. About 10 or so years ago when the streaming platforms were very new, they were being called a new media in our contract, and we were sort of giving them a break while they figure this streaming thing out. And if you follow some of the folks from Orange is the New Black, which was obviously the first big hit streaming show, they’ll share what they are making in residuals and it’s mind-blowingly pitiful. And the contract has not been updated to any meaningful degree with the streaming services. They’re just vastly taking advantage about what they pay us and also the residuals that they get. They also do not release their numbers of how many people are watching any show at any given time or their network at all, which makes it very hard to negotiate when you don’t know exactly how many people are watching. So I know one of the things the writers have asked for is to know the numbers and they will not come around on anything in that regard.
Yeah, there are a lot of other things that relate to particular performers. One thing for me is geographic discrimination. I have seen it in my own paychecks and also with friends where you have a similar size role to someone else on the show, a similar resume, and the other person will be brought to Georgia from LA to film, and that person will be making sometimes almost double what we’re making here, not to mention they’re being flown and housed and given per diem. And it’s real hard to get them to get around that. It’s a very take it or leave it attitude. You should be grateful to have this job, and if you don’t want it, we’ll move on to the next person. I’ve literally been told that quite a few times.
My favorite example is Marvel comes to Georgia, they bring their movie stars, they bring their directors, they get all set up here, then they send out the auditions to Georgia actors. And it will say on the audition, “You must be willing to work for scale only, we will not negotiate with you,” which is just ludicrous that you’re not even allowed to negotiate with Marvel. You’re just supposed to be grateful that you’re getting a job in their universe. So it’s exploitation like that. Actors are just primed to be taken advantage of because we do love what we do, and most of us didn’t even get into it to get rich or famous or anything like that. Contrary to popular belief, we want to do the work, but we also see these huge bonuses given to CEOs, and we see the money and the viewership, and we just want our fair piece of it, that’s all.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I think that’s beautifully and powerfully put. And before we turn things back to Bob to talk about what it’s been like for y’all since these strikes began, I’d be remiss, and I know if I didn’t ask about, and I know that folks in the live chat are going to be asking about it, but like you said, Bethany, there’s a lot of issues here. The union covers a lot of different folks doing a lot of different kinds of work in the industry. But one of the biggest, next to the residuals and streaming model, has been everyone’s freaking out about AI and what that is going to mean for a range of industries. This even includes Bob and mys industry. What is that going to mean for journalism and copywriting and so on and so forth? There are already outlets that are trying to produce AI generated or assisted articles.
It’s a really interesting moment that we’re in, and I think a lot of people were taken aback to learn from the writers and now the actors strike that this is a really big issue. Not necessarily saying that AI is taking over Hollywood as such, or that the technology is there to do what the studios say it can do or what they want it to do, but essentially what the studios want to ensure is that they have carte blanche to do whatever the fuck they want with AI when the technology is ready. So I just wanted to ask, because it’s been such a sticking point for people, how does AI enter this story? What does it mean for you all on the actor’s side in these negotiations?
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yeah, it’s scary just like it is in every industry. I mean, the craziest thing that the AMPTP came back with was they offered to scan background actors and give them a day rate, which is maybe $150, and they would be able to use that background actor in anything, anytime, anywhere, forever. That’s the kind of thing they want to do. That’s the kind of thing they want to be able to do. And it blows my mind that we are an industry that tells the stories of the human experience, we reflect humanity back to itself, and they literally would take the human beings out of all of it if they could, because it would be cheaper. They can’t, and I truly don’t believe that it would be the same thing, have the same influence or effect. But that’s what these people want to do, and the fact that we have to go ahead and get it in writing that they won’t be able to, it’s pretty wild.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, you’re not kidding, man. I mean, we’re going to do more in depth coverage on the AI labor question here at The Real News. So I promise folks watching and listening that more of that is coming, so stay tuned for that. But I did want to get that question in before we move on. And in this next round, I want to just sort of talk, frankly, with both of you, about how it’s been for you and your coworkers since you hit the picket line. For Bob, that was late October. For Bethany, that was earlier this summer, right? But as I said, there’s been a lot going on. The country was kind of expecting a potential UPS strike, there were practice pickets going on around the country. We still got wars going on across the world, economic ups and downs, Trump indictments, a presidential election, so there’s a lot happening.
But while all of that is happening, Bethany and Bob are still on strike. Every day they’re still on strike. And every day it can feel like a week, especially if and when people stop paying attention. But you can also be sustained to hold the line one day longer, one day stronger if you get more support, if people don’t forget about you, so on and so forth. So I wanted to ask y’all, while we’re all here on the call, if you could just say a bit about what it’s been like for you on strike all these months. What do you think folks out there watching and listening who maybe have never been on strike need to know about what that entails. And also what developments have we seen, if any, from these respective struggles?
I mean, I mentioned earlier that it’s very clear to me at least that the owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette want to delay, demoralize and ultimately decertify these unions until they don’t have to deal with them anymore, hence where they’ve been on strike for 10 plus months. But the AMPTP, the studio directors or the studio bosses in Hollywood, they’ve also said that they want to wait out the writers and the actors. There are all these leaked comments from executives saying, “Yeah, we’re going to wait until they start losing their apartments and losing their healthcare and going poor, because that’s just what we want to do.” So Bob, I’m going to toss it back to you. Yeah, tell us what it’s been like for you on strike. What do you think people need to know about that experience of 10 plus months on strike, and what if any developments have occurred in that time to bring this strike to a resolution?
Bob Batz, Jr.:
I think my answer is the same as when we talked the last time, Max, it sucks. And I can elaborate on that, but I do want to touch on something that Bethany brought up that I think, you started out by talking about how workers have certain things in common, and listening to her talk, there’s certain parallels with her industry and our industry where these struggles start way before the strike starts. We’re getting taken advantage of for years and decades sometimes. And the thing that I see that’s similar is that these are both really kind of fun jobs, you get some access, you feel a little bit special. A lot of people think it’s cool to be on the sideline of a high school football game or a professional sports game, or they like to get flown out to the bowl game when…
Bob Batz, Jr.:
… or they like to get flown out to the bowl game when their local university plays. And I think there’s a lot of people that are lower level but that still have… there’s sort of that shine to the job and they’re willing to do it for not very much money in the first place. So when they come for you and they try to take more away, you’re like, “Well, I really do need to live here. I do need to eat. I do need to have a place to stay.”
But that’s similar… And the star thing, A lot of people who hate the media hate the pundits and the anchors and the big name men and women, and the media is a bunch of people going to school board meetings that need to be covered in high school football games like I’ll be doing on Friday.
So there’s these different tiers to it, but I think a lot of us were getting taken advantage of even before we went on strike, and that certainly was the case for us. So yeah, it has sucked to be on strike for almost 11 months.
A couple of things that I feel every minute of it and that I repeat to people, my nice neighbors, my good friends always ask me about how it’s going, if there’s any news, and I always appreciate that; it’s better than them acting like there’s no strike going on. But it wears you down in the sense, and I know we talked about this, Max, and Steve, my colleague Steve Mil and I talked about it too, you’re never off. If you work and you work really hard, you could work six days of 20 hour days and at least you’re off on the seventh day and you can catch your breath.
When you’re on strike. You’re never not on strike. You’re always on strike 24/7. And it takes a while to get your head around what that means, but it is a grind. It’s very hard to be on strike this long.
But the other thing that I’ve realized, I would’ve said this in the first month of our strike or the first week, I’m on strike because I knew I was right, I know I’m right. I know that… We got a federal administrative law judge to rule that our workers are right, that our company has broken federal law on multiple counts just about on every count, but one that we charged them with, and then the company appealed it again. That was in January that we were told that we’re right.
And we’re still, as you alluded to Max, there’s no… The NLRB, which is working with us, and they took up our case, they don’t have any enforcement powers. So you can be right, but you’re still on strike.
But no, we are surviving on strike benefits from our union, the CWA News Guild. A lot of people are surviving from donations that are coming in from little old ladies and big unions and other supporters to our strike fund that we’ll talk about later, and supporting us in other ways too. It’s not just a financial thing, but it’s a very complex mental health…
It hits on every level when you’re trying to last, even… I don’t want to dismiss how long Bethany’s been on strike. We got you there a little bit on time, but being on strike since July is no picnic either, and I know it comes with all those same things.
But if you’re right and you’re on strike, you can’t change. I don’t even want to be on strike, but there’s no exit strategy because I’m still right, the company’s still wrong. I would never cross my own picket line much less anybody else’s, and I don’t want to give up on my striking workers.
We slowly… You lose people over a long strike like this. There’s some people that have to go get jobs, or they got to move on with their lives. So we shrink a little bit, but you bond with these people that literally, I don’t know, we all throw around the term, “I’ve got your back,” there’s people that they’ve got my back front and sides, and I would die for some of these people because they’re dying for me and some of these other workers in Pittsburgh, not just in our union, not just workers that are on strike. Because with our strike, we want to help the people that are undermining us by going to work every day at our company and for our paper.
And so we’re going to help them. I don’t think at seven o’clock tonight, that’s going to be my biggest priority. But I know that by being on strike, I want to help everybody and I want to help the media industry, that’s not hokey. If we can hold the line here and make a living wage and get some of the things that aren’t asking for that much, we might help keep some other people covering high school football games, making more than $25 a game.
It’s all tied into that. And our struggle is tied into you guys’ struggle. And even though the unions seem like they’re vastly different, but we sort of do the same thing. But yeah, it’s hard and there are ways that people support us and just you don’t have to send a check. Checks can be nice, but kind of knowing that we’re on strike…
The last thing I’ll say, because I want to come back to it later, Max knows this, but a couple of days after we went on strike in Pittsburgh, we’re the journalists, we’re the people that make the paper. We write stories, we edit them, we take photographs, we cover high school football and city council meetings and presidential visits and you name it. And we decided that we were going to withhold our labor based on our situation in Pittsburgh of having a company not even talk to us, not bargain, impose conditions, take away healthcare, take away money.
A lot of us lost salary, such as it was when they imposed conditions. We lost short-term disability. They took a bunch of stuff from us that we had legally agreed they were going to give us.
One thing they weren’t going to take away from us is our advocation. We were, and we still are journalists, so we started up what we called the first digital strike paper ever. Strike papers are something that have a great history, but there hadn’t been a big newspaper strike for like 20 years. And when we decided we were going to keep doing what we do, we didn’t have to figure out how to print it or deliver it. We just fired up a WordPress site. And we went on strike on the 18th of October, and by October 20th we had launched the Pittsburgh Union Progress, which was our strike paper.
And it was our way of doing exactly what we did before we went on strike, just doing it for ourselves and doing it for no pay, which is not as much fun as getting paid for it, but that’s one thing that we’ve done to… A big part of it is keeping our sanity, and keeping our identities, and keeping our shit together.
It has tactical purposes and it helps us tell our own story, and it helps us tell other stories. My colleague Steve, that Max knows, did a wonderful big story about local actors in SAG-AFTRA and how this impacts them and how they’re not people you know of, even though they’re very accomplished, but they’re not Tom Cruise.
And that was a story that was just… It was a great story to read. Steve’s photographs were great. I’ll send that to you Bethany later, or anyone can look it up at our site unionprogress.com. But if you can find ways to still do the thing you do while you’re on strike, which takes a lot of time just to be on strike. Not working, it turns out to be a lot more work than you would ever imagine. I’m sure Bethany can tell us about that too.
But I’ll gladly work unpaid overtime on my strike paper because that’s what I do. And I’m not going to let some greedy company tell me whether I do that or not. I’m just going to try to get them to pay me if I do do it for them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. I cannot stress enough to people watching and listening how amazing of an accomplishment it is that Bob and his colleagues have maintained this strike paper, the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Which again, I want to remind folks the link to that is in the YouTube description for this live stream. So please go support it because this is an incredible story.
Striking journalists who are making no money are still doing vital journalism for the community and publishing it on their own strike paper. And Bob’s not lying, the stuff that they’ve been doing, these are accomplished trained journalists doing what they do best. They have covered in more depth than most national media the ongoing catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio, and the Pennsylvania side of that, the SAG-AFTRA strike, Starbucks workers, local issues across the board. They have maintained coverage even while on strike.
And you can support them by supporting that magazine, by supporting that strike paper. You can donate through there to the strike fund. You could buy advertisements, so on and so forth. But if you want to check that out, the link for it is in the show description along with links to the strike funds at SAG-AFTRA and the Entertainment Workers Community Fund, which is for entertainment workers across the board, who are being impacted by the strike, even if they are not on strike with SAG-AFTRA or the WGA.
Okay, so we got a little more time left. So Bethany, I wanted to toss it to you and ask if you could say a bit about what it’s been like for you on strike since y’all hit the picket line in July. Give us a sort of breakdown of what it’s been like for y’all out there in Atlanta, what you’ve been hearing from folks at the picket lines on the East Coast, the West Coast, and what support you’ve been getting, and what developments, if any, have occurred in that time.
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yeah, I’d say the strike officially started on July 13th, but the industry itself has been slow all year. And like I said before, we only work so often. So even the opportunities for jobs had vastly diminished since I’d say January, February of this year. I have not worked a film or TV job since February.
But that also goes to say that we are used to feasts and famines. It’s kind of like the people that won’t negotiate with us have trained us for this. You can’t starve people when they’re not working when you’ve trained them by starving them while they’re working for you; it doesn’t make any sense.
So I mean, so many actors have side hustles, have day jobs. I hate to see some of the best actors I know who are not household names, but just such good actors are working at Trader Joe’s and getting their health insurance that way and doing other things. I’m about to start doing a play because we are not on strike with Actors’ Equity through our stage union, thankfully. So I love what you said, Bob, about finding the ways to do the things that you were born to do that you love to do. So I’m so grateful I’ll have that outlet soon.
In Atlanta, we are not allowed to picket because we don’t have an actual AMPTP presence here. Even though we have studios built here, there’s no actual, I guess, member there. So we are not allowed to picket. But we have been doing a lot of solidarity rallies, things like that, where we’ve had, I think about 1,000 people at each one come and give speeches. And I feel for my brothers and sisters in LA and New York watching them in the heat on those picket lines. And man, just sending my solidarity every chance I can get with them.
But the truth is we know how to survive. We know how to pay our bills outside of what we depend on them already. It is hard. It is not fun, especially I feel bad, I feel a degree of guilt even with our IATSE brothers and sisters who work on crews and people that are just out of work because of this. But I keep emphasizing, “When it’s your turn, we have your back too. We will strike again with you or we will gladly be out of work again when you strike for what you need.”
Because these people just keep taking and taking and taking. And as has also been said by Bob, when you have the righteous cause, when you know that you’re not going to settle for the crumbs that they toss you anymore, you don’t have a choice and you’re glad to make it. And I imagine if this goes on for 11 months, you’re going to see a lot more just people making creative things on their own that don’t rely on those, I’m not going to say it, but the people who hold the purse strings.
I think you’re just going to see a lot of creativity. I think there’s a weariness and a grief to it for sure. There’s a grief that like, “Oh, they really don’t value me.” Every time I negotiate a contract I do sort of feel that. But then you get on a set and people are nice working with other workers like you, but there’s a grief to just seeing it so plainly that they don’t value what you do. They don’t value your humanity, they don’t value all of your friends and collaborators. And when it comes down to it, that grief turns into rage, which turns into action and solidarity because there is no other way out of this except winning.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s very powerfully put. And I just wanted to quickly ask Bethany, just because I know folks are wondering what does the industry look like right now? Folks are wondering, “What’s this going to mean for the fall lineup? What is this going to mean for movie production, streaming?”
I guess just if you could give a quick summary of what the industry looks like right now. You rightly mentioned, this is another really important point that I want to stress for people, is in the same ways that the Hollywood studios have been able to weaponize divisions within the industry to kind of foment division, because you’ve got IATSE workers working on the set, you’ve got teamster workers doing various different jobs, delivering stuff to different sets. You’ve got SAG-AFTRA members, you’ve got animation guild folks, there’s a lot of people working in Hollywood, but they can all be pitted against one another.
And when you have a strike like this where, say the writers and the actors are on strike, that still shuts down production for other people who would be working on those productions. And so the studios are hoping that those divisions will sort of eat away internally.
But in fact, what we’re seeing is an incredible amount of solidarity with WGA and SAG-AFTRA and others like working to raise money for their affected coworkers in other unions. My colleague Mel Buer has a great extensive piece about this coming out at the Real News later this week where she’s been on the ground in LA covering the different solidarity efforts to keep other workers in the industry afloat.
And like Bethany said, when those workers are negotiating their contracts and could potentially be on strike, the only way to counteract that manufactured division within the industry is broad sustained solidarity. And that’s what we’ve been seeing right now, which is really incredible.
But I wanted to ask Bethany, just like, is production happening, I guess, what should folks understand about where the industry is right now after WGA folks have been on strike since May, and y’all have been on strike since mid-July?
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yeah, so much was shut down when WGA went on strike, but they were still kind of holding out as long as they could, allegedly without any writers on the sets with them. And then once we joined them, pretty much everything stopped immediately.
They now have an interim agreement, which is being given to productions that have no ties to the AMPTP. So that is starting a little bit more work. And those agreements have stipulated… they’ve basically agreed to literally everything we have asked for. And it also shows these big corporations, “If these smaller productions can do all of this, why can’t you?”
Bethany Anne Lind:
Smaller productions can do all of this, why can’t you? So that is slowly happening. I don’t even know of any around here. I’m hearing of more short films, things like that. As far as what you might be seeing, it’s hard to say. I mean, I know a few of the networks have released fall lineups and there’s a lot of reality TV and Netflix sort of claims that they have a bunch of stuff just waiting to go. I know I was on a show on a streamer that I thought was going to come out over a year ago that hasn’t come. The second half of the season just has not appeared yet. So I think maybe they saw this coming and have held things back. Now, of course, we can’t promote anything for them. So you might have something come out with an actor you follow, but that actor is not going to be telling you about it on Instagram or anything because we aren’t going to promote it for them.
So it’ll be interesting to see what does end up coming out that they’ve just had sitting in the can for a while and how it will get released and promoted and all that without the faces that people recognize promoting it. But I don’t know a whole lot and I also don’t even always know what to believe of what I read because the AMPTP controls so much of the press. Sometimes you’ll read something and just the way it’s worded, you’re like, “That sounds real, I don’t know, pro the producers and I don’t know if I buy it or not.” It’s been interesting trying to filter what you’re getting and who has filtered it before it got to you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, they’re really trying some shit there because the AMPTP, they also did that thing earlier this month where they leaked the offer that they presented at the bargaining table in the hopes that they could basically go to the public and say, “Look at all the great stuff we’re offering these Hollywood actors and writers.” And it kind of backfired on them because people were like, “Yeah, that’s a shit deal, man. That’s why they’re on strike.” So there’s an interesting yet tug of war in the court of public opinion right now, and that’s where I want to end up actually because we only have a few minutes left here, and you both have been so incredible and I’m so grateful to you for giving us this much of your time while you’re in the midst of these high stakes strikes.
So I don’t want to keep you much longer, but just with maybe the last five or six minutes that we have together, I wanted to ask, what can folks out there do to help, and what do you want to say to people watching and listening right now about why it’s so important for you all to get that outside support?
What can that outside support look like? Are there strike and hardship funds you want to bring up? Are there solidarity efforts that you’ve seen and experienced yourself that you want to lift up? Just anything you wanted to plug at the end here or highlight at the end here stressing to folks watching and listening that what they can do to support and why it’s so important that all of us do show that support for as long as it takes.
Bob Batz, Jr.:
You want to go Bethany first?
Bethany Anne Lind:
Sure. Well, thanks again for just doing this. This is wonderful. You mentioned the Entertainment Community Fund and you said you’ll have a link to that, which is great. That is for anyone in the entertainment industry who is affected by or who is not just affected, but who is in a bad place because of not working. That is one place you can donate. In Atlanta, we started a website called talentsupportingtalent.com. It’s a website of union members in the entertainment industry who offer other services. So a crew member who might know how to help you fix your roof, you can hire them and throw them some work at this point. So that is a mutual aid thing we’ve come up with here. And one thing I’ve mentioned on my own social media is the next time you watch something and something affects you, not who isn’t a star.
Maybe it’s the writing, maybe it’s how something was worded, or maybe it’s an actor who you don’t recognize, look them up and just send them a quick message of thanks or what it meant to you. I have gotten a few things like that where people went out of their way to just be like, “I really liked that little thing and that big thing that you did.” And it means so much because at the same time, there will be people who will just because you’re an actor and they think that you are famous, will throw insults at you or try to demean you, literally go out of their way to send you a message and I don’t know, just put some kindness into the world when you can and when you think of it.
Because it really is one of those things that helps the continuation of us being able to remember that what we do is important, the stories we tell are important. And so yeah, we’re not calling for boycotts yet, so that’s not on our plate. I’ve canceled most of my subscriptions because that’s a way I’m going to save a little money right now, but maybe you want to cancel something for a month and go see a play instead. That’s another idea.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. And again, I just want to stress to everyone watching and listening that we do have links in the show notes for this live stream. So if you’re watching on YouTube and you click the description for this video, you will find links to the Pittsburgh Union Progress, the strike paper that Bob edits and that his coworkers are producing while they’re on strike. You can also donate through the Pittsburgh Union Progress to their strike fund. We also have links for the hardship fund for SAG-AFTRA members, as well as the Economic Community Fund that is for people who are being directly affected by not working at the moment.
I don’t want to say people who are being affected by the strike because again, the studios have pushed workers to strike. So they’re the ones who are responsible for the kind of economic hardship that people are facing right now, and they have the power to end it. But until they do, you can support them by donating through those links on the show description. And Bethany, I just wanted to ask you one more time if you could say the link for the Talent Supporting Talent website.
Bethany Anne Lind:
That’s it, talentsupportingtalent.com.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Boom.
Bethany Anne Lind:
I’ll double check and get back to you after Bob, but I’ll make sure that’s the right one.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay, cool. And we will also make sure to add that link into the show description after this live stream finishes. All right, Bob, with the last few minutes that we’ve got, how can folks keep supporting you all and anything you want to say about why it’s important that we keep that support going?
Bob Batz, Jr.:
Well, thank you Max. And again, thank you. We do have a Pittsburgh Stryker fund. You could find that at unionprogress.com. We’ve got a donate link at the very top, and that goes to help all the news workers with car payments, rent, groceries, whatever it is that they might need. And we also have an advertising link on there. You can get an ad to support us for very, very cheap. I was trying to make Max a deal he could not refuse, but I’d like to get one of his many platforms on there. He could do it for very cheap because he knows the interim editor. But that’s just one way. I mean, we want people to read our publication. I’m going to send Bethany the local SAG-AFTRA story because I’m quite proud of that. In Pittsburgh, we are a smaller local union, even though we’re part of this global thing right now.
But some public officials and sources and other people have taken a solidarity pledge where they’re like, “We’ll talk to the Post Gazette once they negotiate contracts with their workers. In the meantime, we’re not going to do the interview.” And so that’s something our union has been asking for from the start. Some people have been stalwart in supporting that. And then that makes us at the Union Progress feel even more like we need to cover some of those stories if they’re not talking to the Post Gazette. And that’s high school coaches to the mayor of the city of Pittsburgh to US Congress people. And a lot of people have taken that pledge. We’re doing something new, relatively new. And you can find this on the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh social media online at unionprogress.com as we’re not as big as SAG-AFTRA. So we’ve actually had some of our supporters help us with actions.
Besides rallies and those kinds of things, we had people help us call one of our owners, one of the twin millionaire, billionaires that own us and just say, try to get him on the phone to say anything, which is none of the owners of this company have said a thing. So we called them 100 times in the last two weeks and basically didn’t reach him most of the time. A couple of times we reached it, they’d made a joke out of answering it by the name of a Toledo, Ohio pizza place, which did not make any of us that happy and seemed to give us a little glimpse at to how serious they’re taking more than 100 people’s livelihoods out here. But we’re asking people to do that. We just launched today, we’re having supporters and friends help us, send him some postcards in the mail. He can’t hide from us.
He may not answer his phone or he might joke about it being a pizza place. We sent him a pizza too, by the way, and it was pretty disgusting one. [inaudible 01:08:21] got it. But yeah, there are opportunities to do that kind of stuff. The biggest thing I would say, and I think Bethany’s touched on this, Max always does, and I’ve learned it in almost a year now, support workers don’t cross anybody’s picket line. If Starbucks is on a one-day strike, get your coffee somewhere else. Learn what a picket line means, learn what bargaining is. A lot of us go on strike and we don’t know how this stuff works, but it’s clear that a lot of the public doesn’t know how this stuff works. Even in the middle of hot strike summer or hot labor summer, there’s a lot of people that don’t even know how it works.
So just like everything else, like democracy, get informed, watch programs like this, read these kind of outlets, wander down to an Atlanta SAG-AFTRA rally because you’re sure to learn stuff, and you’re sure to find out that these actors are just like you talking about all the same shit that you’re talking about at your job and your work. And I would love to see, there’s things I care about more than my own situation. And I think that’s another thing about being on strike, Bethany’s the same way, but I hope that out of hot strike summer, there comes some education. People know how this stuff works and why a union matters and why you don’t cross a picket line ever. And those are some of the things that I think have gotten lost. The Starbucks workers here, they’re a lot younger than I am, but they’ve been all in.
They’re leaders in their own companies. Their workers fight in the bigger labor pictures fight, and they’re learning as they go, but it’s not rocket science to know why. You don’t need a really long test to know if something’s right or not. I think you can pretty much pretty quickly get to that answer and then you can do things to support it. And as Bethany said, put some kindness in the world. When I’m not working so hard being on strike, I cannot wait to go support some other worker’s efforts because anytime someone retweet something, calls us, reads a story, sends us $10, I mean, it’s the smallest kindness can really help with this, and we appreciate every single one. So that’s all I got.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, man. I mean, I think that’s all that needs to be said. I mean, for everyone watching and listening, please take Bob and Bethany’s words to heart. Show kindness and solidarity, however you can. As we always say here at The Real News, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something, even if it’s sending a postcard, even if it’s reaching out to an actor or a journalist or an auto worker whose account that you see, hospitality workers.
I mean, just take that extra second to make the connection and to send your love and solidarity and to show and vocalize your support for your fellow worker and don’t ever, ever, ever cross a fucking picket line. And with that, I want to thank once again the great Bob Batz Jr. who has been on strike at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette since October of 2022, and the great Bethany Anne Lind, the SAG-AFTRA actor who has been on strike since July of 2023. Bob, Bethany, thank you both so much for taking the time to join us on this live stream. I really appreciate it. And we are all sending all of our love and solidarity to you and to your coworkers here from Baltimore.
Bob Batz, Jr.:
Thank you, Max. Thank you Bethany, and good luck with your struggle, Bethany. We’re all watching, so we’re still watching you just differently than maybe we wish we were. So yeah.
Bethany Anne Lind:
Yes, thank you so much. Thanks for doing this, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And thank you all for watching. Thank you for caring. Please take care of yourselves and take care of each other. Again, we are going to be doing these worker solidarity live streams more consistently every other week. So please watch this space, like and subscribe to our channel here at The Real News Network. Subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss any of our other reports, because we got a lot more coming in text, podcast and video form. We are here to the bitter end, and we are going to keep supporting our fellow workers from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and SAG-AFTRA to United Auto Workers, hospitality workers, and beyond. Please join us in this struggle. Thank you for watching. Solidarity forever.
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
Los Angeles has been a hotbed of labor activity this year. 30,000 school staff workers, represented by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 99, struck for three days in the spring, leading to a landmark deal with the LA Unified School District that included 30% wage increases and better benefits for support staff. After going on strike last year and dealing with protracted legal battles, strippers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in North Hollywood made history this May by unanimously voting to unionize with the Actors Equity association. Down in Orange County, Medieval Times performers have been on an indefinite unfair labor practice (ULP) strike and holding strong since February, facing violence on the picket line and a vindictive employer that, according to workers, is not bargaining in good faith with the union and has continued operations during the strike, flying in scab performers from around the country. Thousands of hotel workers with UNITE HERE Local 11 have been striking at multiple hotel chains across the city (and more are joining) in an effort to secure a fair deal. Fast food workers have set up pickets across LA as they fight for safer working conditions, and UPS workers could be found walking practice picket lines at multiple sites across Southern California in July, joining their Teamsters siblings across the country who were mobilized to strike on Aug. 1 (a strike that was averted after a tentative agreement was reached between UPS and the Teamsters bargaining committee, which members ratified in late August).
“Without us, none of this fucking happens. Bob Iger’s yacht doesn’t fucking exist.”
Josh Kirchmer, IATSE Local 700.
The most high-profile strikes have been organized by the Writers Guild of America (WGA), on strike since May 2, and the Screen Actors Guild side of SAG-AFTRA, on strike since July 13, who have joined each other on the picket line for the first time in 60 years. As these and other strikes and rallies continue to bring thousands of workers together on the streets of Los Angeles, more and more of those workers have coalesced around shared struggles, offering solidarity and support on and beyond each other’s picket lines, and joining the chorus of renewed calls for solidarity across the Southern California labor movement. And when it comes to solidarity, LA entertainment workers are really putting their money where their mouth is: multiple fundraisers and charity events have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the various hardship funds that are supporting entertainment industry workers who aren’t striking actors or writers but are still directly affected by the strikes, and WGA and SAG-AFTRA picket signs can be seen at labor actions for other unions across the city.
There’s a big difference between a “strike wave” and a slew of disparate labor actions by unconnected groups of workers occurring at the same time. To call what is happening in Southern California—and across the country—a strike wave would require evidence that workers across these different industries are watching one another and seeing themselves reflected in each other’s respective struggles, that they are being inspired by one another to take actions they otherwise wouldn’t, that they are learning from each other, cooperating with and supporting each other, and that their struggles and strategies for achieving victory are being actively shaped by that mutual solidarity and a growing common sense that their current and future struggles are interconnected. Having spent time on a number of these picket lines, I have seen that evidence firsthand.
Strengthening the bonds of solidarity across the film industry
What began as urgent conversations amongst writers and directors in a WhatsApp group at the start of the WGA strike soon became an earnest campaign to build solidarity with, and offer material support to, entertainment workers across Hollywood. After all, the work stoppages brought on by the strikes have affected not only the writers and the actors, but also the many Teamsters and IATSE (International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees) members in the entertainment industry who have honored the picket lines.
As work ground to a halt and the studios remained confidently intransigent at the bargaining table, the need to help keep workers afloat became even more urgent. Scores of WGA writers banded together on July 15 to throw a fundraiser at a skatepark in downtown LA in an effort to keep IATSE and Teamster siblings from falling through the cracks while their strike continues. They formed The Union Solidarity Coalition (TUSC), a nonprofit mutual aid fund, and partnered with the Motion Picture and Television Fund (MPTF) to distribute the raised funds back to the entertainment community. Their main goal has been raising money to cover health insurance premiums for crew members and Teamsters who have been affected by the WGA pickets since May.
When it comes to solidarity, LA entertainment workers are really putting their money where their mouth is: multiple fundraisers and charity events have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the various hardship funds that are supporting entertainment industry workers who aren’t striking actors or writers but are still directly affected by the strikes, and WGA and SAG-AFTRA picket signs can be seen at labor actions for other unions across the city.
The July 15 event, which one volunteer called “the hottest ticket in town,” featured unique raffles, a screen printing station, fortune telling, and even a few magicians wandering through the throngs of people who came to show their support for striking writers and their non-striking siblings in the entertainment industry. A performance by Fishbone capped off the night. The event itself raised over $190,000 for IATSE and Teamster members’ healthcare, with online auctions and individual donations garnering at least another $100,000. Hundreds attended the event, presenting a unique opportunity for entertainment workers to get to know one another away from set, and open up conversations about the working conditions shared by workers inside the industry.
The event was a chance for “barriers to be broken down, and to just talk to people about their experiences in their line of work, whether it’s acting or writing, or production, sound, camera, or anything,” said Josh Kirchmer, a member of IATSE Local 700. “There is so much more that brings us together than pulls us apart. It’s in our best interest to foster those relationships when the folks on the other side of the table are going to do everything they can to convince us that we’re divided.”
Within the entertainment industry, workers are shuttled into two major designations: Above the Line and Below the Line. These designations refer to the line-items in a production’s budget—above-the-line workers are the creatives (writers, directors, actors, etc.) who take part in the creative, collaborative process of envisioning the project. The below-the-line workers (and there are a lot of them; IATSE alone represents more than 168,000 entertainment industry technicians, artisans, and craftspersons across the US and Canada), according to this designation, are the technical workers who help bring that vision to life. Below-the-line workers are generally paid a day rate for their work on a given project and could theoretically be replaced at any time. In contrast, above-the-line workers are paid per project, and they are rarely replaced during the life of the project.
“In film, work is highly specialized,” said Joshua Locy, WGA member and TUSC organizer. Different departments are responsible for different areas of production, Locy elaborated; many writers may never even meet the crew members working on the project they wrote, and many crew members literally crafting writers’ imagined worlds will never interact with the writers themselves. “So while there is a lot of camaraderie amongst film crew members on set, there is a distance between above the line and below the line, even though we’re all the same class of people,” he said.
Naturally, these designations have the added effect of creating division amongst the entertainment workforce. Employers in any industry take advantage of similar divisions, and many actively create them in the form of different employment tiers so employers can pay workers different amounts for doing the same work—as UAW workers in the auto industry, UAW workers at John Deere, Kellogg’s workers, academic workers, and, frankly, low- and mid-low-wage workers in most workplaces can tell you. In the entertainment industry, the studio bosses can leverage the separation between departments to prevent the formation of a sense of unity or mutual camaraderie, let alone an appetite for collective action, among the workforce. By sequestering portions of the workforce away from the rest of the workplace—having, say, writers, animators, administrative assistants, etc. all working for the production but often far away from production sets—employers can continue to pit one section of the workforce against the other by mere virtue of the fact that they rarely or never see each other.
The picket line is the place where workers can see and know one another on a much more personal basis. Much like striking workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette (who work in different departments and are represented by five different unions) have described learning more about their colleagues on the picket line than they have in years of working together, the current entertainment industry strikes present a unique opportunity to blur the line between below-the-line and above-the-line workers. In a 21st century social landscape that provides so few similar opportunities, the picket line creates a gathering space where coworkers and fellow workers are meeting and congregating in person, outside of work, amid an atmosphere of fellowship and on newly found common ground.
In a 21st century social landscape that provides so few similar opportunities, the picket line creates a gathering space where coworkers and fellow workers are meeting and congregating in person, outside of work, amid an atmosphere of fellowship and on newly found common ground.
“One of the big propaganda points that has always come from the studios is that above-the-line crew or unions are these elites—and, of course, there are some millionaires in those unions,” said writer-director Alex Winter ahead of the July 15 TUSC event. “Most of us are regular workers who are trying to make a living, [receive] healthcare, and we’re very much in the same boat as everyone else.”
Workers across the entertainment industry have resoundingly echoed that sentiment over the last month. “I feel that the solidarity is so much stronger than it ever has been,” said Nora Meek, IATSE 839 member and organizer with The Animation Guild (TAG). Meek believes that a heightened understanding of the importance of class solidarity has helped rank-and-file members below and above the line bridge the gap between them. “We’re all working people,” she said. “Your title or designation doesn’t make you any different than any other entertainment worker.”
The strikes, Meek attested, have continued to expose to her and her fellow entertainment workers the extent to which they are all feeling the squeeze of the studio and tech executives’ cost-cutting, profit-maximizing practices. “We’re all workers and we’re all making these extremely lucrative products together, and we’re all being shafted,” she said.
“Without us, none of this fucking happens. Bob Iger’s yacht doesn’t fucking exist,” Kirchmer said. “There is no movie industry without the people here.”
“There’s been a 40-50 year history of capital in this country separating labor from each other and the atomization of people in general,” Locy explained. “So understanding that we have a shared struggle, and understanding that they’re not alone in their struggles and vice versa… is literally the only way to overcome the weight of capital that affects our lives.” Locy also called attention to the ways in which striking writers have seen their own struggle echoed in the wider labor movement: “I think the entire country is feeling the weight of capital squeezing every bit of value out of our time that they can, and we’re done. It stops here.”
Principal TUSC organizer and WGA member actor-writer Paul Scheer stressed the continued importance of unity during this moment: “I think we realized the only power we have is being together and being a monolith that they can’t break. It’s so much easier to break us when we’re individuals.”
Building solidarity: From digital organizing to the real world
Digital organizing has become a mainstay of the labor movement, particularly in the last decade, and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and social media is playing an important role in fomenting this new wave of labor militancy in Southern California.
Many workers point to social media as a critical tool for strengthening their bonds of solidarity as the strikes have continued—a tool that was not available in past strikes. Winter, who joined SAG-AFTRA in 1977 and WGA in 1989, has lived through multiple entertainment strikes and cycles of change in the industry, and he can attest to the difference today’s technology makes. “Because of the technology age and the ability for community to come together so quickly online, I’ve never seen so much uniformity,” he said. “People who are usually siloed and don’t talk to each other across all areas—we’re all talking to each other, like the walls just came down.”
“We’re all workers and we’re all making these extremely lucrative products together, and we’re all being shafted.”
nora meeks, iatse 839 member and the animation guild (tag) organizer
Kit Boss, a writer-producer with over 25 years of tenure in the industry, recalled how small of a role social media played in the 2007 writers’ strike. “There was Facebook, but it didn’t feel as active—it felt like more of a select group of people [communicating] on Facebook,” he said. “When [this current] strike started, it seemed like [X, formerly Twitter,] was the best place to keep my finger on the pulse of what was going on [at] different picket lines and how other members were feeling.”
Increased social media communication has played a major role in poking holes in the public relations strategy of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Many of the tactics that worked so effectively during the last writer’s strike have failed spectacularly this time around. As the studios have flouted media blackouts and leaked misleading information to the press, writers have used social media, particularly X, to set the record straight and renew calls for unity. With each subsequent attempt by the studios to use the press to reach around the bargaining team and negotiate with the rank and file directly, WGA members across social media are using their platforms to call them on their bullshit. The studio strategy has failed so badly that they’ve since hired yet another crisis PR firm to try and salvage the situation.
1: Be AMPTP & decide problem w/paying your employees is PR problem. 2: Hire The Levinson Group as your 3rd PR firm to help w/crisis PR. 3: Have TLG's other clients reconsider being clients anymore. AMPTP curses all. Give unions what unions ask for.#ActorsStrike#WritersStrikepic.twitter.com/hIEz8anNHt
Social media is also helping WGA and SAG-AFTRA members stay informed about other labor struggles in the entertainment industry and around the country, and it’s enabled them to connect with other workers and supporters. “From the earlier WGA strike to now, I think there’s been a proliferation of cross-channel communication on social media… We’re understanding each others’ jobs better,” Meek said. “We are understanding each other better, [understanding] that everyone is suffering under capitalism just the same, and the disparity has gotten worse between the workers who make these beloved entertainment properties and the people who profit the most off of them.”
It’s not just social media; the sense of militancy and unity is palpable on the picket line, and veteran members have noticed the difference between the ’07 writers strike and today’s strike. “What I feel on the lines is partly that the membership has changed. There are a lot more younger members who have come up in the business experiencing all of the negative changes that have happened to their jobs,” Boss said. “All of that stuff has really impacted younger writers much greater than it’s affected me and a lot of the people who were on strike in ’07. As a result, I feel like there’s more of a sense of cohesion, less of a sense of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’ and I think the ‘have-nots’ represent the majority.”
Boss, who raised more than $170,000 for the Entertainment Community Fund through a “WGArage Sale,” where items from a variety of popular shows were auctioned off to fans, has felt the groundswell of support from the wider community. “I’m very often reminded of—and sometimes I forget—that phrase ‘LA is a union town.’ It’s not just empty rhetoric. I’ve felt that out there on the picket line, and at the other rallies attended by unions,” he said. “I mean, right now, show me another union town that has so much support from so many different unions.”
While all forms of support are welcome and helpful, IATSE Local 695 member Stephen Harrod, who has become a fixture at multiple pickets across the city with his trademark sunhat and guitar slung over his shoulder, believes that there’s no substitute for getting to the picket line. “There’s something to be said for moving past your safe and comforting computer and cell phone screen, getting past the comments, going out there and talking to the people that this affects, [talking about] how it affects [them] and what they feel needs to be done,” Harrod said.
LA is a union town
As the WGA strike has worn on, WGAW (Writers Guild of America West) signs have been popping up at different pickets across the city, lending much-needed attention to other ongoing labor struggles across Southern California. After Medieval Times workers posted on X about WGA members crossing their picket line at the Buena Park location, the WGA put out a statement reminding workers not to cross any picket line, for any reason, and reaffirming their support for strikes across the region. That caught the attention of California representatives, including Rep. Katie Porter, who released a statement calling on the company to bargain fairly with the performers.
WGA joined Medieval Times employees on their picket line today. @MTUnitedCA have been on strike for 5 months against unfair wages, unsafe conditions, sexual harassment, and animal abuse.
All workers should be treated with dignity and respect. I'm alarmed by reports that @MedievalTimes is attempting to bust newly-formed unions at their Buena Park, CA location. Today, I wrote directly to the CEO to demand answers and urge the company to negotiate in good faith ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/ZJdELTOMcl
The added support for and visibility of their own strike has also encouraged the striking performers themselves. “I sort of understood the idea of solidarity in the abstract [before the strike],” Erin Zapcic, a striking Medieval Times performer and bargaining team member, said in response to the support she and her coworkers received at their picket on July 16. “But just the amount of people that didn’t know us, especially because we’re a brand new union, who heard about our fight and immediately dropped everything to support us, was really overwhelming and incredible.” Medieval Times workers have held special picket events—specific days where Medieval Times United members show up in force to support other striking workers—at WGA and SAG-AFTRA pickets, and they have been a feature at multiple solidarity rallies throughout the summer.
There is an emerging sense of cross-union solidarity that extends beyond support for the currently active picket lines. “We have been shown solidarity by IATSE, by the Teamsters, and it would be hypocritical of us not to give that sort of support back to other unions in the local LA area,” said Liz Alper, WGA Board of Directors member, at the July 16 picket at Medieval Times in Buena Park. “At the heart of this movement is a workers’ movement. We are workers, and we are standing in solidarity with all of the workers of Los Angeles.”
These messages of support from the picket lines have translated into real strategy in negotiations over the last month. In recent negotiation communications, the WGA has stressed their intent to include the ability for WGA members to honor others’ picket lines in their negotiation demands. Negotiations resumed with the AMPTP on Aug. 11, after a previous sit-down ended in a rather public embarrassment for the studios, who leaked details of the meeting to the press in the hours after it concluded. On Aug. 22, the studios called WGA negotiators back into a meeting where, the WGA said, they were lectured by studio executives and pressured to accept the single counterproposal that the studios have offered, which the WGA says “is neither nothing, nor nearly enough.” The meeting resulted in yet another PR nightmare for the AMPTP, who again flouted the media blackout and released details of their counter offer directly after the meeting concluded.
WGA members say they are eager to return the support to their IATSE and Teamster siblings, who are entering into their own negotiations in 2024. When asked about the ability for WGA members to honor picket lines, the IATSE workers I spoke with had a positive response. “I was elated,” Meek said. Alicia Haverland, Local 44 member and Co-Founder of the IATSE rank-and-file charity Drive4Solidarity, was equally optimistic: “Whether or not it’s in the contract, I have a belief in my heart that WGA members will not cross our lines.” Haverland’s sister Jackie, also a member of Local 44 and a Drive4Solidarity volunteer, echoed that sentiment. “Now it’s time for us all to prove that we will walk together,” she said, “no matter who it is.”
By all accounts, workers across the entertainment industry and beyond are resolved to stick it out until a fair contract is won, but the stakes are high and the economic realities of long-term strikes in a city as expensive as Los Angeles are felt acutely by all. The strikes, like any strike, have been hard on working families across the city. Some workers are facing homelessness as the entertainment strikes have worn on throughout the summer–a strategy that anonymous studio representatives publicly boasted about in July and is intended to sow division amongst the rank and file and force the negotiating teams onto the back foot at the bargaining table. Mutual aid events like the Drive4Solidarity and TUSC fundraisers are doing what they can to help close some of the gap left over from the work stoppages, and the unions have organized food drives to help keep workers’ shelves from going completely empty.
SOLIDARITY IS A VERB ✊ 200 Volunteers. 1,000 households served. 5 Organizations working together w/ 1 common goal to take care of our own during this time and any future time of distress. Thank you for the support of our members! Together we will win. pic.twitter.com/bAfibElZGJ
Organizing, attending, and contributing to solidarity rallies, food drives, parades, and cross-union picket events has helped workers harden their resolve against the bosses who have upended the city with their greed and their refusal to fairly bargain with their employees. Most recently, UNITE HERE has called for a boycott of the Fairmont Miramar hotel in response to recent violence against picketing workers, and the union has also called for a boycott of all conventions at struck hotels in Los Angeles until the contracts can be finalized. Workers from across the entertainment industry have routinely shown up at UNITE HERE’s picket lines, and vice versa. There is a renewed sense that members from across these industries are engaged in a shared struggle in which their future and the future of the working class of Los Angeles is at stake.
PACKED HOUSE at UPS “practice” strike this morning in Los Angeles:
340,000 UPS workers are preparing to walk off the job when their union contract officially expires July 31. This will be one of the largest labor actions in U.S. history. pic.twitter.com/ioG251i4ui
— People's City Council – Los Angeles (@PplsCityCouncil) July 19, 2023
As Winter puts it: “This crisis is not an entertainment industry crisis. It’s a national labor crisis; it’s a global crisis. The collision of big tech and oligarchs and where the economy is, it’s certainly not specific to show business. You see this tsunami coming, and there’s a lot of people who want to band together and say, look, we can all face this wave together or we can face it individually—we’re much stronger if we face it together.”
It is no strange coincidence that a decade of uprisings against white supremacy have shaken the US at the same time as a growing mass movement for economic justice. Since 2020, the ruling class has tried to pass off addressing personal biases as “anti-racism.” But racism itself exists because the system of capitalism gives it shape. In a special panel hosted by Rithika Ramamurthy, editor of Economic Justice at Nonprofit Quarterly, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and ACRE Co-Founders Saqib Bhatti and Bree Carlson explain how racial justice can’t be achieved without economic justice.
Production: The Nonprofit Quarterly
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Remaking the Economy: Race for Profit. I’m Rithika Ramamurthy, editor of Economic Justice here at Nonprofit Quarterly, coming to you from Brooklyn, New York on land historically stewarded by the Lenape people. For this webinar, our panelists will discuss racism and economic unfreedom, from corporate profiteering to antidemocratic states and how to fight them together.
For this conversation, our expert panelists are Maximillian Alvarez, editor-in-chief at The Real News Network in Baltimore, and the host of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. He’s also the author of The Work of Living, a book of interviews with workers conducted after year one of COVID, and he hosts the Art of Class War segment on Breaking Points.
We also have Saqib Bhatti and Bree Carlson, co-executive directors at Action Center on Race and the Economy. An organization working on campaigns to win racial and economic justice, by taking on the corporations responsible for extracting wealth and resources from communities of color and poor people. Saqib is co-founder of ACRE, as well as Bargaining for the Common Good.
And is a veteran organizer with experience in the labor movement working on corporate campaigns with UNITE HERE and SCIU, as well as co-founding and steering the Bargaining for the Common Good Network. Bree spent 10 years before ACRE at People’s Action, first as the director of the Structural Racism Program, and then as its deputy director and director of organizing. Before we get started, I have a few notes.
First, we’re very excited to take your questions and we have time for questions. We will start with a few prepared questions of our own, and then we’ll get to yours. Please enter your questions into the questions box at the bottom of your screen, and I will share as many of them as I can. Second, this recording will be available online about a week after the webinar.
Please also join the conversation via social media with our #RebuildtheEconomy, and visit the NPQ website for past webinars in the series. One last thing before we get started, if you could please complete the brief survey after the webinar, it helps us inform our work and continues to offer programming that you want to see. We can get started.
Max, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your work at The Real News, making media elevating movements that advance the cause for a just and equal world?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sure, I’d be happy to. Thank you so much, Rithika, for having us. Thank you to NPQ for organizing this important event. It’s a real honor to be on this panel with everyone here, whose work I’m incredibly grateful for and a big fan of. As Rithika said, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News Network in Baltimore. I’m sitting in our main recording space in downtown Baltimore.
The Real News is a viewer supported, nonprofit multimedia network where, as my colleague, Mansa Musa would say, we give volume to the voiceless. We are a small organization, but we are an incredibly dedicated one. We are dedicated to lifting up the voices and struggles of people on the front lines of the fight for a better world. That fight, as we know, takes many forms.
It could be happening where folks are organizing with their coworkers in their workplace to form a union and to fight collectively to improve their working conditions. We report on that every week, with myself conducting long-form, one-on-one or panel interviews with working people. We’ve been covering from a grassroots perspective, the incredible labor struggle that we’ve been seeing in this country and beyond over the past few years.
We have an incredible video documentary series called Workers of the World, where we published on-the-ground reports featuring workers in Palestine passing through Israeli checkpoints at 3:00 AM in the morning on their ways to work. We’ve covered extensively the general strikes in France against Emmanuel Macron’s proposed changes to the retirement system, the strike wave in the United Kingdom.
But also here in North America, we’ve covered extensively the crisis on the freight railroad system. I’ve interviewed railroad worker after railroad worker, along with my colleague, Mel Buer, as well as organizing drives from the workers involved in them at places like Starbucks, places like Home Depot, places like Amazon. But also places like Kellogg’s, Frito-Lay, healthcare, education, so on and so forth.
But we do much more than cover labor struggles. We really try to take that grassroots focus, and apply it to a number of realms of crucial struggle where working people, regular people, people like you and me, are understanding that they are the agents of change. That it is us who are going to be the ones to build a new world out of the shell of the old. We, as media makers, believe we have a role to play in that, in not only lifting up those voices and struggles.
But putting those voices and struggles in direct contact with each other, so that they themselves can learn and share notes and determine ways to better support one another, and build solidarity across our respective struggles. One example is we are working to bring together environmental activists, labor activists, and anti-police brutality activists, who are all involved in the necessary struggle to stop Cop City in Atlanta, for example.
We also cover the violence and victims of the police industrial complex every week on the Police Accountability Report hosted by my esteemed colleagues, Taya Graham and Stephen Janis. Rattling the Bars, our weekly show that premieres every Monday, was founded by a longtime political prisoner, an incredible organizer and activist, our dearly departed brother, Eddie Conway.
That show is now hosted by Mansa Musa, who himself was locked up for 48 years in the Maryland penitentiary system. Now as a free man, Mansa interviews people involved in the fight to end mass incarceration in this country. That’s a little taste of what we do. We produce original podcasts, video reports, text reports. Please check us out, please support us. We also host The Chris Hedges Report every Friday.
We just launched a great new show about sports and struggle with the great Dave Zirin, which premieres every Wednesday at 7:00 PM, but we’ve got a lot more work to do. We really want to dig deep into the housing crisis, the fight against the climate crisis, and the fight against endless war and US imperialism. That’s a little taste of what we do at The Real News Network.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Very light work, Max. Thanks so much for providing everything that the mainstream media doesn’t. Saqib, maybe you could introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your work at ACRE, fighting for justice by exposing corporate and political profiteering from racism.
Saqib Bhatti:
Yeah, happy to. It’s great to be here, Rithika. Thanks so much to you and to NPQ for organizing this great conversation and to everyone who is joining. As you mentioned, I’m the co-executive director of ACRE, the Action Center and Race and the Economy, along with Bree. Also, I’m on the executive committee of the Bargaining for the Common Good Network. My background’s in the labor movement, as you mentioned, SCIU and UNITE HERE for 10 years.
Really, I spent much of my career working on corporate campaigns, and especially campaigns focused on challenging Wall Street. Throughout much of my career, we were working with, whether it was union locals or community organizations that were organizing predominantly in communities of color. We had this idea that by doing economic justice work in communities of color, we were doing racial justice work.
A big shift for me came in 2016 actually at a meeting that as chance would have it, that Bree was facilitating where we were really talking about, “Okay. Well, what does it mean for us, for so many organizations that lead with economic justice?” The way we talk about racial justice is that bad things happen and people of color are disparately impacted.
We keep saying bad things happen and people of color are disparately impacted, as though there is something inherent to communities of color that makes us more likely to be disparately impacted, but not actually naming why is it that that happens? Of course, it’s because it’s intentional. It’s actually intentional targeting that corporations, they target harm.
Corporations and politicians, they know they’ll face less resistance if they target harm to fall predominantly on communities of color, particularly Black, Indigenous, immigrant folks. It’s important to actually be explicit about that. Because the truth is, if we have a race blind analysis of the problem, that’ll lead us to race blind solutions. The idea that a rising tide lifts all boats isn’t actually true.
Especially not in this country, where we’ve seen time and again, that some boats have holes in them that have been punctured in there through racist, white supremacist structures. That really was the starting point of ACRE. That meeting where we had that piece of analysis, ended up being the main thing that led us to starting ACRE and thinking about what does it mean to actually build out campaigns and to work to support the work the local community organizations, local unions are doing around the country?
To support that work and really support them in sharpening their analysis of racialized capitalism, of why is it that the harms fall on communities of color and who is driving that? Really, naming the corporate actors, particularly on Wall Street and the Silicon Valley, that we owed a whole bunch of economic and political power in our communities. Naming the ways in which they’re driving racialized harm and profiting from racialized harm.
Even though they might be posting Happy Juneteenth on their social media next week, what are the ways in which they’re actually profiting from actually oppressing communities of color? That’s the work that we do.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks so much, Saqib. Bree, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your work at ACRE, empowering communities of color and the struggle for democracy, and anything else you want to talk about?
Bree Carlson:
Absolutely. I’ll try not to be too repetitive of what Saqib said. I also come out of organizing, but I was mostly organizing on the community organizing side. While I worked briefly with labor, the bulk of my work has been working with communities of color directly impacted by any number of issues in our economically and racially unjust society. I am actually really excited to be at ACRE because I think that I came up in the ’90s in a world of organizing, where economic and racial justice were thought of as two separate threads.
To Saqib’s point, as long as you have people of color and you do an economic justice fight, that just makes racial justice happen. The racial justice work that was born in opposition to that, that would exclude economic factors to a certain degree. Really focused people on the way in which people of color were being directly targeted without actually talking about the why. Being in an organization where we understand that both there is no economic injustice that’s possible in the United States absent racism.
And racism the way that we’ve created it, wouldn’t be possible in the United States without capitalism that is designed to be the most egregious, extreme wealth extracting tool that it is here. All of our campaigns make an effort to do a few things. One is to really help focus the attention on the corporations and people who profit from this arrangement. We’re trained to think of racism as the bad things that happen to people of color and not to ask hard questions about why.
But in reality in this country, race is a strategic force that’s used by capitalism to allow for incredible, profound, obvious disparities to exist across the population. Everybody to be able to think that that is just a natural outcome of people of color being just a little less hungry, a little less motivated, a little less talented, a little less whatever, and it’s deeply embedded in each and every system.
We at ACRE don’t believe that you can actually win the kind of change that’s necessary for communities, without being explicit about the role that race plays in allowing it to happen, which is both the extraction of wealth by the corporate few and the elite. But it’s also the way that all of the rest of us support it because it’s an arrangement that we’re so accustomed to, we’ve never seen anything else.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thank you so much everyone for those introductions. I want to just jump right in and open by asking, what does it mean to say that racism is profitable? The title of this webinar borrows from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s 2019 book, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership.
That book tells the story of how the push to end redlining in the wake of the civil rights movement created a system of predatory inclusion, where bankers and investors targeted Black women most likely to go into foreclosure to maximize their profits.
Many of you on this call may have read this book. How does that political economic story continue today? How do corporations and cities continue to profit from racism today? Saqib, maybe you could get us started.
Saqib Bhatti:
Sure. Corporations profit from racism in really all kinds of ways, whether it’s funding private prisons, immigrated detention centers, building and polluting infrastructure through Indigenous lands or Black neighborhoods, or selling police brutality bonds that let investors profit from police killings. Corporations are just incredibly adept at finding ways to make money off of white supremacy and racism. You mentioned predatory inclusion.
One of the things that I think is really salient these days, is the rise of cryptocurrencies. A lot of cryptocurrency corporations, they’re really trying to market themselves as civil rights heroes. This is really actually another example of predatory inclusion. We know that traditional banking system has really done a terrible job delivering high-quality, affordable, wealth-building financial services to communities of color.
The crypto bros are really trying to market themselves as an intervention in that system, as a way to really fight the racial wealth gap and for Black and brown families financial security. They do things like talk about crypto reparations for Black folks or developing a crypto utopia in Puerto Rico. But in all these ways, the crypto bros are explicitly marketing themselves to communities of color, and it’s actually working. The survey last year found that nearly 40% of Black investors under 40 own crypto.
Black investors are more likely to see it as safe than white investors. This is likely because Black investors are being aggressively targeted by the industry. That’s interesting because the biggest cryptocurrency investors, of course, are white billionaires. Many of them bought into cryptos when the price was very low. They got to profit immensely as demand increased in something that one could say it resembles a Ponzi scheme. Even after the big crypto crash, many of them still made millions because they got in so low.
But with a lot of the smaller investors, who bought when prices were already high and then they actually got wiped out in the crash, they actually lost everything. Among these smaller investors, Black investors are more likely than white ones to own cryptocurrencies. They are much more likely to be invested in cryptos than in mutual funds or stocks, or other more diversified asset classes that are not just Ponzi schemes.
This means that what we’re seeing now is even at this new industry that’s really marketing itself as the frontier of the way that capitalism is going to really drive racial justice, we’re actually seeing Black investors bearing an outsized share of cryptocurrency losses. This is important because a lot of the ways in which the systems works, is that if something is seen as predominantly harming Black and brown communities, it is seen as less important to try to fix that, even if it harms everyone.
Another example that comes to my mind is actually in the housing crisis. We know that an outsized share of foreclosures were born during the foreclosure crisis of the last decade, were born by Black and brown folks who were disparately impacted because they were actually targeted for predatory loans. It is also the case that 70% to 80% of people who went through a foreclosure, were white families, because the truth is white people are just a much larger share of the population.
It can be true that Black and Latinx folks, bear a disproportionate share, and that’s due to only 20%, 30% of all foreclosures. But by actually painting that as a Black and brown and as an issue of irresponsible Black and brown homeowners, we had the powers that be, the banking industry was really able to turn the tide against meaningful loan modification with principal reduction. Which is what it would’ve taken to keep the majority of folks in their homes, to actually keep people from losing their homes to foreclosure.
By actually turning this issue that affects mostly white folks into a racial issue that is Black and brown, be able to turn the tide and turn popular opinion against it. That’s one of the big ways in which predatory inclusion works today, but then also ends up driving, making sure that the harm is able to continue because race is a great way to try to manipulate public opinion around it.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Bree or Max, please jump in.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You want to hop in, Bree? I can hang out.
Bree Carlson:
I’ll hop in because I’m going to add on to what Saqib was saying and then hand it over, so I won’t take up too much time. I just want to talk about one other dynamic, which is something we talk about a lot because of our policing work. We’ve talked a lot about technology companies that are profiting because they’re beginning to develop tools for surveillance. In a country where we’re overreacting to crime, where we have a history of doing that.
Whether or not crime rates have increased, there’s this very easy space to build a market. We specifically have a campaign dealing with a company called ShotSpotter that’s been really effective in forcing the company to react, but the larger question is it’s not just ShotSpotter. It’s not an individual corporation, it’s that they’re creating a market now where there’s an expectation that something about public safety requires surveillance, and it requires surveillance of Black and brown people.
People are easily willing to support technologies like what they use with ShotSpotter, which is essentially a microphone that captures sound. It says that it can identify when a gunshot’s been heard in a neighborhood. I don’t think it’s difficult for anybody here to imagine which neighborhoods they’re talking about, but the really terrifying part is that it fails far more often than it works. The impacts for communities of color, I think, are easy again to imagine.
Over-policing is intensified, people are killed, children are killed as a result of these failures. All the companies required to do is say, “Hey, but it works sometimes. We can provide an example of a place where it worked.” Because of our fear of crime, they’re able to create a whole market and a whole set of police agencies across the country that are taking this technology in, even as they understand that it fails far more often than it works.
That’s another way in which racism is profitable, because as Saqib said, if you target communities of color, there is a built-in narrative in the marrow of this country about the inadequacy of people of color. Any dynamic that is racialized, instead of people asking the question, who gains from that, who profits from it? They understand it as just further evidence of the inferiority of the people who are most impacted.
Again, it’s very easy to sell the country on the reason we had a foreclosure crisis wasn’t the greed, it wasn’t about investments. It was about homeowners who were irresponsible. Every time we highlighted in our organizing communities of color that were disproportionately impacted, all we did essentially for the narrative was reinforce what people already believe about the failure of people of color.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I feel interpolated by that in, I guess, the most personal way, because my family was one of those that lost everything in the recession. In many ways, my path to doing the work that I do began then when our family lost the house that I grew up in. When I was working low wage jobs with my family to try to stay afloat, so I’d wholeheartedly agree with that. Would also just say, I don’t know if I can swear on this, but screw ShotSpotter. This thing is bunk technology.
We’ve reported on it here in Baltimore. I’d recommend folks go check out Brandon Soderberg’s great piece on ShotSpotter here in Baltimore, which the city is giving money to, even though it has proven to be a completely failed technology. Brandon Soderberg also just published a blockbuster report where he poured over 30 years of statistics from the Baltimore Police, definitively showing that there is no correlation to throwing more money at the corrupt police department and increasing safety in the city.
It has made zero dents, so go check that out. Okay. Taking a step back, so why is racism profitable? I think in many ways, the United States is the answer to that question. I mentioned my dearly departed brother, and comrade and colleague, Eddie Conway. Eddie was very adamant that in the grand history of the United States, slavery was the bedrock of modern capitalism. What he means by that, and what I think we all would agree with here, is that this is baked into the concept of racial capitalism itself.
That capitalism was not some great historic break with feudalism. It was just an evolution in which the lower classes, the hyper-exploited underclasses that were always needed to supplement the riches of the people at the top, they just got recategorized and resubjugated in newer and more efficient means of exploitation. That is written into the very story of this country. The United States with all of its wealth and largesse, was bounded on the mass enslavement of Black people, and the mass genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples who were already here.
The wealth of the United States is predicated upon that murder and thievery, the world historical thievery. Then we construct systems that maintain the hierarchies that emerge within that historical synthesis. A great example of that, which I’ll connect to contemporary circumstances, is that after the Civil War, after Black slaves were at least nominally freed. You had the swift implementation in the south of the Black codes in 1865 and 1867.
These were legal mechanisms to discipline freed slaves back into slave-like subservience, because they criminalize things like vagrancy. Slaves who on paper or freed slaves on paper, were not in effect able to refuse work for subpar wages in the South, because it was criminalized to not be working or to reject the terms that were being offered by southern employers. This is just the system again learning to adapt, and using exceedingly and openly racist premises that we’ve covered here.
To use things like law to subjugate poor and working-class people to be the proverbial grist for the mill. Now, fast-forward to the ways that this has continued to evolve and become ever more functionally necessary to the profit-seeking prerogatives of our capitalist system, look at what’s going on in Florida right now. Everyone’s talking about Ron DeSantis’s new anti-immigration law, which will go into effect on July 1st. I would point people to the incredible scholarly work of Shirley Lung, who has looked extensively at the anti-immigration laws.
Particularly the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, and the anti-vagrancy laws in the wake of the Civil War, showing how they both adopt an underlying racist logic that is meant to serve the needs of racial capital. You see that in what’s happening in Florida right now. We’re hearing these devastating reports of undocumented migrants, 40% of whom constitute the labor force in the agricultural sector. I think around 30% of whom constitute the labor force in the construction sector.
If this law, which is essentially just the Immigration Control and Reform Act on steroids, which would reinscribe the very same problem with IRCA in 1986. Which is that it delegates state enforcement power of immigration law to employers, who can then use it selectively when it serves their needs. What the bill in Florida is going to do, is it’s just going to stipulate that employers who have 25 employees or more, have to use the E-Verify system.
What you’re going to see is what you always see in systems like these where capitalists adapt. You’re going to see a lot more subcontracting where jobs are being done with workforces of 24 or 23 people that are subcontracted out, so they don’t have to abide by this new law. But you’re also going to see what you’ve seen for the past 30 years, which is employers selectively using these enforcement powers that they have been granted by the state, to discipline racialized labor forces into subservience.
I would draw people again to when Donald Trump announced in 2019, that he and ICE were going to be launching this massive wave of terror that he called the family op. What he was saying is that we are going back to the days of mass workplace raids. We’re going back to the days of home raids. The expressed desire, you saw it in officials in the Trump administration from Jeff Sessions, down to the head of ICE at the time to Stephen Miller. They said, “This is meant to send a message. This is meant to terrify people.”
This is meant to be a spectacle of racialized violence, that is not meant to achieve the ostensibly stated goal of getting rid of the 10 million plus undocumented migrants in this country. We know from statistical analysis that that is not going to happen. Even when we increase in certain states immigration laws like what Ron DeSantis is doing, the stats, the history all tell us one thing. It does lead to some people like selectively self-deporting out of fear, but that’s a minor percentage of the people who are going to stay.
They’re going to accept worse working conditions, worse pay, they’re going to recede further into the cracks of society. They’re going to be that much less willing to speak up against mistreatment. Just like the anti-vagrancy laws that followed the civil rights, just like the construction and explosion of the new Jim Crow in the forms of the prison-industrial complex or even the gig economy. I didn’t get to that, but I’ll shut up in a second. We can maybe get to it later.
But I remember interviewing a rideshare driver, Ahmad Moss, in July of 2021 when Rideshare Drivers United launched a one-day strike against the then pending Prop 22, which passed. Ahmad Moss, a Black rideshare driver, told me in no uncertain terms, “The gig economy is an extension of Jim Crow.” It is not an accident that Black workers and Hispanic workers are more than twice as likely to work in the gig economy than white workers.
Because of things like Prop 22, because of the incentives of racialized capital and the influence that it has in this system. You saw a perfect example in California where these gig companies amassed a war chest of over $200 million, making the disinformation to pass Prop 22, creating a legal third category of worker who could legally make less than minimum wage. It was the most expensive ballot measure in the state’s history. These are just more ways that again the system has learned to adapt, to create and perpetuate.
Then reinscribe with legal backing, these subcategories of hyper-exploitable workers, who for very clear historical reasons, overwhelmingly tend to be racialized. I guess the last thing that I would say on that front, going back to Eddie Conway’s point about US society and modern capitalism being founded on slave labor, this is also the logic of imperialism. It is also not an accident that the white empires of the Brits and across Europe.
Then even the United States in the modern era, expanded that regime of genocide, dispossession, stealing and hoarding wealth and resources from racialized countries and peoples around the world in Latin America, in Haiti, in India, everywhere. Now, basically that system always has to gobble up more and more people, more and more resources. That system isn’t just expanding outwards into the reaches of the globe, but it always extends inwards as well, to colonize and subjugate and oppress the most marginalized and racialized among us.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thank you, Max, for that super substantial answer. You’ve brought us to our next question, which is about racial capitalism. As you’ve said, as we’ve talked about very clearly here, the idea of racial capitalism is that the capitalist economy depends on racist and classist hierarchies in order to create and continue to extract value. We’ve talked a little bit about the financial and legal instruments by which this works, and we can continue to talk about that.
But I also want to visit the ideological underpinnings of this too. How do things like the myth of the free market and the demand for capitalist efficiency against the laziness and individual bootstrapping, how do these things also play into the technocratic and financial systems that have already been built on legacy of slavery? We can revisit some of the more technical things, but I’d also like to talk about the ideological ones. Bree, maybe you could start us off, and Max and Saqib, feel free to jump back in.
Bree Carlson:
Oh my gosh, that was a lot. I think I’m still thinking about Max’s last response and the complexity of how deeply embedded in capitalism, as we are currently living it, is the need for racism. I just want to underscore or maybe say in a different way what Max already said, which is that I noticed that somebody had added a question. I normally don’t look at them while I’m talking, but I did this time. Somebody had asked a question about the difference between capitalism and oligarchy.
I will just say that I think we spend a fair amount of time nuancing whether or not what we have in the country now is capitalism as it’s supposed to be. Well, no, it’s never actually been our capitalism, our democracy, none of this has ever been what we say it is in the textbooks, that’s reinforcing the narrative underpinnings of it. But every effort, every structure designed to concentrate wealth among a few requires labor. It requires poverty.
It requires a set of people from whom extraction will occur. What we’ve done with the secret sauce of modern capitalism and the way that it operates in the United States, is the story of race. It’s what makes it work here, but it’s an old system to Max’s point. We should bear that in mind because one of the ways race has been so incredibly effective at reinforcing this capitalist structure, even as it becomes more broken and more extractive and there are more crises.
Even as that’s happening, we’re holding tight to it because of how deeply race has affected our ability to understand our own self-interest. We talk a lot about race as the moral problem that it is. We talk if at anything beyond the moral, anything beyond individual meanness, if we go anywhere beyond that, we talk about how painful it is for communities of color, which it is, and how deeply we’ve suffered at the extraction of wealth, which we have.
But I think we often miss as organizers, the importance of understanding race as an arrangement of power. There’s much more to understand about how much folks in this country are required to support policies, and to support corporations and to support markets being created to surveil people. All of these things against their own individual, economic self-interest, even when they’re white, because that’s who the vast majority of poor people in this country are.
It is not just a system designed to be mean to people of color. If we think of it that way and craft solutions that are designed to deal with if people think that people of color are less than. Rather than to ensure that we are fighting for things that change the outcome of institutions in this country, we’ll never really get at what’s really broken. Racism does exactly what it was designed to do. It reinforces this new, modern capitalism, which is devastating actually almost everyone in this country.
We’re almost universally supporting it, even as it happens. I don’t think I got to your question, but I’ll shut up and let someone else talk about something.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I think that was a really important point, Bree, and I just want to build on that for a second. Then I yakked on so much, that I’m going to keep this one shorter. But I just want to build on that really, really important point, and stress to people that the message here is that these systems of racist, brutal, capitalist accumulation hurt all of us. You can see that as clear as day in the area that I cover week in, week out, the labor movement.
This is a tale as old as this country. Read incredible works like David Roediger’s Wages of Whiteness. There’s a whole vast body of incredible literature. Keri Leigh Merritt, who looks at poor white workers in the South, and so many more who show how it was a very intentional move by the landowning, wealthy, white-ruling class to institute. To inject racial difference as a way to break apart the budding solidarity that was emerging between poor whites and freed slaves.
If you give poor whites, that just added incentive to see themselves as better than their Black fellow workers. That in itself becomes what economists would call a shadow wage. It becomes a form of compensation without actually compensating you more. You just get to obtain some ethereal sense of racial superiority, that is confirmed for you in the way that the society around you treats people who look different from you.
But it is again profitable because if you are a boss, who is trying to pay the least amount of wages as you can to the most exploitable, compliant workforce that you can. This becomes an incredibly profitable tool that you can weaponize. It has been weaponized time and time and time again, even and including within the labor movement itself. We can’t let organized labor off the hook for the many years and decades in which it shot itself in the foot, by deliberately excluding non-white workers, by excluding women and by excluding unskilled trades.
That’s not to put all the blame on labor, but it’s definitely something that labor needs to continually reckon with, if we are going to not make the same mistakes in the future that we made in the past. But just to hammer that point home, these racialized categories, the ways that different kinds of people are coded and drenched in certain, as Bree said, these certain myths and stereotypes about their worthiness, about their work ethic, so on and so forth.
These also maintain a very profitable system of divide and conquer, which is the way the bosses have always won and have always been able to oppress us. That is their number one tool, divide and conquer the working class. They do this using things like racial difference. They do this using the legal means that enshrine the mistreatment and differential treatment of different kinds of workers that we were talking about, in order to continue to urge working people of all colors to compete against each other in a perpetual race to the bottom.
I gave already the example of how the racist, Draconian immigration regime that we have in this country from George Bush, Jr.’s devastating workplace raid in 2008 in Pottsville, Iowa, to Barack Obama, the deporter-in-chief, still holding the title for most deportations because the bureaucratic means of silent deportation were far more effective than these workplace raids. To now things like Ron DeSantis invoking that same spectacular regime of terror that Trump et al. and Bush really employed.
Again, when you look at all these things taken together, when you look at the net result, what it means is not that we are going to somehow magically get rid of all the 10 plus million undocumented migrants who live and work in this country. What we are going to do is create again, this regime of terror that further silences those workers, further pushes them into compliancy and subservience, because we see this all the time.
If and when they speak up about having their wages stolen, about harassment, about mistreatment, even about slave-like treatment, that is when the employers decide to use those I-9 checks, those E-Verify checks. They use them in order to send a message to workers who get uppity, that you are going to be out of here if you don’t just accept the lowest possible standard that I am offering here. This is a message to all of you around, that you better keep your mouth shut if you want to keep getting a paycheck.
Why do I bring that up here? Because we know, again, that even the most Draconian immigration enforcement measures, are not going to mean that these undocumented workers somehow leave and all those jobs are going to be taken by good, homegrown American citizens. No, it’s just going to create a deeper race to the bottom, where those undocumented migrants can continue to be used as ploys to undercut the wages of everybody.
Because you can always, if you have the ability to employ hyper-exploitable, cheap, undocumented labor, employers will, and they will use that to bargain down wages across sectors, across industries. This is also then used to foment racist sentiments within labor. People then start to identify the undocumented migrants, the brown, the Black, racialized migrants as somehow the problem. They are the ones undercutting our wages.
No, it’s your boss that’s undercutting your wages and exploiting all of you. But again, when you create that tension, you create a system where workers are defeating themselves. They’re fighting against themselves, they’re not fighting against the bosses. The system of mass incarceration is another outgrowth of this. I did a great interview with Mansa Musa, my colleague on Mayday, where we talked about how the institution of the 13th Amendment.
The continuance of slavery in the United States to this very day, as long as it is meted out as a punishment for a crime. The creation of a basically free slave labor force across an ever expanding prison-industrial complex, that also undercuts wages. That also means that prison labor gets first dib on government contracts for a lot of jobs that could go to union workers, but because of the system that you get a shortcut there.
Then the only other thing I would say there is that obviously, well, maybe not obviously, but it bears repeating. Even just the threat of something like the prison-industrial complex, the threat of losing freedom, losing your life to just horrifying prison apparatus that we’ve constructed in this company, because you live in a society that criminalizes poverty where we see in New York and across the country.
If you are out on the street, if you are unable to survive in a system that makes it increasingly harder to survive on the wages that poor and working people make in this country, where housing prices are skyrocketing, where the social safety net has been gutted over decades, you basically have a downward spiral to prison. That also becomes a stick with which the entire working class can consistently be beaten, in order to accept lower wages, worse working conditions.
Because they know that the alternative to accepting those poor wages and working conditions, and at least keeping a roof over their head, is a cold, unfeeling society that will shuttle you into prison where you can be a slave worker making cents for your labor. This is all part of the system of racialized capitalism and subjugation of the working class.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Max. Saqib, did you want to respond before we move to the next question?
Saqib Bhatti:
Yeah. The one thing I should add to this is I think for me, the term that perfectly captures racist and class hierarchies and how they’re enforced by the current system, is the term white working class, working-class white. If we think about it, we only ever talk, for the most part, we hear working-class white. We don’t really hear working-class Black, working-class Latinx, working-class Indigenous.
We actually know because white people who are poor, are working-class whites. Black and brown people who are poor, are Black and brown because they’re lazy or because they want to mooch off the system and so forth. I think that is really part of how we are pathologizing Black and brown folks, which really it speaks to the racial hierarchy there that exists even within the layer and top of the classes.
What’s also interesting about this, is when we talk about the economy or one of the things I think pre-market ideology points us towards thinking about the economy as a natural thing. It’s a natural thing that when it functions well, if the economy is doing well, people are doing well. Working-class white people, they’re working, so them being poor, well, they’re actually deserving. But the reason why Black and brown folks are not deserving is because they’re actually not working.
They’re being pathologized. They’re actually resisting the system, and so that’s why they deserve to be poor. Of course, the thing is I think this points to referring back to that same question in the Q&A, which talks about are we capitalist or are we an oligarchy? Well, I agree with what Bree said, that for me, I think the answer to that is we are an oligarchy. I reject the premise of the question, because the question actually presumes that capitalism is supposed to function some different way.
The truth is that the reason why we’re able to remain an oligarchy, is because the race class hierarchy is actually what makes it possible to sustain the system, and what makes it possible for those at the very top to keep growing their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us. Yeah, I think that’s a key piece. There was a study by the University of California at Berkeley several years ago, that showed that white folks, conservative, white folks, they’re actually generally are supportive of raising taxes.
Taxing themselves to increase social services and to strengthen the social safety net. But when you remind them that in some number of years, the majority they’ll support plummets. Alongside of that, if you talk about race and basically shift folks into thinking about race, support amongst white folks plummets for the same programs. That’s why really those, the oligarchs, which again, in our society it’s billionaires, mega corporations, increasingly it’s the titans of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
They have a vested interest in making sure that race stays front and center in our minds, and really speaking very deliberately about working-class whites versus the welfare queens. Making that dichotomy to make it clear that they’re not really trying to prevent working-class folks from having ideas of maybe the system doesn’t need to be this way. I think that that’s sort of… Yeah.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thank you. Our next question is we’ve been talking about politics implicitly here, but I want to turn to democracy in particular. What is the relationship between racial and economic justice and a democratic society? Conversely, how do both racial and economic inequality depend on anti-democracy?
You can answer these questions more in the abstract, or you can also talk about the specific kinds of legislative policies. More obvious ones might be defund the police or prisons, or protecting the right to organize, which ones might support both racial and economic justice and create a more democratic society. Saqib, since you went last last time, maybe you can start this question this time. You are muted.
Saqib Bhatti:
Yeah. I’m sorry, can you repeat the question? I’m just not going to pretend that I heard what you said
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Sure, no problem. We’re talking about the relationship between economic and racial justice and democracy. We have an anti-democratic society, we have a society of record wealth inequality and racial injustice.
What kind of ideas but also legislative policies, specifically like defunding the police, defunding private prisons and protecting the right to organize, for example, might support the social transformation that would create that kind of democracy and justice?
Saqib Bhatti:
I think that what we really need is a massive redistribution of power and wealth in this country. I think one of the key challenges we have is when we try to focus purely on legislative answers, we’re not able to get the legislative victories we need. Because at the end of the day, politicians are more beholden to corporations than they are to their voters. I think really what we need to be doing is challenging the power of the corporation.
One of the things that’s interesting is since Citizens United, I think you hear much more of corporations run the government, but our campaign for the most part still target government as of that’s where the power is. Theoretically, that’s where the power is, but we need to look up the food chain, look up the money tree. Why is it that even if we elect the “right people” nothing changes?
It’s because at the end of the day, there are a set of folks who are very, very invested in status quo. Those folks are able to make sure that any changes we get are crumbs, but nothing structurally changes. I think the key thing we need is to figure out, the biggest thing would be how do we actually chip away at their power? I think the only way to really do that is by organizing.
We need to organize and we need to organize with an explicit analysis of who is in power, how do they use race to keep them in power? How do we actually advance policies to build our power in a way that takes away their power? To really have this clear power analysis, I think is the most important thing. That if we can actually chip away at their power, that’s how we can start to then lay the groundwork for passing the kinds of policies that we need.
I think one of the things that really gives me hope is I’m in Chicago, and just this last election cycle we had here in Chicago where we elected Brandon Johnson as our mayor, along with a historic number of progressives in city council races. That wasn’t done purely with an electoral strategy. That was the result of decades of organizing that happened on the ground to actually build power in neighborhoods. Brandon was outspent, I think, two to one or something like that.
But at the end of that, he was the only person with the with the ground game because people were actually holding house parties in every neighborhood, that were actually hitting the doors in all 50 wards of the city. Doing so in a way that was very much driven from the grassroots, because it built off of actual campaigns that had been happening to try to change the power structure in the city. I think that’s the kind of stuff that we need to see more of.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Bree, do you want to respond?
Bree Carlson:
Yeah, I’ll add, which is exciting. Thank you for talking about the power analysis piece. I’m going to get to talk about something I rarely get to, because I get so distracted by racist power and you don’t. I’ll talk about something else, which is I support every policy that you laid out, but I would say that we don’t have democracy. I would start with that as a premise. If we wanted to experience what is actually possible in terms of the romanticized narrative we have about democracy, then I think we have to start quite a lot further back.
The easy stuff, it’s not easy, but the easy stuff to say is that as long as people are disenfranchised and lose their right to vote based on their relationship to the criminal justice system, we can’t have democracy. Just not possible because we’ve disproportionately pulled Black and brown people right out of the electorate. But beyond that, we also have a system that is so corrupted by greed and by capitalism, that even if we were to give everyone the ability to vote, there is far too much in the way of voting being what determines outcomes in our democracy.
I think about things like participatory budgeting. If we’re talking about if I get to let go of the power analysis piece and talk about people being ready for democracy, I get super excited. I really geek out when I hear about processes that give people not just the ability to go and cast a vote and a story about what that did or didn’t mean, but give people actual experience of what public leadership of public systems might look like if we had democracy.
If we had an economy that was actually developed and designed for the wellbeing of all people, and folks actually got to put their hands into it and think together about collective needs. I sound ridiculous to myself, but I think that is so beautiful and so outside of the experience of the vast majority, the overwhelming majority of people who’ve ever been in what we call the United States. It is just so far away from what we actually have.
Talking about democracy, well, you would need to have democracy for most of the real change that we need, the structural, long-term change to our economy to ending race and racism as the construct of organizing breed. To get on the other side of that, the other thing we need to try is to imagine something that’s an alternative. It’s very exciting to me when people are making experiments that give everyday folks a sense of what might be possible if we shared leadership, and we all took responsibility for our collective wellbeing.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Bree. You identified that this was a leading question and that democracy certainly not what we have now, but hopefully what we can imagine in the future. Max, did you want to respond briefly before we move on to our final question?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yes, emphasis on the briefly. Please start waving your hands if I’m going over three minutes, because I already feel really bad for talking so much so I’m going to make this short. But I think one of my favorite titles of any book ever is by the great Astra Taylor. It’s a book called Democracy Doesn’t Exist but We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone. I think that’s a great way to understand it. Democracy is a powerful and essential idea. I think in many ways, the history of this country is the history of the dialectical struggle to expand that promise.
That principle to those who were not included in its actual material and societal founding. Everyone who was not a landowning white men, that is the history of struggle to expand that idea, but also we are seeing the dialectic move in the other way. All the ways that promise of democracy, the practical ability to exercise democracy, has been chipped away at systematically, especially in community poor and communities of color.
I think there’s starting with that, the understanding that our task, as always is to… God, I’m forgetting who had this great quote, but to make America as good as its promise. To actually fulfill on the practical reality of democracy that so many of us do not enjoy. One of the key areas I think that in which we need to drill down and commit to the promise and practice of democracy. One of the great absences of the American Democratic Project, is the concept of democracy existing in the workplace where we spend the vast majority of our waking lives.
Yet it is this democratic no never zone where most of us don’t have any rights to speak of, even if maybe we do on paper. If we can get fired like that in a state that doesn’t require just cause, what good is that right? Just to really make this point about why workplace democracy is so important in the larger scheme of democracy. Actually, instead of waffling, I’m going to just read from a piece that I was commissioned to write on that Obama series for Netflix, where he’s trying to be the new Studs Terkel.
Obviously, as someone who spends his life interviewing workers, I had a billion people asking me what my thoughts were about this series. I’ve now watched it eight times. I’m writing a piece that’s like 10,000 words and I’m like, “It’s breaking my brain.” But one of the things that I really try to get across in this piece and in my work, it basically boils down to what I write here. I say, “More goes on at work than the work we do on our shifts. A lot of social engineering happens at the workplace.
A lot of work is done on us at the workplace, especially those of us who work low wage, non-union jobs. The workplace is a social factory where people are made into subjects. A brutal schoolhouse, where we learn how to be powerless. We are conditioned there to be and feel like compliant, replaceable numbers in a larger system we do not control. Through repetitive exposure to the same old, same old, we are conditioned to accept being treated and paid like dog shit.
Conditioned to believe our bodies are nothing but grist for the mill in the world of work to be discarded when we break down. We are conditioned to accept that we don’t really have rights in the workplace, least of all, the right to make demands on our employers. Conditioned to accept undemocratic hierarchies and our relative powerlessness as workers at the bottom of them.” What I’m saying here is that in a society where the vast majority of us have to spend the vast majority of our lives working low wage, crappy jobs where we don’t really have any rights.
That is part of the social conditioning to make us good capitalists’ subjects, it inevitably has an impact on how we understand ourselves as agents of democracy. Because if you don’t have it in the workplace, that the workplace is an autocracy, it is an undemocratic hierarchy over which you have no say, and that is where you spend the majority of your time. That is the majority of the interactions that you have with upper socioeconomic classes.
That’s inevitably going to trickle into your sense of self and the way that you relate to other hierarchical systems like government or private companies that you consume products of. How much democratic say do you have over the leadership of corporations like Norfolk Southern, that have poisoned the entire East Palestine area? We don’t. We don’t have that democratic, that means to exercise our democratic agency in the workplace, the vast majority of us at least.
Only 10% of currently working Americans are in a union across the private and public sector, so most people don’t have that. Then most people, again, were conditioned day in, day out to feel powerless and to accept our powerlessness. In many ways, what democracy is supposed to look like is so alien to so many of us, which is why it’s so important that we support the labor movement. That we really do our best to build solidarity with workers across sectors.
Young workers, queer workers, Black workers, undocumented workers, workers in the healthcare industry, workers in logistics, and all over the place. The more that we can foment that grassroots struggle, the more that we can help be the wind at the backs of our fellow workers, who are learning to stand up perhaps for the first time and say, “I am worth more than this and I have rights in the workplace.”
We together collectively can work to change our circumstances by exercising the raw practice of democracy, that too will filter out into other areas of civic life. That’s why I pay so much attention to the labor movement.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Max. I want to make sure we get to our last question before we turn to audience questions. I’m going to try to fold them in a little bit as well. We have to talk about organizing. We’re having this conversation three years after the largest uprisings for racial justice in the United States. People have begun to develop a more systemic and strategic view of the relationships between police violence, between prisons, how they connect to wealth extraction and inequality.
How can we organize to transform the economy and build the racially just future that we want? What are some strategies to organize for racial and economic justice together? I’m hoping that Bree and Saqib can answer this question first, since there’s a question in the chat about what possibilities for challenging racial capitalism there might be at the local level, given the recent mayoral election victory of Brandon Johnson.
Bree Carlson:
Saqib, you should definitely take the first stab at that, particularly given the Chicago connection.
Saqib Bhatti:
Yeah. I think generally speaking, it’s interesting. As I was hearing your question, what I couldn’t help but think was it’s true that two or three years after the uprisings, that there is a heightened awareness about racism and structural racism in this country. But it’s also true that in a lot of corners, there’s a sense of like there was a reckoning and we have reckoned with race and that is done, like check.
I think that that’s a part that as you were saying the question I was like, couldn’t help but focus on that piece. I think for me, what it speaks to is that this is actually, I think, part of our capitalist system. That the capitalists are very good at co-opting and making sure that whatever we do is just bandaid solutions without actually addressing root causes and without actually structurally affecting power.
Bree and I, just on a call before this, were talking about Juneteenth, which is why that’s fresh on my mind, but it’s like, “Okay, we make Juneteenth a federal holiday.” Juneteenth should be a federal holiday, but now even companies like ShotSpotter, which their entire business model is premised on criminalizing Black and brown folks, and they’re wishing their customers a Happy Juneteenth.
I think what we need to be doing is really figuring out how do we actually look at the structural causes? How do we actually put forth policies that automatically change the way power works in our cities? I think it’s a hard job because I think seeing within the Democratic Party, for example, which for better or for worse right now, they’re the standard-bearers of the driving legislative change from our side at the federal level certainly in many cities.
At the end of the day, their biggest donors are actually the very corporations that profit from keeping the system exactly as it it. That’s why when it comes to policies like, “Okay, how do we actually?” If we have this greater understanding of the fact that police don’t actually keep us safer, they actually are a tool for maintaining white supremacy for terrorizing Black and brown neighborhoods.
We can’t actually talk about the fact that they don’t actually give us real safety without being lectured from the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, about the fact that we’re harming Democrats chance at the next election. I think for me, what’s exciting about Chicago, what we did here with this last election, is I think Chicago really gives a blueprint for how do you actually talk about what real public safety looks like and when?
The other side really tried to come after Brandon and Paul Vallas, his kids are cops. He was endorsed by one of his kids is a killer cop. Literally, murdered someone in San Antonio just a couple of years ago. He doesn’t condemn that certainly. I don’t know if I’ll say that he endorsed but he was the FOP candidate or the police union candidate and so forth, Paul Vallas. Very much the election was about policing and about public safety.
Very much Vallas and his folks tried to come after Brandon by saying he’s the defund candidate. Brandon actually, his big thing was we need to look at the root causes of violence and how do we address those? He talked about having this policy treatment, not trauma, which is instead of just sending police to respond to mental health emergencies, we need to send non-police responders, non-uniform responders.
We need to reopen mental health clinics. We need to actually invest in yearlong youth jobs programs. We to actually bring jobs to communities throughout the city, especially putting money, investing in the south and west sides of the city, which are predominantly Black and brown, but have been long neglected by past mayors. I think those are the types of things that we need to be doing, which are fundamentally about shifting the way the power and resources flow.
The flow actually help us address these issues in a real way. I think what that means though, is not being afraid of taking on or not being afraid of being labeled as like you just want to defund the police or you just want to. To be clear, for better for worse, Brandon does not support defunding the police, but he does also support these other policies around people not trying to look at the underlying causes of police violence.
I think that that’s all very important. I think that what I’m hoping is a big takeaway from Chicago nationally is that gives progressives a roadmap for how you can actually talk about these issues in a real way, instead of pretending that they’ve already been addressed and instead of pretending that we’ve already dealt with that and actually still win.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Saqib. Bree, did you have something to add on organizing?
Bree Carlson:
Yeah, but that was just a lot too. A couple of things to add. I guess I want to just underscore that organizing is the only path that we can take to make these changes. I think sometimes we get confused about shorter or more expedient ways of making policy change, or quick practice changes that we know will have a huge impact on solving problems, and so we go for them.
I mentioned organizing is the only way, because I think if nothing else surfaced from this conversation so far, I think we have some shared understanding that the meaning that people make about things, the narrative, the story. The worldview that is behind so much of the economically and racially awful policies that can get passed in this country, it’s the way that people understand the story.
There’s no getting around the hard work of what it takes to give people an imagination or help people’s imagination imagine something other than the status quo. That’s required because there is no small tweaking of systems that we are currently living under that would actually repair the problem. As we’re making increment steps, as we’re taking small victories and having small electoral shifts.
We have to keep in mind that the kind of systems change that we need requires the ability to hold the win. As long as all of our solutions are not bigger than just advocating for the government to do a particular thing or not. Or tarnishing the public faith in a particular organization, when it’s part of a bigger set of organizations doing exactly the same stuff. We have to think differently about how we approach organizing.
I would just say that the way to get there is not overnight. It’s to keep in mind that this is a long arc of transformation. What are all of the various pieces that help to move you in the direction you need to go? Too, that we need to remember that my dear friend and genius friend, David Hatch, talked about the difference between the society that existed as organizing as an art and a craft was being developed, versus the modern version of it that we use now versus the world we live in.
One of the big takeaways from that is we have to remember that it was designed to go to government and ask them to solve problems that communities were experiencing, and government does not have the resources to do that anymore. As we’re fighting for change at the government level, one of the things that ACRE really tries to take some leadership around, is we need corporate targets that actually frame who has the power to make the change we’re asking for.
Because now, we have a government we need to fight for because the last part is if we’re ever going to experience democracy, real democracy, it requires all manner of public institutions are deeply invested in across the board. All of these things have to work in tandem, but we have to get enough people engaged to shift power to our favor so that we can win things and hold them. That when we do that, people have had some experiences that reinforce that us having public sector investment is a good thing.
Saqib mentioned the people who support increased taxes, but not when you talk about what the spending might look like. There’s also a lot of evidence that most people in this country think corporations should be taxed. That they’re evil or bad or whatever they think, that they know that everything we say about how nasty and greedy corporations are is true. But they’d rather take the money from them and burn it than give it to government.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Bree. Max, anything to add on racial and economic justice organizing together?
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, I’d say that was beautiful. I’ve talked enough. Let’s roll into audience Q&A.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Okay. Yeah, that definitely picked up a question that was in the audience Q&A on context specific organizing. There’s another question here on reparations. A panelist is asking on the positions on cash reparations for descendants of slaves.
I’d just like to add to that question to expand to the concept of reparations broadly, what else could reparations look like? Whoever wants to take this question, Max, you are certainly welcome to respond and I’d like to hear your position.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Bree, go for it. If you’ve got head steam, roll with it.
Bree Carlson:
I’ll try to do a quick one, which is yes, of course, first of all, yes, I support cash reparations. It is nothing but racism to suggest that reparations could come in a particular form because you don’t trust the people you stole from to spend it the way you think they should. That’s just horrific. But there are also many, many other ways that reparations could happen.
As long as there’s some level of democratic control of people who are receiving the reparations, deciding how best to use them, myself included, then that is a fine way to do it. But we should definitely push back on the idea that cash reparations is somehow not appropriate, and that the people who did the stealing are the ones who get to decide whether or not it makes sense.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, wholeheartedly endorse that. I think that’s perfectly put. Yeah, I’m all for it. We’ve had so much stolen from us, and this is I guess a response to another question in the Q&A. Which is do we feel like the US can ever fully reckon with the racism and its DNA? No, it can’t, because time moves one way. We are working on this is I guess Marx, one of his many great insights.
People make their own history, but not under the circumstances of our choosing. We are thrust into a world that has been assembled for us, that has been shaped by generations past, but we still have agency within the time and place we live. It is up to us to use that agency as best we can, to make the world we hand over to our children better. We have no choice but to fight, because we see that the pillage, the dispossession, the exploitation is going to continue.
In fact, it is getting worse. In fact, it is threatening the very continuation of our species and so many other non-human species on this planet. We are really facing an existential crisis for our civilization. I think in that regard, it’s worth understanding these questions. I mean this not in just a conceptual way. I do mean this as a practical mantra for us as organizers, is we have to understand ourselves in generational terms.
We need to see our role in the long fight that has been going on since time immemorial. One of my favorite quotes that’s ever been said on my show, was by the great labor organizer, Indigenous labor organizer, Cooper Caraway, who said the labor movement didn’t start when a bunch of guys sat down in a hall and called themselves the amalgamated bricklayers. He said from the moment one human being had to serve another to survive, the labor movement was born.
The labor movement is there in the fight against the Pharaohs in Egypt. It is there in the fight against slavery in the Antebellum South. It is there in the fight to expand women’s right to be full employees in the workforce and receive equal pay for equal work. It is always there and it is here now, and that struggle is never ending. We have to understand, it’s important to understand this because the present context that we live in, work against us having that generational mindset and in fact, stunt a lot of our imagination.
Take the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Glacier Northwest against the Teamsters. This is going to severely hinder the legal ability of unions to strike in this country. It’s going to open the floodgates for employers to sue unions out of existence for economic damages incurred during a strike, when causing economic damages is the whole damn point of a strike. We can look at that in two ways. One, “Well, shoot, they just took another weapon out of our arsenal, so we’ve got to just work with what we’re given.”
Or we take the generational stance and we say, “You know what? In the 1930s before the Wagner Act was passed, workers were getting militant and they were forcing the government’s hand. They were scaring the living jeepers out of the ruling class.” In fact, many in the ruling class were beseeching the government to find some peaceful resolution, unless we devolve into all-out class war, which many feared we were at the precipice of. That’s like the broth from which the new deal itself emerged.
But the point being is that we cannot undo these systems of oppression by playing by the rules that that same system sets for us. We need to understand in generational terms, that many of the biggest gains that working people have made fighting, just as imposing and daunting or even more imposing and daunting circumstances like the divine right of kings, like the Atlantic slave trade, so on and so forth.
If we can overcome that, we can overcome anything. That I do believe. Now whether or not we can repair all the damage that those systems have done and the unequal, uneven societies that we have inherited from them. I don’t think that we’ll ever necessarily reach a point of equilibrium of stasis of full equality, but we can move towards the horizon of it. We have to move towards that horizon because amazing things can happen, even if you don’t achieve that ultimate goal.
I guess the last thing I would say is that I would stress to people that we can’t be so sure that we know how things are going to shake out. A lot of us did not know or expect that one protest in Minneapolis was going to spawn a worldwide protest movement, the size of which we couldn’t even conceive of a month earlier. We can’t necessarily anticipate the cascading effect that it has when more and more people get involved in the fight.
But the more that we do the tilling work, the more that we organize daily, the more that we talk to our coworkers, our families, our friends, our church members. The more that we do the work to remind ourselves and our fellow workers that we are the agents of change. That we have it within ourselves, as Thomas Payne once said, to make the world over again. If we start building those muscles.
If we start seeing that we do have the ability to change our circumstances in our workplaces, in our apartment buildings, on our blocks, we start seeing the tangible results of our agency, our action, our collective work. Then that is only going to fuel more energy that is going to bring more people into the fight. That is going to make us that much more confident as we continue to move towards that horizon that is not inevitable.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thanks, Max. I think that the responses here have really actually mapped the spectrum of approaches to reparations, in particular, which is what the question about Olufemi Taiwo talks about in his book, Reconsidering Reparations. Which on the one hand, needs to take stock of historical harms and redistribute wealth and provide resources to rectify those harms.
On the second part, gives people the actual resources to be able to be economically not degraded the way they are today. Third, does the things, the speculative and visionary things that we’re talking about here, which is struggling for more participatory, equitable democratic structures the way that Bree is mentioning, which we might not even be able to conceive of yet, but have to struggle for in the present.
The first step, of course, which is where we began this webinar, is taking down the corporations, politicians and people that have begun to amass and concentrate that wealth and power in the first place. I just wanted to bring us back full circle here to reframe the question. There is one last question that I’d like to visit in the chat, which is practical. Is asking what are some of the most concrete ways today that the racial wealth gap can be closed, and whose responsibility is that to lead? Saqib, maybe you could chime in here.
Saqib Bhatti:
Yeah. I don’t want to sound like a broken record here, but redistribution, I think, is the key thing. It’s not just enough to, “Yes, we need to raise the minimum wage. Yes, we need to raise the floor.” But you will not close the wealth gap, unless you’re actually taking from those that have been given to those who don’t. I think for me, this also gets at this question of reparations.
Yes, we need reparations from the government, but we also need reparations from the corporations that have profited from racialized harm and interactive profits. I think that that just is a big piece. We know that one of the most effective ways to actually redistribute wealth is through taxation, progressive taxation. I think that’s what we really need to be looking at.
Is how do we actually just tax the hell out of folks at the folks who have the most, in order to have deep investments in the communities that don’t have both cash investments and investments in infrastructure, public services? Just really lifting up the communities that have been starved of resources so that a handful of old white guys can get wealthier.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Bree and Max, Saqib said one word, redistribution. If you could have one word, I’m just kidding, but feel free to respond before we close out here.
Bree Carlson:
Voluntary taxes, just to make sure that [inaudible 01:27:31].
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. The two things I would say, one, we need all of it. I would just ask people to not be so sure that we know the exact right path to achieving equality and justice, especially when we are living in a society where so many people feel thoroughly disempowered. They are treated as idle spectators and consumers by our corporate media and our politicians, and our bosses, so on and so forth. Are just pliable numbers, disposable discardable numbers in a larger system.
Anywhere there are people who are fighting back and realizing that they are the agents of change, we need to support that. Again, the cascading effect is important, so I would say that. And second, I would just put in a plug, unionize your workplace. It’s not going to solve everything. But as I’ve aforementioned, it will give you a necessary sense of power that you have it within yourself and your coworkers have it within yourselves to change your circumstances.
Also, union contracts drastically improve the earning power of Black people, people of color, and other marginalized groups when compared to non-union workers from those same categories. That is an essential piece to this pie.
Rithika Ramamurthy:
Thank you. Very well said, everyone. I just want to thank our panelists and give them some, my applause is real, but please give them some virtual applause for a wonderful conversation. That’s all we have time for today unfortunately. As I said, this webinar, the recording will be available online sometime early next week.
I want to thank our amazing participants for an excellent conversation. Of course, you, the audience for joining this episode of Remaking the Economy, please complete the survey, which will be available in the chat. Have a wonderful rest of your afternoon, everyone. Take care.
What is the role labor unions should play in the Russia-Ukraine War? In a special conversation moderated by Bill Fletcher Jr., former president of the TransAfrica Forum, panelists make the case for why they believe arming Ukraine shows solidarity with workers. International Secretary of the Confedration of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine Olesia Briazgunova, Brazilian Labor and People’s Federation member Fabio Bosco, and UK University and College Union member Liz Lawrence join The Real News. Bill Fletcher Jr. is a member of The Real News Board of Directors.
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Bill Fletcher:
Hey, this is Bill Fletcher and welcome to The Real News Network. We have a great panel discussion today looking at the Russia-Ukrainian War, but from the standpoint of trade unions. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought with it a tremendous international discussion in left and progressive circles regarding the motivations for the war and what should progressive forces do in the face of this conflict. The Real News Network, as you know, has been ahead of the curve in covering the war, the controversies, and the larger impact. One feature that has received insufficient attention is the response of labor unions to the war. Specifically, is the Russia-Ukrainian War a labor issue? Is it something about which labor unions should be concerned? Is there some special role for labor unions in the face of this conflict?
In order to address these questions, we have a special panel with us today. These include Fabio Bosco, a member of Workers’ Aid to Ukraine campaign, and of the Brazilian Labor and People’s Federation, CSP, and Conlutas International Solidarity Caucus. Also joining us is Liz Lawrence, a member of the University and College Union in the United Kingdom. She previously served as national president of the union and is a retired sociology lecturer. Finally, Olesia Briazgunova is the international secretary of the Confederation of Free Trade Unions of Ukraine.
Together, we shall look at the war and its relevance to working people inside and outside of the conflict zone and what must be done. Thanks for joining us. As I mentioned in the opening, the issue of labor unions has largely been ignored in discussions regarding the Russia-Ukrainian War, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with some minor exceptions. But I want to start by asking a basic question, why in your opinion is this conflict a labor issue? And just to clarify, sometimes, at least in the US Trade Union circles, there’s a very narrow idea about what should be a labor issue. And I can tell you one thing, many people would say, the Russia-Ukrainian War doesn’t fit there. So how do you respond to that, panel?
And we can start with Olesia. Why don’t we start with you? On one sense, Olesia, in one sense, the question is pretty obvious since you’re in Ukraine, but as a trade unionist, why?
Olesia Briazgunova:
Thank you for your question. Greetings from Ukraine from Kyiv, that was under the missiles and drones attacked today morning and two people were killed. And why this war is a labor issue? Because as the trade union movement, we must fight for peaceful environment for workers, for a just peace, for a just transition, for decent work. But in the condition of horrific war I want to emphasize that this war was unprovoked by Ukraine. It’s a war that started in 2014 and on February 21st, 2022, this war became larger because of the full scale invasion of Russia. And this Russian War, Russian aggression kills peaceful workers at their workplaces. These missiles attacks, hostilities drones, they still kill ordinary workers when they stay in their homes.
It’s a danger for people everywhere in Ukraine, in eastern territories like the [inaudible 00:04:14] region as well as Western regions because of these missiles attack. And as a trade union movement, we know that since 2015, independent unions were forbidden on the territories that temporary occupied by Russia and workers don’t have a protection from the real democratic unions at these territories. And their workers’ rights, their human rights violated and no one can protect their rights.
And two, what trade unions must do is to help Ukraine to win this war, to bring the peace back on whole territory of Ukraine, and to bring the democracy and freedom on this territory to ensure that workers’ rights and human rights, they are ensured and to fight for better worker condition, to fight for better future for workers.
Bill Fletcher:
Liz, I want to ask you the same question. Why is it a labor issue?
Liz Lawrence:
Thank you for inviting me on your program. I’d say for two main reasons. Firstly, that it’s international solidarity is saying it should be a basic duty of labor unions. We should all think ourselves as part of the international working class, and we are going to be affected by the outcome of this war. But also in a very practical direct sense, we have members who are of Ukrainian descent. We have students who are of Ukrainian descent. We also have students members who may be of Russian descent who are affected by this war. They may have family and friends who are coming into trouble in Russia for opposing the war. They may have family and friends fighting at the front in Ukraine or being affected by the bombing. Members are affected. We can’t just be sort of insensitive or unaware of that fact. The war isn’t that far away for a lot of our members, and we should be aware of that too, I would say. So they’re my comments.
Bill Fletcher:
Thank you. Fabio, same question.
Fabio Bosco:
Bill, I think that the connection between the bread and butter issues that we are using to deal with in our unions are getting increasingly connected, linked to this international conflicts. On top of that, there is a general feeling among the working class in terms of solidarity, international solidarity with the suffering of the working class in Ukraine, see. So when we see the images of the houses that are destroyed, the hospitals, school, millions of refugees and all these suffering, there is a feeling of international solidarity. That’s why I think that it’s a labor issue. At last, I think also that this struggle by the Ukrainian people, it’s sending a message against all these imperialist tribes that we are witnessing across the world.
Bill Fletcher:
So Liz, I want to start by asking you this question. It’s been plaguing me. Recently, The Real News did a program on struggles in France and they interviewed some French workers who were complaining about the French government providing assistance to Ukraine while they, French workers, were suffering in France in terms of housing, in terms of jobs and other things. And I hear things like that in the United States as well. And I want to start with you, but anyone else can also respond to this. How do you respond to that? Is this something that you’re encountering in Britain?
Liz Lawrence:
Yes, first of all, certainly organizations like Stop the War, which just want to end the war now irrespective upon what terms and oppose weapons for Ukraine, which would, of course, lead to Ukrainians being massacred. I mean, they do use slogans like welfare, not warfare. So yes, we are getting that position too. And we do have to challenge it. We have to say that it isn’t a simple counter position of two things. You could counter pose any two things if you want to and say more should be being spent on workers’ rights, but you shouldn’t counter oppose international solidarity. There are plenty of things we could do. We could abolish the monarchy, for instance, to save money and spend more on welfare. There are plenty of ways you could make savings if you want to. But if you get into that sort of discussion about savings, it can be a very divisive discussion, I think.
And I think what’s important is explaining the justice of the Ukrainian cause and the fact that people need to defend themselves. If their country’s unjustly invaded, that means they need to access the weapons from where they can to get them. So yes, we do get that sort of position. It comes through from people who are really not thinking through the implications of a war situation and don’t understand why the Ukraine, won’t face up to what will happen in Ukraine if the Ukrainians don’t have the weapons to defend themselves. But yes, we get that. And it’s partly the attitude too, of just opposing everything the government does, rather thinking about the rights and wrongs of the issues. Does that help?
Bill Fletcher:
No, it does. And Fabio, do you encounter that in Brazil?
Fabio Bosco:
Of course. Some brothers and sisters in workplace, they raised this issue. See, they witnessed this big struggle in France against the pension reform that’s inspired a lot of us across the world. And they say, “Hey, why don’t the French government take the money they are sent to Ukraine and give to the pensions of the French workers?” And I feel, Bill, that we must explain to the working class that in reality the French government is not taking money from pensions to send weapons to Ukraine. Reality, there is an arms race, but these new weapons are not being sent to Ukraine. They are sending secondhand weapons to Ukraine. That’s why the Ukrainians cannot win the war quickly, you see? So I think we must explain, and as Liz said, we must also stand in solidarity with what is justice. You see, justice is central in this discussion about solidarity with the Ukrainian workers.
Bill Fletcher:
Olesia, the economic policies of the Zelensky government have been very controversial and the neoliberal direction as well as neoliberal pressures from outside of Ukraine. How does your federation and other progressive trade union unions, how are you responding to the neoliberal pressures within Ukraine in the context of the Russian aggression?
Olesia Briazgunova:
As a trade union confederation, we are the representative at the national level. So we use every tool that we can use as a democratic union in Ukraine to negotiate with the government to comment on different legislation and to request withdrawal of draft laws and so on. Yes, there is an attempt to narrowing trade union and labor rights in order to make better economic situation. But at the same time as a trade unions, we use also tools of social dialogue, tools of international support from different organization as international labor organization, international trade union movement to explain our government that ensuring labor rights is essential during rebuilding. And moreover, it’s beneficial to economic growth because when workers receive decent wages, it helps economy to recover. And [inaudible 00:13:11] examples of post-COVID rebuilding of economy. So we are trying to do all possible to convince our government.
Yes, it’s not easy because it’s a war and as a trade union, we stay in solidarity with all Ukrainians and we resist and do everything possible for victory that bring us peace. But we also try to push our government to stop this labor reform. And also we rely on the protest of the integration because Ukraine must fulfill different requires to be a member state of the European Union. And as you know, there are a level of this labor standards in European Union that must be insured in member states. So it’s a hard situation, not easy to fight for workers’ rights, but we are looking forward for social dialogue and for cooperation at the international level to ensure that international labor standards won’t be violated in Ukraine. But I want to add that workers’ rights also violated in Ukraine because of Russian aggression and it’s right to decent work, right to receive wages, right to leave. Thank you.
Bill Fletcher:
So I want to follow up on that question and I’d like you to explain to US workers who might say something like this. The Zelensky government is neoliberal, it’s reactionary. Yes, I don’t agree with the Russian aggression, but I don’t agree with the Zelensky government. I don’t think we should give any support to anybody. What would you say to someone that raises that?
Olesia Briazgunova:
I want to emphasize that there are two different issues. Issues of war, genocidal war that includes massive killings of people, mass graves, tortures, killing of children, deportation of children, people who are activists of human rights and labor activities under the threat of captivity on the occupied territories. And also I want to emphasize that workers’ lives are under the threat because it’s unprovoked, horrific genocidal war. The second issue is a policy regarding the labor market. If we live in a peaceful democratic country, of course, we would have more tools and more deep social dialogue regarding the labor rights and maybe the situation would be another. But it’s horrific, if people think that we don’t help Ukraine to survive, we will let Ukrainian people alone with aggressor who wants to kill Ukrainians, people in Ukraine who fight for dignity and freedom.
And the second issue is a policy at the labor market. And in different countries, these issues are also put on the table by their government. So it’s two different issues. Yes, we need the support in this direction of fighting for decent work and labor standards. We need your solidarity. But to fight for worker’s rights, we need to survive because today morning I woke up early morning because of alert and 100 meters from my apartment there was a fire because of the attack of Russian missiles. So I’m happy that I survived and I want to express gratitude to all people from all countries who help us and provide the military assistance to Ukraine because this military assistance saved my life this morning and saved the life of trade unionists who live in Kiev, for example. And I’m grateful for these workers who manufactured this air defense protective equipment because they also, by their work, they help people to survive because a lot of people died even on workplaces because of the missiles attack.
First, we need to survive and ensure that workers right to live, to life is in short. And then of course we will fight for better working conditions and decent work. And maybe in peaceful time, it would be more easy to promote our agenda within the social dialogue.
Bill Fletcher:
Fabio, in Brazil, I know that there’s multiple labor centrals and the one I’m most familiar with is the CUT. And I’m curious, what has been the stand of these various labor centrals on the Russian invasion? Have they been silent? Have they taken positions?
Fabio Bosco:
Look, Bill, in general, the major labor federations, they share the same understanding as Lula. You see, our president, Lula da Silva is talking about unconditional peace, you see? So let’s say he’s not concerned about eventually Ukraine losing part of its territory to Russia. He thinks that a negotiation means that everyone must give something. That’s what he’s talking about. And unfortunately, the largest labor federation, the CUT, shares a lot of this perspective that is widespread by Lula da Silva.
Bill Fletcher:
And is there, I’m curious, is there struggle within these labor centers around this? Or is that particular position uncontested?
Fabio Bosco:
Look, there is a political debate about that, but unfortunately, it’s not widespread, you see. We can see the working class talking about this in workplaces you see, but mass meetings and the bodies of the labor federations, this debate is not so present. In the labor federation I am a member of, CSP Conlutas, we have been standing solidarity with Ukraine since the beginning of the invasion, last year’s invasion. And we joined an international campaign that is called Workers Aid to Ukraine. I myself have been twice to Ukraine last year.
Bill Fletcher:
And Liz, what about in Britain? What debates are underway within the trade union movement around Ukraine?
Liz Lawrence:
Well, there will be Russians coming to the Trade Union Congress in September. The TUC basically has been supportive of Ukraine. The difficulty is some unions have positions which are also just pro-armaments industry or pro-NATO in a way which isn’t helpfully persuading people on the left of the union to support Ukraine, on the left of the union movement. But generally it’s been a position of solidarity in terms of condemning the Russian invasion and supporting the right of Ukrainian people to support themselves, to defend themselves. There are difficulties with my own union, UCU. We had two motions passed at our conference this summer, one of which from the Nash Executive, was a fairly decent solidarity motion, which is about educational and humanitarian assistance and about listening to Ukrainian voices and having Ukrainian socialists, Ukrainian trade unionists, Ukrainian feminists speaking to our members, which we could do now over Zoom and so on.
The other motion was a problematic one from the stop the war position, which got carried by nine votes. A lot of us organized against it and it was a very narrow debate, but it got carried by majority of nine votes, and that was calling on the UK government to stop arming Ukraine. This was obviously met with outrage by some of our members who are Ukrainian, by Eastern European scholars and by people in Ukraine. I’m very sorry about it. A lot of us tried to organize to put the case against that and say, if you support the right to self-determination, you must support the right to self-defense. You must support the right to weapons from any source people can get them. That’s not the same as saying you think NATO is great on everything, whether you align with the foreign policy of your government, it’s about trying to make that distinction. But some people don’t always hear that. So that’s where the debate is. But there will obviously be discussion. I would imagine at the TUC in September, but I would hope the motions in solidarity of the Ukraine are passed.
Bill Fletcher:
Let me follow up on that question. And it relates to something that I asked Olesia. There was a statement that I read recently by a [foreign language 00:23:16] trade unionists or leftists who had a strong condemnation of the Russian invasion, and at the same time, raise the argument that there should be humanitarian assistance to Ukraine but that progressive forces including but not limited to unions, I assume, should not engage in anything that strengthens the hand of NATO, therefore no supplying of weapons. And I’m curious, Olesia has spoken to this and I’m curious particularly with Liz and Fabio, it sounds like this issue has come up in both of your contexts. What has the debate looked like and have you been successful in pushing back on any of that?
Liz Lawrence:
We’re pushing back. We’re organizing a couple of UCU members for Ukraine. We are also going to get the union nationally to hear Ukrainian voices. I think the way to turn the tide is to get people hearing Ukrainian voices more. But the debate can operate at two levels within the unions. I think there’s a very practical level, [inaudible 00:24:34] a lot of labor unionists here. These people have been subjected to an unjust invasion of their country, they should be given the means to defend themselves. Of course, they have a right to get weapons from whoever they can get them, that’s not the same as endorsing NATO’s policies and so on. But which remember by the way, it’s Putin has actually done most to persuade people that they want to join NATO. That’s really the problem, which is put the responsibility there, I think. So there’s some people operate at that level.
There are other people who engage in very, very sophisticated debates about history, who think that this is like World War I. This is a war of inter-imperialist powers, a struggle for colonists or whatever. The workers have no interest. We should be neutral. We’ve got to point out to them, well, that a neutrality will mean simply the Ukrainians will be killed if you deny them the weapons because we can’t do anything in Britain to stop the Russians getting weapons. And if you just deny weapons to the victims of oppression, you are just actually siding with the oppressor in a way. But it’s difficult to get some people to see it. They just hear a sort of argument about this is a terrible conflict. We’re worried about nuclear war, we’re worried about World War III. Well, aren’t all reasonable people, including I’m sure a lot of people in Ukraine and Russia?
And they just hear this argument, it’s putting more fuel on the flames sort of thing, so stop sending arms. And it’s about trying to help people think beyond that. But no, look, this is a just war. This is a national liberation struggle. The problem with the proxy war discussion as it’s talked about in terms of this is a war between the Western imperialism and Russia or Russian imperialism, is simply that it obscures the Ukrainian people. They sort of disappear in the picture. They denied any agency, any voice. They’re sometimes just treated as puppets. And sometimes this opposition to weapons for Ukraine goes along with a very pessimistic scenario, which doesn’t think another Ukraine is possible, which just thinks the only options for the Ukrainian people is to be dominated by one imperialist power or another. And it’s often because of people who are quite militant labor unionists, who in their own workplaces would never accept it.
If an employer said, there are just two bad outcomes. You lose your jobs or you work longer hours, they’d say stuff it, no, we want a better option. But when it comes to Ukraine, they don’t seem to have any prospect of seeing Ukraine for the Ukrainians, a Ukraine in which Ukrainian people decide what sort of economy and society they want for their democratic political processes. So we have to keep arguing with these people. And I think there are a lot of people who are hearing both sides of the argument and thinking about things. I think that’s where things are in my union. We’ve got to educate these people. I think the most important educational tool is that people actually listen to what Ukrainians are saying. So that’s how I see it.
Bill Fletcher:
I have a final two questions. I’m sorry, Fabio, you’re going to say something.
Fabio Bosco:
Let me say something. Our historical stand is for the solution of NATO, CSTO, and all these military alliances, which we understand all of them as imperialist alliances, you see. At the same time, we keep this position up to our days, but at the same time, what we see is that what made NATO stronger was the invasion of Ukraine, see. The invasion of Ukraine make NATO popular across Europe and even Sweden and Finland decide to join because of this invasion. So Putin is directly responsible for the popularity that NATO has today. At the same time, we agree with least that the Ukrainian people must have the necessary weapons in order to defend their country.
So for instance, what we see, where are the F-16 planes so that they can have some hegemony in the air to advance. They don’t have it. They are struggling basically with the willingness of the working people that are in the front lines fighting back the aggression. So we stand for demanding the major powers to provide all the weapons the Ukrainian people needs. But at the same time, we do not believe that NATO or any other military alliance is necessary for the future of humankind in the world.
Bill Fletcher:
So let me ask you all a final question, which is, what concretely do you want to see trade unions and trade unionists do in order to advance solidarity? And let me just add to that, that I’m tired of resolutions. I go to I don’t know how many conferences and people pass resolutions and nothing is done. So what, concretely, if you are talking to other trade unionists, which you are, what should people do? How can they actually act in solidarity with Ukraine? And Olesia, I want to start with you.
Olesia Briazgunova:
Thank you. I just want to say that a lot of people across the world, they have already acted and provide different kind of assistance to Ukrainian trade unions. And we are greatly appreciated because their aid in form of foods, clothes, power banks, generators, medicine, tactic medicine, all these things have already saved people’s life in Ukraine, and we are greatly appreciated. And I honestly want to say that please keep staying solidarity with people of Ukraine because we understand that this war is not end, and it’s continuing, and we still need your solidarity and actions. Donations, participation in different solidarity actions in your countries, humanitarian aid. And I want to emphasize that we need the military aid that your governments provide Ukraine.
And also, I ask my brothers and sisters across the world to explain people that this war is not only regional war in Ukraine, this war affected their economic situation in Europe, affected the situation with food, it [inaudible 00:31:27] food crisis, and so on and so on. So that’s why we need to end this horrific war. And also, I want to just emphasize one important issue, that this war undermined all policies and actions against the climate changes. And the war has a huge negative impact on climate, not only in Ukraine, but in the European region and in the world. So only with your solidarity we can end this war and have a victory and just peace. We need to just peace and ensure freedoms and democracy in whole territory of Ukraine. Thank you.
Bill Fletcher:
Thank you. Fabio.
Fabio Bosco:
Bill, look, as I told you, we are in this international campaign. There were three convoys with humanitarian aid, basically with first aid, staff, medicine and power generators. We know that it’s just a drop for what is needed for the Ukrainian people at this difficult situation. We know it’s symbolic, but it’s a way that we can show our solidarity and [inaudible 00:32:43] morale of the working class that’s fighting back the Russian aggression. At the same time, here in Brazil, we are discussing the workplace. We join the Ukrainian community when they organized rallies. For instance, when the foreign minister of Russia came to Brazil, we were in the demonstrations against his presence in Brazil, this guy, [foreign language 00:33:10]. So that’s what we are doing in practical terms. And next week we start our Congress, that’s the national Congress, and we invited a brother from Ukrainian Labor Union of [foreign language 00:33:26] to be in the Congress with us. We have a special session to talk about the situation of the Ukrainian working class and their resistance.
Bill Fletcher:
Thank you. Finally, Liz.
Liz Lawrence:
Well, I agree with what the last two speakers have said. We need practical solidarity. Things like sending supplies, sending equipment, medical equipment, so on. I think it’s going to be need for help with demining equipment too, given the terrible amount of mining of Ukraine that’s happened. I also think from universities we can maintain academic links and help to sustain academic life and education in Ukraine in what ways we can, because obviously, people are feeling isolated. In some ways, their lives are being totally disrupted. So we have to extend solidarity in all sorts of practical ways. And I agree with you, it isn’t just about passing resolutions, it’s what you’ve done once you’ve passed the resolutions, which is more important.
Bill Fletcher:
Indeed. Well, I want to thank the three of you, Olesia Briazgunova, Liz Lawrence, Fabio Bosco. I want to thank you very much for joining us for this discussion. The struggle certainly continues. Everyone, take care and have a good one.
[The] barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.
— Big Bill Haywood, addressing commencement of miners’ strike, Colorado, 1903.
Work taught him of injustice early and converted him to socialism. His first boss whipped him when he was only twelve, and the same year he witnessed a black man handed over to a lynch mob. Three years later he was a Nevada miner doing a “man’s work for a boy’s pay,” breaking the loneliness of Eagle Canyon by reading Darwin, Marx, Burns, Voltaire, Byron, and Shakespeare. An older miner’s explanation of the class struggle capped his education, though it didn’t sink in until the Haymarket anarchists were hung two years later.
After that, he saw scores of men poisoned at Utah’s Brooklyn lead mine, watched a friend’s head crushed against an air drill by a slab of falling rock, and had his own right hand smashed between a descending car and the side of the shaft at Iowa’s Silver City mine.
Adored by women and instinctively obeyed by men, he was the most popular union organizer in the country. Blessed with the manners of a gentleman, he packed a revolver, cried like a baby when reciting poetry, and delivered thunderous speeches that ignited crowds of workers like a wick in a powder keg: “Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep, EIGHT DOLLARS A DAY!”
Haywood had no use for politicians and referred to Washington D.C. as a “political sewer.” He testified as an expert witness before the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, which gathered broad testimony on labor issues from 1913 to 1915. Commissioner Harry Weinstock, a California businessman, attacked Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World, the most militant and democratic union in U.S. history. Weinstock bluntly suggested that Haywood was a crook for promoting worker-controlled production:
“If I was to come in and take possession of your property and throw you out, would I be robbing you?”
“You have a mistaken idea,” Haywood responded, “that the property is yours. I would hold that the property does not belong to you. What you, as a capitalist, have piled up as property is merely unpaid labor, surplus value. You have no vested right to that property.”
“You mean then,” Weinstock said, “that the coat you have on your back does not belong to you but belongs to all the people?”
“That is not what I mean,” Haywood answered. “I don’t want your watch. I don’t want your toothbrush. But the things that are publicly used – no such word as private should be vested by any individual in any of those things. For instance, do you believe that John D. Rockefeller has any right – either God-given right, or man-made right, or any other right – to own the coal mines of the state of Colorado?”
“He has a perfect right to them under the laws of the country,” Weinstock replied.
“Then the laws of the country are absolutely wrong,” Haywood retorted.
Reported the New York Call on Haywood’s repartee: “The big witness clipped a sizzler across the suave Commissioner. In every one of these highly amusing clashes on the broad question of right and wrong, Haywood had Weinstock fighting for wind.”
In addition to the jibes, Haywood set out the IWW’s ultimate aspiration:
“We hope to see the day when all able men will work, either with brain or muscle. We want to see the day when women will take their place as industrial units. We want to see the day when every old man and every old woman will have the assurance of at least dying in peace. You have not got anything like that today. You have not the assurance – rich man that you are – of not dying a pauper. I have an idea that we can have a better society than we have got . . .”
The “better society” would be achieved, Haywood told the Commission, when workers owned and operated their industries collectively and democratically. “If foremen or overseers were necessary, they would be selected from among the workers,” he said. “There would be no dominating power there, would there? I can conceive of no need for a dominating national, world-wide power…”
Commissioner James O’Connell, an official of the American Federation of Labor’s machinists’ union told Haywood that his dream was “Utopian.”
Haywood disagreed. “Really, Mr. O’Connell, I don’t think that I presented any Utopian ideas. I talked for the necessities of life – food, clothing, shelter, and amusement. We can talk of Utopia afterwards. The greatest need is employment.” He recommended to the Commission a virtual blueprint of New Deal programs like the WPA and the CCC that president Franklin Roosevelt took up twenty years later.
SOURCES
Roughneck – The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood, Peter Carlson (1983: W. W. Norton), pps. 226-7
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – Rebel Girl, (International Publishers, 1955) p. 131-2
Melvyn Dubofsky, Big Bill Haywood (Manchester University Press, 1987) pps. 10-15
Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais Labor’s Untold Story, (Cameron Associates, 1955) pps. 146-51
Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble – (Simon and Schuster, 1997) p. 233, 237
Robert K. Murray, Red Scare – A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920, (University of Minnesota, 1955)
Mathew Josephson, The President Makers – The Culture of Politics and Leadership In An Age of Enlightenment, 1896-1919, (Harcourt, 1940) p. 400
Mari Jo Buhle and Paul and Harvey J. Kaye eds., The American Radical, (Routledge, 1994) pps. 105-11
Jesika Gonzalez will tell you that she wasn’t the biggest fan of Porterville, California while she was growing up.
“When I was younger, I was very, like, angsty,” the 18-year-old said as she flicked her purple hair over her shoulder. “Whatever, this town’s small, nothing to do.”
Porterville is a predominantly Hispanic working-class town in the Central Valley of California, where environmental hazards include some of the worst air quality in the state; the past year’s torrential rains that inundated hundreds of acres of farmland; and a heat wave that pushed temperatures past 110 degrees Fahrenheit this July.
But Porterville has this going for it: Its school district pioneered a partnership with Climate Action Pathways for Schools, or CAPS, a non-profit organization that aims to help high school students become more environmentally aware while simultaneously lowering their school’s carbon footprint and earning wages.
CAPS is part of a growing trend. Like similar programs in Kansas City, Illinois, Maine, Mississippi, and New York City, CAPS is using the career-technical education, or CTE, model to prepare young people for the green jobs of the future before they get out of high school.
For Gonzalez, a self-described tree-hugger, the program has changed the way she looks at her hometown. These days, she downright appreciates it “because I’ve had the opportunity to see that sustainability is everywhere.”
CAPS started in part because a local solar engineer, Bill Kelly, wanted to share his expertise with students in the school district’s career-technical education program. Kirk Anne Taylor, who has a deep background in education and nonprofit management, joined last year as executive director with a vision to expand the model across the state, and far beyond just solar power.
CAPS students are trained for school-year and summer internships that teach them about the environment and how to lower the carbon footprint in school buildings and the larger community. They earn California’s minimum wage, $15.50 an hour.
For instance, Gonzalez and her classmates held a bike rodeo for younger students. They’ve created detailed maps of traffic and sidewalk hazards around schools, to promote more students walking and biking to schools.
Other CAPS participants give presentations, educating fellow students about climate change and green jobs. They are helping manage routes and charging schedules for the school’s growing fleet of electric buses. They work with farmers to get local food in the cafeterias.
Their most specialized and skilled task is completing detailed energy audits of each building in the district and continuously monitoring performance. In the first year of the program, some of these young energy detectives discovered a freezer in a high school holding a single leftover popsicle. Powering this one freezer over the summer vacation meant about $300 in wasted energy costs, so they got permission to pull the plug.
Climate Action Pathways for Schools, or CAPS, students pose for a photo in Porterville, California.
Climate Action Pathways for Schools
The popsicles add up. Over the past few years, by reviewing original building blueprints, inputting data into endless Excel spreadsheets, and cajoling their classmates and teachers into schoolwide efficiency competitions, CAPS students have saved the district $850,000 on a $2.9 million energy budget — this in a district that was already getting about two-thirds of its energy from onsite solar. And 100 percent of the most recent participants are going on to college, far higher than the students who aren’t in the district’s career-technical education program.
CAPS is small, just 18 students this year. But its model sits right at the intersection of several big problems and opportunities facing the country. One is that in the wake of the pandemic, public school achievement, attendance, and college enrollment are all suffering, especially in working-class districts like Porterville. This is likely not entirely unconnected to the fact that young people are suffering a well-publicized mental health crisis, of which eco-anxiety is one part.
Career technical education programs like this one have been shown to lead to higher graduation rates and to put more students, especially working-class students, into good jobs.
And there’s massive demand for green workers in particular: Skilled tradespeople like electricians are already in short supply, making it difficult for homeowners and businesses to install clean energy technologies. The Inflation Reduction Act and associated investments are expected to create 9 million new green jobs over the next decade.
Some CAPS students are also changing community attitudes toward climate change, starting with their own families.
Gonzalez says her dad is skeptical of climate change and the progressive politics it’s associated with, while her mom seems passive — “like, what can I do?” But they supported her involvement in CAPS because it’s a paying job, and recently her dad said, “I’m proud of you for doing what you like to do.”
She’s heading to California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt in the fall to study environmental science and management.
Students at Monache High School in Porterville, California, gather for one of their CAPS classes.
Climate Action Pathways for Schools
David Proctor, 17, grew up the oldest of seven. His mother didn’t believe in climate change, Proctor says, but grudgingly agreed to the CAPS program. It helps that Proctor is earning money for his work monitoring the district’s solar performance. He loves every minute.
He’s on track to graduate this coming December and be the first in his family to go on to college. He wants to combine his interest in climate change and public health.
Jocelyn Gee is the head of community growth for the Green Jobs Board, which has a reach of 96,000 people and focuses on creating equitable access to high-quality green jobs. They see a huge demand for programs like CAPS.
“We get a lot of requests from college students and high school students about what kind of roles are there for them,” Gee said. “This field hasn’t existed for that long. There are very few people. So you need to invest in training the next generation now so a few years on you will have the brightest in the climate movement.”
They said the strength of a program like CAPS is that it’s making life better for Porterville residents right now. “I really think that hyperlocal solutions are the way to go,” Gee said. “It’s great when green jobs involve the frontline communities in solutions.”
One factor that distinguishes CAPS from other green CTE programs is that it’s also designed to address the opportunity for public schools themselves to decarbonize. Schools collectively have 100,000 publicly owned buildings, and energy costs are typically the second largest line item in budgets after salaries. The Inflation Reduction Act, along with Biden’s infrastructure bill, contains billions of dollars intended specifically to address school decarbonization, but many districts lack the grant-writing and other expertise required to chip the money loose.
In partnership with CAPS, the Porterville Unified School District, or PUSD, recently learned they’ll be bringing in $5.8 million over three years from the federal Renew America’s Schools grant program. The money will fund lighting, HVAC and building automation upgrades–all needs identified by the students’ energy audits — as well as an expansion of the internship program itself. Only 24 grants were awarded nationwide out of more than 1000 applications, and the education component made Porterville’s stand out. PUSD and CAPS have also scored a $3.6 million grant from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) for a green schoolyards program.
The district is also applying for an Environmental Protection Agency grant that would allow them to go from six electric school buses to 41, nearly the entire fleet. The vision is to train students to maintain and repair these as well. CAPS students have already started analyzing and planning more energy-efficient routes that allow for charging.
“The issues we’re trying to address are common, and we’re delivering real benefits: environmentally, in terms of student outcomes, in terms of cost savings,” says Kirk Anne Taylor, CAPS‘ executive director. CAPS is expanding to three other districts in California, with more in the works, and the program in Porterville has drawn visitors from Oregon, New Mexico, and as far away as Missouri.
For Elijah Garcia, a graduating senior headed to the University of California,San Diego to study chemical engineering, the work has given him a newfound commitment to pursuing a sustainable career. It’s also given him hope for the future.
“We’re trying to change something — climate change — that when you look at it in a vacuum it’s, like, insurmountable. But this is boots on the ground. It’s a bit more tangible. I can’t do everything, but I can do this little bit.”
