Dozens of healthcare workers were arrested in Los Angeles on Monday after sitting in the street outside of a Kaiser Permanente facility to demand that providers address dangerously low staffing levels at hospitals in California and across the country. The civil disobedience came as the workers prepared for what could be the largest healthcare strike in U.S. history. Late last month, 85,000…
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Urban socialists blazed a path toward social democracy. Leftists who want to reclaim this tradition face a whole new set of obstacles.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Glacier v. Teamsters was not a crisis averted but another step in the right’s plan to stifle labor power.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Ironic how so many who say they worship Jesus as their Lord and Savior forget all that he taught:
If we have food and covering, with these we shall be content. But those who want to get rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction.
— Timothy 6:7-9 English Standard Version 2016 (ESV)
I was watching a lecture on the 1914 Ludlow Massacre, where striking mine workers and their wives and children were attacked and murdered by National Guard soldiers and hired coal company thugs. Their tent village was burned and sacked at the wishes of the Rockefeller combine who owned the mines and related businesses. The mine owners disregarded the federal laws that protected mine workers. They also ignored the pleas of the workers for better pay and accommodations, which actually initiated the strikes in the first place. Here’s the skinny on all this: viewing Claude Berri’s 1993 film Germinal which related to the 1860s French mining workers’ strikes; John Sayles 1987 film Matewan about the 1920 coal miner’s strike in Matewan, West Virginia; and Barbara Kopple’s 1976 documentary Harlan County USA about the 1973 coal miners’ strike in Harlan, Kentucky, you see that nothing had changed.
And so it still is, to some extent, today. Yes, the owners of industry may not plan to kill their unhappy workers. They just continue with the practice of “dead end” salaries and terribly unsafe, even deadly. working conditions. They just do whatever is possible to get most of the profits of labor for themselves and their investors. Obviously, this is why it is paramount to have strong unions and not ones that succumb to the whims of the owners OR the Democratic Party (because the other party is too fascistic to even consider). Sadly, less than 10% of the private sector workforce is even in a union! What is crucial is the need for what the old Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies) called for in 1905: ONE BIG UNION… PERIOD!! The Wobblies were destroyed for obvious reasons, capped when they came out against the US empire’s imperialist participation in the war in Europe (WW1). Yet, the most mainstream union of the time, The American Federation of Labor, along with the two major political parties, made sure the Wobblies idea of one big union for ALL workers was dismissed and deleted from worker consciousness.
So, we have our current economic environment whereupon the majority of working stiffs are oblivious to the past. The Democratic Party gives us “We feel your pain” BS and keeps out of the way of the super rich (where most of their donors reside). The Republicans pass laws to comfort the super rich owners of our empire, calling anyone who disagrees as a Marxist/Communist. The mainstream media does the bidding of the empire, as their salaries come from that source (Duh, who owns the media?). When men like my dad made at most $10k a year in the early 1960s as a member of the corrupt Longshoremen’s union (ILA) he still had better benefits than 90% of today’s private sector workers. Look how feudal our society has become! Wake up working stiffs, and adopt the ideals of those Wobblies!
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Philip A. Faruggio.This post was originally published on Radio Free.
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Formed in 1905, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) — or the Wobblies, as they were also known — may have been the most radical and egalitarian mass union in U.S. history. From the mills of New England to the wheat fields of Kansas, from the docks of Philadelphia to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, the IWW organized workers, often the so-called unskilled laborers that craft unions…
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The Biden administration released the first-ever nursing home staffing requirements today after first promising them in advance of the 2022 State of the Union address. If finalized, the standards will be the most significant change to nursing home regulations since they were first created in the 1970s. Health policy experts are mixed on what the new standards will mean for residents and workers…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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According to a newly unveiled memo from Michigan Republicans, workers shouldn’t be guaranteed paid leave from work to care for one’s newborn or a seriously ill family member — instead, the party says it’s akin to taking “summer break.” This week, Michigan’s Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer called on the Democratically-controlled legislature to pass guaranteed paid family and medical leave for…
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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the labor market and women lost millions of jobs, the country plunged into the first women’s recession. It was the first time women had experienced more job losses than men in one catastrophic economic contraction. Economists feared it could take decades for women to recover. But just three years later, that recovery has already arrived. As a group, women are back to…
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Johnny Perez was arrested and incarcerated two days after his daughter was born, a heart-wrenching fact by itself. Perez wanted to be there for his daughter, but he was stuck at a state prison in Coxsackie, New York. He worked hard to save money, but his prison job sewing bed sheets started at 17 cents an hour. There were no sick days, no time off and refusal to work could result in solitary…
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The United Auto Workers filed unfair labor practice charges against General Motors and Stellantis on Thursday, accusing the major carmakers of illegally refusing to bargain in good faith as the union seeks substantial wage increases and benefit improvements. UAW president Shawn Fain announced the charges during a livestream late Thursday, just two weeks before the union’s contracts with GM…
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Flight attendants for American Airlines overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike on Wednesday as contract bargaining has stalled after years of negotiations and workers have gone through the pandemic without getting a raise. According to the union, the Association of Professional Flight Attendants (APFA), 99.5 percent of flight attendants who participated in the months-long vote approved the…
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This story originally appeared in In These Times on Aug. 30, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
Thirty-year-old Rick Savage was among the first workers hired at Ultium Cells’ 2.8-million-square-foot battery plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in April 2022. “I heard about the battery plant and how it was going to be technologically superior to all other manufacturing companies,” Savage remembers thinking. “The future of the automotive industry is going to be electric.”
Ultium Cells was a high-profile joint venture between U.S. automaker General Motors and South Korea’s LG Energy Solution. The Lordstown plant — billed as the largest battery plant of its kind anywhere in the country — was predicted to cost some $2.3 billion and generate more than 1,100 new jobs. GM’s legacy as a union employer was part of the company’s sales pitch to new employees.
“They were saying, ‘Hey, it’s the next GM, you can retire here, it’s going to be great,’” Savage says.
Deindustrialization has been battering northeastern Ohio for half a century. Ohio hemorrhaged 50,000 jobs within five years after Youngstown Sheet & Tube shuttered its Campbell Works steel factory in 1977. In 2008, after GM shuttered its facility in Moraine, 2,000 autoworkers were left without jobs. The Chinese automotive-glass manufacturer Fuyao hired some of them when it took over the closed plant in 2014, but at much lower wages.
James Anderson, a worker who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, was one of the thousands who lost their job in northeastern Ohio after GM’s Lordstown assembly plant closed in 2019 — after 52 years of cranking out cars. The closing of that Lordstown plant directly eliminated 1,500 jobs; hundreds of others lost positions at GM suppliers in the area.
For Savage, Anderson and others, the electric vehicle transition brought new hope. “We were sold a dream,” says 41-year-old Meghan Crockett, who started at the Ultium plant in Lordstown in May 2022. Like Savage, Crockett thought she was going to be part of ushering in a new clean-energy future. Sure, their wages started at a measly $15 and $16.50 an hour, but they were working for two, billion-dollar companies, and wages would improve over time.
“They were saying, ‘Hey, it’s the next GM, you can retire here, it’s going to be great.’” says Rick Savage. “We were sold a dream,” says Meghan Crockett.
Anderson previously earned $21 an hour in his union job making brake lines at GM supplier Comprehensive Logistics. When Ultium opened up, “People were expecting to get the same type of pay as GM workers,” he says. “When you hear GM in this town, you think of a good-benefit job, a good-paying job, something you can retire from and, you know, prosper.”
But he was earning only $15 an hour as a material handler at Ultium. “It is a very steep pay cut,” he tells me in the company parking lot at 5:30 a.m. during a shift change in August.
Many of the jobs at Ultium are highly skilled and workers interviewed for this article say they toil within an often hazardous environment.
At other GM plants, workers who assemble cars often start at $18 an hour and top out at $32 an hour. Those wages are assured by a master labor agreement with GM negotiated by the United Auto Workers (UAW). But as “joint ventures,” the electric vehicle plants of GM and the other “Big Three” automakers aren’t covered by the labor agreement.
“When you hear GM in this town, you think of a good-benefit job, a good-paying job, something you can retire from and, you know, prosper,” says James Anderson.
The contracts for some 150,000 workers across the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Stellantis — are expiring September 14. And the safety standards and wages of these electric vehicle workers loom large over the UAW’s ongoing negotiations. The UAW is demanding that workers at electric vehicle battery plants receive the same pay, benefits and safety standards as UAW members at other auto factories. What’s at stake is no less than the future of American car manufacturing, and all eyes are watching how these negotiations will play out.
UAW President Shawn Fain, elected in March as part of a reform slate backed by the rank-and-file movement Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), has pledged to lead a strike if necessary to accomplish the union’s ambitious goals—chief among them, ending tiers on wages and benefits in which long-term workers enjoy better wages and benefits than new hires doing the same work. A two-week strike could cost GM $1.3 billion in profits, according to one Citi analyst’s estimate.
“Ultium Cells shows us that we are in danger of replacing oil barons with battery barons who are happy to take billions in taxpayer handouts while offering jobs that are dangerous and pay poverty wages,” Fain tells In These Times. “We are going to see this pattern play out in communities across the country, from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, unless unions fight for a just transition that doesn’t leave workers and working class communities behind.”
But the fact that Ultium Cells is a joint venture makes “folding them into the national agreement very difficult” for the UAW, says Arthur Wheaton, the director of labor studies at Cornell University who specializes in the auto sector. Therefore, the union’s demand is for “automakers [at the EV plants] to voluntarily agree to follow national agreements.”
UAW President Shawn Fain at a rally in Michigan on August 20, 2023. PHOTO BY JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES Meanwhile, many federal lawmakers are urging the Big Three to do just that and fold their joint ventures into each of their national agreements. In late July, 28 Senate Democrats, including U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), signed a letter demanding that Big Three automakers bargain in good faith with the UAW and fold workers at joint-venture electric vehicle battery plants into their national contracts.
“UAW workers have made General Motors, Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis the successful, innovative, and profitable companies they are today, and workers in the new electric vehicle sector will be critical to your future success. They must share in the benefits of a union contract,” the Senate Democrats wrote. “These are highly-skilled, technical, and strenuous jobs. To that end, it is unacceptable and a national disgrace that the starting wage at any current American joint venture electric vehicle battery facility is $16 an hour. We note that at $33,320 a year, the starting wage at one of these facilities is just above the poverty level for a family of four.”
At the end of the day, it’s not like the federal government is without leverage in these matters, but the outstanding question is how — and whether — they might further intervene. A strike at the Big Three auto companies could be comparable to taking down 2% of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), according to news reports that cited a recent Bank of America analysis. That analysis reportedly notes a strike “could incite intervention analogous to what occurred in the rail sector.” Last December, President Joe Biden and Congress intervened to block a national railroad strike. It was a move that drew the ire of many workers who felt betrayed by a president who has cast himself as a friend of labor. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has appointed a liaison to the Big Three automakers and the UAW.
Automakers and their joint-venture partners have received lucrative federal subsidies and billions of dollars in loans, all without the federal government requiring any specific wage or safety standards or benefit protections. The UAW has lambasted the White House for awarding those loans with no strings attached, a sharp contrast to the strong standards for federal contractors and a recent reset of prevailing wage standards in construction.
“The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” Fain wrote in a May memo to union staff, announcing the UAW was holding off on endorsing Biden’s re-election campaign while it pushes for a “just transition” for workers, meaning guarantees that the switch to a renewable auto manufacturing economy creates safe and good-paying jobs on which workers can lead dignified lives.
“If the government is going to funnel billions in taxpayer money to these companies, the workers must be compensated with top wages and benefits,” Fain went on.
GM’s CEO Mary Barra has signaled that it’s not the company’s responsibility to guarantee work after a plant closes: “There’s a lot of conversation about job security. Job security is not something you negotiate. Job security is something that you earn,” she told a Wall Street gathering in 2019 after the company closed Lordstown Assembly and three other U.S. plants, eliminating 14,500 jobs. “And making sure they all understand that and their role is something we’ll double down on as we go forward.”
“We’re at a crossroads — politicians can’t profess support for unions and not speak out against plant closures,” Fain said during a Facebook Live session on August 1. “They can’t say they support workers and remain silent while CEOs like Mary Barra make 362 times what the average employee makes.” Barra received a total compensation package of $29 million in 2022.
For his part, Biden said in a statement August 14 that jobs facilitating the transition to a clean energy future at the Big Three should be “good jobs that can support a family.”
But the statement failed to mention joint ventures, which loom over the negotiations. The Biden administration has said that electric vehicles should make up half of all new vehicles sold by 2030. But the key question for the U.S. workforce is whether these new jobs will come with wages and benefits that provide for a good quality of life for workers.
The other big issue is safety: More than a year into its operations, Ultium has been dogged with reports of hazardous conditions, including fires and chemical leaks. In interviews with almost a dozen workers at the plant and by examining police records, In These Times corroborated many of these reports. Together, they raise a critical question that reaches beyond Lordstown: Will the clean energy economy be built on a factory floor riddled with toxic chemicals and safety hazards?
One of the most recent safety incidents happened less than two weeks ago. On Sunday, August 20, a chemical spill left black blots of a slurry substance on the floor of the mixing department at the Ultium plant, according to photos and videos obtained by the Detroit News. The slurry contained a hazardous solvent known as n-Methylpyrrolidone (NMP) used in the production of battery cells. “The NMP is the worst part of the slurry. It’s a nasty chemical that is definitely not good to breathe or get on your skin,” Greg Less, technical director at the University of Michigan Battery Lab, explains in an email to In These Times.
“The active material and conductive additive powders are very small particles that can cause respiratory issues if inhaled while still in their dry powder form,” says Less. “The active materials are suspected carcinogens due to their size and chemical makeup. Once dispersed into a slurry though, both of those materials are pretty well contained.”
“The NMP is the worst part of the slurry. It’s a nasty chemical that is definitely not good to breathe or get on your skin,” explains Greg Less, technical director at the University of Michigan Battery Lab.
Ultium said no employees were exposed or injured in the spill. “Upon the discovery of a cathode mixing slurry leak … immediate steps were taken to isolate the cause and contain the leak. The immediate surrounding area was cleared, and area mixing operations have been halted while we assess and address the situation,” according to a statement from the company. It went on to say that the “investigation into the cause of the spill is ongoing.”
But some workers believe that several SERVPRO employees were taken to the hospital. When asked about it, the company refused to respond to the question.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is investigating the spill.
Ultium Cells, though still negotiating its first contract and enforceable language to address safety issues, is the first unionized EV battery plant funded by the federal spending blitz. It received a $2.5 billion loan from the Department of Energy to spur battery cell manufacturing at three plants in Ohio, Tennessee and Michigan, while also benefiting from tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act. GM is expected to earn $300 million in tax credits in 2023 and aims to build one million electric vehicles a year by 2025.
It’s a critical moment in American auto manufacturing, comparable to the union’s previous failures to organize foreign-owned factories, or transplants. The UAW has witnessed a steep decline in its core manufacturing sector since the 1970s. GM, for example, is today about 11.5% of its more than 400,000 heyday in the 1970s. Organizing efforts in the South have failed, from a Nissan plant in Mississippi in 2017 to a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee in 2019. The UAW has joined a coalition of labor unions and civic groups targeting Hyundai’s electric vehicle plants and suppliers in Alabama and Georgia, an important swing state. They are also taking aim at Biden, urging him to act on behalf of workers.
“I know the president can’t make stipulations that all new jobs have to go to union workers, but there have to be fair labor standards for jobs that are supported by tax dollars,” David Green, the UAW’s regional director for Ohio and Indiana, told The New York Times.
“Ultium Cells shows us that we are in danger of replacing oil barons with battery barons who are happy to take billions in taxpayer handouts while offering jobs that are dangerous and pay poverty wages,” says UAW President Shawn Fain. “We are going to see this pattern play out in communities across the country, from the Great Lakes down to the Gulf of Mexico, unless unions fight for a just transition that doesn’t leave workers and working class communities behind.”
Brian Callaci, chief economist at the anti-monopoly Open Markets Institute, compares today’s fight at EV plants to the UAW’s past efforts to extend its patterned bargaining agreements at the Big Three to larger auto parts suppliers. “In the early 1960s, supplier contracts started to fall behind, and companies began exiting UAW contracts,” Callaci says. “The parts industry ultimately grew largely outside the UAW’s influence, and today employment in parts dwarfs employment at the Big Three.”
“This is our generation’s defining moment with electric vehicles,” Fain told the Guardian in mid-August. “The government should invest in U.S. manufacturing but money can’t go to companies with no strings attached. Labor needs a seat at the table. There should be labor standards built in, this is the future of the car industry at stake.”
Capitalizing on generous subsidies and high demand, automakers and their joint venture partners are building plants across the country. GM has three more U.S. battery plants in the works with its Korean partners.
Ford is also building three battery plants with its Korean partner SK On in Kentucky and Tennessee after receiving a $9.2 billion loan from the Department of Energy, part of a joint venture called BlueOval SK. It has another battery plant planned with Chinese partner CATL in Michigan, which it reportedly hopes to open in 2026. Stellantis is also slated to open a battery plant in Indiana with joint-venture partner Samsung SDI in 2025.
The UAW estimates that more than 20 major automotive battery plants across 14 states have either been announced or begun production, with the potential to hire between 1,000 to 3,000 workers each. If the United States reaches its goal of 59 million EVs on the road by 2031, federal subsidies could reach $220 billion, Benchmark Mineral Intelligence estimated in June.
Ultium could haul in $1.25 billion in tax credits for battery cell production in a single year, according to the July UAW white paper, “High Risk & Low Pay.” A Good Jobs First study released in July, “Power Outrage,” projected that taxpayers will fork over $200 billion through the Advanced Manufacturing Production Credit, also known as the section 45X credit. Those credits would be enough to cover initial capital investments and wages for the first several years of production at five recently announced battery plants, according to the study. Ford’s forthcoming battery plant in Marshall, Mich., the study added, would get $3.4 million in subsidies per job — for jobs that pay $45,000 a year.
The Ultium Lordstown plant manufactures the cells that power electric batteries. These batteries are assembled elsewhere and put into the Cadillac Lyriq, the GMC Hummer EV and the Chevy Bolt EV. A recently announced collaboration would add them to locomotive fleets produced by the currently-striking United Electrical Workers at the Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies Corporation (Wabtec Corporation) plant in Erie, Pa.
Workers describe the facility as highly computerized, with automated guided vehicles bringing materials to workers on the line. Those workers stand for grueling 12-hour shifts, staring at computers measuring the thickness of materials, or pressing buttons to troubleshoot malfunctions with the machines. There is no heavy lifting, but workers say the factory floor is still blazingly hot (the company claims it is a temperature-controlled environment). There is a harsh symphony of clanging sounds, with robots moving at a dizzying pace and workers struggling to keep up. Workers say they undergo periodic hearing tests because of the noise.
Head of Advanced Automotive Battery Division (EVP)-LG Energy Solution, David(Dong-Myung) Kim speaks at an event where General Motors announced an investment of more than $7 billion in four Michigan manufacturing sites on January 25, 2022 in Lansing, Michigan. Photo by JEFF KOWALSKY/AFP via Getty Images The batteries they manufacture are made of lithium-ion electrochemical cells. Each cell has two electrodes — a positively charged cathode containing lithium, and a negatively charged anode, which is typically made of graphite. The cathode usually contains nickel, manganese, and cobalt oxides.
Lithium is highly reactive. It easily loses its outer electron and becomes an ion. “The cell basically works by ping-ponging these ions and electrons back and forth,” journalist Patrick Sisson explained in the MIT Technology Review. To enable this, lithium compounds are dissolved in a liquid solution called an electrolyte.
Ultium Cells doesn’t appear to publicly disclose the ingredients in the electrolyte solution it uses. Some are merely labeled “additive” and don’t have a chemical abstract number. That, according to the UAW, makes it “impossible to independently verify its hazards.”
The recent chemical leak is just the latest reminder of the dangers of EV battery production. In the clean transition, potential hazards are everywhere — from electric shocks to dangerous chemicals to fires.
Last October, two workers at the plant were exposed to “battery acid,” according to police reports. In May, police records also indicate there was a fire. And a month later, a defective battery burst into flames.
For protection, workers generally wear clean-room suits, hairnets, ear plugs and goggles, which make them look a bit like astronauts. These offer a modicum of protection to known hazards, but workers say other hazards are melded together into chemical elixirs of unknown ingredients and lurk in the nooks and crannies of the machines they operate.
When the plant first opened, Savage says, the company didn’t even post a Safety Data Sheet, which lists all dangerous chemicals in any given facility.
One of those dangerous chemicals is NMP. The UAW white paper notes it is used in manufacturing the cathode. “Acute exposure may damage unborn children, cause respiratory tract irritation, skin irritation, nausea, headache, dizziness and diarrhea,” according to the UAW white paper.
“In manufacturing the anode, the company uses a product called Lucan BT1003M,” the UAW white paper continues. “More than 95% of it consists of carbon nanotubes, which can cause germ-cell mutations and cancer.”
The UAW’s industrial hygienist, Darius Sivin, says there are dangers to routine airborne exposure to the electrolyte mixture and carbon nanotubes, not to mention the risks posed by potential leaks and spills of electrolyte and NMP. These dangers are far from hypothetical and are tallied up in worker stories and in emergency response calls, with multiple reports of workers passing out, vomiting, having allergic reactions and difficulty breathing.
Lithium hexafluorophosphate (LiPF6) is one of the ingredients in the electrolyte. It can react with water and moisture on a person’s skin, eyes and respiratory tract, releasing corrosive acids, according to the UAW white paper.
With so many volatile and hazardous chemicals present, the Lordstown Fire Department was even worried it didn’t have enough training to deal with everything happening inside the plant.
“It is a concern with our fire departments and emergency responding to battery fires, chemical spills,” Lordstown Fire Chief Travis Eastham said in a July 2022 interview with local news station 21 WFMJ after a chemical leak at the plant. “We do need to get some type of program here to train firefighters and my thoughts are, if we are going to be named Voltage Valley, we need to lead the way. We don’t need to be learning later on. We need to be learning now and teach other places how to control these types of batteries and spills and things of that nature.”
Last October, two workers at the plant were exposed to “battery acid,” according to police reports. In May, police records also indicate there was a fire. And a month later, a defective battery burst into flames.
In April, Ultium publicized a two-hour training event for area fire departments on how to “operate safely” when facing incidents involving electric battery vehicles.
The July 2022 WFMJ news report noted three hazardous chemicals present at the facility: hydrogen, which can cause an explosion; difluoromethane, a refrigerant which can cause suffocation; and Ensaco, which can have combustible dust.
Since official production started at Ultium in October 2022, records show at least 48 calls have been placed to police related to health and safety at the plant. They have included fires, bodily injuries, and symptoms like dizziness, fainting, vomiting, allergies, trouble breathing, chest pain, smoke inhalation and seizures.
Ultium has paid $12,431 in fines — accounting for reduced amounts and settlements — to OSHA for workplace violations since the plant opened last year. It has been the subject of at least 11 separate OSHA inspections into various health and safety complaints. The UAW also says 22 workers suffered injuries at the plant and missed a total of 200 days of work in the first five months of 2023.
Around the time that official production started, one of the machines in the roll press department began leaking coolant. The coolant turns into a vapor once it comes into contact with moisture, so Savage and his coworkers described it as a gas leak. Managers, he says, accused them of creating “panic and chaos” and being “troublemakers.”
Savage says there were 20 workers in training when suddenly they started complaining of a smell in the air and began experiencing piercing headaches, nausea and dizziness.
“Something’s wrong,” he recalls telling managers. “There’s some sort of smell on the lines. People are getting sick.” A manager told them to return to the line, he says, so they did until they couldn’t anymore.
Coolant leaks have since become frequent, Savage says, and maintenance workers have a hack to fix them: They wrap Teflon tape around the threads of fittings to prevent larger spills until the leak is properly sealed.
Since official production started at Ultium in October 2022, records show at least 48 calls have been placed to police related to health and safety at the plant. They have included fires, bodily injuries, and symptoms like dizziness, fainting, vomiting, allergies, trouble breathing, chest pain, smoke inhalation and seizures.
When the leaks aren’t fixed, Savage says supervisors say to rotate people out on that machine. “Once one person gets too sick, we’ll just put someone else over there until they get sick and then rotate them out,” he recalls one supervisor saying. “Pardon the pun, we’re not replaceable batteries, you’re gonna swap in and out.”
Last year, a contractor at the Ultium plant was crushed by an automated crane while working inside the plant, suffering serious injuries, Travis Eastham, the local fire-station chief, told Bloomberg. “The worker was hospitalized for months and later died of his injuries.”
“We’ve actually been inside of a machine while tagged off,” says Savage. “And they’ve actually tried turning it back on and running it while we were inside of it.”
In May, six workers in the plant’s electrolyte-mixing department refused to work until the company installed safety showers in their work area, as required by OSHA regulations. Two of those workers, in a July 7 interview with 21 WFMJ, referred to the electrolyte mixing department where they worked as “the head of the snake in the battery making process.” They were suspended, with some later returning to work, according to the company.
In their first days on the job, Savage and his co-workers saw Ultium as a symbol of ingenuity and advanced technology propelling a clean economy forward. “It’s very high tech. And you’re just amazed when you first walk in,” says Camie Norquist, 38, who left her job at an ALDI supermarket to become a machine operator in Ultium’s packaging department.
She was dazzled by the plant, how pristine everything was and how the machines function, but not by the starting pay: $16.50 an hour. She assumed it’d get better with scheduled raises. “And then we find out, you get 50 cents after six months, and then when you hit your year, you only get 23 cents,” she says. “And then every year after that you only get 23 cents. That’s it. … We don’t even get cost-of-living increases.”
Norquist now describes the job as a “nightmare.” She has reported puddles of electrolyte solution on the floor to managers, only to be told to move to another machine.
“So we’re in there inhaling electrolyte,” she says, noting that they have only a cloth mask to protect them from toxic fumes.
One thing that “can lead to electrolyte leaks,” according to the UAW’s industrial hygienist, Sivin, is that “cells have to be cut open to test.”
Generations of Mandy McCoy’s family have worked at GM and its electrical-components supplier Packard Electric, enjoying the wages and benefits that came with good-paying union jobs. She had similar hopes for Ultium, where she started a year ago as a quality inspector earning $18 an hour. “I wanted to get in at the ground level and hopefully grow with this company,” says McCoy, 47.
McCoy says the packaging department is constantly having leaks, but management doesn’t bother to inform other workers in the nearby quality assurance department. “You’re far enough away,” she recalls a supervisor saying.
“We’re having fires from Canada come down and affect our air quality,” she says, wondering how a factory floor that is the size of 30 football fields wouldn’t be affected by a leak anywhere in the plant.
On May 17, an engineer dropped waste from another department into an uncovered garbage can in quality assurance, instantly emitting toxic gas and one worker began vomiting, according to the UAW report and worker interviews. The Lordstown 911 dispatch records described the worker as female with “chemical exposure earlier today, now vomiting and sick to stomach.” She was taken to the hospital.
Brittany Veltri, 27, left her job at a nonunion plastics factory over safety concerns and began working at Ultium in September 2022 in cell assembly in the lamination department. Since then, she says she’s experienced multiple electrical shocks.
“Because we have so much scrap going through [the line], and I can’t get to it to dump it, the cells kind of almost charge from sitting for so long,” she says. “There’s so much static, I get shocked multiple times, even with the safety gloves that we have to wear.”
Lithium-ion batteries “can hold high voltage and exceptional charge, making for an efficient, dense form of energy storage,” Sisson wrote in the MIT Technology Review. But that high voltage can also pose hazards for workers.
The gloves the company provides don’t offer enough protection against shocks, Veltri says. At one point this summer, she got shocked so badly that the electrical charge sent searing pain up through her arms to her face. “It’s a different shock than like [when] you rub your feet on the floor and you go and shock somebody,” she says. “One time I saw a spark.”
In July 2022, a man was taken to the hospital after an electrical shock, according to 911 records reviewed by WFMJ.
“All manufacturing requires large amounts of electric energy and hence lends itself to electric shocks,” the UAW’s Sivin tells In These Times. “In this case, the product itself stores and can potentially release large amounts of electric energy.”
“If you complete a circuit with other parts of your body (e.g., left and right shoulders) anti-shock gloves will do nothing,” he adds. “Even if it is the hands contacting the source of electric power, the gloves have a certain amount of electric insulation that can probably be overcome with a high enough voltage.”
Veltri says that she’s also concerned about being at risk for reproductive issues due to the chemicals and carcinogens from the materials she handles on the factory floor. She’s in the same room as workers in the packaging department, where they handle electrolyte solution. As part of the battery assembly process, workers come into contact with NMP, which the UAW’s white paper says “may damage unborn children.” Veltri says that when there is an electrolyte leak, “you smell it, and you’re going to get an instant headache, instant stomach ache, and it’s hard to breathe.”
“Dealing with the electrolytes, too, there is a possible chance of ruining your reproductive system,” Veltri says. Norquiest adds that, on the electrolyte bind, there’s a warning message: “This chemical can cause defects in your reproductive system.”
US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen speaks at the future Ultium Cells battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, on February 8, 2023. Photo by BEIYI SEOW/AFP via Getty Images The UAW white paper calls for hazardous materials at Ultium to be managed using a hierarchy of controls. “The hierarchy of controls is a way of determining which actions will best control exposures,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “The hierarchy of controls has five levels of actions to reduce or remove hazards.” The preferred order of action for general effectiveness ranges from elimination to substitution to engineering controls to administrative controls to personal protective equipment.
To prevent shocks, “The best solution is engineering controls to eliminate the possibility of worker exposure to electricity,” says Sivin, after hearing a description of what happened to Veltri.
But Savage says that after workers staged impromptu work stoppages because they felt unsafe, the company has made some changes, including providing workers with N95 masks instead of paper masks. The company also created a second emergency exit after the UAW says OSHA cited it for blocking an exit with a machine. In a settlement, OSHA dropped all fines.
In a statement to In These Times about all of the various worker claims and safety issues at the plant, Ultium says that “nothing is more important to us than the safety of our team members” and that “your list of allegations is not an accurate depiction of the overall work environment at Ultium Cells.”
The statement goes on: “We are working hard to create a culture of continuous innovation, prioritize a diverse and inclusive workforce, maintain a safe working environment, advance sustainable operations, and have a positive impact on Warren and surrounding communities.”
The plant has four health and safety representatives who were selected in April to step in to fix issues as they arise or escalate them up the chain of command, according to the UAW. But the big issue is enforcement and that should be easier once workers negotiate a contract and put in place language that shop stewards can enforce on the factory floor. The GM master agreement is a model, which originated in 1973, and created joint health and safety committees within the company’s auto factories. As the UAW white paper notes, “It provides for a hazardous material control committee that has the authority to prevent chemicals from coming into the workplace and, where certain hazardous materials are necessary for production, to plan for their use as safely as possible before they enter the workplace.”
“In a just transition to production of climate-friendly modes of transportation, the best practices for ensuring worker health and safety should be enshrined as a matter of standard corporate (and public) practice in union contracts,” Michael Felsen, who worked as an attorney at the U.S. Department of Labor for nearly four decades and now serves as an advisor for the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, tells In These Times. “We urgently need a rapid transition to safe energy alternatives, but we cannot allow worker health and safety to be sacrificed in the process.”
Workers I spoke with believe managers’ primary objective is to keep production running at all costs. “We run bad material,” says Veltri, referring to the production process the battery cells go through. “They just release the material … to make production.”
Norquist says engineers intervene when quality assurance flags a problem. “The engineer will come over and say, ‘Run it anyways. We don’t care if it’s no good.’”
Savage says he makes about 35,000 meters a day of the mineral-mixed slurry, more than 20 rolls, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Veltri says that when she started she had to make 5,000 packaged battery cells in a 12-hour shift, but that has increased to 14,500 cells.
These packages come in a protective cover in a gray cellophane pouch, making them look like a package of oversized Pop-Tarts. In cell assembly, Veltri works two stacking lines simultaneously, doubling her output.
“It’s very overwhelming, especially to have one alarm going off to change tape. And then the other side has the same issue. And it takes about six or so minutes to change tape,” she says. “So you’re down for almost 12 minutes on one side while you’re trying to do the other one.”
Workers at the plant also raised concerns about a clogged ventilator, but the company left the problem unaddressed, according to Savage and Norquist. In March, several workers say there was some type of an explosion due to dust build-up clogging the ventilation system that set off sprinklers and flooded the factory floor.
In another incident, Gavin Currey, a production maintenance technician, was sprayed in the face by toxic electrolyte liquid solution.
“After I was gassed, for a second, I couldn’t breathe,” Currey told the UAW. “I couldn’t say anything, I couldn’t tell the worker closest to me what had happened. I was groggy, dizzy. I had a hard time standing while we waited for security to arrive.”
Some workers estimate turnover is more than 50% at the plant. “I feel like people are scared,” says Justin Garrity, a worker who I met in the parking lot during shift change. “Honestly, they come down to do a tour to see how it is and then they leave.”
“People go to lunch, they don’t come back,” says Norquist. She adds that it takes two years to learn many of the machines inside and out. But she says workers often don’t stick around long enough to learn.
The prospect of good jobs still draws people to the plant, but apparently not fast enough to keep up with staffing shortages. McCoy says she became one of the senior workers by dint of how many people quit.
Garrity says there are typically only eight people running 10-person lines. “Basically, to sum it up, we are overworked, underpaid, underappreciated, and understaffed,” he says in the company parking lot at 5 a.m. after clambering out of a pick-up truck with a rust mark on the fender shaped like an unknown landmass. He is lanky, with brown wisps of hair plastered to his forehead by a mixture of balmy weather and sweat. He is chatty and alert but also eyeing the entrance, lest he be late for work.
“Management was pretty bad,” says his coworker Dante Butler in reference to the attendance point system the company uses. Workers can be fired after accruing 9 points within a certain timeframe. He says workers accrue points for being tardy, among other things.
Then I met a worker, “Roof,” the street name by which he asked to be called to protect himself from management reprisals.
Roof says his family discouraged him from taking a job at Ultium because there was a fire a month before he started. In the end, he opted to leave his job at Panera Bread to chase the prospect of joining a growing company. “They got different plants opening up. And that means opportunities to transfer maybe to Tennessee, Michigan or within the organization.”
He has a fresh-hire, can-do attitude about the plant — and life. Like other workers when they first started, he speaks of the plant as a technologically advanced and enchanting workplace.
“I don’t know a lot of the ins and outs, but everything I have learned is state of the art,” he says. He adds the hardest part is standing for 12 hours. But he quickly offers a note of optimism: “I like it because then you ain’t got time to spend money on a bunch of crap all day.”
Roof and other workers stream out of the parking lot to go home to their loved ones in one piece as more people arrive to take their spots in the parking lot and then on the factory floor.
“My hope is that when I wake up in the morning, I don’t have to wonder if I’m coming home or not, or if I’m going to be missing a limb, or if my lungs are going to be damaged by the fumes that I’m breathing in,” says Savage. But despite it all, he and other workers are rooting for Ultium to make it.
“I think it’ll do nothing but good for Lordstown and Ohio for Ultium Cells to flourish and be a great company,” he says. “The better it does, the better it’ll do for Ohio.”
One way workers have tried to make their conditions better was to unionize the plant. When a union drive began in June 2022, workers’ main concerns were better wages and safety. In December 2022, they voted to unionize with UAW Local 1112 by a 710-16 margin. Despite the overwhelming support from workers, the company had already refused to voluntarily recognize the union.
But the UAW recently won a partial victory when worker organizing and public pressure helped force Ultium to raise wages.
On August 27, Ultium workers reached an interim agreement with the company, voting 895 to 22 in favor to ratify it. The agreement immediately boosted wages by $3 to $4 an hour, bringing most starting pay from $16.50 an hour to $20, and rising to $21 an hour after six months or 1,000 hours. The interim agreement also gives workers a big wage bump retroactive to December 2022 — between $3,000 to $7,000, based on hours worked.
Many workers at the plant welcomed the news of the agreement, but they also are demanding more. “It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s going to take more than this to fix the relationship between employees and the company with how we’ve been mistreated,” says Savage.
“It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s going to take more than this to fix the relationship between employees and the company with how we’ve been mistreated,” says Savage.
“We would of course wanted it to be more, but a lot of us have been through a lot over the months,” says Norquist. “I think it will take a lot of stress off of us workers, but most of us don’t think it is a great long-term number to be at.”
At the same time, the union and workers are speaking in a unified voice to temper any cheerleading of the wage boost. “We aren’t done fighting for standard-setting wages and benefits at Ultium and beyond,” Fain said in a statement.
“Our members are going to receive well-deserved financial relief from the poverty wages they were making,” Green, UAW’s Region 2B director and a former Lordstown GM worker, told The Vindicator, a newspaper serving Youngstown and nearby areas. “But the struggle is real. We know this and the fight’s not going to be over until these workers are brought up to traditional autoworker standards.”
Overall, the union remains steadfast in its demand that the transition to EV create good jobs and mirror the strong safety standards of the existing Big Three contracts.
“In a just transition to EVs, jobs in the battery plants that will power this transition must be as good or better than current jobs building internal combustion engine vehicles and components,” the “High Risk & Low Pay” white paper reads.
Some experts speculate that the transition to EV could cause massive job losses. The Economic Policy Institute put out a report in September 2021 estimating that it could cost roughly 75,000 U.S. auto industry jobs by 2030, but could also create 150,000 if subsidies were provided to spur domestic production. Other industry studies have found that EVs come with fewer moving parts and require 30% to 40% less labor to produce than internal-combustion vehicles. Still, other studies say the EV transition will require more labor, not less.
“In a just transition to EVs, jobs in the battery plants that will power this transition must be as good or better than current jobs building internal combustion engine vehicles and components,” the “High Risk & Low Pay” white paper reads.
It may still be too early to arrive at a definitive answer. “While internal combustion engine and EV vehicles require similar amounts of labor to produce according to some analyses, their content differs substantially,” reads a June 2021 White House report titled “Building Resilient Supply Chains, Revitalizing American Manufacturing, and Fostering Broad-Based Growth.”
“The biggest lever is going to be the way we design the vehicle for radical simplification of the labor content,” Ford Motor Company President and CEO Jim Farley said in a June 2022 fireside chat. “Half the fixtures, half the workstations, half the welds, 20% less fasteners. We design it because it’s such a simple product, to radically change the manufacturability, take the content out and labor, and optimize the engineering.”
Ultium, a company that will mass produce battery cells for electric vehicles, is under construction in Lordstown, Ohio, on October 16, 2020. Photo by MEGAN JELINGER/AFP via Getty Images That is the specter looming over the Big Three contract negotiations: the future of the next generation of autoworkers and auto manufacturing in the country. UAW leadership has called for a softer EV target that “increases stringency more gradually, and occurs over a greater period of time,” and says that Biden’s 2030 target would “risk disrupting the market that will make the EV transition possible.” SUVs and trucks are the Big Three’s most profitable vehicles.
The UAW’s “total asked-for package is likely too expensive to win all at once, but why ask for the minimum?” says Cornell’s Wheaton.
“The big question everyone’s going to ask is: How much is this gonna cost?” Fain said on the August 1 Facebook Live talk, channeling members’ anger at the soaring profits that the automakers have raked in, amounting to $250 billion over the past 10 years. “But if this awful pandemic taught us anything it’s that there’s more to life than just work. It’s not enough to just survive — we should all have a right to thrive. I believe all of us have a right to look back on our life and not regret spending so much of our time making hundreds of billions of dollars for greedy companies rather than spending time with our family and friends.”
McCoy was one of thousands of UAW members tuning into these popular Facebook talks and one line from Fain’s remarks has stayed with her: “A newly hired Ultium worker would have to work full-time for 16 years to earn what Mary Barra makes in a single week.”
Savage acknowledges the challenges ahead but is optimistic about what the union can do — mainly because without workers, the transition can’t happen.
“They’re trying to say we can’t fall under the GM master contract,” says Savage. “But if we don’t make batteries, these vehicles that they’re making in Michigan don’t move. They don’t go anywhere. So I’m hopeful for the future for the UAW that we have going on right now. We have a lot of strong people, and they’re fighting for us.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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The recent surge in labor militancy has brought fresh focus to the workers’ struggle in media—but is labor’s big moment a passing fad in the content cycle, or can it be sustained? The answer lies in the capacity for labor journalism and media to rise to the occasion. What’s it really like being a labor reporter? What does it take to be a good one? What are the common misconceptions about unions and the labor struggle that reporters have to be cognizant of? TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez moderates “No Such Thing as a Union Boss: and other things the media gets wrong about labor”, a panel discussion with Sarah Jaffe, Kim Kelly, and Braden Campbell co-hosted by the Freelance Solidarity Project of the National Writers Union, Writers Guild of America East, and The NewsGuild.
Recording: Freelance Solidarity Project
Post-production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Abigail Higgins:
Welcome everyone to No Such Thing as a Union Boss, and other things the media gets wrong about labor, a panel about labor journalism, the media workers who do it and how we can all do it better. My name is Abigail Higgins and I’m a freelance journalist in Washington DC and I am the co-chair of the Freelance Solidarity Project, the Digital Media Division of the National Writers Union. We’re a union fighting to end the exploitation of freelance media workers and helping to build a world where all workers can thrive. If you’re a freelance editor, photographer, writer, podcaster, fact-checker, or anyone else who makes modern media happen, get in touch, we would love to organize with you. Along with the National Writers Union, this panel is co-hosted by the Writers Guild of America, East, a labor union representing thousands of writers and media professionals who create what is seen, heard, and read across television, films, radio, in the internet, from big budget movies and independent films to television podcasts and digital first media platforms.
It’s also co-hosted by The NewsGuild, a labor union representing print and digital journalists, including reporters, columnists, copy editors, photojournalists, videographers, and others across the US, Canada, and Puerto Rico. The NewsGuild also represents workers and advertising circulation, business offices, as well as other communications employees. We also want to thank our comrades at Labor Notes for lending us their Zoom capacities and helping us plan this panel. If you’re a media worker who is not already in a union, get in touch with any of the organizations above, we would love to start organizing with you.
With that out of the way, I am thrilled to introduce our three brilliant panelists. Sarah Jaffe is an independent journalist covering labor and social movements and is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back and Necessary Trouble. She is currently working on her third book and is a member of the Freelance Solidarity Project at the National Writers Union.
Kim Kelly is a Philadelphia-based independent journalist and the author of Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor. She is a regular labor columnist for Teen Vogue, and her writing has appeared in The Nation, Rolling Stone, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She’s also worked as a video correspondent for More Perfect Union, the Real News Network and Memes TV. She was a founding member of the Vice Union and is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalist Union, as well as a member and elected councilperson for the Writer’s Guild of America East. She’s currently at work on her second book.
Braden Campbell is an editor at large on the labor team at Law360, covering labor law and policy and all things NLRB. He is a steward in the Law360 union and a member of the bargaining committee in negotiations for the union second contract.
Our moderator today will be Maximilian Alvarez, the Editor-in-Chief of the Real News Network in Baltimore, and the host of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and the 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.
Maximilian, before we dig into the panelist’s perspective on this topic, I would love for you to kick things off by telling us a little bit about how you think about your own work as a labor journalist and the media’s role in covering the struggles and stories of working people.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, thank you so much Abby. And thank you so much to our incredible hosting organizations for putting this really important and necessary event on. Thank you to the National Writers Union, The NewsGuild, the Writers Guild of America, East, Freelance Solidarity Project, Labor Notes, everyone who’s helped make this event a reality. We so appreciate your hard work. And of course, thank you to all of you who are tuning in to watch and really, really want to thank our incredible panelists, Sarah, Kim and Braden, three remarkable journalists whose work I deeply admire as I know all of you do as well. So I’m super, super excited to dig into the questions that y’all submitted for this panel. Super excited to learn as much as we can from our incredible panelists. So I’ll keep my introduction here, short and sweet.
As Abby mentioned, my name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’m the Editor-in-Chief here at the Real News Network in Baltimore. I’m calling in from our main recording space where you can catch great productions that we put out every week, including The Chris Hedges Report, the Police Accountability Report, Rattling The Bars, labor reporting from me, and much, much more.
I’m really honored to be moderating this panel. It speaks very deeply to issues that I’m deeply concerned with and that are deeply wrapped up with my own path to doing the work that I do now. When I was thinking about this event and meditating on the question of why labor reporting and good labor reporting is so necessary for working people to feel like they have a stake in the future of this country, of their jobs, of their communities, that they have it within themselves to be the agents of change in the world, I couldn’t help but go back to a memory that seared onto my brain from around 2010, 2011 when I was working as a temp in warehouses and factories in Southern California for 12, 13, 14 hours a day. We as a family were in the midst of losing everything, including eventually the house that I grew up in.
And I remember distinctly coming home from work just bone weary, tired, flopping down on the couch because I didn’t really have energy to do much else. And watching the news that we had on all the time, it was just this background noise in the house, because we didn’t want to sit and stew in the silence and feel our own failure senses of shame, but when I would watch the news, I would feel shame nonetheless because I was constantly being told by pundits and politicians that the economy was back, that the recovery was happening, and all of these narratives were being spun as if people in Washington, people on Wall Street, people above our heads were the ones making the decisions, and the rest of us were just there to experience whatever they gave to us.
And that really, really made me feel alienated from the society that I was in. It made me feel like whatever recovery they were talking about didn’t include families like ours, and whatever solutions they were coming up with also didn’t include us as part of that solution. It was really just pitched as a technocratic adjustment to a world historical market crash that we were suffering the effects of, but that we were not being asked to participate in the recovery from. And I think that 10 years, 11, 12 years later, I just think about how different the world and the country looks to me when I follow the work of the incredible journalists on this panel as well as so many other incredible labor journalists out there, writing for outlets like Labor Notes in these times, independent outlets, the Real News, so on and so forth.
You get a very different sense of what’s going on in the country and who’s involved in the making of change when you actually report on worker struggles and when you report on them consistently and humanely, and you lift up the voices of people on the front lines of those struggles, which is what we try to do here at The Real News every week, whether we’re talking about labor or the fight against the military industrial complex, the police and prison industrial complexes, so on and so forth. And I think that that’s one of the many, many things that makes the reporting that Braden, Sarah, and Kim do, so vital for all of us. Is that they are out there every week lifting up these voices, paying attention to these struggles, giving people the nuance and context and firsthand commentary that they desperately need to understand that these struggles are happening, why they’re important, and what our role all of us is in advancing these struggles and being part of the struggle for better workplaces and ultimately a better world.
And so without further ado, let’s bring in our incredible panel and learn more from them and talk to them about the process of doing that work. And I’ve tried to incorporate as many of the questions that folks submitted into the panel discussion today, so we’re going to try to get to as many of them as we can. We got an hour down to the minute from now, so let’s get rolling.
So panel, with our first question, we’ve got a lot of folks watching this stream right now who are asking them themselves many of the same questions that you are going to respond to today. And many folks watching right now who are trying to find their own place in this changing media labor environment. And speaking for myself, I know that a lot of my own difficulties navigating this stuff early in my career stemmed from my own misconceptions about the industry itself and the working lives of the journalists that I looked up to. These are misconceptions that I develop largely by being an uninformed internet lurker, only really observing things from the outside, projecting all kinds of assumptions, expectations, and insecurities onto these seemingly larger than life figures with blue check marks next to their Twitter handles. This was before the days of Elon Musk taking over Twitter.
So I want to start there because I think before we can talk about how to improve and expand labor journalism, we need to demystify things a little bit and ground all of us here in a shared understanding of what this work actually is and to many readers, followers, and fellow journalists who know you three through your work, you all have that larger than life quality to some extent. So this is the icebreaker I wanted to start with. In your experience, what do people think labor journalism in general and your lives as labor journalists actually entails, and what do you most wish people understood about you, the work that you do and the industry that we’re doing this work in? So who wants to volunteer to go first?
Braden Campbell:
I guess I can start. I guess I’ll just briefly describe my work. So I’m at Law360, which is a more niche publication than either than Sarah and Kim routinely work for, but I cover the law and courts for an audience primarily of lawyers, and my specific area is labor, and so that means a lot of reading court briefs and a lot of talking to lawyers and folks involved with the labor movement as well. I think the image I have of the labor reporter is definitely a person embedded out on the strike line and in the union halls and which frankly is my image of Sarah and Kim, I guess, and not so much matching the work I do. But yeah, I mean, I think, the question being, [inaudible 00:12:10] people most understood? Yeah, it’s tough. I mean, I guess just understand what goes in. I mean, I think you all work here, know what goes into a story, but a layperson, just as knowing the process of how a story is made and identifying sources and good sources and building up those sources I think is something that I wish… And I think generally this audience is going to know a lot more about that, but for a general audience think a better understanding of how the journalism sausage is made is helpful. But I think it’ll leave it at that, I guess.
Kim Kelly:
I think the biggest misconception I can come up against is that I have a job, I don’t. I mad freelance. I’m lucky enough to do columns, regular columns at a couple places, but every piece that I publish, I had to hunter gather that shit. I think as Braden was saying, there’s just a widespread, outside of our little bubble, a widespread lack of understanding on what journalism is, what media is, how it happens, what’s going on. The biggest recent piece I’ve had come out was this investigation into the resurgence of black lung in Central Appalachia among younger coal miners. And the primary subject, John Moore, the person that I profiled in the piece, he was really reticent to talk to me at first because he heard, okay, a journalist is here, supposed to talk to, and he was like, “Oh man, my entire family doesn’t know my diagnosis yet. I’m not sure about that.” Because he thought I was going to show up with a camera and put him on the evening news. And I was like, “No, I’m just going to put my phone in your face and you can tell me whatever you want to tell me. And whatever you’re comfortable with, I am on your side. I’m here for you. This is your story.”
I think, and maybe not every single journalist approaches it that way, which we can talk about later, but I think the fact that people and workers and vulnerable people, they’re everything, they’re where the stories come from, what the stores are about, and they are in control or should be in control of how their stories are told. That’s not necessarily an experience that everyone has when they engage with the media. Not everyone sees it like that. And I think that’s something unique about labor journalism, about good labor journalism is that you know what side you’re on, you know how the story you’re telling might impact people, real people, and you use that as a means to guide the way you approach the story. Also, people seem to think that journalists make money, which is very funny, because I maybe if you’re like, one of the fancy neo-fascist mainstream publications, but we’re not out here like that.
Sarah Jaffe:
Yeah, what everybody said there, I think it’s really funny still the idea that journalists are celebrities and we’re trapped in this terrible media ecosystem, especially as freelancers. Where you have to constantly hustle and promote yourself and scramble and hunter gather that shit, I’m stealing that one, Kim. That’s a great line. And so we have to simultaneously give the idea that we’re doing great and super successful and also that we need work at all times. And that living in that space is really weird, and it’s frankly not good for journalism to be that insecure constantly, but to have this projection onto you that you are doing great and that you’re not on the same level as the people you write about.
I write about working people. That means a lot of the people I write about make more money than I do. A union auto worker makes more than I do, by a good bit. And is a hell of a lot more secure and has much better health insurance than I do.
But the real thing that I think I want people to take away about labor journalism, particularly when I’m talking to an audience of journalists, is that this shit is hard. It’s not just talking to workers and absorbing their stories and carrying sometimes really difficult stories around with you, although it is that, and it’s not just memorizing 50 states different labor laws, although it is that. It’s fighting for respect in an industry that decided about 40 years ago that labor journalism didn’t matter anymore. And so constantly watching publications hire people to be their new labor correspondent who you’ve never heard of.
I had a New York Times reporter who her story was, I wasn’t going to do this, anyway, ask me after interviewing me for a story if I could give her tips on how to do the job. And I was just like, “Well, you have a job at the New York Times and I’m freelance, so it’s really not my job to teach you how to do your job. If you weren’t qualified for it. And I am, maybe they should have hired me in the first place.”
The idea that labor journalism can be done very quickly and easily by anybody without a lot of practice or learning, but also that it’s somehow glamorous and rarefied. It’s a beat any other journalism beat. It requires specialized knowledge building sources and a lot of hard, frustrating work, like most of the people we cover.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. Well, and that’s one of the reasons I really wanted to start there because thank you all for those really candid and essential answers. But still, even though we can apply that perspective to the stories we’re reporting on, it’s very hard to do the same to the industry that we’re working in. And we still get so much of that rarefied celebrity worship, putting people on pedestals and associating visibility with financial success or personal success. And I just wanted to communicate to all the folks out there watching folks, freelancing folks just getting started in this world to just pump the brakes and don’t allow yourself to get swept into that high school-ish race for clout. And just approach everything with a humility and try to approach folks in this world as fellow human beings. Because I think that’s one of the undersides that a lot of people don’t see, and it can trickle out even to your personal relationship.
So the one thing I just wanted to add is, even friends and family will associate your public visibility with your ongoing success. They make assumptions about what your daily life looks like and they stop reaching out to you as much. And I’ve had a lot of families say, “Oh, well, we didn’t want to bother you.” And it’s like, well, I still miss my family. I still miss my friends, or I still like to talk to people about stuff that isn’t work. But you can become isolated when people associate that visibility with many other things. So I just wanted us to be real and frank there in the beginning that we’re all hustling as best we can in an industry that has not made it easy for any of us to do this work and do it in a sustained way.
You got some of the most incredible premier labor journalists in the country here who still have to hustle day in, day out to keep roofs over their heads, let alone get those stories published, so on and so forth. So thank you all for those answers.
I want to move into the title question for the description of this event. I know that we’re all dying to hear you three answer that question, which was written in the description of this event, and I quote, “Movie and television writers are sticking to their pickets. The Screen Actors Guild voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike, and a strike may be on the horizon for more than 350,000 UPS workers, the largest potential work stoppage in US history.” So why is so much media coverage of strikes still so bad?
Sarah Jaffe:
I mean, the short version is that newspapers, magazines and the like don’t actually hire people who are actually beat reporters and they slap people on the story when something exciting happens. So the Amazon Labor Union wins an election and suddenly everybody’s a labor journalist, but then two weeks later they’re not doing that, they’re not following up, they’re not still on that beat. The New York Times bought out Steve Greenhouse and replaced him with somebody with much less experience on the beat. That’s just the reality of the structure of the thing. And so people just don’t know basic stuff, and their boss has told them that they don’t have to know basic stuff in order to do the job.
Kim Kelly:
And then Sarah is, I mean, she’s the expert on this. She’s been around longer than us. And has seen this shit over and over again. And it makes me so mad, I think there’s just less value placed on working people’s stories on working class and poor people’s stories. And that filters into the way that editors look at the work that we do and that other people are doing to do labor reporting. Like, oh, anybody can write about that. And that’s why we hear every other week that the AFL-CIO is a union, the most basic shit. And it’s insulting, to us, to people that pour in our time and knowledge and put everything into this to sit around and watch as major news publications that have a huge reach, that impact lots of people, that have a massive voice, that have massive potential to be helpful, they just assign away stories to people that don’t care that much or don’t know as much because they figure, well, this stuff isn’t that hard. That’s not complicated. Oh, somebody’s mad at their boss. Oh, that’s an easy story. There’s probably no context. I think there’s probably more than a little bit of classism and various other isms invested in the way that this is approached.
I mean, New York Times isn’t going to hire someone like me, even if I might know more about a certain subject, they’re going to hire some guy named Jeff who went to an Ivy League. That’s how the system is set up. Think I have a lot of simmering class rage about this in general, but I think that is the biggest crux of the matter. They don’t think these stores are worth investing in. And as a result, everybody else suffers, or at least served lower quality journalism, or has their stories twisted or has their dirty laundry aired in a way that is harmful to the movement and not helpful to anybody. You have to give a shit, and if you don’t give a shit, we can tell.
Braden Campbell:
Yeah, and I think I’ll add to all that. I think another big piece of it is just union stature in our society today. I mean, I think the better you know a subject better, your coverage is going to be. And unions are just so diminished as an institution. Everybody’s got a nurse or a teacher in the family who’s a union member, but so few people in this work have been involved in the unions themselves. I think I’m fortunate that when I came to Law360 in 2016, right around the same time our organizing campaign was happening, I got this job at the same time and became involved in that. So I saw our union drive happen. They brought in the anti-union consultants, we had our two-year-long contract campaign. We’re now in the midst of our second contract negotiation. I’m on the committee, and I think it’s hard to substitute that experience with the institution to understand this area.
And yeah, there’s so little of that. I think it is really cool to see there’s been a resurgence of attention here in, and there are a lot of people who are non-experts parachuted in, but there have been an uptick in people who are staff or beat writers really like drilling in. I think you’ve seen some improvements to the coverage the last few years when there’s been more of that. And I think just hopefully this attention continues and these people who are new on the beat can continue building that experience and expertise. Because yeah, there’s really no substitute for doing it and seeing it as far as learning, so.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I think one other point that was implied in a lot of what y’all said is that when labor stories do make it into a more mainstream publication with a wide reach, all the standard problems that we have with a lot of those publications still apply. So the story of struggle for people struggling to afford to keep a roof over their heads, or to have proper PPE when they’re risking their lives and their family’s lives by going into a COVID hotspot to work, or people who are trying to exercise their democratic to organize in the workplace, that gets sucked into the same both sides belief that to have credibility, the reporter needs to just lay out the issue, talk to the boss, talk to a union rep. There you go. That’s an even-handed reporting report on this struggle.
But I think that like Kim said, we can tell if you don’t give a shit, because I think that what’s really starting to emerge out of this resurgence of interest in labor reporting is people who are less afraid to acknowledge that we take as a first principle that workers deserve better than what they’re currently getting. And we take as first principle that it is our right to organize in the workplace and people who are violating those rights are in the wrong. We don’t have to pretend otherwise in our reporting. We can still apply the tools of rigorous, honest, principled journalism to a cause that we believe in because we believe on that first principle level that working people have a right to better than what they’re currently getting.
We’re going to dig into maybe some specific examples in a second, but I wanted to follow up on that question with one that was submitted in a number of forms, number of variations on the same question in the RSVPs, that I think is really important to hover on. Not many publications as y’all have acknowledged, invest in labor journalism, which means that it’s often done by freelancers and staffers at smaller publications. How did the precarious working conditions of labor journalists that we mentioned in the beginning, how did those impact coverage of strikes and unions and other stories involving workers struggle? And I guess conversely, how does being a union member or having experience organizing impact the way that you think about and report on labor?
Sarah Jaffe:
When I started trying to be a labor reporter, there were even fewer people doing it than there are now, and it was a constant struggle to convince even the kinds of places that now regularly run pretty good labor coverage that it mattered. And what has happened in that time is I started trying to do this stuff full-time in 2009, and then since then there have been big exciting labor events that made publications go, “Oh, who do we get that knows about this shit?” Basically. “Call Sarah, she knows what a union is, right?” And that is how I managed to get somewhere. And through that time, I had a few full-time jobs at that point in time that I no longer have, and next year will be my 10-year anniversary of being full-time freelance. And it is really hard because the thing that I finally realized after 10 years of being freelance is that what I can do best with these working conditions is feature stories, that actually maybe pays me enough to eat and it has a long enough planning period that I can work on something, I can pitch it to an editor, work on it with that editor, whatever, in that frame. I mean, that and writing books.
Because trying to do a news story as a freelancer is basically impossible unless somebody commissions you to do it. I’ve had somebody like The Nation sent me to LA to do the teacher strike in 2019, but most of the time if you’re trying to pitch a news story and it’s breaking news and you’re freelance, you’re calling editors, you’re waiting for them to get back to you, they’re on their own schedule, they maybe don’t realize that the thing is as important as you do because it’s your beat and that’s why you’re the expert in it, and it has disastrous effects sometimes for the story.
So one of the things though that has been really, really, really helpful in addition to just labor becoming more of a prominent force in American politics, again, is also that reporters have been unionizing and reporters have been unionizing at publications that are not necessarily the ones that are commissioning labor stories. So when bustle unionize, suddenly you’ve got a whole bunch of people who work at mostly pop culture site targeting young women who know what right to work means because their boss tried to stick it in the contract.
And that level of basic knowledge through experience has actually changed some of the conditions that we work under, not only under people knowing what stories have value and understanding more when I say this is important because of X, but also that they’re more willing and more able as unionized employees to fight for the rights of freelancers too. Then the organizing that’s been going on among freelancers to set our own standards, it’s changed the structure of the thing and also I think had a really positive impact on the reporting. So that’s a really good feedback loop. So if anybody on here is a reporter and not yet unionized, we’d love to talk to you about that.
Kim Kelly:
Sarah is so, I’m so glad that Sarah brought that up. I mean, that wave that kicked off in 2015, 2016 with Writer’s Guild of America, East, my union, and The NewsGuild started organizing the hell out of digital media. I was part of that wave when I was at Vice. That’s how I ended up here. That’s how I ended up here. I was a heavy metal editor forever and ever, which is why I look like this. And being involved in organizing, learning firsthand what it was like to organize and bargain and go to the bureau hall and argue over minutia in a contract and make friends with labor lawyers, just everything that comes with it that a lot of you folks know about now because you’ve been through the same process and you’ve probably also gotten laid off and gone to new publications and talked to your friends there about unionizing.
It’s like I think of it blowing like dandelion seeds, right? We get laid off all the fucking time, and then we land at new publications and we start organizing there, or we’re freelance and we start organizing in that capacity. They keep trying to chop us off at the head, but we still have those roots. And I think that is great, but in terms of the way that being freelance and the general precarity that comes with doing this work the way that we do it, I think one thing that makes me sad is that the lack of funding and support means that so many stories don’t get told because good journalism costs money, let alone paying someone a living wage to do the work, you have to often go somewhere and talk to people and stick around for a little while. You can just walk up to the picket line, talk to three people, write a quick blog and be done with it, they’re not going to get anything good.
Because my most potent experience with all that, which Max knows a lot about because he helps facilitate me, enable me, some might say, is spending the two years reporting on one strike in Alabama, a coal miner strike, it’s still like an ellipsis instead of a period, but in order to go down there, that was a story that most editors didn’t really care about because it was complicated. The characters weren’t necessarily as sympathetic as other characters could have been, but it was important. And so I pitched so many different angles, so many different places. I got little reporting grants. I worked with publications like The Real News that will actually give you a little bit of money to report on things, you should really pitch to them. I did everything I could to continue covering this story, and if I had been a staff writer, that could have been a beautiful sprawling magazine piece, one piece that I’ve spent six months on, and instead, I just hustled my ass off and I did what I could do.
And I think a lot of us are in that position where a lot of the work we do could be a beautiful cover story or a documentary or just a really good feature, but who has the time? Who has the money? What editor’s going to give you license to do that with something? It’s rare and it’s precious, and it shouldn’t be that rare. When you’re freelance, it’s so much harder to just get your claws into those resources. Because oh, if someone on staff, just send them instead they’re already on salary. It’s just the value proposition or whatever, the calculus they’re making, is the story worth it? Is this person worth it? I think that hurts us and that hurts the movement and the coverage we’re able to generate because people don’t spending money on things in general, especially not workers and especially not precarious workers. So that’s something that sticks with me a lot. I think I answered most of the question. I think this is Braden’s time now.
Braden Campbell:
Sure. I can take this one. Yeah, I think you guys did a great job discussing the precarity and being a freelance reporter on this one. I’m staff. I’m not enough of a hustler too, as you said, Kim, hunter gather that shit. So I’m hanging on the staff here, so I can’t speak to that world. But I guess in terms of the question of how does being a union member impact the way I think about and report on labor, I mean, again, I think it’s that opportunity to really have the experience and have gone through all these things myself that I also report on, which, it’s hard to, you can’t really overstate how beneficial that is, but I think one of the things that enables to do is even more so the understanding is I can speak to sources from a place of having done the things they’re going through in whether that’s workers themselves or union reps and officials or lawyers who I talk to routinely talking through these things I’ve done.
I can mention I’ve done that. It’s really helpful to establish that familiarity. But yeah, I think have any other aspects of how does being a union member impact the way I think, I mean think just really understanding labor and unions as institutions made up of workers, not some vague monolithic institution, but a bunch of people coming together to work towards their idea and work it out. And that understanding I think has been something I’ve gotten from being a member myself and seeing it happen.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. So I really, really appreciate all those answers because I think they give important tangible examples of the effects that the political economy of this industry such that it is directly impacts us and directly impacts the reporting that we do. And I know that folks watching and listening, y’all have felt this yourselves to many extents. And I would just say that it was very eyeopening to me coming to The Real News Network and getting to have a permanent staff position as now the editor-in-chief. And getting to see the labor reporting world from that side and just realize how much power other editors at other publications have to influence these kinds of things that they don’t fucking use, pardon my French, which drives me nuts.
So even just having this position instead of being a freelancer meant first and foremost, I have more power now to say, we’re going to keep following up on this story. We’re going to keep sending Kim down to Brookwood, Alabama because it’s important. And also it’s not just a one-off thing, even after the initial headlines about the strike fade into the collective memory hole, those folks are still on strike. They’re still there. They’re still holding the line, they’re still figuring out how they’re going to buy their kids Christmas presents come winner. They’re still trying to negotiate a fair contract. And so it’s important to keep that story in the collective memory. And I really want to give a shout-out to Kim, who’s as a freelancer, did more than any single journalist alive to lift up the Warrior Met Coal Strike over the past two years, and I saw how hard she worked on that, and I’m very grateful to her for that. And I know how hard all you freelancers work, and I’ve done it myself, and it would be great if we had more institutional support because we can do more and better and more extensive coverage. So even just doing those followups is really important.
The other thing I would say is that getting to be on this side of things, I remember very well how many times I got dicked over by publications with my payment. That impacts your reporting. If you have to wait until a publication publishes the damn thing before it starts processing your payment, then you’re going to put a premium on getting the story out, even if there are questions that you want to investigate more, even if there are more people you want to talk to, you’re going to become victim to that same news cycle. And the stories may inevitably suffer from that. And so I think that other publications do have the ability to at least get folks some of their money upfront or when a draft is submitted and approved, give people the ability to keep drilling down on this story and get it to where they want to be without worrying about how they’re going to pay rent. I think that’s one thing that other publications can do.
And last thing just to highlight what folks said is that union journalism is better journalism. I can say The Real News is a proud union shop, and it benefits just like you see the union logo on all the products, the Kellogg’s products that the union members make here in the states, they put it on there because proud of it. They want you to know that this has been made with the high level of union craftsmanship that you come to expect. The same applies to journalism. I can’t submit a labor story to my union staff and they’re going to call me on it if we’re not practicing our principles here at the Real News, or they’re going to be looking at the story from that angle and it makes the story better. And so I think that that’s a really, really important facet to all of this.
Oh, okay. Sorry, I thought my internet crapped out. I had an existential nightmare. Okay, next question. So we’re still here.
So I want to drill down on some examples here, stuff that folks watching and listening can learn from and adopt in their own reporting. I wanted to ask if we could go back around the table and talk about some general tropes or pitfalls, just some examples of bad labor reporting and the consequences of bad labor reporting that stick out in your heads, and what should the opposite look like? What are examples maybe in your own work that you feel is pushing against those bad trends that you see in other corners of the media ecosphere? And get as wonky about your own reporting as you’d like.
Braden Campbell:
Sure. I guess I can lead this one-off. We’re have a relative rotation here. I guess I can take that invitation to get wonky and talk about the NLRB a little bit, which is like the bread and butter, what I cover. And Amazon and Starbucks and all these other big campaigns going on, they have run into the NLRB a lot. And a lot of the coverage gets the broad strokes, but misses some of the finer points at times. For example, I think the NLRB itself, it’s agency with two sides. You have the general counsel who acts as the prosecutor and investigates and bring cases, and then the board, which is the entity that actually decides cases, and a lot of people conflate the action of the general counsel as the prosecutor with the board as deciding things.
And you see these litigation against Amazon and Starbucks, and there actually hasn’t been a decision by the board really, at least regarding those campaigns. It’s all been things about the prosecutors and judges and preliminary stuff. And then I think another piece is putting in perspective where these legal milestones fit in the bigger picture. I think as long as both the Starbucks and Amazon and all these other public campaigns have been going on for two, three years now, as long as they would seem to be on, they’re still in their infancy as far as the legal aspects go. And so there’s going to be a judge’s decision, there’s going to be the board’s going to rule, and then it’s only going to go to an appeals court, and it’s only after an appeals court rules on a case that it’s a final thing and has impact.
And then I think one thing I’d say on that point is these steps should be framed as preliminary rather than the end of themselves when the board or a judge rules or even a prosecutor brings a case viewing the long picture. And then when it comes to actually negotiating a contract, and this is something that I think a lot of the coverage gets well, but what the NLRB says and does, the NLRB calls balls and strikes, but organizing, negotiating contracts, that happens in the actual workplace. So don’t overstate the importance of the structure to that, but as well as keeping it in perspective that again, this is a long-term thing and it’s one thing for Starbucks and Amazon, those are the big examples going on. It’s one thing for them to form a union. That’s a big achievement in itself, but that’s so far from getting to a contract, which is really what is the focal point of organizing. That’s what confers the benefits. And I think keeping that whole thing in perspective, these individual events and where they fit in the broader picture, I think is really important to good reporting, contextualizing that. So I’ll give it to the other panelists now.
Kim Kelly:
I want to hear what Sarah has to say first because I know Sarah has a lot to say.
Sarah Jaffe:
Whatever do you mean? Yeah, I was just writing in my notebook. I’ve been threatening a lot lately to get tell no lies, claim no easy victories tattooed across my chest, and I’m probably not actually going to do that. But I think about it a lot because I think one of the things that’s happened a lot lately is I find myself, and I’m biting one of the questions that we may not get to that I know is on the list, rather than being an excited cheerleader for everything, I’m often the one who’s trying to tell people to slow their roll a little bit, because now things are really exciting. And as Braden was just saying, people win an NLRB election, which is stunning achievement on its own considering how stacked that process is against workers right now. And then it’s like, woo, woohoo, everything’s done now. This is great. This is amazing. And everything’s going to be magical and ponies now, right? No, no, it’s not. No, it’s really not. There’s a whole bunch of other hell that you’re going to go through over the next two to three years. The average union contract takes around two years to achieve.
So details like that, just the sense of the thing born from watching it happen a lot. The context that these things fit into in the historical space that they’re in, we’re in an interesting place in political history now. I’m sitting here and I’m talking to you from London, and in the US and in England, we both had these left-wing moonshots with Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. These people who come out of nowhere and are talking about, I mean, not out of nowhere, they’ve both been in parliament and Congress for a very long time, but suddenly they’re national figures and they’re running to possibly leave the country and they’re talking about class and oh my God, this is really exciting. And we’ve got a lot of people who are excited about the idea of class, and therefore they’re excited about the idea of unions. But it’s not the reality of unions, and it’s not the already existing things that are both actually existing collections of collectives of working people working together, and also bureaucratic structures that have long histories, finances, property, ownership over all sorts of things, corruption, scandals, leadership fights, all of this stuff going on in there.
And so there’s a lot of woohoo out there that I am as excited as anybody in the world when there is a new union win in a field that hasn’t been there, but I want to tell people we need to get to the 100th Amazon warehouse, not the first. We are at the 200 and something Starbucks, which is great, but none of them have a contract yet. So I find myself a lot of the time saying, okay guys, but we have to have some understanding of the real context that we’re fighting in, which is still stacked against us, even though in a lot of ways it looks brighter than it ever has in my lifetime, and I’m 43 years old.
Kim Kelly:
I really should never follow Sarah in anything, but I will just say, obviously everything they said is their right. Something that I suppose personally sticks in my [inaudible 00:49:06]. I alluded to it earlier, and there’s a recent piece that I’m sure a bunch of people read, and I’m sure there’s more tempered criticisms we made, but I don’t like seeing dirty laundry aired just because some unflattering things or uninspiring things about a union leader or a union campaign. I think it is important to sit with that for a minute and think, okay, I have this information. What good will it do if I put it out in the world? Will this harm the movement? Will this harm this person’s credibility? What impact will this have? And is it worth it?
And obviously, yeah, if someone’s being awful, that should be called out. But when it comes to internal union politics and internal union machinations, some of it, I don’t know, man. Some of it isn’t necessarily the rest of the world’s business if they don’t understand the context or what is happening or how everything fits together.
I’ve been on a lot of picket lines, I’ve talked to a lot of workers. I’ve reported on a lot of strikes and conflicts, and not everyone is a little angel all the time. I’ve seen some things. I know some things. Is it helpful to put those things out in the world? No. Am I taking some stuff to my grave? Yeah. If I had reported it at the time, would that have helped anybody but the boss? No. And I mean, those are some of the calculations I make. I’m being a little vague. And thankfully I’m like a reported op-ed kind of gal, so I don’t have to pretend to be objective. But that is something that always sticks out to me when I see big labor stores that seem mean or dismissive or classes or racist or homophobic. Just think about what you’re trying to do and who it’s for and who it helps and who it hurts the most. That is just a little piece of advice I put out there for my other extremely biased reporters.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we got a little time left, and I want to keep this conversation going. As Sarah mentioned, this does bleed over into the next question, which was, what folks who are RSVP’d really wanted some advice on. And I think y’all have started to give exceedingly helpful advice in this regard. And yeah, I think we can’t be naive. Not that anyone here is being that, but I mean, I’m addressing this to everyone watching and listening. We can’t be naive in thinking that what we write, what we publish, what we put out there in the world, as Kim was saying, doesn’t have an impact on the story that we’re reporting on. I think that we all understand that to some extent, there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that role.
And I think that, as Sarah said, I also see a lot of the progressive energy that really rose up through and expressed itself through the Bernie Sanders campaign, the Jeremy Corbyn campaigns, and when those political movements were more or less crushed, the hope that I think a lot of us had for that progressive change got dumped into things like the labor movement. And I think you’ve seen a lot of great results coming from that. A lot of rank and file energy, a lot of younger folks getting involved, public favorability for unions higher than ever, great. Like we said, that’s all well and good. But I think if people don’t have, as our panel here is saying, a realistic understanding of what this world looks like, what its issues are, what the realities of labor law are, the realities of an organizing campaign. They can have very inflated expectations of what the labor struggle looks like, and then they’re going to quickly recede or come to quick unfair conclusions about that movement, if they don’t see what they want to see from it.
As everyone here is saying, it’s not that unions don’t have problems, don’t have corruption scandals, don’t have undemocratic practices, don’t have histories of concessionary bargaining, yada, yada, yada. But I think about something that in Sarah’s neck of the woods, Clayton Clive, a member of the RMT Union up in Manchester, told me in a recent interview, he said, unions aren’t perfect, but my union is the most democratic thing that I engage with in my life. If I have problems with it, I can run for office. I can be part of the change to make the union what it’s supposed to be. I can’t really do that with my political MPs or the party, the Democratic Party. They don’t listen to me. I can’t really do that with the companies that are screwing me over from Netflix to BP, they don’t listen to me. Unions are still at least more of a democratic arena of engagement that regular working people can participate in and be part of fixing. And I think that that’s an important thing to hold onto.
But still, for folks who are reporting on this, there are a lot of hairy questions that y’all have already started to address. And I wanted to just throw some more at you in the time that we have left, because folks were asking us, how do you balance investment in wanting to see the labor movement succeed and wanting working people to win their struggles? How do you balance that with being realistic about the labor movement’s weaknesses and challenges as a journalist. And how should say new labor journalists, how should they navigate and understand their relationship to unions? And another question, you guys can take whichever one of these you’re most interested in, please don’t feel like you have to answer all of them. But the last one was, what role, if any, can labor journalism play in that labor movement politics y’all were talking about, of trying to push unions in more progressive, less conservative, more inclusive directions? What role do you feel that you play in those internal movement politics? So again, take whatever’s useful there, leave whatever’s not.
Sarah Jaffe:
So I’m the one who has to leap off in exactly 10 minutes, so I’m going to jump in here first, if that’s okay.
The thing that I always end up saying whenever I’m on any panel about journalism is that every decision that you make as a journalist is political. Every story that you choose to cover or choose not to cover, everyone that you choose to interview in that story, everything that you put out there in the world, those are political choices. They have repercussions, they have ramifications, sometimes big, sometimes not big. It depends on what it is. You often don’t know what will be the thing that you write that blows up. And so yeah, that means that we take seriously the responsibility, or we should anyway, take seriously the responsibility that you’re putting in our hands, if you were trusting me with your story.
A thing I learned in journalism school, which a lot of journalists don’t seem to take seriously, but I did, is that there are two sets of rules in the media for your average person and then for public figures, that means that your average working person who is in their shop trying to organize a union or a member of a union deserves to be treated like they didn’t ask for a damn reporter to show up on their doorstep, because they didn’t. And that’s a different set of questions and different ways you treat them, different responsibility that you take with what they told you, than somebody who is in a position of power, which is to say, either the boss, or in some cases union leadership. Union leadership does have a responsibility to answer questions from reporters. They do. I’m sorry. They have that responsibility to their members, but they also do have a responsibility to take my calls. And if they don’t, I’m going to have questions.
That’s a different way to understand things than just like I am on the side of everybody who’s fighting for the working class, which is true. But when people are screwing up… The UAW has a new leadership now after a really ugly corruption scandal. And there is nothing to be gained by pretending that corruption scandal didn’t happen. Because what actually happened is as a result of that, people within the union organized, they made the union more democratic, they instituted a one member, one vote structure, and now they’ve put in a new leadership that has a different approach to organizing and a different approach to running the thing. And we’ll see how that works. Alex Press had a really good piece about that, actually, the new leadership of the UAW that everyone should read.
And she did that thing really well that I was talking about before, of grappling with the reality of this thing, the structural challenges that the people are up against, trying to organize in factories when companies want to close the factory down and move it somewhere else where the workers are more exploitable, that kind of thing. Again, I think being really honest about the conditions that you’re in is not the same as airing dirty laundry or doing a gotcha story or undermining people because you can, the kind of thing that you see sometimes in political stories, in electoral politics stories, you can do the same thing to union leadership, you can do that same thing to your average worker.
And I think it’s really important to tell the truth. That’s a really corny thing to say, but I wouldn’t be a journalist if I didn’t believe it. But that only one part of the question of the decisions that you make when you decide what you’re going to put out there, and always why, right?
So, I would be lying if I said I could give you an easy set of rules. These are calculations that I make every time I write something. What is the point of this? Do I know what I’m talking about here? Did I talk to the right people? Did I talk to enough people? And where is this being published? Who’s going to read it? This is like this math that lives in my brain, and I think that that’s true of probably most reporters and on most subjects, is that you’re making a series of calculations based on what, not even as a political practice, but just as a general point of whatever. We only publish a tiny, tiny fraction of what we know.
I’m working on an outline for a book chapter right now, and the outline for the chapter is now 100-pages long. That book chapter is not going to be 100-pages long, but that’s just like the thing, and then you carve it into the shape of a story. So while doing the carving, this is where all of those questions get answered and they change from story to story. And I think that’s natural. And to make this very, very short and shut up now. It’s hard and it should be hard to do that well.
Braden Campbell:
I guess I can hop in here. So I’ll say about Law360, our audience is both union and management side lawyers. So our coverage is neutral. And we could talk for days about what neutrality means in the context of reporting. I guess from where I come from, I guess what that means is I’m a union member, I have reaped significant benefits from that and our contract and the contract we’re negotiating now has made Law360 in a measurably better place to work. And so I’d have to also keep a detachment though from my own experience and the broader labor movement. And to think critical, I think there’s an instinct to see unions like a David to management to Goliath. And ask the good guys, we have to keep in mind that these are human institutions and have their flaws and failures while also recognizing that they are worker advocacy institutions at bottom.
But I think we have to really strive to cover them accurately and fairly and truthfully. And I think one of the animating principles that I try and keep in mind when I’m doing anything is to focus, whatever I’m covering, a court decision or a new lawsuit or whatever is focus on the implications to an individual worker, in a union or organizing a worker of what that is that’s happening. And I think that’s really helpful for cutting through any of these layers here is to really drill down into what is the actual impact on a person who is organizing union, who’s in a union, negotiating their contract? I think that’s really helpful for doing good coverage of this stuff. And I think, again, for covering movement issues and the like, it being very focused and elevating the individual, I think, is really important.
Kim Kelly:
Yeah, I’ve just been over here chewing on what everyone else is saying and trying to figure out what I have to add. I’m feral when it comes to these things. I don’t have any formal training on these things. I’ve picked it up as I’ve gone along and learned from people like Sarah and from Steven and just other people have done this work for a long time on how you should approach it, what to do, what not to do. And I do have a tendency to be a big Pollyanna about these things and be very protective of the stories and the people that I’m covering and I care about. But yeah, unions are messy, union members are messy. They’re not a monolith. You’re going to come across stuff that’s ugly, that does need to be made public, that is part of the store, that’s part of the context, you just have to make those decisions. Like Sarah said, you have to do that calculus and do that math and try and hope you come out with the right answer.
And when it comes to the role that labor journalism can play in pushing some of these more conservative unions or their leaders in any way, I mean, Lord knows you could try, you can piss them off real bad by talking about cops, about how they shouldn’t be in the labor movement. Will they pay attention to you? Maybe. Will they ignore you and blacklist you? Maybe, I guess I’ll find out. But I mean labor journalism has a lot of power though, even if in that specific case we’re still figuring out how to really get those nudges to land. I think there is so much power in the work that we do just by bringing these stories out into the public eye and empowering those workers and making them feel like, yeah, your struggle matters, your experience, your life fucking matters. Maybe I’m just being a Pollyanna again.
My role or my experience as a labor journalist has been a little unorthodox. I went from just being a heavy metal editor writer person forever and then fell into the labor world and fell in love with it. And I’ve tried to learn as much as I can and do as good a job as I can, but I think a lot of journalists who cover this beat, I still have a lot to learn, right? I am still trying to do the best I can with what I have and to pull in as many new skills, as much new knowledge as I possibly can, because I think this is a sacred burden in a way. If you have the privilege to be able to have a platform and opportunity to tell these worker stories, you cannot afford to fuck it up because it matters. And I think that’s just something to keep in mind when you’re looking at these stores, looking at how you want to approach them like, these are people’s lives in a way that’s very intimate and very personal.
As I think Sarah, a lot of people said, every story is a labor story. There’s always that angle and it’s always important to keep that in mind. This is someone’s life. You’re having an impact on their day-to-day in a way that other types of reporting don’t always have. And you owe it to them. You owe it to them, not to any union leader, to any union, you owe to the people themselves to do a good job. And since Sarah has to leave in four seconds and given the title of this, I would ask Sarah, why don’t we say union boss?
Sarah Jaffe:
Because the union, the leadership of the union is no more your boss than your member of Congress is your boss. They’re elected leadership, and they are very different things than the boss, and union boss is a term that actual bosses have put out there because they really, really, really like to make it sound like the union is trying to do the same thing to you that the boss is, but that’s not true. Even the worst union elected leadership is as your [inaudible 01:06:11] to the RMT said, elected leadership. Even the most undemocratic union, you still have ways to get rid of them. And now you have to get rid of me. Goodbye guys. I got to go.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thanks so much, Sarah.
Kim Kelly:
What an exit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What an exit. Yeah.
Kim Kelly:
Incredible. It’s like she’s the OG.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Beautifully put by all of you. And I would just, one thing that I was thinking of that I would want to also add for any folks out there who again are watching because you want to get into doing this work or maybe you’re starting to do this work and you want to grow your ability to do it more consistently, you’re trying to find your place in this media ecosystem. The other thing I would just add, and I think that this is really just picking up on what Kim, Braden and Sarah have already put down, is please do not mistake your public visibility as a journalist for your role as a speaker for these movements, or leader of these movements. This is a very tantalizing, seductive incentive that you get in a media ecosystem that puts such a high premium on public visibility.
You can start to convince yourself because people are hitting you up to talk about these stories and to do interviews about them, you can start to convince yourself that you yourself are among the leaders of this movement. And I would say you have to be very honest with yourself about what you want your role to be. Do you want to be a journalist? Or do you want to be a propagandist? Do you want to be, I guess, a public speaker about labor or? You can’t have it all. I think that a lot of people can kid themselves into having it all and then their work starts to suffer. They start to overstep. But I think if you keep yourself honest about what that role is, it’s really, really important as you continue to do this work, because for me, there are plenty of times where people ask me about my opinion on, say I was reporting on the railroads all last year, and then people were asking me what I thought the leaderships of the 12 different craft unions on the freight rail system should have done at this point in the timeline.
And I had to say this, I got a lot of opinions about it, but it’s not my fucking place to be out here and telling these unions what to do. I’m not a member of these unions. And also, it’s not my job to, as Kim said, just use my publication to air dirty laundry in a way that is not productive in helping the union solve its own problems. There are plenty of times where you got to pass on a story because it’s a conversation that needs to be had internally with members of that union or members of that organizing committee. Not everything needs to be blasted out on Twitter and fought over in public. We need to have spaces where people can work their shit out in less high stakes, high visibility circumstances. So that again, is just being honest about the role that media play in the politics of the movement that we cover.
And last thing, just like rapid fire, Sarah had to leave, but I guess are there any 30 second messages that Kim or Braden that you had about the importance of journalists, photographers, editors, videographers, folks in this industry, any final messages you wanted to share with them about the importance of organizing themselves as workers?
Braden Campbell:
Yeah, I guess I can go ahead. I think obviously it’s important to advocate for yourselves and get yourself the best lot you can, and this offers a great way to do that for sure. I guess one thing I wanted to, take this as a catchall thing just to close up my piece. I wanted to mention that I forgot to earlier that I talked about the wonky legal stuff. If anybody here who’s watching this ever runs into that stuff and has questions, I’m happy to help another reporter understand a very wonky area of coverage. And my DMs are open if you want to find me on Twitter. But yeah, I guess that’s my piece here. But I think we’re all doing important work and the first step is starting, and you guys being here and listening to us speak, I think is going to be helpful to informing your own reporting as you all on your crews.
Kim Kelly:
And I’m going to completely ignore Max’s question. Though obviously you should organize. Organize fucking everything. Organize your block, Organize your workplace, organize your family, figure it out. But what I want to say is because I realized that we’ve said a lot about what not to do and what fucking up looks like and why this is so important and life-threatening, you can’t blow it, but I don’t want to scare you off from doing it because you can do it. We need more labor reporters. We need more good people with experience, with organizing, with experience with labor, with experience as working class people than grow up all fancy to do this work, because that’s what we’ve been talking about this whole time. We need to get these worker stories out there. We need to get our stories out there because journalism is just another fucking job. And as we know, a lot of time it sucks. That’s why we’re organizing, that’s why we’re here.
I just want to be a little bit of a cheer cheerleader right now and really encourage people who are interested in doing these stories to do them, to write them. Maybe take a little extra time to reach out to experts, people that know a little bit more about it or can handle the wonky stuff or can help you figure out how to not be just a total op-ed monster like I am, but you should do it. Everybody who was interested should try and work on being a labor reporter or writing labor stories. There’s no barrier to entry. I spent my entire life in tour vans writing about heavy metal bands, and then I helped organize my workplace, and now I am a labor reporter that people ask to come onto panels and to talk to other reporters. So it worked out. I’m just some fucking guy. So if I can figure this out, you can totally do it. And we want you to, and we welcome you. And we love you for trying. Even if you mess up a little bit, we’ll figure it out together because that’s who we are as journalists, as freelancers, organizers, as working class people. It’s us against them. And if we have the opportunity to tell our own stories, we got to make sure we take it. Because fuck them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Beautiful, perfect spot for us to end on. Couldn’t have said it better myself. I want to thank the incredible Kim Kelly, Braden Campbell, and Sarah Jaffe for being so generous with their time and expertise over the past hour. I want to thank again everyone who tuned in to watch this live stream, and of course, a huge, huge thank you to the National Writers Union, The NewsGuild, the Writer’s Guild of America, East, the Freelance Solidarity Project, Labor Notes, and everyone involved in making this event a reality. Thank you so, so much for watching. Thank you for caring. This is Maximilian Alvarez from The Real News Network, signing off. As Kim said, let’s go get them. We got a lot of work to do.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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As labor activity is surging across the country, polling has found that young people are saying they favor unions at overwhelmingly high levels — support that labor organizers say is “unprecedented.” According to polling by GBAO conducted for the AFL-CIO, a whopping 88 percent of people under 30 say they approve of labor unions, while 90 percent say they approve of strikes. This is a far higher…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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“What are the ways we could organize people into new social forms in which new human, more humane, more liberatory capacities would emerge that we could use for our own liberation?” asks Aaron Goggans of the WildSeed Society. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Goggans and host Kelly Hayes talk about how activists can resist the trends of late capitalism, including the alienation imposed by the…
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The Biden administration proposed a major expansion of federal overtime protections on Wednesday in a new rule that could hand a raise to millions of workers across the country ahead of Labor Day next week. The Department of Labor is proposing raising the threshold under which salaried workers are guaranteed overtime pay from its current level of $35,568 to $55,000 a year. Crucially…
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Trader Joe’s workers in New York City may be getting a second chance at forming a union after their election failed with a tied vote earlier this year, thanks to a groundbreaking new rule handed down by federal labor officials last week. Trader Joe’s United, the independent union that has unionized four Trader Joe’s locations across the country so far, filed a request for a bargaining order with…
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Within the past two years, South Korea has seen major labor actions. Hundreds of thousands of workers have mobilized in response to multiple calls for general strikes, and the reactionary government of Yoon Seok Yeol has responded in force. This January, the National Intelligence Service, South Korea’s equivalent to the FBI and CIA rolled into one agency, raided the offices of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. In that same time, military and geopolitical tensions in the region have been rapidly intensifying. What is going on? What is the state of organized labor in South Korea, and how have imperialist and capitalist pressures, especially from the US, shaped the terrain upon which working people across the Korean Peninsula are struggling to live and work with dignity? We talk about all of this and more with Ju-Hyun Park, author, organizer, and Engagement Editor at The Real News Network.
Additional links/info below…
- Ju-Hyun’s Twitter page
- Nodutdol Twitter page
- Jia Hong & Ju-Hyun Park, Truthout / The Real News Network, “Half a Million South Korean Workers Walk Off Jobs in General Strike“
- Dongmin Yang, The Real News Network, “’The President Forced Our Comrade to Die’—South Korea’s Workers Confront Yoon Seok Yeol’s Labor Crackdown“
- Joonseok, Left Voice, “South Korea: Building a Powerful General Strike Is Urgent to Fight Against the Right-Wing Government’s Attacks“
- Tim Shorrock, The Shorrock Files / The Real News Network, “South Korea’s Yoon Launches Vicious Attack on Unions, Peace Groups“
- Ju-Hyun Park, The Real News Network, “Biden Needs to Accept That the US Can’t Intimidate North Korea“
- Kap Seol, Labor Notes, “South Korea: Intelligence Agency Raids Top Union Confederation“
- Sam Yang, The Real News Network, “Squid Game and the Long Shadow of American Empire“
Permanent links below…
- Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
- Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
- In These Times website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
- The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
- Jules Taylor, “Working People Theme Song
Music / Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hey everyone, this is your Working People host, Maximilian Alvarez.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Hey, this is Ju-Hyun Park, back at it again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang. So we got a real treat for y’all on the main feed today. So if you are a Patreon subscriber and supporter of Working People, first of all, thank you so, so much. It’s because of you guys that we are able to produce this show every week and we try to keep y’all stocked with really great and rich and interesting bonus episodes every month over on the Patreon feed. So if you aren’t a Patreon supporter, please do support us and you’ll get access to all of our great bonus episodes that we’re publishing every month over there on Patreon. We actually published a really, really killer bonus episode back in March, which was a conversation between Ju-Hyun and myself. I have the honor of working with Ju-Hyun at The Real News Network, but they are also an accomplished and fiercely dedicated activist, organizer, and thinker.
I brought them on the show in March to talk about an area that we haven’t talked about nearly enough on this show, which was the state of organized labor in Korea and how labor and the labor movement fits into the longer, larger picture of the fight for reunification on the Korean peninsula. Ju-Hyun, to their credit, dealt with my very, very big questions and answered them as rigorously as they possibly could. But we wanted to share this great conversation that Ju-Hyun and I had with our listeners here on the public feed. To commemorate that occasion, we thought it would be nice to check in real quick and give you guys a bit of an update on what’s been going on over in Korea since we published that episode back in March. So Ju-Hyun, once again, I’m putting you on the spot, what’s been going on over in Korea in the past few months?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, so since March, we have definitely seen an escalation in the labor struggle in South Korea in lots of different ways. So when we checked in last, we were talking a little bit about the trucker strike, which occurred last fall and winter. We spoke a little bit about the history of the labor movement and its role in the political struggle against the Yoon Suk Yeol Administration, who is the current president of South Korea. To catch us up a little bit, the biggest episode that we need to focus on for starters is the death of Yang Hoe-dong, who was a chapter leader of the National Construction Workers Union. He set himself on fire on Mayday in protests of racketeering charges that he was placed under along with several other union leaders at the time. Now, this is part of President Yoon’s so-called war on unions which he is prosecuting. Mainly targeting them under, the best analogy to US law would be thinking about the RICO Act and things like that. So basically, the charges is that the unions are corrupt, that they are infiltrated with gangsters at the most abhorrent rhetoric.
They’ll use the language of North Korean spies and things of that nature. But they’ve really been taking this corruption angle against the unions in particular and the self-emulation that Yang Hoe-dong did, setting himself on fire, was in protest of all of these charges and the general campaign that’s being waged against union leaders. Because, of course, these are incredibly trumped up charges and their purpose is primarily political, right? It’s to intimidate the union leadership, it is to restrict their capacity to organize, and it’s also an attempt to spoil public opinion away from the union leadership. And also give the impression that the Yoon administration is doing something to reign in the strikes and labor activity which can be disruptive to society because that is precisely the point. But it’s worth pointing out that all of that is happening amidst a huge downturn in the South Korean economy which has seen a record trend of over a year of month after month of trade imbalances of declining power of the one or the Korean currency.
A lot of that is tied to the Yoon Administration’s foreign policy. Specifically to his obsequence to Washington and his going along with the US victims that South Korea and other nations in the Asia Pacific such as Japan, Taiwan, others should be cutting off their economic ties with China. Which by this point is the economic powerhouse of the region and a major trading partner with all these countries. So these countries cannot go along with the US plan to isolate them from China without taking a major economic hit. It’s important to situate Yoon’s war on the labor unions within all of that as part of his attempt to gain political points despite making some very bad political moves, at least from the perspective of what is good for South Korea’s economy. Now, getting back to this incident, there’s been a huge uproar, particularly in the labor sector, against the Yoon Administration, against the prosecution of union leaders as a result of the death of Yang Hoe-dong.
The workers in the Korean Construction Workers Union have taken the initiative to stage a series of extended rallies and candlelight vigils at City Hall that have lasted for weeks and months. There is a video from The Real News regarding that story which I definitely recommend that people check out. This has really been used as a moment to galvanize the entire labor movement to also bring other sectors into this political struggle against the Yoon Administration. We’ve also seen a lot of stellar and very militant labor activity, particularly from the Metal Workers Union. That’s spurred a lot of repression from the Yoon government, including with some very widely circulated, at least in Korean media, videos of police officers taking down union leaders. Including going as far as to … There was an incident where Metal Workers Union occupied a construction site and the police got on a crane to physically beat the union workers who were occupying that high place.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus.
Ju-Hyun Park:
So these are some examples of small episodes that illustrate the way that the labor struggle is intensifying and the way that the militancy of the workers is on display and they are standing firm against the many kinds of oppression that are coming at them, whether it’s physical or legal. Now, I could go sector by sector, talk union by union. That would result in a very long update. But to fast-forward a little bit into what’s been happening in the past few weeks, we’ve been seeing how there’s a real coalescing occurring in order to bring labor more full frontally into this political struggle against the Yoon Administration, often under the banner of the slogan of demanding resignation of the current president. That’s something that’s been called forth through many sectors of South Korean society, particularly following the widely internationally recognized incident last Halloween in the district of Itaewon where hundreds of people died in a crowd-crushing incident.
It was later revealed that police were not responding to calls made by party-goers hours ahead of time pointing out that the situation there was very dangerous because they had been diverted to guard the president’s office, which had been moved from its traditional place in the government house known as the Blue House, to a location that’s very close to the US military base in the same neighborhood. So there’s been many, many calls for Yoon’s resignation and labor has already been involved in that struggle but has been coming out more in full force. We’ve been seeing that in the past few weeks. At the end of June, there was an 80,000 strong mobilization, particularly of precarious workers in the Capitol who were demanding a raise to the minimum wage. The South Korea minimum wage is about 9,601 or something like that, which because of the fluctuating exchange rate, particularly over the past year and the devaluing of the currency, really means that workers have been seeing a loss in real wages, which you have to also pair with the fact that South Korea like many other countries, is seeing record inflation.
Now, in addition to that, in the last couple of weeks, we’ve actually seen a general strike in South Korea led by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions which is the umbrella union that includes the Construction Workers Union, the Metal Workers union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s the federation whose offices were raided in January by the same government.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yes, exactly. So in this general strike, we saw about a quarter million people participate in the strike itself, over 100,000 people participating in over 30 street actions and demonstrations. Once again, it’s all… There are, of course, economic demands folded into it that are specific to sectors. We did see the Medical Health Workers Union participate in whole in this general strike. So that’s tens of thousands of hospital workers and healthcare workers with their own specific demands. But we also see arising to the level of political demands, not only including questions around regulations and protections for workers as a whole and the minimum wage, but also around this question of the resignation of the current president. So I think that’s probably the most concise update that can be offered in terms of what has been unfolding in the last few months with the South Korean labor movement.
If we go by the reporting of the union itself, we are seeing a turn in public opinion regarding union activity. Last fall and winter, there was some public opposition to the activities of the trucker strike, and I think the Yoon Administration was also able to successfully leverage its crackdown against them to see a short bump in their approval ratings. But going by the most current polls, public opinion is shifting towards the side of the unions against the Yoon Administration and is becoming more and more supportive of labor action. So I think these are definitely positive developments. Of course, we have to wait and see in terms of how this is all going to play out. In the meantime, there are a bunch of military escalations also occurring in Korea that are not unrelated to the struggle that we’re seeing in the streets.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, I mean this is an intense and important story that we are going to do our best to continue covering. Ju-Hyun themselves is actually getting ready to go to South Korea as well. So when they return, I promise we will have them back on to debrief and get an update on the state of things over there in South Korea. But as they mentioned, you cannot tell this story of the government repression of and crackdown on organized labor in South Korea without talking about the increased military activity, the imperialist jockeying for position between the US attempts to encircle China to isolate other countries in the region from China, as Ju-Hyun already mentioned, like this translates to real hurt for working people, and there are a lot of dimensions to that, but I really hope that everyone listening to this in North America understands that this isn’t just empty rhetoric coming from US politicians, these are actual policies, this actual foreign policy that is translating to continued commiseration for poor and working people and is giving a license to a reactionary government to crack down on organized labor.
So we all need to be invested in this struggle. In fact, that’s a perfect lead in to the bonus episode that we’re going to now play for y’all because Ju-Hyun did an incredible job in that episode of explaining how the military imperialist side of this from North Korea, China, the US, all the big questions about foreign policy and military and economic hegemony connect to the question of labor and worker struggles. So I guess without further ado, we will circle back with Ju-Hyun when they return from South Korea. So let’s all send our love and solidarity to them and wish them well and stay safe over there, comrade. When you get back, I am going to force you to come back on the show and talk about what you saw and what you heard. But thank you so much for coming back on. Thank you for laying this out. Yeah, we’ll talk to you when you get back.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for having me back on, Max. Hi everyone, my name is Ju-Hyun Park. I am the engagement editor here at The Real News. I’m also a member of [inaudible 00:14:24] for Korean Community Development, which is an organization of Koreans and our comrades struggling against imperialism in Korea and for national reunification. Thanks for having me on, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, well welcome everyone to another special bonus episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of beautiful listeners and Patreon subscribers like you. So as y’all heard, we’ve got a really special guest with us today, my comrade and now colleague, Ju-Hyun Park, who is, as they mentioned, the engagement editor at the Real News Network. We get to work together every day. They do incredible work as an activist, as an engagement editor, and as a journalist. In fact, that’s how I came to in Contact with Ju-Hyun’s work because back in October of 2021, so Jesus, yeah, I guess it was like a year-and-a-half ago, at The Real News, I remember seeing a piece, a text article that the great outlet, Truth Out, had published about half a million South Korean workers getting ready to walk off the job in a general strike. I was like, “Whoa, I haven’t heard about this.”
So I read the piece, it was great, and it was a piece that Ju-Hyun co-authored with Ji Hong, and we were able to republish it at the Real News and it took off because no one else was hearing about it either. This was a really, really crucial moment. That’s what we’re going to talk about for y’all today because a lot has been going on in the labor movement and beyond over in South Korea. I thought it would be really important to just give listeners as much context as we can in a short time on a bonus episode. I know that Ju-Hyun’s so knowledgeable about this that we could have a five-hour podcast, but I’m not going to do that to them.
We’re just going to do close to a one-hour podcast here, but I know that folks who listen to this show have been, if not seeing the news in the past couple years about this labor unrest in South Korea, I damn sure know that a lot of our followers saw the news earlier this year, 2023, when South Korea’s Intelligence Agency raided the offices of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions in January. This is a really, really dark situation where it seems like this new president is very explicitly pushing through this anti-labor politics. So I wanted to bring Ju-Hyun on to just get folks some up-to-date info and essential context. We’re going to try to basically walk you through these two points in time from that general strike that occurred in October of 2021 to these raids on organized labor headquarters in January of 2023. Before I toss things back to Ju-Hyun, I just wanted to read a little passage from that piece in Truth Out which we republished a year-and-a-half ago because I think it really grounds us. We’re going to link to it in the show notes so y’all can read the full thing.
But here’s what Ju-Hyun and Ji Hong wrote in that piece. Again, this was from October of 2021. “Today, South Korea ranks third in highest annual working hours, and as of 2015, it was third in workplace deaths among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or the OECD. Over 40% of all workers are considered irregular workers. As in the United States, many of these irregular workers labor in the gig economy, beholden to the tech giants apps. With an economy and society dominated by corporate conglomerates known as…” Ju-Hyun, how do I pronounce this? Is it Chabo?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
“Corporate conglomerates known as Chabo, South Korean people face increasingly bleak prospects. The top 10% of earners claimed 45% of total income in 2016. Real estate speculation has led to a housing crisis and privatization and education and healthcare are expanding disparities. As South Korea undergoes blowback from the effects of Covid-19 on the global economy, these crises have only sharpened. Exploitation and unsafe conditions are consistent across industries. Coal miners at Korea Coal, a government-owned coal mining corporation, are suffering health conditions from breathing in coal dust and overwork. One coal miner recounted the plight of irregular workers saying, ‘The government reduced the labor force by half, so our unit now has to do the job of two units, so everyone is ill. There’s no one here who is not sick. Our wages need to increase, but have stayed the same. We work the same as regular workers, but we don’t even get half the pay.’”
So sadly, as anyone who listens to this show knows, you’ll hear a lot of striking echoes of the things that workers here in the US and the folks that we’ve spoken to in the UK, in France, I mean, we’re hearing sadly a lot of the same issues that working people are facing across the globe. So that’s the essential table setting that I wanted to do here. Again, we’re going to link to that great piece from October, 2021. We’re also going to link to a great piece in Labor Notes by Cap Sol about the intelligence raids on the Korean Confederation of Trade Union. So you guys can read up on that after listening to this episode. But enough from me. Ju-Hyun, I want to toss it over to you. Again, I don’t want to make you write a whole dissertation here. I know that there are a lot of folks that listen to this show who probably know next to nothing about the situation of organized labor, let alone regular working people in South Korea.
So I wanted to ask if you could just talk to us as you would a child, right? Starting with the general strike in October, 2021, what essential context do people need to have about where this worker unrest is coming from, what workers in South Korea are going through, and then how we got from there to these Draconian raids of the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions earlier this year?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thanks, Max. So yeah, this is a pretty extensive historical breadth that we need to cover. Even though it’s only been a year-and-a-half, there are many, many different details and factors that we could dive into. I’m going to do my best to keep it at the surface level, to keep it at the most important information possible, which may mean that at times I don’t really go into detail about some factors, but I’ll still do my best to try to present as cohesive of a narrative as I can. As you laid out with the quote from the piece that I wrote a couple of years back with my comrade, Ji Hong, there is a crisis that has been ongoing within South Korea, not only since two years ago, but really since the 1997 IMF crisis, which is when South Korea was forced to accept IMF loans along with many other strings attached as IMF loans usually come with, which included changes to its labor laws that have really reworked the economic structure of the country in some fundamental ways.
I would argue that for a very large strata of South Korea’s working class, there has never really been a recovery since this period. The figure that you stated around the number of so-called irregular workers, those are workers that are working without an official contract who are not covered under existing labor laws, their proportion of the workforce has been steadily rising since the 2000s and has been at the level of being about half of the workforce for, I think it’s safe to say, roughly a decade if not more. So this is something that has been building in South Korea for a long, long time. It didn’t just appear with this general strike a couple of years back. The thing that I would point out around the timing of the general strike in October, 2021 was that it was really supposed to influence the upcoming presidential elections in May of last year in 2022. The purpose or the strategy of the KCTU, the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions, was to bring together the most marginalized and oppressed strata of the working masses.
So that includes the irregular workers, it includes the remaining peasantry in South Korea, it includes organizations for the urban poor as well as with the more traditional unions for workers who are considered so-called regular workers, workers who have contracts who still have some protections under the law. The purpose of this was to really shake things up and to bring together a working coalition that could push for major changes in South Korea at the time. Something that’s important to understand is that South Korea in 2021 was under the administration of a liberal president known as Moon Jae-in. Moon Jae-in is best known to the world for his efforts to move forward Korean reunification. There were many progressive things that he did on that front, including the signing of the Panmunjom Declaration in 2018, which created something like a roadmap for an eventual process of reunification with North Korea or the DPRK and also announced the shared intent of both governments to end the Korean War, which until this day, has not been formally concluded by a peace treaty.
Now, I bring this up because while Moon Jae-in was progressive in some of these ways, he was ultimately still a representative of the capitalist class. He was brought to power by the Candlelight Revolution in 2016, which deposed former President [inaudible 00:26:00], but he did not come in necessarily as a representative of that movement. The movement did successfully remove the existing president, but it did not bring about a transition of power that was under the control of the movement itself is what I’m trying to say. So he came in as a representative of the existing political establishment, a representative of existing neoliberalism, the left wing of neoliberalism in South Korea. As in many other countries around the world, particularly in capitalist nations, if there are two parties or some kind of rivalry between political parties, it’s often between different strains of what neoliberalism that country will be adopting. The same is true currently in South Korea as well. So under Moon Jae-in, the actual material circumstances of the vast majority of people did not improve. With the particular historical circumstances of Covid-19, we can definitely say that they worsened, in fact.
So what this all led to was last May in 2022, there was a bit of an upset victory by a new candidate from the right known as Yoon Suk Yeol. He was actually Moon Jae-in’s former prosecutor who helps prosecute the past administration, but then he switched allegiances to the right-wing party and then began to really push a campaign that was based on a couple of different points. It was very strong current of anti-China rhetoric, anti-DPRK rhetoric. He very viciously attacked the diplomatic efforts of Moon Jae-in, and additionally, he promised that he would reduce taxes and improve the standpoint, or sorry, improve the environment for business, and in that process, achieve some trickle down improvement in conditions for the working class. Now Yoon Suk Yeol won by less than 1% of the vote. I do want to point that out.
This is not a president with a very clear mandate, but once he was in office, he really said about carrying out a lot of the things that he said he would, which included a much more aggressive stance towards both China and North Korea and a much more pro-US and compliance stance with regard to the US’ efforts to build a stronger military alliance in East Asia that is specifically aimed against China and North Korea. This has included increased collaboration with Japan. Now, I realize that we’re going a little bit all over the place here. We’re talking on the one hand about labor conditions in South Korea, about the material circumstances facing workers. Then on the other hand, we’re talking a lot about all of these foreign policy items. I think that it’s essential to do this because I will argue that these two currents are actually very, very closely related. Now, the point that I want to fast-forward through is that 2022 was a very, very tense year on the Korean peninsula. The DPRK or North Korea launched a record number of rockets and other ballistic missiles.
There were also a record number of South Korean and US joint military exercises, which are extremely provocative to the situation on the peninsula, and definitely not an exercise that promotes any kind of peace or dialogue, but really just sharpens the existing divisions and brings us closer to a situation of war. In the face of this, it was actually the KCTU and a lot of the workers’ movements that posed a lot of the political opposition to this military brinkmanship. On August 15th, there was a start of a major exercise known as the UJI Freedom Shield exercises between the United States and South Korea. The opposition in the streets was coming from the organized labor movement, which even went as far as to release a joint statement with the Organization of Trade Unions in the DPRK or North Korea itself. So this was a united statement from organizations of workers’ unions across the peninsula opposing the drive towards a renewed war, opposing Yoon Suk Yeol’s anti-people, anti-democratic policies.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That statement, that’s a pretty big fucking deal, right?
Ju-Hyun Park:
It’s a huge deal. I think that’s entirely appropriate to say. One thing that’s very crucial, particularly when we get to talking about these raids, is that in South Korea, there is still what is known as the National Security Law, which dates back to from before the Korean War. What this law does is that it defines any support for North Korea or the DPRK, which it defines as a quote, unquote, anti-state entity to be illegal activities. So any quote, unquote, anti-state activities, any kind of support for the DPRK or even just communism, depending on which administration is in power, is interpreted as essentially an act of treason and can result in prosecution and charges that can and have sent many, many people to prison for years on end. So this is a very bold move that was taken by the organized labor movement to oppose the enhanced military drills on the peninsula and to oppose the war agenda of Yoon Suk Yeol and President Biden. Now, coming back to a little bit closer to the present day, as you mentioned in January, there were raids on KCTU offices.
There were also a number of arrests made in various peace groups, including the June 15th Committee, which is an organization that exists in both the North and South, as well as amongst overseas Koreans, which organizes for reunification and arrests of members of the Korean Peasants League as well. A lot of these charges came back to prosecution under the National Security Law. Many, many of these arrests of people were basically on the pretext that there was some evidence that they had been spying for North Korea. Now, I think that that’s important because the labor movement has been providing the main organized political opposition to Yoon Suk Yeol’s administration throughout his presidency thus far. At the same time, they have not only been organizing within labor for economic concerns, but really pushing political demands as well, political demands that don’t just stop at the level of so-called domestic policy, but actually extend to international concerns as well.
So I think there’s a couple of things happening here. I think Yoon Suk Yeol is going after these unions in this way, is ramping up charges, which I personally believe are fabricated, around so-called espionage conducted by members of the union movement and peace groups in an effort to really undermine their basis within society in an effort to red bait the leaders of the Organized Workers’ Movement, and really to do what so many right wing leaders of South Korea have done before, which is to use the specter of the DPRK to crush the labor movement, to say that all those who fight for improved working conditions, who try to unionize their workplaces, who try to stand up to the bosses must not only be communists, but also be traitors because they’re operating for this so-called anti-state entity known as the other government of Korea.
I think this really speaks to how in South Korea, the question of the labor movement and justice for workers is very closely intertwined with the question of reunification because so long as the war continues, so long as division continues, the capitalist class has this cudgel that they can use against workers at any time, that they’re not only being disruptive, that they’re not only simply being troublemakers, but that in fact that they are traitors who deserve to be treated and prosecuted as such. So I think that’s about the shortest summary that I can offer in terms of what’s been going on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I was going to say you got minutes to spare. I thought that was beautifully done. Again, I know it probably pained you to gloss over some details, but for me that was incredibly helpful and I know it will be for our listeners as well. I want us to end on that question of reunification and the incredibly volatile state of things right now. But I guess before we get there, I wanted to just really drill down on how you framed that analysis, because I think it’s really important and it really, I think gives, it’s an object lesson for all of us here in the West, and I think it’s safe to say that a lot of folks who are invested in the labor movement here in the US or are part of that movement almost see it as yes, somehow magically unconnected to the tangled mess of geopolitics and international relations, whatever other terms we give for it. But it feels like a terrain of struggle that we can actually wrap our heads around and actually do something about.
Whereas the imperialist war machine from the things that are going on from the war in Ukraine to the Korean Peninsula. For most people, they’re just like, “I don’t know enough to know what I should feel about this or what’s the right path.” So I think there’s this knee-jerk tendency to focus on what’s in front of us, focus on the things that we can understand, including the labor politics here in the US.
What I would say to anyone who thinks that way, as I thought for many, many years of my life is even today, the labor conditions that so many workers labor under that we talk about every week on this show, the labor laws that we talk about all the time on this show when we’re talking about how incredibly fucking hard it is in the US to unionize a non-union shop, all the different stages you have to clear, all the ways that labor law is stacked in favor of the bosses, not just in a unionization campaign, but when it comes to things like retaliation, I mean, there are so many laws that put workers at a disadvantage because the system moves so slowly, it can be exploited so easily by the bosses and the businesses that have the money, resources, and lawyers to do that, whereas workers generally do not.
So from the working conditions to the labor laws to even the shape of the organized labor movement in the United States today, all of these have been directly shaped by anti-communist politics of the 20th century. I mean, we’ve talked about it plenty on the show, but you can also go read about it. Mid-century, this was the deal with the devil that the labor movement made was to excommunicate, to buy into the red scare, to excommunicate communists from the labor movement, even though those very same communists had been recruited by the labor movement or into the labor movement years prior because they were the best organizers, they were more class-conscious. They played a vital role in the growth of the labor movement around World War II and then the inevitable crackdown on communism in this country because of the geopolitical situation, because of the anti-communist fervor in the capitalist West, the geopolitical war with the Soviet Union. But this really, really spanned the globe, the challenge that actually existing state socialism posed to the capitalist hegemony, the emergent capitalist hegemony of the United States, so on and so forth.
All of this was directly translating to decisions that were made, legislation that was passed, people who were appointed to positions in labor unions, in legislatures, certain people being picked for those positions over others, plenty of people’s lives being ruined for their affiliation or accused affiliation with the Communist Party. So that’s just one example of how you may think that our labor struggle here is not connected to the crazy world of geopolitics. It is. It always has been. Like we always say here, it’s not just from a sense of workers solidarity because we are all working within and against this kind of global capitalist system. I think you can really hear that in say, the international panel that we just posted a couple of weeks ago with rail workers from the US, UK, and France. You can hear that in their stories. But also like Ju-Hyun was describing, there are also very clear ways that you can look at the influence that geopolitics and the different rivalries and imperialist ends or all of that stuff does impact what we do, how we work, how we organize.
I could go on. I mean, I got my degrees in Mexican radical history. The AFL was essentially like a quote, unquote, diplomacy arm of US imperialism in Latin America. It extended its tendrils out into Mexico and other parts of Latin America directly to counteract the influence of the common turn in those same countries. So again, this is everywhere, but Ju-Hyun, I wanted to bring you back in here before I talk too much on that front. I wanted to focus on that, the sad way that things have gone since over the past 20 years. You mentioned the IMF.
You mentioned this economic restructuring that we hear about, and I remember another piece that we published at The Real News by Sam Yang last year that was a really deep analysis of the show, Squid Games and trying to put some analytical meat behind this show that people were watching and Sam really talked about, he’s like, “What you need to understand is that the plot device of all these people being in debt, that hits different for people in South Korea.” I guess could you talk a little more about, I guess just what working people in the 21st century, they’re the working class in South Korea in the 21st century, what this crisis, this extended crisis has meant for their working and living conditions?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the place to start, as I mentioned before, is the real big condition is the casualization of labor, this huge proportion of so-called irregular workers who are not protected by worker laws, who are not protected by contracts and are really just at the disposable whims of their bosses. In the article in Truth Out, which we’ve mentioned a couple times, Ji and I, my co-author, did talk about the role of tech giants and their platform apps. But it really is so much deeper than just the apps, right? We’re not just talking about Uber drivers. In many Korean workplaces, you go in and there’s actually workers working side by side, and some of them are on contracts and some of them are not. So there’s really not just concentration within particular industries or sectors. It’s really a generalized condition that you find in many, many different workplaces. The overall effect is to bring down the bargaining power of all workers, because if some of your colleagues supposedly don’t have a contract, supposedly are not covered by labor laws, what that means is that they’re not supposed to be organizing with you.
You can’t really organize with them in the same way. The management is using different tactics to create these kinds of segments of different kinds of workers in order to split the possibility of unified solidarity to fight for better conditions and also for the overthrow of the capitalist system, really. But there are some stats that I do want to share. So the top 10% of earners in South Korea 2016 claimed 45% of the total income.
As we mentioned before, there’s been a runaway real estate and housing crisis that has been going on in South Korea. I think one thing to understand is that the way that rent laws work in South Korea, you actually don’t pay your rent every month. You pay it in a lump sum, often to cover multiple years at a time. So what this means for most working people is they end up having to take out loans, so they end up going into debt in order to pay rent. As you can imagine, this just creates this really vicious cycle amongst workers. I believe that the average household debt currently, or in the last couple of years, was almost double the annual income of a household.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus.
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah. So you’re really seeing a situation where most people, they’re not financially solvent. Most people are just in the red and they’re just constantly trying to get as close back to even as possible. There’s also a very stilted, uneven economy. We talk about these chibo, these massive conglomerates. When I say this, I’m talking about your Samsungs, your LGs, at this point, household names in many parts of the world. These conglomerates, 64 of them account for 84% of the economic output, the GDP of all of South Korea, but only provide 10% of the jobs. So that means that about 90% of the economic pie is on paper only going to about 10% of the population. Of course, we understand that people working those jobs are not the ones actually taking the lion’s share of those profits. Those profits mainly go to the investor class, which is not just in South Korea itself. You have these big billionaire oligarch families, but then you also have all of the banks, all of the firms mainly in the US, Japan, and Europe that are invested into these conglomerates as well.
So you have this situation where for the vast majority of people, they’re employed in these secondary industries, in these sectors of the economy that are really dependent upon these monopolies in order to exist and that are therefore very much subject to the whims of the international market to the ups and downs of global capitalism. In the last couple of years, particularly with Covid, but also as a result of the Ukraine War and what that’s meant, both in terms of Korea’s prospects for trade and this global inflation crisis that we’re seeing, most people are facing pretty bleak prospects. Things were not so great prior to the pandemic, but these compounding factors are really just putting a strain upon workers and what that’s meant in South Korea is an upswing in workers fighting back, right? There was the general strike in 2021. Last fall, there was a really well-publicized trucker strike as well, which ultimately was repressed because the Yoon Suk Yeol government threatened the truckers with jail time. They threatened them with personal fines. They said, “You’ll individually be charged if you continue with this activity, if you continue with this strike.”
I think that’s also a factor into what we’re seeing in this crackdown on the KCTU using these spurious charges of having violated the National Security Law of being North Korean spies. What they’re really trying to do is enact really harsh labor discipline. They’re trying to bring down the hammer so that they can keep the workers from being organized, so that they can keep these really brutal conditions running. Because I mean, quite frankly, the system is eating itself. Just as we’re seeing around the world, the prospects for continued…. Continued profits, continued growth in South Korea is just about as bad as it is anywhere else. A lot of what the US is doing to try to maneuver South Korea into its alliances is not helping the situation because South Korea is ultimately a neighbor to Russia, it’s a neighbor to China. It had very important trade ties with these countries and is increasingly facing pressure from the US to, on the one hand, cut off those trade ties and on the other to export some of its major industries to the United States.
So the prospects for even South Korea’s capitalists under this imperialist arrangement are becoming increasingly poor. So the response of the Yoon Administration is to at least get a handle on the workers’ movement so that they can keep the gears running for as long as possible. Of course, we know that they’re really running up against the physical and political limits of this kind of system. So this isn’t a crisis that the Yoon Administration is going to be able to resolve, but this is the response that they’re taking given all of these conditions coming together.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. Yeah, it’s like, I don’t know. If you’re a country out there, don’t be friends with… I don’t know what’s worse, to be a friend or an enemy of the United States, because we fuck over both of them. Jesus. So again, so I want us to get to that before I have to let you go, but just as one more quick context filling question, and by no means do you have to go into a whole thesis about this if you’re uncomfortable, but it’s just like on the show, on our weekly episodes, people know the basic facts about the state of the organized labor movement in the United States. It’s not great, as we know. There are really important and vital signs of life, a lot of great new organizing happening, a lot of rank and file energy and reform efforts happening within existing unions.
We’re talking just after some pretty ground shaking election results after the United Auto Workers, the UAW, held their first referendums. They held their first leadership elections after last year’s referendum passed that would allow UAW membership and retirees to directly elect their international union leadership, which was not the case before. The teamsters do that because the teamsters were forced to do that after all the organized crime and corruption scandals. This was actually like a government decree for the teamsters to have more direct democracy in their union back in the, what was that, the nineties? So the UAW, as you guys know, we talked to Justin Mayhew, UAW member, auto worker in Kansas City a year or two ago, and we talked all about the importance of that referendum and now the elections that resulted after that referendum happened.
Lo and behold, if you let the rank and file directly elect their leadership, maybe their choices will be different from the handpicked successors of the people in that union leadership class. So that’s just one example of the general context that folks have for the conversations that we have with primarily US-based workers here on the show. But we also know that in general, union density in the United States is at a historic low point, barely hovering above 10%, dismal in the private sector. So that’s the kind of context that I think people have on a week-to-week basis when they’re hearing the stories of workers on this show. So I just wanted to ask again, in broader strokes if you had any additional points that you wanted to make, Ju-Hyun, about the state of organized labor in South Korea, or any particular nuances about that that folks should understand before we let you go?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Yeah, definitely. I think from the standpoint of the US, South Korean labor looks so organized, and that’s because relatively it is much more organized.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Not hard.
Ju-Hyun Park:
I think that is a fact, and I think there are some real indicators that help us understand why that is. I think just like on the surface, South Korea has umbrella union organizations. That’s what the KCTU is. It’s the second largest umbrella union organization. It’s the more radical out of the two or three large umbrella organizations that exist. The KCTU alone represents over a million workers. I don’t really… Well, actually, there may be something, there may be some kind of analogy to that within the US labor movement, but I think that there’s a difference in the level of politicization and the way that the KCTU has historically pushed for political demands, not just economic ones, throughout its history. A lot of that comes from the different histories of the labor movement, given the different histories of the two countries. South Korea was under authoritarian military fascist rule for roughly 40 years. These, of course, were regimes backed by the United States at the same time that it’s saying, “Look at South Korea. It’s the beacon of democracy against communist totalitarianism.”
But the union movement, the labor movement really developed in tandem with the democratic movement in South Korea at the end of the 20th century, leading up to the moment of formal democratization in 1987. Then after that, it continued to expand. It continued to be a political force pushing against the remnants of the past regimes that were still in government, that were still in power in many ways and still really pulling the strings of the country’s politics. So I think that that is one of the major differences between the two. Because of these different historical trajectories, you end up with different kinds of labor movement, both in form in terms of how it’s organized and in terms of its essence in the sense that these are very different than a lot of the larger union formations, which may exist in the US today, in that they have a very long history of involvement in not just economic or workplace struggles, but political struggles in things that cut across industries and that really attempt to bring together the workers as a class to struggle for their interests.
So I think that’s one of the main differences that I would point out, which I don’t know how much immediate lessons there are for folks involved in the union movement in the US today from that, but I do think it’s an important observation because if unions are only ever concerned with what’s going on in their shop floor or in their industry without really seeking to build broad alliances that cut outside of that, then the scope of what unions are able to accomplish and the scale of power that they can build is always going to be limited. So I think that this is something very important for observers to know.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, no, I think that’s beautifully put. I’m not heartened by much these days, but I am heartened by that, when I hear and see folks within the labor movement really learning that essential lesson. Just off the top of my head, since we just recorded our Working People Live show in New York City a couple weeks back at the People’s Forum, so you guys heard us talk to this incredible panel of organizers, including Toph Sorav from Labor’s Local 79, the Construction Workers Union in New York City. When people think of construction worker unions in New York City, right, as Toph says, the stereotype is, what is it, male, pale, and stale, right? That stereotypical kind of 1970s, eighties, New York construction worker, the negative connotations of that type of worker being that they feel that they’re better than non-union workers. There is a racist, sexist component. Women aren’t welcome into that trade. Non-citizen workers are seen as the enemy.
So if you have undocumented workers who are being exploited by anti-union contractors like Alba Demolition in the city, there was a time, and in fact, there still are plenty of parts of the country now where union workers may see those undocumented exploited workers or workers who are coming back from prison and are having their parole status held hostage, which is why they have to work for these exploitative contractors. So really, just the most exploitable groups of workers who in the past were not the friends of organized labor. A lot of union workforces didn’t do anything to reach out to these groups. They in fact saw them as the enemy, the ones undercutting their union jobs and so on and so forth. All the while, it’s the bosses who are the ones who are fucking all of us over. It’s the bosses who are exploiting people. It’s the bosses who are finding ways to circumvent safety protocols and steal wages, all that stuff. So it’s very heartening to hear a union like Labor’s Local 79 learn those lessons from the past. They are actually doing work to correct that.
They are reaching out to non-union workers, to the most exploited workers in the construction industry in New York, which is a major component of the city’s economy, and they’re taking a community organizing model that I think is at least embodying in some sense, those crucial lessons that Ju-Hyun articulated a second ago. I think the more of us who learn those lessons and put them into practice, the better. I guess that leads us to the final turn here about how the Korean unification, if we’re talking about expanding the scope and scale and solidarity of the working class. We’re literally talking about a country split down the middle, a people split down the middle, and how that split has been used and weaponized in so many different ways to the detriment of working people on the Korean peninsula.
I guess, Ju-Hyun, believe me, I know that this is a topic for a whole other podcast, but I guess I just wanted to ask again for the people who are listening to this here in the English-speaking West, for folks who maybe just, we’ve all been hyper-conditioned, living in the imperialist core of the world, when we hear about this, we think, “Oh, North Korea, bad. That’s the evil one. That’s the one that the hermit kingdom that wants to be cut off, that there must be some reasons for it. South Korea good. They’re more like us. Their economy’s more like us, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” This is the official narrative that working people tend to get in this country. It’s what I was fed my whole fucking life. There are resonances all over the world of this kind of stuff. Just right now, it’s really dismal, but people are seeing in real time, for the past year or so, we’ve been talking about, “We got to defend Ukraine at all costs, defend Ukraine at all costs.” It’s like, “Yeah, Jesus, the working people in Ukraine are going through hell right now.”
So naturally, I know a lot of people who listen to the show, they’re like, “I want to help. I don’t want people to go through this.” Now, here we are. You got actual legislators, you got lawmakers like Mitt Romney just saying the quiet part out loud, where they’re like, “Well, we don’t actually want peace brokered between Russia, Ukraine, NATO, whatever. We just want to basically keep pushing Ukrainians into the firing line so that it, quote, unquote, wears down the forces of Russia.” So we’re just sending people to be grist for the mill so that we quote, unquote, militarily weaken and adversary? That really fucks with your brain when you realize that this is how the geopolitical game is played. I only bring that up, not to drag this conversation into an area where it doesn’t belong, but just to try to give listeners another example that they can latch onto of if you’re hearing the powers that be frame the narrative for you about Korean unification, maybe pump the brakes for a second.
Ju-Hyun, I just wanted to ask if we could round this out after this incredible discussion just for regular working folks here who need to understand and need to cut through that bullshit that they’re hearing from the media and politicians, what would the reunification of Korea actually mean in this situation? How can folks, regular working folks, support that and support their fellow workers across the world in Korea?
Ju-Hyun Park:
Thanks for that question, Max. I see you’ve thrown me another softball.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Sorry, in five minutes or less.
Ju-Hyun Park:
All right. So to keep it very, very short, I think the thing to understand is that Korea was united for over 1000 years. The Korean War occurred within living memory. The division of Korea occurred within living memory. It tore apart about one in three Korean families, which is probably a low estimate. So there are people alive today who have not seen their parents, haven’t seen their children, haven’t seen their siblings for pretty much their entire lives, or close to a century, who have no idea what happened to them. This is just a reality for many and many of our people. So this is a very personal thing when we talk about reunification. We’re not talking about some pie in the sky, a political idea. For many people, it just means, “I want to see my family again. I want to know what happened to my family. I want to see my home. I want to go home.” So I think that’s the most human level at which I can communicate it. Politically, what it means is removing and finally ending this war.
It means across the peninsula, really committing to the fact of a shared destiny, which is really inevitable. You can’t pick up South Korea and put it in Ohio. You can’t pick up North Korea and put it on the moon. We live on the same peninsula, and we have a shared destiny as one country because that’s what Korea is. It is one country. It always has been. The political question of how unification happens is a little bit more complicated. But what I can say is that it’s something that Koreans have been thinking about for many, many generations. Even when there are differences in ideology and economic systems, there is a shared commitment and agreement, including from the government of the DPRK, from North Korea, to abide by a system wherein the threat of war could be removed. The possibility of living together could once again come into the picture, and where it wouldn’t necessarily be about imposing one system upon the other. It would really be about coming together again as a nation, coming together again to build a shared destiny through a democratic gradual generational process.
So I think this idea that reunification is somehow uniquely impossible, that the differences are just too great, that once the DMZ comes down, then people will just begin slaughtering each other or something is really just a narrative that entirely serves the United States, that entirely serves those interests that want to keep Korea divided. Now, when we get back to this question of what does solidarity look like, what can people do? I think one of the most important things actually is to unite the labor movement with the anti-war movement in this country. The United States is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That is Dr. King’s quote from over half a century ago. It is still true today. What we’re seeing in Ukraine right now is a dress rehearsal for what interests in the Pentagon and on Wall Street ultimately want to do to China. So Taiwan a major flashpoint that could become another Ukraine, but so is Korea. When we talk about these wars between these massive powers, these are not going to be small affairs.
These are nuclear armed powers that would essentially fight a battlefield over most of the surface of the planet, right? China and the United States are connected by the Pacific Ocean. When the United States, the last time the United States went to direct war with power that could be described as having the same level of military capabilities, which was Japan, that was a war that was essentially fought across all of Asia, across the entire Pacific. I don’t think that any kind of direct confrontation with China would be any different. So I know that oftentimes in the US it can feel like, “Oh, well, we don’t know enough about these situations abroad. It’s confusing. There’s always people trying to tell us different things that we need to do.” I think that even if you are confused personally, even if you feel like you don’t know enough, what every person can know is that war is not good for the planet. War is not good for people. War is not good for workers who does war benefit. It benefits profiteers from war and only profiteers from war.
It benefits those who have a business interest or a political interest in advancing war. Those are not the working class. Those are not the workers of the US. So I think it is really essential to find ways to politicize the workers’ movement in the US that is really the thing that is going to provide any kind of internal possible block from within the United States in addition to other progressive movements that also exist here as well. I think to just end on a final note, a lot of what I’m talking about in terms of a confrontation in the Pacific is in motion. Next month, Yoon Suk Yeol is going to visit the United States. The president of South Korea is going to come here for a summit with Biden. A lot of what this is all gearing towards is to build a new alliance between Japan, South Korea, and the United States. Japan was Korea’s colonizer for the last 70 odd years. There has been a conflict even between South Korea and Japan over this legacy, this colonial legacy.
What Yoon Suk Yeol is now trying to do is to put all these matters to rest in order to lay the path for South Korea to join more formal military alliances with both the US and Japan that feed into the project of encircling China. Now, the reason why this is important is because all the chess pieces are already moving, right? The US is already orchestrating many, many different maneuvers that are building its political and military capacity within East Asia. The object is entirely for the purposes of confrontation with China that will come about in some form or another. This is something that to decision-makers in Washington is not an if, but a when. So I think workers in the US and organizers in the US also need to be looking at it that way. Because if we’re talking about this kind of cataclysmic confrontation, there is no way that there is no way that doesn’t touch every single part of our lives. I’m not just talking about for folks in the US, but I really mean the entire planet.
We know already that we are standing at the precipice and at a turning point, not just in history, but really for our species when it comes to the question of climate change, and now also with the question of nuclear war. So I would really say that it’s all out right now. It’s socialism or barbarism, it’s extinction or survival. Even when things can feel complicated, when it can feel overwhelming, it really is essential to understand that there is no option to not pick a side. It is essential. It is really important for all movements in the US that want to be working towards justice to be coming together, to be combating imperialism as the primary contradiction that we’re facing today in the world, because it’s only with a people’s victory on that front that we’re going to even be able to ensure our capacity to have much of a future anyway. So we’re all in this together or we’re all going down with the ship.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Aug. 28, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
Five hundred Auto Workers (UAW) from Local 862 held rallies in Louisville, Kentucky, August 24 and 25, part of a wave of practice pickets and rallies around the country.
Class struggle was on everyone’s lips. A variety of issues brought them to the picket, but the auto workers there were unanimous about turbocharged wealth inequality leaving workers behind.
At the Thursday picket, Local 862 member Aaron Webster said he’s grown tired of feeling squeezed, describing the contract fight as a fight between the rich and the poor.
Webster started working at the Kentucky Truck Plant in 2014 building Ford Super Duty Trucks, Ford Expeditions, and Lincoln Navigators. “As much as I may not want to strike, I believe it’s necessary,” he said. He has been saving money and talking to his co-workers in the event Ford is one of the strike targets when the September 14 contract expiration deadline arrives.
Near Unanimous Vote
In past negotiation cycles, the UAW has picked one of the Big Three legacy automakers (Ford, General Motors, and Stellantis) as a strike target, picking the company the union believed would agree to the best deal in order to set a pattern for the remaining two.
This time, the UAW has broken from this practice—UAW President Shawn Fain has said all three companies are targets, leaving the companies guessing.
Local 862 members almost unanimously voted to authorize a strike. Across the country, 97 percent of UAW members at the Big Three who voted, voted in favor of strike authorization.
Webster said his main contract issues are raising the low pay, ending tiers, and getting to choose vacation dates to spend with his family. Many workers were forced to take time off in July as Ford retooled the plant for next year’s model. Workers want to spend their vacation when they want throughout the year, instead of at the company’s whim.
The UAW has made shorter work hours and a good quality of life key themes of the contract campaign. “We have to work longer and harder just to maintain the same standard of living that we had before,” Fain said in a Facebook Live video August 1. “That means more time at work, and less time living life. That means missing Little League games and family reunions. It means less time outdoors, less time traveling, less time pursuing our passions and our hobbies.”
‘Walking Like Zombies’
James White works 10-hour shifts at Ford’s truck plant putting leaf springs on the beds of the full-size trucks. The job is so grueling, he’s canceled his gym membership.
“I’m basically putting the big springs that are the payload for the back of our trucks,” he said. “They’re really heavy pieces of steel. And I lift them all day. Luckily, I have a hoist.” He says the hoist lifts the steel, but it doesn’t push or pull it. That’s where the momentum of human brawn comes in. “They’re making our trucks really strong,” he said.
The heavy work means lots of injuries. “That’s why we want our health care to improve,” White said.
He’s especially concerned about the older workers, because the physical demands of the job have broken down their bodies. When workers leave the assembly line at shift change, he says they look like the people in Michael Jackson’s Thriller video: “People are walking like zombies. They’re in pain. They’re sore. They’re tired.
“Some of the injuries they get are life-altering,” White said, and the company’s response is to tell them to take pain pills. “You can’t live off pain pills.”
Workers say they’ve given up much over the years to help the auto companies make record profits. White says he isn’t willing to give up so much of his time. He switched from night to day shift to tuck his daughter in at night. But it’s still not enough.
“I came in at 6 a.m. My kid gets home from daycare about 6 p.m. If she’s going to bed at 9, then I get off at 5:36 p.m., I feed her dinner, talk to her a little bit—that’s not enough. I have three hours of daylight.”
“We should have eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation, and eight hours of sleep. I can’t tell you the last time I got eight hours of sleep. I average about four and a half hours.”
Woking Family Protection Plan
James Slonaker works as an assembler on the chassis line. He transferred from Atlanta after Ford shut down the Atlanta Assembly Plant in 2006. It was the third time in his 22 years as a UAW member he’s had to pick up and plant new roots elsewhere. His main demands are ending tiers and getting job security to protect workers against plant closures, including the return of a “jobs bank,” a program that guarantees wages and benefits when an automaker eliminates work or closes factories.
“The Big Three have closed 65 plants over the last 20 years,” Fain said August 1. “That’s been as devastating for our own towns as it has been for us. We have the right to defend our communities from the corporate greed that’s killing so many cities and towns.”
The UAW is proposing a “Working Family Protection Program” that requires companies to keep UAW members employed in the event of a plant closure or financial downturn in their community.
‘We Do The Same Job’
Brittany Slemmons, a tier-two worker, came to the picket line with her daughter and said that she’s ready to strike to end tiers: “We should all be equal. We do the same job. We work the same hours.” She has been at the plant for eight years.
Aaron Crawford hired in early in the pandemic in 2020. He said he wants to fight for pension and cost-of-living increases, a raise pegged to inflation that the union gave up during the Great Recession. But he said he’s also fighting for retirees. Workers hired since 2007 don’t get retiree health care.
“Even though I’m still young into this career path, I’m also looking out for the older workers that have retired to get better health care,” Crawford said.
Katrina Bailey has put in 30 years at the Kentucky Truck plant and is looking to retire in the next couple of years. “This plant is getting ready to face a mass exodus between now and probably another three years,” she said. “Because the bulk of our workers have almost 30 years in, [this contract fight] is generational—securing both sides of the fence if you will—for the newly hired workers as well as the ones that have been here for some time.”
Bailey supports ending tiers to bring union members together because “a house that’s divided can’t stand.” She said she’s been saving up to strike. “Am I afraid? I’m not.” She pointed to the pin on her overalls: “I don’t want to strike, but I will.”
She referred to a quote from Malcolm X, which Fain has repeated on a number of occasions: “Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won’t do to get it, or what he doesn’t believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn’t believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire…or preserve his freedom.”
Bailey watched from Louisville how auto workers enforced picket lines during the 2019 GM strike and said she’s ready to do the same at Ford. In the event of a strike, she said, “We’re out here fighting for our rights. Don’t you come over here trying to put in an application at this time!”
Fighting Mood
Many issues brought people out to the picket line, but the unmistakable was that the union’s top leadership and membership are in a fighting mood the likes of which the UAW hasn’t seen in decades.
UAW Local 862 President Todd Dunn said he hadn’t seen such a turnout in his 28 years in the union. “Half the time we can’t get two people together,” said Dunn. “But what you’re doing right here today is a total commitment. No matter where we’re at—if you’re entry level, middle level, side level… it doesn’t matter. We are one union.”
Local 862 represents about 12,000 workers between Ford’s Kentucky Truck Plant and the Louisville Assembly Plant where workers build Ford Escapes and Lincoln Corsairs.
“A lot of members here at Local 862 said they are tired of being left in the dark. It’s time to connect the top [of the union], all the way down. And we’ve done that,” Dunn said.
The bonds of solidarity also stretched to other unions, with UPS Teamsters fresh off their contract fight joining the practice picket.
“We just took on UPS and won,” said James DeWeese, central region assistant director of the Teamsters and business agent for Local 89. “And now we are standing with you.”
“Our purpose here today is to show Ford Motor Company that while we appreciate their paycheck, we also work long and hard to be treated fairly,” said Dunn. “They owe it to us. They can’t do it without us. And we are the union that keeps their Ford Motor Company alive.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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After 127 years of operation, San Francisco’s beloved Anchor Brewing Company shut down operations earlier this year. Bought by Sapporo in 2017, Anchor Brewing’s revenues had been declining for years before the call was made to liquidate the business. But workers are fighting back to save their jobs—and this historic city icon. Patrick Machel and Kieran Engemann of Anchor Brewing speak with Staff Reporter Mel Buer about their union’s campaign to buy out the brewery and reopen it as a co-op.
Studio Production: Adam Coley
Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back to another episode of The Real News Network podcast. My name is Mel Buer and I am a staff reporter here at the Real News Network. I am so glad that you’re back with us. The Real News is an independent, viewer-supported nonprofit media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads, and we don’t put our reporting behind paywalls. To stay up to date on the important stories that we’re covering, sign up for our free newsletter at therealnews.com/sign-up. Follow us on social media and consider becoming a monthly sustainer at therealnews.com/donate.
Anchor Brewing first opened its stores in San Francisco in 1896 and is widely considered to be one of America’s pioneers in craft brewing. The beloved California institution has survived the peaks and troughs of extreme economic conditions in the United States as well as prohibition and two world wars. But according to spokespeople for Anchor’s parent company, Japanese beer giant, Sapporo, the brewery could not survive the economic fallout from the pandemic and announced last month that it would cease operations after 127 years.
Anchor’s unionized workforce represented by International Longshore and Warehouse Union, Local 6 released a statement via the union that read in part, “To Sapporo, Anchor Steam was just another line item in the budget of their multi-billion dollar corporation and an asset to be cut up and sold. But it is the workers in the city of San Francisco that will suffer the consequences. In an effort to save the brewery and keep a respected San Francisco institution from dissolution, Anchor workers put their heads together and are making an attempt to purchase the brewery from Sapporo and turn it into a worker coop. Here with me to talk about this incredible story are Patrick Machel and Kieran Engemann. Patrick is a production lead, an Anchor Brewing Union shop steward, and Kieran works in the packaging department. Thanks for coming on the show, guys.
Patrick Machel:
Thank you.
Mel Buer:
To begin our conversation, I would like to get our audience up to speed on the organizing that’s been happening at Anchor Brewing over the last couple of years. Can you just give us the broad strokes of your unionization at the brewery and what’s been going on up to the announcement of the sale?
Patrick Machel:
Yeah. From the beginning, we did our underground campaign around 2018-ish. Went public around 2019, got our first contract in about seven months. Pretty historic contract because we’re the first craft brew union in the country. So we didn’t really have a lot of examples to take, so we had to essentially create our own contract through just what we were doing. And then that was a three-year contract. Then we just got our second contract about a month or two months before the news came out to the public that they were shutting down. That was a longer fight. We were ready in July of the year before, pretty much told the company that, “Hey, we’re ready. Let’s do this because it’s going to be a long contract fight. We want to change a lot of things, and they denied it until January thinking that they could get a contract done in three months.”
It didn’t. We ended up going four or five months, so we were out of a contract for a little while and eventually we had to get a mediator into the negotiations and… Someone is vacuuming. So we have to get the mediator and here we are today. It’s closing down. Took us by surprise. We knew the writing on the wall anyways, but just the amount of… Or the quickness that it happened almost seems like a big middle finger to the working people there. But that’s broad stroke.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. It seems like just from the brief bit here about how the union contract was kicked down the road, the negotiations took so long. It doesn’t seem like the company was dragging its feet for the express purpose that they knew the sale was coming down the pike. Do you even want to speculate on that or what’s your sense of that from the shop floor?
Kieran Engemann:
I mean, I don’t want to speak for Patrick, but I know that it felt at times that there was just not a lot of clear communication and not a lot of clear direction out of higher management. That’s just the feeling from… Patrick could have a much better understanding because he’s there talking to them constantly, but for most of the guys on the brewery floor that aren’t involved in all the Caucus, Inc., that’s just your day-to-day kind of feels like that. There’s a massive gap between how we can communicate with the people upstairs, how they communicate with us. And I think you saw it affect a lot of things, mainly like the contract negotiation. I don’t know if it was necessarily malice, but it definitely just seemed unorganized.
Patrick Machel:
I feel like they were dragging their feet and they wanted to get it done and clean really quickly, not understanding how much we were invested into trying to change it the last month or the meeting that they had with us saying that they’re closing down and they’re enacting… Or we got the WARN Act thing, so we got our severances and stuff like that is they were saying that they were trying to sell it for a year before, but we never heard any news of this happening until that month.
I’m pretty sure they knew and they just were playing dumb to us the whole time. The people that were managing Anchor weren’t really Sapporo employees. They were still Anchor employees. And I feel like Sapporo kept them in the dark too. Or if there was people that knew what was going on, they’re being assholes about the information. But they wanted to do a wage freeze for their first economic proposal and then do a 1%-1% raise for three years, and we were like, “No. The inflation has gone crazy. We’re doing multiple jobs. We had to learn automated robots.” Kieran helped me out on setting that automated robot up in the morning, but it’s way more involved of a process now with half of whatever the staff was in the first contract. So of course we wanted to change things, but the fact that they wanted to do a wage freeze, really glad that we pushed back against that because then we would’ve had nothing and then they would’ve closed and we would’ve gotten no raises whatsoever.
Mel Buer:
So the sudden closure announcement comes down last month from the various Twitter posts and really just the response across the internet. It came as a surprise to pretty much everyone that this was going to happen. I mean, this is a San Francisco institution. This brewery has been around through the San Francisco earthquake, through World Wars, through prohibition, through all these, the Great Depression, through all the sorts of things that you would consider to be life altering economic crises. And the response that these books people are giving to journalists who are asking questions is that the pandemic economy is finally the thing that’s causing it to shut its doors. What was the union’s response? I mean, obviously this came as a shock to everyone. As far as I know, The Chronicle was putting out articles before you even got notified, right?
Patrick Machel:
Yeah. 2:00 in the morning, which I guess we found out that that’s when Japan’s market closes. It’s around 5:00 or 6:00 PM over on their side, but they got it before we did. So my phone died pretty much that whole week because everybody was reaching out. The responses that the company was giving like a lazy response, in my opinion.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. What do you think is really going on here in terms of the closure? Do you really think that this is due to the economic conditions or… Again, I’m not trying to get you to speculate, but it does seem a little weird. This is a multi-billion dollar corporation that just won’t… What do you think their reasoning is?
Patrick Machel:
Kieran, do you want to answer that? I figured you’d want to.
Kieran Engemann:
Yeah. I mean, I guess really it would be speculation on my part, but it feels like it’s a multi-billion dollar corporation. Like you said, they have plenty of other breweries. They had just bought Stone, which just expanded. It’s not like Sapporo was necessarily hurting. If they really wanted to try and pump life into it, I think they could have. The funds I’m sure were there. I think it just became more of a headache than they wanted it to be. And they also had just recently purchased Stone, so they had another area to set up a headquarters in the United States. They have three Sleeman Breweries in Canada, so they have plenty of locations in North America. I think they kind of just got disinterested and wanted to move on.
Patrick Machel:
And the thing is, with our brewery, it’s a very unique brewery. We have parts in there that were made in West Berlin, and that line has been running for decades and decades just kind of improving on itself. And the processes that we do are kind of antiquated. And the thing is, with our company, there’s a love of the craft of what it is and an understanding of what we mean to San Francisco and its culture that beer tastes change. It’s the industry, and it’s kind of in a downward spiral right now in breweries of our size. But it almost felt like Sapporo had no idea what Anchor was, didn’t really care about whatever the history was.
It’s pretty clear with that rebrand that they didn’t understand what type of people bought this beer. And with that rebrand, we were already getting heat for Sapporo buying us out because that’s like a selling out kind of situation. But then the rebrand goes and it’s like, “Well, there goes any diehard Anchor fans that we had.” Right?
Mel Buer:
Right.
Patrick Machel:
It feels like they didn’t take any care or time or effort into what we were as a workforce and what we were as a company.
Mel Buer:
Right. But certainly I would assume that a lot of that is a motivating factor for the workers coming together to try and buy out Anchor from Sapporo and turn it into a worker coop. Do you want to kind of expand a little bit more on your reasons for doing that beyond… Because we’re not just talking about saving the brewery for the sake of the jobs of these individuals. We’re also talking about reaching back into the community and really trying to preserve an institution that caress about the San Francisco community and cares about its place in that community. And it certainly feels that way in how you’re starting to fundraise for this, but you just want to give a bit more about the motivations for even going to the corporation in the first place.
Patrick Machel:
You want to take that?
Kieran Engemann:
Yeah. I’ll do it. I can.
Patrick Machel:
We’re going to let you.
Kieran Engemann:
Yeah. I think one of the driving forces about trying to go into the coop is wherever you are in the beer world when you work at Anchor, I was not a huge craft beer person. I’m not very particular about beer, never had a position in a brewery before, never did any home brewing, but it doesn’t take you very long when you get into Anchor to feel that historic love for the place. I think a lot of us just couldn’t stand to let it go like that. I mean, there was no lead up. It just suddenly dropped on us.
Sure, we saw certain things that made it look very apparent that that was the future of the brewery, but it’s like we never got a chance to do anything. And we have a lot of legacy employees. That’s what we call guys who were there for Fritz’s ownership and his whole thing when he owned it, and what those employees pass down to you as a new guy coming in is to really care about what you’re doing, whether it’s making boxes, taking slip sheets off. Whether you’re in fermentation, take pride in it.
Because every piece of the puzzle affects everything down the line, whether you’re making boxes, whether you’re making the beer. I think when you’re constantly taught that when you work there, you’re not going to just let the doors shut. And ultimately because we are constantly the ones working on all of it, and we’re the ones picking up the pieces when things go awry, I think we all felt like, “Hey, we basically run this brewery anyways, so why are we going to let it go into the hands of another corporation? We don’t need this hassle. We don’t need this headache. What can we do to make sure that we’re still there?”
I think it’s surprising. I was in our first meeting that Pat and the union set up about whether or not we would want a coop. I was surprised how many people went just because some people had pretty openly expressed like, “Hey, I don’t know. This place has warned me out in the last few years.” And reasonably so we had a lot to deal with, but just about everyone showed up and guys who were very historically not pro union were immediately like, “I don’t care what it takes, I’ll join the union. I’ll do this, this and that. Whatever it takes to make sure this place stays open.” So there’s just a lot of congruency in the fact that all of us take the utmost pride in this place and we can’t stand to see it close.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. Patrick, what was the process for, you have this meeting, you have seen that folks are expressing a willingness, an ability to go all in on this worker coop proposition, right? What’s next? You send a letter to the company. What is the company response been like? Or where are we at in terms of how did the process get started and how do you feel about the fundraising, things like that?
Patrick Machel:
Yeah. So there was a couple of questions in there that I might miss, but essentially it’s always been a running joke on what if we own this place? And I think when the closure happened that the gears in my head were just like, I’m not even going to think that this is actually a reality and just try and push for this. I asked our international organizer, Evan McLaughlin, “Yo, what would it take to do a coop?” And he was like, “I don’t know, but let’s go talk to people.” And it pretty much was hitting the ground running. We were learning new things every day. Every week the group turns a little bit bigger. There are people that used to work there that were in pretty high positions that we reached out to and asked if they would be willing to help us out.
I mean, we’re production workers. We don’t know exactly how to run a business. I mean, not yet at least. But having that kind of experience at the table and what Kieran said earlier with people that were pretty anti-union coming into the fold and seeing that these are union workers that are starting this process, that they’re behind us with it. We did give notice to Sapporo that like, “Hey, we are trying to buy this. What do you want from us? “And they gave a response with, “If you have a qualified individual or something like that, I’m assuming a lawyer, then we could talk about it being serious.”
So we sent them a bankruptcy lawyer, and then they dragged their feet for a little bit, I think a week, which the news came out and it was like three weeks later we’re done. So a week is a lot. It’s very short time to get around to this. But they gave out some financial information. We know of two investors, and then we asked for it so that we can make a competitive bid and actually start the fundraising for it. We don’t know how much it really is worth or how much Sapporo is trying to get rid of it for. And they didn’t respond. And then out of nowhere they’re just like, “We’re closing this to anybody and everybody. It’s too close to the August 1st date, blah, blah, blah.” And then we haven’t heard anything pretty much since.
Our bankruptcy lawyer has been talking to the assignee because it isn’t technically a bankruptcy like a chapter seven or 11, it’s something that they use called ABC process which stands for the assignment to the benefit of creditors, which is a quicker, faster way of pretty much what a bankruptcy is. But I guess our bankruptcy lawyer has been talking to the assignee and they’ve been trying to establish some contact.
I have another call after this that we’re setting up a bank account to start fundraising and getting a GoFundMe. We already have an LLC for the new company trying to move as quickly as possible, but we’re kind of in the dark. And the fact that they gave it to two investors that were basically like, “I got 20 mil.” “All right. Well, here’s all our financial information, and then your own workers ask for that and you drag your feet and then you act like it’s not a real attempt at buying,” it goes to show how much that they actually respected us.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. It seems like they’re just not taking it seriously at all, and it is a serious business proposition. Making the decision to assume the responsibility of a business like this. And converted into a worker coop is not something that you take lightly and it definitely shows how much you and your fellow coworkers really care about the place that you’ve built careers in and you want to see that institution continue.
So in terms of raising funds, you sort of appeal to the wider community you have have the idea to do more crowdfunding. Is there any other funding fundraisers or things that you’re doing that you can talk about now that are part of that plan? Or is this really going to be something that you really want to really lean on the community’s support to help you accomplish?
Patrick Machel:
Yeah. So it’s interesting because we were talking about coops and actually buying a business. There’s a lot of legalities that are involved with it. I can’t just put it into my bank account because then there’s problems legally with that, which is why some of this process is a little bit longer than what we thought. We just want to make sure that when people are putting money into this or helping us crowdfund to it, we have to be very clear that this isn’t investing in the company yet.
This is just only helping us out with certain fees. And if we don’t explain that to people, then we can get into a lot of trouble with that. But that’s why we’ve teamed up with some solid lawyers like Project Equity specializes in doing this kind of thing as well as Tuttle Law Group which is also helping us out tremendously on this, that they have been essentially running us through what we need to do.
We’re working on a business plan. I think we have a meeting later this week about it, but funding wise, I’m assuming it’s going to happen probably in this week and we’ll probably put it out on one of our social medias. But other than that, we have a little team of people also trying to work with other breweries to try and bring it back to the craft of collaborating with breweries. Because once you go corporate, you’re kind of just like, “We don’t care about anything, we only care about our profits.” And the fact that we’re trying as workers trying to reach out to other breweries and be like, “Hey, we’re trying to buy this back,” you want to make something.
We call it a solidarity, which is based off a recipe from way back in the day that used corn as the main ingredient because it was a lot cheaper that we feel like it made sense for other breweries to tap in on this and then they could sell it if they want, but also put proceeds into this fund that we’re going to set up. It’s a fun way to get your local community on board. We’ve been telling people to reach out to our Twitter or email to get the recipe from us, and then obviously they could tweak it. It’s their brewery.
We don’t have a facility to brew it, so we can’t really do it. But yeah, that’s the major thing I think we’re trying to work on to put it out there that we’re not craft brewers, but we’re a craft brewery and we’re trying to bring it back to whatever its roots are.
Mel Buer:
Right. Kieran, sort of a follow-up question to that then. What has been the public’s response to this whole effort? Obviously on social media, you saw quite a bit of shock from a lot of people. How has that translated to support from the community at large in San Francisco?
Kieran Engemann:
It’s pretty funny because we were all kind of taken aback the first couple days when we announced the closure. It felt like the entire city of San Francisco was inside PTAPs buying whatever they could. They wanted to show like, “Hey, we appreciate merchandise, we appreciate you.” People were wearing shirts with pretty tasteful messages to Sapporo, which was pretty entertaining. But it happened so quickly. Just about as quickly as us announcing the shutdown, everybody was talking about how they couldn’t believe it. They wanted to support us. I mean, it’s up and down. I mean, my girlfriend’s family is from Wisconsin, and there’s people in the Midwest who they don’t get Anchor that consistently or anything, but they’re like, “I can’t believe this. It used to be the thing where if you went to California, you would come back with Christmas sale.”
They knew about Steam. They understood Steam. They really appreciated it. Her dad actually sent the family photos of him buying the last two variety packs in their grocery store.
Mel Buer:
Wow.
Kieran Engemann:
So it’s just like everybody wants to know what they can do. One of our family friends who lives actually pretty close by, grew up in SF his whole life. He’s very vocal and he’s like, “However, I can help and get in and support this, help fund it.” And everybody loves the fact that it’s a coop. I mean, beyond just saving Anchor, everybody is so hyped about the idea of us cooping it. I think if there was rumblings of a new investor like a new Fritz or something like that, people would be like, “That’s awesome, sweet. Anchor gets to stay alive.” But I think the fact that it’s the workers’ push, it’s a coop, it makes everyone feel like they get to have their hands in it, and it makes everyone feel like Anchor really is their beer.
They’re just as much a part of the brewery as anyone else. They’re just as much a part of the history. And I think that gets people riled up more than anything to try and make sure that this doesn’t go down. I mean, our Instagram Anchor Union SF does a great job of plugging everybody who shouts us out. And you’ve seen some really creative stuff. Some guy just made a song about it, which is pretty cool. Up and down the streets, everybody is about it. My neighbor I see walking around in a yellow Drink Steam hoodie a lot, which is pretty hilarious.
Everybody came out to support. And I hope it doesn’t die away. It doesn’t feel like it. I mean, we’re three weeks removed, two weeks removed, which isn’t that long. But I think that’s long enough for Fever to die off, and I think people are just as about it as they were the day was announced.
Mel Buer:
Patrick, anything to add? I mean, I really want to drive home the point here that we’re not just talking about saving a brewery for the sake of good beer. It really is a sort of worker led movement to really kind of save a cultural institution in the city. And I think a lot of folks across the country see a story like this, and I don’t want to reduce it to the underdog against the corporations kind of story. You know what I mean? But there is something really magical and beautiful about this idea, especially in the current wave of labor organizing in this country, the working people against these faceless corporations that want to break up communities. You see a story like this and you can’t help but just really hope that there’s some positivity that’s going to come at the end of this very long, arduous sort of road.
Patrick Machel:
I started actually at Anchor as a bar back and worked my way up to a lead at the brewery itself is two different buildings right across from each other. So I know that bar pretty well. When they were getting pretty much murdered by the amount of people that were showing up, there’s a line around the block for pretty much two and a half weeks straight that I was there as auxiliary to pretty much customers would ask them questions. And they’re trying their best to get as much beer and as much merch out as possible that they’re like, “I can’t answer these fucking questions. It’s too much.” Well, I was there helping out and answering questions to people. It is.
There’s this amount of community involvement now that it could be just because we’re closing that they might not ever see it again. But there’s a lot of people that I talked to that were just like, “Oh, I totally used to drink you guys, but I faltered off.” But now drinking it again, I forget how crisp and how actually solid this beer is. And it’s like that’s all that it was. It’s a pretty middle of the road dad type of beer. And it should have been marketed in that way that’s like, “Look, we’re not trying to be some crazy ass IPA, milkshake IPA kind of bullshit.”
We’re good at what we do because it’s what we’ve been doing for a century and almost a half. And that should have been marketed in that way to have people understand that this is why you want to drink this beer. And then on top of that, it’s like we’ve been in Potrero Hill for since ’65, I think. So we’ve been in that community for such a long time that even before I worked there, I was working at a coffee shop in the same neighborhood. I was able to watch that whole neighborhood change in just a short span of 10 years. The Anchor has always been there. It hasn’t changed at all other than adding that tapper, which we were a little late on that whole craze, but we’ve created a community there. And there were regulars there that they never went anywhere else. We became friends with them. I’ve seen kids grow up there.
I’ve been invited to dug out level seats with a regular at the Giants game. We were part of the community and we still kind of are. You walk around and in the city, people know you like, “Oh, you’re one of the Anchor guys.” You know what I mean?” I mean, I think the fact that we’re not going down without a fight and with all this doom scroll that San Francisco is in right now, that it’s pretty poetic that this place that is a majority of people are multiple generations, San Franciscan here, that we’re not going down without a fight. We’re not going to be part of the headlines like you guys think that we will be.
Mel Buer:
Right. That’s about it that I have for my questions. Do you guys, either of you have any final thoughts, things that you want my audience to really take away from this conversation that maybe we haven’t touched on?
Patrick Machel:
Social medias, if you want me to plug those, I don’t know.
Mel Buer:
Sure. Yeah.
Patrick Machel:
So Twitter is where we’re releasing a lot of the news that we get because it’s pretty hard to try and release it on every platform all the time, and you don’t want to be like stale. You know what I mean? But our Twitter is Anchor Union SF. Our Instagram is Anchor Union. Our Gmail is Anchor Union at Gmail, and our Facebook is Anchor Union. So it’s pretty, “Uh-oh, there it goes. He he’s out.” So those are those. And then on top of that, we’re very proud of what we do. And even if this kind of falls through the fact that we were able to put our name in there and actually do it and try as a message to everybody else that has this happen, if you really care about your workplace, organize your workers and work together to come.
I mean, it’d be sick to buy your own business, but also just organize yourselves to get a better equality? What is it? A better wage, better life. There we go. We’re very proud that we were union.
Mel Buer:
Right. And hopefully that can continue with this coop. Hopefully you are successful. For our listeners who are interested in the updates of this ongoing sort of saga about trying to buy Anchor Brewing from the corporate Giant, the Twitter account is the way to go. That’s all the time we have today. Thank you so much for joining us, and I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me. I think this is a fantastic story. I currently live in Los Angeles and I’m heading up north at the end of the week, so I’ll be in your neighborhood for a good weekend.
Patrick Machel:
Sick.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, I’m excited. It’s for Cal Extreme is where I’m headed up to Northern California. It’s a pinball expo.
Patrick Machel:
I was going to say, if you’re up there on the 26th, Enterprise Brewing is releasing the first Solidarity Ale.
Mel Buer:
Well, hey, I’ll make a note of it in our show notes so that folks know that that’s going to happen. That’s it for us here at the Real News Network podcast. Once again, I’m Mel Buer. Follow us on your favorite social media and don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter so we can continue bringing you independent ad-free journalism. Until next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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Under the cover of Internet invisibility, companies around the globe are using online gig platforms to break labor laws and violate human rights. The so-called gig economy (more akin to digital piecework) is exacerbating poverty and inequality, particularly in the Global South, by circumventing existing labor standards and imposing harsh working conditions and low wages on millions of workers. I was one of those workers, and I was recently fired, after seven years, for speaking up.
The so-called gig economy (more akin to digital piecework) is exacerbating poverty and inequality, particularly in the Global South, by circumventing existing labor standards and imposing harsh working conditions and low wages on millions of workers. I was one of those workers, and I was recently fired, after seven years, for speaking up.
I had been working as a researcher at the New York-based company Ask Wonder in order to supplement my income as a freelance journalist in Mexico. The company provides personalized research reports to mostly corporate clients, who pay $150-200 (USD) per hour, or a custom rate, depending on the plan they’re on. While most full-time staff and executives are based in the US, almost all researchers live in Global South countries and earn $12.75 to $21.25 per hour, depending on tiers determined by internal auditing (those with an auditing score of 19/20 or more are paid the highest rates). The people doing the auditing are fellow freelance researchers, who score research based on set criteria.
Workers like myself were being paid just 10-15% of what clients paid for the research reports we wrote. The pay includes casual loading—a payment that is made in addition to one’s base wage in lieu of job security and basic benefits like sick days, retirement, health, and maternity leave. It includes rush fees, a standard practice in freelancing to compensate for work that has to be completed within 24-48 hours. After taking out casual loading and rush fees, the real base hourly pay rate amounted to $8.40 to $14. The research is high-level and specialized, requiring years of experience using health databases and marketing reports, and most workers have one or multiple degrees.
To get paid work, we would first have to join an online dashboard queue and wait for an assignment. I’d often enter the queue at around the 34th position, and I would routinely have to wait 16-20 hours before making it to the front of the queue, at which point I would be assigned, typically, just three hours of work. Often, I would reach the end of the queue late at night and would have to log off to sleep and start over in the morning, so it was common to wait up to four days before being assigned work. Other times, I would accept work at 11PM on a Sunday night, or get up at 5AM to finish a report. Not knowing how fast the queue would move, I would be watching it all day, afraid to leave the house to pay a bill or run an errand; I would regularly put my open laptop on a chair in the bathroom when I showered just in case work arrived.
The dash queue functions as an algorithmic mechanism by which gig and digital companies can shift enterprise risk onto workers themselves, with no corresponding compensation. Instead of the company bearing the responsibility for fluctuating client requests or sales numbers, workers bear the burdens of adjusting to those fluctuations, which translate to erratic work schedules, variable workloads and take-home pay week to week, etc. Digital platforms promote these burdens as benefits under the banner of worker “flexibility.” Workers like myself are meant to accept the lack of social security, holidays, sick days, certainty of work, etc. in exchange for choosing when we work. But at Ask Wonder, we could not choose when we would be assigned work; and when we were given an assignment, we typically had no more than seven hours to complete it. That’s what “flexibility” meant for us.
Precarious living and working conditions in Puebla, Mexico. Photo: Tamara Pearson. Gig workers are parents (usually women), migrants without access to formal work (in Argentina and Chile, over 70% of gig workers are migrant workers), underpaid professionals who need more income, people working from home due to mental or physical disabilities, and unemployed people covering costs while searching for work. It is these already-vulnerable people who bear the brunt of fluctuating or decreased sales for companies like Ask Wonder.
Workers like myself are meant to accept the lack of social security, holidays, sick days, certainty of work, etc. in exchange for choosing when we work. But at Ask Wonder, we could not choose when we would be assigned work; and when we were given an assignment, we typically had no more than seven hours to complete it.
There’s also a lot of unpaid labor involved in gig work. For instance, we were often made (or else we would lose our jobs) to complete unpaid training and testing exercises, even though labor laws in the US and in most countries require that workers be paid for such obligatory training. Some freelancers, moreover, were doing customer service work on a 40-hour-per-week schedule, without receiving any full-time benefits, which is also illegal. Then the company would hold voluntary Friday trivia sessions to try to create “community” and loyalty.
In mid-July, the Ask Wonder senior director posted the following message in the researchers’ Slack channel: “In today’s competitive environment, you either change or get left behind… the question is, will you? Your value here is your brand of creativity, the ideas you have for our business, the strategies you have for research… It’s your choice whether or not you believe we… value you, and whether or not you get left behind.”
I responded to that post, reminding the senior director that there are tangible, measurable ways a company demonstrates how much it values its workers, and that it is not simply a matter of perception for workers who chose “whether or not [to] believe” their employer values them. “Pay, dash waits and other material conditions are core attributes of” the workplace relationship and determine if we feel valued, I wrote. Many of my fellow workers expressed support for the content of my response.
Three days later, I went to log into the dash queue and the Slack channel, only to find I’d been blocked from both, after working for the company for over seven years. An hour later, I got an email from Ask Wonder. With no further explanation, the email curtly informed me that “Our journey together… has come to an end. We’ve chosen to release you from our contract effective immediately.”
Digital abuse of the Global South
The online work market is estimated to be worth $5 billion (USD) and served by 48 million workers, most of whom are concentrated in the Global South. India supplies 25% of web-based labor, but garners just 3% of global revenue from digital labor platforms. The profits are instead channeled to the Global North. A lot of US companies are outsourcing their tech and digital work to Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
India supplies 25% of web-based labor, but garners just 3% of global revenue from digital labor platforms.
While companies in the US and Europe rake in enormous profits, they are able to justify and exploit atrocious conditions for digital workers under the cover provided by the normalization and acceptance of poverty in the Global South, coupled with the myth of lower costs of living. Sadly, this extractive hoarding is nothing new: Rich countries drained $152 trillion (USD) in raw materials and human labor from the Global South between 1960 and 2021, to say nothing of the untold riches and resources that were pillaged during centuries of colonization prior to that.
Living in a Global South country is not cheaper than living in the Global North. Many expenses, like online subscriptions, cost the same no matter where you live. Imported goods such as non-perishable food, hygiene products, and electronics also cost the same. Healthcare costs vary according to each country’s public policies, and according to individual needs and demographics (healthcare is more expensive for women).
A water truck ready to pump water into local’s water tanks, in Puebla, Mexico. Photo: Tamara Pearson Rent is usually cheaper in the Global South, but quality of life is also much lower. I love where I live, but I am also accustomed to sewage overflowing from a manhole at the main entrance to my building, I can’t sleep at night because water trucks are pumping water at 1AM, and I shower twice a week due to the lack of water. Add to that the daily reality of the mafia, who control the streets here, the impunity for perpetrators of femicide, corruption, and more, and you can see how lower rents here are offset by other “costs of living.” Exploitative and abusive work conditions only make things worse.Poorer countries have also been harder hit by inflation, climate change, and food scarcity. Lower-income earners have been more affected by inflation, too, because they spend more of their income on essential goods and services, which have had greater price increases than non-essentials (as Barbara Ehrenreich famously put it, it’s quite expensive to be poor).
Online companies use gig work and the Global South to dodge work laws
Under Article 330 of Mexico’s amended Federal Work Law, remote or “telework” companies have to provide computers and ergonomic chairs for their workers, and pay for their internet and a proportional amount of home electricity bills. Many other countries have similar laws and regulations concerning paid training, overtime, higher rates for weekend work, or obligatory social security contributions, even for casual workers.
Living in a Global South country is not cheaper than living in the Global North. Many expenses, like online subscriptions, cost the same no matter where you live. Imported goods such as non-perishable food, hygiene products, and electronics also cost the same. Healthcare costs vary according to each country’s public policies, and according to individual needs and demographics.
Instead of meeting their legal and ethical obligations, gig and digital companies use the cover and impunity of cross-border hiring to offload workspace costs to workers, and to offload management costs to auditing, rating, and dash tech services. Ask Wonder and other such companies dodge their responsibilities by classifying workers as “self-employed,” yet such workers are denied the autonomy attributed to entrepreneurs or genuinely independent contractors when companies use evaluations and algorithmic work assignment and monitoring systems like dash queues. Small business owners set their own prices, while companies from Wonder to Uber decide pay rates, because they are, in fact, employers—they’ve just found, through technology, a convenient means of evading all the responsibilities of employers, including adhering to basic labor laws or internationally recognized human rights. Firing someone for speaking up about pay rates, for instance, is a violation of the right to free speech (Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
15 articles a day
Mateo is another professional in Mexico who had to turn to gig work to supplement his income. (Out of fear of retaliation from his former employer, Mateo’s real name has been replaced with a pseudonym.) For TRNN, I interviewed him in July. Mateo was hired by Alivia Media via LinkedIn in 2021, and he worked for them for almost a year. Headquartered in Miami, Florida, the content company hires people from around Latin America.
Mateo was initially told to write 10 short articles a day, six days a week, for which he would be paid $500 (USD) a month, with no other benefits. “As the months passed, the amount of work increased, but not the pay. Eventually, they were asking for 15 articles, and they increased the requirements for each article; wanting more links, more SEO,” Mateo said.
In addition to the articles,“They also made me watch videos all day… The money wasn’t enough to cover my expenses,” he said, explaining that the company made him watch the videos and Facebook content so the view numbers would go up.
“I felt very exploited,” he continued. “I basically had to work 12 or 13 hours a day. The boss was very rude. And one day, they fired me, because I updated some of the older articles. They tried to not pay me for the last month—but I spoke up, and they did.”
Insider Inc. (formerly Business Insider), the New York-based, majority German-owned media company, has also been using underhanded strategies to deny its Mexican workers basic rights. Workers recently took to social media to denounce Insider’s labor practices, saying that the company uses harassment and intimidation to avoid its severance pay obligations, that it doesn’t pay overtime, that racial and class-based discrimination is rampant, that it pays a lower wage than it advertises for, and that it even registers workers as having a lower salary than they really do when filing information with the social security system, which means the company has to pay less.
A job posting from TTEC, a US customer service tech company. There are countless other examples. US and Canadian call center companies frequently seek remote bilingual workers in Mexico, whom they can pay much less. TTEC, a US customer service tech company, recently advertised openings for workers “available to work any shift, including nights and weekends,” for a “maximum” monthly pay of 9,700 pesos, or $560 (USD). As Kevin, a gig worker in Kenya doing transcription work, told Alex J. Wood and Mark Graham at the New Internationalist, “It’s so insecure… unless you have ten clients; then you can breathe.” A Nigerian man working as a virtual assistant for a US company told Graham and Wood that working all night and keeping pace with irregular work hours was leaving him exhausted.
The issue isn’t that companies have a global workforce; the issue is that they discriminate by paying people in other countries much less and making them work under worse conditions, even though those same pay rates and working conditions wouldn’t be tolerated by full timers in the same countries where those companies are based.
Covertly creating poverty and disposable workers
A few months ago at Wonder, one of the administrators posted a survey in the gig workers’ Slack channel asking for feedback on their plan to begin a monthly competition to reward good work. Because responses were displayed anonymously, a number of people responded truthfully, after months and years of silence: they didn’t want competitions, they wanted decent pay.
The precariousness of the work, and the devaluing of workers (despite the company claiming the contrary) reflected in both pay and the way it would so quickly fire people, cultivates a constant state of fear and self-censorship. That, combined with the largely invisible nature of digital Global South workers, makes it hard for digital workers to organize and defend themselves, and US-based digital companies are taking advantage of that situation.
By abusing Global South workers and paying them much less, these digital companies are reinforcing poverty and magnifying inequality. Borders, supposedly irrelevant to the Internet, are cemented by such pay gaps. Increased labor precariousness has been demonstrated to increase poverty, while informal employment—persistently high in the Global South, and severely exacerbated by the digital economy—clearly contributes to inequality.
There is no law of nature that low prices and low wages in Mexico go hand in hand, or that one necessarily causes (and justifies) the other. These conditions are the result of global power imbalances. Dignified living for everyone involves ending poverty, rather than entitled discourse that the Global South deserves less.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
When Chris Hudson saw a heat advisory in the forecast for the Portland, Oregon, area earlier this month, he sprang into action. Things were about to get sweaty in his vegan food truck, and turning on its 75-pound deep fryer and 500-degree-Fahrenheit grill seemed like a bad idea.
“We are hoping to make it through the next few days by offering a cold menu,” he told his business’s followers on Instagram. Instead of grilling his famous meat-free burgers, he would serve a new “chik’n salad sando” and a “BBQ chik’n wrap.” In lieu of fries, chips. Plus, for dessert, several flavors of dairy-free milkshakes and soft-serve ice cream with chocolate dip.
The new menu was meant to tamp down temperatures inside Gnarlys, the popular food truck Hudson opened in 2021. But when the mercury climbs into the upper 90s and beyond — as it did earlier this month, breaking August records for the Portland area — there’s only so much he can do. “We were still at, like, 102 in the cart,” he told Grist, even with a portable AC unit and a fan running around the clock, and with all the windows open.
A food truck is basically “a metal box,” he added. “The sun is beating down on this metal box.”
Hudson is just one of many food truck owners across the U.S. who are struggling to contend with longer and hotter summers. This year alone has seen thousands of daily temperature records fall, and a brutal series of enduring heat waves has made this summer the hottest on record for more than a dozen cities in the South. Among major cities nationwide, heat waves are now happening three times more often than they used to in the 1960s.
The trend is particularly pronounced in Portland, a historically temperate city with more than 1,000 food trucks and carts, one of the highest numbers per capita in the country. All those mobile food businesses are dealing with a spike in the frequency, duration, and intensity of heat waves even more dramatic than what other U.S. cities are facing. Portland used to get about a week’s worth of 90-degree days every year; now it gets 27. Residents spend more than three times as many hours enduring a heat index above 90 degrees, sharply increasing the risk of heat-related illness.
“I didn’t think I would have to worry about heat in Portland,” said Hudson, who moved to the city from Chico, California in 2019. He had ruled out his second-choice city — Austin, Texas — because of its high temperatures. But now in Portland, he said, “we’re dealing with 100-something days every year … I’m worried to the point where I don’t really want to continue to be in a food truck next summer.”
Inside the Gnarlys food truck.
Courtesy of Gnarlys
Portland’s most recent heat wave reached its peak in the afternoon of Monday, August 14. Around 4 p.m. that day, the thermometer at the Portland International Airport read 108 degrees Fahrenheit, the second-hottest temperature ever recorded in the city.
But that was just the beginning for the city’s food trucks. Hours before then, as early as 9 in the morning, the temperature inside Rad Magic Subs had already hit 108 degrees. Justin Miller, who opened the submarine sandwich food truck two and a half years ago, didn’t stick around to see how hot things would eventually get — he announced a temporary closure on Instagram. But he knew from experience that the mercury would only climb higher inside the truck, potentially all the way up to 115 or 120 degrees, as the day went on. The owner of another food truck that did open for business that day reported a peak temperature of 122 degrees.
This is typical. Most food trucks are retrofitted from cargo vehicles like moving vans, and are inherently prone to high heat. They have metal exteriors, limited air flow, and lots of heat-generating kitchen equipment crammed into a relatively small space — sometimes as small as 70 square feet. The exact setup varies from truck to truck, depending on the kind of food being sold, but might include a massive flattop griddle next to a deep fryer, or perhaps an industrial-sized oven — in addition to a big fridge, which lets off heat in order to keep food cold. Other features of a typical food truck include a large ventilation system above the cooking equipment, a generator to keep the fridge and freezer running, tanks for wastewater and freshwater, and separate sinks for washing hands and doing dishes.
Unless clouds roll in to block the sun, “you really can’t get it much cooler in the cart,” said Miller. Small fans and AC units are often ineffective, since the air they blow tends to get sucked up into trucks’ exhaust fans. Even on a 61-degree evening, researchers have shown that temperatures near a food truck’s cooking area can reach as high as 105 degrees. In some jurisdictions like Los Angeles, although not in Portland, health-code regulations make it harder to cool off by preventing food trucks from opening their back doors, in order to keep insects away from the food.
Miller joined many Portland-area food truck owners in deciding to close down during the heat wave, rather than suffer through. But that’s not a decision to be taken lightly, in a sector marked by financial precarity. Many food truck owners will go to great lengths to stay open, even under sweltering, 100-degree-plus conditions.
“We have such a small profit margin that every single day matters,” said Kiaha Kurek, who owns a Hawaiian food truck in Portland called Hapa Howies, which serves a variety of hot lunch plates. Like many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with, she said she doesn’t let her two employees work once outdoor temperatures start to feel “unbearable.” But she’s willing to put herself through those uncomfortable conditions.
Portland, Oregon, during a heat wave in August 2021. Nathan Howard / Getty Images If it’s been a slow couple of weeks, Kurek will brave the heat by herself, wrapping a wet towel around her neck as she prepares a limited menu of cold poke bowls. “You have to think strategically,” she said. “Make sure you have lots of water on you, wear tank tops, wear shorts.”
Other strategies to beat the heat include everything from running cool water over one’s hands to eating smaller meals and nibbling spicy foods to induce sweating. One crepe truck owner in Durham, North Carolina, told the News & Observer they close their eyes and pretend the intense heat is “from the sun’s rays as we lie on a pristine beach somewhere in Aruba.” Another said they sing Christmas carols, perhaps to conjure the cooling image of snow.
Leah Tucker, founder and executive director of the Oregon Mobile Food Association, a membership organization that represents the state’s food trucks and carts, said these kinds of coping mechanisms are typical: Most food trucks are owner-operated, and those owners often put their health and safety in the backseat so they can prioritize the well-being of their business. Tucker said she spends hot days encouraging food truck owner-operators to limit their hours or shut down temporarily.
“Taking a day off and closing on a really hot day is not the worst thing that could happen,” she said. “A worse scenario would be working a full shift in an extremely hot environment — and then having to take more time off because you’ve had a heat stroke.”
Indeed, the consequences of heat exposure can be crippling. Every year, extreme heat kills more Americans than any other kind of weather-related disaster, and even among food truck veterans who say they’re “used to” the heat, researchers out of the University of California, Los Angeles Heat Lab have documented many cases of heat-related exhaustion, vomiting, heart attacks, nausea, and more. Workers of color may be particularly vulnerable to the heat, due to centuries of baseless assumptions that these demographics are less affected by high temperatures. Sofia Sabra, a researcher at the Heat Lab, said she’s interviewed food truck workers who thought they were able to take longer shifts with no breaks “because they were Mexican.”
Despite the human health risks, many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with expressed a greater concern over equipment malfunctions during a heat wave — especially faulty refrigerators, which may not function well in temperatures above 90 degrees. Buddy Richter, who owns a Portland food truck called Buddy’s Steaks, said he stuffs ice into his fridge to keep the internal temperature from exceeding 40 degrees and spoiling his house-made vegan meats and cheeses. If the fridge breaks altogether, he said, that can lead to thousands of dollars in lost food and repair costs.
Inside Rad Magic Subs, which didn’t open during the heat wave, the temperature was already 108 degrees F at 9 in the morning.
Courtesy of Rad Magic SubsAs with Hudson’s chik’n sandos and Kurek’s poke bowls, Richter often prefers to offer a special “heat wave menu” rather than close down temporarily. Still, this strategy can cause further complications. When Richter offers a hot-weather special caprese sandwich instead of his normal plant-based cheesesteaks, some visitors grumble about the change. Some are reluctant to spend money on simpler menu items that they think they could prepare at home, for cheaper.
“Half the people show up and walk away,” he said. Sometimes, he barely manages to break even on these limited-run menus, since it costs extra to buy new ingredients and equipment. Miller, with Rad Magic Subs, experiences something similar — ”People say they can make [cold] sandwiches already” — while Kurek said she’ll get customers who say, “What do you mean, you don’t have your deep fryer on? It’s not that hot.”
“I look at them, and I’m like, are you crazy? It’s 104 degrees outside, how hot do you think it is in here?” she said. “There’s an absolute lack of understanding.”
Gnarlys, which not only changed its menu during the heat wave but also shifted its operating hours, took to Instagram with a request for customers to “be patient and understanding” in the face of heat-related service changes. “Being frustrated and taking it out on us is not helpful for anyone. Contrary to popular belief, we do not control the weather.”
As climate change progresses, summers are only expected to get hotter. Already, the number of Americans exposed to dangerous heat waves every year has jumped by more than 125 million since 2000. And in the Pacific Northwest, by 2050, heat waves as extreme as the one that killed more than 250 people in the region in 2021 are expected to occur once every six years — rather than once a millennium.
These forecasts only increase the feeling of precarity that defines daily life for many food truck owners. Combined with the increasing risk of wildfires and the suffocating smoke they bring, Miller, with Rad Magic Subs, said the weather is “like an unfightable foe.”
“It’s our biggest challenge for sure,” he told Grist, even bigger than “the economy, supply issues, anything.” With each summer forcing more and more multi-day closures, he added, “the business model of a food truck seems to be less viable year after year.”
Many of the food truck owners Grist spoke with have the long-term goal of opening a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant; the food truck is just a stepping stone along that path. But with so few options to mitigate the relentless and worsening heat, people like Hudson and Kurek have been eager to accelerate that transition. Kurek already has a September opening date for her restaurant — a joint venture with a Portland pop-up restaurant and a new brewery. (The Hapa Howies food truck will stay in operation.)
Hudson, the owner of Gnarlys, said he isn’t yet financially ready for that move. “But I’m ready when it comes to my mental state,” he said. He’s already planned out a new, expanded menu for when that day finally comes.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In Portland, Oregon, extreme heat is making food trucks feel like ovens on Aug 28, 2023.
This content originally appeared on Grist and was authored by Joseph Winters.
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Ever get mad at a delivery person for bringing your pizza late? That used to be me. Now I assume it’s late because an overpaid boss is probably making two employees do the job of 10. That’s because I worked for two years at a company with the kind of chronic understaffing that plagues many of America’s largest retailers and fast food corporations. My job was to build merchandise displays at Lowe’s…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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Members of the United Auto Workers at General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis overwhelmingly voted to authorize a strike should negotiations for a new contract fail, the union announced Friday. With some votes still left to be tallied, UAW said 97% of its participating members at the so-called Big Three automakers approved a strike if a deal can’t be reached with management before the workers’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
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In any socialist future worth living in, an abundance of diverse foods would replace the tyranny of monoculture.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has thrown his support behind nearly 2,000 nurses in New Jersey who are entering their fourth week on strike, demanding that hospital executives give the nurses a fair contract. Nurses at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital (RWJUH) in New Brunswick went on strike on August 4, protesting low staffing levels, which they say put both themselves and their patients…
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Jake Urtes and Jonah Gallagher were getting ready to play a show in Brooklyn when they found out they had lost their jobs. The pair had taken the week off work for a short tour with their band, Shift Meal. To everyone’s surprise, their boss and owner of Common Ground Bakery Cafe, a long-established and beloved coffee shop in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood, had abruptly shut down the shop.
On the Common Ground internal Slack channel, workers read owner Michael Krupp’s brief message to all staff informing them that they wouldn’t need to come to work the next day, Monday, July 3. “For multiple reasons, today I have made the very difficult decision to cease operations,” Krupp wrote, in part. Managers had only learned about the closure a few minutes before staff, and the public found out on Monday morning, thanks to a sign taped to the store’s window.
On the Common Ground internal Slack channel, workers read owner Michael Krupp’s brief message to all staff informing them that they wouldn’t need to come to work the next day, Monday, July 3. “For multiple reasons, today I have made the very difficult decision to cease operations.”
“It didn’t really feel real,” Urtes told TRNN. “All of our hard work just up in flames in a second with no warning at all.”
More than 30 people lost their jobs when the store abruptly closed. Multiple workers told TRNN that, although they didn’t have exact figures, they understood Common Ground to be a profitable business. It was a neighborhood mainstay, too, having been in business for about 25 years. Krupp, a real estate investor, had owned it since 2011. He did not publicly explain why he closed the business and did not respond to TRNN’s requests for comment.
The day the cafe closed, a group of former staff created an Instagram, @CommonGroundWorkers, and shared a group photo with a caption detailing workers’ reactions to the news. The Instagram post also provided more information surrounding the shocking closure—including that some staff members had been working on a union campaign months before Krupp announced he was shutting down the store. The post struck a mournful tone, but it also showed there was already forward momentum, noting that workers discussed relaunching Common Ground as a worker-owned cooperative.
The Instagram post also provided more information surrounding the shocking closure—including that some staff members had been working on a union campaign months before Krupp announced he was shutting down the store.
A few months and many meetings later, they did just that, announcing today that Common Ground will soon reopen, in the same building, as a co-op. The date hasn’t been set yet, but they’re aiming to return in early September with a similar menu. Nineteen people will be worker-owners, and another three will return temporarily.
“We’ve always had ownership and pride in our work, and it feels so good to actually have literal ownership of our work,” Urtes said.
Shortly after the unexpected closure, former Common Ground staff met with the Baltimore Roundtable for Economic Democracy (BRED), a local branch of the national “community wealth cooperative” Seed Commons, which helps businesses convert to cooperative models. Seed Commons, with BRED as the local agent, is acquiring Common Ground and reopening it as a cooperative in partnership with the workers.
Kate Khatib, a director of Seed Commons and BRED, said the cafe already had a lot going for it as a potential co-op in terms of its scale, number of staff, and longevity in the neighborhood.
“Food service is a hard industry,” Khatib said. “And relationships aren’t always as strong as the ones that we’ve seen [at Common Ground]. And I think that has allowed the workers who are going to be returning to really start stepping into the roles and responsibilities of ownership.”
Re-forming as a co-op felt like “the most logical thing to do,” said Nic Koski, who’d been working there for nearly a year when it closed. “There are multiple folks essentially doing managerial tasks on a day-to-day basis. We’re running the shop all together.”
“We’ve always had ownership and pride in our work, and it feels so good to actually have literal ownership of our work”
Jake Urtes, Common GROUND WORKER-OWNERJackie Du, another former employee turned worker-owner, described Common Ground as a “special little bubble”—not only for patrons, but especially for the people working there. Du credits her coworkers for creating the homey, friendly, cool-but-unpretentious atmosphere for which the shop became known. When it closed down, Du went straight into “crisis mode,” pulling out her list of phone numbers. “I just sent out a mass text like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna meet at this time tomorrow to talk about things, get unemployment, and discuss our next steps.’”
Staff designated one worker’s Venmo account as a hardship fund, which has helped keep several of them afloat over the last few months.
Re-forming as a co-op felt like “the most logical thing to do,” said Nic Koski, who’d been working there for nearly a year when it closed. “There are multiple folks essentially doing managerial tasks on a day-to-day basis. We’re running the shop all together.”
This shift to a cooperative structure requires a deeper level of commitment from workers in an industry known for its high turnover rate. “I think, also, part of the idea behind turning a cafe into a co-op is changing the narrative when it comes to the service industry—that this is a temporary gig for people in their early 20s, before they get a real job,” Urtes said. “But this society needs people in those roles … and those people are doing a real job. It shouldn’t be seen as something that’s just a stepping stone to something else.”
Restructuring as a co-op has saved other Baltimore businesses, too, including the pizzeria Joe Squared and Taharka Brothers Ice Cream, both of which received capital from BRED to make their transition. The cooperative model of workplace democracy and collective decision-making also creates more sustainability and predictability for workers. A 2021 report from the Democracy at Work Institute (DAWI) and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) comparing revenue and labor hours showed that, although revenue generated by cooperatively run businesses dropped 44% from FY 2018 to FY 2020, workers’ average hours dropped just 9% in that time.
Co-ops also tend to have fewer problems with losing workers so easily. Khatib estimates that, of the service-industry cooperatives Seed Commons has worked with around the United States, turnover rates there have been 20–30% lower than the industry average. If low-paid work and bad, exploitative, and even unsafe conditions promote higher turnover, then cooperatives, Khatib said, “can mitigate those things by giving people control over their working environments.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this. I started this whole thing feeling really depressed. As soon as I started talking to my friends and coworkers, they all really inspired me to just help them keep pushing and get this momentum going.”
Jonah Gallagher, COMMON GROUND WORKER-OWNERCommunity support has been essential for the worker-owners, and they hope to see the support continue. They’re also just excited to get back into the shop.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Gallagher, a barista. “I started this whole thing feeling really depressed. As soon as I started talking to my friends and coworkers, they all really inspired me to just help them keep pushing and get this momentum going.”
Back in July, days after the shutdown, Shift Meal played a homecoming show at the Ottobar, which became another opportunity for Common Ground employees and friends to gather in support. Wearing aprons as shirts, Gallagher and Urtes played their hearts out while coworkers cheered, screamed, and sang along. Prefacing their song “Personhood,” Urtes shouted out his coworkers for assuming leadership roles that week, roles “that maybe other people would’ve passed them over for.” He continued, “The reason I’m saying this now is because the first couple lines of this song address it perfectly, but I wrote it before all that shit.” He strummed a few times and then sang: “I’m still broke / at least I’ve got my friends and I’ve got my folks.”
Editor’s Note: Kate Khatib, co-founder and co-director of Seed Commons, is the spouse of TRNN Executive Director John Duda.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
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On Tuesday, August 22, the Teamsters union announced that its members voted to ratify the national UPS contract by 86.3% – and with record turnout. Workers won significant raises, the abolition of the two-tier driver system, air conditioning in package cars, thousands of new full-time jobs, and more.
In our previous episode, we discussed the gains of the tentative agreement and the years of Teamsters organizing it took to make them possible, including the past year’s contract campaign which built a credible strike threat. In this episode, we dug deeper into the various layers of members’ reactions to the contract, as well as what’s required of the membership to enforce it and build on it moving forward.
We invited Greg Kerwood, a UPSer from Local 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts, back on the show to share his point of view. Greg explained what he’s heard from the membership, how social media may have distorted members’ views, and why it’s important to translate the disappointment of some workers – including his own – into productive organizing on the shop floor.
We also share some news on the future of The Upsurge…
Additional links/info below…
- Support the show at Patreon.com/upsurgepod.
- Follow us on Twitter @upsurgepod, Facebook, The Upsurge, and YouTube @upsurgepod.
- Hear Teddy discuss the UPS Teamsters’ reaction to the tentative agreement on The Valley Labor Report.
Hosted by Teddy Ostrow
Edited by Teddy Ostrow
Produced by NYGP & Ruby Walsh, in partnership with In These Times & The Real News
Music by Casey Gallagher
Cover art by Devlin Claro Resetar
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Greg: a lot of these folks that are involved in, in fighting different pieces of this agreement.
Based on what they believe, uh, are new to this, and this is their first time through this process. And it’s a wonderful thing, uh, that they all became so involved and got so fired up and, and active and that they’re willing to fight for what they believe in. Whether, whether I agree with it or not, um, is really irrelevant.
Um, but what we need to do going forward is sort of, uh, take those folks and. Teach them that, uh, you know, this is not, no contract is the end. Um, and, and that, uh, you now know the game. You’ve now learned the rules. You’ve now learned how this structure works, how to play it, how to do it, and that’s gonna give you all the advantage going into the next one.
And if you channel that energy and that drive and that conviction, In the right direction, uh, then we are all gonna be better off for it in 2028.
Teddy: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to the Upsurge, a podcast about UPS, the Teamsters, and the future of the American labor movement.
This podcast unpacks the unprecedented labor fight this year at UPS. On August 22, UPS Teamsters ratified the tentative agreement on their national labor contract, which covers roughly 340,000 workers, reaping concessions from the company by credibly threatening one of the largest strikes against a single company in US history.
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.
You heard that right. On Tuesday, August 22, the Teamsters union announced that its members voted to ratify the national UPS contract by 86.3% – and in record turnout.
The overwhelming passage of the TA comes after a year-long contract campaign, months of strike threats and tense negotiations, and years of internal organizing for reform in the union. Workers won significant raises, the abolition of the two-tier driver system, air conditioning in package cars, thousands of new full-time jobs, protections for drivers’ days off, Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday, and more.
Only one small supplement in Florida out of the 45 supplemental agreements was voted down. Before the national contract can go into effect, that supplement must be renegotiated and voted on, which the union says could be done by the weekend. The ballots for two other locals in Chicago, which have separate agreements, are still being counted.
With ratification by these margins and an unprecedented 58% participation rate, the rank and file have spoken. It is a testament to the historic contract campaign in the union, which is already serving as a standard for other big labor fights ahead.
Now, we did not have enough time to squeeze in a long interview responding to the results before publication, but we do have one, I think, that is both instructive and relevant.
For this episode, I invited Greg Kerwood back on the show to discuss the many layers of UPS workers’ reactions to the tentative agreement, which is now the official contract.
Greg is a 19-year veteran of UPS out of Local 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts, and he is an elected member of the international steering committee of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. And full disclosure, as we have stated at the end of every show, Greg is also a patron of The Upsurge on Patreon.
In our last episode, we discussed the gains of the tentative agreement and the years of Teamsters organizing it has taken to make them possible, including the past year’s contract campaign which built a credible strike threat. We also discussed briefly why some workers expressed disappointment with the TA, and why that actually could be a positive sign of raised expectations among the membership.
With Greg, I thought we’d expand on that latter topic: to capture the various reactions that he and I have been hearing from members over the past few weeks, as they voted on whether to ratify the deal. We now know what happened, and hopefully the last episode and this interview will help to explain why it happened.
I invited Greg on the show because he occupies a somewhat unique role in the UPS Teamsters. He has probably read the contract front-to-back more times than most of his coworkers, and he has been very meticulous and public in his own analysis of the tentative agreement. That doesn’t make his point of view more right or wrong than anyone else’s. Indeed, he probably has a minority position.
But he is an organizer on the shop floor and online, and has spoken to dozens and dozens of UPS workers about the TA over the past few weeks. So, Greg offered a very informed analysis of how the membership reacted to the TA, including some comments on the social media climate, which may have convinced some observers that the vote would be much closer than it was. He also gives his personal opinion on how the union can build on the contract campaign to move forward productively and to enforce the contract, which UPS, he argues, will certainly try to violate.
Before we move onto the interview, I want to address what many of you are likely wondering. What will become of The Upsurge?
That’s a good question. We started this podcast to capture in real time the Teamsters’ historic contract campaign at UPS in 2023, which very well could have led to one of the largest strikes in US history.
We did this primarily by listening to and platforming the workers themselves, who were generous enough to share their struggles as well as their organizing. To tell this story accurately, we had to dig into the history of the Teamsters and UPS, the impacts of the pandemic on workers, the broader resurgence in working-class militancy in the US, and the rise of e-commerce logistics.
But this podcast was always bound to end, or to move on to other sites of upsurge. And the latter is what we’re going to do. Moving forward, we will not abandon the Teamsters entirely, especially as they continue their existential fight to organize Amazon. But we will be shifting our focus – to the renewed militancy of the United Auto Workers.
If you haven’t yet, go back and listen to Episode 5 and our July 13th bonus episode to understand why we’re making this shift. On September 14, the contracts of over 150,000 auto workers at Ford, GM and Stellantis will expire. Taking from the Teamster playbook, the UAW has made it clear that that’s a deadline, not a reference.
A strike is on the table, and for the first time in living memory, the UAW has launched a contract campaign, practice pickets and all. I have been speaking to auto workers around the country in the past couple of weeks, and it’s pretty clear, the Teamsters changed the game. Member after member has said that they saw what the UPSers achieved, and now they want it for themselves.
This is what The Upsurge is all about.
Now, I know that this shift means that a lot of our patrons will move on, and that’s ok. Thank you so much for what you’ve helped us build over the past eight months. We could not have done it without you. But we still do need you, so please consider sticking around for the next phase. And even if you can’t contribute some money, I encourage you to stay along for the ride, because there’s a lot to learn.
Much like the Teamsters’ story, the UAW fight is about a changing union, a changing economy, a changing labor movement, a changing working-class politics, and most importantly, a changing climate.
At the dawn of the green, and hopefully just, transition, the Teamsters will be moving the future, but UAW members will be building it.
I’ll leave it there for now.
Greg Kerwood: Greg
Teddy Ostrow: Kerrwood, welcome to the upsurge.
Greg Kerwood: Thanks for having me again, Teddy, it’s good to talk to you always.
Teddy Ostrow: So briefly, can you just first tell us about, What your role has been in the past year or so in this contract fight.
You know, I know a lot of U p s workers know you. You’re perhaps a little famous in that regard, but my broader audience does not know who you are. Maybe beyond the couple episodes you’ve been on my show. So maybe you can go back even a little further, explain your background a little bit too, but, Most of all, elaborate on your own role in this movement.
Speaking with workers, coordinating with workers, and figuring out what their demands are and what their proposals are for this contract campaign over the past year. You know, one of the ways that you did this was through a Facebook group. For contract proposals and you run a couple different Facebook groups, and if people don’t understand this, there is a lot of activity of u p s workers on Facebook.
It’s not necessarily representative of all [00:01:00] the opinions and all of the people, but Greg, you’re a pretty, you play a pretty key role there, so please can you, fill listeners in on that? yeah.
Greg Kerwood: So I can go back. my time at U P S began in 2004. I started relatively late. I was almost 31, at the time.
and my first contract experience, didn’t happen until 2008. like a lot of the folks that are coming to this fresh, this time around, I had no idea how the process worked. what it entailed, or even the concept that we could change our working conditions was sort of a. and as such, when I went through it, I was sort of caught, uh, unprepared.
Um, didn’t have proposals ready, didn’t know that there was a meeting, didn’t know, uh, you know, that, that this was how it worked. from that, I took my lessons and when I came back in 2013, I was ready to go with a stack of proposals. Ready for the local meeting. and then [00:02:00] 2018 was, sort of an extension of that.
Um, and what happened was, I was not, actively on social media. I owed that debt of gratitude to our former president, who unfortunately convinced me that I had to start speaking about things due to his, ineptitude. So I had, uh, sort of tied into the vote no movement in 2018, after the contract came out and after we saw, what a disaster it was.
And so, uh, I became, uh, part of that became very vocal in that, join some Facebook groups. Sort of, came to understand how they worked and sort of how powerful of a tool they could be, as far as getting messages out, uh, convincing people of things, spreading the word between members very quickly.
it was something of a, of a unprecedented tool of organization that we hadn’t seen before.[00:03:00] and so, first, after that, I started a group, for 4 0 1 K users, u p s, teamster 4 0 1 K users, just to sort of give everybody a central location for information about their 4 0 1 k. that sort of got my feet wet as far as managing, uh, Facebook group and what that entailed and, sort of showed me how to do it.
and then having been through all those contracts, uh, prior, I came to the conclusion about two years ago or so that, perhaps a Facebook group about proposals for the 2023 contract, would be a good idea. my goal being to, sort of illuminate the process for, a larger number of members, I think it’s something that we don’t do a very good job of as far as teaching members, what the process is, how it works.
And more importantly, getting through to members that it’s their contract. I think we lapse into this mentality [00:04:00] sometimes of, we are the workers and someone goes and gets our contract for us and gives it back to us. And, that, that’s how it works. And really that’s a product of the size of u p s.
That’s not, I don’t think anybody’s approach, in some of the smaller white paper contracts that happen, in, in, within locals. but with u p s it always had been. This attitude of, well, there’s a bargaining committee and there’s no rank and file members on it. And, they just go and do their thing and then they tell us what they get and we vote on it.
and so the goal of the group was to sort of break down those walls, get past that, get people to think outside the box. I knew I was gonna have my proposals regardless, so it really wasn’t about me as much as, getting people involved, getting them to see the possibilities. Of what their contract could be and not sort of accept the default response, without questioning it.
And so I think that was the goal of the group. I don’t know whether it succeeded or not. we’ll see, I [00:05:00] guess. But, I hope, I certainly would like to believe that it got a lot of people much more involved in the process and gave them a better understanding of the process. and hopefully that’s something that they, and, and we as a, as a group can carry forward onto the next one.
Teddy Ostrow: And, you know, I just to say as well, I know you were also there on the shop floor as a shop steward, like in person doing the things that other, workers across the country, labor activists, and also specifically teamsters for a Democratic Union. Activists were in, in the hubs, at rallies, at the practice pickets.
Because you know, you have been in communication with so many people online as well as in person. I know that your phone was blowing up when the TA was released, a couple weeks ago. I thought you’d be a great person to sort of give your own honest assessment, you know, of the members you’ve spoken to, and I know there’s been many of them, how they received this tentative agreement.
How they continue to receive it, how maybe their [00:06:00] views are changing as time goes on. They become more educated. it’s a huge bargaining unit, you know. So views are obviously going to be wide ranging, but I’m curious if you’ve been, you’ve clocked any order in this chaos, that it might appear. What are people telling you? What do you see from the membership? I
Greg Kerwood: would say that there are, as you sort of alluded to, there, there are different levels. I think for the average, worker who, who is just interested in going to work every day and doing their job, providing for their family, and sort of doesn’t pay attention to anything beyond that.
I think that their reaction to this, has primarily focused on, the monetary, uh, payoff for, for good or for worse, whether you’re part-time or full-time. it’s a matter of opinion whether, you know, the raises are sufficient or the part-time pay, uh, is sufficient. Um, but I think either way, that’s been the main focus for a lot of folks.
and then there’s sort of [00:07:00] the next level of person who is, active, as a u p S member. As, as a, they’re active in the workplace. they’re active maybe with the contract. They’re active with grieving things. But they’re not necessarily active beyond that. and I think those folks, a lot of them, if they’ve been doing it for a long time, view this as, sort of a major turnaround and, and a win and, and something that is, uh, turning the ship in the right direction and a relief to see after years and years of pushing.
There are the others of those, of that same category who, view this as sort of, not quite the culmination of the fight that they expected, that the buildup perhaps was, was so huge, that they were expecting, even more dramatic changes than they received. and in that sense, to them perhaps it was sort of a letdown.
and then I think there’s a third level of, of person who’s [00:08:00] active in the labor movement, even beyond the world of u p s, who sort of sees this from a further distance and has a different perspective and who sees it as, something that, coalesced members and got them to fight, and got them to take to the street.
And, and show a force and, brought the company to where we wanted them to be, and see it as a huge win for us and a huge win for the labor movement. and, one more step in sort of turning the tide, back in favor of workers. the last two groups, I would say represent the minority, even though, those are the groups that perhaps you and I are, are most familiar with.
I think your average member, is really focused on the financial aspect of things and, again, they’re viewing it from their own perspective, whether it’s sufficient or it isn’t.
Teddy Ostrow: Right. And from what I can tell, even I. With, with across those different groups, I think, which are sort of a helpful [00:09:00] representation of what people may be seeing either online or, or if you talk to someone at a practice picket over the past month.
You know, from what I can tell though, there is a broad range of opinion. You know, a lot of it is certainly positive people’s. Lives are clearly going to change, whether it’s the monetary elements. I know some folks are certainly happy that, especially in, in some of the hottest areas of the region, they may be getting, ac somewhat soon.
They won’t be forced in, for a sixth or seventh day unless they want to do it. you know, and then there’s people who are expressing criticism and. On that front too. It’s, it’s a ton of different issues. You know, there’s the activist layer, which I think you’re a part of, that has other reasons for disappointment, but then there are the individualistic reasons for disappointment.
Maybe the, the raise wasn’t high enough or they wanted to see a certain language that was most pertinent to them. So I’m wondering, you know, are there certain issues that are rising to the top from your conversations, both positive and negative? [00:10:00]
Greg Kerwood: Well, I think, there’s issues, obviously there are part-timers who are dissatisfied with the raises, and dissatisfied with perhaps, the format of the raises.
I don’t know whether that mathematically to me that’s, that’s tough to swallow. but certainly psychologically I completely understand where they’re coming from. That’s one side of it, that, that issue.
Teddy Ostrow: and just to be clear, this, you’re kind of alluding to some folks who may have wanted $25 an hour, which was what, some portions of the union were pushing, at certain points in time.
Yep.
Greg Kerwood: 25. I mean, I’ve seen higher, I think in some sense there, there, should be dissatisfaction with the structure of part-time pay as a whole. as it is different from all the other classifications at u p s, which really makes little sense. but yeah, I think that that’s, that’s a major issue, that’s come up.
I think that, for [00:11:00] drivers, certainly some of the lack of harassment, protection, as far as being ridden by supervisors. the complication of, nine five excessive overtime protection. some of the confusion around, the eight hour request language. I, and I think the, the overriding, concern if there is an overriding concern for a lot of members still comes back to, the quality of life, the having control over.
Your workday of having a say in how much of your time, you are willing to sell to this company, and not so much the price you’re willing to sell it at. And I think that holds for part-timers as well. they don’t have the four six punch protection, that’s only for drivers. they are captive in the workplace just as much as drivers are.
as far as drivers go, you know, you’re still held to 14 hours a day if that’s what the company chooses, as long as they’re willing to pay you any kind of penalties.
so I, I [00:12:00] think if there is an overriding issue, even though I, I’m, I’m not sure there is, it still comes back to that and I think. If there’s any dissatisfaction with this agreement, it primarily stems from, people went through what they went through in this pandemic and it was impossible not to come to the conclusion, that this company does not care about its workers at all and will abuse them at all costs to maximize profit.
I’ve been thinking about this today. just remembering, when the pandemic first hit, the, the, the indifference that the company showed when they thought that they were gonna be shut down. And it was almost an immediate response to them, from them that, you know, we’re gonna lay you all off.
you’re gonna be on sitting at home. We’re not gonna pay you. We’re not just sort of like trying to absolve themselves of any responsibility for anything as quickly as possible. And then the second, [00:13:00] the company got permission to operate during the pandemic, that same total indifference completely flipped into.
a profit making machinery that still had the same attitude towards the workers, but now it was heightened by this incredible sense of we’re gonna make an absolute fortune from this as long as we can just continue to force everybody in and work them into the ground. You know, this is a golden goose that’s gonna gonna lay eggs for us for the next however many years.
and the mentality’s the same from, from management, but it just, it was an interesting. Thing to think about, how, uh, whether it hurt the company or didn’t hurt the company, their attitude towards the employees in the circumstance was still gonna be exactly the same. We don’t care about you at all. whether we’re laying you off or we’re working you to death.
We just don’t care about you. We’re only concerned about our company and our profits. and I think everybody was made aware of that in this pandemic. And I think [00:14:00] that, we went into this contract. Sort of expecting that to be dealt with. And I’m not sure, I think part of the issue is that’s a very difficult thing to put into contract terms and sort of point to some specific, uh, we need X so that that will address this mentality.
And I think that’s perhaps where some things got lost in translation between proposal and negotiation. Was that, perhaps there wasn’t a clear path to how do we put that desire of the members to be respected and treated as human into some sort of concrete, language in a contract that will somehow change that approach and, and give them that, that protection and that sense of humanity in the workplace.
It’s not a a, a small order and I don’t wanna diminish what the, the negotiating committee [00:15:00] accomplished, but I think if there is an issue underneath all that, that’s what it is. That somehow that feeling that people got during that pandemic, was not translated into the contract language that would address their concern.
Teddy Ostrow: I wanna circle back to that in the, you know, last episode, Sean, or even went and, and said, it translated into a lot of folks just wanting to strike the bastards, right? It’s, it didn’t even matter, if it would necessarily be resolved in a contract language, but really just the indifference, but even more so I would argue is active hostility to people who are doing essential work and.
Dying. and not being protected and, and not seeing their families and they’re worried and what have you, you know, just the absolute terror of the pandemic translated into, look, I want to, I want to hurt this company. and you know, there might have been a minority of people, but that sentiment certainly is [00:16:00] out there.
You know, first, before we get to that, I wanted to address, you know, the role of social media because we know. At least some of the debates and discussions are happening online by no means exclusively, and a fraction of the members are participating there. You know, I think you probably should be proud, Greg, of the thousands and thousands, tens of thousands of people who you’ve been able to organize online, um, that’s, it’s an accomplishment.
But they also still are like a fraction of the thoughts and discussions, that are happening about the ta. you know, they’re happening, on the shop floor, in, in, in, People’s personal homes and text messages, what have you. Um, so I wanted to ask you, you know, as someone who, uses social media, but also is out there on the shop floor, is out there on the phone with a lot of members, do you find that there’s a difference between how social media may portray members’ reactions versus what you actually hear when you talk to workers on the shop floor?
Or hear workers in, in other areas talking about what they’re hearing in their own [00:17:00] hubs. I wonder if social media can sometimes distort what’s actually going on, in a massive union like u p s,
Greg Kerwood: Yeah, I think there’s no question. I mean, and, and to some extent it, it amplifies things and to some extent, as you said, it distorts things.
I would say, just from a, an initial response, my members that I spoke with sort of immediately after the, the agreement came out, were primarily concerned with the lack of harassment, protection, which was not frankly something that I had seen at that point online. certainly wasn’t anybody’s instant response.
And it wasn’t something that I necessarily expected to hear from them, and they sort of caught me off guard. Uh, that that was sort of the consensus concern was, protection from excessive rides as drivers. and I know certainly the part-timers feel the same way. I have to say in, you know, the part-timers in my building.
You know, are very happy, with the [00:18:00] financial situation. but again, they’re not facing, the same m r a structure that others are facing. That’s
Teddy Ostrow: market. Sorry, just to say that’s market rate adjustment, which were these raises, That were given to people in certain areas so that they could compete in the labor market, you know, otherwise people will go and find other jobs that perhaps aren’t as stressful and you don’t get yelled at in a warehouse.
Greg Kerwood: Yeah, we’ve had those, uh, sort of come and go and there’ve been different ones, uh, in different buildings within the local still are. but I think in my building in particular, they just happen to be at 21 already. which sort of, now that they’re getting the raises on top of that, that was an initial concern.
But since the, that was made clear by the I B T, there’s sort of. Position perfectly to reap the full benefit of, of the, the general wage increases. And so, they tend to be pretty happy, with that as it is. but obviously that’s not the case everywhere. there are people who are, you know, [00:19:00] longtime workers elsewhere who are still under 21 that are just gonna get bumped up to 21.
and there are people who are dealing with, uh, RAs that are well above, even this, this contract. that are sort of wondering where that leaves them.
Teddy Ostrow: And just to, just to talk about that for a, for a second, just so people understand. for a lot of folks it wasn’t clear or not whether someone who was making $23 an hour because a U P S was like, oh my God, we gotta give these people raises or else we won’t be able to hire them in Seattle or something.
It wasn’t clear whether or not they could lose that, after this contract. but because of a side letter that clarified some language, which some people still seem to be a little bit, ambivalent about.
They aren’t sure whether it really says, that they can’t have it taken away. But nonetheless, this. has been for some people, somewhat of a relief to see, okay, I’m gonna get a general wage increase on top of my [00:20:00] M r a rather than, having the m r MRI taken away. And then I end up perhaps at the, at the same level that I was before or even even lower after the ratification of the contract.
Greg Kerwood: Yeah. So to, to get back to your original question, it’s hard to say. I, I think, The, that that average member that I referred to earlier, tends to focus more on the money. unfortunately, I think, there’s a lot of apathy amongst that group in general. And, if they didn’t get something, beyond the financial, package, I think there’s sort of a, a, a default acceptance of that, especially anybody who’s been here for any number of years.
You know, again, the goal of my group and, and certainly the work of others was to get people to think outside the box and beyond what they know and, and dream big, so to speak. and I’m not sure, uh, you know, for as many members as are in my group, as you said, it’s, it’s a very, very small fraction [00:21:00] of 340,000, members.
And I think the majority of members, uh, still have the mentality. Through no fault of their own, that, uh, u p s is the way that it is, and it’s gonna continue to be the way that it is. And, you know, the best we can do is try to get more money out of ’em. And, I think that probably represents the vast majority of members.
Um, you know, anyone, like myself who’s, who’s made, campaign calls or follow up calls to individuals around the country, I think that sort of gives you a, a serious sense of. How, how little the social media activist, even leadership bubbles really impact the average member at all, which is somewhat disheartening.
but at the same time, you know, we have to be realistic and that’s, the majority of this stuff. even though what we do may have an impact on their lives. They don’t see it and they’re [00:22:00] not a part of it, and it doesn’t concern them. And so, uh, I think that, gauging things off of social media is a tricky business.
it can be, in some cases, give you insight into what’s going on in other places around the country and things like that. But at the same time, you, you’re, you’re very right that it can, it can absolutely distort things, and make you think that something is much more prevalent than it’s.
Teddy Ostrow: Thanks for, thanks for humoring me on the, uh, the social media question. But let’s, let’s get back to some of what you were just talking about before. You know, I’d like to hear about your point of view on things in our last episode. Sean Orr, a packaged car driver outta 7 0 5 and Al Bradbury from Labor Notes.
We talked about. part of the conversation was we talked about, you know, some folks who are disappointed with the tentative agreement, despite it being, and I think. You have said this elsewhere. You know it clearly being one of the best, if not the best contract for U P S Teamsters in history, but we talked about how raised [00:23:00] expectations, the impact of covid, which you were just discussing, just this broader labor moment, how there may, how all of that may have played into this.
So, I know you listened to that episode, and I’m curious, you know, about your own assessment of the tentative agreement and whether, that, or any of that or, or something else sort of resonates with you. Well,
Greg Kerwood: it’s unquestionably the best contract we’ve ever had. I defy anyone to produce a better one.
to me that was never the question. The question for me was whether it was the right contract, for the time given the leverage that we had, given what our members went through with the pandemic, and given the things that they wanted. now in fairness to the committee, they had a lot of stuff to undo.
From the prior contracts, which obviously we only have so much, capital to expend at the bargaining table. And when you have to use a lot of it to undo the damage from [00:24:00] previous contracts, it is what it is and you have to do that. I think that, Alan and Sean were, we’re right on point with a lot of stuff.
as far as, having issues with it is a good thing. From a certain perspective, you don’t wanna be satisfied. you don’t want to, uh, sort of crest the hill. you always want to be striving for more. and part of the way you do that is by getting people involved and active and fired up, which is what we did to get what we’ve gotten in this agreement.
the tricky part, I think, going forward. Is going to be, steering that, that, let down slash anger slash frustration slash disappointment into something positive. I think it’s, there’s a fine line, between, cynicism and hope and, the folks that are disappointed and frustrated, Perhaps with, with what they didn’t get in this agreement, can very [00:25:00] easily turn into what a lot of people turned into in the last three, four contracts.
people who just throw up their hands and say, you know, this is the way it works. This, this whole system stinks and we’re never gonna get anywhere. I don’t care anymore. and that’s what we don’t want and that’s a very serious danger. a lot of these folks that are involved in, in fighting different pieces of this agreement.
Based on what they believe, are new to this, and this is their first time through this process. And it’s a wonderful thing, that they all became so involved and got so fired up and, and active and that they’re willing to fight for what they believe in. Whether, whether I agree with it or not, is really irrelevant.
but what we need to do going forward is sort of, take those folks and. Teach them that, no contract is the end. and that, uh, you now know the game. You’ve now learned the rules. You’ve now learned how this structure works, how to play it, how to [00:26:00] do it, and that’s gonna give you all the advantage going into the next one.
And if you channel that energy and that drive and that conviction, In the right direction, then we are all gonna be better off for it in 2028. unfortunately the contracts being the length that they are, that can be an eternity sometimes. And, you know, you lose some people by the wayside and, and things happen in life and, and not everybody makes it to the next one.
but I think it’s very important, that we find a way to take those folks and sort of, First off, acknowledge their concerns, and acknowledge the imperfections in this agreement. I mean, no agreement is perfect. we shouldn’t be pretending that it is. There’s always other stuff that doesn’t get addressed.
Some of those things are known now. Some of them will become known in the next five years when we see how things play out, when, when things go to panel and arbitrations and gray language gets decided one way or the other. And things that we don’t see as issues right [00:27:00] now may be very quickly issues a year from now.
Or two years from now, when the company starts pushing things in one direction and we have to fight it, enforcement of this contract is, is the other half of the battle. you know, getting the language is one thing, enforcing it is another. And we also need to take those folks that are all fired up and, and channel that into enforcement, which requires the same level as or of organization as, as the contract campaign itself.
But I think we have to first, you know, acknowledge the way that people feel and acknowledge that it’s legitimate. and this is nothing against Sean and Al, but it’s, you can stand back from this, from a distance and see the bigger picture, and that’s a wonderful thing to do.
and it can seem very optimistic from back there. but at the same time, you also have to acknowledge. That person who’s struggling and who was looking for something that was gonna change their life and they didn’t get it, or they didn’t get enough of it, or, they want something [00:28:00] different or they want something more.
And, to my mind, uh, you know, not being a young person myself, that I find to be the best part of all of this from a, from a, a distant perspective, is that people are willing. To, no, I want more. That they’re willing to not just accept that they’re willing to stand up and say, this is not good enough.
This is not okay. This is not how things should work. We’re willing to change it. We’re willing to fight for it. We’re willing to stand up and make things different. To me, that’s the best part of all of it. and. In order to, make that work, you have to see that from a distance, but you also have to put yourself in that person’s shoes, in that person’s position because if you don’t, you run the risk of them giving up.
And, you don’t want them to give that up. You want to keep that fire burning for the next five years and, and beyond. You wanna keep those folks that, that are just getting into this and seeing the possibilities,[00:29:00] from giving up hope. You want them to understand that they now have the tools in their, in their bag to make these things happen.
Whether it’s daily workplace changes or whether it’s fighting for new contract language in 2028. And, if we can find a way to do that and get that message through to these folks while they’re disappointed and while they’re angry and while they’re frustrated, I think that that army that we built for this contract fight is going to be, even better, going forward.
Teddy Ostrow: I appreciate that perspective. And I, I want to ask you, you know, building off of the disappointment, building off of also what was won, you know, what are the issues that people you think going forward are going to have to be addressed on the shop floor or in pursuit of a new contract, five years from now?
You know, what are you hearing from your coworkers? What do you think for yourself and, and what is it gonna take? For you guys to address them. When a ta, whether it’s this one [00:30:00] or another one, is finally ratified, what is next for the u p s Teamsters?
Greg Kerwood: Well, I think the issues though, the, the, the big issues are still the same big issues that have been there since I started, and I think the struggle continues is to, how to find a way to address them.
it’s it’s work life balance. It’s harassment in the workplace. It’s, it’s something that, as a u p S employee, you find yourself struggling to describe to anyone who hasn’t worked there. there’s just a mentality in this company, and I know, you know, there’s, there’s a, you mentioned payback. you know, that that’s part of that reason that, some folks, including myself, thought it was an absolute necessity.
That we strike this company, because they’re really, it’s, it’s all about power. And the power continues to remain in the hands of the company. And until we flip that in the other direction,[00:31:00] u p s is gonna continue to be u p s and working at U P Ss is going to continue to be very, very difficult. regardless of pay.
it’s just, it’s not a question of money. I don’t know what driver out there that will tell you they don’t make good money. I think after this contract plays out, you will be hard pressed to find, that many part-timers, that will feel that they don’t at least make decent money. and so, uh, the money is really for me, never really been the issue.
and I think it’s becoming the case for a lot of other folks after going through, the pandemic, it really becomes a question of. What your priorities are in life and, and should you have to sacrifice your entire existence to the place you work. and you know, it’s, it’s 2023 and I think the answer to that is a resounding no.
And I think that, uh, a lot of these folks that are upset and disappointed, whether indirectly or, or directly, that’s really the [00:32:00] underlying factor of all the frustration I. and, all I can say, to those folks is, This is a good thing, right? I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to Teddy Ostro on the upsurge if I hadn’t been disappointed in 2018 and 2013 and 2008, which is a contract that everyone forgets because there was absolutely nothing in it.
but you know, to someone who started under a six year contract. And waited so long for that 2008 to roll around. To me, that was one of the bigger disappointments of all of them because that was the first time I was even remotely involved in, in, in seeing possibilities and got absolutely nothing at all and had to work under basically the same contract for another five years.
but that’s what drives the next one, and, and that to me is the message that has to get out to people is that. You don’t, you understand the possibilities now and you understand the rules of the game, and the disappointment is what [00:33:00] drives the next contract. This agreement here comes from 2018.
The election of the odds slate comes from 2018. The, the, the potential of a strike even comes from 2018. If we don’t change the leadership and we don’t change the constitution and we, we don’t have practice pickets. We don’t have this agreement, we don’t have anything that this agreement accomplished.
Doesn’t happen unless we go through 2018. And you sort of have to be tempered by those fires in order to become the weapon that you should be. And, I think that that’s what people need to understand is that this is part of the process. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else does. you know, I don’t wanna be disappointed.
I wanna open an agreement. One of these. Five-year periods and just be wowed and, and, and, and shake my head in awe that we’ve accomplished everything that we did. I expect a lot, so that may never happen. but, you know, that’s the goal. Uh, but you have to understand [00:34:00] that, disappointment is part of the process and, and part of the growth curve, as a union member, you, and, and like I said, even at the best contract in the world, Even if this addressed everybody’s issues, there are things that are gonna come up between now and 2028.
There are loopholes that are gonna, that are gonna rear their ugly head. There are arbitration decisions that are gonna change the meaning of language that we thought was one thing, and it turns out now it’s another. There’s always going to be more issues, and this process will teach you how to fight those issues and how to take them on, and how to be prepared to change the language in 2028 to address those things.
So it’s, this whole process is nothing but a learning curve. And you have to take the good with the bad and the ups with the downs and the wins with the defeats and, dust yourself off and, and learn. I, I learned in 2018 that, my making proposals in my local was not gonna be enough.
And so that’s why I started that [00:35:00] Facebook group because I knew that if I could make these proposals and I could get more people involved and they could be making the same proposals in different parts of the country at the same time, that perhaps those proposals might actually get through and make it to the table, and maybe we might get some and, and getting people to have faith in the process, in building momentum to a pro potential strike and a contract campaign and all of that stuff.
Uh, that doesn’t happen without the previous losses. And, and so, to me, that’s the way you have to view this. I’m gonna be eternally optimistic about it, whether I like it or not. and, you know, encourage everybody to keep on pushing and, and keep on, remembering that we’re all still on the same team and we’re all going in the same direction.
And if you play your part, you might have a say in how the ship gets steered. And, and that’s what we need to push for and that’s what people need to fight for.
Teddy Ostrow: Greg Kerrwood, thank you so much for coming on the
Greg Kerwood: upsurge. Thanks for having me. Teddy.[00:36:00]
Teddy: You just listened to episode 13 of The Upsurge.
I chatted briefly with Greg after the vote, and he told me he wasn’t surprised. While he sees this as a stepping stone, he think there’s a lot of work still to be done in the Teamsters union, as far as enforcement and education, so that UPS workers see the contract not as something given to them, but something that’s there’s and that they won.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
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Before I get to our Patreon supporters, I want to speak directly to a sizable portion of our audience who are UPS Teamsters themselves. This show, which has taken countless hours to produce over the past eight months, would be nothing without your labor, your courage, your willingness to fight for yourselves and the greater working-class, and especially the stories of individuals who were generous to share them with me and our listeners.
So, thank you for what you’ve built, and I look forward to seeing how you continue to build, at UPS, in the Teamsters union, and beyond, as the organization of Amazon is undertaken.
Thank you also, of course, to all our Patreon supporters. We could not do this without you, but a very special thank you and shout out to our patrons at the Business Agent tier or higher.
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