In the 2002 documentary American Standoff, Teamster John Murphy stars as the protagonist in the fight to organize Overnite Transportation, then one of the largest freight trucking companies in the United States. Between 1999 and 2002, the Teamsters union struck the company in an effort to win union recognition across all the carrier’s terminals and secure a first contract. They treated the struggle as existential for the future of the Teamsters—and its new leadership within the union.
In the early minutes of the film, Murphy set the stakes for the filmmakers. The deputy director of organizing and a vice president at the international Teamsters union, he leaned forward in his chair and raised his eyebrows during the interview. “It’s a do or die situation. Failure is not an option,” he said soberly.
“For us to be an effective labor organization, we have to keep this industry unionized,” Murphy explained. “If we can’t be a major force in the trucking industry in this country, why would any workers want to join us from other industries?”
Without unions, employers who once paid truckers hourly wages began paying them “by the mile,” or the distance they traveled. Countless hours of work now go unpaid.
Ultimately, the strike failed. Overnite Teamsters were left without a contract, and the freight company would remain mostly non-union until UPS bought it and converted it into “UPS Freight” several years later. (It would then be sold to TFI International in 2021 and become “TForce.”) In the two decades following the strike’s end, the Teamsters’ grip on the freight industry, already tenuous since deregulation rocked trucking in the 1980s and ’90s, would loosen further. The union overall would lose roughly another 200,000 members between the late ’90s and today.
Two decades later, some labor activists hope for resurgence, not only at the Teamsters but in the broader labor movement. A key spark could be the Teamsters’ contract fight at UPS, where 340,000 workers have threatened to strike should their demands not be met in a new contract by Aug. 1, 2023. The organizing potential of a successful UPS strike is enormous: the union could leverage a strong win at UPS to achieve its twin goal to organize the mostly non-union Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers.
In addition to these high profile stories, there is another piece of the Teamster agenda: the reorganization of the Teamsters’ (former) bread-and-butter industry, freight trucking.
The first step is to halt decades of concessions in the union’s existing shops. As has his predecessors, Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien has promised a turnaround. “The day our administration took office was the day concessions to the freight industry ended,” O’Brien said earlier this year in a Teamsters press release. “We’re eager to get to work on negotiating contracts that raise standards and rebuild this industry for workers.”
On June 30, over 8,600 Teamsters ratified a new contract at ABF Freight, a subsidiary of ArcBest. The contract is considered by many workers to be the best in the business, with 24% wage increases for full-time drivers over the life of the contract and protections from automation and surveillance technologies. Meanwhile, TForce Freight and the Teamsters, which represents 7,000 workers at the company, came to a tentative agreement on July 13, a month after workers authorized a strike by 91%. At the time of writing, details about the TA which still needs to be ratified by member vote have not been released, but the union claims the “highest wage increases in the history of the national contract,” as well as protections from subcontracting, which is a major issue at the carrier.
However, reorganizing and raising standards in an industry fractured by deregulation and decades of recomposition is easier said than done. The conditions and structure of the freight industry today are such that—like in a semi truck—a full-on u-turn doesn’t appear possible for the Teamsters’ organizing.
The most immediate obstacle is the potential implosion of Yellow Corporation (previously YRC Freight), where 22,000 Teamsters could lose their jobs if the 99-year-old company goes bankrupt by the end of the year. Teamsters are threatening to strike the company on or after July 24 unless it pays the required contributions to health and welfare and pension funds that it missed in June and may miss again this month.
Even prior to the crisis, workers say Yellow’s contract, which expires next year but may be renegotiated early, is so subpar that it has severely damaged the union’s ability to organize in the industry.
Despite this, workers across ABF, TForce, and even Yellow are hopeful that we’re witnessing the first signs of a shift—or the first move in a three-point turn. “If we want to organize another freight barn, the Teamsters have to show what they can offer,” James Talamantes, a Local 222 Teamster in Salt Lake City, Utah, told The Real News.
Deregulation
The jewel of the Teamsters union—and the envy of the rest of organized labor—was once the National Master Freight Agreement (NMFA). First negotiated in 1964 and the result of tireless planning and organizing, the NMFA set the wages and working conditions for 450,000 truckers across 16,000 companies.
Eighty percent of the trucking industry was unionized by the early 1970s. A trucking job was nearly synonymous with the “American Dream.” According to sociologist Steve Viscelli in The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, Teamster members’ wages were up to 20% higher than even unionized auto and steel workers.
By the time the Teamsters struck Overnite Transportation in 1999, union density in trucking had fallen to 20%, and it has continued to decline. Today, the average trucker makes less than half what they did at their peak when adjusting for inflation. Less than 60,000 Teamsters freight workers remain. The principal cause of this decline was the deregulation of the freight industry.
“The whole idea of deregulation was to knock down inflation by making the industry more competitive and driving down price,” said Michael H. Belzer, a former Teamster truck driver and economist who wrote Sweatshops on Wheels: Winners and Losers in Trucking Deregulation.
“We will never have as much leverage as we do now…. Because in the first contract [since the company was bought by TFI International] you have to be tough on it and build off of that. If you fold up like a house of cards, the company’s gonna take advantage of that every chance they get.”
Todd Hurley, a 23-year Teamster and TForce driver in Reno, Nevada
The inflation crisis of the 1970s and the threat posed by strong bargaining power of the Teamsters pushed a bipartisan coalition of politicians, business associations, and right-wing economists to deregulate the industry and break the union. “The Motor Carrier Act of 1980 passed and the next three years absolutely destroyed the industry as we knew it,” Belzer said.
After 1980, the bar for market entry lowered dramatically. The industry’s highly concentrated structure, which provided bargaining leverage to the Teamsters union, gave way to hypercompetitive conditions. Non-union companies and small mom-and-pop “owner-operators” flooded the industry, converting wildly profitable unionized carriers into bloated, highly indebted zombies.
“Legacy carriers just started folding one after another like a house of cards collapsing,” remembered George Stokes, a 35-year veteran of the trucking industry.
As these companies filed for bankruptcy the industry rapidly de-unionized, forcing the Teamsters, where they remained, to acquiesce to serious concessions on wages and working conditions. Today, the Teamsters are almost exclusively concentrated in “less-than truckload” (LTL) freight companies, which transport freight from multiple shippers that don’t require a full truckload trailer. The more structured nature of the LTL industry has allowed the union to keep a foothold. But in “truck load” (TL) companies, which ship full-trailer freight using “over-the-road” or “line-haul” drivers, unions are practically non-existent.
It is primarily in the TL sector where we’ve seen the dirty secret of the industry: truckers are exempt from the protections against unpaid overtime in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). “The practice of paying people for all their time, was forced out by paying people for no time,” explained Belzer. Without unions, employers who once paid truckers hourly wages began paying them “by the mile,” or the distance they traveled. Countless hours of work now go unpaid.
“A line-haul driver doesn’t get paid for a lot of his work time, like dropping, hooking, fueling or motel delays, like we do,” said Stokes, who has worked for five years at ABF, an LTL carrier, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
On the road for weeks at a time, line-haul drivers are severely overworked and sleep-deprived, putting themselves and others on the road at risk. Highway crashes increase year by year. Meanwhile, the surveillance technologies that are mandated in trucks as of December 2017 were pitched as promoting safety, but in reality have solved few of these truckers’ issues and only deepened managerial control.
The prospect of Teamsters organizing over-the-road drivers in the present regulatory environment is practically nil, according to Belzer. “There is no stability. [Drivers] are ping ponging all over the country, and there are no market control frameworks to make any of this organizable,” he said. Even if workers could organize, he continued, “the law has favored employers to just not negotiate a contract.”
Pumping the brakes on concessions
For a turnaround, the Teamsters would have to plow ahead in the LTL sector, where unionized shops no longer set the standards for the industry. The union has seen mostly failure in its attempts to organize and win contracts at XPO Logistics and FedEx Freight in the past decade. The renegotiation of freight contracts under the leadership of O’Brien gives some observers hope for the union to pump the brakes on concessions, and to begin significant organizing again.
“It’s going to be quite a challenge given the circumstances, but the social environment is more favorable now,” said Belzer.
During the ecommerce boom of the COVID-19 pandemic’s early years, freight companies renewed their alarms over a so-called “driver shortage,” which according to Belzer is a framing that papers over the dire conditions of the work but also emphasizes the importance of and potentials for the industry. “There’s a greater recognition of the need for freight transport, and they’ve also gotten down to the very bottom of the barrel in paying truck drivers,” he said.
Paired with a 97% strike authorization vote, the Teamsters were able to leverage those conditions, and specifically the profitability of ABF Freight, to renegotiate a contract that some workers view as a major victory. ABF workers’ pay previously lagged behind most union and many non-union LTL carriers. The new five-year collective bargaining agreement, which was ratified on June 30, included raises of $6.50 an hour for full-time workers over the life of the contract. That’s a 24% increase, making the company among the industry leaders in wages.
“Hopefully O’Brien can put his money where his mouth is and get us a rock solid, strong contract that we can build on for future generations.”
Todd Hurley, a 23-year Teamster and TForce driver in Reno, Nevada
“This is gonna be like the best contract that ABF ever had,” said Talamantes, who drives with ABF Freight. Some drivers wanted higher wage adjustments that surpassed inflation, he said, “but ultimately, it’s a really solid contract.”
While Talamantes was happy about wages, he says that many drivers were concerned about forced overtime at the company, too. In his region’s supplemental agreement, there were few protections for workers from being forced in for a sixth day of work. “Sixth day punch” was not abolished in his new supplement, but it was limited to once a month.
Other concerns include uncertainty around how increased contributions to health, welfare, and pension plans will be allocated, as well as the meager wage increases for casual dock workers, which some Teamsters claim is tantamount to securing a tiered wage structure at the company.
Stokes believes that within the context of decades of concessions by the union, the contract is a win. Other improvements include more paid sick days and Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a paid holiday, and prohibition of autonomous vehicles and surveillance technologies, including inward facing cameras or body sensors.
Optimistic eyes have now moved onto contract negotiations at TForce Freight, where the union and the company came to a tentative agreement on July 13. According to Todd Hurley, a 23-year Teamster and TForce driver in Reno, Nevada, the biggest problem with their contract is the lack of subcontracting protections.
“The impact of subcontracting is pretty simple,” said Hurley. “You’ve got a guy that’s laid off, sitting at home and he can’t pay his bills and put food on his family’s table because the company is allowed to subcontract in unlimited fashion.” Hurley also explained that workers lose their health insurance during layoffs and often cannot afford their COBRA premiums. Stokes at ABF told TRNN that he left the company (when it was UPS Freight) precisely because subcontracting was running rampant.
Few details have been released about the tentative agreement at TForce, but the union stated that the deal includes “the highest wage increases in the history of the national contract, protections against subcontracting, a return to work for laid-off workers, pension increases, reduced insurance premiums, language against road drivers working the dock, work preservation, and card-check neutrality.”
“We will never have as much leverage as we do now,” said Hurley. “Because in the first contract [since the company was bought by TFI International] you have to be tough on it and build off of that. If you fold up like a house of cards, the company’s gonna take advantage of that every chance they get.”
Hurley believes that after the membership voted 91% in favor of authorizing a strike and ABF secured a solid tentative agreement, the union was in a good position to demand concessions from TForce. “Hopefully O’Brien can put his money where his mouth is and get us a rock solid, strong contract that we can build on for future generations,” Hurley added before the TA was reached.
Trouble at the company is years in the making. Alleged financial mismanagement has plunged the nearly century-old corporation $1.5 billion into debt, including $700 million to the federal government from a pandemic-era loan, which a congressional commission described as a mistake.
The crisis reached a breaking point when Yellow attempted to unilaterally implement a change of operations that, among other issues, would force many truck drivers into jobs that include dock work—something many drivers have never done and represents a kind of flexibility for the company that the Teamsters have typically rejected in freight contracts. The Teamsters refused the proposed change of operations, which would be the second phase of the company’s larger restructuring plans.
“We can’t expect Sean O’Brien in five years to fix all the mistakes that [James P. Hoffa] made in 20…. That’s why this contract that we got [at ABF] and the one that TForce is gonna get are super important.”
James Talamantes, a Local 222 Teamster in Salt Lake City, Utah
“Instead of sitting down and negotiating a new contract with the Teamsters, they are trying to do this change of operations,” said Billy Camp, a Yellow dock worker, who has worked in freight since 1995 and held an organizing position at the international Teamsters. The union and the company agreed to address the issues by reopening negotiations on their contract, which expires in 2024, but there’s been no progress.
Yellow is claiming the Teamsters are putting the company at risk of bankruptcy and has sued them for $168 million, but the union has insisted that they’ve given billions of dollars in concessions to the company over the years to ensure its stability. “The concession stand is closed,” said John Murphy, the Teamster from American Standoff, who is now the union’s freight director, on an update call with Yellow workers.
Of Yellow’s lawsuit, Camp told TRNN that “it’s a PR move…another example of the company’s wasteful spending. This time it’s on lawyers.”
Meanwhile, blaming its low cash-flow, two of Yellow’s companies reneged on pension and health and welfare contributions in June and plans to withhold payments in July. In a delinquency notice to the company, the board of trustees of the Central States Funds, which manages half of Yellow’s Teamsters’ plans, said that workers’ health insurance claims will go unpaid and pension accruals will be terminated if payments are not made by July 23.
Murphy sent a letter to local unions instructing them to demand Yellow make funds payments by Friday, July 21, or risk a potential strike by the 24th. In the letter, Murphy quotes the NMFA: “In the event an Employer is delinquent in its health & welfare or pension payments in the manner required by the applicable Supplemental Agreement, the Local Union shall have the right to take whatever action it deems necessary until such delinquent payments are made.”
According to the Teamsters, the company offered wage increases a few days prior to deferring their required funds payments, which total $50 million for June and July. “We are not going to agree to informal offers for new wages in the hopes of getting a fair contract next year when [Yellow subsidiaries] can’t even figure out how to pay their bills right now,” O’Brien said on July 19.
In an email response, a Yellow spokesperson said that the Teamsters have refused to meet with the company over the past nine months. “Over several months, the company has made numerous offers to increase wages. Teamster leadership has irresponsibly ignored the opportunity to secure higher wages for its members,” they wrote.
Yellow has filed for a temporary restraining order in federal court to prevent a Teamster strike, reported The Wall Street Journal.
According to Camp, who has worked the docks at Yellow since 1999, members’ wages, benefits and pensions are significantly worse than most union freight companies, as well as some non-union ones. “We have the oldest average age at Yellow,” explained Camp, because workers don’t make enough in wages and retirement benefits to retire as early as other Teamsters.
Yellow’s bankruptcy would be a major hit to the Teamsters and devastating for tens of thousands of workers. But the current pay and benefits at the company and its looming crisis are already liabilities for the union, according to workers.
“They really hurt us when it comes to organizing another freight company,” explained Talamantes. When he speaks to workers at non-union companies, they often ask him about the union. “I tell them about all the benefits, but they always go, ‘Well, I’m kind of worried, because I don’t want my company to turn into Yellow.’”
Despite the concessions of the union over the past decades, Talamantes says that the difference between union and non-union is like night and day, especially when it comes to safety and discipline. At non-union companies, “they cut a few corners here and there. They pushed their employees to do more and more,” he said. “Here they don’t even try that.”
All the workers TRNN spoke to were under no impression that a resurgence of freight organizing was around the corner. A regulatory overhaul would be needed for that, according to Belzer. But neither were they quick to discount that this moment could be a turning point.
Multiple workers pointed to the pro-business concessions of the previous Teamsters leadership, led by Jimmy Hoffa’s son, James P. Hoffa. “We can’t expect Sean O’Brien in five years to fix all the mistakes that guy made in 20,” said Talamantes. “That’s why this contract that we got [at ABF] and the one that TForce is gonna get are super important.”
“It’s hard to know what’s a turning point,” concluded Belzer. “You only really know when you look back and say, ‘oh, it looks like we turned.’”
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When we hear the term “whistleblower,” we tend to think of names like Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange—people who have risked their freedom, even their lives, to expose government lies, abuses of power, and state secrets that the public needs to know about. But there are a range of federal statutes designed to protect those who blow the whistle on their employers, too, especially when those employers are breaking the law and/or endangering their workers and the public.
Michael Paul Lindsey II is a military veteran who has worked for Union Pacific as a trained locomotive conductor and engineer for the past 17 years, and he has maintained good standing as an employee throughout that time. Over the course of his career on the rails, however, Paul has seen and experienced firsthand how corporate greed has destroyed the railroad industry, damaged our supply chain, run workers into the ground, and put the public in danger. Even though he knew it could put his career at risk, Paul has been outspoken on these issues, using his popular TikTok channel, writing op-eds, and giving interviews in which he has exposed, with a veteran railroader’s insight, the destructive business and labor practices of Union Pacific and the other Class 1 rail carriers, and how those practices have contributed to catastrophes like the Norfolk Southern train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Then the company came for him. In suspected retaliation for his whistleblowing, Paul has officially been fired from Union Pacific. In this urgent and exclusive interview, we talk with Paul about his career on the rails, the changes he’s seen take hold of the industry he loves, and the dubious circumstances that led to his firing.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
I’m Michael Paul Lindsey, former Union Pacific locomotive engineer, 17 years and active whistleblower in the railroad industry.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Well welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So if you are hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please, please support the work that we are doing here at Working People so we can keep growing and keep bringing you all more important conversations with workers around the country and beyond every week. You can support us by leaving us positive reviews of the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can share these episodes on your social media and share them around with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members.
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My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got really important episode for you guys today. It’s no secret to anyone who listens to the show or follows my work here or at The Real News Network over on Breaking Points or if you follow the great work of my colleague Mel Buer, you guys know that we have been very committed to covering the ongoing struggle by railroad workers across the freight rail industry here in the United States to fight against the Wall Street led corporate takeover and destruction of the industry and a vital component of our supply chain. You guys heard us all throughout the past year and a half, interview railroad worker after railroad worker. We talked to conductors and engineers like Michael Paul Lindsey, our guest today. We’ve talked to Carmen, we’ve talked to maintenance of way folks, we’ve talked to dispatchers. We’ve tried to give you guys access to as many rank and file voices of the people who actually make this industry run.
And this is an industry upon which basically every other industry depends. Everything that you buy on the shelves at the supermarket was on a railroad car at some point or another. Right. And or virtually everything that you buy. Right. And so this is why obviously so many people got so invested in the high stakes contract dispute between the 12 unions representing over 100,000 railroad workers in the freight rail industry and the class one freight rail carriers, i.e. the companies that own the railroads. We watched all this play out last year. I’m not going to run through the whole saga again. I know you guys have heard me do so a number of times, but we reported as much as we could on the issues that railroad workers have been going through and what their working conditions, their quality of life or how much was left of it after years of corporate destruction of this once good blue collar job.
We talked about how those kind of worsening working conditions for workers on the railroads were indicative of the larger sort of system change that has taken hold of the railroad industry. The same corporate philosophy that focuses exclusively and intently on slashing operating costs year after year after year, cutting labor, cutting maintenance, cutting basic safety, necessary safety measures, all for the purposes of jacking up prices on shippers, reducing labor costs, piling more work onto fewer workers, making their work more unsafe, more unbearable, making the trains longer and heavier and more wieldy. Also, that the railroads could end up in the position that they’re currently in where they are raking in billions of dollars of profits every year. The railroad industry is more profitable than it has ever been. Stock buybacks, shareholder dividends, executive pay have all gone through the roof in recent years. This is what the corporate led destruction of everything looks like in one industry.
But I think one of the reasons that so many of us got so invested in this struggle is because we see in the railroads a tale of the destruction of our very society, right? Because these are the same array forces that are destroying everything from Hollywood and the entertainment industry. Right now, writers and potentially actors are on strike fighting against very similar dynamics where the greedy studios are destroying everything that we once loved about Hollywood so that they can maximize their profit and minimize their operating costs. We see this in healthcare with nurses and hospital staff going on strike, fighting against the sort of just parasitic conglomerates that are owning so many of these hospitals and that are pushing nurses to the breaking point, piling more work onto fewer people. Is this sounding familiar? Giving them untenable nurse to patient ratio so that they can’t provide the quality of care that they were trained to give, and many of them are fleeing the industry or leaving hospitals that desperately need staff, just like is happening on the railroads, railroad workers are quitting at record numbers because they can’t take it anymore.
So you guys get the point. The point that I’m making is that what has been happening to the railroads is happening to so many other industries. It is happening. We are feeling the effects of it in so many other realms of our lives. And that is why as always, we need to be there to support the workers who are actually taking a stand against this crap because the government isn’t taking a stand against it. Corporations aren’t going to change their ways out of the goodness of their own hearts if they even have hearts left.
So it’s got to be up to us. And I think we saw some really hopeful signs of people rallying behind railroad workers like Michael Paul Lindsey, but we still have a very long way to go. This is still very much a David verse Goliath story, and sadly, Goliath has no qualms, no scruples, no shame when it comes to doing everything that Goliath can to squash the Davids of the world, to silence workers, to force us into unsafe and untenable working conditions and just beat all will out of us so that we accept our subservient position in their grand profit making scheme.
And Michael Paul Lindsey, our guest today has been a truly courageous freedom fighter in that regard. And I don’t use those words lightly. Right. Paul was instrumental in the contract dispute last year when so little was being reported on that contract dispute in the mainstream media, especially from the side of the workers. Paul was out there being a whistleblower. He has built up a sizeable following on TikTok. He was using that TikTok channel to communicate information to other railroaders as well as the general public about what he and his fellow railroaders are going through on a day-to-day basis. And then also I had the honor of interviewing Paul for Breaking Points. We’ve interviewed him at The Real News Network. And when I was doing the rounds last September, and then again when we were approaching a potential rail shutdown in late November, early December, Paul and I were doing the full court press trying to get on as many other outlets and shows as we could to make sure that people knew what the hell was actually going on and why they needed to support workers like Paul.
And it didn’t stop there. We all know the story and I know I’m going on a lot, but I promise I’m going to toss it over to Paul in a second. But I really want to make sure that everyone kind of remembers the long kind of march that we’ve had over the past year and a half to get to the conversation that we’re going to have today with Paul. But we all know what happened in December. Scab Joe Biden as well as Republicans and Democrats in Congress conspired to crush a potential railroad strike, force a contract down workers’ throats, essentially endorse all of the bad greedy practices by the rail carriers, giving them no incentive whatsoever to change their ways to address the issues that workers like Paul have been whistle blowing about and screaming about to anyone who will listen.
And then the mainstream media kind of moved on at the end of the year and what happened on February 3rd, just a couple months later, East Palestine, Ohio, the catastrophic Norfolk Southern train derailment there, which as people who listen to the show know, has completely destroyed and upended the lives of everyone in that area, including the railroad workers who were on that train, right? And so if rail companies and the government had actually listened to people like Paul, they could have seen catastrophe like East Palestine coming and they could have done more to prevent it, but alas, they did not. And that brings us to our conversation today because Paul was there like he was last year during the contract fight, he was there posting updates on his TikTok channel. He was there whistleblowing about the conditions on the railroads that contributed to the avoidable catastrophes that were seeing all the derailments around the country, including the catastrophic derailment in East Palestine.
And how did Paul’s employer reward him for that? They fucking fired him. Right. And we here at Working People, we at The Real News Network stand in solidarity with Paul. We unquestionably condemned what we see as a very clear cut case of retaliation for whistleblowing because everything that Paul has said has been in the public interest. He has a deep, deep level of expertise and experience in this industry. The information that he has been bringing to the public is information that the public deserves to know because these trains are going through our neighborhoods, they’re going past our houses, they are causing damage to our communities like East Palestinian and beyond. And so the public has a right to know these things. Paul has spoken nothing but the truth about the conditions on the railroads, and for that he has been summarily fired by Union Pacific.
And so that is the context of our conversation today. Paul, I’m incredibly sorry that you are going through this and we are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you. And I promise listeners, we’re going to dig into all of this insofar as we can given the kind of current and pending litigation. But we’re here with this sort of exclusive one-on-one with Paul to sort of talk about his life and work on the railroads, to talk about where we are right now in this country, in the rail industry, and how his career over the course of the past 17 years, right, he has seen the destruction of this industry.
He has tried to do something to stop it. And we’re going to talk about what we can all do to stop this silencing of him and other railroad workers who are trying to yeah, stop the destructive practices of this industry and stop the public from enduring more destruction at the hands of the greedy rail carriers. So without further ado, and that’s enough from me, I apologize for talking so long. I want to kind of come back to you, Paul, and before we get into all this shit and there’s a lot of shit to get into, like I mentioned, you and I have done a lot of interviews together. We’ve texted, we’ve communicated throughout this whole saga.
And like I said, you have been an invaluable source of information throughout all of this, but we’ve never had you on the show to sort of do the full Working People treatment and get to know more about your backstory and kind of how you came to work on the railroads, how you came to be the person that you are. So let’s do that first. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this for a long time. So tell me about where you grew up and yeah, just kind of what life in young Paul’s world was like.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Well, I sure appreciate you having me on Max. It’s always great to do a segment with you and talk with you, and I really, and I appreciate the kind words I feel kind of undeserving there. But yeah, I grew up in several places, actually, it’s kind of a weird story. Most of my life growing up was in California, but I also lived back east in Georgia for a little bit, Tennessee for a little bit. But everywhere I lived as a kid, I was always following the trains. I always loved the trains. There’s a lot of funny stories related to it. I mean, I used to live at my grandmother’s house in Tifton, Georgia for a while. We would go on nightly walks, we’d always go by the Norfolk Southern line out there. And back to California. I used to watch the Southern Pacific trains prior to the merger going by.
And I always loved the railroads, always wanted to work for the railroad and always wanted to be an engineer. And that continued my entire life. I just, and it wasn’t just an obsession with trains necessarily. I really genuinely just love the railroad, loved the industry. I haven’t had books on it. For example, there was a book back in the 90s, The Railroad: What It Is, What It Does. And it was all about the industry and how it works, the technological changes, how rail cars are built and detectors. And it’s just kind of a dated book now, but it still is very, that’s just one of the many books that I ingested over the years to kind of learn about the industry. I’m a huge follower of the history, the industry. I have a whole collection at home. It’s actually in storage now. Books are in storage right now because I’ve been traveling.
But I have quite a collection of railroad related books, especially Southern Pacific and California related. But I’m trying to have a good understanding of the industry and its history, where it’s been and where it’s going. And I know that growing up I always would see lines that were abandoned or pulled out a service and wanted the industry to grow and hope there would be a need for them again. And unfortunately, all I’ve seen all of these years from being a kid and from working at the railroad myself is the railroad shrinking itself into effective oblivion. It’s shrinking itself into almost obscurity as an industry now while the rest of the world is developing technologically to actually modernize the rail systems into the future. And everywhere I’ve traveled to, I always try to kind of observe the railroads from outsider perspective. Like when I traveled to Ukraine a few years ago and I got to see some of the trains going into the central station in Kyiv, and even they being lets say maybe outdated rolling stock and mode of power, they were still fully electrified and they ran a very, very efficient operation.
And just this spring, I was in Italy going 190 miles an hour on a train. And it’s amazing to see. You didn’t even need to look at a schedule because you just knew if you showed up at the station, there’d be a train leaving within 10 or 15 minutes. And it just works over there. Other countries are investing into their infrastructure. And I see how we have a highly consolidated rail system that has consolidated into larger and larger monopolies. And throughout my career at the railroad, which started in 2006, I’ve just seen more money be diverted from the physical plant of the railroad itself into stock buybacks.
And then I’ve also seen this change in culture at the railroad. When I started 06, you could see it in their advertising campaigns. Back then companies like that still advertised. And I remember these commercials, these Union Pacific commercials. Building America was the slogan, and we’re still kind of running in the years after 9-11, the patriotic movement. And they put the American flags on their locomotives and they have these commercials, you can still look them up on YouTube and just this deep voice of the narrator describing their powerful history of building and growing the United States. And you see this train of the same colors of the sunset going across the screen into the distance and Union Pacific, Building America. And it made you proud to work for that company.
And over the years, that image has just gone away and they keep changing their image to not even care about their public image anymore, not care about growth, not care about image. I know maybe it’s anecdotal, but it was just such a shame this last year I observed that I happened to be off for 4th of July, the parade. There were three different parades in Pocatello where I live, and they had all the employers in town, all the big business. And here is Union Pacific, the largest oldest employer in Pocatello. And they did not have any presence there. No pride in the community. They didn’t even have a maintenance away truck with someone throwing candy, nothing. And that’s one of the major cultural shifts that I’ve seen in the industry is just the disregard and contempt for the general public.
And then also the share buybacks where they would happily divert money that could go into growing and modernizing, electrifying, becoming a 21st century railroad and diverting that into share buybacks. Every single quarter, every single year for, I don’t even know how many years now, but I’ve been following it, they consistently put more money into share buybacks than they do their infrastructure, bridges, tracks, better rolling stock, electrification, better wages. They don’t do it anymore. And it almost seems like the industry now that I love and I love the industry, it seems like the industry that I love is ruled by people that would rather see the railroad eventually go bankrupt, fold into itself and receive a bailout. Because they know it’s too big to fail. They know they’re just like the airlines. They’re just like the banks. They can make any irresponsible business decision they’d like, and eventually they’ll just be bailed out and given a golden parachute. The people responsible won’t be held accountable.
And that’s what’s been happening in the industry. And it was this kind of shift that made me want to be vocal and speak out against what’s been happening. And I knew the risk and I knew that eventually they were going to come after me for it. And I really did. There was no question about it, but it became more and more important to me because I cared about the survival of the industry and also how it was affecting safety for communities like East Palestine and every other community that Lac-Megantic, we’re 10 years past the Lac-Megantic disaster in Canada. And really safety practices, maintenance practices especially, have just essentially fallen off a cliff.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to hop in there for a second,
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because I have so many thoughts running through my head. And I guess before we kind of get deep into that, I wanted to kind of jump back to something that you said earlier before we get too far away from it because I actually didn’t know that you grew up in California. So did I. Were you in SoCal or are you in Northern California?
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Southern California.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Same here.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yeah. So Ventura, I spent a lot of time in Ventura, California, and then also Paso Robles, California. I was there for a little bit. I still have family in the central coast, San Luis Obispo, Atascadero, [inaudible 00:25:06] area there. And I actually, I just spent three weeks down there. That’s one of my favorite places in the entire world. And I live on the central coast again, if I could justify it financially right now. But really what’s been time me to Idaho has been the railroad for all this time because seniority has just helped me in Idaho. But California is where I started work at railroad too. I started in Oakland in fall of 2006, and that was after I’d been deployed to Iraq and the Marine Corps most of the year. And after the deployment, dropped the reserves and hired on for the railroad out of the Bay Area. Worked for Union Pacific in San Luis Obispo for a while.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s such an interesting kind of chapter to your story because it hooks back to my connection to this story as well, because I remember I grew up in Orange County.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Okay.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And,
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
I was born in Upland, by the way.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yeah. San Bernardino County right next door.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Yeah, well look at that. Yeah. I kind of just associated you with Pocatello, but I’m loving this Cali boy connection. But what you described is something that really hits home literally for me, because I can remember seeing the kind of changes to my town growing up. I’ve told the story, I believe on this show that I remember being young, but conscious of a fight happening in my hometown of Brea, California, which was like, I mean Brea, it’s named after tar. It was an oil boom town. There’s still oil rigs dotting the hills that my brothers and I used to run around and climb on. It was ill-advised to do so, but we would, that’s the landscape of my childhood. Yeah, yeah. They’re everywhere. And so there was that history there. But I also remember there being remnants of the kind of old world of Brea.
There were a couple of buildings left over from the 19th century where I believe it was a saloon and a bank that some people in town were trying to get the city to give it historical status so that we could preserve those buildings. And they lost that fight and it all got bulldozed. Maybe there’s a plaque somewhere over there now, but now it’s like a shopping center. It’s a promenade. There’s no memory. Yeah, there’s no memory of that history there anywhere. But in that same vein, just down the road from there, if you keep going down that street, there was a rail line that passed across from my junior high school, and I remember…
Maximillian Alvarez:
Passed across from my junior high school and I remember the process of that rail line being in use to no longer being in use to just being something that you would drive over, to now it’s paved over and now it’s, I think a bike path. And I’m not saying that in and of itself is a bad thing. Maybe that rail line wasn’t necessary, but it still, it gave me this sort of sense of the railroads as, yeah, this sort of fading technology, this sort of the progression into the future as far as the world that was around me was concerned, like meant sort of phasing out the railroads.
And that’s what I came to this story with last year when I talked to you, when I talked to Ron Kaminkow, all the great folks at Railroad Workers United, Matt Parker, right? All the homies, Jeff Kurtz, that was all rattling around in my brain and then it kind of became clearer to me. It was like, oh, that wasn’t a natural progression. In fact, railroads can and should be part of our future but what I was actually witnessing without realizing it was what you just sort of described, the kind of slow destruction of vital industry, not because of technological progress, but for increasing profits per executives and shareholders.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
That was definitely part of it. But it began long before that because you see, if you go back to the sixties and seventies, we also started building subsidized highway systems in interstates in the United States. And I’m not criticizing entirely interstate highways and everything. I love them, I love traveling on them. But we kept the same regulatory structure on the railroads during that time and it wasn’t until the Staggers Act in the 1980s where they actually allowed the railroads to shed some of these regulations, but those regulations are also very misunderstood as well. So I’ve had this discussion with a lot of old time railroaders that try to say… because the guys I hired on were hired on in the sixties, and they try to say, oh, if they’d only re regulate the railroads back to the way they had it, that would’ve fixed our problems. But not necessarily, these regulations that were in place before were actually created by the railroads themselves.
It’s almost like business has never really changed. They’re always looking for ways to monopolize and control the market and to not have to compete with each other. So if you go back historically, there was a time when railroads in the late 1800s were adamantly competing at each other’s throats because they had been overbuilt, because they had been subsidized by all kinds of different governments because every community wanted a railroad at the time. And there were some markets that were just ridiculously oversaturated. There were about eight or 10 different ways to get a load of freight from Omaha to Chicago on different railroads. So they didn’t want to compete with each other because they wanted to be profitable. So they kept trying to make underhanded agreements with each other and forcing rates, but they weren’t enforceable by law because of antitrust law. You can’t do that.
So they lobbied to form the Interstate Commerce Commission and to have the government set their rates to basically set a fair rate saying that if you haul a carload of this type from this point to this point, this is how much it’s going to cost. And it made it to where they didn’t have to compete. They could just operate a big cozy cartel. And that worked great for a long time because you didn’t have trucks, you didn’t have planes. The trains were the only game in town. But fast-forward to the end of the 20th century and those regulations were still in place. Meanwhile, trucks and planes and government subsidized highway systems could undercut them and were not regulated to such an extent. So a lot of railroads went bankrupt during that time and it’s such a shame because there’s just beautiful marvels of modern railroad engineering.
Like for example, the Milwaukee Road going across Washington and Montana through Butte and Missoula and up and over the pass into Avery Idaho and across Washington and Snoqualmie Pass and beautiful tunnels and trestles, it was the last major transcontinental railroad to be built, was built to the highest standard. And yet in 1980, they abandoned the entire thing all the way from Miles City, Montana to Tacoma, Washington. And you can bike on it now. There’s a bike path on the Montana Idaho border called the Route of the Hiawatha. Wonderful experience if you’re ever up there. But you bike over these huge trestles and you started out by going through a couple mile long tunnel from the Montana side and emerging on the Idaho side, you got to have headlights on your bike. It’s pitch black in the middle of it, but you ride down it. You see these beautiful pieces of engineering marvel that the rail industry built.
But as these railroads consolidated out of… they consolidated out of necessity, they needed to, and they became bigger and bigger and bigger. And now over the last decade or two, especially with interest rates falling and monetary policy favoring bailouts and borrowing money. So they’ve joined into the whole, let’s borrow money so we can buy back our own shares nonsense and just let the industry fall just like everyone else. But we’re starting to see an industry now that’s resembling what you talked about growing up in Southern California and seeing a line that was active, transitioned to not being active, transitioned to be a bike path. There’s a lot of Americans that believe that the rail industry is antiquated and out of date, and to a degree it is. However, what they really need to realize is that you’d be saying the same thing about the aviation industry or about the highway industry if no major improvements had occurred since the 1960s.
If we hadn’t made any highway investments or any investments in new airplanes or new anything since the 1960s, people would be saying that infrastructure’s out of date too but that’s because we don’t really put money into it. And I guess that kind of transitions us to… a question I’ve been asking is why do we tolerate this? Why do we tolerate allowing our vital infrastructure? And it’s more vital than people realize to deteriorate like this. And it clearly has no place being entirely held in private hands anymore. It is kind of like, look at our freeway system. It’s constantly being rebuilt. Bridges are being rebuilt, modernized, updated with higher speed interchanges and turnouts. Same thing with our airport system. Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it is constantly being modernized and constantly having capital put into it because we know that if we were to function as a civilization, we need a functional transportation system that’s simply not happening to any significant extent in the rail industry.
And it’s going to be to our own detriment as a country. So all in that thought process by asking your listeners here. So we have tons of trucking companies operating along the interstates every day and they’re private companies, and it’s not a perfect system, but they compete and it works. But no one’s suggesting that a trucking company should own the Interstate 40. And that would be ridiculous. If we were to suggest, hey, we should privatize an interstate, that would be nuts. No one would support that, but yet that’s what we’re doing in the rail industry.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Now the more that I talked to workers like yourself and learned about just the sort of Frankenstein’s monster setup that we have with our rail system. And then I started talking to rail workers in other countries, like the RMT folks in the UK, and they were comparing their system to ours and they were like, wait, the companies own the rail lines over there? It’s like, how does that fucking work? And I was like, I don’t know man, apparently it doesn’t.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
It doesn’t work very well anymore.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, the answer is it doesn’t. And we could be, and you’re right. I think that it has this crushing effect on our imaginations where if you go so long with the system set up like this, people just start to accept that there’s no other way to do it and they are. This is the kind of American exceptionalism problem. It’s like if you keep telling yourself that you’re the apex of everything in the whole world and you don’t look at what the rest of the world is doing, you’re not going to realize how much we’re all getting fucked over. We could have a much better rail system in this country. We should be demanding it because we deserve it.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
And that’s why when you bring up passenger rail and bring up how it works in other countries, so many people just… it’s like you’re talking in a foreign language. They don’t even understand because they’ve never seen it. And they don’t even question like, oh, back to your deal with Brea and those old buildings and those old parts of town that existed and then they tore it down to build a shopping center. So many Americans just can’t imagine because they’ve never traveled abroad. They can’t imagine an area where you don’t have a dirty strode. I don’t know if you know what that is. Dirty strode with lots of traffic and all the traffic is stopped and it’s dangerous with strip malls and big box stores lining, it’s not natural. It’s not the way of natural human development that humans have developed for thousands of years. And it’s not natural to other countries, especially when you leave North America. It’s kind of a uniquely North American problem because Canada has that problem as well with the sprawling car based development for everything. But yeah, if you’ve never seen it, then they’re not going to understand it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You’re not going to understand it. And again, this is why it’s so important for people to hear your side of the story and not just the company side, which in the media, if we hear about these issues at all, we generally only hear about the company side. And I wanted to talk a bit about your experience as a worker in that industry. Again, we’re working our way up to the kind of clusterfuck that you and I were talking about all through last year and the Union Pacific firing you for whistle blowing about it. But before we get there, I want to go back to a young Paul, veteran coming off deployment, going up to Oakland and starting to work on the railroads.
What was that like? Granted, after doing so many interviews with railroaders over the past year and a half, I actually do feel like our listeners have a bit more of a sense of what you guys do every day. But I still feel like I’m learning new stuff every time I ask this question. So I guess just walk us through your first few days, weeks, months. What does that job entail? How did you acclimate to it? And then let’s talk about how you have seen those changes take hold over the past 17 years and what those changes translated to for you and other workers on the railroads themselves.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Okay. Well, first few days, weeks, my first introduction to the railroad, I know I did my interview session, started out with a hiring session where they had a whole room full of people that had been called in. We were in the upstairs floor at the Jack London Inn in Oakland, Jack London Square. And there was a whole room full of people. And this whole story here will show you the difference in the standard that the railroad used to try to set on new hires versus today. So the first thing they always did is try to scare everyone in the room away from the line of work. They tell you, oh, you’re going to be working every holiday, every weekend. You’re going to be on the job nonstop. Your wife’s going to divorce you. Your kids are going to hate you. You’re going to develop an alcohol problem, you’re going to… everything else.
They just tried to do everything in the world to get people to scatter. And the room just slowly emptied more and more. The people that were left, they give a reading comprehension test and that was one of the first things you passed. And the reason for that is because we operate on the general code of operating rules and that describes how you keep trains from hitting each other. They’re both running both directions on the same track. So you’ve got to have very specific, very unambiguous ways of describing how these movements are to take place so the trains don’t hit each other. And so the first thing they do is they give you reading comprehension, a reading comprehension test. And then after that we went to lunch and they told us they’ll call you if you’re to come back for an interview. And when it was all said and done and they called people back to interview, there were only five or six people left. So that was the initial weed out process and the way it always was back then, they had very, very high standards.
Anyway, long story short, I started class up in Roseville, California. And a stupid memory I’d just got back from Iraq, I hadn’t driven in a long time, and it rained that morning and oh man, I just about rear-ended somebody sliding on the rain. I forgot how to drive apparently during my deployment, but made it in there on time fortunately because they had a no questions asked. If you showed up late the first day, you were done, you’re automatically gone. Even if it was 30 seconds late and I saw that happen to a few people. They showed up 30 seconds late the first day and they’re like, sorry, we’re not interested. You can leave.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
So that was the kind of high standard that was set. Fortunately, I was very punctual and I’ve always been that way throughout my career.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I guess my imagination of… I’ve often thought, I was like, man, what if I ended up working on the railroads? What would that look like? Apparently you just gave me my answer. I wouldn’t have made it past the interview phase because the Alvarezs are a famously punctual people.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Well, the standards have dropped a lot because they’ve run all of their employees off and so many people have quit or retired early or just left. And that’s why they’re giving out these big hiring bonuses now. It’s unbelievable, they’re trying to go to federal regulators and get the FRA to sign off on doing a lot of the training remotely now in class or on a Zoom call, do online training for your new hire stuff, which obviously you’re not going to be able to observe people properly, weed them out or anything. The amount of safety standards for new hires, they’ve just thrown it out the window because all they want is to hit their 55 operating ratio. That’s all they care about now. And so yeah, nowadays, punctuality probably wouldn’t matter. You’d probably be able to skate right through it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Again, after talking to you guys, I think I’m fucking good. After seeing what you guys have been through and the way that this industry treats its workers, I’m all set, but I want to talk about that and yeah, keep talking on this thread. Tell us more about the kinds of… what goes into being an engineer and the kind of route you would take, kind of things you’d haul and when and how you started seeing that standard, that high standard that the industry was setting for you and the people that it hired started to change.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Well, most of my career I worked as a conductor, and the conductor works as the second person on the crew. They’re the ones in charge of the train. So everything behind the locomotives back, also everything needs to be done on the ground. Adding cars to the train, removing cars from the train, switching cars, communicating with the engineer, speed restrictions and everything else. But taking engineer promotion is the next promotion. It took me eight years to have enough seniority to take that promotion and it was a long eight years waiting because I was itching to get over there and learn how to run trains. So definitely my career changed from a personal enjoyment perspective a lot more when I got to finally go to take my engineer promotion. I did during my time as a conductor, I got to do an immense amount of things during that time.
I worked in a lot of places, worked all over California. How I ended up in Pocatello was we were kind of in the early phases of the slowdown before the financial crisis in the fall of 2007 now. And you always see slowdowns on the railroads first. They start to slow down first before everything else does. And they were looking for people around the country in different places and they called and said, I put in my name to transfer somewhere else because I didn’t want to get furloughed. And they said, “Well, do you want to go to Pocatello?” And so I gave up my seniority, started my seniority over in Pocatello, and that’s how I ended up there. But since then, I’ve temporarily worked in Chicago, worked in San Antonio, worked in parts of Utah, Elko, Nevada, Grand Junction, Colorado. Been a lot of places. But when I finally got to take engineer promotion, that is when you really, really, you just become a much better employee, I think as an engineer.
Maybe employee’s the wrong way to put it, but a better railroad because engineer training was intense. It’s intense for various reasons. For one, if you are a conductor and you have a whole career in front of you, there’s a lot of people that just never take promotion because they’re not interested and they stay conductors forever. If you take engineer promotion and you fail out of it, you don’t have a job anymore, you can’t go back to being conductor. So that’s the first thing is when you take promotion, you just know that you need to pass it. If you want to have a career, you need to pass it because once you start, you’re committed. And it was a solid six months of working nearly nonstop. And part of the training was down in Salt Lake and this was your classroom and simulator training and we went there two different times.
And I really enjoyed Salt Lake in a lot of ways. It was interesting, they had one room that was devoted all to air brakes and all of the subsystems of air brakes. And I thought I understood the air brake system and rail cars beforehand but after that, it had a full miniature setup. By miniature, it had all the full life-sized parts of the locomotive, the control console, the brake cylinders on the cars, but all consolidated into about 20 feet going across the room. So it basically simulated having two locomotives and two freight cars and [inaudible 00:49:32] a train device on the rear and all the moving parts. And you could play around with a full real size control console and see how all the systems functioned together. You learn very, very in depth into GCOR rules and then part of your day. So GCOR and airbrake rules, all the rules that we operate by and all the context, every sort of scenario and context and maybe scenarios that you didn’t understand because you’d never seen before related, just weird situations.
And then part of your day was classroom and the other part of the day was simulator. And every day was a scenario. You got the paperwork the day before of the scenario, how big your train is, your max speed limit, your tonnage, and what line you’re going to be on and they would try to compete. You’d compete for speed, fuel efficiency, and also on train handling because it rates all of your draft and all of your draft, which is your pulling force and your buff, which is your compression force and all of your other lateral and vertical forces. It counts all that and measures you and pumps out a score. But there’s also an FRA score, your license score, which if you do something that’s an FRAD certifiable offense in there, it zeros out that score and you automatically fail it.
But they intentionally try to do that to you and everyone gets decertified on the simulator while they’re there because that’s the place to do. It’s to learn and then you never forget that rule again. So I remember one day in particular, and it was a scenario and they hyped us up, they’re like, “Hey, so tomorrow it’s about, it’s a speed run and we’re going to measure you on distance covered in time, and we’re going to compete and whoever gets the highest score, they’re going to win a prize basically.” And so they’re distracting us on the prize. And I spend all this time at home trying to learn this route. I even looked it up on Google Maps and then [inaudible 00:51:44] timetables and tried to learn the speeds on this segment and was all ready to go. And man, I started it. The scenario started, the train was already moving about 15 miles an hour.
And I’m like, okay, I’m in a permanent 60 mile an hour. I’m going to get it up to speed. Well I forgot we hadn’t seen a signal yet. So per the GCOR rules, you were initiating movement and you have to be at what’s called restricted speed until you’re leading wheels past the first governing signal, it relieves you from being at restricted speed. It’s a catchall rule. I won’t go into depth on that, but it’s one of the most important rules we have. And somehow I miss that. I’m all focused on the speed because they’re intentionally trying to distract you and man, I thought I was doing great. I’m zipping along and okay, I got this 40 mile an hour curve coming up. I’m going to set some air and get down for it. My instructor comes behind me, “How you doing? So what was your last signal?” And that’s when it hit me. Wow.
Maximillian Alvarez:
God-damn it.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
I just failed the simulator run. And then I still had to go through the whole thing. But that’s trying to simulate distractions coming up. You’re going along down the rail and something comes up on the radio and radio communication going on and a car coming up on a crossing that looks like they’re not going to stop. And a speed change coming up and maintenance away, workers coming up ahead and a form A speed restriction and a form B, all these overlapping distractions. They’re trying to do that. But then you come back to Pocatello and you do months and months of working as a student engineer with a qualified engineer, and you’re just back to back to back nonstop.
And also during this time, it’s a pay cut. You actually take a pay cut while you’re doing the training. But during this time, I remember losing a lot of sleep because I would constantly have dreams that there’s a red signal coming up and I’m trying to find the brakes and I can’t find them in bed and it’s getting closer and closer. It was enough to give you nightmares during engineer training. Yeah, that’s how-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
[inaudible 00:53:57] come out, [inaudible 00:54:01].
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man, I’m breaking out into a cold sweat just thinking about this, and I think a number of things jump out. One, just like this is also what we were saying during the high stakes contract dispute last year, and I guess just a reminder for everyone, by the time we were talking about that contract dispute, the contract was already three years out of date. This was three years into the negotiations, but because of all the provisions within the Railway Labor Act and all the funky conditions around bargaining between the rail unions and rail carriers, we’re not going to go into all that. Again, you guys can go back and check out our past interviews to get more up to date on that but because of all that weirdness, this kind of contract dispute had been going on for a long time. The more that I would talk to workers like yourself, the more that it was just baffling to me that people like you could go through that much training and that you could be expected to hold within yourself on any given day.
That much knowledge and sort of scenarios upon scenarios for how to act in a situation while still staying in compliance with federal regulations, with company rules, with the size of the train you got, the kind of train you got, the crew that you got. It kind of reminded me of when two homies, who we’ve had on the show before as well, the great Zack Pattin and Skiff from the Longshore workers in Tacoma. When Zack and Skiff were on the show, they were describing to me this kind of practice that they have in the Tacoma port that’s kind of particular to them, where they load the-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Where they load these ships that are docking there and are on their way to Alaska. And so you got these guys in forklifts, a small army of forklifts, zipping up and down these ramps and in these tight quarters and stacking it as tightly as you can. And just hearing them describe it was anxiety producing for me because I was like, I don’t know how you act in that situation. I would be so terrified by what could go wrong that I would end up causing an accident. Because you almost have to have that sort of state of flow, you have to be so intimately connected to that machinery and so well versed in that knowledge that it becomes instinctual and you’re able to always be aware of the safety risks but not be immobilized by them. I don’t know.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Repetition.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I just have so much Tremendous. Yeah, the tremendous respect I have for you and others who are able to do that is off the charts, which is why, I guess this is the point I’m making, it was so baffling to me to hear that the railroads have been cutting their staff year after year after year, and that in fact they were trying to make that job harder for you guys by getting crews on trains that used to have five people down to two and then possibly down to one. And I was like, how the fuck does any of that make sense?
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
While at the same time also running longer and longer trains that usually don’t make it across the territory in the designated time allowed. So a trip that may have taken seven hours in the past is now consistently taking 12 hours plus while you wait for another crew to come out and relieve you. I’ll touch on one thing there, Max. You mentioned about the labor dispute hitting that a little bit and how you mentioned earlier how Biden collaborated with big business to basically prevent us from strike, a work stoppage and the media talked all about a strike and the potential of a railroad strike, but actually because railroaders are not allowed to strike, it’s against the law, they can force us back to work, which in a supposedly free country just seems obscene to even discuss that.
So the language of it does not specifically refer to a strike though. It refers to a work stoppage. So being a strike from the labor side or a lockout from the railroad side, and I’m going to be one of the people that… One of the only people that has said this and that is that there was an illegal work stoppage. It did occur, but it wasn’t the employees that did it. It was companies like Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern that several days before the strike was even legal, started shutting down ports and saying, “Oh, this is in anticipation of a potential strike and an orderly shutdown.” They illegally broke the law and started shutting down the US economy before the allotted date where we would be allowed to do that and no one talked about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and just to contextualize that for listeners, because what Paul just said is really important, and you’re right, it was driving me insane on this end on the media side, hearing so many outlets that had paid no attention to this struggle until we were literally at the 11th hour in September of 2022, and we were at that moment when a rail shut down could potentially happen. To your point, and like I said, I won’t run everyone through my whole spiel on the Railway Labor Act and all the stages that we had to clear in order for a strike or a lockout to become legal like Paul said. But because labor relations on the railroads are not governed by the National Labor Relations Act, they’re governed by the Railway Labor Act, which was passed in the 1920s with the explicit purpose of preventing the kind of railroad strike that this country had seen in the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Railroad workers like Paul and his ancestors in the industry, they showed corporate America the business class and their lackeys in DC and state houses across the country.
They showed how much power workers on the railroads had to bring the economy to its knees, and they exerted that power multiple times, which is why the ruling business and political establishment was like, all right, we need to create this whole other separate set of rules, which became the Railway Labor Act essentially making it next to impossible for workers in this industry and other affiliated industries that are vital to our national security supply chain, yada, yada, yada. We need to make it as hard as possible for work stoppages to happen here. So that’s why we went through all those fucking stages last year. There were the negotiations that reached an impasse. There was a federal mediator who came in when they declared an impasse that started a 30-day cooling off. Biden had the opportunity in that period to create a presidential emergency board to review the contract dispute from both sides, labor and management.
They offered their recommendations, they put together a report in late August that triggered another 30 day cooling off period during which the unions and the carriers would have an opportunity to say whether or not they could agree to that report as the framework for a new contract. So what Paul was just talking about is in September when we were reaching the end of that 30 day cooling off period after the PEB, the Presidential Emergency Board had released its official report and its recommendations for the framework for a new contract. The rail carriers immediately said, “Yeah, that sounds good to us.” Right? So that should tell you right there why it was such a bad report or what was missing from it. The rail unions not so much. There was a lot of internal debate. A couple of the unions said that they would accept it as the framework for a new contract. Others did not.
All the while the clock was ticking down to late September when after the end of that 30 day cooling off, that is like the last stage in the railway Labor Act. At which point now a lockout initiated by the rail carriers or a strike initiated by any one of the unions could effectively and legally happen. And so the railroad unions and the workers, like Paul was saying, they had to sit and wait. They couldn’t start a strike before that 30-day deadline was exhausted. They would get fired. There’s a whole lot of consequences if labor jumps the gun and starts a work stoppage before the railway Labor Act says that they can. And yet the rail carriers, a week before that 30-day deadline was up, started doing slowdowns, started Embargoing Freight, started closing down lines. They started holding the rest of the economy hostage by violating the Railway Labor Act and no one in the media was calling them on it, and it was insane.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
They should have been criminally held liable for that because they would’ve held us criminally liable had we started a strike early.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, no, again, it just showed how stacked the deck is here and just in terms of the business side’s willingness to flout the law because they know they can get away with it. But also, like I said before, the fact that you guys were going up against a corporate media ecosystem that is so deeply entrenched in business friendly ideology, anti-worker ideology. I mean, it was just so infuriating to me that you and your fellow worker whistleblowers had to fight so hard just to get a countervailing perspective in there and to even make points like these because the pundits didn’t know that shit. They had no idea what they were talking about. It took me and Mel Buer a whole year of interviewing workers to gain the basic level of competency that we had to try to explain it to other people. And so I could go on all day about this, but I want to hook that into our final round in this conversation.
I want to make sure we give ample time to talk about the situation that you are in now and what people can do to support you. But this is important because in many ways the situation you’re in now is linked to the whistleblowing that you were doing during that time when we were approaching a potential rail shutdown. And you were, like I said, posting on your TikTok. You were doing interviews, you’ve written op-eds for industry magazines like Railway Age, and you’ve been, I think, a really fair critic of the industry. But it’s always been clear from your writing, from your speaking, how much you love the industry, how much you care about your fellow workers and their ability to do the job that you were hired to do, the potential that you know the railroads have and also the danger that corporate Wall Street led practices posed to the rest of the country.
So I wanted to ask if you just say a little bit about that side of things like when we were in year three, the contract dispute, some people like myself, Mel in these times, other outlets, people are starting to get involved. So what was going through your mind in terms of seeing where the industry was, seeing how little people outside of the industry understood that and what you felt compelled to do to try to raise people’s awareness about that, right? I mean, I guess the final thing I’ll say there then I’ll shut up, is just from my side, I will tell people listening to this, it was not easy to get connected with railroad workers like Paul. It took a lot of work because initially the first story I reported on was in late January of 2022 when I had learned that BNSF railway workers, this was specifically the conductors and engineers were prepared to go on strike against BNSF railway over the institution of a new draconian attendance policy called Hi-Viz, and the district court judge blocked workers from striking, allowed the policy to go into effect.
So that was kind of a prelude to what we would see happen with Biden and Congress and so on and so forth. So I tried to connect with people at that point, and all I heard from workers was like, I’ll talk to you off the record, but you cannot use my name. For the love of God please don’t tell anyone that you spoke to me because I will get fired. So right off the bat, it was very clear to me. It was like this is an industry that is so tightly controlled from the top down, that the rank and file voices are being actively silenced and that the public is not aware of the danger it is in because of that regime of silencing. And those are the conditions under which Paul himself took a really big risk and like I said, wrote op-eds gave public interviews posted on his TikTok. So that’s the context here. Now, Paul, take it away from there and talk us through your own sort of process for why you felt you had to blow the whistle on what you were seeing and what that entailed, what you felt the public needed to know.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yes. Well, it’s been very difficult to convey the message to a lot of people because the media, certain sides of the media and then also the railroads themselves and just, I would say this general gaslighting that workers get around the country, they’ve convinced people that it’s totally cool to just criticize each other and bring each other down like, “Oh, you’re already overpaid as is.” And try to get much empathy from people that just do not understand the context of what we’re talking about. So it’s hard to break past that brick wall of what’s going on. And like you said, talking with railroad workers that are willing to talk is very hard because these are the same industries. These are the same companies that oppressed racial groups that willingly were totally cool with paying the Chinese less and letting them die on the job, getting blown up in tunnels and on rock faces.
This is the same industry that just a few short decades ago was totally cool with preventing women and preventing African-Americans from getting promoted and keeping African-Americans in low paid quarter and waiter positions and not letting them promote. I mean, these are the same companies that did this, and they are totally cool with silencing you and oppressing you and firing you or worse. I mean, it’s kind of funny. I was making all these TikTok videos and everything, and one of my coworkers said, “Hey, when something happens to you, I’m going to make a bunch of money. I’m going to sell t-shirts that say that Michael Paul didn’t kill himself.” In relation, implying that the railroad’s going to off me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus man.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
This is the mentality of these railroads that are perfectly with intimidating people that would dare to speak out against what they’re doing, anyone that would dare speak out against their business practices or anything else. And this isn’t the first time that I spoke out against them. Let me give you you an example. This was about five years ago. It was before anyone started talking about what’s been going on with the bailouts and the share buybacks and everything else. If you go back about five years ago, the executive leadership at Union Pacific had a town hall meeting in Pocatello at the depot and Lance Fritz, the CEO, and at the time Rob Knight, the CFO, they were all there and in front of everyone I asked him why they were feeling it necessary to deplete our resources and to not invest in the railroad’s future growth and to destroy our capital by buying back their own shares to such an extent.
And they basically gave me the most polite screw you I’ve ever gotten in my life and talked down to me like I’m stupid, but I have a business degree. I’m not stupid. I know what share buybacks are and I know how they’re financing their share buybacks. I call them out about it back then, but now people are starting, it’s hitting the mainstream. People are talking about it. And so I’ve focused on the Wall Street issue with the railroads and how their own just so many companies in this country by BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street that try to squeeze every penny out of them regardless of which industry it is and whether it even survives long-term.
But train length and the amount of staff on hand to service these trains was definitely a huge factor. So the railroads act like running longer and longer trains is just as safe as running shorter trains, but what it’s actually doing a lot of times is full blocking communities, blocking crossings, and between that tied with cutting locomotive maintenance staff and also cutting car maintenance staff, it’s creating a lot of stress on the supervisors and the employees in those roles. So if let’s say a 6,000-foot train comes into the terminal, it’s pretty easily to comply with federal law and service that train and ensure that it’s safe to go to get it out of town and to spend a proper amount of time per each car. But if that’s a 14,000-foot train like they like running and they’ve cut the car staff down and they don’t have as many, then it is very, very tempting to rush through that train and get it done and get it out of the terminal and send it onto the next, because God, I’m going to get my ass chewed if I don’t get this train out of here.
That is a very real human action result of forcing these 14,000 foot trains through. Also, it feels like they’re conducting unregulated experimentation on the public because these trains do break down more. They do run over the track slower. They run over any territory slower. And imagine if you have a 10-mile section of track and there’s a 40 mile an hour curve at both ends of this 10 mile section, right? But you have a 14,000-foot train, almost three miles long, and your train’s good for 60, but you have 40 mile an hour curves on both ends of this 10 mile section. You cannot pick it up to 60 until your very last car comes out of that 40 mile an hour curve, which is almost three miles. Then it’s going to take a few miles to get back up to 60 again, and then you’re going to have to slow back down to 40 again.
So you might as well just go about 43, 44 miles an hour through that whole section because by the time you get out of that 40 mile an hour section, you’re almost up to another one. So the trains are moving slower, people’s goods are moving slower across the system, and it’s an unregulated experiment on the economy because people need their goods. We’re seeing high inflation and the railroads do play a part. They’ve farmed out their maintenance. So something that was going on with the East Palestine thing, and this was something that they specifically brought a TikTok video that I made. They magically decided to fire me right as East Palestine was coming along because I released a video on East Palestine. That was one of five videos they used in their investigation of a five TikTok videos, videos that I’d made, and specifically talking about East Palestine.
And I feel like they really wanted to just silence me because East Palestine was making me entire industry look bad, and I made a video about how these hot box detectors are being silenced. So a hot box detector is a detector in the track every 10, 15, sometimes 20 miles, and as the train goes by, it measures the temperature on the bearings and determines whether the bearing is overheating, and it always sends a message over the radio at the end of the train after it goes by, gives a milepost, no defects, usually an actual count, a speed, and sometimes the ambient temperature outside, and it gives that information. So the crew is constantly aware of what’s going on. Well, in the last few years they’ve been silencing these messages and they’re not regular, these detectors, I thought that maybe there were federal rules governing these detectors, just like there’s federal standards on everything.
But somehow what has come out with this East Palestine thing, the biggest thing that they’re wanting everyone to shut up about is that hot box detectors do not have a fixed standard. There’s no standard how far apart they need to be. There’s no standard as to how they need to be calibrated. There was no fixed standard. So it was people like me talking about this that got people really looking into that and wanting to talk about why the hot box detectors were being silenced. Well, what they were doing is they were silencing these detectors and if say an alarm for a high temperature bearing went off, it would go to Omaha, like where the headquarters UP is or whatever the headquarters is on the other railroads, it would go to their headquarters, to their bearing desk. Someone would review it and determine whether it was worthwhile to report it to the actual crew. I mean, that would be like being on a plane and they say there’s an engine alarm that goes off and it goes to the airline headquarters and they determine whether they need to tell the pilots about it. It’s ridiculous.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It is, and I’m so glad that you brought this up, right, because this was also news to me that I learned by watching the Surface Transportation Board hearings on East Palestine that just happened. I was watching Jason Cox, the national rep for the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen on CSX and Norfolk Southern, give his testimony saying what you’re saying, and then the industry or the Norfolk Southern representative effectively revealing that these hotbox detectors are not federally regulated. It’s the railroad itself that determines what its standards are for reporting. I mean, that was a real big bombshell, and it’s a really important side to the story. But what I want to impress upon people is that the video, the TikTok video that Paul is talking about, the points that he’s making about those hotbox detectors and why the public needs to know about them again at these official federal hearings that have just happened in the past month where Norfolk Southern has admitted to these, that’s the same shit that Paul was saying in the TikTok that he has now been fired for. So it’s like-
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
They use that TikTok in their formal hearing gets-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, you know what, let’s pause real quick. Let’s tea up that TikTok just so everyone listening knows exactly what we’re talking about. So we’re going to play that clip and then we’ll hop back here in two minutes.
Speaker 1:
This is a hot box detector. It’s a device that inspects train axles for overheated bearings like the one that caused the East Palestine derailment. As a train passes over one of these devices, it scans each bearing and gives the crew an exit message over the radio like this
Speaker 2:
UP detector milepost 6.3, no defects, total axle 619, temperature 25 degrees detector out.
Speaker 1:
The no defects message ensures the crew that all temperature readings are normal. Those detectors are usually placed about every 15 or 20 miles along the route. But over the last couple of years, these monopoly railroads have shut off the alert messages on much of the system crews used to be alerted over the radio when a detector found a hot bearing. Now, crews are being kept in the dark as to the true status of they’re trained. Now, when a detector senses a rising bearing temperature, an alert is sent to the railroading dispatch center, which is hundreds of miles away and not to the crew. A manager or other useless middleman reviews the message, but usually allows the train to proceed. Now, if the bearing temperature continues to rise on future detectors, the crew’s finally alerted that a bearing is trending hot and the crew now knows to stop and inspect their train.
Meanwhile, the train has traveled who knows how many miles since the first detector saw the problem. This practice has stripped away the abilities to take corrective action by the crew, keeping trains with problems moving and surely has saved the railroads money to buy back more of their own shares. But at East Palestine, their luck gambling with public safety seems to have run out. This is the route the train was following in the miles prior to the derailment. At Salem, a video caught the train passing as fire engulfed the wheel bearing. Also, at Salem, a hot box detector inspected the bearings on the train. The crew was not alerted to any problem. Now have the detector given an exit message alerting the crew to the presence of a hot bearing, they would’ve stopped the train immediately and inspected. Instead, the unaware crew continued on east to East Palestine where the next detector was located.
But as we all know, by this time, it was too late for the crew to take corrective action and the bearing failed derailing the train and causing an environmental disaster along a river, which provides 10% of Americans drinking water. Why was the detector at Salem not working correctly to alert the crew? Why are the railroads allowed to silence safety devices? Logically, there are only two scenarios which could have played out. Either one, the detector at Salem had maintenance problems and was not working, in which case they need to be held liable for gross negligence. Or two, the detector worked just fine, but the hot bearing message went to the dispatching center in Atlanta instead of the crew and the train continued on, in which case the company needs to be held liable for gross negligence. It’s time that Americans asked why giant unaccountable monopolies are allowed to own neglect and dominate our vital rail infrastructure while buying back billions of dollars of their own shares every year. Railroad workers have warned of the cuts to maintenance, longer trains and utter contempt these companies hold for the general public. East Palestine will happen again if we continue to allow these companies to be unaccountable.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Again, you guys can see why the rail carriers are so focused on silencing people like Paul, why they are so intent on creating this culture of fear among its workers. That makes it so difficult for media makers and journalists like myself to connect with their workers to get these kinds of stories and to learn about the real issues going on in this industry and how those issues endanger workers, how they hurt the economy, and how they put us citizens and our communities at hazard, right? I mean, if the public knows about these things, then we’re going to start rightfully demanding that this industry be more tightly regulated, that the business practices of the major rail carriers be more tightly regulated, or even as we’ve talked about over at the Real News, even perhaps like we should take the railroads into public ownership.
This is a proposal that Railroad Workers United has been pushing for, and the rail carriers who are raking in record profits, of course, they don’t want that. So they’re going to do everything that they can to sort of create that culture and that environment in which this vital information does not make its way out to the public. And anyone like Paul who puts their neck out there to try to get that information to the public is going to face swift and severe repercussions for that. And I really want to stress that in this country we-
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I really want to stress that in this country we have a important tradition of whistleblowing. We associate that tradition with great patriots like Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, W Mark Felt AKA Deep Throat, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange. I mean, people who brought information to the public that the public needed to know. But we tend to think of that in terms of exposing government lies. And that’s the only realm in which whistleblowing is applicable. No. There are tons of statutes protecting workers under whistleblowing provisions. Workers who take that step to alert authorities, the media about safety issues, about violations that are going unreported. Again, whistleblower protections mean that information that the public has a right to know and needs to know that is being actively suppressed, that people who are trying to get that information out are being retaliated against. We have all of these whistleblower provisions to try to protect from those things.
But you can very much be a whistleblower in an industry like the railroads. If you are a rank and file worker or even a manager, in many ways you could call Chris Smalls a whistleblower. He led a walkout at that Amazon warehouse in Queens over the company’s COVID safety protocols. That is blowing the whistle. That is saying to your coworkers and to the public, something is going on here that is in violation of the law, that is in violation of basic laws of civilization and humanity, and people need to know about it. That is what we’re talking about here. And this is the kind of stuff that Paul was bravely and rightly and necessarily bringing to public view. But when the public started turning its eye to the railroads, especially after East Palestine, the carriers, they wanted to stamp that out however they possibly could. And here we are now with Paul, 17 years on the railroad being ended because of that service that he has done to us and to this country.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
And it’s not just me. Just so you know, I’ve been in contact with others. This is pure brute force intimidation. There have been people that have had my videos or other videos that people have made on the railroads on their phone or had been messaged it by someone else and the railroad found out about it and fired them permanently for just having this content.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus. You kidding me? I mean, that is insane.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yeah. And like you said, everyone should have the right to be able to call out this unethical behavior. Behavior from these companies that violates basic societal norms, safety. But the problem is these whistleblower laws were really written in an age prior to social media. And social media has become the primary form of news exchange. And so, my goal has always been to create legislative change on the railroad industry. Up to including, like you mentioned, public ownership, which is definitely a misunderstood issue, but legislative change. And the only way to get legislative change is to alert the public so that they can alert their lawmakers to make legislative change. And in past generations, that would’ve been through rallies or the newspaper or something, but that era is gone. The way people do that now is via social media. And so the laws need to reflect that social media is protected speech.
And these companies will argue that, oh, we’re a private company. The first amendment that doesn’t apply to private companies. Well, then quit taking federal funding. As long as you guys take federal paycheck protection loans and preferential fed loans and any assistance because you don’t want to maintain your infrastructure yourself. So you want to take federal or state loans or grants or anything, stop sucking on the tit of government and stand on your own two feet. And don’t be too big to fail if you want to be separate. Otherwise, you’re essentially a wing of government if you’re going to take money from the government. And yes, I have first amendment rights to talk out against you. At least that’s my thoughts.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Fucking Amen. Yeah, I’d say preach, man. I think that’s exactly right. And I know that you made a really great point back in September when we were talking about the potential rail shutdown, and we were talking about the presidential emergency board report from August and how the rail carriers infamously said that workers like yourself bore none of the risk of the rail industry and thus were entitled to none of the rewards. And you rightly pointed out, you’re like, oh, so all that money you guys got from Trump’s tax cuts, was that risk or reward, right? Was that you taking a risk?
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Yeah. Was that risk or was that investment? I’m confused. Yeah. And their quote was as follows, “The carriers maintained that it was their risk and investment that resulted in their profits and not any contribution by labor.” And that’s just amazing, because labor is the ones that contribute their finite lives and existence on this planet and risk their safety and their times away from their family and children and everything else. And meanwhile, we’re the ones that get taxed the most. And there were certain people that had major disagreements with this union contract, but I had one in particular that really, really rubs me the wrong way. And I’ve mentioned it a bunch. For some reason, it just hasn’t stuck with the union. Even though I talked to the president of the BLE, Dennis Pierce, back when he was the president and everything else, the union has not been on our side on this issue.
And that is taxation on meals when you travel out of town. If you’re out of town a couple of hundred days a year traveling, you bear an immense expense on having to eat out because you don’t have the choice. And people could say, “Oh, well just bring your lunch.” What are you got to bring a cold lunch 200 days a year? What kind of life is that? Sometimes you eat away from home and it costs a lot more money. It’s a lot more expensive than eating at home. So it used to be that you could write off that expense at the end of the year, but the tax cuts and Jobs Act took that ability away when they change the way that all that is calculated. So now Railroaders can’t really write that off anymore. So they lost their biggest tax deduction. And the railroads do not pay a proper daily per diems.
The IRS says, I believe it’s $60 a day now, is when you travel out of town is the portion of your pay that is to be paid to you tax-free as a reimbursement where you don’t pay taxes on it. Instead, we get $12 because it hasn’t gone up since the nineties. $12 to be gone for two days. And that affects your adjusted gross income. It results in higher taxation. Meanwhile, those companies and billionaires alike, they don’t pay hardly anything in taxes. Because everything’s written off as a write-off. Because if you’re a business, you can write off everything in the world, but workers don’t get that ability. So that’s what really, really bothers me. And I do intimately understand how that’s calculated. I’ve run little businesses of my own. I have a business degree, I understand the taxes, and I understand how much railroaders are getting screwed. And it doesn’t just apply to railroaders, it applies to any company that doesn’t pay a proper per diem for their workers.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, no, I think that’s again, really powerfully put and spot on, man. I mean, just yet another example of how workers like yourself are bearing the costs of this industry. And the executives and shareholders are reaping all the rewards, and they still have the gall to tell Biden’s Presidential Emergency Board that you guys are taking none of the risk, right? And thus, you deserve none of the shares of their record profits. It’s just sickening, frankly. And I know I can’t keep you much longer, and I want to round the final turn here. I mean, we got so much more to talk about, but I just wanted to really put in a plea, everyone listening, right? We’re going to link to other past interviews that Paul and I have done, pieces that he’s written. We’re going to link to his TikTok. Please get these out there as much as you can. Make sure people know about, A, what Paul has been trying to make the public aware of in terms of the rail industry and its destructive business practices, and what that is doing to the workers, to the infrastructure, and to our communities.
So please, please help us get the word out about that. But also, please help us get the word out about Paul being retaliated against and fired from all three times. So this is what we’re going to end talking about. We’re not going to be able to ask Paul about anything regarding pending litigation, so please just bear with us there. And, of course, with the way that the law in this country moves so slowly and how much it favors the bosses already, we got to be careful and say, allegedly in retaliation for his whistleblowing. But to me, everything that we are seeing and hearing about, and given Paul’s existing record on the railroads, it seems pretty damn obvious to me that he was targeted and retaliated against and fired for his whistleblowing and should have the same whistleblower protections that this country claims that we have. And so Paul, I guess take us around the final term, man. Tell us about what has happened with these firings, how you are doing, and what people can do to stand in solidarity with you.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Okay. Well, yeah, February 24th was my last workday, and I’ve always had really good rapport with my local managers, get along fine with them and everything. And they personally, I don’t think personally wanted anything to do with this. But on that day, after working a whole shift and all, I came into the yard office and they said, “Well, yeah, Omaha called and we’re supposed to escort you off the property.” That was my last workday. And it’s amazing the time period on it, because it’s right when the media is just exploding over East Palestine. And then also another derailment that had happened in Southern California where an excessive tonnage train that had broken in half got away and derailed at 145 miles an hour. And so at some point, someone in Omaha decided to pull the pin and make the call and silence me on that.
And they held five of my TikTok videos, held a formal investigation over my videos, played them, I think it’s funny, I also think it’s kind of hilarious that off the record, the UP managers agreed with me on it, and they were quite impressed with the amount of views that, but of course they couldn’t put that on the record for it. But yeah, they held three formal investigations. So well, one on that. So that’s where it gets really interesting. So remember how I said this is an industry that has people in the background that makes calls and they will smear and destroy the reputation and credibility of anyone that they see standing up against them. So it’s bad enough they held an investigation, a formal hearing on this, that probably would’ve been overturned by the arbitrator when they looked at it.
Well, they want to multiply that times three to see if an arbitrator will overturn it three times. Because I referred to myself in the investigation just as I think any worker right now would feel toward these corrupt billionaire employers. And that is I referred to myself as feeling like a slave to my work, to my industry. And they didn’t like that. And so they held another formal investigation a few weeks later to fire me again for saying that I used a racial slur to talk about myself when I was referring to myself as being a slave to their company.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Fuck off man.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
And then they held a third one that day that I didn’t even know was going on until afterwards. We went straight into another formal hearing so that they could bring one more TikTok video that I’d posted into the mix. This time about the SEMA derailment and the train, leaving the rails doing 140 miles an hour. So they hold three separate four investigations. One on the original first five TikTok videos. The next for me calling myself a slave to them, and the next for another TikTok video so that they can ensure that I’m silenced and can never be brought back to work by an arbitrator, is what they’re trying to do. And it’s unprecedented and it’s unheard of in the industry. I don’t know that anyone in the industry that’s dealt with the union and formal investigations that has ever seen someone investigated three times in regard to the same exact charge.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m like, I’m at a loss for words with that. That is insane to me. And I think, yeah-
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
They blackballed me from the industry too there, Max. I’ve applied to multiple positions on Amtrak since then as a qualified engineer with a lot of good years of service. And I’m not getting any response from anybody because they blackballed me by essentially saying that, hey, if you look at my service record now, and now it shows that apparently I use racial slurs for referring to calling myself a slave.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I don’t know what part to be more angry about. But obviously that part I’m very angry about. Because I mean, this is just so cynical and so diabolical, to when you are talking about a worker who is given 17 years of their life to this industry, who knows their job inside and out, who takes that work incredibly seriously. And is raising the alarm about serious issues within that industry that are endangering workers, endangering communities, and ultimately hurting the economy and the industry itself. So you have that situation, amidst the kind of other dynamics we’ve talked about in the industry that have led this industry to pile so much work onto so few workers to treat workers like crap, to constantly push people to be on call, to devote every waking hour of their lives to this industry, so on and so forth.
Yeah. I can tell you firsthand, as someone who’s interviewed many railroad workers, that they have also described to me that they feel like slaves to this industry. Because how else would you describe it when you are a conductor, an engineer working under these oppressive draconian attendance policies that mean that you have to be on call 24/7, 7 days a week, 365 days out of the year, you can’t plan your life. You don’t have paid sick days, although some may now finally be getting a few paid sick days.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
That didn’t apply to conductors and engineers, by the way.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, there you go. So then you’re still fucked. So if you don’t have the ability to take paid sick days, you were literally at the beck and call of your employer. If you miss those calls, you are fired. You lose your paycheck, you lose all your accrued benefits, so on and so forth. So yeah, I wholeheartedly understand it when you and other workers say you feel like slaves in this industry because that is the position you’ve been put in. And then for the company to turn around and say, well, we’re going to fire you for saying that. Because by calling yourself a slave, that’s a racial slur. And then in turn, for you to be blackballed from the industry because you have this company written note on your record saying that allegedly, you know, have a history of, or you were fired for racist comment, pardon my French, but that is fucking bullshit.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
It is. And this is the same industry, I’ll say again, that literally oppressed blacks by holding them in low paying porters and waiter positions, until not that long ago, preventing them from being conductors and engineers. I mean, this company is the most morally bankrupt company in the world historically. And now they want to pretend that they have some sort of moral high ground to stand on. It’s just amazing. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. I mean, it’s funny you mention that or not so funny. But if people go back to our own show catalog, two months ago. I interviewed Brian Mack, a black conductor for CSX, who was also fired under very dubious circumstances that feel to me, pretty racially motivated. And Brian himself talked about what it was like to be a second generation black railroader. You can hear him describe in his dad’s experience, trying to make a career amidst that kind of racist regime that Paul was just describing. That when he says, that wasn’t too long ago. You can hear that in the interview that we did with Brian Mack just a couple of months ago. And again, I know we got to wrap this up. I know I got to let you go. But it’s just, again, this is what we’re dealing with here. To not only not address the serious issues that Paul was communicating when he says, “I feel like a slave to this industry.”
Instead of addressing the issues that are leading your workers to feel that way, you fire them and smear them in this way to try to send a message to anyone else who dare speak out. That is ultimately what we’re talking about here. That is why it’s so important for all of us to not let them get away with this, not let them push this under the rug, not let these issues just fade from our memory until the next East Palestine or Lac-Mégantic happens. I am begging people to-
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
It’s going to happen.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And it’s going to happen. It’s not like derailments just stopped after East Palestine. We just haven’t had one as catastrophic since then.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
We just had that derailment Montana. Did you see the bridge collapse?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Yeah, I did.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
So that is our infrastructure. That is our infrastructure that money doesn’t go back into that. Money goes back into share buybacks. It doesn’t go into maintaining stuff like that. And I can tell you personally, and I hope the railroad is listening to this, but when I was down at my dad’s recently, he lives right next to a bridge along the line in California that Amtrak uses every single day. And the pilings under that bridge are disgusting and falling apart. And it’s probably in just as bad a condition as that bridge in Montana.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man. Yeah, this is a crisis. That kind of destruction of the railroads took years of neglect and greedy practices. And it’s not like we can just turn a switch and fix them. There are things we can do now. Biden and Congress could make those trains half the size tomorrow, if they were really adamant about intervening here. There are immediate things you can do while making long-term investments to improve upon the issues that Paul and I have been talking about for nearly the past two hours. But again, it’s going to take that will, it’s going to take all of us forcing our elected officials to make it a priority, forcing the media to continue to cover it. And yes, speaking out for those who can’t, speaking up and letting companies like Union Pacific know what you think about how they’re treating their workers and how they’re treating whistleblowers like Paul.
Please, do whatever you can to spread this Paul’s story, to hold these companies accountable and to do whatever you can to make this better, because it’s not going to get better on its own. And so on that final note, Paul, again, I wanted to thank you so much for sharing all of this. And again, I’m so sorry that you were going through all of this bullshit, and I just wanted to ask one final question by way of rounding out how you’re doing and what people out there can do to support you as you go through this.
Michael Paul Lindsey II:
Personally, I’m doing pretty well. A few years ago, I acknowledge that I can’t be a hundred percent reliant on the railroad. So I tried to manage my finances and everything to where they’re not hurting me. And I’ve been traveling around and finally trying to work on my health and just doing some things I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I am concerned about my health insurance eventually running out, have an extension program where it goes on for a bit, but it’ll eventually run out, which is another one of those. It goes back to my comment on why I felt that I was a slave of the railroad. So just a little reminder to everyone, where we live in a country where if you’re employed by one of these big companies that likes to engage in dubious activity and you say anything about them, they can literally kill you.
I mean, I’ve got obstructive sleep apnea from my time at the railroad, and I’m on blood pressure medication now, and they’re taking my health insurance away. So all because I decided to speak out against them, that would definitely be another issue that I know, Max, you’ve probably covered the issue of health insurance in this country, but in the meantime, that’s not quite there yet. So I’m doing okay and traveling around. But I think that everyone that wants to, they need to stay engaged into what’s going on here.
And it relates to the TikTok thing. Don’t allow people to talk about how TikTok needs to be banned. Don’t allow your mind to believe this crap that they’re trying to put out there. People get their news, their unbiased news from passionate creators on outlets like TikTok. And banning TikTok is a way that they can shut down that information stream. And keep following people that are having the nerve and braveness to stand up and make content about these issues. And don’t forget about it, because it’s going to affect every one of us. But especially with whistleblowing, it doesn’t matter what the industry, this potentially could result in some sort of jurisprudence that is used in the future for generations to come. That states that social media is a form of free speech.
The Philadelphia Art Museum is an icon of the City of Brotherly Love, and there’s no shortage of art lovers who wouldn’t consider a chance to work there to be a dream job. But passion and prestige don’t pay the bills, as many museum workers have found while being severely undercompensated for their labor. After a public spreadsheet displaying the vast disparities in salaries at the museum was circulated in 2019 by a group called Art Museum and Transparency, workers at the PMA began to organize for a union. In summer 2022, the PMA Union held a successful three-week strike after two years of contract negotiations. The Real News speaks with Adam Rizzo, museum educator and president of AFSCME Local 397, and Amanda Bock, assistant curator and co-lead shop steward of the PMA Union.
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Vince Quiles:
Hello, everyone. This is Vince reporting for The Real News Network. I’m the lead organizer from Store 4112 at Home Depot in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Today we’re going to talk about one of the union fights that actually helped to inspire me during our organizing drive.
The Philadelphia Museum of Art is a staple in the city, something that we reflect on a lot when we see movies like Rocky and just general day-to-day activity within the city. Whether you’re a tourist coming in or you’re somebody who’s lived in the city for a long time, it’s definitely one of the symbols of the city. Over the summer, there was a major strike fight, and today we have with us Adam Rizzo from AFSCME Local 397, Museum Educator, and Amanda Bock, Co-Lead Shop Steward, PMA Union, and Assistant Curator. Guys, thanks for joining me.
So just to get started off, wanted to talk a little bit about you guys and shape your role within this fight. So please tell us about what it is you do at the Museum of Art, as well as what inspired you to get active in organizing.
Adam Rizzo:
Sure. I can start. So I’ve been working at the art museum for about nine years now. I am a museum educator in school and teacher programs in the education department. My day-to-day job at the museum is working with K through 12 students who come to the museum on their field trips, which is an absolute joy. I get to work with the wonderful kids of the school district of Philadelphia. Then I also work with teachers, helping them to use our collection in their classroom. I develop classroom resources, and I work with college students. So I get to work with a lot of different audiences. I get to use the museum as my classroom, which is really a treat and a privilege.
It was a couple years ago now, probably four years ago, 2019, when a bunch of us started to realize that the museum needed to make some big changes. The thing that got me started in particular was an open source Excel spreadsheet that was circulated among museum professionals. It was from a group called Art Museum and Transparency, and it basically just asked folks to input their salary, their job title, what benefits they receive, and share it with the world.
At first when I saw it, I was really nervous. I thought I could get in trouble for sharing that type of information. I’d been taught that you don’t talk about money, that that’s improper, first of all. I also had internalized this idea that there’s some sort of prestige associated with working at an art museum that is somehow compensatory and means that you shouldn’t expect a living wage and also that there were some sort of value in the public service that also meant that you should expect to be paid less.
When I saw the data in that spreadsheet, I immediately noticed that there were tons of inequities within our institution, but also across institutions throughout this country and even internationally. The common thing was that our wages were wildly depressed and our benefits were garbage. So that got conversations going.
One particular example in my department was one of my colleagues who sat right across from me and had the same level job as me, had been working at the museum longer than me, and had more experience than me was making $7,000 a year less than me. The only explanation we could come up with when we opened up that conversation and started talking honestly was that I’m a man and she’s a woman. So those types of inequities got blown open very quickly, and that’s what got me started in this work. Amanda, I wonder what your thoughts are.
Amanda Bock:
Yeah, so my job at the museum is a curatorial position. So my work involves essentially bringing artwork into the museum that we acquire. I organize exhibitions that people come to see and do research for those exhibitions. I write books for the museum about art and art history. So my job is a little different. Also came from a love of education and about making art accessible and available to people was something that really brought me into this work.
I’ve been in that role at the museum for about five years, and prior to that, I held a fellowship at the museum, which is … On a good day, I would say it’s like an apprenticeship, where you learn how to do the job that I have now. On a bad day, I would say it’s an underpaid version of my own job now. So I was in that capacity for four years here at the museum with a little gap in between.
Actually, Adam, I don’t think I’ve ever shared this with you, but it relates to the salary spreadsheet. So it’s on my mind after your comments, which is that I remember sitting, just paralyzed in fear of this document, because I knew that I had taken a job where I was underpaid. I took it for all the reasons that Adam said. Jobs like mine, there might be three job postings a year, and one of them will be someplace totally undesirable to live, and the other two will have 200 applicants at least, most of whom are qualified. So when I took this job, I was just so relieved to have a job in a field that I love, and I know that I was not getting paid enough.
I finally opened it, and there were a couple other people at the time who held the same position as I did at our institution. One of them had filled it out and was getting paid $14,000 less a year than I was. So it was just a shocking journey into how depressed the wages were at the museum, how big the gap is between the prestige of the work that I do and the reality of compensation. That was for me also a real motivating factor in wanting to organize, was just wanting to stay in the job that I love and knowing that the economic realities of that for me and all of my colleagues were not pretty.
Vince Quiles:
I can totally see how those would be animating factors. Generally, whenever you’re in a museum of art, you see all the lovely paintings. You’re in a world of wonder, and you get so sucked into the art itself, you don’t consider the importance of the people doing the work. In a way, it feels a little bit detached. But when I hear you speak on the things you’re speaking about when you’re talking about unfair wages, people being paid at various amounts and there’s no explanation for it, it reminds me of things that we face at Home Depot, conversations that we’ve had with people in other industries, where, again, there’s this fear that’s put around talking about what it is that you’re paid for.
But at the end of the day, if you’re paying people for a set standard, there should be no concern in that. We should be able to say, “Hey, Adam, we pay you for this because you do X, X, and X. This is the value you bring.” The same thing with you, Amanda, and yet there’s a very obvious circumstance that happens where companies just like to take advantage of the fact that you live in that fear, and look at what happens when you come out of that. So I’m sure once that document went around, the art museum was probably not very happy about the conversations that were going on. I know you guys were in a three-year-long fight. So if you can, can you just walk me through some of the things that you faced both in your organizing drive as well as the strike itself?
Adam Rizzo:
Sure. I can get us started, and please, Amanda, at any point jump in. You were right there, too, although in a different position, which I’m sure Amanda will talk about.
So we started organizing shortly after the spreadsheet went viral, and it started as just informal conversations at people’s apartments, at bars, after work. I’m not sure we really knew we were organizing at first. We were just talking to each other. Museums are super hierarchical and super siloed between departments, so I didn’t really know Amanda before we started organizing. I didn’t know so many other people in different departments just because our work never really overlapped, and we were working in isolation from each other. So that was a real barrier that we had to overcome. The only way we did it was by having conversations with each other.
There were also some major harassment scandals that had happened at the museum with some managers who were not held accountable for their actions for many years. In fact, one was promoted out to another museum, and these stories were whispered about at the museum. We all knew these things had happened, but there was no accountability, and people were feeling unsafe in their workplace. So that was another motivating factor to get people organizing.
I’d say the museum didn’t really … Even after the spreadsheet went massively viral and was in all the newspapers, I don’t think they had any idea that it had the impact that it did. It was only after we went public and announced our intent to unionize that the museum really started the union-busting fight. Up until then, there was probably a year where we were just doing organizing behind the scenes, and the museum seemed to have no idea what was happening. We did a good job of keeping it secret, which was really important. We were revised to keep it secret by lawyers who we were talking to, by organizers, by folks at other museums who we were talking to.
So yeah, it was a lot of work, getting to the point where you can even just go public. There’s a lot of organizing that has to happen. We at a certain point realized we had to affiliate with a local union. We chose AFSCME because they had experience with the library workers, with zoo workers, other academic workers. So they seemed like a good fit for our group of humans. We wanted this to be a wall-to-wall union, which meant we wanted it to represent every department that was eligible, because oftentimes at museums, you’ll have a union for, say, the art installers, and it’s just them. We wanted everyone together so that we would have more power and more bargaining power and leverage.
So yeah, when we finally affiliated with AFSCME, it was like dating a little bit, like interviewing different organizers. We went with AFSCME, and they helped us really kick our organizing drive into high gear, really move from sticky notes on the wall with different people’s names on it to really organized spreadsheets where we were tracking who had been spoken to, who was supportive. Then we were collecting cards, and we did that right up until the world shut down in, I think, March 13th, 2020. We were about ready to go public, and then COVID happened and we were sent home from work that Friday and said, “See you in two weeks. We’ll see what happens.” We didn’t go back in two weeks. So that’s what happened up to that point. I wonder, Amanda, if you have anything you want to add.
Amanda Bock:
I can speak a little bit to the obstacles that we faced once we went public up until a point, and then Adam’s going to have to take over, because one of the big obstacles that immediately became apparent was we were not the only people to realize that there would be power in a wall-to-wall union. It was very clear that our employer also recognized that, and their first move was really to try and bust up our bargaining unit and say that we did not have things in common. It’s classic playbook anti-union stuff. But I think in the case of a museum, there are not very many people who have the same job title, and we have right now about 190 people in our unit. There are some jobs where there may be 10 or 15 people doing the same job, but most of them are unique titles or two people doing the same work.
So they were trying to make a case that we didn’t have enough in common to organize together, largely divided along professional and non-professional lines, which we all know are very arbitrary. We, I think, responded very smartly by live tweeting the NLRB hearing about whether we could file for an election together. It went viral and was profoundly embarrassing, the kinds of things that were being said about, “I might not have anything in common with someone who does fundraising.” Well, I can’t do an exhibition without someone writing grants with me and someone raising money to help me bring work into the museum. So all our jobs are really interconnected. It was very apparent to people in our field that this was bogus, and the museum took a real … They had a real tough time with that, and they eased off on most things.
But then next step was, “Who’s the supervisor?” That is largely why I was absent for most of the next nine months of our organizing, because although I’ve never had anyone work under me in a direct way, I’ve never hired anybody or fired anybody, there was a real determination to conflate the prestige of my job with actual authority. So the efforts to split the bargaining unit went all the way up to the NLRB for a handful of positions, including mine, which as you can tell by me being here today did not work out in the museum’s favor. So I was very excited to then get involved in organizing again.
Vince Quiles:
That’s amazing, because you consider the fact that you guys said a wall-to-wall union is what’s going to be the most effective, because ultimately, when you break these things down, it’s about leverage. The reason why you all were so afraid to talk about your wages once that sheet came around was because of how the art museum had leveraged itself to prevent you guys from doing so. Of course, the second workers start to do that, start to talk with one another …
I think what’s also really comical and touching on that is the fact that most employers like this like to proclaim, “Oh, we’re a family. We’re together in this.” Then it’s like, “Oh, wow. Well, now conveniently, apparently we have no common interest,” even though, to the point you guys raised, your job is interconnected, whether it’s you, Amanda, curating the art; you, Adam, coming in afterwards and doing a tour and educating people on the art she just curated; the person that’s cleaning the museum so that it’s actually fun to be in and it’s not crazy messy; people that do various different things within there, people that sell things within the gift shop in which people then go buy something and take that home with them and have a memory of that place for the rest of their life.
Again, it’s funny how on one avenue, an employer may look to try and create this idea of solidarity. “Oh, yeah, we’re family. We’re together.” Then the second you guys are like, “Yeah, you know what? You’re right. We are a family, and you’re abusing us,” then it’s like, “Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Hey, maybe we’re not as much of a family as you guys say.”
So then with that, I think it’s also really important to stress to the audience, because one of the things that we hope comes out of this is people understand more about organizing. I like that you guys touch on the clandestine aspect, because in the end, when you look at it, the resources you have as workers, it’s not going to be quite as much as the resource that the art museum has, in which I remember previous conversations, Adam, you were telling me the people that are on the board of trustees are like Philadelphia royalty. So not only do they have a lot of money, they have a lot of connections.
But getting mad at you guys for using your leverage, it’s very interesting and very comical how things will be played in a manner convenient for them. So then with that, moving on to the actual strike, and I know that’s probably where things were the most public, what was some of the opposition you guys faced there?
Adam Rizzo:
Well, yeah, so I’d say even just rewinding a little bit, there was the moment that the pandemic started, and we had to pause our organizing, because we didn’t know what was going to happen. The NLRB shut down. So there was a moment where we had to come back together and decide, “Do we want to move forward with this? Are people still interested?” We started making phone calls and reaching out to folks, and it turned out because of the precarity of the pandemic that people were even more interested in organizing.
So we continued moving forward, and we went public finally over the summer. We were given an election date. They were going to count our votes in July, at the end of July. Two days before the votes were counted, the museum laid off about 100 people, most of whom were in the bargaining unit. We had very smart lawyers working with us from AFSCME who had created an election agreement so that even if there were reductions in force at the museum, if they voted in the election, their vote would be counted. So it was a bittersweet win, but we won by a landslide, 89% voting yes. Like I said, it was bittersweet, but it was a wonderful victory for us.
Well, I tell you, as soon as we went public with the intent to have an election, the museum pulled out all the usual stops you would expect. They hired Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to represent them at the bargaining table. You might know them as the law firm that has been consistently fighting the Fight for 15. They are a union avoidance law firm.
So they did everything we expected they would do. That’s the good thing about union-busting lawyers. They’re not very creative. So we were able to inoculate folks to what was going to happen. We knew the messaging that was going to come out. It was a lot of, “Oh, we respect our workers’ right to organize, but we don’t believe this is right for you. You won’t be able to talk to your boss in the same way. You won’t be able to advocate for yourself. You won’t get raises in the time that you’re negotiating,” not that we had gotten raises in the past. So it was just absurd.
So that was the beginning of the campaign. When we got to the point that Amanda was talking about with the unit clarification, it became clear that they were really trying to divide us and eat away at the unit. Once that was resolved and the NLRB ruled in our favor, then we dove into negotiations, which dragged on for two long years. Throughout that time, the museum did just what you would expect. They tried to move as slowly as possible. They fought us on everything. I should have expected it I guess is what I’m trying to say. There were no surprises. It was just the same thing over and over again.
I think their goal was to tire us out to make it so maybe people would leave and stop this fight, maybe even decertify our union. Who knows? So we got to the point when we were finally talking about economics at the table, and it was clear the museum wasn’t going to move. We had to make a decision, and that decision was to escalate. We had done big rallies at the museum with thousands of people on the steps. We had done informational picketing. We had done all sorts of stuff, but it wasn’t enough to move them to just providing basic living wages.
Amanda Bock:
Can I just jump in?
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah, please.
Amanda Bock:
I feel like this entire endeavor for me exposes my own naivete or maybe optimism about it. But I was on the table team also, bargaining the contract, and I knew they knew about that salary spreadsheet. I knew that they knew that they were underpaying us. But I think I underestimated the undergirding of contempt that an institution can have for people who just want basic provisions to be met. None of us were there asking for a pony or whatever, anything too fancy. We wanted wages that were keeping with inflation and with the cost of living in Philadelphia, which is not the cheap city it used to be live in. We wanted paid parental leave for people so they did not have to take all of their sick and vacation time to raise a family, and we wanted healthcare that people could actually afford to use.
I somehow thought that an appeal to logic or reason or empathy would get us somewhere, and it got us almost nowhere. At that point, along with everyone else who was at the table, we said … This was probably nine months or so from when we went on strike, “We have to start preparing for a strike, because there’s no appealing to the humanity of these people. We are just hitting a wall, and we’re going to keep hitting a wall until we make something else happen.”
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah, and I would just add that one of the great tools that we had throughout those two years of negotiations, pretty much up until the end, when we ended up switching gears a little bit during the strike and right up to the strike for bargaining, but we did open bargaining for the majority of our negotiation sessions, which meant that anyone in the unit could attend via Zoom and see what was being talked about and what was being negotiated across the table.
That was really powerful because you don’t have to explain to someone management’s bad behavior or what their positions are. They see it, and they see the contempt that Amanda talked about. It comes across very clearly. I think that was a great tool for us in keeping people engaged and keeping people involved. But Amanda’s also right that you can’t just call a strike out of the blue. It takes a lot of preparation. So we were looking at the calendar, looking at when we thought we’d be negotiating economic issues, and planning back from there months out to start talking to folks about what they were willing to do, what escalations they were open to.
Vince Quiles:
Real quick, I just want to touch on the opening bargaining sessions. I remember, Adam, you and I before this had a conversation, and I think it’s really important to bring up in this. One of the common tactics that companies and corporations will use is, “Oh, the union, they’re a third party. They’re this other group.” But something that you said that really stuck with me was the fact that because you guys had open bargaining, people were coming, and they were saying … They’re like, “Wait. They’re trying to say that the union are the other side. But all of my buddies, all of my friends, all the people that I work with are sitting on the union side. We’ve got a couple union-busting lawyers who are sitting on the art museum’s side, and they have not very nice things to say about us.”
It just helped to again paint that picture, like you guys said, to show, “Look, ultimately, we as the workers, we are the ones that are the union. We are the ones that are trying to improve this situation,” whereas the art museum, as you were saying, Amanda, really has no humanity when you really think about it. It’s very easy to speak in platitudes and to say, “We care about our workers, and we appreciate them and all of the work that they do.”
But to your point, you were saying how this is not a city that’s quite as cheap to live in. This is also a city that can cut through the BS and see when people are lying. Ultimately, the way that we speak in this city is in the currency of action. Doesn’t matter what you say. It matters ultimately what you do, and you can see very clearly there that their actions are not lining up with their words.
Again, you guys aren’t being disrespectful in saying, “Oh, there are some disparities that are going on. What’s happening?” It’s basically like, “Oh, how dare you, people who get to live a life or working in a job that you do what you love, have the audacity to say something to us?” I could totally see how that would be such an animating factor. I think that that’s just such a display of brilliance in your guys’s strategy in terms of building up the energy for that strike, because I know if I was sitting on that art museum side, I’d be like, “Wait. These guys said what? Oh, yeah, come on. Let’s go on strike.”
Adam Rizzo:
I would say just two things. One is we also were very transparent with members, both communicating to them one-on-one conversations, email communications. We did a lot on social media, which had a great effect of getting the community involved, which I think was really helpful when we got to the point of the strike. But the other thing is that you don’t organize and do all of the work to form a union and bargain a first contract if you don’t really love the place you work, I think, or care about your work and your workplace. It’s like a second job that you don’t get paid for. It’s a passion. It’s something that you commit yourself to pretty wholly.
So I think that it was often that the museum was, like you said, trying to third-party us. That was just so hurtful, I think, for so many people, because it couldn’t have been more untrue.
The other thing that was interesting was that the lawyers from Morgan Lewis who were negotiating on the museum’s behalf and even the lawyers who work in-house at the museum just have no idea how the museum functions on a day-to-day basis. So we would end up in these crazy conversations about … Amanda, do you remember, “The curator of Irish art wants to do this”? It was like, “What are you talking about? This is insane.” We would just waste so much time on these hypotheticals that were just … It was absurd. They were wasting our time. That was the strategy on their part.
Amanda Bock:
It was a really expensive one.
Adam Rizzo:
Yes. Oh, gosh. They must have [inaudible 00:29:21].
Amanda Bock:
They could have just paid us.
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah.
Vince Quiles:
But I think that that goes to show, and something I talk about with various organizers, and I know, Adam, you and I have spoken about this, sometimes we’ll talk about the amount of money that a place makes. We’ll say, “Yo, the art museum, they make X amount of dollars.” We tend to focus on the cost of things. But in actuality, what it’s ultimately about is the power. That’s why they get so afraid when you guys try and form a wall-to-wall union, is because they’re like, “Oh, snap. No matter where we’re at in this building, we have no support. It’s the workers that are sticking together.” So the union is going to have all of the support. So there goes your leverage.
They’re so afraid of people in workplaces recognizing that, as you guys did, because then as we’re describing in this conversation and as we’ll continue to speak on throughout your guys’ strike is that ultimately puts you in a position to really leverage that power and put them at a point where it’s like, “Look, you’re either going to have to do what we say or you’re going to lose crap tons of money. Now, we can have a conversation and figure out what’s the fairest way to go about this?,” because, again, something that is just lost on employers all the time and I think is so important for workers to recognize is the fact that these people don’t know your workplace better than you do. It just logically doesn’t make sense.
If you’re there every day, 40 hours a week, some people 50, 60 hours a week, doing the same things over and over and over again, talking to the same people, working together in tandem all the time and seeing all aspects of that job, these people sitting in an office downtown or for other companies and corporations, they’re sitting across the country, like Home Depot down in Atlanta. They’re not going to know what’s going on in the actual place. So then it’s like, “Come on. We can give you guys that respect to say, ‘Hey, we’re a little money-hungry, but we can listen to you more.’” But that just shows how terrified they are of workers having power.
Adam Rizzo:
I think that’s true, and I think there’s also this assumption that museum workers make a living wage, which we often don’t because of the bloated budgets that museums have and the huge endowments that they have. That’s just not the reality. During our negotiations, it came to our attention that there were folks at the museum who were making below the city’s minimum wage rate, and we brought it to management’s attention. We were like, “What’s going on?” They immediately raised them up to the city’s minimum wage, which showed, first of all, that they were lying when they said they couldn’t make changes during the bargaining process, but also showed that unless we hold these people accountable, they’re not going to do it for themselves. So I think that was a real lesson for us, too, and we continued to put pressure on them about a lot of things.
I think even now, about 90% of workers at the art museum are on the high deductible healthcare plan. Those plans are designed for people who make around $75,000 a year or more. I’d have to look at the numbers, but I think 90% of our unit makes well below that. So these plans are unusable, basically. We have the health insurance, but we can’t afford to use it sometimes. The next step up to the HMO is hundreds of dollars a month. So you have to make this choice, and I think when we were negotiating, like Amanda said, I thought we could appeal to people’s better angels to share testimonials from our colleagues who couldn’t afford to get healthcare that they needed. It fell on deaf ears.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah, absolutely. Again, it’s one of the unfortunate aspects in this fight, but the important thing to remember is that ultimately nobody’s going to come and save us. We’ve got to have each other’s back the way that you guys have each other’s back. So to just round out this conversation, one of the things that I absolutely love about your guys’ effort is the timing of your strike with the Matisse effort and really maximizing your leverage.
So I’d really just like to speak a little bit on that and get both of your guys’ perspective. What two people to get perspectives from than somebody who helps to curate different events at the art museum, and so you can definitely speak to the importance of that, Amanda, and then obviously, of course, having an educator, too, talking about the historical aspect of those pieces and why it is that that exhibit is so big for the art museum. So please, guys, break us down, and a brilliant move that you guys had there.
Amanda Bock:
Yeah, so I didn’t curate the Matisse show, but if I did, I still would’ve walked out, just for the record. So a show like that is big, and it’s big because it involves a lot of art coming in from international and national museums on loan. So art has to get brought into the museum. It has to get checked over to make sure nothing happened to it during its travels. It has to get installed on the wall or in a case or wherever. All of that is union work.
So that’s to start us off, and then of course, with a show like that, there’s a big press preview, and a lot of the people who get things ready for that are union workers. There’s big events, and the event planners are union workers. The development officers are union workers, and the retail workers and the people who welcome people to the museum are union workers.
So an event like that, when it’s a huge show with lots of lenders and a big eye in the public with lots of advertising to let people know it’s coming, offered us an opportunity to really gum up the works and slow down work that has a deadline that can’t be moved, because at the end of all of the installation and the press preview, there’s always a big celebration of a big opening. It’s a private event, lots of wealthy people, lots of donors, lots of artists and trustees, and it’s a big, fancy event that you certainly wouldn’t want a seven- or eight-foot tall scabby outside and hordes of Philadelphians with noisemakers and our siblings at DC 33 driving trash trucks around in circles.
So the biggest looming thing at the end of this three-week strike was that very important private opening, which is conveniently when we finally reached a tentative agreement, was the night before that event was supposed to happen. So we created a situation where they had to bring in scabs if they wanted to get things done, where there were a lot of things that weren’t getting done. One of my managers said at one point when we ran into each other during the strike that every week we were out on strike, we fell one month behind inside. I think that was really true, because even beyond Matisse, you’re looking at what the next big show is, and there’s a lot of work that wasn’t getting done for that, too.
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah, and I would just add that, and Amanda knows more about planning exhibitions than I do, because I’m not involved in that at all, but these shows are planned out years in advance. It’s a really intensive process, and if you gum up one of those wheels, it has a butterfly effect across the institution. That not only affects us, but it could also potentially affect other museums that are putting on that show. It could also potentially harm relationships between lenders. I’m not the type of guy who has the money to own a Matisse, but if I was sending my Matisse to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I wouldn’t want to send it across a picket line. So it brings up some of those issues, too.
The timing of the strike was essential. Without that pressure point, I don’t think they would’ve finally agreed to all of our demands, like Amanda said. I thought they would’ve come to it sooner, a lot sooner. But they kept maintaining that everything was fine inside during those three weeks. Everything was moving ahead as scheduled. Meanwhile, the reality of it was that department heads and division heads were taking tickets at the front desks, were working the retail jobs, were doing all the jobs that folks in the unit do, were working coat check. I think that’s really valuable for them. I actually think they needed to experience that, and I’m happy they did. But that was unsustainable, clearly.
When the show finally opened and they said everything was fine, it was perfect, and this was their big post-pandemic blockbuster show, it wasn’t finished. There were some works that weren’t installed. When you go to a museum, there are usually interpretive labels that tell you a little bit about the artwork. That wasn’t installed. There were a lot of things that didn’t happen, because we weren’t there to do them.
So yeah, I think we had a big impact on all of those things. But the thing that they feared the most, which I think says a lot, is regarding their big party for the board of trustees being disrupted. Throughout this process, I thought that all of the community pressure, that all of the really bad press the museum was getting, all of the people in the community who were canceling their memberships, folks who weren’t showing up, who were showing up for us to support us, I thought that the harm they were doing to the reputation of the museum was what was … I was surprised at how far they were willing to let that go. I was really surprised, because I care about the reputation of the museum. But they were just acting so poorly in the public and without any self-awareness that it was just really disappointing to me and I think a lot of other folks.
But when it came down to it, they wanted to have their party. They didn’t want us out there, confronting the board of trustees, who ultimately are the ones who decide if we get what we want and what we deserve. We weren’t asking for that much. We were asking for enough money to live in this city, lower cost of healthcare, four weeks of paid parental leave. We had had zero, like Amanda said before. It was really shocking to me that it went as far as it did.
Vince Quiles:
Again, touching back on something that I said in the beginning of this interview, when you consider Philadelphia, you think of the Eagles. You think of the Sixers. You think of the cheesesteak. You do also think of Rocky running up those steps. You think of the historic importance that that museum has within this city. So to your point, it’s really a drop in the bucket, the things that you guys are asking for. You’re not trying to bankrupt them. You’re trying to put yourself in the best position so that then you can show up to work and do the best job possible, because that’s another important thing to remember in all this, is if you’re consistently concerned with, “Can I pay my bills? Can I make ends meet?”, that’s going to affect you at your job.
We can all think of times where, whether it was ourselves or coworker that we cared about, someone we were close with, when they had personal things going on and it’s obviously affecting them in the workplace. So again, we have to consider these things as well in these fights. But to your point, when you talk about how the board of trustees, all they cared about was their party, because in the end, that’s the core of this issue ultimately, is there are people in the upper echelons of society that run the show that only care what each other thinks. They don’t care what we as workers think. They don’t care the things that we go through. They’re just basically like, “Hey, chug along. Do what you got to do. Hey, Amanda, go put some pieces of art together. Hey, Adam, go teach some things about art to some students.”
They don’t understand that by Amanda doing what she does, it allows somebody to walk in and to lose themselves for a little bit in the wonder of art. It allows children who see really cool paintings, but don’t really understand what they’re looking at, be able to talk to someone like Adam and to be educated and to have their knowledge and their perspective expanded, which is really transformative for people at those ages.
So I think, again, just to clamp down and something I think you guys show really well is that it’s about the workers looking out for each other. I think you guys gave a masterclass in that. Really, my hats off to you all, and the fight that you had, I think it’s absolutely commendable. I think it’s super wonderful. Ultimately, the chapters of this labor fight that we’re currently going through across this country, you guys have cemented that place, and you have been able to help improve the lives of each other, but also help to set an example, because I know, like I said, as I was going through my organizing drive, I was looking a lot at what you guys were doing and seeing what was happening there and trying to learn from that. I can only imagine what others were.
So with that, I’d like to close out and ask you guys, how can we keep up with things that are going on at the art museum? How can we keep up with things that you guys are doing individually? Should there be any other struggles that you feel we should be looking at, anything going on underway? Whatever you want to plug.
Adam Rizzo:
There’s so much. I don’t know. I think what’s happening in labor right now is really incredibly inspiring, whether it’s at Starbucks or an art museum or at an Amazon distribution center, like Home Depot. I think workers across this country are realizing that they have more power together and that we can actually improve our lives if we work together. So I’m watching right now what’s going on with the WGA strike. I think that’s really an important fight, and I think they’re going to win. I was really inspired, and I’ve been really inspired by the actions that have happened at universities recently, whether it’s Rutgers or Temple. They’re voting at Penn as we speak, the residents and fellows at the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. So great. I’m so excited about that.
But I will say also just in regards to our local, so we were chartered as a local so that we could represent multiple cultural institutions within the city of Philadelphia. Since we won our election, the Penn Museum has joined our local. They won their election, and the Please Touch Museum just very recently, two months ago, won their election and joined our local. They’re both negotiating their first contract. Penn is approaching two years of negotiating for their first contract. So they’re in a similar position as we were when we ended up going on strike, and they’re hung up on the economic issues again. Penn is even bigger than an art museum like the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It’s like its own country in terms of the money that they take in and the economy of those places.
Amanda Bock:
It’s top five employer in the city of Philadelphia in terms of number of people.
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah, and they always say, “We’re the best employer in Philadelphia. Come work for us.” Meanwhile, there are folks who are working over at the Penn Museum, like was the case for us, who can’t afford to live in the city, who have to work two jobs to continue doing what they love and work at a place that they really care about. So I’m really hopeful that Penn will come to their senses and negotiate with them on economics in a real meaningful way. But we appreciate any support you can send their way to the Penn Museum workers. They are Penn Museum United, and you can find them online on Penn Museum Workers United. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram, and they also have a website.
Amanda Bock:
I’ll just tack on that Please Touch Museum is the children’s museum in Philadelphia and I think one of the first children’s museums to unionize. They had a real wild card fight up to their election with some anti-union tactics that might be new to the playbook. Obviously, we’re so out there that nothing stuck, and they won their election by a huge margin. But they will be entering, I think, what will be a tough contract fight. So Please Touch Museum United is their full union name, and they are also on social media.
I also just want to maybe give a nod to some unions that have had some longer fights, because I think there is a real risk that something can fall off of view when it’s a longer strike. So the grad workers at the University of Michigan have had a really tough fight. They’ve had the cops called on them. There’s been an injunction in court that’s gotten kicked around, and they’re not asking for any more than the successful strike at Rutgers or the successful strike at Temple amongst their graduate workers. I think any support that we can give to them would be welcome.
Then in our home state, the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh has been on strike since we ended our strike in October of 2022 and have had a really hard time, have been replaced with a lot of scab workers. One of their picketers was assaulted by a scab worker, and they have a really nice alternative newspaper that they’ve been writing in lieu of doing their own jobs, which is a really great read. I’m a monthly donor to their strike fund to keep them going. So if you are looking for a strike fund to support and want to support some workers who have been on strike for many months, they’re a good union to turn to.
Adam Rizzo:
Yeah, and I would just also add that we are so grateful to the folks of the city of Philadelphia and beyond, the museum community, cultural workers all over the place who supported us through the strike, not only by bringing coffee and pizza and donuts, which I never want to have ever again for the rest of my life, but by contributing to the strike fund, because that was really what kept us afloat. We were able to pay people while they were striking, and it wasn’t as much as folks were getting paid in their day jobs, but it was enough to sustain folks through that very challenging time. So I encourage everyone, if you’re able, to donate to strike funds and support workers. I know with inflation, money’s very tight these days. But it goes a long way, and we are so grateful for all that support.
Vince Quiles:
Awesome. Thank you guys so much for taking the time to explain your fight today. Thank you guys for paving the way and pioneering the way that you all did over at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I look forward to talking to you guys again in the future.
With labor activity making headlines across the U.S. and wealth inequality at all-time highs, new polling finds overwhelming support among the public for a slate of pro-worker bills advanced by Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vermont) Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee last month. According to polling by Data for Progress released Tuesday, all three bills passed by the committee last…
Part two of our interview with John Womack Jr, legendary historian and labor organizer. He is one of the foremost historians of the Mexican revolution, author of the book, “Zapata and the Mexican Revolution.” His new book is “Labor Power and Strategy.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! Audio and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Workers in Erie, Pennsylvania, are on strike, asking for familiar items like better pay, voting rights, and health care benefits. They’re also asking for one unique condition: to shift their production plant to greener technology.
The plant workers in Erie, two hours north of Pittsburgh, manufacture locomotives for Wabtec Corporation. Locomotives are the engine of the train and generally run on diesel fuel.
Manufacturing workers have been on strike since June 22 and are represented by the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America union, or UE. Initial conversations to renegotiate working contracts began in April. Scott Slawson is the president of the local 506 UE chapter in Erie and said there are currently 1,400 workers on strike.
“The members are dug in for the long haul,” Slawson said. “This is a passionate fight for them and they’re willing to go the distance if required.”
He said his union and train operator unions are working together to push for better environmental standards and greener technology in the industry.
Trains aren’t massive polluters, but the industry is trying to reduce emissions. The transportation industry is responsible for the highest amount of greenhouse gas emission of all industries in the country, with rail being responsible for two percent of the sector’s emissions, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Compared to other options, both freight and passenger rail lines emit fewer pollutants than automobiles or planes.
Still, trains are known to release air pollutants in the communities they operate in. For example, diesel emissions from locomotives are responsible for 70 percent of cancer risk in California and the rail industry releases 640 tons of air pollutants every year in that state alone. This reality recently pushed California regulators to create the nation’s first emissions regulations for trains.
To prevent pollution, train companies would purchase and use emissions-reducing locomotives, commonly referred to as Tier 4 locomotives, from manufacturers like Wabtec.
These machines decrease emissions by an estimated 70 percent more than their counterparts, according to industry projections. Top rail companies Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific have made pledges to reduce their emissions (30 percent by 2030 and net zero by 2050, respectively) and adopt some of these greener locomotives.
The industry is moving slowly to make this change, according to a report from the investigative labor outlet Workday Magazine and the progressive public policy organization American Prospect. The Environmental Protection Agency told Workday that, as of 2020, 74 percent of all of the locomotives operated by major rail companies are Tier 2 or lower, with almost all smaller rail companies operating outdated, polluting technology.
Slawson wants to speed up this industry shift and said workers are using their voices to get it done. A report from the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that manufacturing green, Tier 4 locomotives at the Erie plant would create between 2,600 and 4,300 estimated new jobs, and additional several thousand in the region.
“It’s not just about building the locomotive; it’s about requiring the rail industry as a whole to make this switch,” Slawson said. “Even though rail is one of the least polluting things out there, there still has to be a push to adopt the newest technologies.”
Organized workplaces and strikes are on the rise across the country. Industries across the nation are now dealing with the realities of what the transition away from fossil fuel dependency logistically looks like. The UE has said its industry is deeply tied to fossil fuel usage to power the cars they create and they want to break ties with the polluting past.
“The company is not willing to make commitments towards assisting us in this venture and they’re not willing to make commitments to the workforce to allow us to do this,” Slawson said, “and that’s a problematic piece of this.”
In a statement to Grist, a Wabtec spokesperson said the company is disappointed the union has engaged in a strike and that “no one benefits from a walkout.”
“The company is a leader with a proven track record in developing environmentally zero or low-emission locomotives for the rail industry,” Tim Bader, Wabtec spokesperson said.
In addition to the Tier 4 locomotives, Wabtec also manufactures a green technology locomotive that is 100 percent battery-powered, known as a FLXdrive. Bader said Erie engineers, who are not striking, do significant design work for these locomotives, but the manufacturing is done on a “case-by-case basis factoring in plant capacity, location, cost competitiveness, and schedule.”
Bader said most of the Tier 4 manufacturing is being done in Fort Worth, Texas.
Past labor battles over a green transition have been rooted in anxiety that as industries try and pivot away from fossil fuel use or polluting machinery, workers would be left in the lurch. This has played out before when offshore wind came to Texas and oil workers worried the transition would leave them behind.
But, this doesn’t mean that workers in these industries don’t support the change. In 2021, 4,500 California oil workers signed on in support of renewable energy projects like wind and solar. That same year, the nation’s largest coal mining union announced its support for clean energy projects, albeit with a few caveats.
Liz Ratzloff said the ongoing strike in Pennsylvania is an example of how industries not directly operating in fossil fuels are moving towards greeners solutions and their workers are demanding they be active participants in any sort of transition.
Ratzloff is the co-executive director of the Labor Network for Sustainability, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on the intersection of labor organizing and climate action. She said as the nation pushes for more renewable technologies in transportation, it makes sense the frontline workers creating those products are organizing.
“These companies are using this point of transition as a way to undo a lot of labor standards that have been won,” Ratzloff said.
Right now, the auto industry is preparing for a round of labor negotiations. The United Auto Workers, or UAW, are advocating for a guaranteed transition for workers who currently manufacture gas-powered vehicles to the manufacturing of EVs. The union, which represents roughly 400,000 active workers across the country, has criticized the lower pay associated with EV production. UAW has also called out the Biden administration for not requiring union laborers and fair pay standards when giving federal subsidies to EV manufacturers.
She said the strike in Pennsylvania echoes similar pushes in auto manufacturing to decarbonize and manufacture electric vehicles, all with fair pay. Auto industry workers who manufacture electric vehicles are often paid less than their legacy coworkers who create gas-powered vehicles, she said. For example, a battery cell manufacturing plant in Lordstown, Ohio currently has a starting wage of $16.50 an hour, with the chance to make up to $20 per hour after seven years. The plant, a General Motors project, replaced an assembly plant that closed in 2019 where GM union workers made double the current starting pay.
Ratzloff said the fight in Pennsylvania goes behind a push for a green transition and is ensuring that workers continue to have rights and a say in their jobs as the industry changes.
“[The Wabtec strike] shows the potential power of workers, communities, and the labor movement in addressing the climate crisis where companies are uninterested and unwilling, and the government is seemingly unable,” she said.
As 340,000 United Parcel Service workers prepare to wage a historic strike, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) on Saturday joined Teamsters union members and leaders at a rally in New York condemning the company for refusing to pay workers a fair wage. “What we are about to step into requires solidarity from everybody,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “Your fight right here is about being the tip of…
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on July 12, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
On June 29, the air quality in Detroit was among the worst in the world.
“Outside it smelled like burnt plastic, almost like trash,” said UAW member Cody Zaremba, who works at a General Motors plant in Lansing, Michigan. He and his co-workers were experiencing coughing, runny noses, watery eyes, and trouble breathing.
But GM didn’t even acknowledge the smoke, Zaremba said, much less offer any protection.
“Everybody just had to go about it their own way,” he said. “We can all see it and smell it. But what are we going to do about it?”
As wildfires, drought, floods, and scorching heat disrupt the supply chain, the logistics industry is starting to worry about the impact of climate change…on profits.
But workers are the ones bearing the brunt—forced to work through extreme weather events, induced by climate change, that are getting more frequent and more severe.
Wildfires in Canada this summer have spread hazardous smoke through the U.S. East Coast and Midwest. Semi-regular wildfires throughout the West Coast have produced what are now known as “fire seasons.”
Outdoor workers like those in delivery, construction, and farming are among the hardest hit. On the frontlines of the climate crisis, some workers are standing up to their employers’ negligence.
‘UPS’s plan was hope’
Teamsters say UPS was unprepared this summer when New York City’s Air Quality Index spiked to a record high of 484 as smoky air clogged the city.
An AQI above 300 is categorized as hazardous. Besides the immediate effects of burning eyes and coughing, particulate matter from wildfires can damage the lungs and heart, triggering asthma and heart attacks.
“The company didn’t do anything. We went out there, business as usual,” said UPS driver Basil Darling, an alternate steward in Teamsters Local 804. “It was only customers who were concerned. Customers offered me masks.”
One co-worker at his hub in Brooklyn was taken to the emergency room after working half the day in the smoke.
This wasn’t the first summer that UPS ignored this problem. Geoff Donnelly, a package delivery driver in Reno, was still making deliveries even after his family had packed up their belongings in preparation to flee the Caldor fire in 2021.
The fire blazed across Nevada and Northern California, burning more than 220,000 acres and lasting nearly two months before it was contained.
“UPS’s plan was hope,” said Donnelly, a Teamsters Local 533 shop steward: “We hope that the fire isn’t coming our way.”
The company lied, he said: “They told me that they had a plan, but they didn’t.” UPS handed out surgical masks, not high-quality N95s—even as the AQI shot up to a record high of almost 700 in Tahoe City, California.
Dodging obligations
When AQI reaches 500, under California OSHA guidelines, employers must not only offer but require employees to wear respirators such as N95 masks. But Donnelly emphasized that UPS suffers no consequences for dodging its safety obligations.
“You can say the company must provide masks or respirators, but if they don’t, there’s no penalty,” he said. “If there’s no penalty, why have the language? What good does it do?”
Like California, Oregon and Washington have passed statewide OSHA guidelines requiring the provision of respirators.
But “workers don’t just need respirators,” said Peter Dooley of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (COSH). “The idea that outside workers are going to be wearing respirators all day is just not realistic.”
“When you work outside, there is really no escape,” said a Postal Service (USPS) letter carrier in Washington state who asked to be anonymous and has worked through both high heat and wildfire conditions. “The actual solution is, if the AQI is 300, 500, we should just be able to go home.”
There are still no federal regulations to protect workers from heat exposure or unhealthy air quality. And since letter carriers are considered federal employees, state-specific OSHA protections don’t apply to them either.
We keep each other safe
Despite several years of wildfires, companies on the West Coast still lack coherent safety policies on air quality.
Jorge Torres, an electrician with IBEW Local 46, was working on wiring a new Microsoft office compound in Redmond, Washington, last year when the skies got smoky.
The general contractor told workers they could use their sick leave to take the day off if they felt unsafe, or take an unpaid day. The electrical contractor’s plan consisted of providing three face masks for nearly 20 people.
Torres called his shop steward, but was told to wait until the union hall opened at 9 a.m.—two hours later—to be advised on what to do.
Torres decided not to wait. He went around the worksite talking to fellow workers. Everyone wanted to go home, but people were apprehensive about being the first to leave.
After he rallied his co-workers one by one, all 10 workers at his building walked out together and went home. The remaining six members of the electrical crew, who were working in another building, followed their foreman out shortly after.
Safety walkout worked
Torres made sure to develop a paper trail in the form of text messages to his steward, documenting his initial discomfort with the smoke as early as 7 a.m., and explaining why he and his co-workers had walked out.
“If the union takes the company’s position and tells us that it’s up to each individual, the union is telling its members that the union isn’t there for them,” Torres warned the steward. “[The contractor] can consider the crews of [the building]’s decision to perform a safety stop work as an opportunity for [the contractor] to spend the rest of the day planning out and implementing a robust and clear health and safety plan for wildfire smoke conditions.”
As he drove home, Torres received an update from a foreman—nobody would be docked sick time, and everyone would get a full day of pay. When the AQI remained dangerously high the following day, the general contractor paused work for the entire jobsite.
Other members of his local couldn’t believe they had done it. Torres attributed the surprise to a culture of “passivity, deference, a sense of inability to assert what you need or what you deserve.”
Deadly heat
The dangers of unhealthy air are compounded by extreme heat, another result of climate change.
Last year, as temperatures in the Los Angeles area climbed to the high 90s, 24-year-old UPS driver Esteban Chavez Jr. collapsed in the back of his truck while working and died.
UPS workers rallied to demand fans and air conditioning instead of surveillance cameras on their trucks. In this summer’s bargaining, ahead of an August 1 strike deadline, the Teamsters have won air conditioning in new trucks and the installation of fans and heat shields in existing ones.
Meanwhile in June, 66-year-old Postal Service letter carrier Eugene Gates Jr. collapsed and died on the job in Dallas, where the heat index had reached 115 degrees that day.
According to a Public Citizen report last year, environmental heat is likely responsible for more than 170,000 work-related injuries every year and 600 to 2,000 fatalities, making it one of the leading causes of death on the job.
‘Keep it moving!’
A month before his death, Gates Jr. had received a disciplinary letter for what USPS calls a “stationary event.”
A stationary event occurs when a letter carrier’s scanner registers as standing still for a few minutes—there’s no announced definition of exactly how long. Supervisors harass carriers about these events and push to minimize them.
Basic safety measures any worker should take in extreme heat—stopping in the shade to cool down and drink some water—could register as stationary events.
A scanner message sent out to carriers by management in one Dallas post office, shared with local news by the union branch president, says, “BEAT THE HEAT!!! NO STATIONARY EVENTS; KEEP IT MOVING!”
During a daily “stand-up” meeting at USPS, when supervisors warned about stationary events, the Washington letter carrier quoted above spoke up, informing co-workers that the union contract bans covert surveillance and that any disciplinary action on the basis of scanner data wouldn’t hold up. A supervisor spoke over her, apparently trying to drown this information out.
The Postal Service has touted its heat safety training. But many workers report they never received the training—even though management marked them as having received it. Virgilio Goze, an officer and steward in Letter Carriers Branch 79 in Seattle, has been helping members file grievances over this.
Since postal management routinely pays out grievance penalties without changing its behavior, Goze has gotten more creative in developing remedies. Rather than taking payouts, he combined monetary remedies to get an ice machine for his station. At least it’s “something communal,” he says. “You can point to it and say, ‘We won that.’”
Public Citizen estimates that California’s heat regulations, while imperfect, have reduced injuries by 30 percent. In New York, members of Local 804 are canvassing door to door to help pass the Temperature Extreme Mitigation Program (TEMP) Act, which would require employers to guarantee access to water and shade, and increase rest times for outside workers.
Still, much more is needed. The deadly combination of rising temperatures and wildfire smoke has to be understood as “climate injustice,” says Nancy Lessin, an advisor with National COSH. “This is yet another reason why the labor movement and the climate justice movement need to come together stronger than ever, to look to the future for the kind of prevention needed.”
With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York.1 Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common to most of the rest of the world.
Slums were not uncommon in Chinese cities a few decades ago, from the precarious working class districts of 1930s Shanghai to the shanty towns of British-occupied Hong Kong in the 1950s onwards. How did China manage to develop in a way that decreased mass housing precarity? What are the structural reasons behind it?
This issue of Dongsheng Explains looks into how the Chinese government deals with homelessness, how this issue relates to socialist construction, and how China confronts the challenges posed by rapid economic development, urbanization, and the migration of recent decades.
Why did mass urbanization not create large slums in China?
When reform and opening up began in the late 1970s, 83 percent of China’s population lived in the countryside. By 2021, the proportion of the rural population had fallen to 36 percent. During this period of mass urbanization, over 600 million people migrated from rural areas to cities.
Today, there are 296 million internal “migrant workers” (农民工, nóngmín gōng), comprising over 70 percent of the country’s total workforce.2 Migrant workers became the economic engine of China’s rapid growth, which created the world’s largest middle class of 400 million people.
This historic migration came with many challenges, including the emergence of “urban villages” that had poor living conditions and inadequate infrastructure. Although basic amenities – such as running water, electricity, gas, and communications – were provided, sanitation, public services, fire safety, and other such amenities resembled that of rural villages. Due to lower rents and the lack of other affordable housing, urban villages are largely inhabited by migrant workers.
With the acceleration of urbanization in the 2000s, the Chinese government began to promote large-scale transformation of the old areas of the cities, focusing on renovation of historically deteriorated neighborhoods and the removal of dangerous housing. Between 2008 and 2012, 12.6 million households in urban villages were rebuilt nationwide.Migrant workers are workers whose household registration is still in rural areas and who are engaged in non-agricultural industries or leave their hometowns for work in another part of the country for at least six months of the year.3 At the same time, efforts were made to construct public rental or low-rent housing. For instance, in Shanghai today, families of three or more people with a monthly income of less than 4,200 yuan per person can apply for low-rent housing, with the monthly rent being just a few hundred yuan (or five percent of monthly household income). In 2022, the central government announced the construction of 6.5 million units of low-cost rental housing in 40 cities, representing 26 percent of the total new housing supply in the 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025).4
Indeed the explosion of rural-to-urban migration in recent decades is not a phenomenon unique to China. While understanding that there are different definitions of “slums” used by countries and international organizations, they all point to the same tendency: since the 1970s, slum growth outpaced urbanization rates across the Global South. China’s efforts to upgrade existing precarious housing or build new affordable housing does not, however, explain why China did not develop slums like in so many other countries. Urbanization in China, therefore, must be understood within the context of socialist construction.
What is the “hukou” system and what does it have to do with socialism?
One unique characteristic of China’s urbanization process is that, although policies encouraged migration to cities for industrial and service jobs, rural residents never lost their access to land in the countryside. In the 1950s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) led a nationwide land reform process, abolishing private land ownership and transforming it into collective ownership. During the economic reform period, beginning in 1978, a “Household Responsibility System” (家庭联产承包责任制 jiātíng lián chǎn chéngbāo zérèn zhì) was created, which reallocated rural agricultural land into the hands of individual households. Though agricultural production was deeply impacted, collective land ownership remained and land was never privatized.
Today, China has one of the highest homeownership rates in the world, surpassing 90 percent, and this includes the millions of migrant workers who rent homes in other cities. This means that when encountering economic troubles, such as unemployment, urban migrant workers can return to their hometowns, where they own a home, can engage in agricultural production, and search for work locally. This structural buffer plays a critical role in absorbing the impacts of major economic and social crises. For example, during the 2008 global financial crisis, China’s export-oriented economy, especially of manufactured goods, was severely hit, causing about 30 million migrant workers to lose their jobs. Similarly, during the Covid-19 pandemic, when service and manufacturing jobs were seriously impacted, many migrant workers returned to their homes and land in the countryside.
Beyond land reform, a system was created to manage the mass migration of people from the countryside to the cities, to ensure that the movement of people aligned with the national planning needs of such a populous country. Though China has had some form of migration restriction for over 2,000 years, in the late 1950s, the country established a new “household registration system” (户口 or hùkǒu) to regulate rural-to-urban migration. Every Chinese person has an assigned urban or rural hukou status that grants them access to social welfare benefits (subsidized public housing, education, health care, pension, and unemployment insurance, etc.) in their hometown, but which are restricted in the cities they move to for work. While reformation of the hukou system is ongoing, the lack of urban hukou status forces many migrant parents to spend long periods away from their families and they must leave their children in their grandparents’ care in their hometowns, referred to as “left-behind children” (留守儿童 liúshǒu értóng). Though the number has been decreasing over the years, there are still an estimated seven million children in this situation. Today, 65.22 percent of China’s population lives in cities, but only 45.4 percent have urban hukou. Although this system deterred the creation of large urban slums, it also reinforced serious inequities of social welfare between urban and rural areas, and between residents within a city based on their hukou status.
How does the Chinese government deal with homelessness?
In the early 2000s, the issues of residential status, rights of migrant workers, and treatment of urban homeless people became a national matter. In 2003, the State Council – the highest executive organ of state power – issued the “Measures for the Rescue and Management of Itinerant and Homeless in Urban Areas.”5 The new regulation created urban relief stations providing food rations and temporary shelters, abolished the mandatory detention system of people without hukou status or housing, and placed the responsibility on the local authorities for finding housing for homeless people in their hometowns.
Under these measures, cities like Shanghai have set up relief stations for homeless people. When public security – the local police – and urban management officials encounter homeless people, they must assist them in accessing nearby relief stations. All costs are covered by the city’s fiscal budget. For example, the relief management station in Putuo District (with the fourth lowest per capita GDP of Shanghai’s 16 districts and a resident population of 1.24 million), provided shelter and relief to an average of 24.3 homeless people a month from June 2022 to April 2023, which could include repeated cases.6
Relief stations provide homeless people with food and basic accommodations, help those who are seriously ill access healthcare, assist them to return to the locations of their household registration by contacting their relatives or the local government, and arrange free transportation home when needed.
Upon returning home, the local county-level government is responsible to help the homeless people, including contacting relatives for care and finding local employment. For a very small number of people who are elderly, have disabilities, or do not have relatives nor the ability to work, the local township people’s government, or the Party-run street office, will provide national support for them in accordance with the “method of providing for extremely impoverished persons”, which is stipulated in the 2014 “Interim Measures for Social Assistance”. The content of the support includes providing basic living conditions, giving care to impoverished individuals who cannot take care of themselves, providing treatment for diseases, and handling funeral affairs, etc.
This series of relief management measures ensure that administrative law enforcement personnel in the city do not simply expel homeless people from the city, but must guarantee that they receive proper assistance, in terms of housing, work, and support systems.
What are the current challenges of urbanization, migration, and inequality?
While creating relief centers is an important advancement, it is clear that shelters are not a structural solution and they alone cannot meet the needs of a metropolis like Shanghai of 25 million people, let alone the country’s 921 million urban residents. The government has been implementing many structural reforms to address inequality, and to make the cities and the countryside more liveable.
In his report to the 20th National Congress of the CPC, President Xi Jinping said: “We have identified the principal contradiction facing Chinese society as that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life, and we have made it clear that closing this gap should be the focus of all our initiatives.”7 The unbalanced and inadequate development points to the gap between the countryside and cities, between underdeveloped and industrialized regions, and between the rich and poor.
On a broader scale, the anti-poverty campaigns – highlighted by the eradication of extreme poverty in 2020 – and the rural revitalization strategy have helped alleviate the pressure of migrant workers moving to the cities. The government has invested substantial funds and resources, using diversified ways to alleviate poverty beyond income-transfer schemes, including developing rural industry, education, health care, and infrastructure.8 These measures fundamentally improved the living and employment environment in rural areas and created more opportunities so that people have the option to stay and work in the countryside. For example, every year, more migrants are returning from cities back to their hometowns, which increased from 2.4 million (2015) to 8.5 million people (2019).
Over the last decade, China has implemented reforms to balance the easing of hukou residency requirements and to improve the social welfare of migrant workers, while ensuring that urbanization and population distribution responds to the country’s needs. Since 2010, major cities have gradually relaxed the household registration restrictions for school admission, allowing children of migrant workers to attend public schools like children with local hukou. Furthermore, according to the 2019 Urbanization Plan, cities with populations below three million people are required to remove all hukou restrictions, while bigger cities (under five million) can begin to relax restrictions. The 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-2025) and the country’s economic strategy until 2035 focus on redistributing income through tax reform, reducing the gap between the rich and poor, and removing the barriers that prevent millions of migrant workers from enjoying the full benefits of urban life. In 2021, the government invested US$5.3 billion to relax the hukou residency rules, and to also boost urban migrants’ spending power as part of the country’s “dual circulation” policy.9
These efforts to tackle the “three mountains” of the high cost of housing, education, and health care faced by all Chinese people, including migrants, is at the center of the government’s vision and policy reforms towards “common prosperity” for all its citizens and the building of a modern socialist society.
ENDNOTES
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Dongsheng News.
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
During a summer that has already shattered temperature records, the 340,000 drivers, dispatchers, and warehouse workers currently in contract negotiations with UPS — the United States’ largest unionized employer — have made climate change and extreme heat a headline labor issue. And if they don’t secure a contract by July 31, they are poised to initiate the largest single-employer strike in U.S. history.
On summer days, the back of a delivery truck can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit. When Viviana Gonzalez, a package delivery driver for United Postal Service in Los Angeles, pulls open the back of her truck, she often thinks: “Am I going to pass out back here? Will anybody find out that I’m here in the back of the truck?”
Gonzalez is all too aware of how dangerous her job can be. Since 2015, UPS has reported at least 143 heat-related injuries to the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Last year, one of her co-workers, Esteban Chavez, died of heat stroke in his delivery truck after delivering his last parcel. “I’m a single mom,” said Gonzalez, “and being able to provide for my son means I have to suck it up.”
While climate change is making summers hotter and even more dangerous for delivery workers, Moe Nouhaili, a UPS driver in Las Vegas, told the Guardian that it’s the working conditions that make the heat so deadly. “It’s how they’re making us work, expecting us to meet these unrealistic productivity numbers even through the weather,” he said.
UPS often requires drivers and warehouse employees to work six days a week and more than 12 hours a day in the heat, and the company measures worker productivity by surveillance cameras and sensors inside trucks. Drivers say these tactics make it harder to take breaks. “The same amount of work that would be done in, say, 30 routes is now being forced to be done in 20 or 25,” said Nouhaili. “Less people get more work done.”
That’s why the UPS workers, who are part of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union, have tied their heat-safety demands to other key issues: higher wages for all workers; more full-time jobs with full benefits; an end to forced overtime, surveillance, and harassment from management; and elimination of a two-tier wage system that pays part-time workers and newer employees differently for the same work.
According to Anastasia Christman, a senior policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project, many of these benefits and protections form the basis of climate justice at work and can better protect workers from the heat.
“Workers who are fighting for better health care benefits are going to be more physically able to deal with excessive heat, because they can address other underlying health problems,” she said. “An increase in pay might mean workers can spend time at home without having to take on a second job to support their family, eat healthy food, or afford to get an air conditioner in their house and really cool down and recover from the heat during their off-hours.”
She also argues that part-time employment, piece-wage and contract pay structures, and low-grade wage tiers can affect workers on the margins to a greater extent than others.
“These workers, who are overwhelmingly Black workers, immigrant workers, and women, literally can’t afford to take breaks or lose time to take care of their health,” she explained. By pushing for more full-time direct employees and fewer contractors, Christman said, workers build solidarity and make sure that certain job classes don’t disproportionately face environmental harms like extreme heat.
UPS workers negotiate a new contract once every five years, and the strike authorization in June was the result of a yearlong campaign on behalf of the union to build leverage at the bargaining table. The strategy appears to be working: In the last month, with the strike threat looming, UPS agreed to install air-conditioning systems in each of their delivery trucks, end the secondary wage tier that allows them to pay newer drivers less, and do away with mandatory overtime.
“UPS Teamsters have strategically navigated this process for maximum leverage against this multibillion-dollar corporation,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien. “At every step, we are forcing them to do what they don’t want to do, which is give our members more money and better protections at work.”
UPS drivers practice picketing outside a warehouse in preparation for a potential strike at the end of the month. International Brotherhood of Teamsters
While air-conditioning will indeed offer welcome relief to UPS drivers in the heat, experts argue that at a global scale, energy-intensive cooling systems pale as a long-term climate-justice solution. Air-conditioning units burn more fossil fuels, increase ambient temperatures in cities, and are inaccessible to most outdoor workers — and most of the global population.
On its own, the company’s concession also doesn’t address the growing issues of pay, contracting, and worker productivity that drive workers to heat exhaustion.
So despite the gains, UPS workers are still not satisfied. The biggest remaining issue is pay: They are looking to raise the starting hourly wage for part-time workers from $15.50 to $20. And they have repeatedly said that if UPS does not meet their baseline wage demands, they will be forced to strike to win them.
In recent years, restaurant workers at Voodoo Donuts in Portland, Oregon; a McDonalds in Detroit; a Jack in the Box in Sacramento; and a Hooters location in Houston have collectively walked off the job to protect themselves from extreme heat. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is in the process of developing a federal workplace heat standard, has acknowledged that taking collective action can help workers stay safe on the job and has developed a legal framework “to obtain the best possible relief for employees” when they choose to do so.
“The suggestion box sitting in the break room is not really the place to address the dangers of systemic heat exposure,” said Christman, the National Employment Law Project analyst. “When workers come together, they build power to really make changes at the workplace.”
The Teamsters union has plainly stated that this campaign will be an example for workers across the country. “What we do in these negotiations,” said O’Brien, “is going to set the tone for the entire country, the entire labor movement, moving forward. The UPS fight today may be your fight tomorrow.”
“It’s time for UPS to feel the heat,” said Rick Jordan, another delivery driver in Southern California. “We feel it all the time.”
Content warning: This story contains references to suicide.
Shoprite Holdings, the largest supermarket retail chain in Africa, is under fire from workers organizing against grueling work conditions. The current surge in organizing follows the suicide of Shoprite worker Fabiola Zondjembo, a Walvis Bay woman who ended her life by drowning after enduring constant abuse at her job. For workers and organizers confronting brutal conditions at the retail giant, the current struggle is also part of Namibia’s long history of colonialism and neocolonialism. Shoprite, a South African multinational, has more than 3,000 stores across the African continent. Originally founded during Apartheid, its founder, billionaire Christoffel Wiese, is now one of the world’s richest men. The Real News reports from Walvis Bay and Windhoek, Namibia.
This story, with the support of the Bertha Foundation, is part of The Real News Network’s Workers of the World series, telling the stories of workers around the globe building collective power and redefining the future of work on their own terms.
Producer: Namupa Shivute Videographer: Hildegard Titus Video editor: Leo Erhardt
Transcript
Inna Hengari, Namibian Member of Parliament, Popular Democratic Movement (speaking before crowd): Forward to the young people of Namibia, forward!
(With crowd response): Amandla, ngawethu!
Hildegard Titus (narrator): It is not easy to secure a job in Namibia where the youth unemployment rate is at almost 50%.
In 2022 Namibia’s government paper New Era reported that the demographic most affected by unemployment is young Black women.
In January, Walvis Bay resident, Fabiola Zondjembo ended her life by drowning. Just a few hours earlier, she had gotten fired from her job as a cashier.
Her local community in Walvis Bay, including her family and former colleagues, demand justice for Fabiola. They claim abuse and mistreatment at Shoprite — Africa’s largest retail chain —
as a culprit in Fabiola’s death.
The majority of Shoprite workers are employed as casual workers, who the company
refers to as PPPs — permanent part-timers. Most of them are women.
1st Anonymous worker: Us workers go to work, but we work with fear because you know that any simple mistake can land you behind office doors. When you come out of that office, its like you are confused and then you go to the till. We want to work smoothly, and smile with customers while we are assisting them at the till, but now I won’t be able to smile with the customer anymore because I was made upset in the office. “Smile with the customer!” How can I smile with the customer if I am angry, while it’s not fair?
And you will be counting huge sums of money, more than you have ever seen in your life, but out of that money the cashier will only get weekly N$400 (U$D 27) or N$500 (U$D 35). It’s not easy. A cashier might not afford to eat that day while counting huge sums of money.
Hildegard Titus (narrator): Shoprite Holding is a multinational conglomerate made up of over 3000 stores in Africa. The Group’s history of worker exploitation, is just as extensive, as its spread across the continent.
Fabiola worked at a Shoprite supermarket for two years. Outside work, she often spent time with her sister Isabella, who remembers her by her traditional name Unomasa, meaning “God is powerful”.
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: In 2018, my mom passed away. Unomasa (Fabiola) was studying nursing at the time. That year she was the best learner in her class and school and was supposed to travel abroad for further studies (in 2020). But then Corona started and she got a job at Shoprite instead.
Hildegard Titus (narrator): The family has been seeking justice and clarity for the events that led to Fabiola’s demise.
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: We were at home one day when Fabiola told: “My older sister, at Shoprite we work like slaves. There is no rest in that place, grown women cry tears. The managers shout at us. People cry real tears.”
Unomasa had her thing (name badge) which was written Fabiola and it was broken. When it broke, Fabiola reported it to the manager telling her it’s not holding and requested a new one.
The woman (manager) chased her out of her office. Fabiola put the badge in her pocket and a few days later, the manager asked her where her badge was. Fabiola said it’s here and the manager
asked why she wasn’t wearing it. Fabiola told her that she had been in her office to report that, which is why she keeps it in her pocket. The manager told her that she had to go for a disciplinary hearing.
Hildegard Titus (narrator): Even though a hearing was scheduled, the managers — whose job appears to be making workers’ lives hell —punished Fabiola until her last day.
1st Anonymous worker: Fabiola was our colleague. She used to work in front with us and if you would ask her to help you with something like “Fabiola, please fetch me a trolley for the customer,” she would oblige without ever answering you badly.
Then we just started noticing, we don’t see Fabiola in front at all anymore. Fabiola is just kept at the back in the staff canteen. She had to clean the canteen, clean the outside toilets etc. Even when we clocked out, she had to stay behind. It was like someone who was being isolated from people.
Fabiola’s situation really shocked and frightened us in this shop. We are not free in this shop. If we just see one of us being placed to work in the staff canteen, we really get scared.
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: Unomasa would be the last to leave the store. By the time she has to go home, it is dark, there are no taxis on the road, no people on the streets and she had to walk roads further down until she found a taxi.
And then came the last day. Fabiola was called to sign her dismissal letter and clean out her space.That day is the day that Fabiola went and completed her last deed and ended her life.
What also hurts us is our loved one really walked from where she walked with no shoes and no clothes and into the ocean.We want to know what were the last words that were exchanged between the woman (manager) and my sibling, when they last encountered each other.
2nd Anonymous worker: We also pass blame onto the big bosses in South Africa that come to inspect the shop and see how workers are performing.
That is why we have now handed in a petition asking for the removal of the current managers, but they do not want to remove them. Instead they want to transfer them to other shops like Checkers etc. but that is not our demand. The people they would be working with there are people just like us.
3rd Anonymous worker: Even if you have a problem at work, who will you consult if your manager has issues with you, not even allowing you to speak or giving you a chance. Who will you talk to?
Hildegard Titus (narrator): The Shoprite Group was founded in 1979 during the Apartheid years in South Africa. In 2016 Forbes counted Christo Wiese, the man who stayed at its helm for 41 years amongst the world’s wealthiest people; with a mass fortune of USD 5.8 billion.
Inna Hengari, Namibian Member of Parliament, Popular Democratic Movement (addressing crowd): We celebrated independence from what we call the Apartheid regime. We thought as young people of this country, the fruits of independence would be jobs. We thought the fruits of this country would not be poverty, but prosperity. We thought as young people of this country, we would have access to free quality education. 33 years after independence, none of us can say we have any of those things.
Hildegard Titus (narrator):
The tracks for racist labor exploitation on Namibian soil were laid before South African Apartheid. Before that, Namibia was a German colony where the Germans enforced settler colonial rule through a genocide. The Germans placed thousands of Nama and Ovaherero in concentration camps and condemned them to racist and sexist slave labor, amidst atrocious human rights violations. It was those tracks that facilitated white South African settler rule in Namibia which helped cement modern day injustices across racial lines. Today, Namibia, as a direct result
of colonialism and Apartheid trails right behind South Africa as one of the most unequal countries in the world.
Namibia also has the fourth highest suicide rate in Africa, a factor, significantly impacted
by the country’s economic situation.
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: The Shoprite woman (manager) would say that these children smell of Vaseline and they don’t wear make up. They don’t look beautiful.
4th Anonymous worker: Apparently, I must make myself beautiful first before I can become a permanent employee.
But the problem is, me I don’t like make-up.This is why they used to force me to put make-up. But make-up is not my favorite.
Hildegard Titus (narrator): Shoprite’s labor violations are not restricted to Walvis Bay.Over the years, workers across the country have resisted them. Also scoring significant victories, with the assistance of the Nixon Marcus public law firm.
In Windhoek, we caught up with Elsie Ashipala, a labor activist who has supported the worker’s struggle in the capital.
Elsie Ashipala, Labor activist: So, I don’t really see that Shoprite has really changed. In today’s world they are just using the term “independent” but then they are still being colonized. But this time actually it’s not only the whites. The whites are colonizing us indirectly; using our own people to colonize us.
Inna Hengari, Namibian Member of Parliament, Popular Democratic Movement (addressing crowd): Hage Geingob [President of Namibia] comes to parliament and tells us he is going to send 2800 unemployed young people to the correctional sector so that they can be employed as security officials, so that they can be employed as police officers. What about those that studied to be lawyers? What about those that have studied to be educators in this country? What about those? What about those who studied to be nurses in this country? What about those young people?
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: On Tuesday we are celebrating Namibia’s independence day. I am asking for whom was this land freed? Was the land freed for us while we are crying? While we have not received a solution/help, yet we are celebrating that the land of our mothers is free.
Fabiola left behind her brothers and sisters in Shoprite. This freedom has not yet reached her brothers and sisters while they are being taken to hearings, while others are being fired. How do we work with this situation? How do we get help so that these things end for those who are still in Shoprite? How will we be helped?
Hildegard Titus (narrator): A peaceful youth protest against unemployment that was scheduled for Namibia’s 33rd independence was shut down by the police who also jailed the organizers.
Police Commissioner (addressing crowd): You have to disperse. Should you not disperse, we as the law enforcement agents, we are going to take necessary steps to make sure that this demonstration does not go ahead. Yes, so having said that, yes, we will only give you 5 minutes.
Hildegard Titus (narrator): Yet, at Walvis Bay Shoprite, it has, been business as usual since Fabiola’s death and the demonstration that followed. We accompanied Isabella to Shoprite to get some answers, but the branch manager who had Fabiola fired, threatened to call the police on us before shop security arrived to escort us out.
Isabella Zondjembo, Fabiola Zondjembo’s sister: When we go to the woman to ask her something, she runs without giving feedback, wanting to call the police instead. When are we going to talk? When will we know what she spoke about with Fabiola?
What we want to know as a family is until when? Shoprite said they would need two weeks to make a decision about what to do with that manager. Until now, we have not
received any feedback. The police said they sent an inspector to investigate what happened and who will get back to us. We have not received any feedback. So, we are asking until when? Our family is hurting.
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This week on CounterSpin: Media talk about “the economy” as though it were an abstraction, somehow clinically removed from daily life, instead of being ingrained & entwined in every minute of it. So white supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people. Our guest’s recent work names a simple, obvious way development incentives exacerbate racialized inequality: by transferring wealth from the public to companies led by white male executives. Arlene Martínez is deputy executive director and communications director at Good Jobs First, which has issued a trenchant new report.
Also on the show: CounterSpin listeners are well aware of the gutting of state and local journalism, connected to the corporate takeover of newspapers and their sell-off to venture—or, as some would say it, vulture—capitalists. Florín Nájera-Uresti is California campaign organizer for the advocacy group Free Press Action. We talk to her about better and worse ways to meet local news media needs.
CounterSpin230714Najera-Uresti.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Israel/Palestine and cluster bombs.
UPS workers are practicing picketing for a historic strike if the Teamsters and package delivery giant do not reach an agreement before their contract expires on July 31. Negotiations stalled after the company and the union failed to reach an agreement. Ninety-seven percent of Teamsters have voted to authorize a work stoppage. The contract applies to 340,000 full- and part-time workers.
This interview was originally published in video form by Breaking Points on July 5, 2023. The transcript of the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity, readability, and time sensitivity, is shared here with permission.
Editor’s Note: On July 13, as reported by The Washington Post, “The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) announced overnight that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to recommend its 160,000 members strike, after weeks of negotiations with companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Warner Bros. disintegrated.” This will be the first time since 1960 that Hollywood writers and performers will be striking simultaneously.
Over 11,000 writers across the entertainment industry, represented by the Writers Guild of America East and the Writers Guild of America West, have been on strike since the beginning of May. The strike has brought much of the industry to a halt, because, as the strike itself is reminding studio bosses every day, the industry cannot function without writers’ essential labor. Like a volcano, the WGA strike is a historic eruption of serious, long simmering, and ultimately untenable issues within the entertainment industry.
And the result of the battle being fought right now will shape the industry as we know it at a time when that industry is experiencing explosive technological change. Among the key issues at the center of the dispute between the writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) are residuals for writers on productions developed for streaming services, the threat of studios using artificial intelligence to replace writers in writers’ rooms, and the emergence of so-called “mini rooms,” which hire fewer writers. These are some among the many concerns that prompted writers to hit the picket line.
And now members of SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), which represents 160,000 actors, announcers, broadcast journalists, dancers, DJs, puppeteers, recording artists, singers, stunt performers, and other media professionals, could be joining their WGA siblings on the picket line. In a letter sent to the union leadership and its negotiating committee earlier this month, A-list actors like Meryl Streep, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jennifer Lawrence, and Ben Stiller committed to a strike if a contract with the AMPTP is not reached. This moment, the letter’s signatories note, represents an “unprecedented inflection point in our industry.” “A strike brings incredible hardships to so many, and no one wants it,” They continue, “But we are prepared to strike if it comes to that.”
As Katie Kilkenny reports at the Hollywood Reporter, “The signatories specifically called out their interest in instituting a ‘seismic realignment’ of minimum pay rates, streaming residuals, and exclusivity provisions. The letter called for a transformation of self-taped audition practices and major regulation of artificial intelligence, making sure that the deal ‘protects not just our likenesses, but makes sure we are well compensated when any of our work is used to train AI.’”
This installment of The Art of Class War was recorded on Friday, June 30, before news broke that SAG-AFTRA members would be hitting the picket line in the first simultaneous strike by writers and performers since 1960. Regardless of what happens in the coming days, though, we need to talk about this moment in the entertainment industry. What brought us to this point? What do these crucial struggles tell us about the state of labor in entertainment, and what we can all do to support the workers whose labor means so much to so many of us? I talk about all of this and more with Sasha Stewart and Diany Rodriguez. Diany is a rank-and-file member of SAG-AFTRA, and she is speaking here as a rank-and-file member, not a representative or official spokesperson for the union. Sasha is a WGA East Council member and Writers Guild Award-nominated TV writer, producer, and creator.
Maximillian Alvarez: I want to start where we are right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen in a few hours, we don’t know what’s going to happen in the coming days, but what we do know is that this is a pivotal moment for you, your coworkers, and the entertainment industry itself. Let’s bring our viewers and listeners up to speed on what brought us to this point, where WGA writers are on strike and SAG-AFTRA may be going on strike, and let’s talk about the critical issues at the center of these interconnected struggles.
We at the WGA (and, I think, many other entertainment unions) feel that the industry is broken, and that it has been broken by tech companies… What the tech companies didn’t realize, though, is that we are one of the most heavily unionized industries in America, and we will not put up with this.
Sasha Stewart: As I’m sure Diany has felt as well, we at the WGA (and, I think, many other entertainment unions) feel that the industry is broken, and that it has been broken by tech companies. The same way that tech companies have broken other industries that had been functional and more supportive of their workers, forcing their workers into worse and worse conditions—this has happened in the entertainment industry, too. What the tech companies didn’t realize, though, is that we are one of the most heavily unionized industries in America, and we will not put up with this. And so, they thought that they could break us. They thought they could make our hours longer, our pay worse, our conditions worse, and hire fewer and fewer of us to do more and more work for free or for less pay. But they didn’t realize who they were up against.
We all know the saying, “Fuck around, find out”: We are now in the “find out” phase. We are showing them each day that we are on the picket lines what we mean, we are showing them that we are worth something, and that we deserve to share in the profits that we create for them. And I want to note that we have had so much solidarity from SAG-AFTRA, specifically, on the picket lines. Every time we have a picket, SAG-AFTRA shows up, they bring a table, their staff come, their workers (ie, other actors) come, and they’re there with us every day.
We’ve seen incredible, incredible solidarity with IATSE, the Teamsters, and all of the crew unions as well. The DGA (Directors Guild of America) has also been supportive. All of us are so angry about what has happened, and we are all standing together and fighting back. We have realized that this is our collective fight, and every single time one of these contract negotiations comes up, we are all going to step up and stand together for all of us.
Diany Rodriguez: That’s the ticket right there! Yes, I agree wholeheartedly. I will say, too, from the point of view of a SAG-AFTRA member, it has been really enlightening (in a kind of horrific way), the things that I am learning daily, hourly, about the treatment of other people in our sister unions. In and of itself, I think that’s a big reason why all of the unions in the entertainment industry should band together.
From a SAG-AFTRA point of view, I will say the pandemic did a whole lot, but the pandemic isn’t the only thing that put us in this moment right now. It’s also been bad negotiations in the past, where we knew that there was a problem and we knew that the problem was coming to a head, and we didn’t really attack it. Because, of course, if we’re not above-the-line workers, we obviously suffer from a scarcity mentality, because we’re not the ones making the decisions. And even if you are the one making the decision, you’re not the best paid one making the decision.
What has happened over the past… God, since 1960… since the studios were broken up… we’ve just seen this slow, methodical erosion of the ability for the workaday artist to make a living. Specifically, right now, let’s talk about the big key points for SAG-AFTRA right now, like self tapes. I’m in a very specific position, I’m a Southeast actor—we’ve been self-taping for damn near a decade. We’ve got our shit set up. But I’m still in a very privileged position: I live with someone, I have an automatic reader, I have editing software that came free with my Mac (those are things that used to be covered by producers). My lights were gifted to me from someone. I didn’t have to pay Amazon (which is a member of AMPTP, by the way) to buy my lights and my recording equipment. I’m in a very privileged position. There are people who live in LA and other markets who have to pay people every time they get an audition. And if you’re a connected actor, an actor that a lot of people want to work with, you’re sometimes busting out three, four, five auditions a day. That’s expensive. And we have no recourse. Around 80% of our work is unpaid labor, which to an extent is understandable. And like I said, I’m in a very privileged position myself, but that doesn’t mean that my other brothers and sisters in the union don’t deserve to be heard.
And, up to this point, nobody has brought that issue to the bargaining table. And residuals? Boy, oh boy, streamers and new media have really cut into our residuals, our ability to actually make a living. Because most actors and actresses out there in the world make a living off residuals, not their initial contract buyouts or their initial negotiating ability. So, again, we’re eliminating the idea of the working artist. And, speaking of our shared interest, I didn’t know until this point in history in my life that animation writers don’t get residuals, which is insane! Look at productions that have broken boundaries, like Moana—I get to see little Brown girls on TV, and the person who brought that beautiful script to life isn’t going to get to see the fruits of that labor beyond the initial contract, but somebody’s making money off of that, just not them.
What has happened over the past… God, since 1960… since the studios were broken up… we’ve just seen this slow, methodical erosion of the ability for the workaday artist to make a living.
And, Lord, don’t get me started on our health and pension for SAG-AFTRA. If we don’t talk about this now, we’re never going to get another opportunity to talk about this. We’ve already been stripped of so much: our healthcare costs went up in the middle of a pandemic, so people who are series regulars can’t afford healthcare right now. That’s a thing we have to address. And when it comes to AI, we are absolutely standing in solidarity with our WGA brothers and sisters. Again, if we don’t deal with this right now, in three years, when it comes up again, it will be too late.
They’re already going to be able to use our likeness. They’re going to use AI to not have to deal with us. The shit’s insidious. And if we don’t deal with it now, if we don’t try to force transparency on their end, they’re going to have a multitude of avenues to hide what they’re really doing with AI over the next three years. It will be too late. It’s already a little too late.
Maximillian Alvarez: I think that same notion—that it may already be too late—is something a lot of folks who are watching and listening to this feel on the consumer side. And I want to address this head-on, because I know there are people watching and listening to this who are thinking, “Well, why should I stand in solidarity with Hollywood workers when I don’t like what Hollywood does?” They’ll say, “I don’t like superhero movies,” or, “All they do is remakes.” The impulse is to throw the baby out with the bathwater and to blame the workers for all the things that you hate about a certain industry.
This goes back to a recent Art of Class War segment that we did right here on Breaking Points. If you guys remember, in the wake of the high-profile firings of Don Lemon at CNN and Tucker Carlson at Fox News, everyone was jumping on the bandwagon to say, “Well, just get rid of all corporate media.” And then I interviewed Bob Batz and Steve Mellon from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where workers have been on strike since October of last year, and I was like, “Look, I get where you guys are coming from. I despise CNN and Fox News and all of these massive corporate media outlets, and I have good reasons for despising them, but we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The striking journalists at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, just like folks at newspapers around the country that are struggling to survive, do vital work, and you can’t just conflate what they do with what assholes like Tucker and Don Lemon do. We need to be able to see some nuance here.”
In the same vein, I want people to understand that Hollywood is not just some big monolith. The very fact that we have a strike right now is because workers and bosses are on opposite ends of the negotiating table. And I would argue that a lot of what you hate about the Hollywood industry is coming from the other side of the bargaining table.
And that point was made all too clearly by a viral quote from in a recent interview that Rick Ellis did with an anonymous Apple TV+ executive. This anonymous executive really “said the quiet part out loud,” and I want to read this quote for folks just so you know what we’re dealing with and how these people think. Then I want to toss things back to Sasha and Diany to ask if you could expound upon this and what it tells us about the executive side of Hollywood. What does this quote reveal about why the things that we love about the entertainment industry are being destroyed in front of our eyes?
Here’s what the anonymous Apple TV+ executive told Rick Ellis in this interview, which was published earlier in June:
You could cut the CEO pay in half, but that doesn’t mean the money will end up in the pockets of writers. This isn’t a situation where streaming companies don’t appreciate the value of writing in the content ecosystem. We do. But we will pay the absolute minimum we can. I see people online blaming streaming for all of this. But this is how all businesses work. When a company moves its factory to Mexico or its customer service functions to Costa Rica, it’s not personal. It’s not because that company’s executives hate their employees or don’t value them. It’s just a simple profit/loss equation. And that’s the case here. Streaming platforms are going to pay the least amount they can for everything – writers included.
I don’t mean to sound like a dick, but writers tend to be smart and love what they do. But they can also think they’re the center of the fucking universe. I know this strike is personal for them. I get it, I’d feel the same way. But this is all just numbers for the studios. What’s the least amount we can get away with paying for everything?
Sasha, your thoughts?
Sasha Stewart: Yeah, so, definitely, I agree that that is their mentality, and I disagree strongly with the premise that this is how companies function. This is not how companies function. This is how companies who are obsessed with late stage capitalism, Wall Street capitalism, corporate greed capitalism, and capitalism that values profit growth over everything else functions. This is not how sustainable companies function, because sustainable companies always invest in their workers. When you invest in workers, you get better outcomes, you get better products, you get things that people enjoy, and you get better workers who can continue to work for you.
When you invest in workers, they give you everything. And when you disinvest in workers, you disinvest in your product. And so, at the end of the day, this is bad business. It is bad business for them to say that “we will squeeze everything out.” And I mean that across the board for every single industry, because this exec admitted it: this is what they want to do everywhere. And since Apple has its hands in everything, I agree.
This is what they’re doing everywhere. They’re always constantly trying to squeeze US workers and make their profits, but that is not going to be sustainable. And eventually people will fight back. And we are just lucky enough to be in a unionized industry where we have the power to fight back now, but someday we’re all going to fight back.
This is why striking is so important. This is why unionization is so important. Because we’re not going to teach these companies how to be better companies without them listening to us. And right now, the only way they’re listening to us is through our power and by flexing our power. Because if they were listening to facts and reason, this is not the answer this person would’ve given. They would’ve said, “I don’t know why we didn’t accept it.” For our deal, for the writers, it would’ve cost Apple $18 million a year. And instead they’re losing millions of dollars every day from this strike.
I want people to understand that Hollywood is not just some big monolith. The very fact that we have a strike right now is because workers and bosses are on opposite ends of the negotiating table. And I would argue that a lot of what you hate about the Hollywood industry is coming from the other side of the bargaining table.
But they would rather lose hundreds of millions of dollars over the course of this strike than pay $18 million a year now, because—as it says further down in that interview—they are worried that this strike will have ripple effects across the entire labor movement. And they should be worried, because absolutely we are part of the labor movement, and absolutely we want all workers to stand up and demand better, because we all deserve better.
Diany Rodriguez: Yes, absolutely! I agree 100% with everything Sasha said. I will also say the idea that somehow giving people a living wage means that these giant corporations won’t make a profit is insane. We’re talking about the amount of money that creates generational wealth—99.9% of us will never know or see that kind of money. So we’re asking them to give up, again, what could amount to maybe $20 million a year.
If you’re an everyday American who feels like Hollywood is made up of just a bunch of elites and you don’t like what they stand for, sure, that’s fine. Then maybe look at it this way: This fight isn’t just for us. You think somehow that this whole Netflix movement to ban password usage isn’t because of this? You think they’re not trying to squeeze every ounce they can from you? And you think that your subscription to Netflix every month is going to keep them from going to an advertising model? Because, heads up, they’re going to an advertising model. You’re basically going to be streaming cable TV.
It’s insane. It’s insane to think that, I don’t know, working towards the interest of the everyday—and I’m going to say blue-collar—worker, because, again, 90% of the people in my union specifically aren’t Tom Cruise, they’re not Jennifer Lopez… they’re me, humans who are just trying to buy a house, who are hoping to maintain their healthcare coverage—that’s stuff that we can all agree on, I would think. And again, if you think that this is just a small problem with a small sect of people, think about what got you through the pandemic. It wasn’t Yahtzee, it wasn’t skipping rope and riding bikes outside. Yeah, I know a lot of people got into their health during the pandemic, but what the fuck got you through it? Movies, media, the artists that you look to to help you escape. And again, even if you don’t think that that matters, what do you think’s going to happen if we turn to AI almost exclusively to create your content? Because heads up, y’all, AI isn’t intelligent enough right now to create original concepts. It’s just going to throw up shit that already exists. You don’t like Marvel? Well, fuck, you’re shit out of luck, because that’s what you’re going to get. Instead of purple and blue, it’s going to be pink and green. That’s literally it. That’s the difference.
You don’t have to love media. You don’t have to love artists just like your own creature comforts. If you like your own creature comforts, then invest in this movement. Invest in understanding what solidarity means, not just for you in whatever job you have, but for this market and how whatever happens here today and over the next couple of months is going to affect you. I promise. Amazon doesn’t just make movies.
This strike isn’t going to be the end-all be-all. Next, we have to take it to Congress because we have to break up these monopolies. Because again, you think that we’re the only ones going to be affected? Do you like going to see movies at movie theaters? Good luck making these people not charge you $40 a ticket. That’s not including concessions, because they’ll be able to do that, because they’ll own every part of production. It’s not just us; this affects y’all. And if you don’t like us, and if you don’t like what we stand for, then back us for you, back us because you feel like you are owed a piece of the pie.
Sasha Stewart: To our audiences out there, I wanted to say exactly what Diany and Maximillian were saying, that if you’re off about something, we’re probably off, too. So you know how Paramount+ just took off a whole bunch of really great shows? We hate that, too. They’re doing it as a tax writeoff, so that they don’t have to pay us. We worked so hard to make these shows that you would love, and they’re taking them away from you. You know how Netflix cancels all your favorite shows after one or two seasons? We hate that, too. And we know how to create amazing shows that can last for five, six, seven, eight, nine seasons. Look at The Simpsons, it’s been on for 30-something seasons. Writers did that, and the actors that make amazing characters who you want to keep watching.
This fight isn’t just for us. You think somehow that this whole Netflix movement to ban password usage isn’t because of this? You think they’re not trying to squeeze every ounce they can from you?
And so we understand that. And the old way that the industry worked was not perfect; it had huge problems, but at least it understood that it wanted to be a sustainable model where you would make money for years to come by creating audiences, by creating amazing shows, by creating shows that people actually want to watch and movies people want to go see. And that involves writers and actors and amazing crews, directors, everybody working together. And this Apple executive, they’re definitely not a writer, it’s not a well-written answer there, that “they’re willing to squeeze really hard on all of their labor costs.” And what that is going to cost them is the quality of their work, because there’s only such an extent to which people can bend before they break.
And if you keep making writers’ rooms smaller and smaller, and you keep working us harder and harder for fewer and fewer weeks so that we’re just desperate—desperate to make our health insurance minimum—that’s not going to create the amazing art and the amazing shows that you all love and that we want to give to you. And it’s not going to be sustainable down the line. Because if we go from having writers’ rooms, where there’s 12 of us all riffing and having fun and coming up with amazing characters and storylines to two people, who are those two people going to be? I can tell you they’re not going to be women. I can tell you they’re probably not going to be people of color. They’re probably not going to be people. And they’re definitely not going to be disabled people. You know what I’m saying?
You’re going to narrow the point of view that we’re seeing. And then, also, who’s going to come after them? As in, who’s going to come and make the shows next? Because there’s no pipeline towards having writers for the next generation. Because if you only have two people in the room, you’re going to hire the people you always hired.
Diany Rodriguez: Again, if you’re not into the whole, ‘Oh, Hollywood, that has nothing to do with me, let them do whatever, I just want to sit down and watch my streamers,’—if you’re not into that, again, that’s fine. I mean, I think you’re kind of a dickhead, but that’s fine. But if you want to see yourself and you’re not a cis white male, good luck. Because if you haven’t noticed, let me open your eyes to this: the shows that are being canceled and pulled off the air are generally women-centered shows, people of the global majority-centered shows, LGBTQIA+-centered shows.
If you enjoy that, then, fine. Close your eyes and sit in the corner and just wait. But again, even if you don’t care about the art, even if you don’t care about anything message-wise tailoring to you, because you don’t need to see yourself, you’ll ingest whatever, if you don’t think that these costs of giant corporations trying to squeeze out writers, costume designers, actors—if you don’t think that eventually they’re going to squeeze us enough that there’s nothing left to squeeze, that cost isn’t going to come back down for you, just look at the grocery shelves right now. The Ukraine War had some sort of big effect on corn production, so shrink inflation happened. We were seeing it at the grocery stores.
And funny enough, we have managed to get back to a normal production of corn, yet our grocery store prices are still high. If you don’t think that this potential strike and these movements are going to have any effect on you, the consumer who doesn’t happen to be invested in any way in the artist behind what you consume, then I don’t know how else to convince you. Because I can promise you, you are going to be affected. So help us stop it now.
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, I think what it really all boils down to is that what that Apple TV+ executive, the anonymous executive (whose quote I read said about the writers) is saying about labor in the entertainment industry also applies to you, the consumer, and to me—all of us. They apply the same kind of calculation and the same level of disdain for us as consumers. So when that executive is saying, “Look, it’s not personal. We just want to squeeze the most we possibly can out of our workers for the least amount of compensation possible, so that we can maximize our profits,”—Now when they’re thinking about you, the consumer, and when they’re thinking about integrating AI, even though, frankly, the technology’s just not there…
I want to impress upon everyone that if a boss who owns the AI is telling you that the AI is capable of replacing writers, they’re doing that because there’s a reason, and they need you to believe that. Because if you believe that, that makes you weaker at the bargaining table. So I want people to understand that they are overselling the capabilities of AI as it exists right now, because they’re trying to scare us into taking less, so that’s one point.
I want to impress upon everyone that if a boss who owns the AI is telling you that the AI is capable of replacing writers, they’re doing that because there’s a reason, and they need you to believe that. Because if you believe that, that makes you weaker at the bargaining table.
The other point, though, is that if you integrate AI now, as Sasha and Diany have said, it’s going to be crap. It’s going to be slop, base-level entertainment. And their calculation is: what is the minimum amount of quality that we need to assure of our product so that people will still keep watching it or still keep consuming it? This is when the lie of capitalist competition gets put under the light, because if you effectively have a number of companies that own everything and they aren’t really, truly competing with each other, then consumers have nowhere to go and the quality of everything starts going down.
You can see it across sectors. We cover it every week at The Real News and on my show, Working People, from the railroads going down the toilet, to consumer products—the quality of everything’s going down because it is profitable to do that when you aren’t really competing with anybody, and you think the way that these executives think.
I hope people listen to Sasha and Diany about why this concerns all of us as workers, as people with a vested interest in working people having some semblance of power in their workplaces, and that we all have a vested interest in working people, not just being perpetually put at the mercy (or lack thereof) of our bosses who enjoy unchecked power and untold wealth. If you have an interest in that, then this fight is for you as well.
The strike is still going, and we need to be there for WGA members until they get the contract that they deserve. Sash and Diany, how can we collectively better support our brothers, sisters, and siblings across the entertainment industry doing the work that makes that industry run?
Sasha Stewart: I just wanted to shout out three different things. One is the Entertainment Community Fund. This is a really amazing fund. You can find it by going to entertainmentcommunity.org. It was preexisting, but right now we’ve put together a special fund to help workers who are facing financial difficulty because of the strike. And this includes all workers in the entertainment industry, not just writers. So actors who are out of work, crew members who are out of work, anybody who is hurting financially because of the strike, we are here to take care of them, and the Entertainment Community Fund is here to take care of them. So please donate if you can. And if not, even just shouting it out to people and asking others to donate would be so, so helpful.
And then if you want to join us on the picket lines or learn more about our issues, you can go to our contract website, which is wgacontract2023.org. And then, finally, a personal little plug. We’ve been creating a strike YouTube comedy show, since I’m a late night writer, along with a lot of late night writer friends who currently don’t have jobs, we decided to make basically a labor comedy show. It’s called Contract TK. The TK stands for to come, which is a little journalism joke. Maximillian knows this.
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. I was like, got it. I got that one, baby.
Sasha Stewart: Exactly. So that’s just youtube.com/@contracttk. And we’ve been doing just about a weekly show. Our last one just went up last night, and it’s very funny and hopefully it helps show you all the different issues. And also is a great place to make fun of all the people who we’re mad at right now, like David Zaslav and Bob Iger.
Diany Rodriguez: Bob Iger, the great savior.
Sasha Stewart: Mm-hmm. Who’s taken a bunch of shows off of Disney+ that you all love.
Diany Rodriguez: Yeah, weird. It’s almost like it’s on purpose.
Sasha Stewart: While, also, raising the cost of Disney+.
Diany Rodriguez: I will also say, and this is not a popular answer, but it will, hopefully, potentially give folks some idea of what they will miss and what is potentially at stake. You can cut ties with your streamers. It’s not popular. It’s not easy. I haven’t done it yet. I’ve done it slowly but surely. We’ve taken off HBO Max and we’ve taken off Showtime. But if you want to show your solidarity, start to cut their dollars. Again, it may bite us all in the ass, because of course, it will always affect the consumer. You know that they’ll probably jack up subscription prices if we all stop our subscriptions now. But that is a way to show your solidarity.
Another way, I would say, absolutely join the picket lines, if and when invited. It has become glaringly obvious that bodies are a big need, which is why a lot of the pickets in Atlanta have been a little stop and go, because since it’s a right to work state, the lines are not as clear cut and it’s much more difficult to convince people who don’t have as much of a vested interest, specifically financial interest. So put your body… Get your steps in! Go and get your steps in. Skip leg day and just get maybe 500 steps, more than 500 steps in, but get to your steps-
Sasha Stewart: About 20,000 steps.
Diany Rodriguez: Get 20,000 steps in on a picket line, and be a body, relieve somebody of their duty just for a hot second. That’s a great way to support. I will say, another way to support—get on social media. Jump on social media, use the hashtags, #solidarity, #WGASAG-AFTRA. Look them up. Use them. Bring eyeballs to it. Talk to people around you. Again, there are people who don’t even know this is happening, but who consume media that we create every day for half of their day. Let them know. Shout it from the rooftops. Tell them what’s at stake and be really honest and true with them, and remind them of the insidious nature of this.
I was talking to both of you earlier before we started recording of this surprise contract that was offered to the five guilds in British Columbia, in Canada ACTRA and IATSE and DGA Canada. Y’all, the AMPTP, these giant corporate conglomerates and their mouthpieces literally went behind the backs of the WGA and SAG-AFTRA here stateside and offered a contract to a union whose deal wasn’t up, and it is a bad contract, in an effort to subvert the solidarity that we are seeking here. If you don’t think that’s insidious and gross, I don’t know how else you can show support. If you think that’s insidious and gross, and you think that NBC Universal strategically planning sidewalk repairs in order to keep picketers from being able to picket is insidious and gross, then find a way to support us.
Do what Sasha said, use those hashtags, scream it from the top of your lungs, because right now what we need most besides money to keep it going, because a lot of us are jobless now, we need eyes and ears to put pressure on these corporations. If the consumer doesn’t seem like they care, absolutely they’re going to stick to their guns and see if computers can do what we do. And I’ll tell you right now, they cannot. They’re feeding you bullshit.
If you think that James Earl Jones is going to come back and do another movie, I promise you, we ain’t there yet. The shit’s open-sourced. So your cousin who has a back room in his mom’s basement is doing it just the same as people who have gone to technical colleges. We aren’t there yet. So what you can do to support us is care and spread the word.
A union representing 160,000 actors is slated to go on strike on Thursday, setting up a historic strike involving both actors and screenwriters that would effectively shut down the film and TV industry for the first time in 63 years. The bargaining agreement between the actors’ union, Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), and major studios and…
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In this bonus episode, we discuss the renewed militancy of the UAW, and the reform movement, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), which shocked the labor world for taking control of the union leadership earlier this year.
There is no labor movement resurgence without the resurgence of labor in manufacturing industries, but the UAW has also been a leader in the upsurge of higher education organizing over the past five years.
To discuss all this, we spoke with two newly elected UAW officers: Brandon Mancilla, Director of UAW Region 9A, and Dan Vicente, Director of UAW Region 9.
Brandon Mancilla: We don’t want to just simply win a union. We wanna win strong unions. And strong unions need to be democratic, they need to be transparent, they need to be participatory.
Daniel Vicente: We have to put our foot in the ground. Now, if we don’t do this now, we won’t have another opportunity.
It’s gonna have to be us. And if you are in a shop and you feel that your local elected officials don’t represent you, run against them.
Teddy Ostrow: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to The Upsurge, a podcast about UPS, the Teamsters, and the future of the American labor movement.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
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Onto the show.
For this bonus, I interviewed Brandon Mancilla and Daniel Vicente of the United Auto Workers union.
You may have heard that contract negotiations between the UAW and the Big 3 automakers, that’s Ford, GM and Stellantis, will begin this week and next. These contracts cover 150,000 auto workers. The headline story has been: UAW president Shawn Fain opted to skip the traditional, kick-off handshake between union officials and the auto executives.
Here the union isn’t just being petty. It’s symbolic of a deeper change we’ve seen at the UAW in the past year. With the election of new leadership, pro-business attitudes and concessions have given way for militancy and promises to return the legendary union to its fighting roots. That includes a willingness to strike the Big 3 after their contract expirations, just a month a half after the Teamsters may strike UPS.
Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? The Upsurge is largely about the militancy that has once again risen in the Teamsters union following a leadership overhaul in 2021. That didn’t come out of nowhere. The reform organization Teamsters for a Democratic Union played a key role in that recent shift, and prior shifts as well.
I invited Brandon and Dan on the show today to talk about their analogous group in the UAW. That’s the Unite All Workers for Democracy caucus, or UAWD, which was largely modeled on and supported by TDU. We talked about it a bit in episode 5 with Barry Eidlin.
Following corruption scandals in their union, UAWD fought for a member referendum to instate one-member one-vote elections of top officers in the union. Democracy, in other words, like in the Teamsters.
Union members overwhelmingly approved of this change, and in the 2022 and 2023, in the union’s first direct election, all UAWD-backed candidates won their races, including for the presidency. Dan and Brandon were among those elected.
The militant developments we’re seeing then, are a direct result of rank and file organizing for reform in the union.
And the stakes are very high. The new leadership wants to abolish tiered contracts, which again sounds familiar. But they also want to regain cost-of-living adjustments and better pensions for their members, and to unionize the burgeoning electric vehicle and battery industries.
There is no resurgence in the labor movement without a resurgence in the manufacturing sector.
Something we also talked about in this interview is the role of the UAW in the higher education union drives that are seeing an upsurge across the US right now.
But that’s enough context. I’ll leave the rest to Brandon, Director of UAW Region 9A, and Dan, Director of UAW Region 9.
Brandon Mania and Dan Vicente. Thanks for joining me on The Upsurge.
Brandon Mancilla: Thanks for having us.
Daniel Vicente: Yeah, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Teddy Ostrow: So I invited you guys on because I wanna talk about union reform movements here, but first, can you both introduce yourselves? How did you come into the union?
What jobs have you had? What are your roles right now?
Brandon Mancilla: I started off as a research assistant and teaching assistant at Harvard University. So I am part of the higher ed organizing wave that’s really taken off over the past five to 10 years. Lots of higher ed workers in the UAW. I’m sure we can talk more about that. Harvard University had a first union election in 2016, which we lost. But then the NLRB invalidated the election because Harvard left lots of people off the eligible voter list. We won our second election. I became more involved through that. We had a strike in 2019 for our first contract. When we settled the contract, I became local president.
We also continued to fight for a stronger successor contract. We went on strike again, so it was a long, bloody fight to win the contracts we won at Harvard University for approximately 5,000 student workers. After that I became an organizer in the legal services and nonprofit sector of the UAW, and then was crazy enough to run for a Region 9A Director, which is the Northeast and Puerto Rico. So that’s how we ended up here.
Daniel Vicente: I’m Dan Vicente. I come from a marine manufacturer out of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, UAW Local 644. I got involved in my local union because I was exposed to chemicals at work. After I came back from the emergency room, I brought those safety concerns to my shop chairman and he told me it wasn’t his effing problem, so I ran against him as soon as I could. Then I won that election and then I’ve just been running for every position that I could ever since. I got my first union job in 2017 after I exited the United States Marine Corps in 2012 and was just kind of going from job to job, from then until I got the UAW job—the benefits and wages of that union job was able to settle my life down and gimme a path forward. I got involved in the reform movement of the Unite All Workers for Democracy after I found out about the one-member one-vote campaign, which was born out of the corruption probe that the Justice Department started on the union, and has sent many of our top officials to federal prison.
That was outrageous, obviously, and I got involved because I was mad and I just thought, we can’t be fighting companies and fighting our own internal leadership. So I figured I’d throw my name in the hat just to show the incumbency that we weren’t gonna take it anymore. Like Brandon said, I was crazy enough to do it and we ended up winning.
So that’s how I ended up in this position.
Teddy Ostrow: Hell yeah. So, as I said, we wanna talk union reform or more than that, really, labor’s revitalization—union reform within this broader labor moment that we’re seeing. The Teamsters shifted leadership right in 2021. UAW just did, including the election of you guys and other people who came out of your caucus, your slate. So I wanna start out with first just what is Unite All Workers for Democracy, or UAWD for short? You started to talk about this, but why did it emerge? What have you guys pushed for, what have you achieved it and where is it going?
Brandon Mancilla: UAWD is the effort by rank and file workers in the UAW to democratize and reform this union. There’s been a long history of reform efforts to make the union more militant, to be anti concessions and keep leadership and staff accountable to the rank and file membership for decades.
We can go back to the ‘70s shop floor struggles, to the ‘80s and ‘90s New Directions movement, and a lot of the veterans of those struggles founded UAWD in the late 2010s and into this decade. Because it became unsustainable, the levels of corruption.
It was really a shameful period in the history of our union when it was exposed that the top leadership was stealing membership dues. So combining that with the history of concessions that were made that affected the livelihoods of our members across sectors, but especially in the auto and manufacturing sectors of the union.
UAWD emerged as a response to that. So with the DOJ investigation and requirement of a referendum for one member, one vote, UAWD as a reform caucus was ready and primed to really organize around winning those. So in 2021, we won that referendum. The choice was [between keeping] this outdated delegate system at the convention where handpicked delegates decided who the leadership was, or we would go to one-member, one-vote, and every member would have the opportunity to directly voice who they wanted to be their regional directors, who they wanted to be their president, vice president, secretary, treasurer, et cetera. So that’s what we achieved so far. In 2022, our reform slate ran seven people as Members United, a combination of vice presidents, secretary, treasurer, and regional directors. We also had an independent run, but also a reformer, for regional director in Ohio and Indiana. And we all won. Dan and Shawn went into a runoff after the first round.
I won in the first round and Shawn and Dan also were victorious, so everybody we ran, won, and now forms a majority on the international executive board, which was unthinkable just months ago, but even like when UAWD was formed in 2019.
Daniel Vicente: Like Brandon said, the Unite All Workers for Democracy movement, a lot of the people that helped found that are seasoned veterans of the reform movement. They’ve been fighting the good fight for decades on their own, more or less, as like these one man, one woman islands. I think that the upsurge, in just, our involvement kind of is a few things. One of ’em is like, Brandon and I are millennials, right? We have been told most of our lives that we live in the best country in the world, and that if we just pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and work hard, that there’s a path to middle class life.
And it just doesn’t exist anymore. It was easy for us to say that’s because of our employers, but with the corruption probe laid bare to all of us, coupled with the pandemic, it’s easy to say that it’s just the employer’s fault, but it was the UAWs fault for the situation that we were in as well.
The UAW had taken a business/management friendly style of unionism, and our members are not down with that anymore. We are angry. We are due increases and we made sacrifices during the recession to save these institutions of American manufacturing with the understanding that when the emergency was over, that they would get us back, make us whole again, and get us back where we used to be and that that has never happened. We’re not gonna continue going forward in just accepting that.
Teddy Ostrow: So an important piece of this is the UAWs mandate, and winning some kickass contracts in manufacturing. Probably the most urgent are the contracts for the so-called big three automakers, Stellantis, Ford, and GM. Maybe you guys could help us understand what’s coming in September?
What are you guys doing to prepare? What are the stakes of this fight and of broader organizing in manufacturing and auto, which does seem to be taking an electric turn right now, with huge investments by battery and auto companies.
Dan, maybe we can start with you. You did mention some things that you guys are fighting for, and fighting against, that have, I think some resonance with the Teamsters as well.
Daniel Vicente: Yeah. These negotiations are arguably the most important in generations. The transition to electric vehicles is happening whether we want it to or not.
It’s happening, so the upcoming negotiations are massive. What we’re doing currently is we’re going through the regions and we are trying to prepare our members for legitimate strike actions. To be very honest with you, it was laid bare during the pandemic that we were all deemed essential, but all of our management could go home. You’re not essential. You need us more than we need you.
What is similar to the Teamsters—the tiered wages are a wedge that was driven into our union. We can no longer accept this. You cannot work next to somebody doing the same exact job on an assembly line and make $10, $12, $15 less than that person. It is not a sustainable model.
The companies are not in financial distress. They’re making money. We are not asking to be made millionaires overnight. We are asking for a path to middle class American citizenship in this country. The jobs that used to exist that allowed our blue collar working class people to sustain themselves and their family no longer exist.
I’ve been in this position for three months. I was just on the shop floor. I was just working in a factory. I had people coming in the door making $16 an hour, having to get EBT cards, which, there’s nothing wrong with having to get assistance, but you have a union job and you have to get EBT to feed your, your families—it’s not acceptable.
We are not going to continue down this path while CEOs are making tens of millions of dollars and our people are having to get government assistance just to feed their families. It is not a sustainable model. In the past, the union, in my opinion, has taken a stance that they need to work together with the companies.
Under our new leadership, our stance is we are responsible partners in this relationship, but we are not going to force our people to take concessionary contracts. When you are making money, it’s not going to happen. The institution of the union doesn’t exist simply to propel itself. It exists to fight for the men and women that work the floors and drive the trucks and make the products and provide the services that make this country go.
Nobody is coming to save us. The Democrats aren’t coming to save us, and the Republicans aren’t coming to save us. It’s gonna have to be us. It’s gonna have to be us. The people listening to this now, it’s gonna have to be you. Because Sean O’Brien can’t do it himself. Shawn Fain can’t do it himself.
It’s gonna have to be us.
Brandon Mancilla: Yeah. Shawn Fain and the top officers on the executive board had the first ever virtual town hall with the UAW membership a couple of weeks ago, and they made it very clear that the big three auto companies, Ford, GM and Stellantis made a quarter of a trillion dollars over the last decade. So there should be no talk of a cost neutral contract. There should be a contract in which our members are making gains and benefiting from the profits that they themselves created through the work that they do. So we are being very clear in our messaging and our preparation for this contract fight.
It’s up to the companies to prevent further strike action. So we’re gonna have to end tiers. Tiers divide workers, give them different benefits, different pay for doing the exact same work, standing right next to each other, oftentimes; to reinstate COLA, implement stronger job protections, especially as this [electric vehicle] transition does threaten thousands and thousands of jobs of our members. And an increase in pensions for retirees. Retirees built this union and they have not seen any increase in many years. So this is something that we have to, for the sake of our, our union, for the sake of the labor movement, for the sake of, I think the working class as a whole, the UAW has so much potential to really reshape the labor movement and the conditions of workers who are also non-union, and also to continue organizing.
How are we going to be able to continue organizing in manufacturing in so many sectors if our contracts are tiered? If our contracts don’t have COLA, if our contracts don’t show that you’re gonna be making more than minimum wage or close to minimum wage, that’s something that’s unacceptable and something that with a union contract, we need to be doing better on.
I think what Dan touched upon is really essential. It’s not gonna be just Shawn Fain and the vice president’s going into a room and figuring it out, and then coming back and saying, “Here, take this deal.” It’s gonna have to be a legitimate struggle, a legitimate contract campaign. Shawn’s committed to not having backdoor secret negotiations, communicating constantly with the members about these negotiations and updating them and communicating constantly.
But that also means involving them, right? Having locals take action to prepare for these campaigns, making sure everyone knows what the demands are, making sure we’re talking with members and having rallies and parking lot conversations so that everyone is constantly aware of where we’re headed and not just in the dark until a TA is reached.
Teddy Ostrow: Thank you so much for unpacking that. I wanted to move on to what many listeners probably know by now, which is that the UAW doesn’t just organize auto or manufacturing workers, right?
They’ve organized a large number of higher education workers, for some time now actually. So Brandon, this is your industry, for people who might ask why the UAW is in higher education. Can you help unpack that a little bit and explain why you think we’re seeing so much activity in the sector? It might be one of the places where we could say there is a legitimate upsurge going on—lots of strikes, lots of organizing right now.
And sorry for the long question, but, I am also curious about how both of you think about the strengths or the dynamics of having seemingly different types of workers, “blue collar” versus “white collar” workers in the same union.
Brandon Mancilla: I think the important thing to say first is that the UAW has always been a diverse union in terms of sectors. It started off as an auto worker union, obviously, but very quickly started organizing in aerospace and military production, office professionals, and then expanded into gaming and expanded into public sector workers.
So it’s, it’s always been a union that represents more than just auto workers. Higher ed also has a longer history. I think there was a real push by office and clerical staff and secretaries to organize at universities, in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Then quickly after that, student workers and faculty also began organizing.
So the University of California, the University of Massachusetts, have been in the UAW since the 1990s. So that’s definitely not as recent as it may seem. But what really changed was the Columbia decision of 2016 which allowed student workers at private universities to organize and collectively bargain.
So since 2016 with the Columbia decision, Columbia University student workers, Harvard University student workers, and then everyone else right? That wave, it’s exploded to the point where, it’s almost a given that the minute an organizing drive takes off, it’s going to win.
My election at Harvard, our two elections were a real, real fight to win. Now elections are winning 80, 90% margins, right? It’s like employers are just forcing elections to buy time because they can’t actually beat the drive anymore. It’s taking off because like so many other sectors and so many other workers across the country, it’s an industry that is facing an existential crisis.
Working conditions are collapsing. People have little job security. They don’t know what they’re looking forward to anymore. In higher education specifically, especially for postdoctoral researchers and adjuncts and student workers, we’re facing a situation in which, it’s neither a stepping stone into a career that is gonna be more secure, nor is it a career in itself that’s sustainable.
So we have to actually organize to make those jobs that have union protections and COLA and strong health insurance and retirement packages, et cetera. So I think that’s what the struggle is. It’s actually acknowledging that so much work goes into sustaining and actually educating and researching in this country, and also taking control over the future of what higher education looks like, beyond just the bread and butter issues that our members are fighting for. We’re also trying to change the culture at these higher education institutions that have protected abusers, have protected people who have no problem taking advantage of workers in very precarious situations. And also pushing for education to be a public good, to make it free in this country and a universal right that people, if they want to, can benefit from. This is a worker led push. So the UAW has invested and made this a priority.
I think since so many of us have been in first contract, campaigns and organizing campaigns, we saw firsthand what the limits and the problems were with the UAW: where we lacked resources, where we lacked proper support, where the concessionary ideologies came from and we pushed back against that really hard.
At this point, I think that’s why a lot of higher ed workers have gravitated towards reform in large numbers because we don’t want to just simply win a union. We wanna win strong unions. And strong unions need to be democratic, they need to be transparent, they need to be participatory.
That’s something that aligns very much with the reform movement of the UAW amongst manufacturing workers.
Daniel Vicente: Yeah. So it has been eye opening to get involved with the higher education people and honestly, the experiences that they’ve have had on their first drives, they’ve been able to bring that and teach us in the manufacturing field because we’ve been long established, manufacturers and leadership had grown stagnant. These higher education guys brought an energy and a level of knowledge to us that allowed us to organize better so that when we went into our constitutional conventions, we knew the rules and processes and how to get things passed. It’s been amazing to get to work with Brandon, but also student workers from California, all over the country, just because there’s so much opportunity for us to teach one another. In Detroit we had a session where the higher education workers allowed the manufacturers to come in after hours and we were able to listen in and kind of hear the issues going on with them.
And a lot of the differences between us were just language differences. We just call things, different things in manufacturing, like we know what whipsawing is. It just called something else in higher ed. The issues that they’re going through sound very similar to ours.
Particularly I remember being shocked hearing from the student workers in California and the grad students about how they work for these universities and then they live in university housing and then immediately have to pay back their wages to the university. It sounded exactly what the mine workers were going through in the 1920s, having to get paid scrip and, and it’s outrageous.
So the bridges that we’re building across sectors right now are amazing. We have so much to learn from one another, and it’s providing us information that we can use at the table across all sectors coming up. What appears to have happened is the UAW made a push about 10, 15 years ago to try to organize down south in the foreign automakers. And that did not go well. And then they reinvested in organizing higher education, and that has been massively, just overwhelmingly positive for us. We have a drive currently in my region, the University of Penn in Philadelphia, which we are very confident will be successful and would bring about 4,000 members into the region.
So we’re pushing it everywhere, and those are just a few drives and it’s been just great to work across sectors with my fellow workers and learn what’s going on with them, not just in higher ed, but in aerospace and agriculture. It’s been amazing.
Teddy Ostrow: I so appreciate hearing that because I think that there are often very bad faith arguments made to try to pit workers against one another, but really in the end, people are looking for similar things, the same things.
To wrap this up, I just want to give you guys a chance to speak to anything we haven’t touched on that you think is important to get out there to the Teamsters and, and to non Teamsters alike.
Daniel Vicente: If Teamsters are listening to this, while I was running this campaign for leadership in the UAW, I was pulling 10 hour shifts in a factory and I was working in the UPS warehouse in Westchester, Pennsylvania on a sorting line.
That job is brutal.
It was effing brutal. The struggle for Teamsters is the same struggle we’re going through in the UAW. If you’re listening to this, like I said, briefly earlier, we’re under attack.
The working class in this country is under attack and we are tired of being paid lip service by one party or the other. I have no faith in either of them to come and save us. If you’re listening to this, it’s because you are interested and you care about what’s going on in your workplace as well.
And you see the injustices and the unfair system that we live in and we work in, and it’s gonna be up to us. We have to put our foot on the ground. Now, if we don’t do this now, we won’t have another opportunity. I am every day following what’s going on with the Teamsters, and it gives me so much strength and it fills my heart with pride.
We run this country, we make the money for these corporations. We’re not asking them to turn us into millionaires overnight. We’re asking them to allow us a path to live in the middle working class. That’s it. An insult to a Teamster, an attack on a Teamster is an attack on a United Auto Worker, a longshoreman.
All of ’em. All of them.
We have to stand together in this country if we want to fight and get back what is due to us. The only way that’s gonna do that is with you listening, getting involved, talking to your coworkers. Like I said, I love Shawn Fain and Sean O’Brien. These dudes get me so worked up. But they can’t do it all on their own.
It’s gonna have to be us. And if you are in a shop and you feel that your local elected officials don’t represent you, run against them. Brandon and I are absolutely examples that it’s not impossible. Get involved, go to your local union meetings, run for whatever positions you can. This is up to us.
No one’s coming to do it for us. They’ve told us that there is no savior coming. You and I are gonna have to link up and we’re going to have to fight this fight not just for ourselves, but for our kids and for the future. And if we don’t do it now, corporate America will grind the middle class into nothing.
Brandon Mancilla: I also add to that, I think the UAW is going to be organizing. We need to grow the labor movement in order to build power. So if you are listening to this and you are not a member of a union, I think it’s essential for this to be the moment that you consider unionizing and, and reaching out to us or any other union that you think would fit your, your workplace.
So it’s extremely important that we’re fighting to improve the working conditions and the lives of our members who are already members of our union, but we are also looking to organize the rest of the unorganized working class. I’ll also say that, there’s been a lot of talk about, Shawn Fain’s non endorsement of Joe Biden, and I think I just wanna make it clear that the reason we’re doing that, and the reason Shawn Fain decided to withhold his endorsement for now, is that we want commitments from the White House, from elected officials, that you’re not just gonna give us lip service, like Dan said, you’re actually gonna stand with us if we have to go on strike. You’re gonna stand with us on the bills that will protect our jobs, that will improve our working conditions and organizing conditions for the labor movement, and not just saying that support unions.
Joe Biden’s done a number of good things for the labor movement. But he also stood in the way of the railroad workers. Shawn Fain fully believes that that was a test of the White House. With the Teamsters UPS negotiations going on and big three negotiations coming up, that’s another test for our elected officials, not just for Joe Biden.
So next time they come around asking for our endorsements and support in elections, there’s gonna be a scorecard. How’d you do in supporting us as we went out after these companies to win stronger contracts?
So that’s the position we’re taking and it’s a strong one. It’s one that I think more unions should take, should be less afraid of, of taking real direct stands about where the labor movement is in relation to Democrats. But you know, I think part of growing the labor movement is having a political stance.
Teddy Ostrow: Brandon Mencia and Dan Vicente, thank you guys so much, for coming on The Upsurge.
Daniel Vicente: Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you for having us, and if the Teamsters go out, we’ll be on your lines as well.
Brandon Mancilla: Absolutely solidarity.
You just listened to a public bonus episode of The Upsurge.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
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The podcast was edited by myself.
It was produced by NYGP and Ruby Walsh.
Music is by Casey Gallagher.
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I’m Teddy Ostrow. Thanks for listening and catch you next time.
A new lawsuit filed against Twitter claims that the company has refused to pay out severance payments after it laid off thousands of workers when right-wing billionaire Elon Musk took over. The proposed class action lawsuit, filed on behalf of former employee Courtney McMillian in a federal district court in California on Wednesday, claims that the company has failed to pay at least $500 million…
We hosted another Working People live show, in collaboration with the Action Builder / Action Network team, on May 8 at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress in Montréal. In this panel discussion, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Sarah Beth Ryther, employee-organizer with Trader Joe’s United in Minneapolis, and Josh Thole, former Major League Baseball player and current Minor League Special Assistant for the MLB Players Association, about what union organizing from the ground up looks like, and about how we can scale up our local organizing efforts and build the infrastructure to sustain nationwide campaigns.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, welcome everyone to this special live show edition of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and the Real News Network. Produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. So first and foremost, I just wanted to thank the great folks at Action Builder Action Network for putting on this great event. Let’s give it up for them. I want to thank the CLC for hosting us as well. Let’s give it up. And give yourselves a round of applause for being here. Thank you all for coming.
All right. Friends, comrades, fellow workers, it is so good to be here with all of you at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the Editor in Chief at the Real News Network in Baltimore in the United States, and it is my great honor to not only thank all of you for the warm welcome we have received here in Montreal, but to also say that we in the states stand in solidarity with our labor brothers, sisters, and siblings here in Canada. Growing up as a Mexican-American kid in Southern California, I always heard the same stereotypes about our neighbors to the north. That Canadians are overly polite even to a fault. Well, I say tell that to the over 100,000 federal public service workers across the country who just waged a historic strike. Tell that to the 55,000 education workers in Ontario who not only struck for a better contract last year, but who said hell no to Doug Ford and his Draconian attempts to strip workers rights.
Tell that to the Punjabi immigrant student workers with the [inaudible 00:02:34] support network who are uniting and organizing with their community in Brampton to fight wage theft, exploitation, and harassment with direct action. Sure, Canadians are polite, but working class people everywhere know that we have never gotten and will never get the respect we deserve, the wages we deserve, the working conditions we deserve, or the world we deserve by simply asking politely. We’ve got to fight for it. And I don’t know about you, but I am pumped to be among so many fighters today.
And rest assured we’ve got a hell of a fight in front of us. Every week at the Real News Network and for my podcast Working People, we talk with workers across the US and around the world. From teachers and Amazon workers to graduate students, strippers and Hollywood screenwriters, from John Deere and Kellogg’s workers, to coal miners in Alabama, hospitality workers, nonprofit workers and journalists. We see and hear firsthand how many of us are fighting on different fronts in the same class war. A cost of living crisis is pummeling poor and working people around the globe right now. From call center workers in the Philippines and utilities workers in France, to service workers in the United States and public sector workers in the UK and Canada. Working people’s wages stagnate or decreased while the gas bills, grocery bills and rent skyrocket.
The social safety net is being gutted while our governments spend countless trillions on tax breaks for the super rich and endless wars fueled by a bloodthirsty profit, hungry, military, industrial complex. Workers are working longer and harder and producing tremendous wealth and record profits that are all being siphoned into the pockets of C-suite executives and their Wall Street shareholders. Let’s hiss and boo real quick. Everyone seems to be working more while our quality of life on and off the jobs declines. And all the while we are struggling to build a future for ourselves and our families as the future of our society, our species and the planet we share is disappearing before our eyes as we continue to careen headfirst into the age of manmade climate catastrophe.
The struggles we face are many and the obstacles in our way are daunting. But we have been here before. From Ancient Egypt to the antebellum Southern United States, working people have overthrown the shackles of slavery. We have risen up against the feudal lords and kings. We have fought the scourges of child labor and apartheid. We have fought and died on picket lines for the right to unionize and collectively bargain. Working people must always fight and that fight continues today. And I could not be more honored to be joined on this live show by two incredible fighters who are going to talk to us about what that fight looks like in their corners of the world. We have the great Sarah Beth Ryther of Trader Joe’s United. Let’s give it up for Sarah Beth. And we’ve got Josh Thole, former professional baseball player and minor league special assistant for the MLBPA.
So without further ado, I want to bring our incredible guests in here today. And now normally on the show Working People, every week I get to sit down and have one-on-one deep conversations with workers about their lives, how they came to be the people they are, their path to doing the work that they do, so on and so forth. So with these live shows, we’ve been doing a condensed version of that, focusing specifically on people’s organizing stories, right? Present company may be excluded, but I imagine most of us don’t grow up imagining we’re going to be labor organizers. So everyone has an interesting story there. And I wanted to start by asking our great panelists, Sarah Beth, we’ll start with you. If you could just introduce yourself to the great audience we’ve got here and everyone watching and listening after the fact.
And tell us a bit about your own personal path into organizing and about why you and your coworkers took that fateful step to say, I’m not going to quit, I’m not going to leave. I’m not going to leave these problems for whoever walks in the door next, but I’m going to stand with my coworkers and do something about this.” What were the kind of key issues or conditions or concerns that led you individually to feel like something needed to change and to collectively determine that unionization was the pathway to making that change?
Sarah Beth Ryther:
So I started working in the Minneapolis store in August of 2021, and Minneapolis is a city right on the Mississippi River. It’s gorgeous, it has a lot of texture. And I had heard that Trader Joe’s was an amazing place to work, that it was seven steps above every other grocery store. That it was a corporation that treated its employees well. That it was really a place where you could go and have a future. And in the industry it was the gold standard. And I started working there. And personally, I’m really nosy. I am a compulsively curious person, and I also talk to everybody. And so as you do, when you start a new job, you make friends with people, you just learn about their lives. You ask them, what did you have for breakfast today? What are your hopes and dreams? Having conversations not only about work but about folks’ lives.
And it struck me after a couple of months of working there that the conversations I was having were overwhelmingly negative when it came to our workplace. Folks were really burned out. We’re still in the middle of a pandemic at that point, frontline workers who had been forced to work in really rough working conditions. Emotional labor, when you’re a grocery store worker and you have to interact with folks who are maybe not having the best day. That had all pressed and pressed and pressed and pressed on my coworkers and that in combination with wages that were said to be much, much better than others in the industry, but were in reality not very much better.
It just created this environment of dissatisfaction and it was really difficult to hear. It’s hard to hear when you’re making friends with somebody and they say very truthfully, they’re not complaining. They’re just stating, “Hey, it’s really rough. Hey, I was late again today because my bus was late, and then I got written up for being late through no fault of my own.” And that for me really was the catalyst to start thinking about how things could be different. And then in the winter of that year, there were a couple of really scary events that highlighted safety issues. It was very apparent that these safety issues were the responsibility of the company at large. It’s not just your managers, it’s not just folks who are put in a really scary position next to you. It’s the fault of policies from the very, very, very highest level that trickle down to make things unsafe for the individual worker. And so in December, we started talking about unionizing and it was just whispers.
I didn’t really even know what a union was. And somehow I had made it through most of my adulthood thus far, not interacting a lot with unions. We started together to ask our community, Minneapolis is a really union town. It’s really union friendly. There are lots and lots of union folks and it has a really rich labor history. So we started asking people, can you tell me about unions? We invited organizers into my living room. We asked members of unions who weren’t even grocery store unions, can you tell us what it’s like to be a member of a union to be involved in this fight? And they told us. And so we gathered information and very quickly thereafter we said, “Hey, let’s do this. It’s going to be an experiment. We don’t know what we’re doing. That’s okay because we trust each other.” Again, we ask each other questions, we hang out with each other outside of work. And that community base led us to stand together and say, “Hey, we’re good on taking this anymore. We can together move towards a future that feels better for all of us through unionizing.”
Josh Thole:
Well, thank you guys again for attending, even though I told you to come here. I had all the faith in the world in you. Thank you, Sarah. I will say this, ours is a bit different. First and foremost. It was four minor league baseball players who did the organizing. So we knew coming into this, what in fact was important at the time. We knew that wages were so suppressed that that needed to change. Again, to Sarah’s point, it was four guys that really had no idea what a union was either, how impactful it could be. So we had a lot of learning along the way as we were learning the organizing tactics going forward and anti-union campaigns that could be run against you and everything in between. But before we really started getting deep into the players and building out our leadership base, that was like step one.
Step two was then building our leadership base out. And that’s what we did. We pretty much were dispatched to reach out to 150 minor league affiliates. So all 30 major league baseball teams have five affiliates. We look around about 180 players, 170 players across 30 organizations. So 30 times 180 is quite of a reach. And in fact, how were we going to do this with such a small organizing group? So we broke up our turf appropriately and we just really started cold calling guys and started to try to understand, again, we knew the question to our answer, but we wanted to hear what it was like. I was a bit removed. I was a few years removed from minor league baseball. The other three organizers were a little closer. They had about two or three years removed as well.
And we knew what was going to be the overarching issue, but having to build the leadership out really one by one is what was going to be the challenging part. And we did that. We felt as if it was important to have one person to reach into every minor league clubhouse. So for example, if you take the Toronto Blue Jays, we need one guy in Dunedin. One guy at the complex in Dunedin. One guy in Dunedin, which is now the low A team. One guy in Vancouver, which is the high A team. New Hampshire, the AA team and Buffalo, the AAA team. We knew if we could conquer getting one point of contact is what we called them at the time. So we had some reach and we had a response there because we knew it was going to be important for us to figure out what was important to them now, pay, grievance procedure, housing. The housing issue was resolved the year before, but we knew we had to make it better.
Advocates for minor leagues made a big push publicly to get housing for minor league players in which Major League Baseball kind of adhered to that and gave every player now team housing. To kind of shed a little light onto that. When I was in the minor leagues, you went into a city and you had to fend for yourself. And for the folks that heard me downstairs, that’s how you save money. When you’re making $10,000 a year, you just jam as many folks into an apartment as you could and slept on floors and air mattresses. We have the leadership, we now know what’s important. We now had to figure out how best to do this. And again, do it in secrecy a bit because there was a fear for these players that if their club found out what was going to happen, were they going to get released? Because everybody’s end game is to get to the major leagues.
You don’t go into professional baseball to be a lifelong minor leaguer. That was important for us as organizers to know. And we kept everything so tight and so under wraps for months and months and months on end and continued to build out our leadership and now we have more than one guy, now there’s two guys at each affiliate, and we just continued to kind of grow the tree, if you will. And then finding out, again, once we knew what the priorities were for these guys, we then went to the Players Association and effectively asked for their blessing and said, “We need help with this. Here is the grand plan.” There was talks leading up to this, but we knew that it was going to be important for the major league baseball players to support what the minor leaguers were doing, and they did that. So the organizing campaign was different from the aspect of we knew going in and we did have quite a bit of support obviously from the 1200 major league members.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I just want to ask us to give one more round of applause for the minor leaguers for actually getting to that point and for Sarah Beths and her coworkers for winning their union in their election. Let’s give it up.
Because that is no small feat. And I mean this is one of the things we talked about before this show, right? About how to make the conversation relevant not just to folks in the US but beyond, right? I mean, granted, it’s easy to look better than the US by comparison when our union density is hovering barely above 10%. But we know that in Canada, with y’all having around 30%, we still have a long way to go amidst all the challenges that I laid out in the introduction. I won’t rehash those again. But like Sara Beth said, it’s so bonkers to me that we have these rights purportedly as democratic citizens in our respective countries, like the right to free speech or free assembly or practicing your religion. But to exercise your rights in the workplace is one of the few areas where you have to go through a Lord of the Rings style saga. Where you could get fired at any point, your friends could get fired. Starbucks could shut your entire store down, and that’s just in the unionization campaign.
Then you still have the long track to getting that first contract. So you’re being subject to captive audience meetings, right? Relentless union busting. You on top of that are subjected to delays at the bargaining table, bad faith bargaining. I can’t count how many strikes are going on in the states right now where the bosses are effectively refusing to bargain in the hopes that they can delay, demoralize and ultimately de-certify the union. This is happening at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, where journalists have been on strike for over 200 days now. Warrior Met Coal. That strike in Alabama is still technically ongoing, but Warrior Met Coal recently filed for a de-certification vote. After workers’ waged the longest strike in Alabama state history. So this is the boss’s plan is to smother and stifle our movement at any opportunity. And that is why it makes it that much more incredible that amidst all of that, you all and your coworkers still manage to reach the point that you’ve reached.
But of course, that struggle is still very much ongoing. And for folks working in the United States and in Canada, I wanted to take the last turn around the table to try to talk about how we get over those obstacles and how we do so in a way that allows us to scale up. So not just unionizing one shop or one warehouse, but actually do so in a way that allows us to build across our industry or across our employer. So for people out there in the US and Canada and beyond who want to organize but don’t really know where to start or for people who are organizing but are having trouble keeping the momentum going, navigating unfair labor laws and relentless union busting, let’s talk about how Trader Joe’s United and the MLBPA have dealt with those issues. So what specific challenges have you all faced in your organizing efforts and how have you and your coworkers worked to overcome those challenges?
And specifically, like I said, how have you been able to do that in a way that allows you to scale up, reaching so many different minor league baseball players, expanding from one to two to multiple Trader Joe’s stores, dozens even. What does that scaling up entail and how did tools like Action Builder help?
Sarah Beth Ryther:
I think for us, first and foremost, we are not going anywhere and that is our base standard principle that we are operating from and will continue to operate from. We’re here, which means that slow and steady, we will get where we need to go eventually, as long as we have our vision, which is as many Trader Joe’s unionized as possible. As long as we have that vision in our horizon, there are folks all across the country who have reached out to us, every single state in the US that has a Trader Joe’s, there is somebody from that Trader Joe’s who has emailed us and said, “Hey, we want to unionize. We have the same problems as you have. Let’s go.” Whether that-
And I think it’s interesting because all of those Trader Joe’s are not unionized precisely because of what Max was saying. If our laws were different, if you had 50% of all of the workers just go to the National Labor Relations Board in the US and say, “We want to unionize.” We would have many, many, many, many, many stores unionize. But because the laws are not like that, and because we are facing union busting, all of the stores that we would like to unionize probably have a lot longer timeline. And maybe one person from one store calls us now and says, “I really want unionize, but I don’t have the capacity.” We say, “You’re planting the seed. Talk to your coworkers about unionizing.” If it doesn’t happen, maybe it will eventually happen.
The idea, the seed, is there. Social media can be a great equalizer. Folks being able to tell their story here, being able to use tools like Action Network in order to reach folks that you might not be able to reach in another way and make sure that you’re checking back with them. Making sure that you’re building and maintaining relationships that allow you to build large structures and large communities in each place. That is what will get us to that horizon, to that goal over a very long period of time. But it is that dedication and that basic understanding that together we can do better.
Josh Thole:
I think I’m going to break this into two parts. The first question that Max asked. For me, I’ll always go back to this. If you feel like you’re getting stuck and bogged down, I always reminded myself of this that it’s all about the players, all about the players. And I knew how bad they wanted it. When we asked our leaders and each affiliate, we sent them a spreadsheet and said, “We need everybody’s email address and we’re going to tell you why we need the email address later.” And they said, “Okay, done.” And we got all of the email addresses because of the players. I didn’t go clubhouse to Clubhouse begging these guys. I built so much trust and my counterparts did as well. We built so much trust with our leadership base that they knew when we said, “Go do X.” They did it. And for me, that’s what kept me motivated. That’s what kept me going.
Even when there was days where the leaders were just like, “Don’t call me today, I don’t want to speak to you.” I just said, “Fine, no problem. Call me when you’re ready.” Because those days happened and they happened more times than not. I mean, imagine 142 game season and your main goal is to get to the major leagues and you have some union organizer blowing your phone up to go get a petition signed or fill out a list of 30 email addresses. That’s hard. It’s hard, especially if you just took an 0-4 or just gave up five runs. Having to navigate that piece of it was challenging. I mean, before I called the guy, I knew exactly what that person did the night before. Because I’ll be damned if I was going to call him when he just gave up a walk off homer, I just wasn’t going to do it and I think the guys respected that. I really do. I think the guys respected that we knew when to push go. So to answer that question is for me it was trust.
Building the trust, always going back to it. It’s about the workers. It’s about the workers. You know that the workers want it. You have to stay… Keep your heels dug in. And for the folks that have been doing this for a long, long time, I’m definitely not telling you anything that you don’t know. The second part of the question to the digital tool of Action Network and Action Builder was so important to us because we had movement. I mean, we would have 50 to a hundred transactions on a daily basis. We needed to know if our leaders were moving from time to time. That was a piece that Action Builder really helped us with, was to navigate the transaction portal again. And we were inputting all of that manually, but it was important for us to have one space to know, “Okay, I need to call a team in Altoona, Pennsylvania. Who’s my guy there?” And it made it so easy.
From the Action Network piece, the ability to use this email address that we begged these guys, that’s why that was important for us because we needed to effectively do what I’ll call test runs. I mean, that’s what they were. We needed to know the priorities and what was important to these guys, but we needed to do test runs to see what the return rate was. And to watch an overwhelming amount just on the priority surveys and spring training surveys and what have you, we were getting just flooded with responses back. At that moment, we knew that this was going to work, timing was going to have to be everything. But thanks to the tool, we definitely wouldn’t have been able to do it with a notebook and paper, much less an Excel spreadsheet given the 5,600 plus players to keep track of where all these guys were.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we got to wrap this up, and again, I encourage everyone to please come up and talk to our amazing panelists, share stories and strategies, and let’s keep this movement building because that’s of course what we’re all here for. And I wanted to sort of end on that note. Because we are recording this, this is going to go out to folks who aren’t here at the CLC with us across Canada, the US and beyond. And so I want to ask this question for them. For anyone who’s listening to this, who is maybe thinking about organizing in their workplace, but sees everything that the Starbucks workers are going through, the Amazon workers, what they’re going through. They see the union busting and they see how quickly the public can give up on them. And I remember something that a French train driver outside of Paris who is currently on a general strike with his coworkers across the country. Shout out to our fellow workers in comrades and France right now.
A really incredible Frenchman named [foreign language], who I’ve interviewed a number of times on this show, said to me in a recent interview that the ultimate enemy that we face is the feeling of loneliness. When you were out on that picket line or after the initial story breaks that your store’s unionizing, but then people move on to another story and the managers start turning on the screws and messing with people’s schedules and surveilling people and holding captive audience meetings. You can feel very lonely and isolating and that’s the point. So I wanted to ask if you had any messages for folks who know that they’re going to face that and why they should press on. Things aren’t going to get better if we don’t actually do something about it. And also if you had any comments for people watching, listening or here in the audience about the importance of solidarity across campaigns, across stores, across industries, and ultimately across national borders, right?
Because with that solidarity, we can achieve anything, I think. But I wanted to ask if you had any kind of thoughts about how that solidarity has helped you all in your campaigns. So any final messages to folks who maybe want to organize right now but are worried about what they’re going to face and any final thoughts on the importance of solidarity in keeping these efforts going?
Sarah Beth Ryther:
I think that what Josh was talking about with trust is absolutely vital. And I think that that leads into the relationships that you form when you’re organizing both in your workplace and in the larger community. And I think for anyone who is feeling alone, this room is evidence that there are many, many, many folks out there who have individuals backs and have each organizing campaigns back. And I was just floored and really humbled. Like I said, I didn’t know about anything about unions before I started organizing and floored and humbled to discover the community that was in my city, that was around the world. The folks who I talked to nearly every day are in California, they’re in Massachusetts, they’re in Kentucky, states that are thousands of miles away from me. People that I didn’t know existed and who are amazing and phenomenal and who enrich my life every day.
And I think that that loneliness and fear can be combated by forming those relationships, by keeping those relationships, by finding folks around you who are there, who exist adjacent to you, even though you might not know it, who will support you. And I would say, again, what I was talking about earlier, just reaching out to members of your community. It can be really scary to cold call somebody or email someone, but folks in labor are really friendly and organizers are always there, even if they’re in a different sector to help you out. So that’s what I would say.
Josh Thole:
Thanks Sarah. That was very well said. I think I will echo one piece of it, and it’s probably easy to say, hard to do. But as much as you can keep your foot on the gas, and this is the importance of building, constantly organizing even, in my opinion, now. We’re a union and we have 5,600 new minor league members, we’re still constantly organizing. So the more you can organize, the less you feel alone. And I say that because throughout the organizing drive, when I started having those feelings, and don’t think for a minute. There was days that happened where you make 55 phone calls and not one person answers the phone. You feel lonely, but the more you can go back to the ones that you have built the trust in and the ones that you really have organized, I just always went back to those guys, even if it was just to call the BS to make sure that we’re all moving on the right track.
Again, I know I say that and I know it’s hard to do, but I think from that perspective was what kept our train moving, was the mindset of organize, organize. Keep building out your leadership as much as you can. And then as far as solidarity goes, internally we see it, right? To have 1200 major league baseball players say, “Yeah, we want these guys, we want 5,600 plus new members.” That’s solidarity in itself. But what you see here, even in this room, everybody has everybody’s back and everybody in this world is pulling from the same end of the rope. And it’s important. Again, I’m here, I get to see it. There’s a lot of folks that don’t… A lot of organizers that are not here that don’t get to see it.
But I think for anybody listening and watching, it’s important to know this room is filled. Downstairs, the room was filled with almost 3000 people. The support that you will always have will always be there. And I think that’s something to never forget. If you’re feeling lost, if you’re feeling lonely, know that there is somebody in the organizing and labor world that you can pick the phone up and call and you will have instant support.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s give it up for our great panelists. All right, let’s go drink. I think that’s good. So we can call that a recording. We didn’t quite know if the acoustics were going to work for Q&A. I would say just please, if you have questions come up, ask our amazing panelists, and thank you all so much for being here. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Goodnight.
One year after the landmark union victory at the Amazon warehouse JFK8 on Staten Island, New York, the brightly colored posters that once adorned the glass at the iconic bus stop in front of the plant are gone. This was the bus stop from which Chris Smalls, Derrick Palmer, Connor Spence, Gerald Bryson, Jordan Flowers, and others launched an insurrection that won an unprecedented union…
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
Heat waves can delay fights and melt airplane tarmac, but Amazon won’t let them hinder Prime deliveries. Extreme heat and unsafe working conditions under the merchant giant have now spurred drivers to unionize. In Southern California, 84 delivery drivers joined the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and negotiated the first union contract among any Amazon workers in the country. And since June 25, these workers have been on an indefinite strike.
Amazon’s requirement of drivers to make up to 400 stops per day, even when temperatures exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit, can make operating one of those ubiquitous gray and blue vans a particularly hazardous occupation. Raj Singh, a driver, knows that only too well.
“Sometimes it reaches 135 degrees in the rear of the truck and there’s no cooling system,” said Singh, who has worked the job for two and half years and through the height of the pandemic. “It feels like an oven when you step back there. You instantly start feeling woozy and it’s gotten to the point where I’ve actually seen stars.”
Even on scorching days, said Singh, “Amazon sets these ridiculous paces. Some people even have to miss their guaranteed 15 minute breaks, because if we break the pace, they contact us to try and find out why we’re behind.”
“On the days that you work, it’s basically mandatory overtime,” he added. “You don’t stop until you’re done or you get reprimanded.”
Last August, after the drivers prepared a list of demands around pay, safety, and extreme temperatures, Amazon responded by offering workers two 16-ounce bottles of water a day.
Heat exposure affects delivery drivers across companies. UPS has reported at least 143 heat related injuries on the job in recent years, and a United States Postal Service driver recently died of heat exposure. UPS, whose iconic brown-uniformed drivers are directly employed by the company, recently agreed to install air conditioners in their trucks after drivers across the country picketed work sites and threatened to strike. But Amazon’s 275,000 drivers are hired through 3,000 third-party subcontractors, with whom Amazon can cancel contracts with little explanation or warning, making it particularly difficult for workers to unionize or fight to improve conditions.
Despite the fact that workers who deliver Amazon packages sport branded vests, shirts, and pants; drive Amazon branded trucks; have schedules and wage floors set by Amazon; receive routes from an Amazon app; and can be disciplined and fired by Amazon, the company claims they aren’t technically employees. On paper, the drivers are employed by a network of small businesses that each rents 20–40 vans and employs up to 100 people. The 84 drivers in Palmdale work for Battle Tested Strategies, one of these businesses, which operates out of an Amazon warehouse.
On April 24, the drivers announced that they had formed a union and had bargained a contract with Battle Tested Strategies to address fair pay and worker safety in the heat. They asked that Amazon respect the terms of the new contract, which guarantees $30 hourly wages, health and vehicle safety standards, and the right to refuse unsafe deliveries.
Instead, the company immediately announced that the subcontractor “had a track record of failing to perform and had been notified of its termination for poor performance well before today’s announcement.” It also said their contract would expire on June 24.On June 25, the 84 drivers awoke to no assigned routes from Amazon or Battle Tested Strategies. They are currently on an indefinite strike (in their view, from their Amazon jobs) and hope to convince the trillion-dollar company to recognize the union, respect the contract, and end what they view as retaliation against workers. Teamsters across the country are now picketing warehouses in solidarity.
Teamsters picketing across the country in Connecticut International Brotherhood of Teamsters
The Teamsters union, which represents the 84 drivers, has argued that Amazon exerts nearly total control over these workers. In their estimate, the company must recognize these drivers as employees and bargain with them directly in order to keep them safe in the heat.
“Fulfilling the promise of the contract will require fundamentally changing Amazon’s exploitative business model,” said Randy Korgan, head of the Teamsters’ Amazon division. “And we will keep fighting until that happens.”
Amazon maintains that the drivers don’t actually work for the company. Spokesperson Eileen Hards called the Teamsters “intentionally misleading,” adding that the strike “does not include Amazon employees and is mostly attended by outside activists.” She reiterated that Amazon had terminated its contract with Battle Tested Strategies.
But according to Daniel Ocampo, a legal fellow at the National Employment Law Project, the National Labor Relations Act defines employment status by whether companies control conditions like pay, safety, and day-to-day work. “All of those are controlled at least jointly by Amazon,” he said. “For the drivers to meaningfully bargain over their conditions of work, they need to have Amazon at the table.”
“We’re here so we can have fair pay and safe jobs,” added Singh. “And we’re trying to get this done, not just for us but for every delivery driver that works for Amazon.”
Karl Marx once observed that “equal rights” under the inequality of capitalism simply means the right of capitalists to exploit workers. Anyone who’s attempted to unionize their workplace has discovered the truth of this—as employers frequently stoop to unethical and dishonest measures to prevent workers from building collective power. Felix Allen, a Lowe’s union organizer based in New Orleans, speaks with The Real News about his experience organizing his workplace for fair pay.
Studio Production: Adam Coley, David Hebden, Cameron Granadino Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Vince Quiles:
Hey everyone, Vince here. Just wanted to give everyone a heads up, a couple weeks after we recorded this interview with Felix, he was unfortunately fired. Now, Lowe’s says that it wasn’t a targeted firing for organizing but we all know what’s going on here. There’s still a lot of good applicable information out here for anybody looking to organize so without further ado, here’s our interview with Felix Allen.
Vince Quiles:
What’s up everyone? My name is Vince Quiles. I’m the lead organizer from Home Depot, store 4112 in Philadelphia and today I have a very special guest. Lead organizer, Felix Allen from Lowe’s down in New Orleans. Felix, how are you today?
Felix Allen:
Doing good, Vince. How are you doing?
Vince Quiles:
I’m doing well, man. Always get to talk to a buddy of mine. So really, really happy to talk to you today and speak on your guys’ efforts. So with that being said, can you just give us a little bit of background to yourself? What led you to organizing, and anything you feel pertinent to set the background for your story?
Felix Allen:
Yeah, well, I guess so I should start. I’m from North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina, and I actually moved to New Orleans to be a musician. That’s what I went to school for and everything but I ended up moving here during the pandemic and decided to get a job at Lowe’s. Worked there for about eight months full-time during the pandemic and then moved to part-time as the music stuff started opening back up, but noticed a lot of problems there that I know Vince will relate to and we just sort of got the ball rolling with organizing, which I guess we’ll get into shortly.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and just to give people a little bit of background for the viewers watching this. Felix and I spoke back during the beginning of Home Depot’s organizing drive and so that was where we got connected and we really felt strongly pulled towards each other just because we’re both in that home improvement market and it’s a reminder of the fact that this is a solidarity based movement. This is about people reaching out across the different organizing campaigns, trying to get whatever information you can.
And so that’s where our history kind of starts. I mean, I remember you calling me way back when, I think I was driving to an AutoZone or something like that to pick up something from my car and I get a call from Louisiana, I’m like, “I wonder who this is?” And lo and behold, I hear your voice on the other side.
So with that being said, you had some struggles that you were going through, so if you can just elaborate on that so that the viewers can better understand.
Felix Allen:
So there was a lot going on at the store. I guess I started working there in December of 2020 and then I think it was maybe September 2022 when I called you but I had been organizing for a while before I got in touch with you and by the time I did get in touch with you, it felt like things were stagnating and seeing you all in Philadelphia filed a petition to unionize, it was kind of a shot in the arm for us.
But I think the thought first occurred to me about organizing probably in April of that year, April of last year, and I actually just jokingly out to a friend saying, “Hey, I found out you only need 30% of the signatures of folks at your store, whatever unit you’re trying to bargain for, to file for an NLRV election. Maybe I should unionize the Lowe’s.” And he was like, “Hell yeah, dude, you should totally go for it. I’m actually talking to the IWW right now about unionizing, the startup I’m working at.”
So it started out almost as a joke but he was actually encouraging about it. So as you know, there’s so much information you got to know about do you want to go with an established union? Do you want to be an independent union? And there’s so many little procedural things you don’t know about, but some local organizers inspired me and gave me some information. There was this group called the Louisiana Workers Council who I actually met. They were leafleting outside of the McDonald’s and I became friends with them and got started talking to workers and I was kind of like, “Hey, maybe I should do this at Lowe’s.”
So that’s how things started and all the problems we have over there are pretty much verbatim the same ones you’ve had at Home Depot, so when I saw the articles that you had, or the interviews that you had done about your struggles at Home Depot, I literally thought, “Man, that is exactly what I’m thinking about in Lowe’s.”
Vince Quiles:
And I mean, can you illuminate us on some of those struggles? I mean, obviously from working at Home Depot, I know, but I think it’s important to speak on, right? Because even though we’re both in the home improvement sector, so the workload that we deal with is very similar, I still think, you would agree, that there are comparisons that can be drawn across the board because I’m sure as you were doing the leafleting with the workers over at McDonald’s, there were probably similar things that you talked about, whether it be under-staffing, whether it be pay.
So if you can just break us down a little bit on some of the things that you guys were personally facing in your store.
Felix Allen:
So I think for a lot of folks who was paid, it was pretty noticeable how people who had been working at Lowe’s for 16 years were getting paid less than folks who had just started. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s wrong at all that folks who just started are getting started at $15 an hour, or I guess now more it should be a livable wage. That’s absolutely what they should be getting paid.
But really when you see someone who’s a veteran, someone who trained me getting paid less than the dude who just started, that really drives home the point that we are just metrics and numbers to these people. They can talk all they want about how we’re a family but that’s not what families do. Families don’t fire people for being a couple minutes late a couple times, or I don’t know, for forgetting to clock out or something, which is probably an honest mistake.
So a lot of people noticed that. My personal experience was I had been there for about a year and a half. I was one of the only people certified on power equipment, so I was constantly having to stop what I was doing to go help other folks. And there’s nothing wrong with that but there’s so many demands we have and I was getting paid about, I think it was like $12.67 an hour at that point and I jokingly asked my supervisor, “Hey man, why aren’t they paying me more, bro?” Because everybody else was at $15 an hour and these were people who I was training.
And my supervisor was a cool dude so he put in for me to get a raise to at least $14 to at least get me closer but he doesn’t really have control over that. So he put in the raise, and that was nice of him but when I looked at the paycheck, it turned out that later on when I guess the higher up saw, they only gave me 21 cents. So that was like my, I guess, in that Michael Jordan documentary, he says, “I took that personally.” That was kind of my moment like that. I was like, “All right, so this is how you all are going to do us.”
So obviously pay is a big thing, as you know, under-staffing is a huge thing, and that’s not always necessarily something a union is going to take care of most but I think knowing that you have something and a grievance process to protect you, if the frustrations that result from under-staffing get to you, that can be a powerful thing.
So like you said, someone might come in with a list of things that they need in the plumbing department and they might have some… they might bring in a 500 year old archaic screw or something, and they expect you to find it on aisle 16. It’s like, I’m a merchandiser. I build the displays. I’m actually on a time crunch doing what I need to be doing, but there’s so few people in the store to help that I got to go through an entire list with someone.
So it’s like I want to help people but I mean, I have other people telling me I got to have this project done by the end of the day so it puts us in a difficult position. And a lot of customers are always frustrated, and I don’t blame them at all for being frustrated. I noticed before I started working there, I needed help finding the right kind of doorknob and it took me forever so I totally get it. But again, it drives home the point that these companies do not care about their customers. They do not care about their workers. They care only about their bottom line.
So yeah, two big things, and other things like folks getting fired for just little attendance issues and I mean, some people think it’s simple getting to… for me, it’s easy to get to my job on time because I have a car, I don’t have any kids, I got a pretty stable life but that’s not the case for everybody here. They’re taking care of their kids. A lot of people are maybe taking care of their parents or grandkids, and a lot of younger people don’t have cars or they’re getting rides from someone else, so you’re going to be late sometimes.
And again, they say, “We’re a family,” but I think family gives each other second chances so I find that claim rather dubious from the management.
Vince Quiles:
You speak on something very important there where you talk about how you had people in middle management trying to come in, trying to help you out and in the end, they’re overridden by people who ultimately don’t understand your life, who don’t understand the things that you guys are going through and I mean, ultimately, that’s even the power in you being an organizer is because you’re there on the front lines every day. You’re dealing with the people, you’re seeing what’s going on and you’re trying to fight for them when ultimately all of these executives are doing is just fighting for corporate profits to just disseminate amongst themselves, disseminate amongst their shareholders, and in the end, people like yourself who are working, who are trying to do a good job, who are trying to do the best that they can and help the customers coming through the store as well as the customers who are shopping, are the ones that are left holding the bag.
And it’s something that’s extremely unfortunate and it’s the importance of doing what it is that you do, trying to organize there. And so with that, I know you had some fun with some of Lowe’s management, so please tell us a little bit about what it was like once you got your drive going, once you got your signatures and how it is that they responded.
Felix Allen:
So I guess I should back up a little bit. It was very tricky getting to the actual drive part. I got a lot of little training from some people including the IWW, which was helpful, and part of it was mapping out your workplace so I had tricks to find out how many people really work here, who knows who, that kind of thing. And a lot of it was at first figuring out that… The first just what are we going to do? Do people want to go with an established union? Do we want to try to go at it ourselves? How do we do it? So we reached out to people like the teamsters and various different established unions, and everybody was extremely generous with their time but eventually I think we decided, I think the best way… we think the best way to do this is go independent.
And so I reached out to you, you shared some important strategies that I think reinvigorated things for us, and we got our union drive going pretty quickly, and it was actually remarkable how easy it was. Even when you tell folks about things like dues, how easy it is to get them to understand. If you’re a worker and you work hard and people trust you, they’ll know you’re not running a pyramid scheme against them. Even if you’re talking about dues and you’re talking about things like, “Well, dues are part of the contract,” but you get to vote on the contract and no one is going to vote for a contract that leaves you with less than when you started out.
Which I guess leads us to some of the things that management were doing. One part of it was captive audience meetings, which were usually held when I wasn’t there because I was working, actually working part-time at that point. And they love to hammer home, as you know, dues. you’re going to have to pay $50 a month, you’re going to have to do blah, blah, blah. But of course they don’t tell you you’re going to get a raise that’s going to far outweigh the cost of any dues you might be paying.
So people recognized, a lot of folks recognized that what they’re coming at us with was bullshit but one thing I think management did that was effective for them was sending in a ton of managers from neighboring stores or ASMs, as they’re called, and they would just walk around and ask people questions, “How do you like the store?” And stuff like that, kind of putting on airs, pretending they really care what’s happening. But folks mostly got the idea that they were there to intimidate us. They were there to figure out who might have signed this petition.
So that scared a couple people off at least enough maybe to not want to stick their neck out. So that was effective on their part and I know you experienced that. I remember you saying it was hard to even have a conversation about sports or something with all those managers walking around. But yeah, that was part of it. I got followed around. I tried to do leafleting outside the store and they would always have managers finding a reason to be outside there and they would tell me to leave. They said they considered the parking lot a working area.
They kicked me out of the break room when I was off duty. Well, no, actually, they made all of my coworkers take their break in the training room instead of the break room so I couldn’t talk to them because since the training room is technically a work area.
So there’s all kinds of little ticky tack stuff like that. And of course, one thing I thought was funny, I see in the media, a lot of people talk about other countries being authoritarian or whatever. They’ll talk about China or North Korea or something and during this experience, I was experiencing some generational level gaslighting and like, “Dude, you want authoritarianism? Try starting a union in your workplace. We got a police state right here at home. You don’t have to look across the ocean for it. They’re watching us on camera 24/7.” So we had fun with it though.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and it’s something I think that’s so important to really put a pin in it and talk about, and something I try really hard to bring across to people when I’m trying to organize, whether it’s in the Home Depot that I worked in or talking to other people in different work environments, is you can see by the actions that you just described, these people aren’t special. They’re not overly smart. In the end, at least for where I come from growing up in Philadelphia, if you’re tough, if you’re big, you’re bad. You don’t run from the fight, you stand in front of it and you go toe to toe and you say, “No, we can hang. We can handle this.”
And to your point, whether it was in our effort over at Home Depot, clearly from the things that you just described constantly, they were trying to run away from that fight and it’s just one of those things again that I think really helps to show these people aren’t anything special. They don’t have anything special. To your point, they’re actually very authoritarian and in the end it’s crazy because it’s not like you’re coming from it from a bad angle. I mean, look at the things that you talked about that brought you to the point of organizing. It was from a place of caring, of compassion, and I’m sure that they probably have something similar to the value wheel that we had at Home Depot, and they talk about the inverted triangle.
But again, to something that you spoke on and something again that you showed is you didn’t just speak on different values, you stood up for it, you fought it, and what did they do? I remember you actually sending me the video of when you were handing out the leaflets and they were trying to kick you out of the parking lot, and it’s like, “Hey, why are you so afraid of Felix? What is so horrible about what he’s doing?”
I mean, you showed a little bit in what you’re talking about and the way that you were able to counteract the arguments with dues, because it’s like, crazy idea. If you actually sit down and have a humane conversation with people, they actually understand more than what they’re given credit for. I mean, it’s absolute insanity and to see, again, the lack of respect, the lack of regard that they have for individuals, and I would say good on you because I saw you keeping on that fight, keep on chugging along.
And I’m really curious to know, how did your coworkers view those efforts in conversations that you had with them? I’m sure some of them were probably afraid to talk to you about the organizing efforts, but I have to believe that some of them were coming up and commending you and giving you kudos.
Felix Allen:
So throughout, even before the drive, there were of course folks who were hesitant to get involved with organizing. That was a huge struggle. So a lot of folks had a lot more… it was a lot more of a risk for folks other than me, in some cases. I had something to fall back on and a lot of people were really taking care of their kids and they needed this job. They could not afford to lose this job.
But I found some folks who were willing to serve on an organizing committee with me, and they mostly did that behind the scenes, but their efforts were crucial, of course. But to your question, some people were just like, “Give me whatever I need to sign and I will sign it. I trust you.” Other people were hesitant because maybe they were about to… They said they were about to retire, they said they were about to get a new job, which is usually just an excuse saying, “I don’t want to get involved in something that might be troublesome.”
So that was a thing, but a lot of people were really ready to do stuff. Just you find out that really a yes usually means maybe, a maybe usually means no, particularly if you’re trying to get folks to meet outside of work, that can be really tricky. Even if you’re just trying to get them to meet out in the parking lot, it can be tough.
I set up one meeting where six to 10 people were supposed to be there and literally no one showed up. The texts started rolling in when we were 15 minutes before, “Hey, I’m not going to make it,” that kind of thing. So I was literally standing out there in the rain by myself. But then there are going to be high points too, like after we started the drive, I remember this one dude coming up to me and he shook my hand. He was like, “Bro, you got some balls, son,” and that kind of stuff. So he was like, “You are a real N-word, bro.” That kind of stuff.
And there were a couple old ladies who kept trying to buy me food and stuff, so that was cool, because they recognized exactly what was going on. They recognized that the response we were getting was because they were scared of what we’re doing, even though I’m like a barely five foot, 26 year old dude who can’t really grow a beard. They were sending all these managers in and eventually they gave us a raise. There are some other pretty minor concessions, but they recognize that organizing has power.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and that’s something that’s so big. Once workers are willing to use their leverage, that changes the whole landscape of things and I think it’s kind of funny when you look at it and you look at the situation that you described because it just shows Lowe’s took you guys for granted. They took all of the things that you brought to the table for granted and it wasn’t until you said, “All right, enough is enough.”
We’re dealing with things like wage compression in which people aren’t actually being valued the way that you guys say that you’re going to. You’re dealing with under-staffing that is preventing you from being able to adequately do your job in your instance in terms of setting up the displays you’re supposed to, but then also not really meeting the needs of the people who are shopping there.
And just something I think is so important for viewers to really understand when it comes to these big box hardware stores, I can at least speak from my experience in Philadelphia. One of the things that is the most infuriating for customers in these stores is that there would be small mom and pop hardware stores, electrical stores, and then these big box stores come in, they put them out of business. They make it so that they’re the only place you can go to get help on these things because that’s what they want to do is monopolize the market, corner of the market, and then they don’t even have a system in place to which people’s needs can actually adequately be met.
I don’t know if you ever do it, but I look a lot at different tweets to Home Depot and oh my goodness, you just see all of these things where it’s like people are like, “I’m waiting for forever. I got this crappy service. I got that crappy service.” And it’d be one thing if Lowe’s was this struggling company. They were barely making it. But I think I just read something about how your guys’ CEO made, what was it? Like $17 million last year? And that’s just the CEO that’s not even getting into board of directors and it’s just absolutely wild, man.
Felix Allen:
Yeah, they’re doing okay, let’s just put it that way. But yeah, I have seen some of that on the internet but I mean, you see it in the stores. The customers get frustrated and they’re going to take that out on us and again, I don’t blame them. I would be doing the same, I’m sure. But that has made me realize, like sometimes when I go to pick up a pizza from Domino’s, it’ll usually be late, so I’ll walk by the pickup window or whatever because the store is closed.
But I feel like I’ll be waiting forever and it is frustrating like, “Dude, I’m just trying to get this pizza and then go to sleep.” But working at Lowe’s made me realize there’s probably a good reason why it’s taking a long time. There are probably only two people in there trying to cook a thousand pizzas at one time, and that’s why it’s taken a long time. So that sort of keeps me in check.
Vince Quiles:
It absolutely helps to shape perspective, I feel you on that. I’m the same way where I do my best to try and be as patient as possible because look, you always get a couple bad apples. People who aren’t the best for sure, that’s in any environment that you go to. But to your point, when you look at the systems in place and the way that they’re structured, it’s usually something little, it’s like an iceberg basically. You see the surface level problem and it’s really easy to hone in on that, but it’s actually this much, much deeper issue that to be honest, I mean, ultimately workers in the store don’t really have any say over.
To a large extent too, I’m sure you had people in your immediate management team within the building who probably wish that they could address these issues, but were never empowered to. And so in the end, again, it’s the workers and the customers who are left holding the bag while the shareholders walk away or the CEO walks away with $17 million dollars. That’s absolutely insane.
So I’m just curious to know. So you go through your drive, that’s the response you get. So how was it dealing with the NLRB? How did your guys drive finish off?
Felix Allen:
Oh, so that was a little bit frustrating. Well, let me qualify everything with everybody at the NLRB was extremely nice, extremely helpful. So what happened was on the petition cards, we handed out to sign, we hadn’t designated a name for our union because we hadn’t chosen a name for our union yet and I actually had called before I made the cards. I mean, this is a pretty ragtag effort. I printed the cards out at Office Depot, so it’s not like I’m the most official people ever, but I literally called an NLRB informational officer, and they told me exactly what I had put on the cards was totally fine, but once we had all the signatures and brought them in to the NLRB, and they were very kind when they helped me fill out the petition and everything, they were extremely helpful.
But a week later I got word, “All right, there’s a problem with the cards. They don’t have a name on them.” And the reason we hadn’t chosen a name yet was because we wanted to ask people what they thought the name should be, “Do you want it to be Lowe’s Workers United? Lowe’s Workers Union? Fuck Lowe’s, or anything like that?” And eventually we set it on Lowe’s Workers United, but it turned out being a problem because of some language in the NLRB manual and because of some issue that Lowe’s lawyers got a little bit lucky on that we were either going to have to withdraw or have our petition dismissed.
So I got with all the people and we said, “Let’s go ahead and withdraw and if we want to refile that, we can.” So that was frustrating and it goes to show you the government is not necessarily our friend. Supposedly the NLRB is supposed to be neutral, and I think they’re a lot better than they have been, but you can’t be neutral on a moving train. Being neutral when one side is Lowe’s and one side is 26 year old dude with not a ton of experience. You can’t be… Being neutral in that situation is not exactly neutral. You need to give the workers the benefit of the doubt.
Everybody knew what they were signing up for. It was a union started right there in the store and everybody knew that. So that was really frustrating. I mean, it just goes to show, I mean, that’s what the government is going to do. They’re not going to protect us, we have to protect ourselves. I remember President Biden said he was the most pro-union president in history, but he went on and decided to break a rail strike. So we got to look out for each other, no one’s going to save us.
Vince Quiles:
And to your point, there’s been so much coverage here at the Real News Network on that, and it’s really important to look at what you’re saying there, in this sense. He goes, he breaks a rail strike, and then look at what happens in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s almost as if though the workers on the railroads were trying to warn about that.
But to your point, that’s something that is being made known here. Obviously something I know I personally say a lot to various people, especially during the organizing drive is, “Nobody’s going to come and save us here. We have to be proactive in our own salvation and this is how we do it is by trying to form a union. And the deck is going to be stack stacked against you but ultimately the question becomes are you going to relinquish yourself to the crappy working environment that you’re in, to the crappy life that you end up living because of the fact that these companies don’t give you what you’ve earned, what you deserve, or are you going to stand up and fight and make your case?”
And so with that, I’m just really curious to hear what’s next for you guys? How can people keep up with your fight with different things that you have going on?
Felix Allen:
Well, so we’re obviously going to run it back because that’s what we do. Who dat? As we say in New Orleans, but we got to focus on forming a stronger committee, think about how we can change our strategy to build something more durable than what we have, which was initially that first drive was a little bit of a Hail Mary. So obviously I don’t want to reveal too much in case the ops are watching, but we’re definitely going to keep organizing because there are a lot of bright and talented young folks who deserve respect.
Because that’s basically what it comes down to. There’s pay and there’s under under-staffing, but really when you wake up at 5:00 AM in the morning and then you got to go to work and deal with all this patronizing bullshit and just be talked to like you’re in fifth grade. It’s not just me. There are like 50, 60 year old folks getting talked to like they’re in the fifth grade. So I think for a lot of people, the bottom line is respect, and that’s why we’re going to keep fighting.
I filed several unfair labor practice charges, which are in the process of being addressed. So we’re not going to give up here and as you’ve experienced at Home Depot, a lot of folks are reaching out from across the country, whether it’s Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Target, they’re reaching out to organize with us, and I think that’s exactly what we need.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and so where can people keep up with your fight? I know you guys have a Twitter. Is there anything else?
Felix Allen:
We got a Twitter, I think it’s called like Lowe’sU_Nola or something, you’ll probably be able to find it, but there’s Instagram too, I guess. But our email is, let me actually, I got it written down somewhere. I don’t actually remember what the exact address is. It’s lowesworkersunited@gmail.com. If you Google and you see it on the Twitter, it’s probably up there too but we will get back to you.
I will give you my phone number, you can call me at all hours of the night and I might be asleep, but I’ll do my best. And I’m sure Vince would say the same, of course.
Vince Quiles:
Absolutely, and what we can do too is make sure that we put all of that contact information in the bio of this video so that to your point, if anybody watching works at Lowe’s, so talk to Felix. He’s also a musician, if you want to talk to him about music as well. Please feel free to reach out. As we said at the beginning of this, this is a solidarity movement. That was how Felix and I connected, and through that, we’ve been able to build a strong relationship in which we’re able to support each other, and we want to do that for other people who want to try and make their work environment better.
So with that, my friend, greatly appreciate your time. Thank you for telling us your guys’ story, and I very much look forward to seeing what you do in the future.
Felix Allen:
Likewise, thanks for having me.
Vince Quiles:
So there you guys have it. That was Felix from Lowe’s Workers United. And something that’s extremely important to consider, whether it’s looking at his organizing campaign, the organizing campaign that I was in at Home Depot. Even when you look at, for instance, Amazon with Bessemer, Alabama and these different drives that didn’t quite get it all the way across the finish line is even when you lose, you still win.
We talk a lot about wages, we talk about under-staffing, and these are definitely core issues in the fight that we’re engaged in, but the thing that’s important to remember most of all, is the concept of hard power. That’s why these companies react the way that they do because they understand just like the rest of us do, that there are two core components to any business, capital and labor and they absolutely are afraid of the fact that labor is starting to organize itself because once that happens, they lose their leverage.
So if you’re somebody that’s watching these interviews, you’re considering organizing in your workplace, you feel that fear, you feel that uncertainty of being able to get it done, please reach out. Reach out to people like myself, reach out to people like Felix because in the end, like we both said in this interview, nobody’s coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves, but as long as we got each other’s back, nobody can stop us. Till the next one, guys.
Negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters have collapsed after disagreement over part-timer wages. With less than a month from contract expiration, the largest single-employer strike in US history is looking more and more likely.
We have another two-part episode this week. First, an update on the contract campaign. The Teamsters gave UPS two deadlines for their last, best, and final offer on proposals. UPS hasn’t met either of them. So the union is upping the ante with practice pickets around the country.
Could a deal materialize or is a strike imminent? We asked Stephen Franklin, a veteran journalist who is the former labor writer for the Chicago Tribune, and an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Labor and Employment Relations.
Next, a deep dive into gig work at UPS and subcontracting more broadly. The Teamsters want to rid their workforce of so-called personal vehicle drivers (PVDs), workers who deliver packages out of their private vehicles and work off a smartphone app, much like other gig workers. We spoke with UPS workers from Georgia, Utah, and California, and a former gig worker from Indiana, about why gig work and other subcontracting is an existential threat to the union.
Gig work is often pitched as flexible for the worker. But in reality, it’s a breakdown of standards that many Teamsters want to uphold at all costs. Even if that means going out on strike.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
EMIL: I know that last year, uh, P V D had their car just, just stolen. Uh, while they were making a delivery, they left the keys in the ignition and they got back in the car and all the packages were gone.
Teddy: What if I told you that not all UPS delivery people wore the brown uniform, nor do they all drive the iconic brown truck. That some are gig workers, that drive their own cars and work off an iphone app.
EMIL: these are kind of risks that are typical to gig workers. I know, you know, it’s not uncommon for people to get robbed, when they’re out there. it’s a risky situation and you don’t have the kind of protections that I do, you know, as, as a driver.
TEDDY: Gig work is often pitched as a flexible for the worker. But in reality, it’s a breakdown of standards that many Teamsters want to uphold at all costs. Even if that means, going out on strike.
Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to the Upsurge, a podcast about UPS, the Teamsters, and the future of the American labor movement.
This podcast unpacks the unprecedented labor fight this year at UPS. In July, the contract of over 340,000 UPS workers will expire and if those workers strike, which is a real possibility, it will be the largest strike against a single company in US history.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
And now our short episodic plea: We are a listener-funded podcast. We cannot do this work without you. And it is a lot of work. So please, if you like the show, you have a few bucks to spare every month, head over to patreon.com/upsurgepod and become a supporter today. You can find the link in the description.
Also, we have one more free one-year subscription to In These Magazine for the next person to sign up to our Patreon. Snag it today.
Alright onto the show.
Teddy Ostrow: [00:00:00] Again, we’re coming to you with a two-part episode. First, an update on what’s been going on in the contract campaign, which has been a lot. The Teamsters gave UPS two deadlines for their last, best, and final offer on their economic proposals. And UPS hasn’t met either of them. Could a deal materialize or is a strike imminent? We asked veteran labor journalist Stephen Franklin.
In the second part, we covered a major issue UPSers have been organizing around. That is of course UPS’s use of gig workers to deliver packages, and subcontracting more broadly. The short of it is: the corporation wants to take solid, union jobs, and make them precarious, non-union ones. Stick around to hear what Teamsters and the gig workers themselves think.
Emil Macdonald: I view gig work as a, as a scam.
you’re like just a tool for the company to ship liability and like, uh, and maintenance and all these [00:01:00] other costs off themselves and unto you.
Teddy: But the update first. A lot has happened in negotiations since our last episode. The most recent news is that bargaining between the Teamsters and UPS has broken down. It appears that a strike may be imminent.
We’ll get more into the details. But first, we want to bring to what’s happening on the ground. We noted it last episode: practice pickets are sprouting up across the country. That’s right, basically pretend picket lines. And since negotiations have broken down, the union has vowed to up the ante.
Chris Wallace, the package car driver from Local 89 we spoke to in episode 4, was nice enough bring us to his local’s practice picket at enormous Worldport Airhub in Louisville.
Teamster: Who away? Team stars. Who? Team stars? Who away? Team stars.
Joe Sexton: My name’s Joe Sexton. I’m a next year [00:02:00] steward at uh, UPS World Report, and I’m a 23 year team steward Teamster, local 89. what we’re doing out here is we’re doing a, basically a practice strike to get our members energized for the, the, the possibility of us striking the company, uh, to spread information and knowledge, to educate their members on what a strike is, what’s going on with the strike, uh, how we will conduct it.
and that’s, that’s basically what we’re doing out here today.
For those of you who haven’t gone on strike before, it may seem pretty simple. You just stop working, stand outside your workplace, hold a picket sign, walk around in circles, and chant. And that is kind of what you do on strike. But even that an for inexperienced workforce, can take some practice. I saw it first hand at Local 804’s practice picket in Brooklyn.
[TKTK – TONY ROSARIO CLIP]
Teddy Ostrow: There tried and trusted methods to bolster the [00:03:00] impact of a strike. First and foremost is to keep people from crossing the picket line. If UPS can keep its packages flowing, the workers pretty much have no leverage. But there are some legal liabilities, and the union has to make sure the strikers keep out of trouble. Back to Louisville.
Cody: Alright. Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, here we go. All right. So my name’s Cody. Uh, I’m the attorney for the local. And, uh, I just wanted to talk a little bit about, uh, how to, uh, keep the picket line local, right?
The, the company, if you all do go on strike. If we do go on strike, the company is gonna allege, uh, in somewhat. Some form or another that our, uh, picket would be unlawful. So, uh, local 89 engages unlawful pickets, right? Right. So in order to do that, uh, there’s certain things that, uh, you all have to do.
Number one is you have to stick together. That’s the biggest thing. Everyone has to stick together.
[00:04:00] All you have to do is look on social media and you’ll see that every day, the Teamsters strike threat becomes more and more credible.
[WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT]
Now, to discuss negotiations, I spoke with Stephen Franklin, a veteran labor journalist who is the former labor writer for the Chicago Tribune. He’s a Pulitzer Prize finalist and an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Labor and Employment Relations.
I invited him on the show because he just wrote a piece for In These Times magazine titled “Can the Teamsters and UPS reach a deal?” It’s a really good question, so I gave him a call.
Stephen Franklin, welcome to the upsurge. Thank you for inviting me here. [00:05:00] So let’s start with a recap of what’s been happening. Uh, when we posted our last episode, the teamsters in UPS just came to dozens of TAs on non-economic issues. Uh, they made some progress there, it seems, you know, most, most notably on air conditioning, which was certainly a major demand.
Um, they moved on to economic issues, which of course, uh, are some of the big ticket items. That’s wages, health and welfare benefits, pensions, paid holidays, um, but also, you know, what will be done on forced overtime and gig workers. So, n now what’s, what’s happened since they began discussing the economics?
Well, they’ve collapsed, uh, and essentially reemphasize they, what’s so unusual about this negotiations and union negotiations? Uh, Uh, the union typically never says, we got this. We got that. We got this. This is very different. This is what Sean O’Brien has been doing, and that’s changed and they have had one, a number of, uh, of victories and he see is constantly repeated.
Uh, it appears to be that they’ll be, um, [00:06:00] wiping away the second tier wages. They’ll be wiping away the, uh, mandatory sixth day. Um, that list, that’s the union has said, we have no idea where the company, the company’s very tight mouthed on all of this except saying that they want, um, a contract that lets them stay flexible.
So there’s where we’re at and all of a sudden they hit a bump. Um, the, uh, the company says the union walked away from negotiations and union says, no, they didn’t. Um, uh, that it was a mutual, uh, uh, departure. Uh, so we’re, we’re at a, um, a point of, uh, interesting change. Uh, I’m gonna expect that they’re not gonna get back to talks in the next few days or maybe week or so that the union’s going to step up.
Its, uh, activities, step up. Its, um, picketing practices, uh, make its, uh, effort more known. Uh, I’m also going to, uh, predict that the bottom line issues are going to be increasing the wages [00:07:00] for part-time workers who start today at 1550 an hour. Um, and dealing with the, uh, Small, but increasingly a large number of uh, people who like gig workers, drive their own vehicles and make deliveries.
These are called private vehicle drivers. That’s a lot of great context. Yeah. I want to just say, you know, uh, before we get to a little bit more, uh, we, at the beginning of this discussion, we, we mentioned, you know, the, the bump that is, uh, negotiations breaking down. But the before that, you know, there has been a couple bumps and, and the union said, you know, uh, we have a deadline for a last best and final offer from you ups.
Uh, June 30th, that date came and went. They said, then July 5th, that date came and went. Um, you know, it seems like this is a bargaining strategy of some sorts, as you said. Uh, you know, maybe a deal could be reached, but yeah, let me, let me just bring it back to that you started to unpack that a bit, you know, given [00:08:00] all that’s occurred, um, the back and forth, uh, the leaking of UPS’s counter proposal, which really, really angered a number of UPSers.
You know, tell me, can, can the teamsters in UPS still reach a deal? Yeah, I think that, look, there’s no question they can reach a deal. I think they, what this is a very unique, um, labor negotiations. Typically unions don’t announce every single victory. Typically, they don’t warn the company a month in advance.
They’re walking out. Um, so Sean has brought a whole new strategy, um, to the, to the, uh, what the union is doing. Um, and so I think my gut feeling is that. Um, I could be very far, you know, very wrong that it all depends upon the last few days and if he can walk away with a deal that looks like a victory for him, um, cuz he’s blown up the expectations so dramatically.
Um, now I’ve been talking to Teamsters around the country and, um, as you know, [00:09:00] um, this is a. This is an empire of many different parts. Uh, the folks at the very top are, are eager to get a contract, but not as eager as a part-timers and, and so there’s a d divisions there. Again, I think that the situation will come down to the end.
The danger for the teamsters is that, uh, a strike means less volume, less work, less work means layoffs. The company has been laying off workers. Um, and the explanations of workers here is that the strike is coming, but volume is down. The danger for the company is that if it does go into a strike it, it’s competitors who are all non-union will quickly seize that work.
So I think both of them were going to tip up to the edge. The company must show it’s flexible, it can make money, and, and there are several reasons why it needs to make money in a declining market, and that’s very important The union. Sean May have, you know, [00:10:00] made a mistake in setting such high goals. But if he emphasizes again, has, he repeatedly has, you know, great victories on economic, economic issues, some apparent victories and economic issues, it’s been a success.
The union has won a lot. They, they scared the company into that. He can walk away. It all depends on how he promotes it. And, um, and then ultimately how it goes back to the membership. Remember, The last time the, the membership voted in 2018, they, they thought it was a stinky deal and they voted it down and then the union said, I’m sorry, we don’t listen to workers.
So they overruled that. Um, so that’s, that’s how I see it. Talk about, you know, uh, the importance of this for the Teamster membership, uh, getting a good deal, and beyond that, um, whether it’s a good deal, uh, with no strike or with a strike. What does this mean for the labor movement? Well, for the union of the Labor movement, remember, um, there’s only in about the 1970s we saw the, the introduction of two-tier [00:11:00] wages and, um, and so, you know, the u a W.
Collapsed on that issue and instead of many other companies and also the collapse of pensions, that has not happened. Um, with the, with the teamsters, they still have their pensions, but it’s the two-tier wages. So the union needs to push back against the two-tier wage system. That is, is a critical thing.
Um, all because again, when you look at, you know, if you start, I was talking to a teamster yesterday and she’s been on the job for 11 years as a part-timer, um, and she makes $20 an hour. It’s not a lot of money and she says she can’t live on it. Most part-timers work, um, two or three jobs if possible. So, Just to get by.
Why they work as part-timers for many is that they get this great insurance policy. So it’s a, it’s a golden handcuffs. So for, for labor. The, what the teams are doing is what the u a w may do is that take on an aggressive populist approach. If they can win, it’ll set a message back to [00:12:00] unions that have been, you know, again, slipping backwards on their heels, trying to, you know, survive, uh, making small gains that you can stand up and do these things.
The, the problem though is that, um, the dialogue for the last 20 years has really been dominated by what companies have to say. We’re in, you know, we are competing globally, which in many cases is bullshit. Um, you know, when, when American companies dominate the world as Caterpillar for many years, it wiped away, uh, the victories of the UAW had had.
And so two tier wages, loss of pensions, um, the, the inability to set, uh, a broad scale, you know, for other companies, all of this is at stake. And if the teams just can win, then maybe the u i w, although they’re gonna have far more difficult problems, uh, with the, because they, their auto companies are not as stable as, as, as u p s, you know, despite the great publicity about the fights for, uh, organizing, [00:13:00] um, barristers and, and folks and smaller companies, blue collar, large unions have not won major victories in the United States.
And, and that’s where this can be very important. There’s a long trail of who will benefit from this. If, if the Teamsters win, it’ll benefit unions. If unions win, it’ll benefit. Um, the Democrats, it may show unions may have a point, and the failure of blue collar workers to show allegiance or support as they once did for Democrat votes will be returned in some way.
So I think there’s a, there’s a whole string of potential impacts here. At the same time, it was a string of potential losses. So it’s a, it is a risky situation. Steven Franklin, thanks for joining me on the upsurge. Thank you for inviting me. Bye.
That was Stephen Franklin and you can find his piece in In These Times linked to in the description. You should expect more of his coverage [00:14:00] of the UPS negotiations coming soon.
Teddy Ostrow: [00:00:00] And now for the second part of the show.
Picture this. You ordered something online, you see that UPS is shipping it. It’ll come in a few days. You’re waiting anxiously at home, and suddenly someone pulls up in front of your home in a… Toyota. They get out of the car, package in hand, and begin walking down your driveway to your front door. There’s no brown truck, no brown uniform. Maybe a orange construction vest, and, well, a Toyota, packed to the brim with cardboard boxes. How the heck can they see out their back window, you wonder?
That person that you saw isn’t a typical UPS worker. They’re called a PVD, or personal vehicle driver. They’re called that for obvious an reason. They deliver UPS packages out of their personal vehicles, and they work through a smart phone app, kinda like other gig workers, like Uber and [00:01:00] lift drivers, or doordash delivery people.
In this episode, we’re gonna dig into these mysterious PVDs. You’ll hear from some UPS package car drivers.
Demetria Shaw: Now, the first thing I thought was, I mean, hey, I wouldn’t be tearing up my car like that,
Teddy Ostrow: And you’ll hear from a PVD themself. What’s it’s like to do gig work at Big Brown.
PVD: yeah, it was kind of, kind of crazy how they just kind of threw me to the wolves there and just, You know, never meeting me, seeing me, just here’s 300 packages, let’s put ’em in your garage and you go deliver ’em.
Teddy Ostrow: Now, we haven’t touched on PVDs much in The Upsurge. But their existence are among the central issues of this year’s contract campaign. The Teamsters want to get rid them, because they represent a threat to UPSers’ coveted, union jobs.
Emil Macdonald: you know, it, UPS would like nothing more than to replace a large part of the package car, uh, driver’s job, with.
[00:02:00] Employees that they can hire and fire at will as they need them.
Teddy Ostrow: But the problem isn’t just PVDs. The problem is also subcontracting in general, or hiring non-union workers to do union work. Teamsters see this as an existential threat.
Tony Winters: The loss of jobs, has been extremely hazardous and it’s, causing turmoil anxiety
it’s causing desperation, it’s causing. Heartache
Teddy Ostrow: There’s not that much information out there about PVDs. I struggled to find even a figure on how many there are, but they certain reach the thousands. So, this wasn’t the simplest of episodes to make. My intuition was first to go talk to some package car drivers. After all, they are the ones who interact with the PVDs the most, and it’s their work that’s being taken by people in their personal vehicles. So I called [00:03:00] one.
Demetria Shaw: Demetrius Shaw, everybody at work calls me D Shaw. I don’t know why. I guess they. Try to break down the name and they run my name together. Um, I’ve been with ups, it’ll be 18 years in July.
Teddy Ostrow: Demetria has been a package car driver for 15 years in Atlanta, Georgia, out of Teamsters Local 728. We spoke as she sat in her car between errands, with her young son in the backseat. I asked her to tell me about when she first became aware of these gig-like workers. She said it was it roughly five years ago.
Demetria Shaw: I would see them at the gate, you know, waiting to come in or pulling in, you know, waiting to fill up their cars. Now, the first thing I thought was, I mean, hey, I wouldn’t be tearing up my car like that, but, but technically in the beginning, I really didn’t think anything of it.[00:04:00]
Teddy Ostrow: Demetria wasn’t alone. PVDs started appear around the country during peak season, that’s around holidays when delivery work gets really busy. They’ve been around as early as 2017 in some areas. And as the years went on, drivers started to see more and more of them every peak. The problems started to become evident.
Demetria Shaw: So, so my idea changed, um, once the like senior, less senior drivers, you know, were getting off early. And I kept asking, why are these people getting off so early? I mean, what is the, the thing?
Normally during peak season, workers would expect a decent amount of overtime. But PVDs started eating into that, which was frustrating for some workers. Especially because some of these PVDs were being paid a few bucks more per hour than less senior drivers. Meanwhile, regular package car [00:05:00] drivers were being told to go meet up wtih these gig workers at their houses, at random meet up spots, specifically to take work off their brown truck and give it to the PVDs.
you know, so it, it, it started to be an issue. You know, you’re taking thousands of packages to these, you know, pods for these people to pull up and load their cars and trucks up. Yeah. So, uh, it was crazy. It was crazy
Teddy Ostrow: Within a few years UPS’s use of these PVDs became systematic. Gig workers in their personal cars were working 9-5 jobs at UPS during peak season. Some even got overtime bonuses.
Emil Macdonald: that was sort of the way that UPS handled all the excess, residential volume during peak season, was to use seasonal drivers.
Teddy Ostrow: That’s Emil Macdonald from Local 315 in Martinez, California, another package car driver. He’s been at UPrS [00:06:00] for less time than Demetria, but he too saw the rise of PVDS. He entered the package car right before the covid pandemic started, shortly before the ecommerce boom had drivers working six days a week, up to 14 hours a day..
Emil Macdonald: we basically had to deal with this huge, huge increase in demand people ordering toilet paper. whatever they needed through the mail to, you know, because a lot of stuff was shut down.
And, um, so we got really backed up. There were just piles and piles of packages stacked up in the hubs and in trailers out in the yard, and stuff was arriving like a week late. And you’d go out there and you’d like hit your maximum hours and you’d still have, you know, 40, 50 packages left on your truck when you got back to the building.
Teddy Ostrow: The explosion of volume was untenable. Something had to give.
Emil Macdonald: And after a while, uh, my understanding is that in many places, including mine, the union was able to come [00:07:00] to an agreement with the company to use Pbds, um, to help get, get through some of this excess volume.
peak season is when UPS is contractually allowed to use seasonal drivers. And, um, so as worse as you used to have a certain number of seasonal drivers delivering at U-Haul, now you have, uh, I’m guessing probably depending on the time, you know, 30, 40, 50 drivers, uh, delivering outta their cars.
Teddy Ostrow: The rise of PVDs caught many locals off guard. But Emil explained that a lot drivers actually appreicated the help. During peak season they no longer were working 12 to 14 hour days, struggling to finish their delivery routes to get home at 11pm at night.
During the height of COVID, there was so much work that some Teamster locals agreed to let UPS use PVDs year round. And the practice still [00:08:00] stands. But for many drivers, it started to get excessive. According to Emil, some UPS package car drivers, their entire route was simply dropping off packages to different PVDs, instead of just delivering those packages to homes and businesses themselves.
Emil and other Teamsters activists started see this gig work for what it is.
Emil Macdonald: I’ll tell you with PVDs, like a lot of drivers understand the threat that this poses to our work over the long term. you know, it, UPS would like nothing more than to replace a large part of the package car, driver’s job, specifically residential deliveries, with.
Employees that they can hire and fire at will as they need them. It could save them a lot in terms of how many, uh, package cars they send out.
Teddy Ostrow: in other words, PVDs are more disposable than protected, union package car drivers. And that’s pretty cost effective for the company. Other gig workers like Uber and [00:09:00] Lyft drivers are often misclassified as independent contractors. Meaning they’re not employees and they don’t get all the protections that come with that status.
PVDs actually are employees. They’re seasonal employees that are technically covered in the union contract, and some even pay union fees to be able to work. But the problem is there’s rarely enough time for the union to reach out to them. The casual and transient nature of the work means these workers can’t really exercise the rights and protections they’re supposed to have on the job.
Teamsters fear that their proliferation could create a wedge for UPS’s further deterioration of their union jobs.
Emil Macdonald: the key with this contract is that when we talk about this issue,
it’s a threat to what we bring to the table as UPS driver, just kind of a de-skilling of, the kind of expertise that we bring to the job. So if, if UPS can sort of make this sort of package car driver roll easier to replace, [00:10:00] they would love to do that.
Teddy Ostrow: Some locals in the union have been fighting back through arbitration, or the procedure unions have to address any company violations of the contract. Indeed, in 2018 national master agreement, there’s actually some language that was intended to prohibit PVDs. Article 26. Section 1:
“No package car driver shall be forced to use his or her personal vehicle to deliver packages.”
Clear as day. And that was reflected in some arbitration wins by the union, at Local 804 in New York and 710 in Chicago. But nonetheless, the practice has continued, and many UPSers want stronger language in the next contract to put an end to PVDs once and for all.
Now, we’ve been talking a lot about PVDs, but I also wanted to talk to a PVD. After all it’s these drivers that are working the apparently deteriorated version of the delivery position.
PVD: I started [00:11:00] at P V D, I think it was summer, uh, or winter October-ish, November of 21
Teddy Ostrow: That’s Chris Weathers out of Lafayette, Indiana. He was a PVD in the peak 2021. And he first heard about the gig when his friend posted about it on social media.
He put something on Facebook, that UPS was offering, you know, a bonus. I was like, yeah, hey, I, I could use the money. So, I did that and um, I put my application in literally like two days later. I was delivering,The whole thing was pretty informal. Chris wasn’t even interviewed. He applied and…
PVD: then the next day Todd had called me, my center manager, and he’s like, Hey, uh, can you start work? And then I was like, you know, what do I, well do I come in, what do I do? And he is like, no, we’ll just drop your packages off at your house tomorrow. And then they’ll come with a phone. There really wasn’t much guidance.
Teddy Ostrow: UPS’s system for dealing with PVDs is different around the country. Some get more guidance than [00:12:00] others. But for Chris, there was barely any training, no orientation, nothing. Which was strange to him because it’s a pretty physical job, and it’s easy to hurt yourself carrying heavy packages.
PVD: I didn’t go to the center or nothing. I had blind, you know, they showed up and the, the guy, the kid that was drop dropping the stuff off to me, he is like, he’s like, uh, yeah, I don’t have a phone for you or anything.
And I’m like, well, how do, how do I know what to do? And he’s like, maybe they’re coming, maybe they’re not. So, um, yeah, it was kind of, kind of crazy how they just kind of threw, threw me to the wolves there and just, You know, never meeting me, seeing me, just here’s 300 packages, let’s put ’em in your garage and you go deliver ’em.
Teddy Ostrow: Chris learned the ropes pretty fast. He eventually was given a DIAD, you know, those electronic scanners that UPSers have that make the beeping sound. Later on, UPS would make a phone app version with the same technology so real DIADs weren’t [00:13:00] needed.
But Chris was never told much about his protections on the job.
I didn’t know what kind of contract they, you know, what their rules and regulations, what, what they followed, you know, what was in their book or anything. In a way this was kinda par for course. Many of the people who do PVD work are doing other gig work, that’s often less consistent and more chaotic. According to Emil, at his UPS hub, many of them are immigrants.
Emil Macdonald: Despite the lack of training, Chris thankfully had very few issues. It was actually a good gig. Ok money, relatively consisent, albeit for only few months. But that isn’t case for everyone. Here’s Emil again:
I know that last year, uh, P V D had their car just, just stolen. while they were making a delivery, they left the keys in the ignition and they got back in the car and all the packages were gone.
Teddy Ostrow: these are kind of risks that are typical to gig workers. I know, you know, it’s not uncommon for [00:14:00] people to get robbed, when they’re out there. you’re putting your own car risk in these situations as well.rr
Emil Macdonald: it’s a risky situation and you don’t have the kind of protections that I do, you know, as, as a driver.
Teddy Ostrow: Looking through social media from PVD drivers. You start to see the problems with this kind of set up. People know the iconic brown UPS truck, but it shouldn’t be surprise that some people are suspicious when a person in a passenger car pulls up to their home unannounced. Stories emerged of PVDs being held at gunpoint, even shot at. Dog bites are common.
Some workers in some areas get accident insurance from UPS. But others dont. And accidents aside, UPS isn’t paying for other hidden costs, like oil changes, tune ups — just the normal wear and tear of driving your car for a living.
Like [00:15:00] other gig workers across the economy, PVDs take on many risks and costs that would normally be the company’s.
After getting into the research for this episode, it became clear, however, that the PVD problem was just one facet of a much larger issue at UPS.
I think you’d almost need to call it just a subcontracting episode. you can’t focus on the PVDs,That’s Tony Winters, a feeder driver from Salt Lake City, Utah out of Local 222, who I met on Facebook. He drives the semi-truck, carrying big loads of packages between UPS distribution centers. While PVDs are taking package car drivers’ work. Other subcontractors, or non-union workers hired from outside the company, are eating heavily into unionized feeder work. But Tony explained that it doesn’t stop there.
Tony Winters: Subcontracting can basically take many different forms within the company, and honestly, it’s a pretty vague term. Most work in the bargaining [00:16:00] unit could probably be done by teamsters, but other avenues are obviously taken by the company. This subcontracting can cover car washers, gateway jobs at airports, PVDs, and then common carriers in the Peter department
Teddy Ostrow: The ways UPS subcontracts out work can get pretty confusing. Tony tried to get me up to speed.
Tony Winters: . I’m just trying to make it as concise as possible because it’s, it’s madness.
Teddy Ostrow: The short of it is that UPS can save money by hiring other non-union truck companies to do work that union workers could easily do.
In addition to delivering packages, UPS also provides “logistics services” to other companies. In other words, they help other corporations figure out how to move their products or materials from A to B to C. Supply chain management it’s called.
And suprise, suprise they often [00:17:00] advise companies not to use Teamster semi-truck drivers.
UPS even bought a whole other company called Coyote Logistics, which is like a platform for non-union contractors to pick up loads around the country.
Unlike unionized UPS drivers, and much like PVDs, these contractors, which may just be one individual who owns a big truck, are footed with a whole host of liabilities.
Tony Winters: These common carriers have to cover their own insurance fuel, roadside breakdowns.
There’s a laundry list of everything that they have to attempt to pay for with the small pile of money that they end up getting. So it is honestly meant for the company to save money and potentially bankrupt other small, possibly mom and pop trucks. It’s a dirty deal.
Teddy Ostrow: Now, some of this subcontracting is contractually permitted. The previous Teamsters leadership allowed UPS [00:18:00] to get away with quite a lot. For example, UPS dispatches so-called sleeper teams. That’s when two truck drivers are sent on a 24-driving operation. One of them drives for 12 hours then sleeps in the truck, while the other one takes the second shift.
If normal union feeder drivers are available, UPS isn’t allowed to use subcontractors. But because of the way the system is set up, it’s very hard to track. Which means UPS may be violating the contract constantly.
Tony explained what this means for drivers.
Tony Winters: Just layoffs. Unfortunately, there’s a number of people in my building alone that are sitting there maybe getting one punch a week, or not even getting called at all for weeks at a time because of this displacement.
Teddy Ostrow: Feeder drivers are among the best paid union jobs at UPS, but if your work being [00:19:00] taken by subcontractors, that doesn’t mean all the much. And the problem in the past year has been getting worse.
Tony Winters: The loss of jobs, even in my domicile in Salt Lake, has been extremely hazardous and it’s, causing turmoil anxiety because people aren’t getting anywhere near what they were paycheck wise a year ago.
So it’s causing desperation, it’s causing. Heartache. It’s, I think it’s, it’s absolutely could possibly be weaponized against the bargaining unit just to make them desperate to take whatever’s offered.
Teddy Ostrow: And it’s so bad, that some people have grown cynical and hopeless.
it’s purely done by the company to make people lose faith in their union. Back to UPS’s gig work iteration of subcontracting. [00:20:00] A few years ago UPS bought another company called Roadie. It’s basically a gig company for package delivery, but it’s unclear just how many workers they have. Workers are concerned that still more work will be taken off their package cars.
But even worse, some Teamsters are concerned that when you combine this unknown number of Roadie gig workers, with the thousands of PVDs UPS employs, the company may just have enough people to keep operations going in the case of strike come August 1.
UPS’s legion of gig workers, in other words, is a waiting army of strike breakers. It’s pretty unclear whether UPS can actually do this, and when I asked Demetria from Georgia what she thought, she was skeptical.
Demetria Shaw: well, if they do use them, it won’t work. and the reason why I say that is because they’ve never been trained to be in these, in, in the UPS truck, you know? [00:21:00] They would have to go out and get drugs or they’ll have to go, they’ll have to figure, try to figure out how to move all this volume.
you’re talking about people who, you know, they don’t have no idea how to, you know, get out there and get it like we do where they try to use them. Yes. Will it work? No.
Teddy Ostrow: We may just have to wait and see. And for supporters of the Teamsters union, you may just have to hope that Demetria is correct.
Back to Chris Weathers, the PVD you heard from earlier. He’s actually not a PVD anymore. He’s one of the rare few to go on and get job a union job at UPS. He’s now a second-tier package car driver at Teamsters Local 710, and he’s aware that his experience as a PVD is the exception.
PVD: I was more led to believe that it was more of a stepping stone, you know, Hey, you do a good job, [00:22:00] you know, this is your stepping stone to get in. That’s kind of the impression that I, I was given by management
But, you know, from what I understand, my case where I came from PVD and got straight on is, uh, not very often happens that way.
Teddy Ostrow: And of course, that’s by design. Hiring more union drivers with their benefits and protections, is expensive. And as a public corporation, profit and stock price is UPS’s bottom line. But many of the PVDs who I’ve corresponded with online told me that they actually liked the gig and would do it again. Some are upset by the prospect of Teamsters pushing them out.
But Emil sometimes tries to talk to them about it.
Emil Macdonald: You know, a lot of times I try to, talk to them about, how great a UPS career is, about the benefits and the pay, and try to talk ’em into, trying to get hired on as a part-timer, uh, and ups and eventually try to work into the package car driver role.
Teddy Ostrow: [00:23:00] You know, um, it’s great money while you’re doing it and you know, in many cases PVDs are actually making more than package car drivers. And so it’s a great, you know, it’s a great opportunity for, a month or two until it goes away. But long term, if you want the pension and the benefits and the $40 an hour pay, you gotta be union back scrub driver. Emil doesn’t know any PVDs where he is that have moved up the ladder to a union job. But he when talks to them, he speaks from experience. He himself has worked as an Uber and Lyft driver.
Emil Macdonald: I just think it’s like having been a gig worker, I just see it as kind of a, a dead end. It’s a great way to keep your head above water, to have a little bit of flexibility But you know, the difference between, being a Lyft driver and a UPS driver is huge.
Teddy Ostrow: And don’t just take it from Emil. Here’s Chris again
PVD: Now I see that because I, I realize what they’re doing. I feel like they’re just [00:24:00] trying to, you know, make money for themselves.
I don’t think the problem with, with, uh, with PVDs is so much as them stealing us work.
Uh, our work, it’s them overloading them and taking work, you know, not guaranteeing our guys ate, uh,
Teddy Ostrow: Some Teamsters have suggested that if UPS is gonna use PVDs, maybe they could just give them more protections or let part-timer who are looking for more work take the job. But others won’t have it.
Emil Macdonald: I want our next contract to prohibit DVDs. I think as a principal we should not be expecting people to deliver out of their own cars.
Teddy Ostrow: Even Chris thinks keeping them in any fashion, would be too risky.
PVD: basically, they, they’ve made it to where we can’t give ’em the wiggle room of the P B D, if there’s a way that UPS can get around it,
You know, you, you’re throwing someone in a personal vehicle.
Then, you know, [00:25:00] cramming packages down their throat and expecting them to go out there and withhold, the same level as, as drivers are, you know, and they’re not because they’re not trained. Right. it makes sense, you know, that’s why that, that’s why, uh, if we do that, it just gives them too much room and it just tears our union down, I think.
Teddy Ostrow: Emil thinks that with PVDs, UPS is setting itself up to cut into the market of what a lot non-union companies are doing. UPS executives have claimed that their main competitors no longer FedEx or the US postal service, but gig companies like UberEats and Doordash.
Emil Macdonald: they’re looking at this landscape and they’re saying all these other companies are doing same day delivery.
Amazon flex drivers, you know, they’re generally people who are delivering out of their cars, and if you order something and you’re, you’re close enough to an Amazon flex hub, you can get that package in two to three hours.
But the dark side of course is what we’ve been hearing. Amazon, Uber, and Doordash can do that because it comes with a cost — to the workers. To Emil, it’s just [00:26:00] a scam.
All, all these sorts of expenses to come up from, you know, using your own car to deliver, I think. People don’t really factor in that. That’s a cost that the company is shifting away from itself and onto you.
And even though your paycheck may say that you made $150 that day, after you subtract all those, you know, extra costs that the company has shifted onto you, you know, you’re really making a lot closer to minimum wage. So I view gig work as a, as a scam. and I think it’s been a very, effective scam.
Because of the flexibility that it gives to, you know, gives to employees. But in reality you’re like just a tool for the company to ship liability and like, uh, and maintenance and all these other costs off themselves and unto you.
Teddy Ostrow: At the end of the day, the Teamsters’ battle against PVDs and subcontracting in general is about protecting good, union jobs. And it’s about rejecting Wall Street’s vision of a flexible workforce, exploitable [00:27:00] with unlivable wages and the constant risk of being disposed of at the boss’s whim.
We want that work to be going to, uh, to union members. I wanna see that worker be able to get a union job at U UPS and be able to provide for his family, you know, for the rest of his life, not for one month, a year during the Christmas season.
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The largest private sector labor contract in the US is set to expire at midnight on July 31; as negotiations continue to play out, we will soon see whether or not the nearly 350,000 Teamsters working for United Parcel Services (UPS) will hit the picket line and wage one of the largest strikes in US history. As Sean Orr, a UPS package-car driver and elected shop steward for Teamsters Local 705 in Chicago, and Elliot Lewis, a UPS package-car driver and alternate shop steward for Teamsters Local 804 in New York City, recently wrote in Jacobin, “This contract fight is about two visions of work in the twenty-first century. One is promoted by workers: equal pay for equal work, dignity and autonomy on the job, and a stable work-life balance. The other is promoted by Wall Street: hypersurveillance, low pay, subcontracting, gig work, and ‘flexible’ scheduling practices that hurt workers and benefit bosses.” In this episode, we talk to Sean Orr about growing up in a de-industrializing Milwaukee, his path to becoming a Teamster and working for UPS, why the current contract fight is such a pivotal moment for the Teamsters and the labor movement, and what we can all do to stand in solidarity with all UPS workers.
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Sean Orr:
Hey everyone, my name is Sean Orr. I am a package car driver with UPS here in Chicago. I’m an elected shop steward with Teamsters Local 705. I’m a member of the 705 bargaining committee with UPS, and I am a co-chair of Teamsters for Democratic Union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Well, welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and the Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like You. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So if you are hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out and support the other great shows in our network. And of course, please do support the work that we are doing here at Working People so we can keep growing and keep bringing y’all important conversations every week. You can support us by leaving us positive reviews on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can share these episodes on your social media, and share them with your coworkers, your friends, and your family members.
And of course, the single best thing you can do to support our work is become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. If you subscribe for 10 bucks a month, you’ll also get a print subscription to the amazing In These Times Magazine mailed to your door every month. So we got a lot of goodies for you guys over on the Patreon feed. And I genuinely mean it when I say it is because of our Patreon supporters that we are able to do the rest of the show. Thousands and thousands of people listening to the show every week, and less than 1% of those listeners are subscribers on Patreon, so they’re really carrying the load for the rest of us. So we got lots of great bonus episodes on the Patreon feed for you guys. I know we didn’t have as many in the spring because I was traveling all over the place for work at the Real News Network, but we’ve really come back in full force with some killer bonus episode conversations with great guests.
We did a great crossover with our friends in Comrades over at the Work Stoppage Pod. We talked to Alyssa Court from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project about her great new book. So that’s just a taste of the great bonus content that you’ll get. If you want to listen to more Working People episodes, go subscribe on Patreon right now, and you’ll immediately unlock a whole lot of awesome bonus episodes that we’ve published over the past five seasons of the show. My name is Maximilian Alvarez, and I am very excited to get to sit down and chat with our guest, Sean, today. As you guys know, as we’ve mentioned here on the podcast, as you’ve no doubt been seeing in the news, we are at the precipice of potentially one of the largest strikes in US history. And as we speak, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are in bargaining with UPS, where we’ve got nearly 350,000 teamsters and a contract representing around 350,000 teamsters that is being negotiated right now.
And we know you guys got a lot of questions about this contract fight, what the state of things is right now, what things may look like as we approach the deadline at the end of July, after which we may see picket lines across the country. So we’re going to try to break all of that down with Sean today. And of course, if you guys aren’t all ready, you should definitely go check out the podcast by our friends over at the Upsurge. They’ve been doing really great work. And we’ve actually syndicated the upsurge over at the Real News Network, so you can listen to new episodes over on the Real News podcast feed. But if you want a deeper dive on the UPS contract fight, you should definitely go and binge all of the episodes of the upsurge. They’re doing really, really great work over there.
So Shawn is doing really, really great work over where he is as well. And there’s just so much I want to talk to you about, man. And I guess to maybe set the table a little bit for listeners, we are recording this on Sunday, June 11th. The episode’s going to come out a little later in June. But as we speak right now, your union is holding a strike vote, a strike authorization vote. And the results of that strike authorization vote are going to come out later this week. So by the time you guys hear this, we’ll know the results of that. I’m going to go ahead and assume that we can kind of take it as a given that it’s going to be a yes vote. If not, color me shocked and surprised, but that is something that’s going to change by the time that you guys listen to this episode.
But to give you sort of a bird’s eye view of why this is such a crucial struggle and why we should all be paying attention, and why we should all be supporting our brothers, sisters, and siblings at UPS and with the teamsters, I’m going to read a couple of passages here from a great piece that Sean co-wrote with another UPSer and shop steward Elliott Lewis. This was published in Jacobin this past week. We will link to in the show notes, it’s called UPS Teamsters are Ready to Strike. So in this piece, Sean and Elliot write, “With the largest private sector labor contract in the United States set to expire at midnight on July 31st, the eyes of the American labor movement are on United Parcel Service, or UPS and the nearly 350,000 teamsters like us that work there. Talk is coming from all corners of a potential strike.
International Brotherhood of Teamsters general president, Sean O’Brien, made it clear on day one of his presidency, if UPS does not meet the demands of the teamsters, picket lines will go up on August 1st. If this happens, the strike will be one of the largest in American history. As the contract expiration looms less than two months away, other workers across the country are also standing up to demand more. From a wave of successful union elections at Starbucks, trader Joe’s and other retail stores to walkouts from Amazon to Hollywood, American workers fighting for dignity and fighting compensation through collective action have momentum on their side. In return, employers have intensified their union busting.
The UPS contract fight therefore comes at a pivotal moment for US labor. What happens here could shape the direction of the movement for years to come, not only because this contract covers several hundred thousand workers who move 6% of US GDP daily, but also because the issues at stake in this fight are representative of those faced by workers across the country. This contract fight is about two visions of work in the 21st century. One is promoted by workers. Equal pay for equal work, dignity and autonomy on the job, and a stable work-life balance. The other is promoted by Wall Street, hyper surveillance, low pay, subcontracting, gig work, and ‘flexible scheduling practices’ that hurt workers and benefit bosses.”
So as I said, we got a lot to talk about. I got a lot of thoughts firing after reading just that introduction from the great piece that Sean and Elliot wrote, but not from me. Sean, I want to bring you in here and want to… Before we really dig into your time working at UPS and what’s really at stake in this high stakes contract fight, I wanted to get to know more about you and your winding path into doing this kind of work. So you said you’re in Chicago now, right? Are you originally from the Midwest?
Sean Orr:
Yeah, I’m from the Midwest, born and raised. I moved to Chicago almost five years ago, but I’m from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about 85 miles up the road, born and raised in the city up there. And I think that growing up in Wisconsin when I did was really… It really did kind of set me on the path that I’m on. Milwaukee, when I was coming up in the world, was considered… For a long time, it was considered one of the best places to live if you were a working person. It was a ton of union manufacturing jobs, high pay. People were able to afford, a home little cabin up north for their holidays. They’re able to pay for their kids to go to college. They’re able to have two cars. It’s a real kind of middle class dream, right? And Milwaukee, like a lot of the rest of the country, at least the part of the country I’m from, the high days are behind us.
We kind of live in the relic of a past better kind of life. Instead of driving around a city full of pretty well off working people, you drive around a city full of abandoned factories that are turned into strip malls, which have now been abandoned and been replaced by Amazon warehouses. The median income in that city is around the poverty line. People really suffer. And there, the people who are working are struggling to get by, and then there’s plenty of other people who just, they’re not even in the economy. They’re not even making it. I think growing up around that, knowing people who had seen their parents lose their homes during 2008, 2009, seeing the impacts of just not… I’m 30. I’m not from the generation that the American dream happened to. You know what I mean? We’re in the aftermath of that. I had a lot more of my buddies in high school have issues with drugs and alcohol.
People go off and fight in the military, come back and have to deal with wherever that is. A lot of people get to go to college because that’s where a whole education system is set up to do. And then you come out the other end of it and you don’t know what kind of job you can have. There’s nothing for those career that you spend tens of thousand dollars for. So maybe you end up being a barista, or maybe you end up working in a kitchen or whatever and just kind of struggling to get by. So that’s kind of the broad framing, right? But then there was definitely a big igniting moment for myself and for a lot of other young people. My generation, that was when Scott Walker took over as a state governor in 2010. I remember in 2011, when Walker and the Wisconsin Republicans introduced Act 10 to strip away collective bargaining rights for public sector workers, I went to Madison like over a hundred thousand other Wisconsinites did, and participated in the protests and occupations demonstrations.
I remember that was the first time that I saw… I had family who were in the teamsters, but that was the first time I saw the teamsters because they had all their tractor trailers pulled up in front of the Capitol building with all the rest of the unions and stuff like that. You had farmers parade in there, tractors through the city streets. It really was a people’s uprising. The people of Wisconsin flooded the streets of the capitol to try to defend the rights of unions, and we lost. We lost that fight. But for me, I was 18 at the time. That fucking set the spark, and I’ve been running with it ever since. I was in college at the time. I spent more time protesting in school sometimes, but I kind of came out the other end really committed to being a part of labor, being part of the labor movement. I ended up working at a meatpacking plant for a while in Wisconsin. Then I ended up over at UPS in 2017. I’ve been with the company ever since, so over six years now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I have so many thoughts firing off from that. So I want to start by jumping back to the beginning, right? Because I think this is something that I find myself thinking about more and more these days, right? Because in many ways, I do think that a lot of the generational discourse is kind of bullshit. The media creates these sort of generational categories that are held together by scotch tape, and it depends on, I don’t know, what class you’re in, what state you grew up in, what gender you were, what language you speak, right? There are all these kind of variations within existing generations that kind of make the experience different for all of us. But I do think there are a couple things that really do sort of connect millennials as a generation that experience something distinct.
So I’m an elder millennial. You’re a younger millennial, right? But we’re still that particular generation that straddled the digital divide. We grew up with an analog childhood, and then a digital adulthood, and that does something to you. That messes with your brain. I think it makes us uniquely positioned to remember what it was like before, but still be digital natives. I think there’s actually a lot of good things that come from being in that position. Because if folks who grow up digital natives and don’t have that sort of analog experience, it can be hard to even imagine what that was like, or imagine a future without all these digital technologies in our pockets and our homes, so on and so forth. But also, when you were talking, it made me realize it’s like, yeah, we also, as a generation, sort of grew up in the tail and the sort of last gasps of 20th century American prosperity.
It still did feel like we… You had the.com boom. You had the real estate bubble in the nineties. There were still… And with the end of the Cold War, it felt in our childhoods the future was still going to be open for us. And that if we buckled down, worked hard, went to college, who knew where we could go. And it just felt like from 9/11 to the market crash to everything that’s happened then, we’ve just been getting reminder after reminder, reminder that that, as you said, the American dream is more or less dead. That promise, that future promise is no more. And I say all this to say, I was wondering what to you, as you were describing growing up in Milwaukee and experiencing that decline, what does that look like for you as a native growing up? Because I guess I’m hearing it more and more. People are talking about how… I just had a conversation with an older person this week who was like, “I remember when you saw more homeless people on the subway in New York.” It wasn’t always that way.
It happened after key policy decisions. I remember when college was a affordable for people, or you could support, as you said, a family. You could buy a home working a job with a decent wage. That all seemed possible. And then but it’s like gradually, that’s been stolen away. And so I was just curious what that looked like in your neck of the woods, or when you started to notice that maybe the future wasn’t continuously opening onto a more prosperous horizon, but in fact, things were starting to fall apart and gradually go to shit.
Sean Orr:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I don’t know. Does that question make sense?
Sean Orr:
Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I think that it’s… It kind of is just… For me, I was born in 1992, a lot of Milwaukee’s heyday manufacturing, good jobs. This was a city that was… It was I think top three manufacturing output in the whole country. There was so much made in Milwaukee. Obviously, Miller and Harley Davidson, all those big name brands, but just a ton of stuff was made there. It was like over a quarter of the city worked in factories. And by the time I was born, a lot of that had been shuttered. It was from the mid seventies through the late eighties, was just one place after the other just shuttering and workers fighting like hell to try to hold on, and it didn’t happen.
But those buildings are still there. You know what I mean? So my whole life, growing up in Milwaukee, you’re driving around the city, you’re driving through the poorest neighborhoods, and these were neighborhoods that you could tell… You just got to look at stuff. This neighborhood obviously wasn’t always poor. These are nice houses. This is a three-story house. They’ve got a front yard, a backyard, they’ve got a driveway… That’s a good house, but it’s falling apart, and now it’s divided up into eight or nine little units and stuff like that. It’s definitely not well kept, right? The neighborhood’s falling apart. People are poor. A lot of people aren’t working.
Right in the middle of the neighborhood is an empty factory or an empty flat lot, where there once was a factory that they just demolished. You really do see those relics all around you. In the city of Milwaukee, you’ve got Allen Bradley. They made these automated control systems, these panels for factories, for assembly lines and stuff, and their factory is huge. It’s this nine-story cement concrete structure, just plopped that down in the middle of the south side. It’s got the biggest clock tower in the world on it. And it was a place that had, at the height, I think 12,000 full-time union jobs, and those were good jobs. That was a UE local, United Electrical workers, really militant union, really involved in the neighborhood, in the city, in local politics. And I think the last union workers retired from there, 2009, 2010, something like that.
And now this massive nine-story structure, it’s still there, and there’s some engineering firm that’s in there or something like that, but they only use a little corner of it. You can drop a nuclear bomb on that thing. It’s not going to go anywhere. You know what I mean? But that’s still standing over the neighborhood where all the people in that neighborhood used to work there, and all that is gone. People are scrambling to find jobs, and I think there’s a permanent sense of we’re in this left-behind space in Milwaukee.
Milwaukee in the late ’60s was considered one of the best places to be an African-American in the United States, because African-Americans had access to great jobs. You could have a good house. It was a high standard of living. Now it’s considered one of the top two poorest cities for African-Americans in the entire country. Now, literally people are record-high poor now than they were in the past. The present is worse than the past, and you live in a city that looks like that. And I think that that rings true to a lot of people of my generation growing up across the Midwest, across the Rust Belt, I’m sure even in Baltimore and cities like that out on the East Coast.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I was going to say, the story here is Bethlehem Steel is the one that everyone talks about. But it was wild to me moving out here from Michigan… So I’m originally from Southern California, but I was living in Michigan during my graduate program. But it felt like a mini Detroit coming out here. Just tons of vacant households that, like you said, you’re looking at them, and some of the row houses, they look small from the front, but like in Detroit, you also have whole neighborhoods of big houses that are just boarded up, or maybe they’re propped up with these big planks of wood. And it just feels like the city’s being desiccated, and it is. The city’s been losing population for decades. It’s slowly dying. So the people who stay get taxed more.
The city’s entire philosophy on generating economic development is to give huge tax breaks away to already-wealthy developers using financial instruments like TIFs. They’re supposed to be incentivizing development in blighted areas so that they can generate investment in areas that don’t normally generate a lot of investment. But of course, with the way that city corruption goes, private industry corruption goes, all that money is just… As my colleagues Stephen Janis and Taya Graham and the great Jane Miller have reported in a recent documentary, it’s like all that money’s just going to build up high rises on the waterfront. It’s not going back into poor and working communities. In fact, those poor and working communities are financing these massive developments that they’ll never be able to enter themselves. I mean, it’s just a cruel, sick joke that I see playing out in cities around the country.
But like you said, like over there in Milwaukee, we do have the hollow husks of industry past dotting the landscape here. I saw it in Bessemer when I went down there to report on the Amazon union campaign. That Amazon facility in Bessemer sits on top of the former site of a steelworker shop. Once the center of production, the economic heart of the working class community there was ripped out, now we see that Bessemer has twice the national poverty rate. It’s also a majority Black town. Those good union jobs were not really replaced with anything comparable, until along comes Amazon that’s paying better than the minimum-wage service jobs in the area, but still paying less than the union warehouse jobs in the greater Birmingham area.
So it’s just all part of this picture of decay and of, I think, deliberate destruction of our communities by profit-seeking entities that have the power to just destroy entire communities, states, generations, and they get a pass as if, well, that’s what they got to do for their business, so great. So this is how we organize a society. This is how we organize the way that people provide for themselves and their families, just hoping that an industry won’t pick up and leave your entire area in ruin, apparently.
Sean Orr:
Well, I think you really hit the nail in the head with the word deliberate, because I think that that’s something that gets lost a lot. People talk about the Rust Belt as if it’s a natural phenomenon, like a famine that came through or a plague of locusts. It’s like, “Oh yeah, this sucks, but now that’s the way the world goes. You just got to live with it.” No, this was deliberate. This was a conscious effort. There were human beings that made conscious decisions that it was better to wreck all of this social and economic destruction on hundreds of thousands of people in Milwaukee, and you extrapolate that across all these other regions. It’s better to have that than to continue to have these people be our employees, because these working people in this country and in Milwaukee, all over this country, have high expectations of what they expect for the fruit of their labor.
And in a city like Milwaukee… Milwaukee was a manufacturing city, but it was a militant city. All of these shops were union to the core. They would strike for whatever they needed, and there was that real sense of a militant working-class culture. There’s a reason why in the city of Milwaukee, for over 50 years the city government was run by the Socialist Party, because there was this level of organization on the job, in the neighborhoods, throughout society, where people felt and knew that they were a part of a class of people, the people who are exploited, and they wanted to have all these institutions, these organizations to fight back. And the people who owned those factories, the people who worked in those financial firms that own most of these factories, most of these companies now, they made a conscious decision: it is better to devastate this than to continue to extract profit from this.
Those factories are still up there. They’re empty. You could reopen a factory in the middle of Milwaukee tomorrow to make car parts and make whatever. You could reopen all sorts of these places tomorrow. You’ve got the people there. You’ve got the instruments there. You got everything. They don’t do it because they would rather make the money elsewhere and deny us power here. And I think that that’s really important for people to realize this was deliberate. All of this stuff is deliberate, and it’s something that we’re bringing up a lot in our UPS contract fight: what Ellie and I raised in the article.
We can’t just keep our blinders on. We have to see that what’s being done to us, it’s not just some natural thing. It’s a planned thing. It’s something that’s planned. There’s deliberate ideas behind it. And if it’s human ideas, if it’s deliberate ideas, then that means we don’t have to accept it. It means that, you know what? That might be wrong. That might not be right for us. Maybe we can actually do something different. And we’re seeing the new plans, the plans around how our logistics industry needs to be run, around how our economy needs to be run after COVID. We’re seeing that play out in our contract fight, and we’re fed up with it. We think we should have a different vision for how our lives should be in the future.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, man. And I think that that’s one of many reasons why people should be invested in this fight, and also why they should be invested in the labor movement, right? Because it wasn’t always this way. I guess that’s really what I was trying to get across with me and Sean going down memory lane here, talking a bit about our experience witnessing American decline, is I don’t want folks listening to this to end up feeling like, “Well, this is just the way things are. This is the best that we can get. This is the natural order of things.”
No, no, no. This is a world created by policymakers. This is a world that we have inherited from the tycoons of our day, and they’re bought off politicians and their friends in the media and stuff. The people in positions of power have made choice after choice after choice that have laid the groundwork for the path that we’re currently on, and that includes decimating the organized labor movement. That includes deregulating industries left and right so that even though working people have been working longer and harder for the past 40 years, we have seen our wages by and large stagnate as the cost of living continues to go up.
And as all of that excess productivity that is coming off of our backs, all of the profits, all the revenue generated by that, it is not, as Ronald Reagan promised it would, trickling down. We’ve got 40-plus years of data to prove, no, that’s bullshit. It’s all been going into the pockets of executives and their shareholders. So these are deliberate decisions that were made. This is a future that was created not by, as Sean said, natural processes or acts of God. This is a manmade decline of a society that is capable of so much more.
And I guess by way of getting us to your time at UPS and the current contract fight, you mentioned another crucial historical moment that gives us a window onto those decisions that are made and the impacts that they have, which was Scott Walker in Act 10. And so I was actually in your neck of the woods two years ago, reporting for the Real News Network, talking to and filming with and recording with a lot of educators across the state about the state of the labor movement and the plight of public-sector workers 10 years after the devastating passage of Act 10 under Republican Governor Scott Walker. I was wondering, because I know we got a lot to get into with UPS and the contract fight, but I wanted to just ask if you could say a little more about what that moment was and what it meant for you, what it taught you about the people who are actively making our lives worse, and what the antidote looks like?
Sean Orr:
Yeah. That’s a great question. I mean, I think we all learn from experience. We all learn from our experiences in life: things that we’ve read, things that we’ve seen. But I think that a lot of times, we learn collectively when we all engage in something together, and coming out the back end of it, win or lose, there’s a lot to digest. And I think it took me and my whole generation up in Wisconsin that went through that fight… We learned a lot of lessons out of that. A lot. Obviously, we lost, like Act 10. We fought that. People occupied the State Capitol, a hundred thousand protestors outside for weeks, and it still passed and we still lived with it.
But I think some things that we did learn… We learned that we don’t have to just keep going through the motions. When wrong is being done to us, we can stop what we’re doing and go act. To see all those working people would come out, skip work… There was talk of a general strike in Madison just to go to be at the protest to shut it down. That was incredible. I think we learned that there’s people in the Republican Party that have a absolute commitment to wringing every last penny out of us and to making us as broken down and as unable to defend ourselves as working people as possible.
I think we learned that the leadership of the Democratic Party don’t have any answers for the current moment and they still don’t. The big idea coming out of them at the time was, “Hey, the guy who just lost an election was Scott Walker for governor. Let’s run him again for governor and let’s see if we get a better result.” And we didn’t, and he lost. But I think that we all got to see, “Oh, this party, the Democrats, that’s supposed to be there to have our backs, they’re not up for the challenge. They’re not up for this moment. They’re using talking points from 25 years ago.” Now they’re using talking points from 35 years ago. That’s the reason why they’re all 80-plus years old, because young people, we don’t believe that. That doesn’t click. They’re not talking about the current moment. They’re stuck in the past.
And I think that we learned the absolute vitality and importance of our own organizations as working people, our own unions, our own organizations, right? Because if this state government was doing that much just to bust up teachers’ unions, well, then teachers’ unions and other unions must have a lot that they’re afraid of, and they do. Any space where ordinary working people come together and realize, “We can change the world. We can change our workplace. We don’t have to accept things as what they are,” that’s a danger to them. That’s terrifying to them.
Going back, that’s why they busted all of the manufacturing in all these places, because that class-consciousness, that awareness that comes out of people every day struggling with each other in their unions against their bosses, that creates a different working class than the capitalists want to have. They want docile people. They want people to feel defenseless, to feel like little atoms, little pieces of driftwood floating around in the ocean. That’s what they want, and anything that’s not that, they’re scared shitless of it.
So I think my biggest lesson coming out of that was we need a full-on revitalization and transformation of the labor movement, because we got to go to fucking war with these people. We got to stop what they’re doing. We got to stop the direction they want to take our country in, because we all deserve better. We all deserve better, and we got to fight like hell and make that happen.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, brother. I couldn’t have said it better myself. I think that is beautifully and powerfully put, and really tracks with, I think, what we hear week in, week out on this show. It tracks, I know, with my own experience. I say this a lot, because it’s something that I’ve realized later in life, looking back at all the low-wage non-union jobs that I’ve had, from service-industry work, pizza-delivery driver, retail, restaurant, waiter, warehouse temp, factory temp. What I realized is that the American workplace… a lot more than work happens there, or a lot of work is done on us like you’re saying. There’s a lot of social conditioning that happens in the workplace that serves the interests and needs of the people who are in power and who are determining the shape of our society and need us to be compliant, exploitable, powerless, cogs in the machine in order to make the rest of the machine run the way that they want it to. And so I think when it comes down to it, the most basic fact is that low wage non-union jobs are social factories or schools, places where we as working people and as citizens are educated in accepting our own powerlessness, educated to just accept that there are going to be undemocratic hierarchies, layers of management that determine our lives, our schedules, our pay, whether or not we get to keep our job with or without just cause that we just have no real say over and we just have to accept.
We start to look over our shoulders at our fellow workers and see their success as our loss. All of these things, they don’t just stay in the workplace, they stay with you. They carry over into how you see yourself and how we see ourselves and our relationship to things like government or anything, any of the big companies whose products we consume. We just accept that we have no real power or say over the quality of those products, things like that. All of that powerlessness that we just learned to accept, I think a lot of it comes from and is forged in our brains through our experience of work in this country. And like you said, it’s something completely different, or at least you see the pathway to something completely different when you are in a union or when you are fighting to build a union.
And when you were seeing how scared shitless you were making your boss at the very thought that you and your coworkers are working together to exercise your democratic rights to unionize and advocate for yourselves, to refuse unsafe work, so on and so forth. I wanted to ask about that. I know you mentioned that you had some family members in the teamsters, but what was it like for you coming to work at UPS and how was that experience perhaps becoming part of the union, how was that different from what you were used to? I guess just walk us through those early weeks. What was it like for a young Sean entering that job and that union?
Sean Orr:
Yeah, I think that teamsters at UPS are different, and I think it’s because there’s been such a counter force to what you’re talking about there. That constant daily, hourly, minute by minute push of management to just make you into the perfect cog in the machine and just break you down, dehumanize you, make you just into this machine. There’s such a counter force at UPS or because of the militancy of the union, because of this long history of the union, because of the 1997 strike. My coworkers who are the highest senior guys, gals, they were strike veterans and they carry that memory with them. You got stuff like TDU, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, that’s militant rank and file reform movement in the union that’s really active on the job in a lot of places. That just creates a different work environment.
For me, coming in there, and this wasn’t my first union job, but when I started at UPS, you walk in and you see people wearing teamster shirts, you hear people talking about the contract. You see more coworkers than I’ve ever seen before, I remember I was shocked by this. I was shocked by how many coworkers of mine were getting right in the face of a supervisor or manager and telling them exactly how they felt about what that manager or sup was doing. People, they walk in with their heads up and they’re able to look the boss in the eye and tell the boss, “No.” And that creates such a different environment. And I think that helps to provide a little bit of a context to where we are in this contract fight and why the expectations are so high, why the militancy is so high, why this really is a transformational moment. UPS teamsters, we have this level of organization, this commitment to each other and to this fight that it makes things different. It makes things different.
It makes management way more confrontational because they are confronting something. They’re not just facing off against, “Yes sir, no sir,” docile workers. They’re up against people who … What we as stewards tell our coworkers is, “You argue with the manager until he instructs you to do something.” They’re like, “Hey Scott, I need you to go take 20 stops off this guy.” Now you can say no. Just say no. And they’re like, “No, come on. I need you to do me a favor, blah, blah.” “No, nope. Not doing it. Not doing it. Not doing it.” Argue with them, be combative. Up until the point that they’re, “I am instructing you to do this, otherwise you’ll be discharged under this part of the contract.” It’s like, “all right, then go do it.”
But that rebelliousness and that willingness for us to assert our humanity on the job, it makes us a different place, and it makes UPS management act differently. It makes the company act differently and it makes us act differently as workers. We have a higher standard of how we expect to be treated and how we carry ourselves at work. And I think that that’s a project of a lot. It’s not perfect. There’s a lot more that we can be doing and there’s a lot more I want to see happen. But I know that we are in a lot different of a place in a lot of other workplaces in the country. And I would like to see us spread that beyond UPS into the rest of the economy.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I guess even on top of that very different kind of relationship that you have with management A, when you’ve got a union, and I don’t want to pretend that it’s the same everywhere. Of course we know that there are plenty of workplaces where the union’s been chipped away at. You guys know, we talk to folks every week who are working to revitalize their unions, working to vote out business-friendly intransigent leadership that’s not serving the members, or bringing in these reform administrations, like the teamsters did, the UAW has done, like some of the railroad unions that we were talking to last year who were not happy with how the leadership handled the contract negotiations. You got these really crucial leadership elections happening where incumbents are getting unseated. That’s important. For folks to democratically engage in their union and make it what they need it to be and be part of that change. That’s also really important and that’s happening in union locals across the country, and that’s also another important crucial part of this story.
But Sean, I wanted to ask, having that kind of relationship to the union and to management walking into UPS, I guess that doesn’t mean that also the job’s not very demanding and that you don’t face a lot of backbreaking labor. We interviewed some of your colleagues last year about the dangerous and ridiculous heat in those package cars, the lack of air conditioning in there, the front facing cameras surveilling you guys on your routes. COVID has just exploded the already growing … What’s the word I’m looking for? Just the Amazon type economy, where people are ordering their goods to their door instead of going to the mall or going to the store.
We’re doing that more now than we ever have been. And so who do you guys think is delivering all those packages? It’s the boys in brown and also USPS and FedEx and so on and so forth. I was wondering, Sean, if you could talk to us a bit about the work side of it? What does a typical week look like for you and what was it like learning those ropes and getting accustomed to being a full-time UPS worker?
Sean Orr:
Well, on package car side, being a package car driver, I think one of the first things that people learn when they start as a package car driver is that you don’t need a gym membership anymore. Most of my coworkers, myself included, you lose between 20 and 30 pounds your first six months on the job because it is a very physically demanding job. The company, and they think this is a cute term, but they like to call us industrial athletes, which the more you think about it, the more awful that is, but it’s a very physically demanding job.
For me, an average workday is delivering around 300 packages a day and picking up maybe 100 packages a day. That’s not just constant. You pull up, you’re driving this eight ton truck around your neighborhood, you park, you get in the back, you grab every package you need for that block, and that could be a tiny little Amazon envelope or it could be 120 pound dresser that somebody ordered, and you got to deliver them all. Every package in there, you personally are delivering. You have to get it out of the truck. You have to walk to the house, into the apartment complex, whatever it is, load it on the hand cart, do whatever you got to do. You’re usually walking, for me here in the city of Chicago, I’m usually walking about nine to 10 miles a day on the route. On top of doing all that lifting and lowering of all those packages, on top of driving this big hunk of steel around the neighborhood.
It’s pretty physically demanding, and it gets worse and worse. We’ve got things that most people in my sector of the economy don’t have. We don’t have a production standard. I cannot get disciplined for not delivering X amount of stops an hour. There’s a lot of factory jobs where it’s like, “You need to make 100 widgets an hour, otherwise you can get written up for it.” We don’t have a production standard at UPS. You work at a safe pace, you get the job done. We also don’t have a cap on overtime until 14 hours a day. Take your time, work at your pace, but you can be out there until 10:30. You can be out there making deliveries that late and you can be picking stuff up.
It’s a lot of hard work. People that work a little too fast, we call my coworkers who do that runners. If you’re a runner, it might mean that today you get home at like 5:30. But the next day, you come into work, the company’s got 20 more stops on your truck because you turned out to be a real productive worker that day and they love nothing more than to reward productive workers with more productivity. And people that keep up with that, by the time they’re 20 years in, they’re getting knee replacements, they’re getting hip replacements, their quality of life plummets, especially after retirement because they’re falling apart. Human beings aren’t made to do that job for that long and that intensely.
We really try to set as much controls on it as we can. It’s a big fight in the current contract right now around mandatory overtime, around making sure that we have ACs in the vehicles, around making sure we can take breaks during hot days, extra breaks, all this sort of stuff. Because that’s the other thing, all of that work, those 300 packages you’re delivering, that 10 miles you’re walking, those 100 packages you’re picking up, you’re doing that in sunshine, rain, snow, sleet, ice. I’ve worked in blizzards, I’ve worked outside when it’s negative 20 below wind chill. I worked outside when it’s 100 degrees in the shade.
We work no matter what. And we all found out that we work during global pandemics too. I remember that day very vividly because we weren’t sure if we were going to be working or not, and then we all get a message on our little DIAD as we’re watching the city of Chicago, people’s businesses starting closing up, people putting signs in their windows being like, “I don’t know when I’ll reopen,” because it’s March, 2020. None of us get what’s happening. And we all got a message on our DIAD saying, “UPS is considered an essential business. You all are expected to report to work tomorrow.” That was it. Point, point, period. That was when we all found out that we are a part of the essential army of workers in this country. We work no matter what.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. And like you said, at great cost to yourselves. We had that panel recording with three other UPSers last summer after a poor guy died in his package car in LA. Imagine dying that way. Imagine your future slipping away while you boil in the back of a package car and no one finds you. Or like you said, imagine not being able to play with your grandkids because you’ve had two knee replacements from getting in and out of that damn package car and trying to hustle. Every day your boss tells you, “you got to hustle.” Or you tell yourself, “Oh, you got to hustle. You got to hustle.” But then decades later when you can’t enjoy your retirement, when you can’t play ball with your kids, who else is going to remember how much you hustled that day?
There’s that great saying that years from now, the only people who are going to remember you worked late are your kids, and I think about that a lot. And of course a lot of us as working people, we don’t have much of a say over that. We’ve interviewed so many people who are working forced overtime and missing their remaining years with their parents before they pass away, or they’re missing tee-ball games and barbecues with their families because the coal mine that they work for in Alabama is forcing them to stay underground for longer. The production plant at Frito-Lay mistreats its workers so badly that the few people who still stay get all that extra work piled on top of them and they’re pushed into forced overtime, so on and so forth. I say this to really hook things back to that great passage in the Jacobin piece that I read from at the beginning of this episode where Sean and Elliot really talk about why the UPS contract fight is so pivotal, not just for UPSers but for all of us, for the labor movement.
We are pushing against the boss’s vision for society, and I think we’ve all seen what that vision is, what that direction goes in, and what it would mean for us and our society to continue to go down this route where human bodies are just grist for the mill, where we are nothing but numbers on a spreadsheet. We are nothing more than just faceless meat bags to be discarded when we have nothing left to give. That is Amazon’s entire business model. It’s just chew people up and spit them out when they have nothing left to give. That’s why they have a turnover rate at some of those sorting facilities of 150%. That’s insane. I’ve worked in those warehouses, not Amazon, but warehouses like that. I cannot imagine working somewhere where the turnover was that high, and we had a high turnover at my warehouse.
But if you have 150%, you have no one to work with. The guys to your left and your right are going to be gone by the end of the week. Anyway, I digress. Point being is I wanted to talk about the contract fight, roll this over into a discussion of how this is all culminating in the current contract fight and what’s really at stake in that fight. And I was thinking maybe by way of getting us there, if you could connect to what you were describing in your day-to-day work as a package car driver. All those packages that end up in your truck, someone’s loading them in there. There are also folks sorting those packages. There are people delivering those packages. There’s a big operation here. There are full-timers, there are part-timers. I was wondering if you could just give folks a little more of an insider’s view of how big this operation is and what sort of key issues in that larger workplace ecosystem are really rallying you and your fellow Teamsters and UPSers in this current contract fight.
Sean Orr:
Yeah, for sure. So, me, as a package car driver, I’m the one that people see out in public. I’m the UPS employee driving a delivery truck in the neighborhoods, making deliveries, making pickups, bringing them back into the warehouse at the end of the night. That’s just a corner of UPS. UPS, We’re as integrated into the U.S. economy as the railroads are. And we have people who are doing things, who are doing a job in every corner of that to make that happen.
Over half of my coworkers around the country are part-timers. These are people who work in the warehouse, either loading or unloading trailers, working on sorting belts or sorting lines, or loading or unloading packaged cars. They are paid next to nothing for their work here in Chicago. They’re paid just above the minimum wage right now. They deal with the worst levels of harassment.
The thing with us baggage car drivers, we’ve got that hyper surveillance, you got stuff on the trucks and stuff like that, but when you’re out on the road, you’re by yourself. You know what I mean? You don’t have a supervisor standing right next to you, screaming at you every minute to work faster, work faster, work faster. Our brothers and sisters that work in the building have that every single day. They deal with massive amounts of harassment. People who basically crack a whip on their backs to make them work faster. The levels of harassment are terrible, absolutely terrible. I’ve had coworkers who have been in prison say that it feels like the exact same place.
So for the part-timers, the biggest issue we’re facing right now is just poverty. People are not making nowhere near enough money. And the company, I think they know that, right? I think they like that. But it’s at such a point where you’ve got people who rather than get forced to come in to work, and the company right now, they’re trying to save money, so they’re cutting down on overtime for part-timers.
So basically, they’re trying to make them do seven hours worth of work in three and a half hours, because that’s their daily guarantee per the contract. They are guaranteed three and a half hours of work. Anything over five hours is overtime. So the companies save money. They’re like, “Hey, how about you do the same amount of work you would do starting at 1:00 AM, but we’re going to have you start at 4:30.” You’re doing that, you’re paying someone just above the minimum wage, and you’re going to yell at them the whole time, a lot of people don’t take that, so they’re just not coming into work. They’re quitting. Massive turnover that we have. At my building alone, we’ve got dozens of vacancies because nobody wants that job.
So I know here in Chicago and around the country, getting a significant raise for part-timers is one of our top priorities. Making more full-time jobs on the inside is a top priority, because we believe that people want a full-time job, they should have it. We can’t accept part-time America as a reality. We should push back against that, right?
Obviously, some people want to work part-time, and that’s totally fine, but if you’re doing that, you should be comfortable. I don’t think that anything less than $25 an hour is acceptable at a company that can make $13.9 billion in profits last year, and since they didn’t know what to do with that money, they weren’t going to give it to us in raises, they decided to give it a stock buybacks to all their rich buddies in Wall Street. So part-time issues are significant.
We’re also looking for AC inside the facilities and more cooling options inside the facilities because it’s hot. These big warehouses, managers have AC in their offices, but us workers on the line, we don’t.
We’re looking for stronger stuff to fight back against harassment on the job as well and all sorts of that kind of stuff.
Beyond that, you’ve got the tractor trailer drivers, which in UPS lingo we call theater drivers. Those are the folks who are CDL operators. They’re driving the semi-trucks on the freeways. They’re bringing packages in and out of the warehouses in the tractor trailers. They’re going to big companies. They’re going to Amazon. They’re going to all sorts of places. Those folks are dealing with insane amounts of overtime, usually working 12 hours a day, if not longer.
We are also dealing with a lot of issues of subcontracting the company, constantly subcontracting feeder work to non-union competitors. We want to put a stop to that.
And then, obviously, we’ve got the issue with package car drivers. In our last contract, we had a second wage tier and job tier forced on us, 22.4 drivers. Those are package car drivers who are package car drivers. They make deliveries, they do pickups, but they make about $9 less an hour at top scale. They don’t have protection from forced overtime, like package car drivers can get, and they are also able to be forced to work inside the building. If the company deems it necessary to cut down on the numbers of routes, they can force you to go work, “This week, you’re doing package car work starting at 9:00 AM, working whenever. But next week, we need you starting at 1:00 AM in the warehouse, and you’re going to do that on a week by week basis for as long as we want.” That’s not acceptable. That kind of flexibility helps the company, but it breaks us as people.
I’ve got so many coworkers that have had to deal with issues with their families, who have to deal with issues of loss of sleep, of exhaustion at the end of the day, of just that constant…
A company that has that much control over you, that they’re like, “Hey, you think of yourself as a delivery driver, or you think of yourself as a truck driver, but you are whatever I want you to be. You’re going to work whenever I want you to. You’re going to do whatever work we want you to do,” and that wears on people. That breaks people down. We want to eliminate that entire job classification totally, day one of the contract.
We want everybody who’s a package car driver to be a package car driver, point-blank, period. We don’t want to give the company any level of flexibility when it comes to determining what kind of job we’re going to do and how much money they’re going to pay us. We want guarantees, we want controls over our own labor, and we’re aiming to get all of that in his next contract.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell, yeah. Well, I mean, I think that was a really great rundown. Made my job very easy, so thank you. But I think that you really hit the nail on the head, right? Because that’s the thing that I think a lot of people forget. Of course, not people who work, not people who experience this every day. I think we all get that on a gut level, because we’ve been through it.
When you are trying to build a life around your work schedule, because you need to work to live, how do you do that when you don’t know what your schedule’s going to be until the night before? Anyone who’s ever worked in service can tell you what that’s like. How can you plan events with your family? How can you plan… I don’t know, maybe you want to take a vacation. Anything that gives you a sense of agency for planning your life outside of work, because as a human being, you should have a life outside of work. We only get one turnaround, like this mortal coil. You get one life to live and you should be able to live and enjoy life outside of your workplace.
But yet, so many workers that I talk to on this show are living, breathing proof that our employers do not give a shit about that, do not even think that we should have that type of control, or even much of a life outside of work to enjoy in the first place. This is the constant thing that I’ve heard from so many people working in service, working in manufacturing, working in mining, working in healthcare, working in education, working on the railroads. They keep piling more work onto fewer workers. People missing time with their families because they’re doing all that forced overtime or they’re dealing with hectic scheduling, erratic scheduling that changes week to week, when it would make a lot more sense for workers to have a set schedule. But then you start to see all the ways it benefits the bosses to keep playing shuffle with people’s schedules every single week. It makes it so that you yourself don’t have any sort of regularity, really are just living at the beck and call of your employer.
Again, remember what Sean and I were talking about earlier, about how we are conditioned to be certain kinds of people in the workplace. So what kind of person are you conditioned to be when you just basically wait until Sunday to plan your whole life around whatever your boss tells you your work schedule’s going to be that week?
I can go on and on and on about this, but I think this is why if we can all understand and relate to what Sean is telling us about these issues that are really central to the UPS contract fight, if we can identify with those very same issues, the response is not to say, “Well, I don’t get any say over that, so why should the UPSers get it?” Or, “Why should the Teamsters get it?” It’s like, no, we should all be fighting for that. So we should want the Teamsters to win this fight, so that we can then learn from them how to win that fight. We can build on that momentum and keep pushing back in the other direction, demanding that we have more of those kinds of guarantees with our work, that we know what kind of work we’re going to be doing, when we’re going to be doing it, and how much we’re going to get paid for it, instead of just being at the mercy or lack thereof of our bosses.
I want to end on that note, man, because it’s been so great talking to you about all of this, and I could talk to you about this for hours, but I don’t want to keep you for too much longer, because I’ve already kept you for an hour here.
Sean Orr:
Appreciate it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But I guess, I just wanted to sort of… Two questions, is you mentioned that two tier system. This is also a big issue that we hear from workers in different industries week in, week out on this show. It was a big issue with the John Deere workers. It was a big issue with the Kellogg’s workers. It’s an issue with all the academic strikes that we’re seeing in higher education. Higher ed is like the poster child for multi-tiered employment systems. You got tenured professors, non-tenured professors, lecturers, adjuncts, grad students, undergrad teachers, all that kind of stuff. So we’ve seen these different fights in different industries over two or multi-tiered employment systems.
But I want to sort of ask, the last contract fight was a very contentious one that left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths. And this, something feels very different right now. It’s been a year, a little over a year since the reform administration headed by Sean O’Brien kind of came into the leadership role at the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. I wanted to ask, has that galvanized people? I guess, have you seen that difference over the past year on the shop floor level? And just rounding us out on what do you think’s going to happen between now and July. Or what should folks be looking for? What should they be paying attention to? And what can folks ultimately do to show up and stand in solidarity with our siblings at UPS and with the Teamster?
Sean Orr:
Yeah, no, for sure. I appreciate this opportunity, brother, for this conversation. I think this has been phenomenal and I’m really glad to share it with coworkers.
So, I think that the effect of that 2021 international election in our union was that it put my coworkers, the rank and file, put people into motion, and they haven’t stopped being in motion ever since. People are having high, high, high expectations of what we will accept in this contract if we do not get rid of 22.4s day one of this new contract. This is a strike issue. If we do not get a significant raise for part-timers, it is a strike issue. If we do not do something to stop UPS from trying to Giggify our jobs, it is a strike issue. We are not willing to accept the tide of history in this fight. We are here to push things back and to get things flowing in our direction for us.
My coworkers have been all involved in this fight. I mean, the level of engagement’s incredible. People are strike ready, and not just in my building, but in every UPS hub around this country. You’ve got coworkers who are not just fighting the boss every day, but they’re connecting with each other around the country through TDU, through UPS Teamsters United. We’ve got workshops where thousands of coworkers on their days off are calling in to learn about their contract, where we’re at, to learn the next steps of the contract, to campaign. You’ve got people handing out flyers and leaflets, collecting signatures at the gates all over the place. You’ve got Teamsters rallying in their parking lots at the UPS facilities all over this country. People are in motion. Things are happening. The ground’s shifting beneath our feet.
We’re coming into this with both fists ringing, and I think that we’re going to come out the other side with the best contract that we could ever possibly imagine in the current moment, right? There’s going to be more to fight for after this, but we’re coming to take everything that we possibly can, and I think that people should be expecting to see.
August 1st, if things are looking good, it’s because we fought the company like hell and we got a contract that 350,000 Teamsters with very high expectations are good with. Or you’re going to be seeing picket lines, you’re going to be seeing stores up and down this country trying to figure out how they’re going to ship their goods out because UPS, it’s not running, and you are going to see a lot of fun happening out there on those picket lines, because we are taking the fight to the streets and we are going to get that country this contract won in the streets.
So I would say if you are looking to get involved, there’s a lot of ways to get plugged in. If you’re not a Teamster, there’s all sorts of ways to get involved. Get your union involved, put out a solidarity statement with the Teamsters. If you’re out there in the community, in cities and towns all up and down the country, I would say reach out to your local DSA chapter. DSA has this incredible campaign, DSA Strike Ready, to build support for the Teamsters in this fight. We’ve got dozens and dozens and dozens of chapters working with rank and file Teamsters, working in the community, going to do community canvases, community rallies, really building the level of public support and public solidarity that we need to win this fight. So I would say get connected up with DSA, get involved in that. But most importantly, come out in August, show some love to the Teamsters if we’re on the picket line, and help us transform the labor movement and transform this country.
India’s single most vexatious economic problem is the lack of adequate employment and earning opportunities for its large and growing labour force. The nation is one of the youngest countries of the world in terms of its demographic profile. This ‘demographic dividend’ is considered to be a blessing. It could, it is argued, help India become the world’s labour force. However, for the dividend to yield returns, it would require, firstly, a well-educated and well-trained workforce. The demographic dividend’s fruition is also predicated upon the availability of enough job opportunities across the world. Neither possibility seems obvious today. Although India has a large constituency of graduates, an overwhelming number of them are considered unemployable. There is also a very large number that is unskilled and functionally literate. Employment opportunities abroad are limited to a few low-skilled jobs, openings in the technology sector, and some in academia. Moreover, low-skilled labour migrating to other parts of the world is subject to scrutiny since few countries look at migration favourably. Moreover, the scale and the speed of emerging Artificial Intelligence-based technologies do not augur well for the traditional job market, save for workers who are highly educated and skilled in cutting-edge technologies. On joining the dots, the future of jobs across all levels of skill is not bright.
Given this context, the remark made by the chief economic advisor, that India does not need a universal basic income because economic growth would suffice to meet aspirations, must be taken with the proverbial pinch of salt. India’s economic structure hides unemployment behind part-time, informal, job-sharing livelihoods. These ‘workers’ are surplus in the sense that total production would not decline even if they were to be removed from their activity. Therefore, the wisdom of depending solely on economic growth to guarantee basic amenities for all is unwarranted. Some alternative strategy has to be thought of to ensure a decent living for all. The concept of a universal basic income, or some variant of it, cannot thus be ruled out. The idea is to be able to provide for collective survival and sustenance. A template of UBI has two principal challenges: the identification of beneficiaries and the avoidance of fiscal stress. The digital enumeration of personal information can solve the first problem. Additional taxes on the super-rich can resolve the latter. Reality demands that the possibility of UBI be debated and kept alive notwithstanding its political unpalatability.
Negotiations seem to have stalled between the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, which is representing UPS workers, and the company, as the latest round of discussions ended early on Wednesday morning with no new agreements made. The latest development suggests that Teamsters are one step closer to a strike, as UPS workers’ contract is set to expire at the end of this month.
