On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education programs. As organizers stated on the Kill The Cuts website:

“By cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care, the Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health, and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding NO cuts to education and life-saving research.”

In this on-the-ground edition of Working People, we take you to the front lines of the Kill the Cuts rally that took place in Washington, DC, and we speak with workers and union representatives whose lives and work have already been affected by these cuts.

Speakers include: Margaret Cook, Vice President of the Public, Healthcare, and Education Workers sector of the Communications Workers of America (CWA); Matt Brown, Recording Secretary of NIH Fellows United (United Auto Workers Local 2750); Rakshita Balaji, a post-baccalaureate researcher at the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and Amanda Dykema, shop steward for American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 1072 at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Additional links/info:

• Kill the Cuts website
• NIH Fellows United website
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “What’s really behind Trump’s war on federal unions?”
• Jocelyn Kaiser, Science, “NIH under orders to cancel $2.6 billion in contracts”

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…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Speaker 1:

I got work. Who protects us? We protects us. Who protects us, who protects us, who protects us? We protects us.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Welcome everyone to another on the Ground edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I’m here in Washington DC right in front of the US Capitol Building where dozens of local union members and union leaders just held a rally as part of a national Kill The Cuts Day of Action. Similar protest rallies were held today from California to Illinois to New York. Organizers called for the National Day of Action to raise awareness and fight against the Trump Musk administration’s cuts and proposed cuts to federal research, health and education. As the homepage of the Kill the Cuts website states by cutting funds to lifesaving research and medical care.

The Trump administration is abandoning families who are suffering and costing taxpayers billions of dollars. These cuts are dangerous to our health and dangerous to our economy. On Tuesday, April 8th, 2025 workers across the country are standing up and demanding no cuts to education and lifesaving research. The National Day of Action is sponsored by a plethora of labor unions, including the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the Communications Workers of America, ame, SEIU, the Debt Collective and more. I came down to the DC action to talk to union members about this fight and what their message is to the Trump administration, to the labor movement and to the public.

Speaker 3:

Alright, we’re our last speaker. We have got Margaret Cook, who is the vice president of the Public Healthcare and Education Workers Sector of the Communication Workers of America. Let’s give it.

Margaret Cook:

I am a little short. Let me move this back a bit. Good afternoon everybody. Yes, I am your last speaker and I promise I won’t be like a Baptist preacher. I’m not going to keep you for another hour. My name is Margaret Cook and I am the public healthcare and education worker sector Vice President of Communication Workers of America representing over 130,000 state municipal and higher education workers across the country in Puerto Rico, including thousands of researchers, lab technicians, public healthcare clinicians and nurses, and thousands of additional support and wraparound staff, many of whom have seen their work shut down, cut off, and possibly killed by these cuts. You’ve heard from all of these people about today. Cuts that are illegal, cuts that are unethical, cuts that are immoral cuts that are unacceptable, cuts that are fatal. And I don’t mean just figuratively

Speaker 1:

Because

Margaret Cook:

As you’ve heard today, these cuts to research that will, these are cuts to research that will save lives. And so our message is pretty clear today. Kill these cuts before they kill us. I’m proud to stand here today with all these other members and leaders from labor who are going to work each day to deliver care and discover solutions for each and every one of us, which is a lot more than you can say for the people who are doing the cutting. You got the world’s richest man on one hand and the world’s most arrogant man on the other.

These men are living in a fantasy world, which may explain one of the reasons why they are so hostile to science. I’ve sat back and I’ve listened to them talk about how they need to cut back on the size of our federal government and to do so by going on a rampage against these workers who are doing some of the most critical and vital work that our government does. Well, what they aren’t telling you because they’re liars and cheats is that today the size of the federal workforce is the smallest it has been since the Great Depression at just over 1.5% of the jobs in this country, years of plundering public dollars for corporate greed, decades of austerity and slashing and burning the public good has left our government smaller than it has ever been, and these jackals aren’t done tearing away at it. And for what? Let’s cut the crap on the racist dog whistles about DEI, setting aside for the sake of argument, the fact that we do need to address inequality and injustice. Are you really telling me that the cuts to people working on cancer research is about DEI, that the cuts to people working to deliver vital aid and care is about DEII see right through it and I know you do too.

The reality is we need more public investment, not less because what is it that our investments really do? What these workers do is they discover, they educate, they provide care, and they prevent and act in emergencies, in labs and research settings across this country, these workers are discovering cures and treatments for diseases that threaten all of us. My grandfather died two days ago from stage four cancer, and my mother currently has stage two in campuses and schools. They’re educating and helping elevate the knowledge of future generations in clinics and hospitals and public service facilities. They’re delivering care to people who need it and in dire straits from outbreaks of viruses like measles. Measles, y’all.

These are people who put themselves at risk to protect the rest of us, and that’s who Trump and Musk and a bunch of kids without any real world knowledge and experience are trying to fire Trump and Musk whose genius lies and putting their name on work and breakthroughs of other people and then have the nerve to charge rent for it well enough. This money is the public’s and we demand that it be used for the public good. Not one penny less. No. I firmly believe for us to meet the incredible challenges and realize the potential of our country, we need so much more public investment. That’s why we’ve got to unite across our unions, across all kinds of work and across our communities to stand up, speak out, resist these attacks, and defend the services and work we do for the people we serve and work for. Lives are on the line. These cuts are wrong. So I say again, kill these cuts or they’ll end up killing us. Thank you.

Matt Brown:

My name is Matt Brown and I’m the recording secretary for NIH Fellows United. We’re a local of the UAW number 27 50.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Matt, thank you so much for talking to me, man. The kill cuts rally just concluded here. The Senate building is right behind us, but for folks who aren’t here right now and are listening to this, can you just say a little bit about what we just witnessed? What brought you guys out here today?

Matt Brown:

Of course. Yeah, max, I really appreciate the opportunity to be on the pod and what brought us out here is saving the completely devastating cuts that are currently happening to publicly funded research here in the US at NIH Fellows United. We’re members of the intramural scientific team at the NIH that are working on things like carrying cancer and making treatments for diabetes, and we’re partnering up with all the folks that are being affected by the cuts to the extramural side of the NIH. So all of the universities and other institutions that receive grants to work on those same things outside of the NIH. And yeah, it’s been really great to see all of these people come together to save the life-saving work that we’re all doing.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Say more about the extent of these cuts and the impact on research intra and extramural. I guess give listeners a sense of how deep this goes and what the impacts are really going to be.

Matt Brown:

This is truly an existential crisis for biomedical research in America. Flat out the cuts to the intramural program have seen thousands of jobs cut from the people that support the science that we do. And on the extramural side, the cuts that we’re seeing to grants these so-called indirect costs, it’s a bit of a jargon term that can be hard to parse, but really that goes towards supporting the life-saving research that we do. The cuts that we’re seeing are going to decimate the amount of research that we can get done on these awful diseases that people face. And like I said, this is an existential question, do we want biomedical research to continue or not?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what about, let’s talk about the flesh and blood workers who are making this research happen and the working people who benefit from that research. Who are these cuts actually hurting right now?

Matt Brown:

These cuts are going to affect every single person. Historically, scientists and researchers have been considered somewhat apolitical quote because, hey, who doesn’t know somebody that’s been affected by cancer? Right? It’s pretty easy to fund cancer research because it can be so devastating. And so yeah, everybody’s going to be affected by this. It’s not just the researchers here at NIH and Bethesda. It’s not just the researchers at universities, but it’s going to be every single person who has or has known someone with a really awful life altering disease.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what’s the message? What was the rallying message that we heard here today for folks in attendance and folks who aren’t in attendance? What are these unions doing to fight back and what are you saying to other folks about how they can get involved?

Matt Brown:

Well, really what I think the rallying call is, is to look around us. It’s look at who are the people that are trying to save each other’s lives. Here it’s the organized workers that are involved in biomedical research around the country. We’re not hearing things from NIH leadership. We’re not hearing things from university leadership. We’re hearing things from the organized researchers who are getting their butts out here to try to save what we do. And that’s really what this is, is it’s about getting as many people out here as possible and all moving in the same direction to not just save our jobs and not just save science, but to save lives around the country.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And last question. I mean, there were a number of different unions present here and represented here. What does it mean that this is such a crisis, that it is bringing together different sides of the labor movement and uniting around a common fight?

Matt Brown:

Absolutely. And actually that’s a very special question to me because as NIH Fellows United we’re one of the unions that was part of organizing this as well as reaching out to other universities, one of them being my former bargaining unit with teachers and researchers United, which is local of UE 1 97. And so

Yeah, it’s been really special to see people come together and not just start organizing the workers in their own workplaces, but reaching out to everybody else in their own regions, in their own careers and making sure that we’re all pointed at the same thing, which is saving lives. This is obviously not some sort of move towards government efficiency, that everything that the Trump and Musk administration is doing right now is entirely done to antagonize workers and make us feel like we’re hopeless. But things like today show us that we’re not and we need to continue doing things like this along in the future to make sure that they can’t move on with their destructive agenda.

Rakshita Balaji:

So hi, my name is Rakshita Balaji Currently I’m a post-baccalaureate fellow, a researcher at the NIH. So what that means is I’ve been spending the last almost two years now post-graduation from getting my undergrad degree working at the NIH and getting training in order to prepare myself for success in my next step of my career stage, which is to go to graduate school and I’ll be a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania coming this fall. So what I’m interested in is neuroscience research, and that’s what my career trajectory has been so far.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Oh yeah. Well, congratulations on your acceptance and good luck. We need you out there. For folks who are listening to this who only see an acronym when they hear NIH, I’m not asking you to sort of describe everything that goes on there, but could you just give folks a sense of who actually works in the NIH and what kind of work is being done there?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, this is a great question and a question. I actually had myself when I was young and going into the NIH or the National Institute of Health, I was 22 when I joined, and I actually also had no idea what goes on behind those gates. And it turns out what I’ve learned so far is that the N NIH is full of awesome people who are passionate about their work, but they’re also not, maybe the scientists you think of in the media that work isolated in a lab in an ivory tower doing crazy experiments. These are people who have families, people who have loved ones who have been affected by diseases and people who really want to make a difference in healthcare in America. And so I just want to first make the point that the NIH is full of regular people who just happen to love what they do and love science, just like everyone in this country is passionate about what they work on.

And so National Institute of Health is comprised by a bunch of different sub institutes. So they’ll work on things like allergies and diseases, cancer, pain, neuroscience, looking at neurodegenerative diseases, looking at aging. There’s a bunch of different types of research that’s going on in order to serve every subset of someone’s health profile and all of the different types of diseases or different afflictions that people can have throughout the us. And what’s also really special about the NIH in particular is their ability to use their knowledge and their resources to target diseases and conditions that are not necessarily as prevalent. So for example, rare diseases where people oftentimes don’t always find care in their own physician settings or don’t always find the right answers, just going to the doctor that doesn’t have the research or the exploratory privileges that people do at NIH. So for example, we look at diseases where the population of people that suffer from them can be so small, yet they don’t go ignored because our clinical center has people who are specialized in learning about specific genetic mutations or specific, I think that’s, yeah, specific genetic mutations for example, or specific diseases that don’t always get studied.

And so the NIH not only tries to serve the general public in terms of looking at complete profiles of people’s health, but they also can target their resources to looking at things that oftentimes go under the radar and give care to people who oftentimes don’t find answers whenever they go to the doctor and they actually find those answers in possible treatments at the NIH.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Could you tell folks listening what these cuts, everything Doge and the Trump administration are doing, what does this all look like from your side of things and how are you and your colleagues been responding to it? What do you want folks on the outside to know about what it looks like on the inside?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so the first thing that really comes to mind when I was thinking about these cuts, especially what’s happened February 14th, April 1st, it’s almost like a trap door. You’re sort of walking into work, you’re getting prepared. Maybe you got your kids ready for the day, maybe you got up and made breakfast and lunch and you made sure that everyone was ready, you got into work and suddenly the four just falls apart beneath you because you no longer have access to your work email. You no longer have access to your data. You are no longer as appreciated as you thought you once were as a federal employee, and all of a sudden you are left stranded without a job, maybe on administrative leave, not knowing if you’d have the chance to come back. And it sort of is almost like a disappearing act is what it really felt like for no apparent reason.

And that’s the worst part to hear that the numbers are the most important thing. How many people can they get rid of? How many people can they actually eliminate? Rather than thinking about how many lives are actually just being torn from underneath people? That’s kind of all I can describe it as. It’s a really strange disappearing act. You don’t know, we had the manager of our building, someone who takes care of our building when we have leaks or have issues with our labs, be fired on this random day and then reinstated the next. It’s all very chaotic. And this chaos is preventing us from actually being able to move forward with our work, which might’ve been the goal, but actually ends up harming way more people than just us doing the work, but the people that we’re trying to serve. So that’s the best way I can describe it. It was immediate, it was forceful, and it was completely and utterly uncalled for. I mean, we had people who were dedicated employees for over 10 years, 20 years, just suddenly say, I’m no longer able to come in. People who couldn’t even email anyone telling anyone that they were fired and had to shoot texts to people that they knew because they were immediately locked out of their computer. I mean completely. It just felt like a huge slap in the face.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I think the response from so many people has been fear and shock, and it’s almost been immobilizing because there’s so many executive orders, so many cuts, so much bad news hitting us day after day, which we know is part of the quote, flood the zone strategy. But what we are seeing, especially in recent weeks is anger, mobilization, organizing and the coming together like today of different unions. So there are different kinds of actions that folks are taking, whether it be going to these town halls and screaming at their elected officials or writing emails or doing mass protests. What we’re seeing here today is more about what unions and what workers can do when they come together with their labor power to fight this. So I was wondering if you could just talk a bit about that. What is the message here about what workers and unions in these agencies and what the labor movement can do to fight back against the Trump agenda?

Rakshita Balaji:

Yeah, so I think the first word that comes to mind is solidarity. I mean, we’ve now seen that an ultimate betrayal take place from our own employers and from our own administration showing us that we’re not valued. And so the only solace and the primary solace that I think is the most powerful has been within one another. We come into work, the morale has been extremely low. It feels like you’re trudging through molasses just trying to get one day to the other. And really all you can do with all that pent up frustration in order to not let it implode you is to actually share it with others and to bring community about it. And I think the most important thing that our union has brought about is that sense of solidarity, that sense of information, connection, network, especially when the actual protocol for all of these things has been so unclear going from a fork in the road to a riff, more acronyms might I add. The only place that we can really get answers is by sharing information and having open lines of communication with one another. And so the community that we fostered, I think that’s our strength and that’s what we want to preserve through all of our labor movements and unions is to understand that knowledge is power and we’re not afraid to share it with one another. We’re not afraid to speak the truth time and time again and to talk about our experiences and we will not be shut behind a door and left out of this conversation anymore.

Maximillian Alvarez:

And what comes next? I guess for folks listening to this, what’s your message about why this is the time to get involved and what they can do?

Rakshita Balaji:

I think with regards to when is the time, my only answer would be when else is the time? This whole period of time since the inauguration has felt like an avalanche, like you mentioned, it’s a barrage of information that usually makes little to no sense and has harmed so many people. So what other time do we have? I think because the only question I’d have, when else do we come out and do this as we need to be active and keep pushing back in the moments that things are happening and that’s how change occurs, what people can do. I think if you’re hopefully angry just like we are, you can call your representatives, keep telling them the stories, especially if you have been a victim of these removals from your job or a victim of the lack of funding for your research or even how this administration has been shaking up your life.

Those are important stories. Your story is as important as everyone else’s, and to not undervalue the power of your voice, whether it’s calling your representative, showing up to these protests, being in unison and harmony with other people, because not only will you find solace in that, but you’ll create strength and to look and try to plug into your local communities as well because typically you’re not the only one who’s going through this. And you can definitely find people who are willing to help you, willing to give you information and speak up. Don’t be afraid to ask questions whether it’s about, regardless of, for example, if you’re worried about things related to your immigration status, if you’re worried about things related to how your funding’s going to work, how you’re going to receive, are you going to receive a pension? These questions that have gone unanswered, echo it as much as you can because through those echoes, you’ll find answers within other people and eventually those echoes will be heard by people who can do more to help make a change and actually protect us from these kinds of ridiculous actions.

And again, if you’re angry, I think anger only will boil up inside of you if you let it fester. So the best thing to do is to release it at places like this, find local movements, do some searching, and look for places you can actually get your voice heard. And I promise that you don’t, don’t feel like you need to be someone special with the name or an acronym that helps you move forward. Just let yourself be heard and give yourself grace during this time too. And I hope that together we’ll be able to make this change together. Don’t lose sight of the power we have within one another when it feels like we’re being towered over. We actually are on an even playing field if we have each other, and we can begin to even that out in numbers if not in position.

Amanda Dykema:

My name is Amanda Dykema and I am a shop steward with AFSCME Local 10 72 at the University of Maryland College Park.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, Amanda, thank you so much for talking to me today. I know you got a lot going on and the crowd is dispersing, but I wanted to ask if you could just tell us a bit about what we just witnessed here and what brought all these folks out here to DC today?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah, well, I think you saw people from all kinds of different unions and different kinds of workplaces who are all impacted by the same thing, which is these cuts that are happening to research and medicine and scientific innovation and education, and they’re hitting all sectors. And what we’re seeing is at the University of Maryland, faculty’s grants that were approved and have been ongoing for years being abruptly terminated with no cause. We’re seeing faculty grants that went in last year not being reviewed on review panels and we’re seeing cancellation of programs that have had huge impacts for things like expanding the STEM pipeline to people who have been historically excluded from it.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What’s on the ground impact of this? What would you want folks to know who are maybe just hearing about that and they’re saying, oh, that’s good. That’s eliminating waste. It’s getting rid of woke programs. What do you want folks to know about what these cuts are actually doing to your members and the people who benefit from their work?

Amanda Dykema:

So my members at the University of Maryland, we support all university services. You can see my t-shirt says we run this university. And so what it does for our members is those of us who work for research centers are concerned about the futures of their jobs. And for our students, we’re seeing student workers who are being let go because the funding’s not there anymore. For students who were looking for careers in these sectors who came to the University of Maryland to learn how to do this kind of research, if a research lab gets shut down, they’re not able to learn how to do that. They’re not able to prepare for grad school, they’re not able to go on. But mainly what we’re seeing is a chilling effect that faculty, students, and staff really have to work together and get organized to fight against. They want people to stop this kind of research. They want people to be scared, and we are here to get organized and work together so that we can fight against that.

Maximillian Alvarez:

What are the long term effects? If that doesn’t happen, if these things go through unchallenged, what are the long-term effects going to be for the University of Maryland specifically and higher ed in the United States more broadly?

Amanda Dykema:

That’s a big question. I’ll give it my best shot. The University of Maryland is a preeminent public research university. It’s the flagship of the state, and we have hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding every single year, and it funds all kinds of work. We heard today from a climate scientist. I work really closely with a lot of people in the College of Education who do work on K 12, and we have researchers in the humanities, in history, in museums, in data science. All of those agencies that fund that type of work have been subject to significant cuts, and those people will not be able to do their jobs or there’ll be a greatly reduced scope and the trickle down effect or the very obvious effect of their research. And when it comes to broader impacts on society, we’re not going to see those things. We’re not going to learn what is the best way to teach kids what is the best way to create climate resilient communities? We’re not going to learn those things if we don’t have this research funding.

Maximillian Alvarez:

So what was the message today about how workers and unions can fight back? I mean, it was really powerful to see so many different unions represented

Amanda Dykema:

Here,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And so that in itself seems significant. But I guess where does it go from here? What can rank and file folks listening to this do to get involved?

Amanda Dykema:

Yeah. Well, the number one thing, I’m going to say it every time is get organized. If you have a union at your workplace, join it. We’re more powerful together. If you don’t have a union at your workplace, work on getting one because we’re not going to be relying on whether it’s the president or whether it’s university administrators. We can’t rely on them to protect us. We have to work together to protect ourselves. But otherwise, the thing I really heard today was a lot about medical advances and people’s health. We’re going to see, if someone is not familiar with a research university, they might not know what this means, but if they go to their doctor and there’s not a clinical trial available for their diagnosis, they’re going to see what it means. And so I think what we’re trying to do now is reach out to our legislators who, the thing I haven’t said so far is that research is a huge economic driver for every state in this country.

And so we’re reaching out to our legislators to say, not only on its merits should this research be funded, but this is going to gut communities. This is people work in these labs and then they go and they spend their paychecks in their hometowns. And so what we’re asking is for people to understand that this isn’t a kind of an ivory tower thing that only impacts universities. It’s a thing that impacts everyone in this country. Senator Markey talked about health doesn’t care if you’re rich or poor, and so people need to realize how this will impact them and their loved ones.

Maximillian Alvarez:

I mean, I was a PhD student at the University of Michigan, which is like the largest or one of the largest employers of that entire state.

Amanda Dykema:

Exactly. I’m from Michigan.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah,

Amanda Dykema:

Now that you’re listeners will care, but yes.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and any final messages that you have because we are also at the same time that these cuts are being pushed through experiencing a violent, vicious state crackdown on the very right to dissent against such things to speak out against such things, and universities are becoming the flashpoint for that war on free speech.

Amanda Dykema:

Well, I think the other reason we’re all here today, the people who came to this rally, we work at agencies like NIH and institutions like the University of Maryland, and we have to pressure our administrators to stand strong in the face of this. Trump clearly wants to stifle free speech, but what is a university, if not a place where people learn and grow through free speech expression and exposure to ideas. And so if that’s really our value, we have to call upon not only our legislators, but our administrators at these institutions to stand strong.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank the guests who spoke with me today. It’s cold out here in DC and I’m about to head back home to Baltimore. But I also want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism like this that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez reporting from Washington DC. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

Last week, President Trump escalated his administration’s war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.

In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating in protest actions in locales across the US on Saturday, April 5. In this episode, we speak with James Jones, a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service, a veteran, and a member of the Federal Unionists Network, to get a firsthand account of the Trump administration’s attacks on federal workers, agencies, and the people who depend on their services.

Additional links/info:

• Federal Unionists Network website
• Indivisible website
• “Hands Off!” National Day of Action (April 5) website
• Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, “Trump Goes Nuclear on the Federal Workforce”
• Tyler Pager, The New York Times, “Trump Moves to End Union Protections Across Broad Swath of Government”
• Daniel Weissner, Reuters, “Union Sues to Block Trump from Ending Collective Bargaining for Many federal workers”
• Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, “Curious How Trump’s Cost Cutting Could Affect Your National Park Visit? You Might Not Get a Straight Answer”
• Maximillian Alvarez, Working People / The Real News Network, “‘It’s not Elon versus government, it’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers”

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…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Maximilian Alvarez:

All right. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximilian Alvarez. I’ll be hosting new episodes this month and my co-host Mel er, will be hosting again in May. Today. We continue our coverage of the Trump Musk administration’s all out assault on federal workers in the United States Constitution and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. In the last episode that I hosted at the end of February, I spoke with current and illegally fired employees of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or the CFPB, as well as the USDA Agricultural Research Service, and we spoke in that episode about what was then a newly launched assault on federal workers, government agencies, and the people who depend on them by President Trump and Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and the unelected head of the Department of Government Efficiency or Doge Musk has been granted immense power to cut government agencies and their federal workforce and unprecedented access to sensitive government and citizen data.

Now that assault has continued, it’s hard to sum up the scale and scope of the damage that Trump and Musk are wrecking upon our government and our government workers and contractors right now, all ostensibly in the name of increasing efficiency and rooting out so-called wokeness. But to give you a sense at the top of the show, here’s the latest report from Newsweek. Tens of thousands of job losses have been announced across numerous federal agencies. Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it will eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a major restructuring plan. The Environmental Protection Agency plans to eliminate its scientific research office and could fire more than a thousand scientists and other employees according to the Associated Press. It has also been reported that the Internal Revenue Service or IRS plans to lose about 18,000 employees, about 20% of its workforce.

Meanwhile, former postmaster General Lewis DeJoy told Congress that 10,000 workers at the United States Postal Service would be cut. The Department of Education has announced plans to lay off more than 1300 employees while the Department of Veterans Affairs is planning a reorganization that includes cutting 80,000 jobs. According to an internal memo obtained by the AP in March, the Pentagon reportedly plans to cut its civilian workforce by about 50,000 to 60,000 people. At least 24,000 probationary workers have been terminated since Trump took office, according to a lawsuit filed by nearly 20 states alleging the mass firings are illegal. In March two, federal judges ordered 19 federal agencies to reinstate fired probationary workers. Meanwhile, about 75,000 federal workers accepted the offer to quit in return for receiving pay and benefits. Until September 30th and last week, president Trump escalated his war on the federal workforce when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions and agencies with national security missions across the federal government citing authority granted to Trump under a 1978 law.

And as the AP reports affected, agencies could include the Department of State Defense, veterans Affairs, energy, health and Human Services, the Treasury, justice and Commerce, and the part of Homeland Security responsible for border security. Now, the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has already sued the Trump administration over the executive order to end collective bargaining across the federal workforce. In response to these attacks, union’s, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups and people of conscience around the country are also showing up to local and national protest actions. They’re showing up to town halls with elected officials and making their voices heard, signing petitions and writing letters to their representatives. And one such engaged group includes the Federal Unionist Network, an informal association of federal unionists and their allies on their website. The Federal Unionist Network say plainly that Elon Musk is trying to steal the federal government slashing public services, firing essential workers, and handing power to billionaires like himself.

It’s illegal, it’s dangerous, and we won’t stand for it. Through a mass action campaign, federal workers and community supporters will challenge every illegitimate and unjustified layoff. Instead of letting Musk steal their jobs, they’ll show up for duty with a clear message. Let me work. I serve the American people, not the richest man on earth who nobody elected to be my boss. To get an inside view of the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on the federal government and the federal workforce and why you and every working person should care about it, and to talk about who’s fighting back, how they’re fighting back, and what people can do to get involved. I’m honored to be joined today by James Jones. James is a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service based in North Carolina. He’s a veteran and a member of the Federal Unionist Network. James, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Man, I really appreciate it.

James Jones:

Hey, it’s my pleasure, max. Thanks for inviting me.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, it’s an honor to be connected to you, although of course, I wish we were connecting under less horrifying circumstances, which we’re going to dig into over the next 50 minutes. But I wanted to just start here at the top, just getting your response to all this, especially since we’re talking just days after Trump’s executive order to end collective bargaining rights for workers like yourself across the federal government.

James Jones:

Well, I think as far as my union, I’m an A FG member with local 4 4 6 out of Asheville, North Carolina. I live in Boone. We expected a lot to happen from Trump’s first term. He did things to attack our union the first time, and we expected him to do it again, albeit maybe not on this level, but I think maybe some people at the national level of a FG would probably, they probably counted on what was going to happen even with some of the atrocious things he’s done already, a FG and my local both. We’ve been fighting a FG national, they’ve sued the Trump administration over several of these illegal acts he’s done after he came on after his inauguration, like firing a bunch of probationary workers and some other things. And the courts have sided with the unions a FG, especially over some of these illegal acts.

And I think if you read the order, I didn’t read it closely, but it did mention a FG in that order is EO banning collective bargaining for these agencies that are so-called entwined with national security. So to me, it sounds like it’s retaliatory against the unions, the NTEU, the FFE and a FG for bringing suit against Trump because they’re fighting back and we’re fighting back at the local level. We’ve held several rallies in Asheville. We had a town hall here in Boone. Our representative Virginia Fox never showed up. We had a packed house of 165 people and she never showed up to address the constituents in her district, which was expected because we’re a dot of blue and a sea of red here in Boone, North Carolina. So she usually avoids meeting with her constituents in Watauga County. And this Saturday, April 5th we’re we have a mass march in rally in downtown Boone to address the attacks on all these agencies and what it means for the American people. So I’ll be there at that as well.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I definitely want to make sure that we talk a bit more later in the show about the attempt to repeal collective bargaining rights as if you could just sign that kind of thing away and talk about the fight back in more detail ending with the day of action coming up at this weekend. But I guess before we get there, let’s take a step back because so much as I read in the intro, so many federal workers are being impacted by this and the amount of people who depend on their labor is incalculable at this point. But when you start reading just the thousands, the numbers and the thousands of folks who are losing their jobs or getting fired or what have you, it’s really easy to lose sight of the human beings behind every single one of those numbers. And I wanted to ask for folks who are hearing those numbers, but they’re not hearing the human beings behind them. If we could just talk a bit more about your time working as a federal worker and in the National Park Service. Could you tell us a bit more about yourself, how you got into doing that work and what up until, I guess recently that work entailed?

James Jones:

Yeah, so I started working with the Park Service in 2002. I served in the military prior to that, went to college, got two degrees and decided I didn’t want to do what I had gone to college for, a lot of folks do, I guess, and just took a job with the park service doing maintenance work, and I’ve worked here on the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina my whole career. So yeah, I started out as a wage grade eight employee. I worked my way up to a wage grade 10. I’m still a wage grade 10 today, and I enjoy taking care of the park. I enjoy where I work. We have, it’s called the Moses Cone Estate. It’s about a 4,000 acres state that’s part of the parkway proper. There’s 26 miles of historic carriage trails that I maintain. And then there’s some other areas that we try to do historic preservation work to keep the facilities up like the cone manor and the carriage barn and the historic apple barn and that sort of thing.

Over the years, I mean since I’ve been there in 2002, there’s just been a steady decline of money. The budget basically has remained static over that timeframe. It’s increased a little bit over the course of say, 23 years. The budget has remained static, which is basically a budget reduction, cost of living, cost of doing business keeps going up, but your budget remains static. When you lose people to retirement, you’re really not able to cover that position sometimes because you’ve got to cover the cost of living raises, the cost of insurance, and all these other things go up. So over that span of time, we’ve actually lost employees in great numbers. And if you remember back in 2013 when they passed that sequestration bill, the Park service I think in general lost about 30% of the workforce then, and we’ve really never retained that number of employees back since that time.

And so now we’re faced again with a possible 30% cut under DO’S proposal to cut the park service. We’re already lean. I always joke and say, we’re not down to the bone anymore, we’re down to the marrow. We can’t really operate anymore unless we get more money and people and equipment and things to do our job. So it’s been a struggle, especially for the last 12 years, and people are noticing with the proposed doge cuts and what they’re saying about the park service people here in this area, most people love the outdoors. We’re in the mountains. They’re turning out, they’re turning out and protesting this stuff. They don’t want to see their parks decline further than what they already are. They want their parks to be taken care of. And when you still, I think the maintenance backlog now is something like 16 billion for the whole park service. They just don’t have any money to maintain a lot of the facilities and trails and roads and such. So this is just another blow. It’s another gut punch to an agency that’s already suffering from a lot.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask a little more about what you were just talking about, right, because I think this is really important for folks to understand that it’s not as if Elon Musk and Donald Trump have come with their axes and hatchets and started making cuts to fully funded agencies. Like you were describing how your agency has been losing budget and people for your entire time working there. And I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about what that translates to on a day-to-day level for folks who are still working for the Park service when they have to now deal with an underfunded, understaffed agency and what that looks like for folks who are coming to take advantage of the parks and enjoy them.

James Jones:

Well, I’m sure President Trump and Elon Musk don’t visit national parks and some of the other billionaires that he’s appointed in his cabinet, I am sure they don’t visit those areas public lands because they own their own land. They probably own as much land as some national parks having capacity as far as acreage. But yeah, so any given day in the park service at my park particularly, and I’m sure it’s park wide, I know people that work in different parks around the country, you just don’t get all the work done. I mean, things that need to be tended to, there’s a priority list. Obviously. You got to do the things that take priority over other things. So if you don’t have enough people to take care of what needs to be taken care of, that gets put to the wayside. And then the important things like cleaning restrooms, cutting trees out of the roads so people don’t get the trees driving 50 miles an hour through the park.

I mean, picking up trash. I mean, I don’t do those things, but I do more of the skilled labor. But even then, you’ve got these systems, these infrastructure systems in the park service that are outdated and most of ’em need to be replaced. Water systems, sewer systems, electrical systems. Most of the park service have antiquated systems. I mean, they’re running, some of these systems are probably 60, 70 years old. I mean, they’ve been upgraded some over the years, but a lot of these systems just need a total replacement. And so when more people visit the parks, which is the case year after year, population increases, more people come. We’re not upgrading these systems. We’re not building newer facilities, bigger facilities. We’re not making more parking lots for people because there’s no money. Then it takes a hit, and we have to shut these systems down sometimes because they’re overwhelmed. The water system can’t keep up. Our sewer systems can’t keep up. People park all over the place now they’re beating the sides of the road down the shoulders of the road with their vehicles, and we don’t have enough rangers to enforce a lot of the rules and regs on the parking anymore. We’ve lost a significant number of law enforcement people. So yeah, it’s a problem, and it’s going to get worse if we don’t change course and protect our parks.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I want to ask kind of a follow-up question to that. That is really for anyone listening who is still sort of buying into the justifications for this that are coming out of the Trump administration all over Fox News, all over Musk’s, social media, platform X, all that stuff, what would you say to folks out there who are still convincing themselves that, oh, it’s a park. You don’t need that many people. I can just go and walk around. What do I need all these government aid workers for or beyond that, people who are pretending that flesh and blood working people like yourself, maintaining our parks are somehow like this part of this evil deep state bureaucracy?

James Jones:

Well, we’re not. We’re working people. We live in the same communities as these people do. Our kids go to the same schools, they go to the same churches. We go to the same grocery store, whatever. I mean, we’re all part of the community. We’re not some sort of evil sect or cult that we have ulterior motives in the Park Service or any other federal agency for that matter, to do harm to people. And this notion that government workers are lazy, that one always floors me because I know plenty of people in government service that work hard and they’re dedicated to their missions. I sometimes think the public may not understand the depth of some of the work government workers do, because a lot of it is different than the private sector. Government doesn’t operate to make profit. We’re here to serve people. This notion that we should run government like a business, I don’t buy that.

We’re not a business. We provide services. And since we’re not in the business of making a profit, then maybe some people see that as they’re not motivated enough to work hard because they’re not making money. Well, that’s not true. I myself, and I know a lot of other people that could quit government tomorrow and go to work in the private sector and make more money, but we don’t because we enjoy public service. We enjoy providing. Me personally, I enjoy, I take pride in my work I do at Mile Park. I know people come there, they enjoy my area of the park. They tell me a lot. I know people in the community and blowing rock where I work. They tell me, you do great work here. This place is nice. I mean, I take a lot of pride in that, and to me that’s more important than making another $10 an hour somewhere. That’s my take on it. And I think I can speak for a lot of other federal employees and a FG members too that work in different agencies with that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, I’m curious, again, given that you’ve been doing that work for decades and you’ve seen so many kind of changes in American politics and the ways that the population talks about government workers. I mean, I remember what was it like over 10 years ago in Wisconsin, like Scott Walker and the Republicans really rammed through a lot of these same anti-labor policies, including eventually turning Wisconsin into a right to work state in a large part based on vilifying government workers in the ways that you’re talking about. So this problem is not new. I mean, I grew up conservative. I remember us talking about government workers this way when I was a kid. I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about how deep that goes and how it’s impacted you and other government workers and what we need to correct in the ways that we understand the work and lives of our federal workforce to stop falling into these traps that lead to us just not caring when we slash budgets year after year, we lay off more people year after year. It feels like this has been a slow building crisis that’s now just reached a critical point, but the roots of that run deep all the way through your career.

James Jones:

Well, max as well as I do, a lot of politicians hate labor unions. And it’s pretty obvious why, because unions traditionally have always been the tip of the spear to fight corruption. Greed read these businesses that prey and exploit on people’s vulnerabilities. I mean, it’s been going on for well over a century. Labor unions have had to fight and scratch for everything for their members. As Frederick Douglass said back in the 1850s, power concedes nothing without demand. And it’s true. They’re not going to give up anything. The billionaire class, they’re not going to give up anything. They’re just going to keep taking. And it is just sheer greed. It seems to me like a disease. I think the message needs to be that these people, and I think Bernie Sanders does a good job of messaging when it comes. He’s always harping on the billionaire class, these people are greedy.

They want everything you have. They can’t ever get enough. I think he was on the Senate floor yesterday and maybe the day before addressing the Senate, how he’s traveled the country and how so many Americans are fed up with the economy. You have two Americas, the ones with everything and the ones with nothing. I think that has to be the message. And as far as government workers go, we need to be in that category. We’re working people. We are not special people. I think the other problem is too, the government has to abide by the law.

President Obama, when he was in office, he had the standing that the federal government was a model employer, that we did everything by law, by Reg, did the right thing. And I think that we need to get back to that. But in order to do that, there is a lot of, sometimes what people perceive as waste is just the government doing what they’re supposed to be doing. A lot of private companies, I’ve worked in the private sector, they don’t always do what they should be doing. They try every which way in the world to circumvent the law. Cause it costs ’em money if they have to abide by all these policies that the government imposes on ’em. But a lot of these policies are for good reason. They protect people health and safety. Look at osha. When I was a local president, I worked closely with OSHA because when you work for an agency like mine and even the va, and I know people that work at the va, the VA try to cut corners on safety and health, and you’ve got to have some sort of safeguard and check on that. And some people might view that as waste for one example, that it shuts down production so the OSHA guy can come in and check out on everything. But I mean, it’s just the way things have to work.

Yeah, the messaging’s just got to change with federal workers and state workers and local workers. We’re not lazy people. A lot of it’s just things we have to go by through legislative action and law and that sort of thing.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and it makes me think about what you were saying earlier, right, about the fallacy of wanting government to be run a business. That may sound good to certain people in theory, but as someone who my entire job is interviewing workers in the public and private sector, I can tell you that most workplaces are dictatorships where your working person does not have any rights, let alone the right to make any demands on their employers without losing their livelihoods. And so why would we want that to be the model of our government? I think there’s really something missing for folks who really aren’t making the connection between this is how businesses are run and this is how they treat their workers in America, and this is how it’s going to look if that takes over government entirely.

James Jones:

Yeah. To me, corporations are tyrannies. There’s no democratic process with corporations private power. They have a board of directors. They make the decisions. I mean, there are some companies like the automotive industry, the big three where they’re unionized and the UAW has a lot of power and they have good collective bargaining agreements, but if they didn’t, they wouldn’t enjoy those benefits and privileges that they have now through a contract. So at least with the government and in unionized workplaces, you have due process with the federal government. It’s a little more restrictive. We can’t bargain over certain things like wages, healthcare, that sort of thing, but we can still bargain over a lot of things that affect our working conditions. And if that’s taken away, then these agencies, a lot of ’em run just like a corporation. They’re a top down. You have no rights. I mean, you have certain rights. I mean, I shouldn’t say that you still have certain rights as a federal worker without a union, but I would prefer to have a union contract over any kind of administrative procedure that I’m granted. I’ll put it that way, because I’ve seen both. I’ve seen how both work. I’ll take my union any day over that.

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, I wanted to ask if you could just follow up on what we were just talking about. For folks out there listening who may not fully grasp the differences between unions representing government workers and other unions that they may have heard of the Teamsters, UAW. Could you just say a little more for folks out there about what the role of a union is for a federal workforce like the National Park Service where you work?

James Jones:

Yeah, so federal unions, they’re like private sector unions, trade unions. They’re there to protect the workers. They’re there to promote better working conditions and that sort of thing that we’re no different in that regard. A FGE, my union, I’m sure NTEU and FFE, they’re there to bargain collectively bargain with their respective agencies, better working conditions. And that can be everything from a grievance procedure to disciplinary adverse actions over time. Your lunch break, when you’re going to take that, your 15 minute breaks. And I want to say something real quick there. Some people don’t realize this. The federal government does not have to give you two breaks during your workday. We have that in our contract. We get a 15 minute break between the start of the shift and lunch and get another 15 minute break between the end of lunch and the end of the workday.

A lot of people don’t realize that they don’t have to give you that. We have that in our contract. I mean, it’s those little things like that that make a difference. And I’m not saying some of these agencies might be very good and it doesn’t matter, but management comes and goes, and believe me, their solicitor and their HR departments tell ’em what they can get by with than what they can’t get by with. I would much rather have that contract that outlines how they’re going to treat their workers and not having that at all. So generally speaking, most unions, that’s what they’re looking to do is to promote good ties with management, improve the working conditions. We just can’t do certain things. Like the big one is strike. We can’t strike, which is, I get it, you’re a public servant. You go on strike. I mean, the taxpayers, basically, they’re paying you to work. So that was laid out in the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act.

The other ones are we can’t negotiate pay, we can’t negotiate the amount of leave we get all that is set by Congress. Congress. You probably, a lot of people realize that every year the president presents a budget, Congress approves the budget or they go back and forth until they get a budget. Federal employees usually get, depending on inflation, we usually get two, three, 4% cost of living raise at the end of the year for the following year. That’s set by Congress and the president. We can’t negotiate over that. A lot of private sector unions can, the UAW, the Teamsters, those big unions, they can strike their employer. If they don’t lock what’s happening, their membership votes to strike, they go out on strike. We can’t do that. So we don’t have a lot of power as related to some of those private sector unions. But we still have power as far as establishing certain things, certain rights in the workplace.

And the billionaire class can’t stand that. They pretty much destroyed the private sector unions. I think union density now in the private sector is 7% the last number I looked at or somewhere hovering around that. So we’re now, yeah, it’s probably lower. North Carolina is one of the lowest states. I think it is the lowest state when it comes to union density. The state I’m in, the public sector, unions are up, I think around 30 some percent, maybe close to 40, and they want to get rid of that power. These billionaires, they want to take that away. Just two years ago, we had a decertification drive at my park where a disgruntled employee brought in the National Right to Work Foundation to represent her to decertify the union at my park, and we beat it. And these people, I think the National Right to Work Foundation, they’re backed by the Koch brothers and other big money interest. It doesn’t even matter if these federal employee unions are part of their company, which they’re not. But they know if they can keep undermining that power structure, it helps their cause. And that’s why it’s so important that we fight this and win it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Well, and there’s clearly some power on top of that that has been frustrating, the Trump administration in terms of the power of federal unions to stall or stop or challenge or reverse these decisions coming from the White House and through Trump’s administration. I wanted to ask from your vantage point from your union, why is he going after the unions and your collective bargaining rights? Trump is claiming that this is a national security issue. Do you believe that?

James Jones:

No, I don’t. It is already in the Civil Service Reform Act. Certain agencies can’t unionize that are involved with National Security, FBI, the CIA, national Security Agency. And then there’s some other smaller agencies out there that kind of fall under that umbrella. Maybe I think some of the department homeland security folks, law enforcement types, I’m not sure, but I think there’s some of those that are excluded. Yeah, I mean, it’s the same old playbook. They use this broad umbrella of saying, alright, all these agencies, I’m going to declare part of national security. They’re not part of national security. I mean, already in the law that there’s certain agencies excluded from unionization because they’re already involved with that. And I fought my own agency over this a few years ago. We had a guy, he was an IT when I was the local president, and they had him mislabeled as non bargaining unit as a non bargaining unit employee like management or HR employee.

And he asked me one day, he’s like, Hey James. He said, I want to join the union, but they say I can’t because I’m non bargaining unit status. And I’m like, no, you’re not. You’re in it. So when I inquired about why they had him labeled as such, they said, well, he sees sensitive information because he’s an IT guy. Well, so what? He’s still eligible to join the union. So I had to file an unfair labor practice and enforce the agency to classify him as union eligible. And so he joined the union, but I mean, they come up with all these, I mean, it’s no different than what Trump’s doing. They come up with all these excuses, these legal arguments that, oh, well, we got to exclude all these people now from collective bargaining, I mean wasn, that wasn’t the reasoning. The reasoning was because a FG and other unions have beat him already on two big cases.

One was the TSA, the other was the probationary people that were getting fired, I’m sorry, the TSA people. That’s still pending, but the probationary employees, and then they filed the suit on the deferred resignation program, which they had to backpedal on that quite a bit. So it is retaliatory for sure. I mean, I would think any judge or judicial panel would see that and say basically what you’re saying about national security, it’s overly broad. It doesn’t apply here because we’ve already got that in the, it’s already covered by, and secondly, it’s clear retaliation. They even mentioned A FGE in the order that they’re thwarting Mr. Trump’s agenda. Well, that’s just too bad. That’s what unions do, protect their members, right? I mean, yeah, it’s insane. It is, but we’ll still be here.

Maximilian Alvarez:

And the thwarting of Trump’s agenda thing, two kind questions on that one. If this executive order just sort of became totally the law of the land and collective bargaining rights were gone from these federal agencies, what would that look like for workers like you and what would that mean for executing Trump’s agenda without the unions getting in the way? Why are they doing this?

James Jones:

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know. I think there’s so much animosity at this point. Unions are still going to do what they’re going to do and they would still fight. You would just have to keep filing actions against the government, against his administration, still follow your contract, still file grievances, whatever you needed to do, LPs, et cetera, on fair labor practices. And then wait it out until he’s out and then have your day in court then and bring it all back. I mean, of course I’m not an attorney. I don’t know if they outlaw collective bargaining for these agencies. I don’t know how that would work as far as getting any kind of recourse or being made whole. It probably wouldn’t even happen, but I think they would would still be a lot of resistance toward that. Another thing is, if he’s successful at this, that’s going to be a green light for big corporations to basically go after their unions.

Just like the PATCO strike in 81. I’m old enough to remember that strike. I was 10 years old and I remember watching it on tv and my dad, he was a factory worker, unionized factory worker, and he said, we’ll never get another contract, a good contract because of this. And he was right. That company, he worked for the union basically. Every time they’d go to negotiate a new contract, they just kept losing. They had to concede things. The company would say, they’re going to shut the plant down. They’re going to do this, they’re going to do that. And it’s just been a steady decline since the PATCO strike. Basically, the Reagan administration said, we’re going to turn a blind eye. You guys want to break labor law. Go ahead. We’re not going to do anything about it. And that would be the same thing today, if they’re successful with this EO that he just signed s strip away collective bargaining rights. But much worse, I think

Maximilian Alvarez:

I work in the news and it’s impossible to keep up with all these executive orders, right? We’ve talked about on this show, I mean, that’s very much part of the strategy. The flood, the zone overwhelm. People hit people with so much bad news that we just become immobilized and unions may challenge some of them while others get through. It’s been a very dizzying couple months. I wanted to ask what the last two months have looked like from your vantage point in Boone as a government worker in a union that represents workers across different agencies, like from Trump’s to now. Could you just give us a bit of a play by play on how this has all unfolded in your life and how folks are reacting to it?

James Jones:

Yeah, obviously there’s been a lot of uncertainty, especially for folks that probationary folks after he was inaugurated and they first proposed firing all the probationary workers because they were easy to get rid of, easier to get rid of, and that hasn’t worked for him. But still, even these folks that are probationary, they’re still hesitant because they don’t know. Even though a lot of ’em got reinstated, they’re still going to do a RIF probably down the road. Who knows? I mean, I’m sure they will with certain agencies. I can’t speak for my agency. I know they’ve offered another round of voluntary buyouts and voluntary early retirement. But yeah, it’s been stressful. Even folks like me that have a lot of time, and I could have taken that first round of deferred resignation program when they offered it, but I don’t want to retire right now. I’m just 53 years old.

I’ve still got a lot of years left, and I’ll retire on my terms, not their terms. That’s the way I look at it. But yeah, I can’t imagine some of these folks, these folks that are just now getting into the government, they’re scared. They’re scared they can’t plan. I mean, I’ve heard of stories where people moved all the way across the country to take another job. These are people that have 5, 10, 15 years with the government. They took a new job. They were put into, they accepted a new job series, which basically your probationary period starts over. Anytime you leave a job series, go into another job series, you still have a one year probationary period. And then to get fired after you’ve had that many years in to say, well, you’re no longer needed, even though you’ve been a good worker and you’ve had good performance ratings, I mean, it’s crushing for those people, I’m sure.

And not all those people got their job back either. I think out of that 24,000, I think only 16,000 were ordered reinstated. So I can’t imagine having to moving into a new job, federal job, two 3000 miles away where I was at and then told You’re fired after you’re trying to resettle in an area. I mean, it is just cruel, inhumane. It’s just unbelievable. But yeah, as far as my agency goes, we don’t have a lot of people anyway. As I mentioned earlier, we’re down to the marrow. I call it the marrow instead of down to the bone, but I think we lost one probationary worker. That’s all we had when that order was signed. And that person is reinstated, to my knowledge, has been reinstated, but I don’t know what’s to happen with this Vera. The voluntary early retirement authority that came back out and the vsip, the Voluntary Separation Incentive payment Department of Interior offered that.

They excluded my job series on maintenance. The Department of Interior excluded a bunch of jobs from that where you couldn’t retire early law enforcement, firefighting, wildland firefighting, and then the park service excluded just about all the maintenance positions. So I couldn’t take it. I wouldn’t have taken it anyway, so I tend to think with maintenance, the reason they did that is because we don’t have many people anyway, so if they get rid of all the maintenance, just close the parks because you’re not going to be able to go in the park because nobody’s going to be there to do anything. Yeah, but there’s a lot of other jobs I’m worried about that they’re going to try, try to riff. They’ll try to do a riff. If they don’t get the so-called 30% reduction, which nobody seems to know what that means, there’s been no guidance issued. 30% of watt, 30% of this park, 30% across the board, 30% of a certain cap of money that they need to cut. I mean, who nobody knows. It’s kind like one of those things they, they’re just flying by the seat of their pants and doing things, whatever they feel like when they feel like it. So that’s the uncertainty of it too. You don’t know,

Maximilian Alvarez:

James, we talked at the top of this episode about the fact that you yourself are a veteran, right? That you’re union local. A FGE also represents workers at the VA over there in North Carolina where you are near Boone. I wanted to ask just a little bit about that, how all of this is hitting you as a veteran who has served your country and also served your country like working for the Park Service while we’re also seeing these devastating cuts to the VA and so many veterans who are being affected by these cuts outside of the VA even as well.

James Jones:

Yeah, the va, I’m disabled, so I use the VA for all my healthcare, dental, health, vision, the gamut. And one of my providers, I do telehealth quite often just because it saves me from having to drive to Asheville, which is an hour and a half drive and Hickory’s about an hour drive. So I’ve been doing a lot of telehealth appointments over the years and now that a lot of that’s gone because of the return to office mandate. A lot of these counselors and some other people were able to telework at home to treat veterans, especially with mental illness stuff, therapists, certified mental health counselors, that sort of thing. They were working at home and even some of the people in admin that I know that work at the VA national that do billing, they were able to work at home and do billing and this notion that we got to get everybody back in the office because they’re not doing anything.

Well, that’s a total lie and a myth. The VA uses tracking software on these folks that do telehealth. They know when they’re working, they know when they’re not working. They’re not at home doing nothing or doing the laundry or on the treadmill or whatever these people think. I mean, they’re being tracked. They have to meet their production quotas. But now since they’re back in the office, especially like with the care with Veterans Care, now I’m having to wait longer to get an appointment for my mental health counselor because now he has to drive 45 minutes to work to the nearest facility. And you say, well, that’s not much. Well, that’s time. He could be at home working, helping another veteran. I mean, I don’t understand where they get this, that people that telework or work remotely don’t do anything because I’m pretty sure most of the federal government, especially the bigger agency, well even the Park service, we had some folks at Telework, they have tracking software.

They know what they’re doing. I mean, if they’re not working, if they’re down less than more than 10 minutes, they get a text or an email. What are you doing? I mean, I don’t know how it works. I don’t telework, but I’ve been told that by many employees that our union represent. There is accountability with that system. But yeah, that’s just one thing. The other thing with Veterans Care, I think President Biden ordered about 60,000 people hired after the PACT Act was signed in 2022. They needed those people to file more claims to help process claims that veterans were filing after the war in Afghanistan ended in sometime in 20 21, 20 22, I can’t remember right after Biden took office, there’s been a flood of veterans from that era, from Iraq, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have come into the VA fold. Thousands of veterans, tens of thousands of veterans, and this administration’s proposing to go back to the 2020 levels of VA staffing.

Are you kidding me? You’ve grown the veteran population tenfold since then. It is not like Secretary Collins. The VA secretary said something the other day on TV about the VA’s not an employment agent. See, dude, dude, you’ve got all these veterans coming back from Afghanistan that are filing even veterans like myself. I filed on the PACT Act. I’m a Gulf War vet. I filed on the PACT Act as soon as it was passed. There’s some Vietnam era veterans that have filed under it. I mean, you’ve got a flood of claims being filed and plus people with real health issues, me included. I’ve got breathing problems. I’ve got all kinds of issues from my surface in the Gulf floor. It’s all connected. And for them to propose to reduce 80,000 positions in the VA system, they call it bloat or waste. It’s a farce. They’re basically sticking their nose up in the air to all of America’s veterans, the people that went over and served their country and sacrificed everything.

Maximilian Alvarez:

I mean, even just hearing that it’s my blood boiling, I can only imagine what it feels like for you and other people who have actually served in the military. I have not. Right, and it really brings us to the point that we’re at now, right? Where I think the rage is really setting in. For the past two months, there’s been a lot of fear, understandable fear. I am a brown tattooed man in the state of Maryland where someone who looks like me just got abducted and disappeared to a fascist colony in El Salvador under a administrative error by the Trump administration, and now he’s going to sit there and languish for who knows how long. I mean, the terror is real. We’re all feeling it in different ways, but I think after two months, the anger is really starting to boil up as well, the need to do something, the need to fight back, the need to speak out, and also the developments that have frustrated the Trump administration’s agenda both in the courts and elsewhere.

So we find ourselves at a very critical moment here at the beginning of April, and I wanted us to sort of end the discussion on that. I could talk to you for hours, but I know I got to let you go, but I wanted to ask if you could say more about how you got involved in the Federal Unionist Network, what local unions like yours are doing to fight back and what folks out there listening, whether they work for the government or not, whether they’re in a union or not. What’s your message to folks out there about why they should care about this and what they can do to get involved in the pushback?

James Jones:

Yeah, it’s not just an attack on federal workers. I mean, when the administration attacks, federal workers are basically attacking the American people because federal workers serve the American people. We’ve heard this over and over and over again, but it has to be said again, if you don’t have federal workers, you’re not going to have clean air and water. You’re not going to have safe food. You might not get your social security check. You might get it delayed. I mean, all this is up in the air. Your national parks close or they’ll be restricted to where you can’t access all parts of the park BVA services for Veterans Healthcare Benefit claim processing. That’s going to be reduced, and this is for people that don’t even work for the government, the FAA, they keep our airline, our airways safe, our border people that keep, hopefully they’re keeping the border safe and vetting people that are actually dangerous, that this stereotypical myth that everybody that comes across our border is some kind of criminal is just insane.

That’s scary too. Well, just like you mentioned earlier about the person that they arrested, I think it was in New York the other day, or the El Salvadorian guy, they took what’s next? They’re going to arrest American people, American citizens because they think you might be linked to the Venezuelan gang or something, and like you said, they’ll languish and you sit there in jail without any kind of due process. I mean, it’s just a matter of time if people don’t start fighting this, and I think they are. I mean, it is really, I think in the last two months we’ve seen the tides start shifting. People are starting to get involved, and I work with a group here, it’s called Indivisible Watauga, and I think it’s a nationwide group, indivisible. They’re kind of organizing these marches I think for April 5th, one of the many groups. And I’ve talked with a lot of my friends in Indivisible and in the county where I live, and we’ve been doing a lot of grassroots organizing.

I mean, I’ve been doing it through my union, through these people, but I think that’s what it takes is a collective effort. The united front across the community, your community and the nation to fight this. And I think we’re going to be okay, but it’s going to be a fight. I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but we can’t rest. We can’t rest. We’ve got to keep the pressure mounted for as long as it takes. I don’t think the courts alone are going to be our savior. I think they’re important and I think they’ll keep things somewhat between the guardrails, but I think the major power here is going to be us. We the people. If you can get out on April 5th, I think it’s a nationwide effort. Find out where April 5th rally is going to be a hands-off rally march slash rally. I think they’re happening everywhere and I think there’s going to be a huge turnout, and I think it’s going to send a direct message to Trump and Elon Musk that we’re not going to take it. You want to try to be a dictator or king or whatever you’re wanting to try to be. It’s not going to work out for you because we live in a democracy and Americans like their democracy and they will fight to keep it.

Maximilian Alvarez:

Alright, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guest, James Jones, veteran and a maintenance mechanic with the National Park Service. And I want to thank you all for listening, and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximilian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

As we’ve mentioned many times before on the show, movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the ninth floor and 10th floors–where 200+ workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration, options for escaping the fire were few. By the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, catapulting some pro-reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government with the introduction of the New Deal 20 years later. 

Near the 114th anniversary of this tragedy, Mel sat down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island and author of his forthcoming book, Organizing America: Stories of Americans Who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment.

Additional links/info:

• Cornell University – ILR School: Remembering the 1911 Triangle Factory Fire
• Dr. Erik Loomis on Bluesky
• More information about Dr. Loomis’s forthcoming book, Organizing America

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
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Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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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 everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’ve been your host for the month of March. Next week, max will be back at the helm for the month of April, bringing you more stories from the working class today for the last episode of this month, we’re taking a moment to train an eye on the past. As I’ve mentioned many times before, movements today are part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world.

With that in mind, we’re talking about the triangle shirt, waist Factory fire. Today on March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames spreading to the ninth and 10th floors where 200 plus workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were alerted to the conflagration options for escaping the fire were few, by the time the fire was brought under control, 146 workers were dead. New York City saw sweeping reforms in the aftermath of the fire, even catapulting some pro reform lobbyists like Francis Perkins all the way to the highest halls of government. With the introduction of the New Deal, 20 years later near the a hundred and 14th anniversary of this tragedy, I’m sitting down with labor historian Dr. Erik Loomis, professor at the University of Rhode Island, an author of his forthcoming book, organizing America Stories of Americans who Fought for Justice to talk about the struggle for better working conditions in the garment industry in New York City, the fire itself and the reforms enacted afterwards, and why it’s important to learn from our own labor history in this current moment. Thanks for coming on the show, Dr. Loomis. I really appreciate you taking some time this morning to talk about a very important piece of our labor history.

Erik Loomis:

Thanks for having me. I’m very happy to be here.

Mel Buer:

To start off this conversation, I just want to give our listeners a little bit of a chance to get to know you and who you are. So who are you, where do you teach? What kind of work do you do?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. So my name is Erik Loomis. I am a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. I focus on labor history. I’m also environmental history, so I teach a lot of courses at my university. I kind of cover a lot of ground in US history that people don’t necessarily otherwise would be able to take. So I try to offer things that students need or want, but I make sure I teach a lot of labor history. I’m teaching labor history right now and super awesome, a great group of students, and so that’s been a lot of fun. And then I write about these issues in any number of different ways. Everything from I write at the liberal blog, lawyers, guns of Money, a lot of that’s about labor history. I have this day labor history series that I started there that I also syndicate do threads on Blue Sky to give a lesson almost every day. Not quite every day, but almost every day I have a lesson about labor history that’s out there. So yeah, so I do what I can to publicize our labor history basically.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I think that’s actually a good place to start with our conversation. One thing that I like to do when I am hosting this podcast is sort of pull back the curtain on what it means to organize within the labor movement and to kind of give folks a sense of the nuts and bolts of what that looks like, but also to really help our listeners tap into the legacy of organizing in the United States, which is long storied, often violent, and really important to ground ourselves in this space. So to start this conversation, let’s just talk about what it means to learn about our own labor and movement history. And as a historian, why is it important to pay attention to and learn about this?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about that and this book have coming out in the fall or I guess late summer Organizing America kind of gets into this a lot because I am very interested in sort of like what do we do with our past? Every American, everybody probably in the world tell stories about the past for themselves, and those stories often reflect what they need in the present. So why do we could tell all of these different stories about all of these different moments in time, and that includes in our labor history. So triangle is a horrible fire, one of the worst things that have ever happened. Of course, we’re going to get into this, but it’s far from the only mass death incident in American labor history. Why do we tell that story? So I’m really interested in why do we tell these stories that we tell and what do they do for us?

And for me anyway as a labor historian, and I think different historians would have different answers for this question. I don’t represent the historical community on this. For me, there’s a combination of things. Some of it’s inspiration, and I think that would be something a lot of people would say, right? We could be inspired by these movements in the past. And I agree with that. But I also think, and maybe we’ll get into this as we talk about triangle, that sometimes when we tell stories that are strictly inspirational, we actually lose something that I have this idea of our movement history and the way we teach it is a Mount Rushmore sort of thing, which in my world is not a compliment. It’s like I know how I have a great idea how to represent the past. Let’s blow some faces into a mountain in South Dakota.

What a great idea. And everybody could come gaze, and I’m like, oh, it George Washington. Oh, he’s so wonderful. But we kind of do that with our movement history. We sort of gaze up as Malcolm and King and Chavez and Rosa and Debs, and we kind of look up. It was like, wow, if only we could have those leaders today. And I would try to counter that a little bit because if you get into the details of what they were doing, they didn’t really know what they were doing at the time either. And I think in some ways learning our labor history is really useful to sort of ground ourselves not only in what they achieved, but the fact that we’re not really that different than them. We can be them. We can become that person. And I think that’s a really important piece of it that I really try to emphasize is the humanity, the mistakes and the realization that there’s not that big of a difference between our struggles and the struggles that they had.

Mel Buer:

And we’ll talk about this a little bit later in the conversation, but I read David Re’s Triangle in preparation of this episode and beyond the book, the book itself is kind of a monumental achievement in really kind of laying out the conditions leading up to the fire, the minute by minute details of the fire, which are harrowing and horrifying, and the reform movement that was born out of the fire plus the manslaughter trial. And we’ll talk all about this here in a moment, but the thing that strikes me the most about reading these books, and this is something that I come across often when I read labor history, is that good historians, good journalists through their archive work, resurrect these people in a way that makes them far more real than just a photo on a labor website or a story about these monumental achievements.

As you say, these are human beings who could have at another time been my neighbor or I could have been sitting next to them at a factory table, and their lives are full of the same sort of quiet dignity and indignities that we suffer and enjoy as working class people today. So I feel my background is in, I have a master’s degree and in literature, I did a lot of work within archives for my own work research when I was in grad school. And I’m always struck by the ability to take what is just a little short newspaper clipping or a receipt or some sort of bit of detritus that makes its way forward into our current moment and to really kind of build life from it and depth from it and memory and to sort of share in that humanity. And so I agree, I think that especially with labor history, not only does it provide the playbook for how to potentially tackle some of these similar problems that we are experiencing with Triangle and with the shirt, waist Factory workers strike that happened a year prior to the fire, they’re going up against the same sort of political machine that we have now.

They’re going up against the same sort of exploitation and indignities that workers are experiencing now. And you can learn a lot from the ways in which they organized and often their failures to be able to have a sense of what you can do in this moment.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, and I think it’s also worth noting, while you don’t want to overdraw the lessons from the past, I mean the past and the present are not exactly the same thing, but within, we live just thinking here of American labor history, we live in a society that is shaped by a series of political and economic constructs, and by looking at our labor history, we can also get a sense of in our present debates around anything from the relationship of labor unions to democratic party or issues of democratic unionism or strikes or whatever it may be, a really deep dive examination into our labor history can really do a lot to suggest the potentials or limits of various contemporary issues that we’re talking about. Again, not that the past necessarily is a restriction on what’s possible in the present, but the basic structure of our economy and government has not changed a lot over the centuries. And even with Trumpism, I mean, everything that’s happening right now is basically a return to the conditions of the Triangle fire that we’re talking about. And some of those strategies used back then may become more valuable again with the destruction of labor law and the other horrible things that are happening right now. So I think that those deeper dives into our labor history, real discussions of our labor history as opposed to just snippets, but really help us move conversations at the contemporary labor and movement building world forward in some very concrete and useful ways.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, I think that’s a good segue into getting into the meat of the discussion today, which is to talk about the triangle shirt, waste Factory Fire, which happened on March 25th, 1911. First, I kind of want to put it in a bit of wider context about what was going on in New York City at the time. So in the early 20th century, garment production was the largest manufacturing business in America. In the decades leading up to the early 20th century, there was this popularization of standardized off the rack fashion during the Industrial Revolution. It meant that instead of making clothing at home or via various sort of cottage industries, the Industrial Revolution standardized that entire process and turned it into the ability to walk into a clothing store like Nordstrom’s or something and to pull a sized garment off the rack. And prior to more mechanized processes that didn’t require as many hands in the process, these garment production factories were staffed by hundreds and thousands of workers. And the largest piece of that was in New York City, in the east end of the city. So just to give our readers, our listeners a sense here, what do these conditions look like for workers at the time who worked in specifically the garment industry in New York?

Erik Loomis:

Sure. Yeah, it’s rough work. You had a mostly immigrant workforce, particularly Jewish immigrants, some Italians as well. And that was working in clothing was something that quite a few of these immigrants had brought over from particularly Russia where there had been a lot of tailors and cutters and things like this. They enter into a growing American garment workforce that you accurately described, and that is happening at a moment in the late 19th and into the early 20th century. We’re beginning to see a shift so that a lot of the early sweatshop industry in New York was home-based. Basically, this contractor would move things out through these subcontracting systems and put things in people’s homes. And so you think about a tiny little New York apartment on say the Lower East side where a lot of this was taking place and people might complain today of their studio apartment, how small it’s, but there could be 10 to 15 people living in that at the time.

And then during the day, they’re working in it right there. They’re basically moving, what they have is for furniture to the side and putting the sewing machines in there. By the 1905 or so, that’s beginning to shift pretty heavily to what we would think of more of as a modern sweatshop, that it becomes more efficient for contractors to have the work in a particular place such as the location of the factory that would become notable for the triangle fire. And that was a very exploitative workforce. They hired mostly women thinking that they could control ’em. Work weeks could be 65 to 75 hours a week, but also tremendously unstable. And so you’d be working those 65, 75 hours a week if there was work, but then if the orders dried up, you went to nothing. So rather than have a consistent 40 hour week or even more than that, but consistent, it was either all the time or nothing at all. The women worked basically between three to $10 a week for all of these hours, which was poverty wages, even at that higher level. And factory owners really tried to control workers’ movements. Locking doors was super common. Fear of these workers stealing cloth and things like that would lead to searches requesting permission to use very unsanitary and disgusting bathrooms, fines all the time at work being required, supply your own supplies such as needles and things like this. Sexual harassment of these workers was a real problem. It’s a rough way to work,

Mel Buer:

And I kind of want to draw a parallel. It’s not a one-to-one, but I do want to draw a parallel from these sort of sweat up conditions that lead into this sort of wider factories that come through in the mid 19 aughts to sort of gig work that we see in some industries today where it is truly a race to the bottom in terms of payment wages and conditions and in these sort of sweatshop conditions. Absolutely. You would find that these contractors were a dime a dozen, and if you were the type of person who wanted to ask more for more wages for what you were working, they could throw you out and find someone within 15 minutes by walking to a market down the street. We see these conditions a lot in the sort of gig economy, certainly in some of the white collar industries like writing or things of that nature where people are making pennies on the dollar for some of the work that they do. And you can sort of see those parallels. And it didn’t just because these factories then establish themselves within a garment district and start employing 500 to a thousand workers per factory or what have you, doesn’t necessarily mean that those conditions improved much.

Erik Loomis:

Oh, absolutely not. I mean, in many cases they became worse. I mean, homework is not a great thing by any stretch of the imagination, but you had a certain control over your, no one’s sexually harassing you, no one’s locking the door, no one’s saying you can’t go to the bathroom. So conditions were probably even worse. I mean, the whole point of centralizing it is of course to maximize profit and you are continuing to maximize profit by exploiting this very frankly, easily exploited workforce for the reason that you discuss in that you have masses and masses of people coming to the United States at this time. And there was a lot of people desperate for work.

Mel Buer:

I think I read a statistic that was like Ellis Island was processing upwards of like 5,000 people a week at the height of peak of that piece of immigration. So you can imagine streams of individuals coming in after spending a week in the bow of a ship, making it through the sort of gauntlet that is Ellis Island and then ending up in the streets of New York and wanting to engage in some sort of employment that they can have skills for.

Erik Loomis:

And a lot of times part of the reason they’re willing to accept these horrible wages other than not having a whole lot of other options is that the first thing they’re trying to do is get their families over.

And so the more people that are working even in exploitative conditions, the more money they can save to get the cousins over or get, A lot of times a father would go first, save money, get their family over, and then they’d kind of collectively get that extended family over. And given that these were Jewish immigrants in Russia at this time, a lot of that is desperately escaping the state sponsored antisemitism that’s going on at that time. So there was very real reasons for these workers to sacrifice a lot, even knowing that they’re working in a terrible job because they had higher calling at that point.

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, and this kind of brings us to a remarkable sort of labor action that happened in 1909. So we have at this point 20 to 40,000 garment workers in New York City who are working in various factories, the triangle fame factory, I think they had what four other locations that were making various items. They’re called shirt waste. They’re, or essentially blouses varying sort of degrees of fashion with lace and other things. But there were also factories all over the lower East side and the east side of New York that were doing some of the same stuff. And in 1909, in response to worsening conditions, there was a massive strike in the garment district that lasted close to a year, I believe, that was led primarily by women over 20,000 garment workers took to the streets and they walked out of dozens of factories in the garment district on strike.

And something that kind of gets missed a little bit in history, maybe this is just me loving a good name for it, but they called it the uprising of the 20,000 and it was considered an opening salvo and a new struggle for better working conditions in the industrialized sort of industries in New York City. So maybe we can kind of start with the strike itself and really kind of underscore how revolutionary it was to see a militant fighting union of primarily women leading this particular labor action and sort of how those impacts reverberated into the following years and decades.

Erik Loomis:

The union they had that was in that industry, it was called the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, or the ILG as it’s commonly known. But ironically, the leadership of the union was basically all men and men had taken over that union, and a lot of these men were skilled cutters and things like this. And even despite the name, they weren’t really that comfortable with masses of women in the workforce. I mean, they brought over gender ideologies as well. And so in New York, you have in those weeks and months leading up to this strike, which begins in November of 1909, you have young organizers, again, mostly Jewish women, some of whom who will become pretty famous in the future, Clara Lemick, Roche Schneiderman, Pauly Newman, all of which will become pretty famous names in American labor and reform history are organizing and the factories to say, we don’t have to live this way.

It’s not necessary that our conditions are so exploitative. Some of them came from families who had brought radical politics with them, which was a growing thing in the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe at the time through the Jewish fund. Others did not. Lelet came from quite politically conservative families who were outraged that their daughter was engaging in such radical activities. But it all begins to come to a head that fall. And there’s a big meeting in New York, I think a Cooper Union. And the point of the meeting in part is for labor leaders to try to cut the strike off. So the ILG member, the president’s there and other leading figures are there, American Federation of Labor Head, Samuel GOPer shows up and basically urges caution. And you have these, you can almost imagine it, it’s like two hours of these guys getting up and talking and going on and on and trying to kill time and trying to really undermine what they saw as a rebellion of low skilled workers that they feared would undermine the very limited gains that they had made in other parts of the garment industry.

And finally, after listening to this Lemick, who is this very small woman, the very tiny young woman gets up and basically marches up to the stage. And in Yiddish says, and I’m going to quote what she says here, I am a working girl, one of those who are on strike against intolerable conditions. I am tired of listening to speakers. You talk in general terms, what we are here to decide is whether we shall or shall not strike. I offer a resolution that a general strike be declared now. And she simply overwhelmed all those men on the stage. The workers walked out the day

Mel Buer:

Right standing ovation for that, the whole place just, and they had overflow for that as well. It was a very, very large meeting of workers, I think. And Clara Lemick specifically is unique in that she is probably in my reading over the last couple of years of labor history, a really solid example of what happens when you can successfully salt workplaces. She would hop from factory to factory, get hired on and salt the crap out of the workplace, organize those workers and bring them out on strike. And inevitably for some reason, she would either leave the job or get fired from the job and she would move on to the next one. And her organizing was so dangerous to the factory owners that they actually had her followed and she got the crap beaten out of her in the street and the next day and for the following weeks, you could see her on street corners displaying the bruises on her face. And using that as a rhetorical sort of example to say, we’re onto something, join us. And I dunno, as a woman in the labor movement, I find those examples to be really meaningful to anyone who’s listening to these sort of stories is that you may not even know who Clara Le is, but she is truly a revolutionary spirit in the labor movement.

Erik Loomis:

And I think that learning about people like that, I think there’s this whole, people like to say history repeats itself, which it doesn’t. Don’t ever say that to a historian, but there is these lessons out there. There are these people out there that you can be like, wow, they really did this amazing work and they suffered for it. I mean, getting the shit beat out of you is not a great story. That sucks. And she will be during the strike itself, lime Lake is beaten by a cop and suffer six broken ribs. She’s arrested 17 times during the strike. So it’s not, and these stories from the past, it’s not great. But I think that in a moment in which I think you see a lot of activism out there, or the beginnings of whatever we’re trying to do to stop Trump and all this horrible stuff. And there seems to me to be a lot of, I want something to happen, but I don’t actually want anything to happen to me.

I’m scared of something happening to me. And the reality is things are probably going to be happening to us. And learning that you can take that and build from it, I think is a critically important thing. It is a little bit of a side note, but I was just, yesterday in my labor history class, we were reading oral history from Harry Bridges, the great organizer of the longshoreman. And my students were struck because he talks in this oral history. He’s like, yeah, every day the cops would beat the shit out of us, and then the next day we would just come back and keep doing the same thing. And it blew their mind that you could do that. And I think these are the things that are important to understand, to bring from that past to the present. Lelet can be very inspiring this way.

Mel Buer:

So what was the outcome of the strike? So they were on strike for quite some time. A lot of these young women were arrested, sent to the workhouse for a brief period of time. You had some really interesting cross class solidarity and fundraising. Even JP Morgan’s own daughter was fundraising for the strike at one point. Funnily enough, they kind of moved away from support of the strike after some pretty hefty socialism and socialist rhetoric entered the sort of demand structure of the strike. But what was the outcome? What happened to these workers?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, the answer is in a sense, it is both a win and a lush. I mean, the cross class stuff is fascinating. These wealthy women come out, some of which would be big players in the future. I mean Francis Perkins, we’ll get into later is one of them, right? And this is a moment, this progressive era is a moment in which middle and upper class, particularly younger people are looking at society and they’re saying the things our fathers created in this era of uncontrolled capitalism, they’re just way out of control. And maybe these workers have a point. So there’d be these tentative alliances, which as you described, it’s one of the things that happen. What will happen to the strike itself is that by and large, the owners very much including the men who would own the triangle fire, were definitely there to resist as much as they could.

And after about 11 weeks, workers begin to, they start trickling back. I mean, because the international, the ILG, they still didn’t really support the strike, and they didn’t have the ability to have a big strike fund or anything like that anyway, so they don’t win a union shop. They don’t win a lot of workplace safety gains. But the manufacturers do agree to some real concessions. The work week drops to 52 hours in most of these factories that were four paid holidays a year. You don’t have to buy your own work materials anymore. And there’s kind of a vague agreement to negotiate pay rates, which is not really followed that much in the aftermath, but there were real material wins. What there was not were material wins about the conditions of work, which will be a huge problem going forward for the union, though that ILG local, local 25 really expands to become a big power player in New York for the next several years. And so the workers themselves feel very empowered by what happened to them. It’s a victory,

Mel Buer:

Right? And many of these workers who picketed outside the Triangle Factory are some of the ones who walked into work on March 25th, the 1911 and did not come out. And now on to sort of the hard conversation here. So this is a year after the strike workers have gone back to work. March 25th, 1911 workers walk into the ASH building, the Lower East Side. They took the elevators up to the upper floors to the triangle shirt, waist factory, which occupies the eighth, ninth, and 10th floors of the Ash building, which is now owned by cuny, right? It’s a science building, university science building.

Erik Loomis:

I think it’s N-Y-U-N-Y-U,

Mel Buer:

Yeah,

Erik Loomis:

NYU.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. So as I said earlier, I read Triangle, which is a very good book that kind of digs into the conditions of the garment workers, and it gives a minute by minute accounting of the triangle fire itself. I’d never really taken the time to learn the details of the fire. I found that there’s those sections of the book to be frankly harrowing, openly crying while reading it. It is, I don’t want to get into really the hardcore details of it because it is really upsetting and maybe for a lot of folks, but suffice to say, so the conditions in these couple of floors, eight and nine are floors where the factory work is being done. The 10th floor is kind of where the owners sit. They have a showroom. There is some tables for packaging and shipping the items that are put together, but the vast majority of materials are being worked on on those two lower floors.

So the fire begins right around the time of the closing bell. Folks were getting up to leave right around what 5:00 PM And something to note about these particular setups is that the cutters who are the ones who do the sort of precision cutting of the materials that are then sewn together in a sort of assembly line style at various parts in the factory are dropping scraps of highly flammable cotton materials into a bin underneath their cutting tables. And we learn later during the manslaughter trial that those bins are only emptied like four times a year. And so you can imagine that what’s underneath these tables is tons and tons of extremely flammable cotton and lace materials that just pile up. And obviously there’s a no smoking sign in every floor because this is a highly flammable workplace environment. Some of these cutters still smoked at the tables. And on the evening of March 25th, we’re not quite sure exactly what got thrown into the bucket, but it was probably a still lit match or a cigarette butt or a cigar butt that gets thrown into one of the buckets under the table and it lights a fire within what, I think it’s like less than 10 minutes. That entire floor is on fire.

Erik Loomis:

Yeah, I mean, so it starts on the eighth floor

And everybody on the eighth floor gets out. They call up to the 10th floor as you point out that the office or the owners are, and those guys are all able to get out. You have those close New York buildings and you can kind of hot from building to building in that area, but in the panic sort of people forgot to call the ninth floor. And within just a few minutes, you have this raging fire on the eighth floor smoke coming up to the ninth, and the doors are locked to get out and there’s an elevator and some workers do get out via the elevator. About a hundred are able to get out in those few minutes before the elevator becomes non-functional. But then you have 146 workers still stuck up there and there’s nothing that they can do. They try to open the door, they’re looking for the key, nobody can find it, and they end up facing a choice of burning the death or jumping from the ninth floor,

And then they all die. So you have 146 dead workers. This was not particularly uncommon. I mean the numbers were high, but you had more workers than that die in coal mines pretty frequently. And you also had other garment fires that were hardly uncommon. There had just been one the year before in Newark, across the bay from New York, but no one sees that. The thing about these sweatshops is that it’s a very low capital industry. All you really need is some sewing machines and a few other things. So you can set these up anywhere. So as you pointed out, it’s an afternoon. It is a nice day. We’re in March right now, and there’s been a couple of nice days, and everyone including myself is like, oh my God, I’m so happy to be outside. It’s sunny, including I look outside the day. It’s a beautiful day here in Rhode Island. And so that’s how people were, right? And so it’s late afternoon. People are strolling around. It’s the lower East side, but it’s kind of on the border of more prosperous areas. So people are just walking around and all of a sudden plumes of smoke will rise up and all these people head over to see what’s up and what’s up is a mass death incident.

And what made this different was honestly for our American history is not the numbers, it’s the fact that this became a public event. People saw this, people saw the people making their clothes die, and that makes an enormous difference in the response of a nation that had traditionally been quite indifferent to workplace death.

Mel Buer:

And there were a number of things that might have made this less of a mass casualty sort of incident. The owners of the Triangle Factory could have at any time updated their factories with fire suppression systems. This was not something that was particularly new. Fire safe factories had been a thing for a number of decades prior to this horrible tragedy. There is an interesting note in Von Dre’s book that suggests that perhaps the two owners were setting fire to their previous, trying to essentially commit insurance fraud in order to get rid of some of their previous stock in previous years. There’s no indication that this was anything other than accident. I want to make that clear. But the way that the building was designed was not designed very well for escape. There were no fire drills that were happening with any sort of regularity that would’ve made it easier for workers to have a direction to go.

And yes, there is. There were two exits, two doors. One door was kept locked in order to reduce the amount of stealing that was happening. Whether that’s true or not, doesn’t really matter. Folks had to go through essentially a carousel at the other door in order to get their things searched before they could leave, which obviously is leading to serious bottlenecking in times of panic. And even the fire escape didn’t really have, it wasn’t really a fire escape. It wasn’t quite rated for the amount of people to run down the steps, and it did not lead to anywhere. There was no clear egress to the street at the bottom of the fire escape. And unfortunately, it was just a rickety thing and it collapsed. And 35 people died plunging to their desks because the fire escape collapsed. So we have all of these things, these things that contributed to a really horrendous workplace accident.

And you’re right, tens of thousands of folks were on the streets watching on buildings nearby. There’s dozens and dozens of sort of accounts of the fire. And even Francis Perkins, who figures a little bit later was standing on the street watching this happen, and they’re watching workers hold each other outside of the windows of the ninth floor and drop their friends onto the concrete, and they’re seeing others who are flying out of the windows on fire. This is a really horrendous thing for a lot of people to witness. And to your point, there is a testament to how affecting it was for folks to witness this and hear about this happening in the days after the event when they lined the victims up for identification at the pier, sort of a coroner’s warehouse. There were tens of thousands of people there who were thousands of people who just wanted to walk through and potentially pay their respects, but also family members who were trying to find their loved ones. And even in the days afterward during these funeral processions, you have folks standing out for hours in the rain watching these funeral processions as folks are identified and then taken to various cemeteries around the city. So we can kind of start there in terms of just beyond the real sort of impact of this and how this moved into answering the question, what are we going to do about this in the years leading after the tragedy?

Erik Loomis:

Yeah. Well, it’s a mixed bag. I mean, first as you point out, the owners blanket Harris were incredibly negligent. They had been really the most anti-union of all of the major garment worker owners or garment factory owners in the uprising. They really don’t get any serious legal punishment for it. In fact, they just, what? They kind of disappeared from the record, but we know that they at least attempt to open up another factory. They don’t even seem to care after all these workers die. They’re really indifferent. But part of the legacy of Triangle, we’re moving in that direction. And it is interesting because it kind of shifts from a worker story to a middle class performer story

Because Perkins is there and she’s already involved in some of these issues, but she gets really motivated to become a much more active labor reformer, and of course later will become the first female cabinet member Secretary of Labor under FDR for his 12 years. And really a truly remarkable human being. But the changes that come are not really about workplace activism. What happens is that Perkins, Robert Wagner, who’s a rising politician in the New York legislature who will later be the sponsor of the National Labor Relations Act, that creates the system of labor negotiation that we sort of still have today, although it’s probably disappearing soon, thanks to our lovely Supreme Court. But the union election process is something that kind of has some things that come out of this. But in the immediate aftermath, there’s serious investigations that happen. And what it leads to are important things around fire safety, building safety, things like this.

So the New York Fire Department could only really handle fires up to the seventh floor of a building. This starts on the eighth floor. There’s changes around that. There’s changes around the kinds of conditions that are allowed in a workplace around issues of flammability, for instance. And these are truly important advances. And New York becomes a leader in creating a safer workplace. But the flip side of that is that at almost the very same time that’s happening, the textile industry begins to leave places like New York, and so they don’t have to deal with Claral LEC anymore. They begin to move to North Carolina, to Alabama, to Tennessee. And you have a whole nother generation of, because again, I mean part of the reason that people like Blank and Harris don’t hardly care where you had other industries that are taking these issues more seriously is that the capital investment needed to open a sweatshop is so they’re not protecting a serious level of investment. And so you could recreate these factories in east Tennessee and Western North Carolina and avoid immigrants, avoid socialists, avoid any union traditions. And so by the twenties and thirties, that’s all shifted down there and you have a new generation of labor organizing that takes place down there, new generations of violence in a industry that proves quite resistant to changing its fundamental ways that it operates, including to the present.

Mel Buer:

Right. So I mean, what’s the sort of antidote to that? I mean, I know that particularly with Francis Perkins and the sort of committees that were born out of the Triangle Fire, they didn’t just stop with garment factories is my understanding. They spent a lot of time, energy, and they had the political will because Tammany’s political machine sort of backed this as they’re moving into the mid-teens to really sort of begin to look at places like candy factories and bakeries and the various sort of industrial places that are also in need of reform. And so we see this sort of new decade or so of real, the political will is there essentially to support these sort of this reform movement that then brings us into what ultimately becomes FDRs new deal and things of that nature. But I guess my question is if the political will didn’t exist, if Tammany wasn’t willing to back these sort of plays because they are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, they’re seeing that there is enormous among voters, enormous need and want for increased oversight things, more progressive working conditions, things of that nature, would we have the same sort of, I guess you could call them policy wins within the labor movement?

Erik Loomis:

Probably not. I mean, I think the political atmosphere is very, very important. And I think that we sometimes ignore that in our contemporary conversations too, our peril. It really is a matter of kind of a combination of worker activism and a particular moment in time in which the politics are ready to act, in which people who have more access to power are willing to do what workers want them to do, either because they support it genuinely or they’re afraid of the worker power.

And this really leads into the New Deal. I mean, these things, the rise of Perkins and the creation of National Labor Relations Act and all of this is a part of two decades, really 25 years by that point, consistent working class struggle to try to pressure the political world to create these changes. Tammany needed to do it because Tammany was relying on working class voters as its core. They had a heavy, they were very heavily involved in the immigrant communities and providing services and things like that. And if those people weren’t going to come out and vote for Tammany politicians, then Tammany was potentially going to lose out. It was in their interest to see this through. New York had a far from universal, but it had a lot of capital, progressive politicians like these middle class people who saw needs for legitimate reform. And that begins to, of course, then influence the Democratic Party.

The Republican party remains tremendously hostile to almost all of this and create, thanks to the Great Depression and other conditions, the ability of this to go relatively national in 1930s, the rise of Perkins, the rise of Wagner, the passage of the National Labor Relations Act, all of that stuff is super critical. So yes, I mean the political side of it is real. And this is the thing is you see other worker struggles. It’s not like when these factories say textiles move to Tennessee and North Carolina that all workers acquiesce to this system, they struggle too. But the problem there is that the governors are just willing to call the National Guard to shoot them, and there’s not the political will there. And that is still a problem that we see in when we’re talking even before we get into issues of globalization, which if we’re talking about this industry, we have to talk about the reality is that the United States, even today, the politics of New York or the politics of Tennessee, let’s just say they’re a little different, and workers have a lot more power in a place like New York City in part because politicians will listen to them. We’re in Tennessee where I used to live as well and was working in labor issues. They don’t care what you have to say.

Mel Buer:

How do you get folks to have such, to have a heel turn on that? How do you start to begin to pull those threats in service of the labor movement? What are some ways in your experience that workers can kind of with a clear eye see as a sort of pathway towards really engendering more political will for better worker legislation?

Erik Loomis:

Honestly, I think a lot of it has to, I think there needs to be a lot more internal political organizing within unions. I think this is a serious problem in the contemporary framework is that a lot of unions are not really doing a lot of political education in their rank and file. And we see this in the kinds of the ways in which Trump has made inroads in the working class and things like this. At the time back then you had the level of political education. If you read union newsletters just as an example, they’re engaging. It could be even relatively conservative unions like say the Carpenter’s Union.

They’re engaging in very significant political education, like helping workers understand their position in society, helping them figure out how they’re going, what their proper action is. As a carpenter or as a wobbly or as a member of a communist union later, it really goes across the political spectrum. What is your role as a worker in this society? And that was in states where those conditions kind of lent themselves to that could lead to serious political action supporting candidates. And that’s going to become really crucial. So if we’re thinking if we move forward to the thirties and we think about the Flint Sitdown strike, a big reason why the Flint Sitdown Strike Succeeds is that the governor of Michigan, Frank Murphy, has been elected by workers and had pledged as part of his platform to never use the national guard against workers. So workers had elected this person who then does what he says he’s going to do, will not forcibly evict these sit down strikers from that GM plant in Flynn and in GM at that point has no other options. They were relying on state power to crush those workers, which had been the standard way of the past.

And so that stuff can make just an enormous serious difference. But in some ways, it has to start with unions doing the work themselves to be like, we are going to engage in a serious political education aspect for our members. And that does not just mean showing up two weeks before the election and telling you who to vote for, but actually building worker power by getting an everyday person who’s a busy person, who’s got kids and soccer practice or wants to hang out at the bar or whatever they want to do to get them to take that time that they don’t really have and to understand their position in society. And I think that’s really critical.

Mel Buer:

I think as we kind of round out this conversation, I think also are living in a time where there’s like what 9% union density we are and have been for quite some time sort of fighting this rear guard battle against the interests of capital and the exploitation of the workforce. And rightfully, I think a lot of unions have spent a lot of their time and energy and money on trying to continue to bring in new organizing is a way to stop the slow bleed that is union organizing in this country. The problem is it feels like this needs to be, this is becoming or has always been a sort of multi-front fight struggle here. And in the last couple of years, especially as I’ve been working as a labor reporter, I’ve been feeling pretty heartened by the amount of new independent organizing that has been happening. And I really hope that it’ll continue and there’s ways in which we can kind of maybe begin to become more militant in a new generation and to allow these more militant, younger folks to really kind of push forward policy and education that they’re bringing into as the sort of shot in the arm to the labor movement. But yeah, we have an uphill battle quite a bit.

Erik Loomis:

Well, I think it’s worth noting Claire Lemick had an uphill battle too, right? I mean, what you’re describing is a lot of what Lemick and Newman and Schneiderman and these other leaders were facing, right? A union leadership that was pretty fat and happy with what they had. They were really nervous about young people coming and taking over the movement and they didn’t really support them when they did, and it just didn’t matter, right? Lemlich did it anyway, and she spent the rest of her life as this incredible organizer doing all sorts of things, ending her life, actually helping the nursing home workers out in California where she was by the time she was an older woman, helping them organize into their own union and forcing the nursing home to honor the United Farm workers. Great boycott. So she continued organizing forever, but never really, actually never with the support of the international lady garment workers union leadership, I mean, she had to fight for a pension from them in the fifties and they were like, oh no, it’s that woman again.

I think it’s important to understand for younger organizers that the idea that the power structure, even within the labor movement’s just going to roll over for you. They’re not going to do that. You just do it anyway. They just create a scenario where they don’t actually matter anymore. And I think that’s important. And we’ve seen that to some extent. I mean, some of the things that say that the Starbucks workers have done, for example, which is regenerated a lot of energy, but at the same time, because of these larger political conditions, has not led to a growth in the actual overall labor movement, which is part of our story too.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We’re going to have to end it here. Please come back on anytime to talk about your forthcoming book, come back anytime to talk about history. I mean, I’ll be doing some history episodes when I come back here to host in May and hoping to do one on the Memorial Day massacre here in Chicago and hopefully something about Mayday. So if you’d like to come back on and chat about that, I’d love to have you.

Erik Loomis:

I’m always happy to chat about labor history, so anytime you want.

Mel Buer:

Great. Thank you so much.

Erik Loomis:

Hey, thank you.

Mel Buer:

That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel Buer and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

This week, we’re staying in Southern California, where the workers of Touchstone Climbing Gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer. Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California, experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations early last year. The successful campaign with Workers United created a wall-to-wall union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. Members of the LA-based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive.

However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers’ demands is better communications, higher safety standards, and better pay. 

With me today to discuss their unionization, and their negotiations are Ryan Barkauskas, PT desk staff at the Post in Pasadena and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, now FT Workers United organizer. 

Additional links/info: 

• Touchstone Workers United Instagram
• Climbing Business Journal – “Touchstone Workers United Win Union Election – First Southern California Climbing Gyms to Unionize”
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Sam, 10+ year Yoga Instructor
• Eaton Fire Gofundme for Martell, Front Desk Worker at The Post in Pasadena

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
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• The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page

Featured Music…

• Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song

Studio Production: Mel Buer
Post-Production: Jules Taylor

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Mel Buer:

I got work. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Mel Buer and I’m your host for the month of March. Stay tuned this month as we share the mic with workers from all over this country and discuss pressing issues central to today’s labor movement. Last week we checked in with behavioral healthcare workers in Southern California as they entered their 20th week on strike. If you haven’t checked out that episode, be sure to head on over to our channels and take a listen. This week, we’re staying in Southern California where the workers of Touchstone climbing gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer.

Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations. Early last year, successful campaign with Workers United created a wall to Wall Union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. And members of the LA based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has been overwhelmingly positive. However, workers have been navigating a frustrating negotiation in order to reach an agreement on a first contract. Chief among workers demands is better communication, higher safety standards, and better pay with me today to discuss their unionization. Their negotiations are Ryan Markowski, part-time desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and Jess Kim, former desk staff at the Post in Pasadena, and now full-time Workers United organizer. Welcome to the show guys. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having us.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, thank you.

Mel Buer:

Yeah. Okay, so to kick things off, we got a lot to talk about. I really kind of just wanted to start by giving our listeners a bit of background on this current struggle that you’re engaged in. Jess, if you would like just to start this conversation, can you tell me a little bit about the climbing gyms that you used to work at, that the bargaining unit works at? How many locations does Touchstone own in California, in Los Angeles? What is the sort of makeup of this particular shop?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So there’s Touchstone Climbing, which is where our story originated. They are a chain just in California that’s fairly large. They have five locations in the Los Angeles area. They have Burbank, Hollywood, Pasadena, Culver City, and downtown. And last year they opened one in Torrance as well, so it five are in our bargaining unit because that’s when we organized. And there’s one more in Torrance Class five that has not been added. And then up north they have another big clump of gyms, especially around the Bay Area. I think it’s about 10 more gyms, Ryan, I think, and then they’re opening a couple more this year up there.

Mel Buer:

How big is the bargaining unit? How many employees?

Jess Kim:

It’s about 170 employees inside the unit. We did organize wall to wall, which means everyone inside of the building who is not a supervisor is included, so that’s disc staff, route setters, safety staff coaches, yoga instructors, janitorial and maintenance employees.

Mel Buer:

Ryan, what are the sort of jobs that folks are doing at a climbing gym? For our listeners who maybe aren’t in the climbing community, they may have never set foot inside of a climbing gym, don’t even know what it looks like or what the sort of space is. Could you kind of clue us in on what that is?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Absolutely. There’s a lot of kind of guest relations because it is a gym that requires servicing and some customer facing. So me personally, being a desk staff, I greet people, I check them in. I assist people with their memberships. I do instruction as well. And besides just the general maintenance and the upkeep of the gym, a large part of our responsibility is the interaction with the community. There’s additional roles such as safety staff that largely their position is meant to just facilitate those lessons, get people first acclimated with climbing, and then be keeping everybody safe. But something that’s usually encouraged and that we really appreciate about the job is walking the floor, being there with the climbers, letting them know about community events, how to be active in this great community, but really, yeah, again, that’s just a couple of the small roles. There’s coaches, there are youth teams that we foster. There are yoga instructors, separate fitness instructors past that, and just as Jess said, there’s janitorial, there’s maintenance, there’s everything that requires this building to continue to function.

Mel Buer:

Would you say, Jess, that these gyms are sort of situated and interfacing really well with the community, just as Ryan has said, but give us an idea of what the climbing community looks like in Los Angeles or in the United States? What does it feel like to you?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, the climbing community is legendary, perhaps just among ourselves for our comradeship and our support. I’ll drop a little hint that when we form a local, we’ll be local 69 because we believe in mutual care. So I started climbing actually on the east coast, and when I was over there, I got in because my friend in college wanted to learn how to escape the zombie apocalypse, and this seemed like the best route for her, and I am a adamant people pleaser, so I was like, sure, let’s go. We got sucked into the climate community there, and everyone is just so supportive, kind, no matter what you look like, if you’ve ever do other sports before, people don’t care. Everyone can get on there and touch those colorful holds on the wall, and we love to see it. So I love being part of that community.

There is a rash of a bros, as in many of the sports, and I feel like that’s just entertainment for other people who come to the gym. You see a man grunting on the wall, just let that go. He’s doing his business up there, he’s getting his emotions out. In California, we are lucky because in LA we have such a strong union community, and so many of our climbers work in industries that are prolific within the working class and organizing within the working class. So we have Hollywood, all those entertainment unions, which I’m a part of. Ryan works in Hollywood as well. We have teachers unions. We’re so active, so we have a very strong community that sees each other in and outside of the gym. And we’re lucky actually at Touchstone, we have groups called Affinity Groups, and these are specialized meetups for people of color, for queer folks. We have lager, thes, brew crush, Eskimos, hair cliff hangers for disabled climbers. We have lots of ways for people to find their people in the gym, and that’s what we love about it.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I’m new to climbing just recently started in the last couple of months, and I would say that it’s the same experience for me. It seems like there’s a very low barrier to entry and that everyone is welcome. And it seems like that’s kind of baked into the community that you have lived and worked in for as many years as you have. One thing that I do want to ask though is you formed this union in the end of 2023, and there was some issues that were happening at your gyms in LA that kind of pushed you to really collectively organize. Ryan, do you just kind of want to tell us what the issues were and why it was important that folks came together and filed for a union?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, there were a few errors, a few omissions and inconsistencies. We were seeing pay being different from location to location. You could work someone else’s coverage and be expected to not be paid their same rate. There wasn’t proper a ladder of seniority, there weren’t establish ways to really protect yourself and have look a path to advancement, better checking in with our bosses, they touched on kind of had this mentality of, oh, we’re so mom and pop. We so easily can just directly work with you. And that works to an extent. But when there can be things that come up that jeopardize our safety that worry us, and that we feel like, Hey, we’d like to have more communication with you every now and then we’ll just get a little bit of like, no, I think we’re doing okay though. That sparked, I think a lot of that organizing us feeling like, but this is our opinion, and wouldn’t you like to hear that? And to just kind of be told, no, I think we know best.

Mel Buer:

We’re a family here. Take your pizza party and walk out the door kind of experience.

Jess Kim:

We didn’t even get pizza that rough.

Mel Buer:

So you tried to solve these problems and tried to open up lines of communication with management ahead of organizing, and they just weren’t receptive at all.

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s a very short progression and still what they encourage is very informal means of we just go to our direct manager and our direct managers are then supposed to be the go-between, but that puts a lot on that middleman. If they make a failure in communication or if it just escalates there and our remote admins just deem it not necessary. We feel like we don’t have any direct say, and it can make us really feel powerless, especially if we don’t, unfortunately might not have the best relationship with our managers. We can hope for the best, but that can only do so much when they’re always like, oh, let’s just talk about it. Let’s make it informal. It doesn’t always work.

Mel Buer:

It doesn’t seem like there’s, when things are informal like that, A, there’s a lot of bottlenecking that happens because there’s a lot of people who are passing messages along in a game of telephone, the worst game of telephone ever, people’s livelihoods, and B, it seems like there’s no documentation for you to be able to track solutions. Does that sound accurate in this situation?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, I think we’ve struggled in that way for sure. There can be some paper trails of emails, but past that, they even changed our communication systems when they changed programs on us to Slack, which I’m sure many people are on, but just simple requests that we have of just like, Hey, can we just put this in writing? Can it be more consistent? Can you include this group in the Slack? Maybe there’s a certain job title that isn’t even on the team communications yet, and they miss announcements. They’re resistant to do even that, and we’re like, why should it be so hard to even just share information?

Mel Buer:

Right. Well, Jess, how did folks come together in January? What was the process for really coming to start collectively organizing and forming this union? One thing that I like to do, especially on this show, is that many of our listeners aren’t really familiar with how unions come together, and a lot of these episodes that I do is really the aim is to sort of pull back the curtain a little bit on what that organizing looks like. So what did that look like for you and the bargaining unit here with Touchstone Workers United?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, of course. So when I had started working at Touchstone, I feel like people joked about forming a union like, oh, we should do that, but there wasn’t any real action despite all these frustrations that Ryan had described. And we had a really unfortunate incident that made the LA Times in October and November of 2023 where there was a threat made against the gym that was very specific, and there was an FBI investigation started, and the company communicated so poorly that the workers and the customers were put in danger, and obviously that doesn’t go over well. And the response from the company was not apologetic. It was very much a little blamey to be honest, and didn’t make people feel comfortable in the workplace. And because of that, like Ryan said, we had a centralized system for most employees to talk to each other with management prior to this.

And because so many people were documenting the status of the threat at these different locations and talking Touchstone did shut down that method of communication, but we had already exchanged emails, so we had a big email thread going with mostly employees and had already signed a petition to help with that situation. So because many of us were talking already, it was pretty simple to be like, you know what? We’re going to really organize. We also are fortunate that at Touchstone, we cover each other’s shifts frequently for desk staff, so we travel to other locations, we get to talk to each other, and then our setters and coaches and instructors, most of ’em work at multiple locations as well. So there’s a good flow of communication. Plus we all hang out. We hang out after hours, we climb, we hang out outside to climb. We have the unifier of being addicted to climbing.

So once we have the comms going, just like classic union campaigns, but if the listeners aren’t familiar, we live in America and in America, you do not want to talk about the union campaign openly, unfortunately, because it is really difficult to protect someone from being fired or retaliated against at this stage in the campaign. So if you’re organizing, you want to use non-work emails, you want to meet offsite, you want to talk in person, and you want to make sure that everyone who’s involved knows that they don’t want to just be talking about the union at this specific workplace out at the grocery store. You never know who’s around. So unfortunately, that’s the reality. So yeah, we just got people talking. We had the emails and then we distributed what are called the NLRB. There are cards indicating your interest in a union, you want 30% of the workforce to sign to file for an election, but kind of the gold standard in most unions now is getting more than 70% of workers to sign because you need a bigger majority to win an election. And so we were able to get that very easily and very quickly because we had the impetus from people feeling very unsafe, even with the security guards that were hired by Touchstone for a brief period of time who were not the best. I will say.

Mel Buer:

Oh, yeah, I mean, yes. One thing to also note here too is when you’re talking about a majority that’s 70% or more is what people call a super majority of cards signed. It’s essentially alerting the NL rrb that if you were to have an election, say for example, you file and your employer doesn’t voluntarily recognize your union, it then goes to a union election that is put on by the NLRB. You’re essentially telling them with confidence that you will win that election because more than a majority, a super majority of your eligible bargaining unit has signed cards saying, yes, I will vote yes. Right. It’s also really good when you file and you present this information to your management, to your boss, you can say, I don’t know, man, 80% of us are already for this. It might just be easier. It’s going to happen.

You might as well just say, yes, let’s get this party rolling. And oftentimes if they’re receptive, they will voluntarily recognize and then your union can be certified and then you can really start the process of negotiations for first contract. So if any of our listeners are feeling the opaqueness of that, that’s the general sort of gist of how unions can be certified in this country. And Jess, you are right. Oftentimes what happens with organizing situations is you really kind of have to plan and prepare for how you’re going to approach people in order to get them interested in the union. I have certainly been in situations in the service industry where I’m from in Nebraska where we tried to organize unions at the bars that we worked at, and unfortunately the organizing was happening in places that got overheard by management. And so they will begin to do things like captive audience meetings, like leaning on certain members to say no to this process.

All of this is technically illegal or there’s a line there. But oftentimes management is not interested in seeing workers collectively organize. They view it as a loss of power in the workplace because often, especially with Touchstone or Ryan, I’m sure you can kind of note this as well, it seems like they have enough of a profit in order to handle anything in terms, and we’ll talk about negotiations after our break here in 15 minutes or so, but it would seem that they have enough money in their pockets to be able to handle you asking for a raise. You know what I mean? So I don’t know if you feel the same way, but it seems to me, especially in all of my reporting, when we have a struggle like a bargaining that goes sideways or a picket line that forms or a strike, oftentimes it’s a question of power. Who wants to have power in the workplace? And Ryan, what are your thoughts on that? What has it felt like to kind of collectively come into your own power as a worker with Touchstone Workers United?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It feels, I mean, it feels empowering or dare I say, nothing really great comes that easy. It’s just really frustrating to recognize how much work and resistance this will involve. Like you said, companies might sit you down and try to talk you out of it. We had that moment. I remember when our CEO and one of the other CFOs came in, and that’s their last little ditch effort to say, Hey, we think we could serve you better if you don’t do this. And at that little meeting, our CEO promises to us, and this feels almost like a little bit of manipulation, how he says, I will not be a union busting CEO if you choose to ratify, I will accept that. Okay. I guess that’s what the majority of my work was wanted. I thought I knew better, but if you tell me this, that’s what I’ll hear.

So what we’ve seen is the opposite of that. I felt inspired to propose to put myself on this bargaining committee only as a part-time staff as well. Most of the people that I’m really trying to fight for are my full-time friends that are more invested in this company that really want to make this like their homes. And I just saw the failings of the communication that what we were getting from our higher ups, and I was like, well, maybe I could lend a part of that. I think maybe I’m a little bit wishful in my thinking when negotiations are a little bit more red and very protected. Everything is said through one lawyer and it’s been frustrating, but really what it’s shown is the need for this was like, wow, I guess. Yeah, his words weren’t exactly true when he said that.

Mel Buer:

No, I think you bring a good point in here, Ryan, is that oftentimes management does feel, it feels a little squeaky talking to him when you’re talking about organizing a union. What’s that one meme? All the questions you have are answered by my t-shirt that says, I’m not going to union bust. You know what I mean? It feels weird, but I will say, you did the thing you filed for election. Did they voluntarily recognize the union? No, they did not. Okay. Absolutely

Jess Kim:

Not. They didn’t even answer or voluntarily.

Mel Buer:

So yes, it was all bs. Them sitting you down and saying, oh, we will. We’ll hear that answer. No. And so you went through the election. What was the results of the election?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I don’t remember the exact numbers. It was fairly close. We had a number of issues. We had a lot of union busting from the employer. Like Ryan said, we had those captive audience meetings, which again are illegal if you’re in the US currently anywhere in the US it is illegal, but especially in California, it was already illegal to have those meetings, which is when the employer comes in and tells you not to accept the union or try to persuade you to not unionize. We also had people like managers threatening that if you unionize, your benefits will be taken away or you won’t be able to talk to your manager anymore. And we received, which is my favorite daily mail to our house in just stacks from the company that was these big, bold, why unions are terrible headlines saying they’re going to come into our homes.

And it was like Scooby Doo investigation out there. It was rough. It was not factual. And then we got an apology letter actually from the CEO mark that was like, oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize that there were so many mailings because people were so angry about getting this pile of mail at their house. And I think there’s something there too in that the anti-union efforts can become from the employer can be so annoying and out of touch and irritating that actually drives more people to want to unionize. We’ve had folks who went to a captive audience meeting undecided, and they came out being like, man, those assholes, I want to be with you guys. We’re like, yeah, that makes sense.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, the best organizers, often the boss. We’ve seen that certainly in the federal worker unions in the last month or so, folks who never would’ve joined the union have seen what’s been going on at the federal level and they’re like, ah, actually, give me a card. Let me sign. I am tired of this. One more thing before we go to the break here, and then when we come back, we’re going to talk about the negotiations themselves and how things have been going since then because all of this has happened in early 2024 or so. But how has the climbing community responded to your unionizing effort, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Geez, overwhelming support. It really is, like you said, how accepting the community is. The motto is the crag is for everybody outdoors. We take care of nature, we take care of it all. We just want to continue to enjoy this. We want everything that’s left behind to be shared and loved by all. And yeah, like Jess said, so many people are a member of II are working freelance in so many different disciplines and jobs, and so they hear about this and every time I’ve told someone that what’s happened, they say, that’s amazing. I’m happy for you guys. And they’re checking in. They want to know how to support. So really the community is really behind us and these are the relationships that we have. We talk to these people every single day. We have become really good friends and we are around them constantly and we’re all invested in each other. So to have the behind us really, really means a lot.

Mel Buer:

Jess, from your position as an organizer, how have you sort of seen the sort of community response to both the union effort that was successful? And now as you’re getting into deep into your negotiations at this point, how has the community response been in terms of support, in terms of reaching out to Workers United and wanting to share their experiences with the unionized gyms? What has that been like for you on your end?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I agree with Brian. Completely overwhelming support. I was only recently fired from Touchstone in, I want to say October. So I’ve only been a full-time organizer with Workers United a few months, but we have an Instagram account for our workers. It’s at Touchstone Workers United. We get a ton of dms from people offering support from high profile climbers to local people in our community to people across the US who want to support, and they’re a part of their local climbing community. We also get interest from other gyms in the US who are asking, how do we organize? Can you walk us through it? And of course, we’re very happy to. It’s been truly wonderful. We haven’t gotten a single negative dm. What also really gets me is I discovered some Reddit threads yesterday about the organizing and wow. People in there are so supportive and so petty. There’s some memes on there that absolutely sent me. It was just, wow, I love the support, what the level of petty is, just That’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful thing.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, you got to laugh at it when things are so frustrating. So we’ve kind of talked about how the organizing was last year. How long have you guys been in negotiation process? When did you start bargaining for your first contract?

Jess Kim:

We started our first session in September, 2024.

Mel Buer:

Okay, so it’s been, what is that, four months? No longer, five months, six months of bargaining.

Jess Kim:

Yep. A long time.

Mel Buer:

Not. Great. Okay. Let’s kind of break it down a little bit. So just overall, Ryan, you’ve spoken about some of the frustration in the organizing prior to the election and probably in the aftermath as well, and you are on the bargaining committee overall. Let’s start there broadly. How have the negotiations been going?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Like pulling teeth? Yeah, me going into that with some hope that, oh, I could just start a real good line of communication. I could just appeal to reason. And what we’re met with is a lawyer from a notoriously anti-union firm who does all of the speaking. We are faced with three other representatives of our company, none of which really add anything to the conversation unless he has a question. Simple things that we would love to just be able the flow of information and to be able to actually go back and forth across the table are usually met with, oh, I guess I’ll have to look into that, and maybe we won’t hear back until six weeks later when the next meeting is right. And so it’s really frustrating to see this wall that I think has been put up by the company to say, Hey, this is us just really worried about our self-interests and we’re going to hold onto this as best as we can and give you as little as we can. In the six months that we’ve been meeting, we have two or three tentative TAs on the contract, and they’re very basic, the ones that we have. So it’s really been a struggle.

Mel Buer:

What are some of the main bargaining priorities that you went in there with? Obviously you’re talking about parody and wages, you’re talking about better safety conditions. What are some of the specifics of that that you really are really pushing for as you continue these negotiations with the company?

Jess Kim:

Yeah. Well, we based our campaign on three kind of pillars, which is safety, equity, and empowerment. Ryan spoke before about difference in wages between employees doing the same job. We’ve been there the same amount of time. The only difference could be gender, it could be anything. It’s just not unfair, it’s not fair. So our contract has a series of articles in our non economics. Most of our articles regard safety issues that we have in the gym. So a lot of it’s just compliance with general federal and state law. There’s a lot of things that are not compliant with law. We’ve had OSHA come in several times for different violations, and it’s simply just not an environment where you feel safe as a worker or where customers feel safe. And it’s very frustrating that there is no mechanism in America to really have companies comply with different laws.

For example, we have the workplace violence prevention law in California, which can law in July of last year of 2024. And in that employers are supposed to design blueprints with the employees, with the employees, like a collaborative effort on how to react to active shooters and how to react to different violent scenarios in the workplace. And given our history in 2023 of having issues related to this, it’s incredible that we not only don’t have a plan, but we have requested a plan many, many times in bargaining via email, people in person to our HR director. And there’s, there’s no compliance with that, and there’s nothing you can do. So outside of the union contract, what path you’re going to pursue with the contract, we can put that through the grievance and arbitration procedure, get that amended, get anything reparations back into it, because it’s not fair that workers want to simply go to work and not fear for their safety, and they want to comply with basic, the most basic laws that we have, which aren’t even that strong in America for safety protections.

And we don’t have those. So safety’s a big thing. Wages for sure, we have a lot of issues with the wages in the climbing community. There’s this history, this beautiful romantic dirtbag history of climbers who are living off the earth and they’re climbing outside. And in the past, they would just work at a gym for six months to get enough money for the whole rest of the year. Then they’d go climb and work on their projects, which is beautiful. But no one can build a savings on what is out here at the climbing gyms. We’re chasing minimum wage. They’re highly skilled positions. Our route setters have to use power tools at heights of 40 feet. They have to communicate with each other and use all these safety measures, and they design routes every single day that are different on three different styles of terrain. And they also take in consideration people who might be vi or visually impaired, people who have different abilities.

So there’s certifications involved. There’s a lot of factors. So to be offering people basically minimum wage, especially in a city like Los Angeles or up in the Bay Area is also not acceptable for us. It’s just not livable. And we do have staff who can’t afford housing and things like that. So that is a huge factor for us. And then the final thing is, as Ryan touched on some of our most basic asks are respect, like building communication structures within the company. We asked for a joint labor management committee, which could meet whenever there’s large safety issues. We asked for to bring back that centralized communication platform that people, everyone was able to use to get notices on new policies or talk about issues that are affecting all of the gyms. And we built in structure as well for what to do when someone receives warning when someone gets disciplined or is leading toward discipline.

And another big issue in our community is sexual harassment. We work in the fitness industry. We ask for different levels of how are we addressing issues in our gyms, these that are very prolific. And so our biggest issues are not building a new handbook or building a new code of conduct. It’s like we’re asking for basic compliance with laws. We’re asking for livable wages for folks, and we’re asking for basic safety protections both legally and mentally and with sexual harassment and ways to address these issues because Touchstone does not have an internal structure, an internal path for these problems. And in the past when people report discrimination or sexual harassment, they can just go unanswered or the answer is deal with it yourself. And that’s not okay. That’s not a safe environment for people to be working.

Mel Buer:

You want to make sure that people stay at their jobs. And these are basic sort of protocols and structures. The cool thing about a union for many of our listeners who maybe aren’t aware is that within the collective bargaining agreement that you ultimately agree on, it is a binding document that both sides sign. So when you ask for these things and they agree to them instead of this pie in the sky, yeah, we’ll get to it, trust us, you now have a binding legal contract that you can point to that says, actually, you said you’d get this to us six months ago. We gave you some time. Now we’re going to start pulling on this thread so that we can actually bring you to do this thing so that you are compliant or we’ll grieve you, we’ll file a grievance. We’ll bring in these mediators to say they haven’t done their side of the bargain, and we have.

And so the things that you’re asking for, you’ve touched a little bit, just some clarity for any of our listeners who maybe aren’t familiar. When you are negotiating, you’re negotiating both non-economic and economic proposals. The non-economic ones fit in the realm of these protocols that you’re talking about, these communication structures, safety plans and things of that nature. And then the economics is going to be obviously your wages, potential benefits, retirement health insurance, things that you may be a pension, perhaps, things that these that deal with the material conditions of the workers who will then be receiving those benefits. So oftentimes during bargaining, you will ta a small piece of that means a tentative agreement. It means you’ve come to an agreement on one provision in your contract, and then you can move on to the next. And sometimes it takes a while, but six months is a long time.

However, there are folks who have been bargaining for years and years and haven’t reached a conclusion. And oftentimes it leads to this frustration that you’re talking about, Ryan, where the assumption is, and maybe this is just me being idealistic, but the assumption is that you would come to the table in what’s called good faith, meaning you are willing to work towards a solution, you’re willing to make compromises and to have a collaborative sort of conversation that ultimately ends in the better working conditions for all happier workers means more profits oftentimes. And for whatever reason, oftentimes the company just decides to throw that out the window the second that you start asking for these things. So I want to ask, you’ve laid out a lot of these proposals, Ryan, you’ve already talked about the frustration, but what has been the sort of response to these demands?

Ryan Barkauskas:

It’s been a lot of legal jargon and slowing down the process really gumming it up. A large contention right now is something that we’ve had to call out and that we might be filing an unfair labor practice for this as well, is we’re arguing that they’re not in good faith for the fact that we have not received counter proposals on our economic proposals

Mel Buer:

Yet,

Ryan Barkauskas:

Ever. When did

Mel Buer:

You introduce them? When was the first time you introduced

Ryan Barkauskas:

’em? Those? A couple months ago.

Mel Buer:

So they should have something by

Ryan Barkauskas:

Now. Yeah, yeah. We had a change in our healthcare that was presented to us with very limited notice that then we had to see if we could bargain, which in itself is unfair labor practice. They’re changing conditions on us. And we very quickly were like, okay, we need to talk about this because this is affecting our bottom line. We’re met with a response of, well, if you would like to keep your same health insurance, maybe you’ll all just take a pay cut. And you can imagine when that was at the table, our reaction and how much that hurt to hear. And yeah, since then there has been just a real slowness on the non economics. They’re feeling like they’re just doing the bare minimum and their argument, which is truly just holding that bargaining chip against us saying, Hey, we want to see more movement on the non economics before we even talk to you about economics. Their justification saying Maybe we don’t know what you’re really going to be wanting to hold onto, but that’s trying to take all the power for themselves to say, we want to see you sacrifice more and to know what you’re willing to give when we should be bargaining the entire agreement when everything should be open to discussion. So it’s been frustrating as always to just receive lots of words and have to comb through them and say, oh, okay, what do they even mean by this?

Mel Buer:

And

Jess Kim:

It’s like homies, they ask for our economic proposals, we delivered them, and then they were like, actually, we’re not going to look at them. They’re like, oh, are you sure? Because we’re bargaining health insurance. They’re like, yeah, I don’t think it’s appropriate at this time. We’ll come back to it. And it’s been four months and we’re like, you asked for it, so we delivered. You got to response. I mean, it’s a long time.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, so it feels like it’s just completely fallen off the rails a little bit. You’re not really getting the movement, even the conversation towards the movement that you’ve been hoping for. And yeah, I can see how that would be an extremely frustrating experience. When’s your next bargaining session? When are you supposed to meet next?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Yeah, we have the next one about two weeks, March 10th.

Mel Buer:

What’s next? Just keep doing it. Keep doing the deal and see if you can make it work. I mean, I know that you’ve been pretty open about the frustrations with the negotiations on your social media and your town halls that you do. And really just kind of trying to gather more support from the community to really puts a pressure on management to come back to the table in good faith and to really kind of come to a solution because no one wants to be bargaining a contract for six months, for a year for however long you just want it done. You want to be able to sign the thing and get back to work. Some gym goers have put together a request for a boycott of the gym calling for people to cancel memberships and to send in letters of support. I’ve seen action networks that were put together in the last couple of months for this. One big question. I do want to ask, especially about something as important as calling for a boycott. Has the union itself called for a boycott as these negotiations have continued? And if not, what can supporters do to support the union and their negotiations to continue that sort of pressure for management to do the bare minimum, the right thing instead of canceling their membership? What are some thoughts that you have?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, so regarding the boycott, we as the union did not call the boycott. We don’t sanction the boycott. We appreciate the intention of the people who are calling for it, and it is a very powerful move for customers to make. For the union, we mostly just reserve our power to call a strike. So a boycott is when customers choose not to patronize a business. And a strike is when workers will not be working and they ask. Customers also do not come to the business, but we saw on social media there’s been some interchange of the terms, so we just want to be a little bit clearer there. And we found, first of all, the support from the community as always is incredible. And for people who are thinking of organizing, I think one of the most powerful tools that we have is communication because Touchstone is not great at communicating either consistently or clearly or responding in general to messages.

So for us, it was very important in our campaign to always have a weekly update. Every Wednesday we send an email to every employee in the unit with what’s going on, even if nothing big is going on that week. And then of course we have our social media. So if customers or members or community members want to support, we have a couple ways at our gym front desks right now, we have what are called union support cards. They look like a belay card for your harness, but they have a little pledge that you are amazing first of all, and second, you support the union and you support the workers. So get a little ego boost and a little color and add it to your harness two. We also have car signs. So these signs say, I support a unionized gym workers, or I demand better pay and benefits for touchstone workers.

You can leave them in your car around town in the parking lots. We’ve seen them in the wild, which is really cool the last couple of weeks here in la, and we also have a rally coming up. I don’t know when this episode is going to be released, but we have a rally coming up on March 7th in city at 6:00 PM It’ll be outside of our gym location, cliff Seve along the street, but it’s going to be a huge party. We’re going to have music, other unions are coming in, they’re bringing their soundtracks. It’s going to be a delight. It’s only going to be for an hour. If you are a worker, as we sent our email, do not walk off the job. We are not closing the gym down. If you’re on break, come on out and join us. It’ll be a great time. And we also have union pins people can wear. You can put on your chalk bag, put it on your gear, also wear it on your shirt. And we have union, so we only have a little bit of those left, but we are partnering with a local lining brand that people love. I don’t want to announce it yet, but let me just say people love this brand and they’re designing our next round of shirts, which will be available not only for our staff, but we’ll also be available to the public.

Mel Buer:

This episode is going to be out on March 12th. So when you have your rally, grab some video, send me some links, we’ll put some links in the description. We’ll put some photos up at the rally to see how much of a party it was so that folks can kind of see that. We’ve got a couple of minutes left here. Ryan, I want to start with you to the folks that are thinking of organizing in any capacity, their shop, whether with attaching themselves to a large union like the Teamsters for example, or doing it themselves, what words of advice, support, solidarity would you start with? What would you tell them if they were in your email inbox today?

Ryan Barkauskas:

Consider your most basic needs and your coworkers. This is clearly what we need for ourselves, but what we believe our community needs, what our friends and coworkers need. So considering them, we I think are very good at checking in and working as a team, but to be organized in such a way means really understanding, oh, I don’t need the same thing that they need there, but have these conversations, right? Understand if that’s going to be that necessary step for you guys, what it means. Ask other unions, understand the process. It can be scary. There was a lot of disinformation. There’s a lot of saying like, oh, are we going to be paying dues before we even have a contract? No, that could be something that could be thrown at you and made you worried. You can wonder if it’s all going to be worth it, and then just be patient. Nothing that great. Is that easy?

Mel Buer:

Do you think it’s worth it, Ryan?

Ryan Barkauskas:

I think so. I mean, again, the evidence of how much we’ve struggled against this makes me feel like the fight, it has really become worth it. And to have the support of everybody to just make, I just want this community to be the best it can be. When I moved out to la, I knew right away I was going to climb it touchstone. It had the name and the relationships I formed with some of the employees was what got me in as an employee myself. And so it’s always had this relationship with the company and I want the best for it, and I’ll continue to want that and have to fight for it.

Mel Buer:

What about you, Jess? What would you say to someone, I know you’ve already talked about folks coming into the dms and asking about how to organize, but to anyone who’s looking to organize, what are some thoughts that you have that you would like to share?

Jess Kim:

Yeah, I want to echo what you said earlier, actually, Mel, is that when you are organizing for the company, it’s not about money, it’s about power. People do not want to see the power be taken away from them. And you as the worker, you have the power. You keep the company going every day. You are on the floor, you’re facing the customers. If you and your coworkers chose not to work, to slow down work, to not comply with different policies, you truly have the power. The people who are giving you, not orders but directions and new policies, they don’t know how to do your job. They can’t do it like you. So be brave. It’s scary. But you as a group have power. And there’s an image on social media that I love of a big fish chasing a school of fish. But when the school of fish turn around together, they chase off that big fish. Kind of like finding Nemo when they all get out of the net. Okay, so swim together, just keep swimming. Don’t come from me, Pixar. And that is the message I want to be.

Mel Buer:

Yeah, I mean, I want to reiterate that for my listeners. Folks have been listening to me on this podcast and other podcast for many a year talking about union organizing specifically. But really what it comes down to really is just you collectively have power and also you are an expert in your own workplace. These CEOs sitting in their nice houses up in San Francisco or wherever the hell they’re sitting with, their very deep velvet lined pockets are not standing there on the shop floor with you. They don’t necessarily know what’s going on. You do. You are an expert at your job. You’ve spent many, many years building skills. It doesn’t matter where you work. If you’re working in a call center, if you’re working at a climbing gym, if you’re working as a barista, if you’re in the steel manufacturing business, it doesn’t matter, right?

Anytime that you’ve put into this vocation, this work experience, this wage labor that we spend so much of our time doing, eventually you become an expert in it. And so you know what you need and you know what will make the job better. And final thought for me before I let you folks go and let you have the rest of your night is really just do it anyways. Even if you’re freaked out, as my mom likes to say, walk through the fear and see what happens on the other side. Because oftentimes what you’ll end up with is a better place to work and a sense of security and a sense of belonging. And I will tell you, and anyone who has experienced it will tell you that feelings, true solidarity for the first time is better than anything that you could possibly imagine. And we’re living through some really harsh times right now.

So if you can build that solidarity with yourself in the workplace, with your friends that you spend so much time trauma bonding over behind a bar or a desk or wherever you are, and you can also, I don’t know, kick management in the pants a little bit, I think it’s probably worth it. So Jess, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on the show today and for giving us really an interesting sort of look into this independent union organizing that you are doing and Godspeed with your negotiations. Hopefully this is one of the things that’ll help kick management in the pants to just get moving. And you are welcome back on the show anytime to talk about updates, to talk about events that you’re doing. And yeah, thanks so much for coming on.

Ryan Barkauskas:

Thanks Mel. We appreciate the platform.

Jess Kim:

Thank you. So good to meet you. Come climb. We will catch

Ryan Barkauskas:

You. Yes. Welcome to the cult as I always tell our members.

Mel Buer:

One thing to note before we end our episode for the day after we finished recording, Ryan and Jess let me know that multiple members of their bargaining unit were deeply impacted by the Eaton Fire in Altadena this past January. If you’d like to support them, I have shared GoFundMe links in the description for those members. That’s it for us here at Working People. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Mel er and thanks so much for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.

This post was originally published on The Real News Network.