Graduate students at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) were arrested at their homes last Thursday by campus police in the most recent escalation of the university’s aggressive anti-union campaign. Jessica Ng, a postdoctoral scholar; William Schneider, a graduate student at UCSD; and a third union member who has chosen to be anonymous, were arrested for participating in recent protests…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
This story originally appeared in Workday on June 30, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
Tania is a mother of four and a new registered nurse in the intensive care unit at Ascension St. Joseph Medical Center in Joliet, Illinois, also known as St. Joe’s. On May 30, at a bargaining meeting with management to negotiate for the union’s next contract, she gave testimony about how her employer allegedly treated her for bringing up safety issues.
“I was two weeks off orientation and I was given four acute care patients. I texted our manager… and said ‘this is a recipe for disaster. I can’t handle this,’” she said in her testimony, which was emailed to Workday Magazine by her union, Illinois Nurses Association (INA). Concerned about safety for herself and her patients, Tania said she declined to clock in during the incident last fall.
Nurses at St. Joe’s negotiating for their next contract have been alerting the hospital and state government—through personal pleas and formal complaints—to the extreme levels of understaffing they say they’re experiencing.
What came next was retaliation, says Tania, who is going by a pseudonym to protect her from further repercussions. “I was penalized because I said four patients was too much.”
Nurses at St. Joe’s negotiating for their next contract have been alerting the hospital and state government—through personal pleas and formal complaints—to the extreme levels of understaffing they say they’re experiencing. But there has been a disturbing lack of response to their complaints, they say, alongside retaliation for speaking out.
This is despite the fact that, in 2021, Illinois passed a safe staffing law, the Nurse Staffing Improvement Act, which requires hospitals to have written safety plans, and gives the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) the ability to impose fines for failure to comply. The law also provides a channel for hospital employees to file complaints about violations internally, as well as to the IDPH. Under the Act, the IDPH has discretion to conduct investigations, impose fines, and impose improvement plans on hospitals. The Act also includes some measures to protect workers from retaliation for doing so.
But INA says that St. Joe’s is failing to comply with the law. The union also alleges that IDPH is failing to adequately use its discretion to regulate according to the rule, placing both nurses and patients in harm’s way.
Alongside harrowing conditions, nurses describe their struggles with organizing in feminized labor as mothers. In her testimony, Tania said she has received offers to work at other hospitals, but wants to stay at St. Joe’s to grow her skills. “My friends say I’m an idiot. Maybe I am one,” she said in her statement. “All of my friends make more than I do.”
“I stay,” she added, “because my kids need me and I need stability.”
Workday Magazine reviewed 69 Assignment Despite Objection (ADO) forms from the month of May alone. A spokesperson for INA explains that ADOs are “union forms that are filed with the hospital, and a copy is filed with the Union.”
In May of 2023, nurses filed at least one ADO almost every day, and some days had multiple complaints—May 23, for example, saw six complaints total. John Fitzgerald, the INA representative for St. Joe’s, says usually around 100 complaints are made each month, but nurses have gotten out of practice filing them because of a lack of response.
The complaints from May tell the story of nurses who are overstretched, exhausted, and concerned about the safety of their patients.
One ADO from May 9 describes nurses being assigned five patients each, a particular concern given that the patients were allegedly high acuity. Another from May 16 states, “Nurses all have six patients. High acuity… Cardiac drips, multiple procedures. Unsafe staffing.”
Another from May 20 states, “Very unsafe! Very busy.” The nurse adds, “No breaks taken.”
These concerns are not new. One ADO form, dated May 23, 2022, was authored by nurse Beth Corsetti and signed by her and three other nurses. It states, “Nonstop admissions and discharges! No breaks, no lunch! We are human beings!”
Corsetti circled the names of the hospital leaders at St. Joe’s addressed at the top. Next to the circled names, she wrote, “Do something! We are drowning!”
“Hire more nursing staff and aids. Increase pay rate of all nurses to retain them,” she urged.
This ADO was accompanied by a formal complaint to the IDPH; the agency has confirmed receipt but has not made a ruling, INA says.
These forms, along with testimony from nurses, allege a pattern of noncompliance with the Nurse Staffing Improvement Act. Instead of enforcing the law, and paying nurses better wages, nurses say Ascension’s behavior is hurting the community it’s supposed to help. (In 2018, Ascension, one of the largest private healthcare networks in the United States, acquired St. Joe’s.)
Fitzgerald explains that the Nurse Staffing Improvement Act from 2021 amends the Hospital Licensing Act to require staffing guidelines developed by committees for inpatient units and emergency departments. Instead of fixed ratios, guidelines establish minimum levels of staffing in the form of grids.
“I think that what it shows is a history of this hospital not putting their patients first, because if you don’t have enough staff, doctors, nurses who are qualified for the care, then you put your patients at risk.”
illinois state senator rachel ventura
“Let’s say that the staffing grid calls for eight nurses, if you have 25 patients, for instance,” he explains to Workday Magazine. “The issue is that if you look at these ADOs, you can see over and over and over again, they’re not staffing to the base grid. The acuity would call for another nurse, but we’re already short.”
Nurses and their advocates say St. Joe’s is flagrantly violating the law, and that the IDPH is failing to fulfill its duty to enforce the rules, designed to protect both nurses and patients.
“The law says that there are minimum staffing guidelines, and that they need to increase staffing with acuity, and they don’t meet those bare minimums,” says Fitzgerald.
According to Will Bloom, a Chicago-based labor lawyer who has represented INA, “Ascension’s repeated short staffing of particular departments could well constitute a pattern of practice of failing to substantially comply with requirements of the statutes and the hospitals’ written staffing plan.”
An IDPH spokesperson told Workday Magazine that it “issued a Notice of Violation to Ascension St. Joseph-Joliet in March for failing to meet nurse staffing levels by patient acuity under the Hospital Licensing Act and state regulations. The Nurse Staffing Improvement Act that you mentioned was an amendment of the Hospital Licensing Act and we are well aware of it.”
“Due to the fact that this is an ongoing and open investigation,” the spokesperson said, “we are not in a position to discuss the details and specific status of the case.”
Illinois state senator Rachel Ventura told Workday Magazine over the phone, “Now that they are in a 60-day cycle of being held accountable for that staffing plan, I think that what it shows is a history of this hospital not putting their patients first, because if you don’t have enough staff, doctors, nurses who are qualified for the care, then you put your patients at risk. And I think that it is criminal that this hospital continues to operate under those types of conditions.”
According to a statement from an Ascension spokesperson, emailed to Workday Magazine, “St. Joseph takes any and all complaints from our associates seriously, and addresses those issues appropriately and as agreed to under the collective bargaining agreement.”
The current contract between the nurses and the hospital expires July 19. Nurses are calling for better wages and safer staffing, including mechanisms for enforcement, like hazard pay for nurses who face understaffing.
Fitzgerald says IDPH is tasked with regulation according to the Nurse Staffing Improvement Act, but the body is “asleep at the switch.”
According to the Hospital Licensing Act, any hospital employee may file a complaint with IDPH about an alleged violation. If the hospital is found to have a pattern of failing to comply with the law, the hospital must provide a plan of correction to IDPH, which has discretion to fine hospitals for violations.
Fitzgerald says the nurses have filed dozens of complaints with the IDPH. (ADOs are often used as evidence in IDPH complaints.) But, he says, the department has not taken aggressive action to address these nurses’ concerns.
Sen. Ventura, referring to oversight of staffing improvement plans at St. Joe’s, said, “I have encouraged IDPH to stay on top of this. I’ve asked them to aggressively look at that plan and really make sure that it aligns with the needs of health care and public health. And I have also contacted the governor’s office to notify them of how important it is for IDPH to be the oversight of public health and our hospitals in it.”
In response to the urgings of Ventura, the IDPH spokesperson said, “we are aware of the concerns expressed by members of the community and are responding appropriately under the authority provided by state law.”
The department said, “we can assure you that IDPH is strongly committed to carrying out its duties to protect patient safety and quality of care under both state and federal law.”
But INA has raised concerns about past incidents where the IDPH did not find merit in nurses’ complaints, or claimed that it did not have jurisdiction.
Workday Magazine reviewed a formal complaint to IDPH filed by Tania, based on her experience last fall. In that complaint, she goes into more detail about the alleged retaliation she faced, explaining that “the hospital decided to reprimand us for speaking up about the unsafe staffing. By giving me and the four other nurses a final warning reprimand. This entails we are not entitled to an incentive if we pick up extra shift, we cannot transfer to another department, we cannot be promoted and so much more. This reprimand is to last for one year. I am writing to bring your awareness to this injustice and retaliation.”
On November 15, the IDPH responded to her complaint in a letter, viewed by Workday Magazine. It states, “we do not find that the nature of your concerns establishes the potential for a significant health or safety deficiency under federal requirements. Consequently, we cannot request an authorization from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) for an investigation.”
According to INA, one complaint made by another nurse on November 3 detailing the same events Tania testified about was found to have merit by IDPH. But the union says it is still waiting for corrective action.
The IDPH has previously said that it does not have jurisdiction over labor issues, and has used this justification to dismiss complaints. Workday Magazine viewed the IDPH’s response to a November 21, 2022 complaint from a St. Joe’s nurse, provided by INA. The IDPH stated, “IDPH does not have jurisdiction over staffing or labor issues such as those you mentioned in your e-mail.”
But Bloom says, “Under Illinois law, the IDPH clearly has the ability to investigate violations of the statute, as well as to demand corrections and impose fines. Under a pretty fair reading, the statutory language clearly empowers them to do this. Jurisdiction can be a term of art in a lot of spaces, but I think it’s hard to avoid the clear language from the statute.”
According to INA, in the context of a hospital, staffing and labor issues are public safety issues. The union is concerned about IDPH’s reticence to intercede, and is also worried about the opacity surrounding enforcement. “This is not a ‘labor dispute’ issue so much as it is a public safety issue,” the union said in a statement emailed to Workday Magazine.
There is evidence that staffing levels have a tremendous impact on patient safety across the board. A 2021 University of Pennsylvania study looking at nurse staffing ratios in Illinois found that thousands of deaths could be avoided, the length of patient stays could decrease, and hospitals could save money, if nurses were only assigned to no more than four patients at a time.
For this reason, the union says that the IDPH does have jurisdiction under the Hospital Licensing Act, and should be using its discretion to enforce safety.
Ascension has been under growing scrutiny. A December 2022 New York Times investigation analyzing staffing cuts at St. Joe’s and Ascension Genesys in Michigan found that the company allegedly made an effort to reduce labor costs in order to line the pockets of executives in the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic. Reports by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Milwaukee Magazine highlighting the closure of a labor and delivery unit and a lack of safety due to staffing shortages in Wisconsin inspired Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) to write a letter to Ascension CEO Joseph Impicciche in February demanding transparency around its Wall Street-like investment practices, revealed by STAT. In addition to understaffing, several nurses at St. Joe’s are suing Ascension over alleged wage theft.
“In this workplace, we have a situation where the boss either ignores issues being brought to their attention, or goes through a grievance process, goes through arbitration, as it resolves, signs settlements, and still doesn’t pay these workers out.”
will bloom, ina labor lawyer
“In this workplace, we have a situation where the boss either ignores issues being brought to their attention, or goes through a grievance process, goes through arbitration, as it resolves, signs settlements, and still doesn’t pay these workers out,” said Bloom. “Everything else they’ve tried to get their employer to do the baseline work of paying them accurately, has not gotten Ascension to do the right thing.”
Due to alleged unsafe staffing, nurses in negotiations for contracts at Ascension hospitals in Texas and Kansas performed one-day strikes on June 27. According to National Nurses United, the nurses were locked out following their one-day strike.
In response to INA’s concerns at St. Joe’s, the spokesperson from Ascension told Workday Magazine over email, “As a ministry of the Catholic Church, we affirm the right of our associates to organize. The management team at Ascension St. Joseph has, and continues, to negotiate in good faith with the union and their representatives. We have participated in active and timely negotiations with the union, including the exchange of good faith offers and the appropriate and timely consideration of counter offers.”
“Ascension St. Joseph takes any and all complaints from our associates seriously, and addresses those issues appropriately and as agreed to under the collective bargaining agreement,” the spokesperson continued.
“Staffing challenges are impacting hospitals across the country, and Illinois is no exception,” said the Ascension spokesperson. “We are actively recruiting for nurses to strengthen the staffing at Ascension St. Joseph. This would typically include using other Ascension nurses to provide temporary staffing solutions in times of need. However, the current collective bargaining agreement prohibits us from bringing in all available temporary staffing support.”
In response to Ascension’s remarks, INA said, “We are happy to hear the employer claim publicly that they are unable to use temporary Ascension agency staff because of our collective bargaining agreement. However, this runs counter to the reality we have seen during recent months in which we have been forced to file a charge with the NLRB over the company’s staffing of St. Joseph’s with Ascension agency nurses.”
“We maintain,” INA added, “that the key to facing the ‘staffing challenges’ they cite is to redirect money away from executive bonuses and toward paying a fair and competitive wage to nurses who have lived in and served the Joliet community for years.”
Ascension would not comment on active litigation, but said “we are vigorously defending the matter you reference and deny any wrongdoing.”
Despite the challenges, new mothers and new nurses at St. Joe’s have been getting more involved with the union since the last time they went on strike in the summer of 2020.
“My first week at St. Joe’s was when the country got shut down. Pandemic nursing is all I’ve ever known,” said Kaitlynd French, a new mother to two children and the sole income provider for her family as a new registered nurse in the medical oncology unit.
French started going to union meetings after going on strike as a brand new nurse in the summer of 2020. “I want our hospital to be safely staffed. I want us to be paid appropriately. But it’s almost like every step I take towards trying to help, I feel like I’m taking a step away from my family,” said French. “If I take any sort of time off from work, in the back of my mind is how am I going to be able to support my family?”
Looking to give her husband a break from caregiving, she asked the childcare center that had been providing her son with at-home speech therapy during the pandemic if they could take in her daughter for a few days per week, but they told her they didn’t have enough staff.
Kristin Barnett took up a position as a registered nurse in the medical surgery unit at St. Joe’s so she could have more days at home with her three children, the youngest she gave birth to during the pandemic.
“It’s hard because the days that I do work, I don’t see my children at all, because it’s so early, by the time I get home, they’re in bed,” she said. “It’s nice to be at work, but there’s so much guilt about not being home. When I’m home, then I have guilt about them being short at work.”
She said she spends a lot of time looking at schedules, a type of mental labor often performed by mothers. She hears coworkers say they want to be more active in their union, but there just isn’t enough time. “If I’ve been at work for two, three days, and then there’s a union meeting, I might have to miss that, because I haven’t seen my kids in a couple days,” said Barnett. “I just have to feel okay with saying no in both areas of my life. My kids understand too. It’s important for me to have them see that I worked hard for my degree and I want to work and that I’d love to be home with them.”
On top of balancing work and family, union organizing cuts into their schedules. French and Barnett are both active members of their union. They say phone calls and Zoom meetings have been helpful, but another way their union has helped is by providing childcare during bargaining meetings with their employer.
“I could not have dealt with this crap having little kids,” said Robyn Richards, who has worked in the ambulatory surgery unit for the past five years. Before that, she was in the orthopedic unit, where she worked for 16 years. Not only does she have a mother who worked as a nurse, both her sister and sister-in-law are nurses, and her daughter is also a nurse working the same orthopedic unit that Richards left because of declining working conditions.
“If [Ascension] would just freakin’ loosen the purse strings and pay attention to how this is really affecting our community,” she said, “then maybe things could get better.”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Vanessa Langness had always been a bit worried about the chemicals she worked with as a biomedical researcher, but when she got pregnant in October, her concerns grew. The 34-year-old based in Santa Maria, California, suspected the ethidium bromide she was using in the lab for molecular cloning could put her and her baby at risk. She wasn’t sure what to do; she was only a few weeks into her…
From legislative attacks on the rights of trans people, drag performers, and queer people spreading like wildfire to statehouses around the country, to rightwing media relentlessly spewing fascistic anti-LGBTQ+ messages, to far-right groups ramping up their intimidation tactics and violent assaults to force LGBTQ+ people back into the closet, Pride month feels different in 2023. And yet, the rebellious, liberatory spirit of Pride persists, and the struggle for equality, acceptance, and the right to pursue what makes us happy continues—and the labor movement must be a source of strength in that struggle. How far has the labor movement come in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights? How far do we still have to go? And what role can and should labor play in the broader, necessary fight for LGBTQ+ liberation and against the fascist attacks on our fellow workers, our neighbors, and our loved ones? We talk to Fae Weichsel, a first assistant cameraperson and member of IATSE Local 600, where they also serve on the National Executive Board and co-chair the Young Workers Committee, and Jessica Gonzalez, who has worked in the video game industry for the past decade, is currently a lead technical test analyst for a video game company, and is a founder of A Better ABK (Activision-Blizzard-King Workers Alliance) and the Game Workers Alliance.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
Post-production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Fae Weichsel:
My name is Fae Weichsel. My pronouns are they/them. I’m an IATSE Local 600 member, the International Cinematographers Guild, where I work as a rank and file first assistant camera person, also known as a focus puller. I am also a national executive board member with Local 600, and the co-chair and the co-founder of the Young Workers of the Eastern Region.
Jessica Gonzalez:
My name is Jessica Gonzalez. I am a lead technical test analyst at a video game studio. I have a pretty long history of working in games, probably about a decade in quality assurance and started at Activision, went around from a few like AAA Studios, so like Treyarch, Blizzard, and tried indie. So I’ve been all over the place with that, but definitely wanted to stay in games and software development. I am a founder of A Better ABK, which is Activision Blizzard King Workers Alliance, which is a group of former and current employees at Activision Blizzard King who are working together for change. It’s like a collective effort of rank and file workers who are trying to change the industry for the better because there’s obviously a lot of like… It’s seen as a frat boy culture or a boys’ club, right?
So there’s definitely a lot of initiative to move away from that kind of stuff, and so that’s what a lot of the work that I did with A Better ABK was. That’s on Twitter, @ABetterABK. Also, I’m one of the organizers for GWA, which is the Game Workers Alliance, under a smaller branch of ABK, which is Raven Software. The quality assurance workers there unionized actually, which is pretty great, and are still trying to get the employer to the bargaining table, but not for lack of trying. Yeah. That’s a little bit about my professional background.
My organizer background really started when I was thrown into a leadership position of organizing ABK under the lawsuit that happened where the state of California sued Activision Blizzard King for widespread sexual harassment, discrimination, which is a thing in the industry that is just plaguing the industry. I mean, I’m sure you saw with Riot Games had a very similar… They actually just recently settled. So it’s still ongoing, the lawsuit. Frankly, the organizing effort is still ongoing. There’s definitely a huge push to make ethical video games.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. So if you’re hungry for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes, and definitely go check out all the other great shows in our network. Please support the work that we’re 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 positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can share these episodes on your social media and share them with your coworkers, your friends, and family members.
Of course, the single best thing you can do to support our work is become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month. If you subscribe for 10 bucks a month, you’ll also get a print subscription to the amazing In These Times Magazine delivered to your mailbox every month. So if you haven’t already done so, please head on over to patreon.com/workingpeople. That’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/workingpeople. Hit the “Subscribe” button, and you’ll immediately get access to all of the great bonus episodes that we’ve published over the past six seasons of the show. We’ve been putting some real bangers up there on the Patreon feed of late, and you guys definitely don’t want to miss the other great bonus episodes that we’ve got coming. Thank you so much to everyone who’s already a subscriber on Patreon. It’s because of you guys that we are able to keep doing the show every week.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and I am so incredibly grateful to our incredible guests for joining me today on our annual Pride-themed episode of Working People. Of course, the struggles that we are going to be talking about today do not just exist for one month out of the year. The fight for the rights of our LGBTQ+ co-workers, and neighbors, and family members is never-ending and non-negotiable, and we need to be there for one another every day of the year. That sadly is getting truer and truer with every passing day because… We hosted this episode last year with… We had a conversation with the incredible Gabbi Pierce as well as Martha Grevatt, retired UAW member. Even then, we were talking about how dark things were getting in the country.
If you’re listening to this, I imagine it is no surprise to you that things have only continued to get darker, and scarier, and more violent, and more intense. So our fight, the fight to stand up for and stand up with our LGBTQ fellow workers and our neighbors, we really need to do everything that we possibly can to stop and fight back against the increasingly fascistic attacks from the far-right. I mean, as we speak here in late June of 2023, we are seeing mobs of angry and violent far-right protestors showing up outside of school boards, showing up outside of schools themselves, and even getting in brawls with Pride… people just trying to enjoy the month of Pride or trying to celebrate LGBTQ history, and they’re being attacked for it. That’s not even mentioning the just relentless onslaught of anti-LGBTQ, especially anti-trans legislation that is coming through state houses across the country. That’s not even mentioning the just high octane, and vicious and hateful rhetoric coming from elected officials all the way up to basically every candidate running for president in the Republican field. Right?
I mean, this is becoming like… In many ways, it already has become the anti-LGBTQ vitriol, the hatred, the genocidal violence that we’re seeing people express around the country. This is really becoming the tip of the spear of a large, dangerous, deadly fascist force in this country. If you are a cis/straight person thinking that this is all just going to fade away and pass us by, that it’s a fad, or what have you, whatever justification you’re using to keep your mouth shut and stay on the sidelines while our neighbors and coworkers are being attacked, I implore you to reconsider because this far-right contingent, they are not going to stop what they’re doing unless they are stopped, and we need to be the ones to do that.
So, today, as with our episode last year, as we will continue to do in future seasons, we want to bring together some more incredible folks onto the show to have the kind of conversation that we do best here on the show, to bring together our fellow workers across industries, across the US to talk about their lives, their work, their experience, to talk about what we as a labor movement are doing or should be doing and can be doing better to stand up for LGBTQ rights for working people. So what is the state of that fight within the labor movement itself? Also, we want to and need to talk about what role the labor movement needs to be playing in the larger fight against these fascist attacks and the larger fight for LGBTQ+ liberation.
So that is what we’re here to discuss on today’s episode, and as I said, I’m incredibly grateful to be able to have this conversation with our amazing guests, the great Fae Weichsel and Jessica Gonzalez. Now, I want to just give a little note to folks listening to this that Fae and Jessica are incredibly busy, and there’s a lot going on in the country right now, so we weren’t able to get everyone on the same call to have a back and forth panel discussion. So when you hear this episode, it’s going to sound like we’re all in the same call, but actually, we are going to be recording separately, but I’m going to be asking all of our incredible guests the same questions so it will fit together nicely in a full episode, but I just wanted to be upfront about that.
Before I toss things over to our guests, again, I want to make sure that everyone listening to this really understands the stakes of what we’re talking about here. I wanted to also point out something that really caught my eye earlier this month. I’m sure a lot of you saw it as well, but the Human Rights Campaign for the first time in its history announced a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans. I wanted to read just a little snippet from the Human Rights Campaign’s president, Kelley Robinson, where she wrote about why the HRC declared a state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans in 2023.
So Kelly writes, and we’ll link to this in the show notes, “I’m not going to sugarcoat this. For the first time in HRC’s nearly half-century history, we’re declaring a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people in the United States. During this legislative session, there have been over 525 state bills introduced that attack the LGBTQ+ community, and over 220 of those target the transgender community. As of press time, more than 70 of those have become law. These laws are fueled by an anti-LGBTQ+ Republican establishment and coordinated, well-funded extremist groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and the Family Policy Alliance, insisting on trying to control our families and our lives.”
“Just look at what’s playing out in Texas, in Tennessee, in Florida. These states are banning educators from talking about LGBTQ+ issues and teaching Black history, and are banning gender-affirming care and abortion care. These same states do nothing to ensure the freedom of children to be safe from gun violence and do nothing to protect the freedom of democracy when Black and trans voices are silenced in state legislatures, or look at Governor Ron DeSantis who has weaponized his position as a lawmaker to target LGBTQ+ families, Black and Brown Floridians, immigrants, and private businesses. Even with the majority of Floridians forcefully opposing his anti-LGBTQ+ laws and despite surging support for LGBTQ+ families nationally, DeSantis has been crisscrossing the country to attack our community. This report details the political attacks like those he’s waged on our community that have transpired in state houses across the country.”
So, again, we will link to that report from the Human Rights Campaign along with many other resources for y’all to get up to speed on the state of the attacks against our LGBTQ siblings, but I really wanted to make sure that I read that in the introduction so that… Again, we don’t want to just spend Pride month talking about how awful everything is, but we need to understand where we are as a country and where these horrific attacks are in order to better know what we can do to fight them.
So, without further ado, I want to shut up on my end and turn things over to our amazing panelists. We won’t be able to do the full sweeping backstory conversation that we like to have with our guests here on the show where I get to sit down and chat to workers and talk to them about their lives and their winding paths to being the people that they are, doing the kind of work that they do, but I was hoping my great panelists would humor me a little bit. We could start by doing maybe a shortened version of that, and if we could go around the table and have y’all, yeah, just introduce yourself a bit more to the Working People listeners, and tell us a bit about your backstory, how you came to do the kind of work that you do now, what that work entails, and what your experience as an LGBTQ+ worker in the American workforce in the 21st century has been like. The good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. So, Fae, why don’t we start with you?
Fae Weichsel:
Sure. Like I said before, I work as a first AC, also known as a focus puller, and I did go to school for filmmaking. I went to the University of the Arts. From there, then I eventually got a job at a camera rental house in New York City. From there, then I took the Union Test, joined Local 600, and I started my career. Then, I, over the years, worked my way up through being a camera PA to then being a loader, then being second AC into now first AC. But in terms of the union activism that I do and the union organizing, that just came out of me. One, I came from a union household. My mother is a public school teacher, and my father is a teamster mechanic. So unions were something that like… They weren’t a thing that we would talk around the table, but it was just always in the background.
It’s pretty funny. I didn’t actually realize I came from a union household until I went to… IATSE ran this leadership conference once, and they were like, “Raise your hand if you come from a union household. Did your parents ever be in a union?” and all that sort of stuff. I was politically active during the Bush years in high school, all the things that people used, the Iraq War protests, walkouts, various demonstrations and stuff that were going on at the time, Days of Silence in terms of queer activism and stuff. Yeah. It was just one thing after the other.
I wanted to get active in my union, so I started going to meetings, and then I heard about Young Workers being a thing, and I wanted to join the one at my union. We didn’t have one, so I made it, and you just… One foot after the other, one day at a time, and then before you know it, you’ve been doing union activism for over seven years now. One of the things that I did actually fairly early in my union activism in 2016, I had my union march for the first time officially in Pride, the Pride March in New York City, and one of the things that’s… That is not so noticeable in and of itself. What is noticeable is that was the first IATSE local that had ever done so. So I think it’s interesting to look at how far we’ve come as a child of the ’90s, not knowing exactly what I was, queer, trans, at the time, but knowing I was different, and it’s surprising seeing how much of the rhetoric from the ’90s that conservatives used to you against gay people has just been swapped with trans or just repeated verbatim.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, and so I have so many questions, but I know we got to get to Jessica. But Fae, before we move on, I just wanted to hop back in and ask. For those of us who have literally no clue what that kind of work looks like, I was wondering if you could just say a little more about what operating that kind of equipment on film sets, what does that look like in your world on a week-to-week basis?
Fae Weichsel:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, as a first AC, you’re assigned to a camera, and generally, they go A, B, C camera down the line. Generally, most shows only have an A and B camera full-time. Some shows have three cameras, but you’re assigned to that camera. That’s your camera. As the focus puller, you’re in charge of making sure that you keep the camera in working order, if anything needs to get replaced, but also, you’re the one in charge of making sure that the lens is in focus.
We use various wireless systems, and sometimes you just grab the lens with your hand depending on what’s going on, but we keep the image sharp. So we have to track and work with the camera operator, but also with the talent, whether it is a human actor or actress, or maybe a dog, or some inanimate object, tabletop or product stuff. But with all those things moving on and with various filters and the lenses, we keep the image in focus or sometimes not in focus for creative or artistic purposes.
Jessica Gonzalez:
I have always been a gamer. I remember getting my first console, which was a Nintendo 64, one Christmas. I mean, I grew up as a middle child in a divorced home, so video games was my babysitter for a while like I would just sit on my console. I remember used to jiggle the N64 cartridge for Super Mario 64, and so it would make Mario look funny, and he would melt into the ground. I thought it was the funniest thing ever. So I always tried to break video games, and that was just a theme that I had. I always tried to think outside of the box, see if I can do any kind of exploits.
Gaming was a really community sense for me because when I would go to school, I would just talk to my friends, and we’d all just be talking about gaming. It was just a huge cultural thing for us growing up, and it connected me to people. So I really always loved gaming, and then I remember, I actually went to school for pharmacy technician before I got into game development and realized that I had gone to school for pharmacy to just make minimum wage. It was really unfortunate because I did so much work leading up to that, right? Then, I had a friend who was working at Activision at the time, working on Call of Duty: Black Ops III in pre-alpha. So they invited me over to their El Segundo office to basically say, “How passionate are you about video games?” “I’m very passionate about video games.” “How do you feel about breaking video games?” “That sounds wonderful to me.” So I went into a three-day training for that where they teach you the technical terms of what specific bugs are called, and how to point them out and things like that, and then how to write a really detailed good bug for a game.
So, after that, they have… It’s like a trial period, that three-day period, and then at the end, you see if they’ll put you on the floor. So I made it on the floor, and I remember I actually was assigned night shift. People were working on Call of Duty: Black Ops III all around the clock. It was insane because we were doing old gen, which is Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at the time, and then next gen, which was the newer consoles. So it was interesting. We were broken up into a bunch of teams. I remember it was just insane. At one point, we were doing 14-hour shifts to try to get the crunch. We needed to make our submission. We had people that were already pre-ordering, so it’s like we’re very pushed to that release date.
I remember, when I joined, I was like, “Ooh, the pay is low.” Right? They actually marketed it to me where it’s like, “Yeah, it’s low starting, but you’re going to make so much in overtime that this hourly rate doesn’t even matter.” I’m like, “Okay. That’s interesting.” At the time, I was no life video gaming anyway, so to me, I was like, “Okay. Cool. I get to just game all night and make bug stuff, and make money.” But it actually was really hard. I just remember the politics of it. Everyone was really tired. Everyone wanted to make it to the next round before layoffs, so there was a lot of infighting. There was a lot of rat race culture where people were stealing bugs from each other and undercutting people, or saying if they’re a minute or two longer on their breaks and things, or if they’re using their phone. It was really weird environment.
On the flip side of that, I actually made some lifelong connections working there just because… I think a lot of industries can relate to where it’s almost like a trauma bond you have with your coworker. You’re both working through crappy conditions, and you’re just trying to get up and get ahead. I’ve met some lifelong friends in the industry doing that as well, so it’s like this double-sided coin of you get to work where you love, you get to work on really exciting projects, but definitely, your passion is exploited in that like, “Okay. You’re passionate. You want to work at video games. Well, this is what it takes,” and then you just give yourself up for a few years, and then you burn out. I’ve seen that happen so many times in the industry where people just leave.
A lot of people leave after the first project that they ship just because they’re so burned out, and it’s just grueling, the overtime, the crunch culture. Crunch is so normalized in video games. I feel like lately, we’re getting away from it, but it was so normalized for a while that crunch was just a part of games. You just had to do it to get the game out on time. It’s weird to think about because it’s video games. It’s not like we’re making software that’s saving lives. I mean, in a way, we are. In a way, we are because, like I said, with the community, you have that sense of belonging to a community that you participate in. You like the games and stuff like that, so you really do give yourself to these projects, and it’s almost like depending on where you are in the company, it’s definitely not giving back to you, unless you really, really fight for it, and there’s a lot of people fighting for it at the same time, so.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. Yeah. I mean, just the stories I’ve heard about crunch is just like… I don’t know how you guys survived that shit, but it does seem… Yeah.
Jessica Gonzalez:
We definitely did.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Really intense. Well, and I wanted to just ask before we move on if you could talk a little bit about how that translated to game workers organizing and you being involved in that.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah. That’s a great question. So, it’s interesting, the position that I was in when the state of California sued Activision Blizzard for widespread harassment and discrimination because when the news broke, Activision tried to paint it off as a Blizzard native issue, that it was only Blizzard that it was happening at. It doesn’t happen at Activision, it doesn’t happen anywhere else, and we fixed the problem. Me, I was working at Blizzard at the time. I had worked at Activision before, and definitely, that wasn’t my experience. I knew that this was something that’s just an industry problem. It’s not an Activision problem. It’s not a Blizzard problem. It’s an everywhere problem, right?
So I was like, “That’s not right. That literally feels like you’re lying to us. We need to take accountability.” The big push and the reason why I joined the labor movement in games is because I noticed none of these companies were taking accountability for the kinds of cultures that they create and foster, and they tried to write it off, and that was a problem. Right? It wasn’t right. The reason I felt so empowered to join, because I was tired of the facade of like, “Well, you work in games, you have to enjoy. You work in games, you should be lucky to be here. There’s five people that would take your place if you leave right now,” type of environment, and I wanted to make it better for the next generation of people because you should be okay to work on a project you’re passionate about and not work yourself into an early grave by hurting yourself or doing these things that are just so mentally taxing, physical exhaustion. It really does take a toll on people. It really does.
I know a lot of people who have sustained lifelong repercussions of just those grueling hours and just lack of sleep, pushing yourself way too hard, people sleeping under their desk or in their cars during breaks. It was just an actually wild concept to think about. It’s like, “We’re making video games. It’s not health software. It’s not something that’s supposed to be enjoyable, so why are we squeezing all of that joy and passion out of people who genuinely care about the project and just not…” There was no return in that. It never showed anything positive, just giving that much of yourself to the employer for them to then say, “Okay. Thank you. The project is shipped, and we’re going to lay you off now.” It just does not feel right. It’s like this carrot on a stick dangling. “You want to work in games? Well, you’re going to have to work.” I definitely, going in, didn’t anticipate it to be as intense as it was, but I definitely… Yeah. It’s just interesting, the things that people accept because they want to work in a place that they’re passionate about.
Maximillian Alvarez:
As the great Sarah Jaffe would say, “Work does not love you back.” Right?
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah. Definitely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. No. Thank you so much for that. That was really enlightening and just heartbreaking, frankly.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, again, I’m just so, so grateful for the opportunity to get to chat to all of you. As listeners can hear, Fae, Jessica have such a tremendous wealth of experience working in different industries, and I just got so many questions that I want to ask y’all. I would say, since we can’t necessarily get into all of that here, I wanted to let listeners know that in the show notes for this episode, we’re going to link to some other related interviews that we’ve done either here at Working People or that I’ve done at The Real News Network. If you want to learn more about the kind of work and organizing that Fae and Jessica do, we’re going to link to a great interview that I got to do including Fae with them and other IATSE members during what was then a… We were quickly approaching a potential IATSE strike. It was averted in the 11th hour, but Fae and their coworkers talked more extensively in that episode about all the crazy work that goes on behind the scenes to make the film industry happen, and so I would highly recommend that folks check that interview out as well.
I mean, Jessica, I’ve been wanting to get Jessica on the show for a long time, and we’re going to link to some reporting on the organizing campaign that Jessica was involved in. We’ll also link to a recent interview that I did with James Russworm, who is the lead worker organizer for Canada’s first video game worker union that formed in Edmonton and affiliated with the UFCW last year. So we’ll link to all those in the show notes. Definitely go check them out, but as I said at the beginning of this episode, we want to devote a good chunk of time here to talk about, first, where the state of the fight for LGBTQ rights is within the labor movement itself. Right? So how far has the movement come on this issue? Right?
We talked last year with Martha Grevatt and Gabbi Pierce about how the labor movement has definitely not been the best on fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in the past. That’s not to say that every union, every local acted as poorly or ignored these issues as much as others, but you can go back and hear Martha describing how much of a slog it was just to get just basic things like benefits for domestic partners, right? Just even putting that on the radar, organized labor, was such a slog, let alone fighting against discrimination on the job, so on and so forth. So we know that we’ve come a long way from there, but we still have a long way to go.
So before we move on to talk about what role the labor movement is or needs to be playing in the larger fight for LGBTQ+ liberation, I want to go back around the panel and ask if y’all could just say a bit more about, from your vantage point and even from your own experience, how is the movement doing with its support for LGBTQ+ workers? What are the common issues and experiences that LGBTQ+ workers in the United States still have to deal with in the year of our Lord 2023 that maybe their fellow workers who are straight and cis don’t think about or don’t see? I was wondering if we could just talk about that first, looking inwards and talking about our own experiences on the job and within the movement. So, Fae, I’m going to toss it back to you to start us off.
Fae Weichsel:
Yeah. It obviously, I think, depends obviously on each union or trade affiliation and how that works. For example, a lot of the health plans now do cover various aspects of transgender care, but they also don’t cover various other aspects. I think that is a very concrete and actionable thing. I think about these things because I’m on the Local 600, and health and welfare committee, and I think it’s really important. When we’re talking about these issues, it is super important to not only be vocally supportive. But when we’re talking about unions, we’re talking about institutions, and institutions… Something I say at union meetings fairly often, it’s starting to become a mantra of mine, is $5,000 in a union’s coffer doesn’t actually do that much material good to the union, but that $5,000 spent on a member could change that member’s life.
I’m specifically thinking of medical debt and things like that. I think that’s really where unions can operate because something that we’ve started to see, and I was afraid of this happening, perfect example, is when Starbucks switched unionizing. Part of the reason that a lot of transgender people went to Starbucks to work there was because they did have a good health plan that did cover a lot of transgender care that for a lot of people might have been the only option that they could get their job that would cover it. Then, once people started unionizing, Starbucks threatened to take that away, and that’s where unions can really come in and not allow employers to use healthcare as a very powerful bludgeoning tool to curb workers’ rights and things like that.
Jessica Gonzalez:
I think the movement now, it’s definitely built up a lot of momentum over the years with… I feel like there’s a lot of parallels happening. So the games industry is having its own revolutionary awakening in the laborer space because that really wasn’t thought of before, and then you see actors, and writers, and everyone at the same time are all feeling this critical mass of something needs to be done, right? You have the UPS workers about to strike, teamsters. There’s so many areas of just labor in general that are reaching critical mass, I feel like. The spot we’re in now, it’s interesting because at the same time, we’re also having this civil rights movement because we had the Black Lives Matter protests happened, and it was so beautiful to see people… true allyship, people using their privilege and their space in society to protect the people who are marginalized behind them. That was so wonderful to see, and you’re seeing more of that now.
I think where we are with the LGBT movement and labor, I think we need to see more of that allyship and the connection there because, to me, allyship is using your privilege to lift others that are marginalized, and don’t have the same equity, and don’t have that voice that you have. They’re not going to listen to someone who they think is just complaining, or they think is mentally ill, or this, or that. We need allyship more than ever, and one of the big initiatives that I pushed at ABK was allyship, and it was… because a lot of the time, the burden is on the marginalized to teach the people who are privileged what it’s like to be marginalized, and what that means, and where our hurt and pain comes from.
Then, you have to look at it with that lens of like, “These people are tired. These people are broken. They’re constantly villainized in the media,” and it’s getting to another critical mass point where it’s like they’re being called horrible names. They’re being literally scapegoated in the media as just the worst thing imaginable, and all of my friends and people that I know are LGBT are the kindest, strongest, smartest, frankly, people that I even know, and it’s just really sad to see them being targeted in this way that it almost feels like an unfair finger-pointing of, “You’re what’s wrong with society,” when, really, all they want to do is push acceptance, and love, and, “You are who you are. Be who you are, and that’s okay.” To even argue that that’s something that’s wrong or morally incorrect is just unfathomable to me.
So allyship is a huge thing I push for in any movement. Yes, realize that you do come from a place of privilege if you are privileged, and then use that privilege to help others who aren’t privileged because it’s the only way we’re going to build equity here. That’s a huge part of the labor movement as well. As you know, labor movement, we all operate on solidarity where you and I don’t necessarily want the same things, but we can both say that both of these are important, and we should strive for better. We shouldn’t just accept the status quo because it’s not equitable. It’s not going to keep everyone happy. It’s not going to protect everybody, essentially.
So the way solidarity is, is you can recognize that we’re both two different people, but also, at the end of the day, we’re both workers. We both want safe working conditions, and then we can apply this to the larger civil rights movement of, “Here’s this group that’s routinely disenfranchised, routinely bullied and scapegoated.” Then, just use our power to lift those people up because you might not be LGBT, but you know someone who is, and they’re actively being targeted right now for wrong reasons. I don’t know if it’s scapegoating, I don’t know if it’s religious reasons, but at any rate, we need to protect our most marginalized communities because if they are targeted and hurt, an injury to one is an injury to all. Who’s to say they’re not going to do it to you next or any other group?
They’re just the easiest group to swing at right now because there’s a lot of religious bias and other biases. Frankly, people have a lot of unconscious bias that they walk around with and don’t even realize it sometimes. Part of allyship is checking that unconscious bias and being actively proactive that you are wired a specific way, and then learning what does it mean to be marginalized in this industry and in other industries. Like Starbucks, right now, they are striking over an unfair labor practice where they’re forced to remove Pride flags and things from their stores, and that’s huge. They’re using their power, their bargaining power collectively to say this is wrong, and the company should make a stance on this. That’s what’s important because it’s really easy to be passive and just say, “Yes, we care about our LGBT employees,” but then showing up and saying like, “This is not okay,” and doing action is where you’re going to really see that push go even further.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. I know. I’m really glad you mentioned the Starbucks workers because I think that’s a huge part of this story. I mean, Starbucks itself as a company has profited handsomely over the years by pretending that it is this progressive, inclusive brand.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Very much so.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yet, it is the same company that is union-busting, scorched earth with a workforce that has a lot of queer and trans workers in it, many of whom depend on the healthcare benefits that Starbucks provides for gender-affirming care, so on and so forth. I think that you’re right, Jessica. That’s a really, really important convergence of the civil rights and labor side of things, and showing how powerful they can be together, and why we all need to be supportive of that and stand in solidarity with them.
Before we get to the final turn here, I wanted to just follow up on something with you, Jessica, if I could because… and I feel like this is a whole other podcast conversation, but a lot of that fascist far-right bullshit that we are seeing today that you and Fae described, the vicious, hateful, violent attacks against queer and trans people in this country, scapegoating them as the source of all of society’s ills, using these really hateful terms like “groomer” to try to turn the public against them. It’s really, really disgusting, but also, a lot of that runs through your industry, a lot of that… Not all of it, but a lot of the far-right weirdness that has culminated in the radical far-right movements we’re seeing today. A lot of them have connections to Gamergate, to the intense sexism in the video game industry from the player side as well as the industry side. So I wanted to just ask if you could talk a little bit about that, about how queer and trans workers in this space or even gamers in this space, how that, I guess, is connected to the conditions that you work and organize in in this industry.
Jessica Gonzalez:
No, that’s a good point. Yeah. It’s interesting because I feel like for a long time, we just collectively ignored a lot of the toxicity in the gaming space. I mean, I’m a woman in games. I pretty much went in knowing that it was a male-dominated field and that I was going to have to pretty much grind my way to the top if I wanted to get anywhere. I consider myself very stubborn in that I don’t want to leave the industry because I want to leave it in a better spot than before I found it, and there’s definitely a lot of boys’ club. It’s why you saw the lawsuit at Riot and why you saw the lawsuit at Blizzard, and it’s because there’s this culture that is just allowed to continue. People make jokes, and then nobody calls it out.
It’s like how the BLM movement framed it as. It’s not enough to not be racist. You have to be effectively anti-racist. I think we need to get to that space in games where it’s like it’s okay to be non-misogynistic, but you need to be actively calling out bad behaviors in your space because then, that leads to a cultural thing of setting the precedent that this is accepted or tolerated here and this is okay. I feel like a lot of the companies are very passive. With games, especially, if you notice, I’m sure you’re on Twitter, there are just constant harassment campaigns against developers and especially LGBT developers. Gamers will actively go out of their way to try and harm developers because they don’t like a video game, because some change happened that the developer didn’t even have anything to do with, but because they’re a developer, they get the target of that rage.
Even in something like a Call of Duty lobby, you hear like, “Oh, you wouldn’t last two minutes in a Call of Duty lobby.” It’s because we allow bad behaviors. We allow people to be abusive, and we don’t condemn actively those things because why? Well, at the end of the day, bottom line is what’s more important to these companies. The bottom line, the end user. We want everyone to play our games. Okay, but you also have to realize that there are groups that are horribly treated in the industry and need that. They need to know that people are going to at least be aware of the injustices that are happening and try to work against that. Right?
That’s why we did a huge push at ABK for our leadership to say something and to say that we believe victims when they come forward and tell us about abuse. Not to say that that doesn’t happen here because then you’re effectively discrediting anyone who’s come forward, and there’s a lawsuit for a reason. There’s enough evidence collected to go forward for a reason. You need to actively say, “Yes, this is wrong, and we are working to correct that,” versus, “It doesn’t happen here.” So then, it’s like this thing of discrediting the victim is always something you hear like Gamergate, everything. When stuff comes out, they go to character assassination of the person who reported the issue versus like, “Okay. Let’s look at the bigger picture of what this problem is and why it keeps manifesting in our spaces.” It’s because we’re actively not anti-misogynistic or anti-prejudice.
It’s just hard. It’s hard because when companies… I think companies are afraid to make that precedent because it’s an admission of guilt, of complacency. We’ve been complacent for so long that I feel like if they were to come out now, people would just then make a mockery of it and say like, “Oh, well, where was this years ago?” I think we need to just collectively agree that it’s okay to feel two things at the same time. We can like a game and hate its community or hate the way that they treat developers and use that solidarity like class solidarity. I feel like we could all pretty much… You’re not a game developer. There’s people that aren’t game developers. Well, at the end of the day, we’re all just people trying to get by, make a living, and work, and be protected while we’re working. I feel like people can resonate with that wherever they work, right?
I think this problem is a larger symptom of a cultural issue where we are not actively calling out injustices as much as we should be or trying to mitigate those things. I think we’re just so passive in that space. Like in gaming, in general, we don’t care. We just want to play video games. When the ABK stuff started, a lot of people in my comments were actually like, “I don’t care. Where’s the new Call of Duty map?” It’s like, “Okay. I get it. I also love Call of Duty, and love the maps, and love working on the game, but let me give you a real hard reality check that like hey, guess what? If the developers that are creating your video games are literally working themselves to death, you’re not going to get a good video game. You want the people that are passionately in love with creating these games to be treated ethically if you want a game that is good and can be ethically consumed.”
That’s what a lot of the movement is doing to show. I feel like we’ve shown a lot of gamers and people that are in the community that kind of treatment that’s been going on in the industry since the Riot lawsuit, since the Blizzard lawsuit. I feel like now it’s more shown, but back then, it was like, “Oh, we don’t know how they make video games.” It’s this huge mystery. Now, we’re showing it, and hopefully… All I can say is we’re already seeing a really huge labor push in games, and I think it’s just going to keep continuing to grow. As long as we’re collectively calling out bad labor practices and continuing on, it’s just going to get better from here on out, so.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell, yeah. Well, again, thank you so much for laying all of that out. I want to, with the time we have remaining, zoom out a bit and take the bird’s-eye view here because as I did my best to lay out in the introduction to this episode and as folks listening to this surely know themselves as you know all too well, we are in a very, very dark period in this country’s history. It’s sad. It’s infuriating. It’s terrifying. It’s all of these things at once. Right?
I have admitted many times on this show that I grew up very conservative and believed a lot of the conservative rhetoric when I was growing up in the ’90s and early aughts. Thankfully, I made my long ideological journey to seeing the world the way that I see it now by talking to folks like yourselves over and over again, by deprogramming a lot of that bigoted hate and just all of this… Yeah, just all this crap, all this ideological junk that is stuffed into our heads from the time that we’re kids. We’re taught to see difference as a bad thing and to judge people for not looking like or acting like us, and to just respond with, at best callousness and at worst, just pure cruelty towards our fellow human beings, even people within our own family. The ways that people turn that hatred outward and push it onto others. They excommunicate members of their own family for not being the person that the parents thought that they “were.”
People can get fired in this country in most states for no cause at all, right? So, of course, if people are gay, or trans, or any number of things, you can’t legally be discriminated against based on your identity, but as we know, as we document all the time on this show, bosses are going to find any excuse that they want to justify firing people or retaliating against people. So, of course, that shit happens all the time in the American workplace, and we should not kid ourselves and pretend that it doesn’t. Again, I just really want us to take stock of where we are right now in this country, and it’s not staying in this country. Right?
I think the other thing to note is that the right-wing politics that we’re seeing here… and this is what I meant by mentioning that I grew up conservative is I’m just seeing so much of the same bullshit that I was hearing in the ’90s, all the manufactured panic over the children. “We’ve got to save the children, and we’ve got to,” I don’t know, “eliminate this sector of society to save the children. We can’t let gay people near our children. We can’t let trans people near our children. We can’t let Drag Story Hour exist because heaven forbid, a child sees a person in drag.” All the while, our kids are getting slaughtered by assault rifles in their own schools. I mean, the climate is going to be uninhabitable for many of them by the time they reach adulthood depending on where in the world that they live. None of that is a fucking concern, right? But heaven forbid, our precious children learn about the fact that there are more than just one type of person out there in the world.
Anyway, I want to focus on that. Right? I want to talk about where we are right now, why this is happening, this fascistic, genocidal attack to either push LGBTQ+ people back into the closet or to push them out of existence, and what the labor movement needs to be doing and what all of us need to be doing to fight against that. So I want to just, one more time, go around the table to our panelists. Please take this in whatever direction you want. Yeah. Can we talk about what role the movement needs to be playing in the larger fight for LGBTQ+ liberation? What people listening to this, what we, and our co-workers, and our neighbors can do to be part of that fight, and why we need to be part of that fight?
Fae Weichsel:
Yeah. I was thinking about what you were saying with how things people used to say in the ’90s, and it is exactly like what you said, I’m an Eagle Scout. I heard all of those things. It’s wild what people will say around you when they don’t know what you are. I remember that stuff, but it’s wild to see how much it’s been repackaged and turned just with gay swap for trans or sometimes not even, like you were saying, verbatim, but I think part of the reasons that it is so drastic is that conservatives did see what happened in the ’90s and the aughts with gay rights, and they just lost, and they lost hard.
So I think part of why it’s so bile, and eminent, and so full of hate this time around, and I do feel this way, is that if they don’t get rid of us, either kill us, put us back in the closet, remove us from public life, they’re going to lose, and they’re going to lose soon, which is why so much of this stuff is so drastic, but also, it’s so rushed. Our Kansas trans healthcare ban got struck down federally because it was so broad. It was obviously unconstitutional. I think that’s the thing that I am personally looking at is that this is a hard fight, and we are not… I’m not someone that believes history will always move in the progress. No. History moves in terms, in ways who fights. That’s how it moves. It is not going to necessarily be progress, unless we make that be the future that happens.
With that, I think the things that not only can unions do institutionally because I think in a lot of ways, outside of queer organizations, unions are one of the few institutions that does have a vested interest in supporting their members, and every union… I don’t know a union that unless it’s one person who happens to be straight, and that’s not a union, that’s one person, doesn’t have queer membership of some variety. What’s so important, and this is so key to why conservatives lost to the gay rights fight, was people started coming out and knowing other queer people. It wasn’t just that, “Oh, I have a gay best friend,” or that cliche line, but what it was, was in conversations where that person who was out wasn’t it, there would be straight people who would say something homophobic, and a straight friend would go, “Hey, cut that out.” That’s what we need to do because there’s not enough trans people to be in every single conversation. There’s not enough queer people even to be in every single conversation. What we need is people to just go, “Hey, cut that out,” and that will do so much in my personal opinion.
Jessica Gonzalez:
I mean, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of rise of fascist policies in the United States. I feel like with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and then the continuous targeting of LGBT people, it’s just getting worse and worse. For the first time ever, there was an alert for safety reasons of LGBT people in the United States which… I mean, I always thought the United States was more progressive in that space, and it’s just really horrible to see that. It almost feels like a grift. The right will attach themselves to anything that they can use to put on a huge charade of, “Oh my God, look at all this horrible stuff that’s going on that’s not even real,” but they can drum up enough support to radicalize, immobilize people.
That’s all the right is doing right now, I feel, is just immobilizing people, aligning them, misaligning them around this thing that’s not even real, that doesn’t exist. The thing that they chose to affix themselves to at first was drag shows, and they are pushing propaganda and things that aren’t even real and true, but because they use such a catching… It’s almost like a hook. They use a hook saying like, “LGBT people are doing this, and this is why you should care about it.” It’s horrible, and any rational person being told that this is what’s happening would think, “Oh my God, I can’t believe this is happening. Of course, I’m going to…” It then radicalizes them to join the movement, right?
That’s the problem, is that it’s misinformed. It’s this horrible, overdramatic, overplayed thing that’s not even real about LGBT people that they’re just trying to prey on people and turn people a specific way when really, it is all that that movement is about is saying it’s okay to be who you are. I think what it is, is there is a critical mass in labor and there’s a critical mass in civil rights right now where people are continually being hurt, continually being scapegoated, continually being pushed to the side, and rights are taken away from them. Then, those people react, and then the right says, “Look at these people reacting. Look at how bad they’re being.” It’s a reactive abuse situation. It’s like you’re going to continue to take the abuse, and the abuse, and the abuse. Once you stand up against the abuse, then they’re saying you’re being abusive.
It’s really sad to see, but also, at the same time, it’s good that we’re calling it out because I feel like for a while, it just felt like, “Oh, LGBT people are accepted, and we have Pride Month, and it’s fine.” It really isn’t fine. We definitely have Pride Month, and I’ve been in the Gay-Straight Alliance since high school. It’s definitely a big part of my civil rights activism is pushing for more ethical treatment of LGBT youth especially, and to see them targeted in this way is just so sad. It’s not something I’ve seen in my years of activism in this space.
My fear is that people are just going to see what’s happening and say, “They’ve got it. It’s fine. They’ve dealt with this kind of stuff for years,” but they aren’t seeing the seriousness of the accusations that are being pushed and the narrative that’s being pushed. It’s weird. It almost feels like, “What’s the bigger picture? Why are they pushing so hard for these things?” Right? Like Roe v. Wade, for example. Criminalizing abortion, criminalizing homosexuality. It’s almost as if they want to force the status quo so badly, they need more poor workers or more broken homes, and people having children that they have no business having, and things like that so that they can keep the status quo. It almost feels like they’re doing any extreme measures possible to keep the status quo, and that’s why you’re seeing these things. Now, it’s reaching a critical mass, and we need the people to just unify, come together, and use their allyship.
Allyship. What the labor movement can do right now is recognize your privilege. Use your allyship to help the people that are not privileged, to help the people that are regularly attacked in the community. That’s what true allyship is, and I feel like when we get to that collective allyship of… Yeah. We know solidarity, right? Solidarity is a great thing in the labor movement, in the industry. Let’s move that into allyship and really, really nurture that solidarity into something that’s proactively making those actions to help those that are in lower places than we are, and don’t have the means to protect themselves, and are getting their civil rights taken away, frankly, because it’s like… Now, women’s autonomy is removed. It’s weird to think that when I was born, I had more rights than I did now.
Now, abortion is illegal, and they’re trying to criminalize homosexuality and transgenderism. It’s just really sad to see, and I wish that… I don’t know. I wish that we were more accepting, and I always felt like, in the United States, we’re pretty progressive, but the last few years, it feels almost like a regression in that space. I think as long as we’re all collectively noticing and putting actions against, then we’re going to fight it, but it’s the scariness of the fascism, and the right-wing’s boogeyman, and how easy that is to radicalize people that makes it really difficult. But as long as we’re calling out the grift and we’re calling out people that are doing these things to incite hatred, and to enforce the status quo, and keep people below where they are, we’ll be okay and in a good spot to fight against it, but it is definitely something that we have to work on.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The point you made about having more rights when you were born than we do now, that was real.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s weird to be…
Maximillian Alvarez:
That sent a chill down my spine.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah. It’s weird to think my mother had more rights as a woman that could have an abortion at her age, right? It’s weird to think about that. In 2023, this is stuff we’re worrying about, right? This is already something that was decided by the Supreme Court as a civil right, and now it’s reversed. Yeah. It’s really weird, the climate that we’re at now. I keep saying critical mass, and it really does feel like we’re there. I guess what happens after that? A revolution maybe. I don’t know.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Fingers crossed.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Yeah. Right? It’s just to that point. I took a sociology class in college, and I specifically remember my professor saying like, “We are in a post-industrialized society. We’ve all just been going with the status quo for so long, and we really need a revolution for workers’ rights to not regress to where they were before.” It’s weird to think about because people literally fought and died for 40-hour work weeks, for non-child labor, and then you’re seeing these stories come out about child labor, like children are working in factories, and, “Oh my gosh, it’s the grind set. I work 80-hours a week,” and things like that. It’s like, “Where did we get to this spot?”
We know people bled, and then lost so much to even give us these protections, like the OSHA and everything. It’s all written in blood. Right? All of those protections, and then how easily it is to just walk that back by a culture of a grind set, and it’s weird to think about because I have nothing in common with a billionaire, but they’re so… In society, they’re looked at as the pinnacle of the human experience like, “Oh, wow, I could be a billionaire,” but there’s literally no chance of that happening. I think people will believe that because it can happen, it’s a good thing, and it’s okay if a small percentage of the world has this amount of wealth because it could be me one day. But really, that’s not going to happen.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I couldn’t have said it better myself. Yeah. I think there’s like… and I don’t know. Maybe there’s an argument to be made there about people telling us that we’re being unrealistic about wanting to save the planet and humanity from climate chaos or transition away from capitalism, and people are like, “Oh, that will never happen.” It’s like, “Well, you fucking believe you’re going to be a billionaire. That’s more magical thinking than this is.” So maybe we’re actually closer to where we need to be than we think.
Jessica Gonzalez:
Exactly. It’s so weird, too. Something else I wanted to mention is when we were pushing our ABK stuff. So Activision Blizzard King has offices all over the United States and even global, right? So we’re in our work communication tool, Slack. We have everyone across ABK in Slack. I remember we were pushing for ethical treatment of people in video games like, “Why is crunch culture so bad?” Our allies in other countries were actually amazed at the sentiment that was being expressed from US workers.
They were actually like, “It’s so anti-worker. The way that y’all speak about your conditions, it’s framed in the way that you should be lucky to be working here,” and like, “Yeah, I worked this much, but I love what I do,” and it’s like, “Yeah. You can love what you do, but also recognize that this is unscalable at this… You can’t just work yourself to death for 20 years, and then expect everything to be okay. Then, our boss is making $200 million a year and laying off all of our French workers because they’re unionized.” There’s just so much that people are actively ignoring because they just think that, “Oh, well, the bosses know what they’re doing,” but it’s always about the bottom line, always about the bottom line, and there’s human cost every time.
“The largest single-employer strike in American history now appears inevitable.” So said Teamsters general president Sean O’Brien late Wednesday after leaders of the union representing shipping giant UPS quit negotiating with company representatives after giving them a Friday deadline to “act responsibly and exchange a stronger economic proposal for more than 340,000 full- and part-time workers.”…
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on June 28, 2023. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Democratic Maine Gov. Janet Mills on Monday vetoed an offshore wind development bill because she opposed an amendment requiring collective bargaining agreements for future projects, drawing condemnation from the state’s largest federation of unions.
“Maine’s climate motto has been ‘Maine Won’t Wait.’ With this veto, Gov. Mills is saying, ‘Maine Will Wait’—for thousands of good jobs, for clean energy, and for the build-out of a new industry,” Maine AFL-CIO executive director Matt Schlobohm said in a statement. “We will wait because the governor is opposed to fair labor standards which are the industry norm.”
“The governor’s ideological opposition to strong labor standards,” said Schlobohm, “jeopardizes the build-out of this industry and all the climate, economic, and community benefits that come with it.”
Mills supported an earlier version of Legislative Document (L.D.) 1847 that originated from her office. Last week, however, the governor made clear that she opposed the addition of an amendment requiring project labor agreements (PLAs)—pre-hire deals negotiated between unions and employers that establish wage floors and other conditions—for the construction of offshore wind ports as well as the manufacturing of turbines and other components needed for wind energy projects.
In a letter to state lawmakers, “Mills argued that mandating a PLA would create a ‘chilling effect’ for non-union companies, discouraging them from bidding on construction,” The American Prospect‘s Lee Harris reported. “Supporters of the PLA provision say that is a far-fetched objection, since the agreements do not ban non-union contractors from vying for jobs. (In fact, that’s one reason some more radical unionists say PLAs do too little to advance labor’s cause.)”
The governor vowed to veto the bill unless the Legislature recalled it from her desk and revised it to the initial version or adopted “language that would ensure that union workers, employee-owned businesses, and small businesses could all benefit.”
“Maine’s climate motto has been ‘Maine Won’t Wait.’ With this veto, Gov. Mills is saying, ‘Maine Will Wait’—for thousands of good jobs, for clean energy, and for the build-out of a new industry.”
In a Friday letter to Mills, state lawmakers told the governor they would introduce “Maine Resident Priority Language” to encourage contractors to first hire qualified workers who reside in the state.
That last-ditch effort to save the bill was unsuccessful, however. On Monday, the final day of Maine’s legislative session, Mills vetoed L.D. 1847, just as the Maine State Chamber of Commerce had urged her to do.
In her veto letter, which repeated language from last week’s threat letter, Mills wrote, “Generally speaking, I recognize the value of PLAs, or collective bargaining agreements, as a tool to lift up working men and women by ensuring that they are paid strong wages with good benefits.”
However, as The Portland Press Herald reported, Mills contended that the legislation’s PLA requirement “was a step too far because more than 90% of workers in Maine’s construction industry—which would compete for these jobs—are not unionized.” The governor “also pointed out that no other New England state requires labor agreements for offshore wind development projects.”
Mills wrote that a PLA requirement “could stifle competition, which could cut out thousands of workers and employee-owned businesses, and could end up favoring out-of-state unions in the region, over Maine-based companies and workers—and I do not believe any of us want to see out-of-state workers being bussed up to coastal Maine to build our offshore wind port while Maine workers are sidelined, sitting at home.”
Jason Shedlock, president of the Maine Building and Construction Trades Council and an organizer for the Laborers’ International Union (LiUNA), told the Prospect: “Right now what we see is the opposite. People leave the state every day to go to other states in New England, to earn family-sustaining wages.”
According to Harris:
Maine’s Building Trades include more than 6,000 workers who routinely struggle to find work nearby.
The construction industry has always involved travel. But Shedlock says part of the case for a PLA is that it will grow Maine’s skilled apprentices and eventually its union halls. If non-union contractors win bids on jobs, he said, they will look to the building trades’ apprentice programs for staff.
Maine Sen. Chip Curry (D-11), the bill’s lead sponsor, said in a statement that he is “disappointed by the governor’s veto.”
It “threatens this new industry, putting good jobs for Maine people and the environmental benefits that go along with offshore wind at risk,” said Curry. “Maine voters understand the opportunity that we have, and they overwhelmingly support an offshore wind industry that guarantees workers good pay and benefits, protects our environment and host communities, and reduces our dependence on fossil fuels.”
“This is a critical issue for Maine’s future,” he added. “I remain committed to working with all parties, including Gov. Mills, to find a path forward.”
Earlier this month, the House voted 73-64 to pass L.D. 1847, and the Senate followed suit with a 22-11 vote. The former margin doesn’t meet the two-thirds threshold needed to override Mills’ veto, but the governor reiterated in her Monday letter to lawmakers that she is still committed to reaching a compromise.
According to Bangor Daily News, “Mills and progressives could come to a deal on the subject as part of a different bill on offshore wind procurement that the full Legislature has not yet acted upon.” That legislation, L.D. 1895, contains the same labor standards, and the governor has already threatened to veto it unless they are removed.
In an attempt to justify her opposition to PLA requirements, Mills warned that robust pro-worker provisions would put Maine “at a disadvantage compared to other New England states,” adding, “It is imperative that investment in offshore wind facilities and projects foster opportunities for Maine’s workforce and construction companies to compete on a level playing field for this work.”
But according to Schlobohm: “Every single one of the 16 offshore wind projects in development or permitting in the Northeast/East coast is being built under these exact labor standards. The same is true for offshore wind ports. It is the industry norm. Why would Maine lower our standards?”
“Funding from the federal government to support these projects is contingent on these exact labor standards,” he continued. “These bills embody the playbook—pushed by the Biden administration—for how we decarbonize in a way that benefits working people and creates a durable transition.”
The Maine Beacon reported Tuesday that Mills’ veto could cause Maine to miss out on millions of dollars in federal subsidies earmarked for offshore wind development.
“We would expect this type of resistance from a Republican governor,” Francis Eanes, executive director of the Maine Labor Climate Council, told The Washington Post. “But to have a Democratic governor impeding the president’s agenda is something that we just didn’t expect.”
As Harris explained: “At stake is whether the offshore wind industry will offer decent work—particularly compared with the industrial-scale solar sector, which promised good-paying careers but has delivered unpredictable temp jobs. In nearly every state, similar fights are playing out as business groups try to beat back labor provisions attached to new federal spending.”
“Labor groups across clean energy are hoping to capture not just installation but manufacturing jobs,” she continued. “Because operations management for offshore wind uses relatively little manpower, retaining the manufacturing is critical. In Scotland, recent reports suggest that heavy investment in offshore wind over the past decade has generated just one-tenth of the jobs promised by government officials, partly because the manufacturing of turbines has been offshored.”
Most wealthy nations in the west have turned to migrant workers to keep a variety of industries afloat. But while the cheap labor of immigrants is welcomed, the migrants themselves are not. Canada is no exception. From the agricultural industry to the service sector, migrants can be found working under dangerous conditions for less than the minimum wage. And in many cases, unions simply aren’t doing their part to organize this vital section of the workforce. Elizabeth Ha joins The Real News to discuss the plight of migrant workers in Canada and why the labor movement must embrace them for its own survival.
Elizabeth Ha is the Equity Vice President of the Ontario Federation of Labour. She is also a member of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, the Asian Canadian Labour Alliance, and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.
Studio Production: Jesse Freeston
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Elizabeth Ha:
My name’s Elizabeth Ha. I guess my most important role is I’m a mother to two girls. I am from Windsor, Ontario. The work that I do in labour would be, I am part of Ontario Public Service Employees Union. We’re like a provincial government union. My activism is in not just labour, but also the community. I’m currently the vice president at the OFL, which is the Ontario Federation of Labour, representing workers of color, and then also ACLA and CBTU. I am a member of both of those, which is Asian Canadian Labour Alliance and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Elizabeth, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at The Real News. I really, really appreciate it. We are, of course, sitting here at the Action Network tent at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress. We’ve been talking to as many folks as we can over the past two days, learning as much as we can about the state of the labour movement here in Canada, what our fellow workers across industries are going through, and how folks are fighting for the working class.
I really wanted to sit down and chat with you because of, I mean, all the incredible work that you do really, but especially in terms of your work fighting for workers of color and fighting for migrant workers in Canada. I think that this is something that really I have a personal connection to. It’s something that we try to cover extensively at The Real News Network as well, because for as exciting as the energy we’re seeing in the organized labour movement is and as exciting as it is to see more established unions nominally support the energy of young workers at Starbucks and Amazon and service industry workers across the board.
That’s all very exciting. But there’s still so many workers who are left out of the movement or who are written out of the movement itself, because like migrant farm workers, for example, in the United States, farm workers were deliberately written out of the National Labor Relations Act for very racist reasons and are very underrepresented in the movement as a result of it. And that doesn’t mean that we forget about them.
That means that we have to fight that much harder to support them as they are dealing with hyper exploitation, rampant discrimination and harassment, wage theft, so on and so forth. I wanted to ask if you could just say a little more about your organizing and advocacy work as it pertains to workers of color and migrant workers in Canada.
Elizabeth Ha:
When you talk about migrant workers in the States, it’s very, very similar to migrant workers in Canada. I know this because I’ve talked to workers in the States. When you hear their stories, a lot of it happens here in Canada. Being from Windsor, we’re about 30 minutes, 40 minutes from Leamington, and we have one of the highest population of migrant workers in Ontario. I’ve been doing this work for years, and I think because of the pandemic in the last couple years, it just really put a spotlight on what’s happening and people in the community are starting to see it.
Growing up in Windsor, you go to Leamington for field trips and stuff and you would see migrant workers, but I don’t think people really knew their working conditions or their living conditions. When COVID happened, initially when the borders closed, they weren’t allowed into Canada. They couldn’t find anyone to do this work. Canadians don’t want to do this work. I think most people know the health and safety risk and the lack of everything. Nobody wants to do this hard labour.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You get paid like shit. You got no bathrooms. You’re getting harassed by supervisors.
Elizabeth Ha:
The other thing is I think the employer wants migrant workers because they are able to do whatever they want, pay lower wages, not pay them. They’re working overtime, but not getting paid overtime. They are doing work that they’re not supposed to do, like demeaning personal errands for their employer. On and on. When they were coming in, the employer went to the government, was able to lobby the government. If you have money basically, the government listens and they opened the borders, then they were deemed essential. They came in. The problem was when you look at essential workers, healthcare workers were essential workers, there’s a number of them.
We called them here. We put signs on our lawns and all this stuff. But when the migrant workers came in, they were essential, but they didn’t get the same welcome. They didn’t get the same protections as other essential workers got. We started to hear about workers getting sick in the workplaces. What happened was, in Canada, if certain workplace worker got sick, they got COVID, I don’t know the numbers, but the health unit would come in and basically close the business. We knew there were hundreds of workers getting sick on these farms, and we had to go and make sure someone checked on them.
We were able to get a lot of information from the workers because we’ve done so much work, we have a history and there’s a trust. They were able to share pictures of what they got to eat. They told us how they didn’t get PPE. Without them even telling you, you know in certain workplaces you cannot social distance. You’re literally working beside another person. Their housing, definitely no social distancing. You’re sleeping in bunk beds with another worker or two bunk beds with… There’s four workers in a small room with shared bathrooms and shared kitchens and things like that. And then on top of all that, they’re restricted.
They can’t leave the property anymore because the employer were not letting them leave the property to take groceries or anything. Their reason was to protect the community from in case somebody had COVID. Meanwhile, they come in knowing they didn’t have COVID. These employers were given money to quarantine their workers. We know a lot of them were not quarantined, and there was no accountability. No one asked the employer, “Can you show us a receipt that this worker was quarantined?” No, they just pocketed this money. The workers were maybe quarantined for a day, two days a week, and then they were working.
But with that said, they still did not have COVID. The reason people were getting sick was some of these farms were bringing in people from the community do the work. They were actually bringing COVID into these workplaces, and the migrant workers were getting blamed for bringing COVID into the country. I remember going to a store and purchasing all this stuff and the cash register lady, whatever, she said, “Oh, you’re buying all this stuff. Are you stocking up?” I’m like, “No, I’m bringing them to Leamington.” This guy behind me, and I had my daughter, which bothered me, and he said, “Why are you bringing this stuff to those people? They’re bringing all these diseases in, brought in COVID.”
This is what’s happening with migrant workers. The good thing is people started to see how these workers were being treated. Even though I’m telling you the story of this one person, there was a lot of people that brought in PPE and brought in donations of food. Businesses were cooking culturally appropriate food so that we can bring it down to Leamington. We had boxes and boxes of fresh produce coming in from Toronto that we would try to get to these farms, to the workers. We had grandmothers making masks for them. It really showed people still cared and they were able to get up and take care of each other.
These workers, it’s not like this is their first time. Some of the workers have been coming for 10, 20, 30 years, even generations, and they’re still treated like this.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. We’re talking in this corner of the country primarily agricultural workers?
Elizabeth Ha:
Yes, like farm workers. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I just wanted to clarify that, because in the States and I know in Canada too, I mean, there are definitely pockets across the labour market where employers exploit migrant labour and even migrant child labour as we’ve been hearing about in the United States. We’re talking meat packing plants. We’re talking construction sites, but we’re also talking about farming operations across the country.
What you were saying is that when COVID hit and farm workers were deemed essential along with other classes of workers, but no one wanted to do those jobs, and so the farmers lobbied the government to essentially ease migration restrictions so that migrant farm workers could come in. The farmers would get paid for having those essential migrant farm workers come in, and they would get paid to quarantine them, but they wouldn’t actually do that.
They would just pocket the money and kick the workers out into the fields, then they would pen the workers in, not let them leave, and occasionally bring in workers from around town who would get them sick, and then they would be stuck there in a locked pen. Do I have that right?
Elizabeth Ha:
Yep. That’s exactly what was happening.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Cool, cool. That’s great. Jesus, man. I mean, it’s so dark and I’m so grateful to you and to others who are doing everything you can to fight for and fight alongside these workers who, as we said, are so often, too often left by the wayside. I wanted to ask about that for a second. I would say in the United States, there are some exceptions. There are established unions that have gone to the mat for the most marginalized and exploited of workers. You’re seeing positive developments like Laborers Local 79, the construction workers union in New York City.
Instead of doing what people typically think of construction workers in New York City doing, which is blaming undocumented workers and non-union workers as the enemy who are undercutting our jobs and our wages, they’re reaching out to these workers, largely migrant and undocumented workers in the city or returning citizens coming home from prison, who are ripe for hyper exploitation and have to work for the most union busting, exploitative, corner cutting demolition and construction companies in the city.
The unions reaching out to these workers and fighting for them, creating things like an Excluded Workers Fund because they weren’t eligible for federal COVID or state COVID benefits. That’s really positive to see, but it’s still, in my assessment, the exception that proves the rule. I wanted to ask where the plight of migrant farm workers specifically in your experience, where that fits into the broader labour movement, if at all, in Canada?
Elizabeth Ha:
The work that I do, it is community work. I was lucky enough where we were able to pass resolution at my union to say, okay, let’s start doing some work with organizations like Justia. The resolution was about when we do training or reaching out to the community, sometimes we need the resources and funds to do this work. Making unions recognize that you have that potential, and these are workers too. We were able to get that convention floor to pass a resolution. That allowed me, who moved the resolution, to be able to do some more of that work. I’m hoping that it was moved because they want to help workers.
But I think at the same time, this is just a part of me that thinks, it’s about also not advertising, but a lot of unions do things for the wrong reasons. They want that stamp, like their logo on stuff, or they want recognition for things. As I did this work, I sometimes will mention my union, but I wasn’t forced to, so I just continued doing it. I do think more unions need to look at not just their own members. When you look at unions historically, they don’t just advocate for your membership, your dues paying membership. Historically, they fought for workers in general. And that’s what our unions, all unions everywhere should be doing is they need to see, why do we have a problem?
Why is there this low percentage of our population not part of a union? How are people viewing unions? As a racialized woman, I think that our communities have… We don’t trust unions because they’ve historically discriminated, or they’ve used our communities for certain things. If you continue to do that, why would we want to participate in a union when even after you join, only a certain group of people get to benefit from some of those things? I think the labour movement needs to wake up. I think this is the time. I believe it’s the time. I mean, I’ve never heard the words equity, diversity, inclusiveness in spaces like this as much as I’ve heard it in the last two years.
But with that being said, I’m just hearing it, right? I need to see it. As a human rights activist, you need to show me. I can’t continue making you look good because I’m part of a community that has been there for me and that’s where my fight is. But I do see this as a moment where there is so much opportunity for unions to do the real work for them to survive really in the long run. Because right now you can have a rally to fight for whatever the issue is now. But after a month later when you’re done fighting, the bigger issue is still out there. There is still not enough housing for people. The price of food has gone up.
People cannot afford groceries anymore. Where I live, the cost of rent. There’s so much homelessness. The unemployment rate in my area has gone up. I mean, everything. I feel like workers are at a point where they’re angry. They see what’s happening. I think that’s where unions need to tap into it and say, “Listen, what can we do to help and not take over what you’re already doing? Here’s a space for you to speak. Tell us your experience. What is it that we need to do?” Because when you talk about affordable housing or whatever, labour will say, “Okay, this is what we need to do,” but we’re not the one struggling.
If you’re part of a union, you have a collective agreement. You make pretty good money, and you have a union that protects you. You probably have benefits, pension, all this stuff, and you’re fighting for people that can barely pay rent or you’re trying to increase wages. Meanwhile, you’re getting paid $25. We need to start moving aside and letting the people who are living these experiences be the voice.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just on that note, to really underline the stakes, first and foremost, they’re the obvious human stakes, which you laid out. People not being able to sleep under a roof. People not being able to feed themselves or their children. People not being able to access the healthcare that they desperately need. People who can be fired from their job like that just for who they are, what they wear. No just cause whatsoever. We have so far to go in fighting these injustices and fighting them for all working people, like you said, not just those who are fortunate enough to have a collective bargaining agreement. There are those basic first principle human stakes of we need to do this because it’s what’s right.
Then there’s the secondary stakes, like you said, it’s like we need to do this, otherwise the labour movement will die. We’ve been in decline for decades. For our own salvation, we need to be thinking about how we can expand our movement and reach as many workers as we possibly can and think in that mode. And then on the third order that I was thinking of as you were talking is we’re not the only ones making a play to appeal to working class people who are feeling that pain right now. There is a rising increasingly fascistic right wing that is speaking to this pain and harnessing it for its own political agenda.
I think the question is, as the great labour organizer Aminah Sheikh put it in a recent piece that she published, she’s like, how are labour in the left rising to meet this discontent, this frustration and anger and pain with the cost of living crisis, with the eroding social safety net, with increased climate catastrophe and endless war? All of this stuff is happening and working people are feeling it. What are labour in the left doing to meet that, meet people where they are, speak to that pain and harness that into something, a movement that can fight for better?
Because at the same time, the right is making those appeals and tapping into that anger and doing what they always do, which is directing it back towards migrants, queer people, trans people, just carving out certain privileged sectors of the real true working class. Everyone else is trying to steal something from you. I guess, I meant to ask in that regard, when we’re talking about the migrant farm workers in your area, are these primarily workers coming from Latin America and the Caribbean?
Elizabeth Ha:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay. I don’t know. I assume that like in the United States, they get sucked into that reactionary fervor and painted as the ones who are stealing our jobs and the ones that need to be targeted for elimination. Anyway, you’ve said so much that’s just making me really, really think about how important it is to act now because this shit isn’t going away and the stakes are only going to continue to increase dramatically.
I guess, I just wanted to ask, in that vein, what would it look like or what should it look like for the labour movement, but also for all of us to make that commitment to fighting for the working class writ large, not just organized labour?
Elizabeth Ha:
That’s a hard question. I think that the key piece is to make people realize, it’s not just about themselves and to really think about who are you doing this for in this moment. Because as activists, we became activists because we wanted to be the voice of someone that didn’t have a voice, or we’re fighting for the rights of our workers. But when you’re thinking about that, I think about the future generation. Even as an activist before I had kids, it’s very different now that I have kids. Because as I go to a rally, it’s like, I don’t want my kids to go to this rally. I don’t want them fighting for this. It makes me think of everything that I have and all the people that came before me so that I can have those things.
I think people need to understand, sometimes people think activism might be a bad word. I think if you want to do the right thing and be that voice, to me you’re an activist and you’re doing the right thing. I think labour needs to be like… I don’t know. I can’t see this as being a quick fix, right? Because the structure of the movement needs to be reinvented. I don’t want to say just smash it down and build it. But in a way, you kind of have to really look at the structure of your union and the people that are making these decisions. Are you including voices? Every union has equity groups like workers of color, people with disability, all these different equity.
You’re giving them a space and sometimes a voice, but are you really listening? Are you really taking what they’re saying and saying, “How do we fix this? How do we open this door? What do we need to do?” I think that’s the problem is we’re doing things because we have to. We have a committee because we have to. But then are you going to do something? I mean, I got so many things going through my head to answer this question, but I don’t really have one solution, I guess, because it’s so hard. I don’t know.
I think the key thing for me right now doing this work is trying to get unions, like the labour movement, to see how important it is for them to connect with the community, not just workers in their unions, all workers as a whole. They definitely have the resources to do this. This is the moment to do it because I think people are ready. I think workers are ready to say, “Enough is enough, and we’re not going to take this anymore.” People can’t survive.
Those who are familiar with Catholic theology will have heard of the “seven deadly sins” enumerated by Pope Gregory I — pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth, all dire moral failings that are thought to lead to further transgressions. As the Bible says, “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24). It’s ironic, then, that the highly paid executives running the Ascension…
This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on June 22, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
Labor leaders and organizers are banding together to demand justice for Chinese-American unionized worker and activist Li Tang “Henry” Liang. Liang was indicted and then arrested in early May in Boston in retaliation for exercising his free speech rights. “The federal government has targeted Liang for advocating peaceful relations between the US and China,” say labor activists in the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance of the AFL-CIO, the largest trade union in the US.
As a hotel worker, Liang was an active member in his union, UNITE HERE Local 26. He is also an activist in the Chinese-American community, rallying against the US’s propaganda war against China. He previously served on the board of directors for Chinatown Main Street, an organization promoting Chinese-American small businesses in Boston’s Chinatown, and the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association of New England, which “serves as the umbrella organization for the Chinese communities of New England” according to its website.
“Li Tang has been a participant in important fights for workers rights, including going on strike with his co-workers for 46 days in 2018,” Mike Kramer, Executive Vice President of Local 26, told Peoples Dispatch. “Despite working long hours as a hotel worker, he has dedicated his free time to being active in his community and to the service of others. The charges being brought against this man are a shameful, racist attack.”
“Following his indictment, his employer placed him on indefinite suspension, unfairly depriving his family of income and assuming his guilt without due process,” reads APALA’s petition. “Someone undergoing trial should not be presumed guilty and should have the right to due process and the right to livelihood.”
Liang has advocated for China’s reunification with regions such as Taiwan and peace between the US and China. He was indicted by a federal grand jury for “conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without prior notification” and “acting as an agent of a foreign government without notice to the attorney general.”
“Having a political view doesn’t make you an agent of a foreign government,” said Amrita Dani, unionized teacher in Boston and APALA member.
Liang’s charges come in the context of the United States’ New Cold War against China. “Liang is facing charges under the Foreign Agents Relations Act (FARA),” states APALA. “In recent years, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) has used FARA to intimidate peace activists, journalists, and others for voicing opposition towards hawkish US foreign policy.”
With the rise of challenges to US hegemony by China and Russia, the United States has grown increasingly paranoid and has lashed out in various ways against these two countries. One way is the billions of dollars in funding funneled to the Russia–Ukraine war, or with the military drills in Chinese waters along with US bases strategically surrounding China. Part of the ongoing effort to rally mass support for the New Cold War is the persecution and repression of free speech in the Chinese-American community.
Waves of Chinese-Americans and Chinese nationals including students, academics, researchers, and activists have been targeted for repression by the FBI due to the US’s orientation against China. In 2020, Trump signed an executive order to expel thousands of Chinese university students purportedly for having ties to the People’s Liberation Army, although many of these students had ties to civilian universities who merely provided scholarships through the PLA. The US is still to this day denying visas based on this proclamation.
“[The US is] fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent, not countries that want to make war with them, but countries who want to develop their economies, to protect their people and sovereignty, and to have a multilateral world, not a unipolar world,” said Marxist militant Ronnie Kasrils, former Minister of Intelligence of South Africa, during a recent webinar. “The Yankees are panic-stricken… for the way their control [over these nations] are breaking down.”
APALA is calling for Liang to be reinstated at his job, for the Department of Justice to stop racially profiling and restricting freedom of speech, and for the DOJ to drop all charges against Liang.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This year, workers from GrowNYC and FRESHFARM, two sustainable food access nonprofits in New York City and the Washington, D.C. metro area respectively, formed unions. Workers who support and organize farmers markets, compost programs, and other initiatives will begin collectively bargaining for higher wages and job security in the coming months for the first time in the history of the industry.
Last fall, all members of Local 1459 of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) in Western Massachusetts received a peculiar letter. All that Iris Scott, a shift leader and union shop steward at the River Valley Food Co-op in Easthampton, can remember about it is that it was brief: “It was kind of just letting us know that, hey, there’s an international [UFCW] convention happening this April. It happens once every five years,” Scott told The Real News. Each local would be sending delegates and alternates to the Las Vegas convention, and rank-and-file UFCW members could nominate people—or themselves—for the positions.
Scott and a few of their union siblings didn’t know much about the union beyond their own local, but decided to throw their hats in the ring. Why not try to get their voices heard in the international union? Uncontested, Scott and another co-op coworker got the delegacy.
Within a couple weeks, a colleague sent Scott an article from the labor movement publication Labor Notes. The piece highlighted that a new reform group had emerged within the union called Essential Workers for a Democratic UFCW—which would later morph into Essential Workers for Democracy—and it was looking to shake things up a bit at the convention.
“I read that article and it was pretty illuminating for me,” Scott explained. “There’s something bigger here and I need to be a part of it.” For Scott, that “something” was not just rising militancy in their own union, but a national labor movement snowballing towards full-blown resurgence.
A “coalition of rank and filers, local leaders, and not-yet-union workers,” the article read, was demanding an end to the undemocratic rule of the international union by instituting one-member-one-vote elections for top officers; a shift in resources from bloated consultancy budgets and local president salaries toward a massive investment in new organizing to meet the rising interest and need for unions during the COVID pandemic; and a turn to coordinated bargaining across union shops, instead of isolated labor agreements that have failed to do right by workers at monopolized retailers.
“I read that article and it was pretty illuminating for me,” Scott explained. “There’s something bigger here and I need to be a part of it.” For Scott, that “something” was not just rising militancy in their own union, but a national labor movement snowballing towards full-blown resurgence.
Across the country, workers are rising up. Stealing headlines are those over the past three years who have organized their workplaces for the first time, either through their own independent unions like the Amazon Labor Union and Trader Joe’s United, or with the backend support of established labor, like Starbucks Workers United.
But this special “labor moment” isn’t only defined by new organizing. Perhaps most significant are the militant rank-and-file reform movements gaining ground in some of the US’s most powerful legacy unions. They want to reverse the effects of decades of corruption and concessions, pro-company complacency, and a repugnance for organizing the unorganized—a state of affairs that forced thousands off unions’ membership rolls.
Following World War II, unions bureaucratized, grew fatally dependent on the Democratic Party, and lost the militancy needed to defend against the corporate offensive of the neoliberal era.
“The unfortunate reality is that there’s been a sort of calcification in the labor movement for many decades,” Eric Blanc, an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, told TRNN. Following World War II, unions bureaucratized, grew fatally dependent on the Democratic Party, and lost the militancy needed to defend against the corporate offensive of the neoliberal era.
“For the most part unions haven’t been transformed sufficiently to meet this new context, and to meet the more militant, more radical orientation that a lot of younger workers are bringing to the movement,” Blanc said.
Despite these conditions, there is reason for optimism. In the past few years, internal union reform movements have successfully pushed for leadership overhauls at two of the country’s largest and most powerful private sector unions. In 2021, the rank-and-file movement Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) was instrumental in breaking the chain of pro-corporate top officers at the 1.2 million-member Teamsters union. Workers elected a more aggressive leadership that has vowed to organize Amazon, and to turn back two decades of concessions in the UPS labor contract—the largest private sector collective bargaining agreement in the country. Five weeks remain before contract expiration, and the Teamsters have walked away from the bargaining table after UPS presented a counterproposal on economic issues the union described as unserious and “disrespectful.”
Formed in response to a string of federal corruption charges brought against several United Auto Workers (UAW) officials, the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) caucus fought successfully in the union’s first one-member-one-vote election of top officers in 2022 and 2023 to elect a slate of reformers. The reform caucus-backed slate, Members United, took control of the executive board and the presidency. Top priorities for the new leadership include the abolition of tiered workforces across auto companies, reinstating the union’s lost and cherished cost-of-living wage increases, and organizing the rapidly expanding and mostly non-union electric vehicle and battery industries.
“For the most part unions haven’t been transformed sufficiently to meet this new context, and to meet the more militant, more radical orientation that a lot of younger workers are bringing to the movement,” Blanc said.
Both the Teamsters and the UAW have vowed to lead their largest shops out onto the picket line this year should their workers’ demands not be inked into new labor contracts. That means 340,000 Teamsters at UPS are poised to launch the largest single-employer strike in US history in August, and 150,000 auto workers could walk out of the profit-flush Big Three automakers (GM, Ford, and Stellantis) just six weeks later in September.
The energy such actions could pump into the labor movement is mind boggling. As the labor scholar Barry Eidlin argued in a piece for Jacobin, the most promising element of this recent uptick in labor activity is workers’ rejection of top-down staff unionism in favor of worker-led organizing. It has manifested in the rise of independent unions, but also in the recent successes of union reform movements, which have presented the labor movement an opportunity to grow by “institutionalizing insurgency.” That is, consolidating and furthering workers’ wins through unions’ organizational structure without suppressing their militant spirit.
“Union reform movements are absolutely essential for any chance at sustained labor revival,” Blanc said. “It’s hard to see a path to turning around decades of union decline without the resources, staff and power that these unions used to have and could potentially rebuild.”
Could the UFCW, the 1.2-million-member behemoth of largely low-wage retail, meatpacking, healthcare and other workers, be the next to rise?
When rank-and-file members went to the UFCW convention, which was held at the gaudy Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas in April, the first thing they noticed was the yelling. “They were being aggressive, yelling at us in the hallway.” said Mike McDonald, a pediatric emergency room technician in Spokane, Washington and a convention alternate.
McDonald stood among roughly 75-100 rank-and-file reformers at the convention, largely from his home UFCW Local 3000 in the northwest, the union’s largest local and the heart of the burgeoning reform movement. The yellers were supporters of Marc Perrone, who has been the international’s president since 2014, and they were yelling the name of his election slate, “Members First.” At the convention, Perrone would be elected yet again to the top job, alongside dozens of others on the slate to the executive board.
“Union reform movements are absolutely essential for any chance at sustained labor revival,” Blanc said. “It’s hard to see a path to turning around decades of union decline without the resources, staff and power that these unions used to have and could potentially rebuild.”
“Elected,” of course, is a subjective word. Perrone and his slate were “elected” not by the membership, but through an indirect delegate system that Local 3000’s secretary-treasurer described to Hamilton Nolan for In These Times as “the Electoral College system on steroids.” Under it, not only do small locals wield disproportionate power, but according to the reformers, a solid majority of the convention delegates—the yellers—were not rank and file, but union staff and officers.
Seeing so few rank and filers in international leadership and in the convention’s delegacy, workers in the reform group say it only reaffirmed their central demand: one-member-one-vote elections of the union’s top officers.
Direct elections of international leadership is a rarity among US unions. Federal investigations into the corruption of Teamsters and UAW leadership ultimately brought one-member-one-vote to both unions. However, in both cases, it was the reform movements embodied in TDU and UAWD that successfully pushed for direct leadership elections, rather than outright government trusteeship, as the solution to the corruption scandals that had overtaken their unions.
In their first one-member-one-vote election in 1991, the Teamsters elected the militant, TDU-backed candidate Ron Carey, who brought a sea change to a union that to many had grown synonymous with the mafia. TDU was the same movement that helped bring the reform-minded Sean O’Brien to power in 2021. At the UAW, the UAWD caucus successfully pushed a member referendum for direct elections of union officers, which passed and led to the election of all the reformers’ preferred candidates in 2022 and 2023. Democracy in both unions has opened the door for change.
“There are things that need to fundamentally change in this union from our approach to bargaining, organizing, and education/training members and leaders to strike prep,” wrote Brandon Mancilla, a UAWD caucus member and the elected director of UAW Region 9A, in a Facebook message to TRNN. “And of course this is also our chance to finally turn the page on the corruption that has brought our union down by implementing more accountability and membership control over our union.”
It was the reform movements embodied in TDU and UAWD that successfully pushed for direct leadership elections, rather than outright government trusteeship, as the solution to the corruption scandals that had overtaken their unions.
In the UFCW, the analog reform organization may be the emergent Essential Workers for Democracy (EW4D). A nonprofit formed out of the efforts of rank and filers and UFCW Local 3000’s President Faye Guenther, EW4D positions itself as an independent organization pushing unions—not exclusively the UFCW—to meet the moment: to channel a building excitement and dire need to organize the country’s “essential workers,” and to raise the standards of their employment. “Essential workers want a union that fights for them,” Guenther told The Real News. “They don’t want to be essential workers and also homeless.”
“Essential workers want a union that fights for them,” Guenther told The Real News. “They don’t want to be essential workers and also homeless.”
The organization is helmed by long-time unionist Steve Williamson, whose time as a TDU activist and staff director at Teamsters Local 174 in the 1990s informs his work today. “I experienced first hand one member one vote. Ever since then, I’ve just been a champion for it,” Williamson told TRNN. “With real democracy, workers will make their own choices. They know their lives, they know the corporations they work for. They will make choices that will revitalize this movement.”
Democracy is one of the four pillars of worker power EW4D pushed for at the convention in the form of constitutional amendments. The introduction of constitutional amendments, like in the Teamsters and UAW, could open the floodgates for the three other pillars: a commitment to organizing, coordinated bargaining, and strike readiness.
Since 2014, Perrone’s tenure has yielded a net loss of over 100,000 UFCW members. While membership decline did not begin under his watch, a remarkable ballooning of questionable spending and saving of union funds certainly did. The UFCW is prototypical of the trend union researcher Chris Bohner has critiqued: “fortress unionism.“
Under the strategy, financial asset growth—rather than membership growth—reigns. According to Bohner, despite the six-digit membership loss, UFCW member dues and other revenues have generated millions in annual budget surpluses. While net assets have risen from $199 million to $521 million since Perrone took control of the union, only a small fraction of spending has been allocated to organizing and strike benefits. According to an EW4D analysis, “UFCW International could hire 500 new organizers per year for the next five years, at a cost of $250 million, and still have $170 million in liquid assets left over, not counting investment income.”
Many locals around the country haven’t done much better. According to Guenther, nearly a third of all workers organized by the UFCW through NLRB elections since 2020 were organized by one local—her Local 3000—but its workers only comprise 5% of the union’s total membership. EW4D proposed an amendment to UFCW’s constitution that would up the budget requirement for organizing to 20%, but it was not passed.
Guenther says that non-unionized workers have explicitly told her the old-school, undemocratic nature of the UFCW has dissuaded their affiliation, and McDonald told TRNN that he believes the rise of independent unions is a sign of lost opportunities for his union. “Amazon and Stabucks—they’re creating their own unions,” he said. “They’re not choosing one that’s already existing and I think the UFCW has the potential to do that. You just need to invest.”
Rank-and-file members have also drawn attention to the exorbitant salaries of UFCW leadership around the country, which EW4D wants to cap at $250,000. An investigation by the group found the top ten highest paid local presidents enjoyed salaries between $349,643 and $700,941 in 2022.
“The flip side of that is probably a majority of their members are struggling to make a living wage,” said Scott from Local 1459. A UFCW-funded survey last year found that 14% of Kroger workers say they’ve been homeless in the past year and reported average wages of less than $30,000 per year.
The UFCW has also spent millions of dollars on a single consulting firm, Park Street Strategies, which brands itself as working for labor as well as large corporations. According to the reform caucus, UFCW spent $21 million on the firm in 2021. They have pointed to the highly spurious utility of this consultancy. For example, the firm reportedly advised union staff to scrap the words “strike” and “collective bargaining” from their conversations with workers in 2016, according to Chris Brooks in an article for Jacobin.
“We have to set aside our little fiefdoms and unify our resources,” advocated Guenther.
Coordinated bargaining is also a huge issue for EW4D as the UFCW faces down an increasingly monopolized grocery industry. The strength of national grocery chains against the regional contracts of organized labor was put on full display when 70,000 UFCW members were forced into concessions after the Southern California supermarket strike of 2003-2004. Retail corporations have only grown in strength since, and the UFCW International’s delayed statement of public opposition to a potential Krogers-Albertsons merger signaled to workers that their union was out of touch with their needs and interests.
“I don’t know what our next contract negotiation will look like,” Zachary, a clerk at Kroger and UFCW Local 1059 member in Columbus, Ohio, told TRNN in November last year. Zachary requested his last name be omitted for fear of retaliation from his employer. “I find it scary because a lot more power is about to consolidate into Kroger’s hands. If things continue as they are now, I feel like we’re gonna feel even more powerless than we already do.”
By coordinating bargaining, UFCW may be able to confront emergent monopolies with greater leverage. “We have to set aside our little fiefdoms and unify our resources,” advocated Guenther.
While no amendments related to EW4D’s first three pillars were passed at the convention, some ground was made on strike readiness. The reform group sought a raft of amendments to unleash workers’ currently restricted ability to strike, such as removing the requirement to receive approval from the strike-averse International president. Reformers also wished to begin strike pay on day 1 instead of day 14. Reformers were unsuccessful in securing Day 1 strike pay, but a small victory was achieved when they were able to strike a compromise to begin on Day 8, as well as ensure that it would be extended to workers fighting for a first contract.
Other victories included the creation of an official division for healthcare workers—a growing sector of the union—and electing one reformer to the executive board. In addition to these smaller wins, the biggest victory may have been simply giving public voice to a growing discontent in the union. Guenther says that there’s been an explosion of interest from workers all around the country. “The convention felt like a kickoff,” she said. “But now workers want a union that will fight.”
Bottom-up organizing, like the teachers strikes of 2018 and 2019, “put the strike back on the table—put back on the table labor as a fighting movement,” he added. “That’s the spirit that these reformers brought and that is their vision of unionism.”
According to Guenther and Williamson, the next steps will be hosting a convention for essential workers in the lead up to the 2024 Labor Notes conference, and building a five-year strategic plan for the next convention in 2028, including running a slate of candidates with the intention to win. (This year, Guenther ran on a slate named “Meet the Moment” alongside other reformers without the expectation of winning, and pulled out prior to the convention.) EW4D’s goals are ambitious, but they’re determined to see them through.
The reform movements at the UAW and the Teamsters were decades in the making, and according to Blanc, their recent successes may be a testament to workers recognizing reformers’ legitimacy. “Worker-led victories created pressure and raised expectations that allowed the reformers to win the arguments internal within their union,” Blanc said. Bottom-up organizing, like the teachers strikes of 2018 and 2019, “put the strike back on the table—put back on the table labor as a fighting movement,” he added. “That’s the spirit that these reformers brought and that is their vision of unionism.”
Notwithstanding federal intervention, UFCW reformers may have to win full democracy in their union through other means. Guenther says that EW4D is preparing to force one-member-one-vote on the union through a lawsuit against the international, which they claim is violating members’ democratic rights legislated in the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act.
Legal strategies aside, workers understand that sustained rank-and-file organizing will be central to the struggle. “Labor’s an ongoing fight,” said McDonald. “A little bit of reform in the UFCW is not a bad thing. Just like Teamsters did, you know?”
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The results are in: 97% of UPS Teamsters voted to authorize a strike if their demands are not met by August 1. Local unions around the country will practice picket lines starting next week. The clock is ticking.
Following the recording of this episode of The Upsurge, the Teamsters announced that its National Negotiating Committee would no longer meet with UPS following “an appalling economic counterproposal.” Contract negotiations appear to be stalled until “money gets real,” which makes the probability of a strike higher than before.
In this episode, we’ve got a two-parter. First, an update on the contract campaign and negotiations, which have moved onto big-ticket economic items this week. UPSers across the nation tell us why they voted in favor of strike authorization. Local 623 secretary-treasurer Richard Hooker Jr. breaks down the vote and a major tentative agreement: air conditioning in the package car. Greg Kerwood of Local 25 returns to the show to explain why the Teamsters and the broader labor movement need a strike.
Next, long-time organizer and the Executive Director of In These Times Alex Han gives us a crash course on the threads of labor militancy over the past two decades. Alex breaks down the political, social, and organizational legacies of the labor movement between 1997, the last time UPSers struck, and 2023, when they may strike again in much larger numbers. At the center of our conversation: the Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012.
We often hear that COVID-19 pushed workers over the edge, that the widespread death and disease was the viral spark for a new labor upsurge in the United States. But according to Alex, the seeds for this moment were sown over the last twenty years.
Additional links/info below…
Hosted by Teddy Ostrow
Edited by Teddy Ostrow & Ruby Walsh
Produced by NYGP & Ruby Walsh, in partnership with In These Times & The Real News
Music by Casey Gallagher
Cover art by Devlin Claro Resetar
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Alex Han: There’s obviously a lot to be said about the impact of the pandemic. but these things were all in motion long before, the pandemic, reared up.
these things were going to be on a collision course.
Teddy: We often hear that COVID-19 pushed workers over the edge. Indeed, you’ve probably heard it on this show. That the widespread death and disease was the viral spark for a new labor upsurge in the United States.
we’ve seen the impact of, Amazon and Its relationship and stranglehold to some degree on the logistics and delivery chain, that was something that was supercharged by the pandemic, but the outlines of that impact were very clear. beforehand.
History, in other words, didn’t disappear after 2020. The seeds of our moment were planted far earlier, and there’s no better time than now to begin tracing the roots.
(Music transition)
Teddy Ostrow: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to the Upsurge, a podcast about UPS, the Teamsters, and [00:01:00] 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. We are currently in a patron drive right now. We had a goal of 200 monthly supporters by July. Doesn’t look like we’re gonna make that. We are at 72, which means this show is [00:02:00] unsustainable. Hopefully we can get to 100 patrons by July but that depends entirely on your support.
We are here through the potential strike no matter what. And continuation after a settlement is certainly in the cards. Which means your support would go a long way. You can even sign up to our patreon for just one month to make a bulk donation. Really, we just need your help, so please, share the show, follow us on social media, but first and foremost head over to patreon.com/upsurgepod and become a supporter today. You can find the link in the description.
Also a reminder: The next 21 people to sign up to our Patreon will get a free one-year In These Times subscription.
Alright onto the show.
This episode is somewhat of a two-parter. In the last two weeks a lot’s been going on in terms of the contract campaign, so we’re hitting on that first.
The big News: UPS Teamsters have authorized a strike [00:03:00] in the case that no new contract is signed by August 1, and they’ll be setting up practice pickets across the country starting next week.
Also, the Teamsters and UPS appeared to have come to terms on all non-economic proposals on the contract. That means they’ll be moving onto wage increases, pensions, overtime issues, and of course, the two-tier driver system. Among what’s already been decided: well, it looks like air conditioning and other heat protections are coming to the package care. And if you listened to our previous episodes, you’ll know it’s been a longtime coming.
In the second part of this episode, we have a really, really rich interview with Alex Han, a longtime labor organizer and the executive director of In These Times. We spoke about the political, social, and organizational legacies of the labor movement between 1997, that’s the last time UPSer struck, and 2023, our current moment when they may strike again in much larger numbers.
But first, the strike authorization.
Last week, Teamsters in across 170 locals in the United States took to their union halls and outside their workplace [00:04:00] gates to vote on whether or not the national negotiating committee has permission to call a strike come August 1st and UPSers are still without a contract.
This was the moment many rank and file were anxiously waiting for.
With the help of Teamsters Dom Belcastro and Brian Denning out of Local 162 in Portland, Oregon, I got to hear why rank and file around the country were voting yes.
Local 162 worker #1: so why, um, are you voting, for a strike authorization at ups? Okay. Why I would be voting is, um, honestly, we work really hard for ups and, and they, they, um, they kind of almost like slap the whip on us.
I’m supporting the strike boat because I’ve been renting my entire life. I’ve given this company, my blood, my sweat, my tears, and I haven’t really gotten much out of it. I’ve lived paid to pay paycheck to paycheck for the last four years and it fucking sucks.
Local 162 worker #2: You know, you got a family, you got mouths to feed, you want houses, you want cars, but how are you gonna afford that? You need to make more money.
Local 162 Man #4: I voted yes because white corporations get [00:05:00] away with too much and I feel like without us making like stands like this, we won’t get any progress. it’s important to make your voice heard and especially Unity makes stuff move.
Josh Palmer: My name is Josh Palmer. I’m a preloader on Swan Island and Portland, Oregon, I want to go on strike because we as workers create all the wealth and too much of it goes to the top and we’re gonna come and take what we’re owed.
Claire Schachtely: My name is Claire Shaley. I work preload at the Swan Island Hub in Portland, Oregon. I voted yes to authorize a strike against U P s because too many part-time workers across the country are living in poverty. While the company continues to make record profits off the backs of workers, it’s time to pay up.
Moe Nouhaili: My name is Mo Noha. I am a packaged car driver out of Las Vegas. I voted yes because we need true heat protection. We have thousands suffering from heat related injuries every year, and we’ve even [00:06:00] had multiple die and just one life lost is too many lives.
Joshua Alexander Crowder: Hey, what’s going on y’all? My name is Joshua. I’m a UPS teamster from Local 89 here in Louisville, and I’ve worked at Worldport since August of last year.
all of my reasons have to do with just kind of how UPS treats its, its workers
And so I voted yes, and I know so many other people voted yes because we don’t, we don’t think that this company just gets to keep profiting off of our broken bodies and off of our dead coworkers without having to answer to the teamsters.
So If you’re out there listening to this, uh, you see a teamster on strike, uh, in the next couple of months, stop by the picket line and show some solidarity. Thanks.
Teddy Ostrow: Last Friday, as was covered widely by mainstream media, we heard the results: 97% of the workforce voted yes. And in the middle of voting last week, we also heard that among the 55 agreements the Teamsters and UPS came to on the contract so far, was air conditioning, heat [00:07:00] shields, fans and ventilation in the package car.
To dig into how this all went down, what it means, I invited Richard Hooker Jr back on the show. You’ll remember him from episode 7. He’s the secretary-treasurer of the Philadelphia Local 623.
Richard Hooker, welcome back to the Upsurge. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So I have some basic questions for you. Uh, you know, what was this strike authorization vote? What, what does that actually mean? To authorize a strike, right? Like you, it doesn’t just mean you guys are gonna go out and strike.
and how, how did it go down? How, how did this, how did you guys make this happen?
Richard Hooker Jr.: So we got 97% both authorization to go on strike if need be. It doesn’t mean that we gonna go on strike. It gives our lead negotiators, that extra hammer that, that ace in the hole, if you will.
If they need to pull it out on the company. If, if, you know, UPS says, you know what, man, we don’t care. we can make it [00:08:00] without you. Then they can hit ’em and say, Hey, okay, well if that’s the way you feel, then you need to realize that 97% of our members are looking to go on, on across the street here.
If you don’t come to the table with a, an agreement that we can agree to. So that’s what that means. So how it all took place. It was, it was kind of chaotic, you know? Um, we didn’t know, you know, I was actually in a meeting with the company and, I, I kept getting phone calls and text messages. Then finally I got a screenshot with this whole, uh, strike authorization vote was start this week from the u p s app.
And I’m like, what, how, when, how, where, you know, where’s the materials at? So, we had to scramble. Come up with a plan quickly and you know it was successful. Cuz again, that’s what we do. I mean, we are organizers at heart,
So what we did was at our, our meeting on that following Sunday, we had [00:09:00] some people vote there. Then throughout the course of the week, we had gating almost 24 7 cuz we wanted to make sure that we got everybody, everybody we could, to send the company a message and to give our negotiators that extra leverage that they needed.
Teddy Ostrow: And you guys clearly sent a message with that 97% authorization vote. Um, so the other thing that happened that was important in the past few weeks is, there was a tentative agreement that was reached on a specific issue, heat protections for packaged car drivers, other drivers, What was agreed to, and, and can you speak to why this is such a big deal, but also that still among some drivers there does appear to be some cynicism about what was agreed to, just what happened.
Richard Hooker Jr.: So, I don’t know all the particulars too, but from what I’ve read, um, it, it, there’s, it seems to be some type of ambiguity there because it says that [00:10:00] on vehicles purchased after January of 2024. So I think that’s where the big confusion is at are, are we going to, is all the trucks going to get it?
Or just the one that’s gonna be purchased next year. And in the u p S world, we all know that u p s loves gray areas in the contract. They love where there is no clear cut language that says they have to do something. And you know, this is one of those things where people have died because of heat on the trucks.
And, and you know, the reason why you see that cynicism is because, they don’t believe it. Now. It’s a good start. It’s good to have that language there. Uh, I do agree with that, but how does it work? How does it work for the driver? What about the people in the warehouse? What about the people that move the cans from on or off the plane?
they got questions too. They got concerns because you know nothing against. You know, the people on the package calls our members and brothers and sisters that deliver packages. but I think the people in the [00:11:00] warehouse they want answers on, are they going to get air conditioned because they passed out.
Some people have died in the warehouse as well. And so, this is one of the things where I think we need to be careful not to continue to put member against member. Because if I’m going to get it in my truck, then what about me in the warehouse? Cause it’s hot in there too. So, I’m hoping that the, the National Negotiating Committee can answer those questions and there is a call on Wednesday.
Um, so hopefully those questions will be answered and those concerns will be addressed, hopefully.
Teddy Ostrow: Right, right. Yeah. So the new packaged cars right, as you said, will get some of these air con air conditioning ventilation. Um, seems like old ones will get some fans.
But yeah, I think, I think you’re right. It is. There are some questions here. Um, is there anything else about negotiations or the contract campaign people should know about and at this point I am curious, Richard, uh, what do you think’s gonna [00:12:00] happen? Some people are, are looking at the progress right now and they’re saying, oh wow.
Uh, there there could be an early settlement. do you think that’s the case?
Richard Hooker Jr.: I’ve heard that. Yeah, man,
we hear rumors all the time. Right. But we won’t know anything until we actually see the receipts. Like I, I, I’m, I’m under the mindset ever since, um, 20 thirteen’s contract to just wait until you get in front of you.
I don’t really, um, like to believe other people or, you know, I want to see it for myself, right? So I, I think that, you know, when we get this, the whole agreement in front of us, we actually read it. Then we’ll be able to decide is it gonna be an early agreement or are we gonna have to go on strike? But ultimately it’s the member’s choice, you know?
we, well, I will say this about the members. We want to see more and hear more, um, about a lot of the issues that affect us day to day, day-to-day harassment, how they gonna take care of that. Nine fives, how they gonna take care of that, the [00:13:00] wages, um, the catch up rates, raises, you know, sick time.
Healthcare pension, those issues we haven’t heard anything about. um, at this late in the game, I think our members are just getting anxious. They wanna know more about what’s going on, and hopefully this call on Wednesday can again, address some of those concerns and answer some of those questions.
Thanks for the update, Richard. Really appreciate you coming on the show. No problem. Thank you. And keep doing what you’re doing, brother. We appreciate it.
Teddy: I spoke with Richard earlier this week, so I attended the Wednesday contract update call that he mentioned. We didn’t get to talk about it of course, but what was announced was that the Teamsters have now come to terms with UPS on all the non-economic issues in the contract, and will be moving onto the big ticket economic items, such as wage increases across all classifications, but especially for part-timers, and of course, the abolition of tiers among drivers.
In the call, Sean O’Brien claimed that the economic package they’ve proposed on Wednesday is the biggest in US labor history. We’ll have to wait and see what they proposed and how UPS responds.
But among the 55 changes to the contract agreed on so far are some of the most important demands that we’ve covered in this podcast. Inward-facing surveillance cameras, for example, appear to be limited but not fully removed from the package car.
And of course there’s the heat protections. To clarify what appears to agreed on right now: Like we mentioned, air conditioning would be installed in all new package cars starting in 2024. But all trucks would be retrofitted with two fans, and within 18 months, ventilation and heat shields in the cargo area, which really is where we’ve seen those ridiculous temperatures that have sickened thousands and even killed people over the years. We’re talking about 130 to 150 degrees.
Members I spoke to were concerned that they’ll never see a new package car in their career. UPS just won’t replace them. But the TA specificies that 28,000 new cars would have to be brought in by the end of the contract. And the states that see the highest heat risk will get new cars first.
Now, one thing I just wanted to emphasize before moving on is that air conditioning – ya know, the thing that workers at most other delivery companies have besides UPS – was inconceivable just a year ago. And the only reason that the Teamsters will now get is because rank and file Teamsters really fought hard for it. Particularly [00:20:00] those who started the Safety Not Surveillance campaign at Local 804 in New York, which we covered in epsiode 4 and in a free bonus episode back in March. While there is skepticism among some members, when I asked some of Teamster activists what they thought about it, they expressed that this is clear case of when workers fight, they win.
Teddy Ostrow: Now I’m gonna let you in on a secret. You can learn a lot about what some workers are thinking by going on Facebook or other social media. And for the UPS teamsters this is certainly true. In episode 4 we talked about the Vote No campaign on 2018 contract, which UPSers unequivocally voted down. And we all know what happened: the Teamsters leaderhip at the time pushed it through anyway.
But that campaign, it largely grew out of a Facebook page that was started actually for the 2013 [00:21:00] contract, called Vote No on the UPS Contract. Over the years, the Facebook page grew to over 25,000 members. And it was actually the organizing that started online therethat prompted the shop floor organizing for the Vote No Vote in 2018.
Now, social media is a less than imperfect temperature check of the enormous UPS workforce. But you can learn a lot. Rumors and debates abound.
And recently, when I was scrolling through one of the various facebook pages for UPS teamsters, I saw a post that garnered a lot of divisiveness. It was quite long and it was written by Greg Kerwood, the local 25 package car driver who joined us on our last episode. The post was on the topic of a strike, and he shared an opinion that I don’t think we’ve heard yet on this show. It was quite impasioned, and I thought it would important [00:22:00] to present it. So I asked Greg to record himself reading it.
Greg Kerwood: It is become almost cliche to say that nobody wants a strike as if it were somehow UNC coth to stand up for one’s humanity without a qualifier. But wanting a strike is truly not the question the. The question rather is, do we need a strike? And the answer is an unequivocal yes. We need a strike to unite our members at UPS and our teamsters union as a whole.
We need a strike to create a generation of militant unionists whose education will be the picket line and whose graduation will be the launch of a new labor movement. We need a strike to create the bonds that hold labor together, that unite workers. Those that can only be forged in the furnace of workplace action.
We need a strike to energize the entire labor movement to show [00:23:00] workers that they can stand up, that they can fight back, and that they can win. We need a strike to remind the corporations of the world just to generates the record profits they enjoy year after year. Ending this fight without striking at U P s, even with a good contract, would be the labor equivalent of a tie ballgame.
We as Teamsters should not be playing for a tie. We should be playing to win. Surely no one believes this company will be taught a lesson or change its behavior without us withholding our labor. If the company is acquiescing to many of our demands out of a fear of a job action and loss of billions, if they’re feeling the heat of a potential strike, then we must push further.
The time has come to finally address the issue, which underlies all others at U P s. Power. Are we going to continue to be owned by this company each day forced to labor until our Lord and master sees fit to let us go? [00:24:00] Or are we going to have control over when and for how long we sell our labor? I say the latter until we have a finite workday, both full-time and part-time.
We will continue to be at the mercy of this company and our jobs will continue to dominate our lives. This is not asking for the world. It is simply asking that our employer recognize our humanity. Recognize that we need rest and time to recover. Recognize that we have families and lives outside of work.
Recognize that personal time is not a gift, but a basic human right. Until we have this, we must strike. Make no mistake striking a multi-billion dollar corporation is not for the faint of heart. It requires strength, commitment, and a willingness to sacrifice in the short term for long-term gain. But I know of no workforce more suited to this task than the men and women [00:25:00] who give their blood sweat and toil to this company day after day, despite being consistently treated as replaceable cogs in a big brown profit making machine.
So the answer is simply this. If you want to change your workplace and your life, if you want to organize Amazon, if you want to empower workers everywhere to join a union and fight back against the abuses of their employer, If you want to swing the pendulum of power away from corporations and back towards the working class, then we must strike.
History is made by those who attempt the impossible, who fight the unwinnable, who believe the unbelievable, who ignore the voices of the naysayers, the pundits, the experts. This is our time to make history to right the wrongs of the last four decades and to return the rewards of labor to those who create them.
If you want your workplace, your life, your community, and your [00:26:00] country to be better tomorrow than they are today, we must strike.
Teddy Ostrow: That was Greg Kerwood. On to our interview with Alex Han.
As I said at the top, Alex is a longtime organizer in the labor movement and progressive politics more broadly. He was the vice president of SEIU Healthcare Illinois and Indiana, where helped organize tens of thousands of home-based healthcare and childcare workers. He was a co-founder of the independent political organization United Working Families, and he served on the national political team for Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign.
I could continue talking up Alex’s bonafides and honestly I could’ve talked to Alex for hours for this episde. But I think even in this short interview he made clear that what makes this exciting labor moment possible can and should be traced much farther back than the pandemic, or [00:27:00] the 2018/2019 teachers strikes, which are usually the explanatory touchstones of 2023. I’m so glad we had him on the show to begin some of that threading, which younger people like me often overlook.
At the center of the interview is the Chicago Teachers Strike, which I think I should explain a little. It was a strike by 25,000 teachers in 2012 that more than anything was really about stopping the city from destroying public schools. It was for the broader community. It was an important breaking point because it was an outgrowth of organizational militancy that was brewing years before, and the broader economic and social fallout of the global financial crisis. But it was catalytic for a militant current in the labor movement that would continue to respond to and channel broader trends in the world, while pushed by many of the same people organizations that were involved in 2012.
So, just wanted to get that out of the way and I also just wanted to tease out a couple acronyms that are used in this interview. First, SEIU, where Alex worked is the humungous Service Employees Interntaional Union, which is one fo the few unions that actually grew in the 1990s and 2000s. Alex also mentioned the AFL-CIO, that’s the American Federation of Labor, Congress of Industrial Organizations, which is the largest federation of labor unions in the united states. It has traditionally been a very conservative institution, but in the 90s it did take a more progressive turn under the leadeship of Jon Sweeney that coincided with the 1997 strike at UPS. So that’s what Alex is talking about.
Alex Han, thanks for joining me on the [00:28:00] Upsurge.
Alex Han: Oh, thanks for having me. Teddy.
Teddy Ostrow: So I’m really excited to have you on because you’ve been a longtime labor organizer for the past 20 years. Uh, and I think something we’ve missed on this show so far is a tracing of the economic, social, and political themes, and also the organizational legacies between these two high points of teamster militancy that we have covered on the show.
That’s first 1997 when the Teamsters last struck u P s and 2023. Now, when they may strike the company again. So let’s start in 1997.
how should we understand the context of the teamsters and labor more broadly at that historical moment?
Alex Han: Yeah, I, I think it’s really important. I. To understand the similarities and differences. I think it’s really important to understand the broader political and [00:29:00] economic context that existed, as well as inside the labor movement and inside the Teamsters. So 26 years ago, in 1997, was a couple years into the last kind of reform moment inside the Teamsters Union.
led at the time by Ron Carey, who was the president, for the lead up. To that, you know, to that big strike in 97. That was a movement. Similarly to now, when Teamsters for a Democratic Union played a critical role, in changing, the, leadership in the teamsters. It was the first one member one vote election, inside the Teamsters Union.
after, uh, kind of decades long, rain from, from forces that were allied with Jimmy Hoff at. Uh, senior, it was a time of real hope in the labor movement more broadly, although that was a hope that wasn’t necessarily driven, by rank and file workers and members.
Um, And so there are some [00:30:00] similarities to now.
there are some real differences. we’ve got, you know, uh, a movement inside the teamsters that has elected, Sean O’Brien. with the support of T D U, we have more broadly in the labor movement. The first, one member, one vote election inside the United Auto Workers, which has brought, you know, to power a real rank and file driven leadership, led by Sean Fayne, the new president.
One of the differences between 97 and the current moment is the atmosphere for organizing now in 97, union density was higher overall in the economy, than it is today. but we have things like the. The organizing at Amazon, um, that’s really excited. People. We have things like the Starbucks workers organizing, a whole lot of particularly service worker organizing, you know, around the country.
that has really helped to build excitement inside and outside of the labor movement, and build attention. we have in 2023, you know, we’re several years [00:31:00] into the resurgence of the Democratic Socialists of America. which I think are still 70,000 members strong around the country in 97.
You could kind of imagine that as maybe the, the, uh, the nadir or the kind of weakest moment for the organized left in American politics. you just reelected Bill Clinton. in a really uninspiring campaign, you know, you had a situation in which the horizons for the American left were much, much smaller, than they are today.
today we still sit in the wake of, you know, two campaigns for President from Bernie Sanders. You, you have a real dynamism, on the organized left that you didn’t have. in the mid to late nineties.
So it was, you know, in short it was like a, somewhat stronger labor movement overall, frankly, you know, bigger numbers, bigger percentages.
Labor unions represented a bigger percentage of workers in the economy. Um, you didn’t have the kind of dynamic organizing campaigns that are really [00:32:00] visible, that you’ve seen today.
So there are some parallels. there are some real differences.
but in a lot of ways that strike was coming, at what people saw was a low point at that time in the labor movement.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah, and I might add that at least. another similarity is just the state of working America. I mean, the, the reason why that strike was so successful, one of the reasons was because of public support, right.
Things have gotten pretty dark, by 1997 in corporate America for working people. And I think you could say in, in some ways it’s gotten worse, especially since 2020 at the sort of beginning of what people may view as a is a new moment to hopefully a new, day for labor. But maybe we can start, Threading those two moments together.
How, how did we get from 1997 to now? We can’t cover everything right now, but what do [00:33:00] you see as the key forces, the key movements moments that show their legacy in our labor movement today, that that helped shape the possibility for a strike of 350,000 teamsters potentially in August.
Alex Han: I, I would want to start, you know, out of 1997, an enormous fight.
I think at that point the Teamster’s membership at U P S was something around 180,000, right? So significantly smaller than it is now. but still a, a really gigantic number of people to be on strike. The messaging of that strike was around a part-time America won’t work. And so I think that was something, you know, roughly two decades into de-industrialization.
you know, into, you know, a set of economic recoveries in the nineties, um, that were really best felt as recoveries on Wall Street. for a lot of Americans, you know, unemployment had gone down. a lot of that was a result of people having to work two and three [00:34:00] jobs, um, to make it, which was something that was, you know,
not brand new, especially for, you know, women workers who are heads of household, especially for immigrant workers, for black workers. but I do think in some ways it was something new for a broader set of workers. and for white men, for, for kind of like other, other people who hadn’t necessarily felt that kind of hit, in the past, uh, under the, post-war economic expansion.
And so the 97 strike really also, inspired, I think, you know, whether directly or indirectly the kind of like key critical organizing. Of the global justice movement that happened in the, in the several years and kind of came to a peak in 2000 and 2001, around.
protests around the World Trade Organization, around the International Monetary Fund in World Bank. you know, there was a set of growing alliances, between environmentalists and labor unions. Things like the Bluegreen Alliance, that was the steel workers and environmental groups. I remember one of the [00:35:00] phrases around the World Trade Organization protests in 1999 was Teamsters and Turtles together.
so it was really thinking. about some, some hope for a broader movement, that could really link together some of these fights. and I would say that, that, you know, that that Teamster’s UPS strike in 97 was a critical piece, a national fight, that had 90% support, a strike that really was seen.
as something that cut to the heart of some of the challenges of that economic recovery. and so I think we’re seeing reflections of that in the issues that exist today. Like that is still an enormous issue, right? part-time workers and their kind of treatment. Um, you know, in addition to obviously all the concerns around, workplace safety,
an expectation of more and more work, for the same payer class. So I think that, you know, we, we kind of, the, the previous teamster strike really helped, juice a bigger movement that was forming around economic justice issues globally.[00:36:00] we had, um, the terrorist attacks of nine 11 that really, Created a line of demarcation between what happened before and what happened after.
and so I think, you know, a lot of what we’re talking about, organizationally on the American left in the labor movement in the years after that was really around ways to make. You know, a set of kind of strategic interventions. the new leadership in the a Ffl c i o of the mid nineties, um, it was seen by a lot of people as this progressive struggle inside the a Ffl C I o in a lot of ways.
It was, um, but at the same time, You know, a leadership fight inside the, a Ffl Ccio doesn’t engage rank and file union members. It certainly doesn’t engage the hundreds of millions of other, uh, people in the country who are not members of a labor union. Um, so you saw things like the rise of S E I U, my old union, that I was, an officer of an S E I U local here in Chicago for over a decade.
Um, really bearing down on what. You know, what we thought of as the [00:37:00] most strategic organizing that we could do, in a political atmosphere that was not conducive to workers building power. Um, in the wake of the next economic crisis in 2008, I think we’ve seen a real. Rekindling of something different, that’s helped to grow into the moment today.
I think we can see, you know, the results of that Occupy Wall Street. the movement particularly centered around teachers and teachers unions, really started with the 2012 Chicago teachers strike. Um, but rolling through statewide strikes in places like Arizona, uh, West Virginia, Oklahoma. Um, in the last several years, I think all of those things helped to feed and were fed by, bigger political, campaigns like Bernie Sanders, two campaigns for president.
and I think obviously right now, you know, we’re functioning in a place where, what’s happened internally inside the Teamsters Union is certainly the biggest impetus for this, right? The, the last contract [00:38:00] bargaining that it, that was not just that member saw it as a sellout, like it was, you know, the, the forcing of a contract, onto a membership that the majority of whom had not voted to approve that contract.
and so I think we see an intersection of the forces inside the union, being able to create, a majority constituency inside the union, for a bigger fight. while across the kind of economy and in a bigger narrative, you also have an openness for people to see workers in motion, as being something that, gets broad public support.
Teddy Ostrow: That was a great summary. I wonder if we could dig into some of the specific, instances for a sec.we had talked, before you had mentioned, massive, protests, for immigration, reform. right in 2006. Yes. Uh, that’s something people around my age probably don’t remember it at all.
Um, but you, you [00:39:00] explained right that this funneled right into, something. That you may not, consider as connected, but the Chicago teacher strike, uh, which maybe is worth explaining a little bit. And then that funneling right into the Bernie campaign, which is generally considered right, something to do with occupy Wall Street, the energy coming from there.
This was something that I didn’t, quite understand and, and understand as, uh, you know, these organizational legacies, but also, legacies emanating from. movements that expanded beyond any one organization.
Alex Han: Yeah, I, I think that there are, there are a set of different links and I’m glad you brought that, um, back up, Teddy.
So I, you know, one of the. Big, I wouldn’t say forgotten because, you know, the movement for immigrant rights, kind of the movement, of immigrants, largely immigrant workers is something that has taken on different shapes and forms, um, you know, over the decades and, going back [00:40:00] much before 2006. but that was really sparked by some attempts on the right, with the partnership of.
You know, Democrats like Ram Emanuel, corporate Democrats, to create an immigration reform that was going to be extremely punitive to workers, and very rewarding, to bosses. And the 2006 kind of uprising, day without an immigrant, the revival of mayday. In a lot of ways, like in Chicago, on May 1st, 2006, there were upwards of a million people in the street, um, marching, um, for humane immigration reform.
That was the closest that we’ve come in modern memory to something that could be considered a general strike. If a million people don’t go to work, you know, in a metro area of 10 million people, that is a gigantic number and it has huge kind of knock on effects. it was also a really amazing kind of show of power.
and power in different ways, the power of kind of workers to make those decisions. the power of media, and particularly at that moment, Spanish language [00:41:00] media, to help move, people into action. That fight in Chicago really did, lead to a set of other developments over the next couple of years.
The development, you know, of a really strong militant movement, particularly around young, undocumented people, to push for immigration reform that went further than any proposals that had been put forward, to that point in Congress. Um, it led into. Uh, in 2008 in Chicago, right in the wake of, of that kind of financial crisis and right after Barack Obama’s election, the occupation of a window and door factory called Republic windows by its workers, largely immigrants.
Who were, under threat of their jobs being shipped away, kind of overnight. workers occupied that plant for eight days. won all of their demands of getting their prior pay and ended up over the next year or two, actually taking ownership of the equipment of their plant and creating a cooperative window and door factory on the [00:42:00] southwest side of Chicago.
That was a struggle that I think really inspired a lot of what in Chicago, energy that ended up being crystallized during the Occupy Wall Street movement. In the fall of 2011, there were members of a community organization on the south side called South Side together organizing for power.
that came. To the occupation of Republic, windows and doors. A lot of the way that Allies, uh, interacted with it was by bringing food and bringing supplies to that plant occupation. Um, those leaders in Southside together, organizing for Power in 2011. embarked on an occupation of a set of mental health clinics in the city of Chicago that were under threat of closure.
that was again, really amplified by the Occupy Wall Street movement. and was all a part of a bigger labor, community movement in Chicago, um, that was really linking together. Uh, teachers, uh, other public sector workers and some of these [00:43:00] kind of neighborhood based and constituency based fights for justice.
that ended up culminating in that moment, in, strike of 25,000 teachers in the fall of 2012, the first time that teachers in Chicago had struck in over 25 years and probably the largest scale, strike. That we’ve seen, you know, of teachers in several decades, many teachers around the country don’t have the right to strike.
and so that Chicago teacher strike, I think in turn, you know, fed off of that occupy Wall Street movement off of those movements against economic inequality, but also help to create a broader current inside the labor movement that we are still feeling the impact of today.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah, I think, right, we can see that expectations were raised for a lot of people and that.
Moment really funneled into, the Bernie Sanders campaign, which seemed to [00:44:00] electrify a lot of young people. funneled them directly into Democratic Socialists of America, which is playing a role today in, in, in several of the high profile fights, but also, maybe in the subterranean, uh, struggles we have yet to really see come, public right.
And I just wanna bring us up to 20 18, 20 19, because I feel like a lot of people, like to trace the energy that we’ve seen in the past three years to Covid 19. the introduction of this pandemic, which clearly has played a role, but. A couple years before that, right? We saw something come out of Bernie’s campaign, something come out of 2012 in Chicago, in this explosion of, teacher strikes.
Right. can you explain how that played a role, where that came from, and how that’s played a role to what we’re seeing today?
Alex Han: Well, the, the 2012 Chicago teachers strike, really was the [00:45:00] first event in what’s now an over a decade long movement. really in a lot of ways to put. Kinda K-12 education workers at the forefront of a new militant labor movement.
now that does, that comes with, you know, not just a militant strike, but that strike was a result of the election of a rank and file caucus two years prior. the caucus rank and file educators. a group of of teachers union members who really had deep relationship with other social movements and other, other actors, um, from immigrant rights to what became the movement for Black Lives, to many others.
Um, that strike. Helped to inspire movements around the country. And there’s actually a direct line, to one of, you know what I think, Eric Black’s book is called Red State Revolt, about these statewide teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019. Uh, you know, one of the leaders of that in Arizona, a teacher named Rebecca Gelli, had moved from Chicago after her really foundational experience in 2012.
Um, [00:46:00] looked around at the, at the union that she was a part of in Arizona and said, Why don’t we fight the way that we fought in Chicago? Why don’t we talk about, not just our own issues, but why don’t we talk about the broader community issues and put all these things in context together? And why don’t we, why can’t we take like a sharper action?
It’s really interesting. You know, if you, if you dig into kind of some of the organizers and the leaders of, of the statewide strike in West Virginia, the statewide strike in Oklahoma and Arizona, of actions that took place in Indiana and Kentucky and a, and a host of other states. the crossover with.
teachers who were really vocal leaders in the Bernie campaign in 2016 are very distinct. the crossover between teachers who would be very involved, in broader, you know, labor for Bernie efforts in 2020, um, are very clear. Um, but you can see, you know, you can see a line that you can trace through specific people like Rebecca and others, [00:47:00] through all of those fights into really the creation.
of a current inside the teacher’s union movement, that I think is still to be seen kind of the, the, the limits of that. you’ve had teachers go on strike most recently in Oakland, California. You’ve had multiple strikes in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Minnesota, um, St. Paul, Minnesota.
you’ve had rank and file caucuses, win victories and teachers unions from Boston to Baltimore. You know, to up and down the west coast. And I think that there is a relationship between all of these and the current moment that we’re in. you saw a lot of those unions take action early in the pandemic, to protect students, to protect workers, to protect communities, you know, fighting for.
Uh, safe return to school, early in the pandemic, you know, fighting against kind of politicians, really trying to force people in back into work and work back into school for political reasons. and so I [00:48:00] think, you know, there’s obviously a lot to be said about the impact of the pandemic. but these things were all in motion long before, the pandemic, reared up.
Teddy Ostrow: we’ve seen the impact of, Amazon and Its relationship and stranglehold to some degree on the logistics and delivery chain, in the United States and globally. that was something that was supercharged by the pandemic, but the outlines of that impact were very clear. beforehand.
Alex Han: it was also clear that, you know, these things were going to be on a collision course. and so obviously, You know, a militant teamsters union that was ready to fight and ready to communicate their willingness to fight, was really critically needed, for workers much more broadly, than those who were represented by the teamsters at U P s.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah. And I think we could, you know, each of these unions, that we had previously discussed, the uaw, the teamsters, which, you know, are undergoing reforms right now, or at least greater militancy, the [00:49:00] legitimacy lent to a reformers in those unions. certainly right, came from the expectations raised.
Before the pandemic and after the pandemic, when we reach a breaking point, among, you know, different people including teachers, um, everyone from teachers to I think, uh, right logistics workers who were put on the front lines of, something that could lead to death, but. I wanna, I wanna move back actually in time, well, not quite exactly, but something you were involved in, right?
In 2012, the Chicago Teachers strike, you were at s e I U at the time, but something I think is really important that we, we haven’t touched on in this show is what’s called bargaining for the Common Good. And this is both a specific network you were involved in, in Chicago or are involved in, but it’s also a greater framework for labor unions to use their leverage beyond, the [00:50:00] workplace specifically.
This isn’t something we’ve seen much of yet in the teamsters Union. We are starting to see it. Right. Uh, but in closing, can you explain what, what bargaining for the common good is? What, what we should learn from that strategy? And why it is so integral to not only a successful labor movement, but also to success, also to successful social justice movements, more broadly.
Alex Han: Yeah, I, I think the, the simple answer to what bargaining for the common good is, is it’s a framework in which workers use their leverage, to win victories that go much more broad than the bargaining unit. bargaining for the common good in the way that I think of it is, Really bringing things back, um, to some of the core of what the labor movement was and what it represented at the times of its greatest expansion and the times of its greatest [00:51:00] impact.
I think about the labor movement, you know, of the Civil Rights movement and the labor movement certainly wasn’t unified in its approach to the Civil Rights Movement. but unions like the uaw. were critical elements of a coalition, to help build, you know, a, a, a civil rights movement in this country.
I think of back to the, you know, through the history of the teamsters to the 1934 general strike in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that was launched by, Teamster truck drivers, local delivery drivers, where their purpose was not can we win the best deal for our members. their purpose was really in thinking about their leverage, uh, as workers, as workers who are delivering goods, in being able to create a much bigger, um, battle.
So in a lot of ways, Labor exists, in a legalistic framework, that was not designed in order to build worker power. It was designed at best in a [00:52:00] compromise, to be able to create, uh, predictable environment for capital to exist in and grow.
When we think about bargaining for the common good, we’re also thinking about breaking out of some of those legalistic frameworks that have been forced on workers that have been forced on unions. but that have existed for so long that, you know, some people, um, think of it as, you know, it’s how the sun rises and the sunsets.
That’s just how things are. that’s not how things are. That’s not how things have been at the moments when workers have created the biggest change. You know, both in their own conditions and much more broadly for the community. You know, I do think of the 97 strike as a moment. The Teamsters were bargaining for the common good.
There’s no other way around it to say part-time America, you know, isn’t going to work. That was something that reverberated much more broadly, just like I think some of the ways that they’re messaging and communicating the issues that they face, those are issues that directly and indirectly impact millions and millions of other [00:53:00] workers.
When we have a big enough chunk of workers in the right place who are able to improve their own living standards, the fate of every worker in logistics, you know, is tied.
To what happens at ups.
so I don’t like to think of bargaining for the common good as something that is separate from what workers want, what workers need, and the tactics that actually are going to help them win. because it is true that creating that kind of public opinion where 90% of the public support to, you know, pushing in that way, is a part of what is going to help workers win in a fight like this right now.
Teddy Ostrow: Alex Han, thanks for joining me on the Upsurge. All right, thanks, Teddy.
You just listened to episode 9 of The Upsurge.
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 [00:54:00] at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
You can also show your support by sharing the episode on social media, giving us five star rating and writing a review.
Follow us on Twitter @upsurgepod and Facebook, The Upsurge. You can also listen to us on our YouTube channel, The Upsurge.
But the best way to show your support is by becoming a patron of the show at patreon.com/upsurgepod. We are listener-supported and can’t continue without you. Please help us get to 100 subscribers by July. You can find a link in the description.
Thank you to all our patreon supporters, but a very special thank you and shout out to our patrons at the Business Agent tier or higher.
Shane Lynch
Greg Kerwood
Emil McDonald
Yoni Golijov
Jason Cone
Jason Mendez
Richard Hooker
Tony Winters
David Allen
Justin Alo
Tim Peppers
[00:55:00] Dan Arlin
Dimitri Leggas
Juliette Kang
Rand Wilson
Randy Ostrow
Mack Harden
Timothy Kruger
Nicole Halliday
D Bo
Ed Leskowsky
Chris Schleiger
Corey Levensque
Martin Labut
Dane Rohl
Jeremy Brake
Matt Cooper
Marlon Russo
Steve Dumont
and
Faye Guenther
All of your support means so much.
The podcast was edited by myself
It was produced by NYGP and Ruby Walsh.
Music is by Casey Gallagher.
The cover art was done by Devlin Claro Resetar.
I’m Teddy Ostrow. Thanks for listening and catch you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The global video games market nets more than $200 billion in revenue a year. Like every other industry, gaming profits are made possible by countless workers. While many video game workers share an affinity for gaming, they don’t clock in to feed their passions. They work to survive, and many barely make enough to do that. For UCSW 401 workers in Edmonton, conditions at their minimum wage jobs were bad enough before COVID-19 hit. After video game testers were called back into the office earlier than anyone else, they started organizing. James Russwurm of USCW 401 joins The Real News to discuss conditions in the gaming industry and share the story of how Edmonton’s video game testers found power in a union.
Studio Production: Jesse Freeston
Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
James Russwurm:
My name is James Russwurm with USCW 401 out of Edmonton. I’m representing a group of video game testers at Unionized last year in April.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, James, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at The Real News Network [inaudible 00:00:19] . We are, of course, here in Montreal at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. And The Real News is here to talk to as many folks as we can, learn as much as we can about what workers like yourself are going through, struggles you’re involved in, the state of the labor movement in Canada, and ultimately how we can support one another better across international lines. And I’m really, really excited to connect with you and talk about your guys’ campaign because you’re the first video game union to form in Canada. Right?
James Russwurm:
That’s correct, yes,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. Yeah. So I want to talk all about that and I want people to know where things stand with that campaign and what they can do to support y’all. But before we get there, let’s take a step back because I love to talk to folks about how they got into doing this work and what that work looks like, because I frankly have zero fucking clue of what video game developing, testing, what the day to day of that job looks like.
James Russwurm:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your path into that industry and in so doing, yeah, just give us a sense of what the day-to-day work in that industry looks like.
James Russwurm:
Absolutely. So to answer your first question of how I got into it, I actually worked in a different capacity. I worked in hospitality and tourism, prior to COVID. During COVID, I was laid off as were so many other of my fellow employees. S.
O I took it at the time, I always wanted to get into video games development that way. So I went back to school, I went to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and while I was there, I applied to work with Keywords Studios and they got back to me and said, “Hey, are you interested in taking this job? I said, “Yeah, that’s great. What’s the pay?” “It’s minimum wage.” And I went, “Okay, yeah, I’ll still take it.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Was that a shock to hear
James Russwurm:
I was hoping for a little bit more than that. I wasn’t expecting them to go… So just everyone knows Alberto on minimum wage is $15 an hour, so that is the bare minimum that they could pay us, but it’s sort of a passion industry, you want to get that foot in the door. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll take the job.” Started working on it and it was great. So I started there and yeah. So what that looks like, it’s not just like you’re just coming in every day, just sitting down playing a video game and testing it. So our-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Is that what most people think you do, is just-
James Russwurm:
Yeah, that’s the-
Maximillian Alvarez:
… Sit on a beanbag and just play Sonic the Hedgehog all day?
James Russwurm:
… Exactly. I don’t even have a beanbag. I wish they’d give me a bean bag. But yeah.
So we were actually working from home because it was the pandemic and everybody was sort of working remotely. Then we had a meeting, I would say in April of last year that sort of changed things. But the actual day-to-day work is a lot of coming in. Someone will tell you, “Hey, go to this level, check out these things, write a report on it, send it back to us.” We’re going to write report files and issues, we’re going to give that back. So I did that for about a year. And then I was promoted up into a next level where I am now a quality analyst. And that throws people for some loops because they don’t really know what a quality analyst is. And what that is, so instead of being the one that writes the test, or sorry, that runs the test, you create the test.
So you’re creating the test for the workers to go do, they are testing what you need to do, and then you relay that information back to the developers and they make changes and stuff. So kind of a middleman between the testers and the developers. But it’s quite a technical job. It requires a lot of technical writing skills and a lot of know-how in sort of broader video games and how they work.
So we wouldn’t consider ourselves unskilled laborers because you pretty much need a post-secondary degree to even be considered for these types of positions. And we have people from all different types of backgrounds and degrees, everything from drama to technical design. So we really represent quite a broad selection of individuals all working as video game testers.
So in, I believe it was February of last year, we got sort of called into a meeting with our managers from Keywords Studios that said, :Okay, starting next month you’re all going back to the office full time. That’s just what’s going to be happening.” And we had been working for the last three years from home, there had been no issues regarding metrics or performance or anything like that. So it took us as a bit of surprise that there wouldn’t be any leniency, there would be no hybrid, it was just, “Nope, back in the office five days a week.”
We’re what’s called embedded services. So we work directly in the offices of the studio, which is currently BioWare, their employees were not required to come in every single day and they were offered fully remote, hybrid, whatever they wanted. So we scratched our heads a little bit at that and went, “Well, why are we being forced back into the office?”
And then for those of you who don’t know, we’re in Edmonton and downtown parking in Edmonton where our office is about $250 a month. When you’re only making minimum wage-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus man.
James Russwurm:
… Over the course of a year, it’s almost 10% of your wage that you’re just paying to parking and gas and car insurance, et cetera. So plus the additional 45 minutes on your day there and back, and that’s if you’re driving. If you’re taking public transit, Edmonton public transit’s pretty bad so you’re going to be at an even further disadvantage and you’re going to spend more time on the public transit. You’re going to spend money on transit passes. It’s over $100 a month for a transit pass in Edmonton. So we were all going, “Can we afford to keep working here?” If I’ve got to go back to the office, I’m already cutting it close… I’m saving costs because I’m at home, I don’t have to commute, I can make my own food at home, I don’t have to go out for lunch or I have to work socials and all of these other things.
And so we decided, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation.” And I approached one of our members and said, “Hey, how does this affect you? If we have to go back to the office next month, five days a week, what is your life look like now?” And they were telling me, well, “I don’t have a car, so I’m going to be spending over two hours a day on public transit just going to and from work.” And we were just like, you know, there’s got to be a better way. So I said, “How about unionizing? Are you interested?” And they went, “Yeah. What’s a union? What does that do? What does that mean?” And then that’s sort of where I started.
So I had previous experience with unions in the sense that my dad works for the Power Workers Union in Ontario for 30 years. And one of those industries, you work 30 years, you retire, you got a great pension. So I understood the power of unions at the time. And it’s been a topic in the video game industry for quite some time where people are saying, “Hey, you know, guys should unionize.” Because a lot of people don’t know that it’s quite an exploitative sector because we work in something that is a passion industry. Like I said earlier, I’m willing to accept minimum wage for the experience and the opportunity and the exposure to get into that role.
And we just sort of said, “Hey, we got to do something.” There was some questions on who would be in the bargaining unit and who couldn’t be. So what I started to do was just sort of reach out to our members, just discreetly. So we’re all remote, we’re not in the office so I couldn’t just grab somebody by the arm after work and say, “Hey, let’s go get a beer. I got something to talk to you about.” So I had to be a little bit more cryptic than that being, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the application Discord. Yeah. So we had sort of a out of work social Discord that had a lot of our members on it. And so I just started reaching out to them directly on that. A little cryptic at first, being like, “Hey, could I talk to you about something?” Yeah, I never reached it-
Maximillian Alvarez:
You up?
James Russwurm:
… Yeah. It kind of felt like that at times where you’re just like, “I don’t want to say it’s not serious, but when you got a minute, can we talk?” And that’s sort of how I started reaching out to our members sort of discreetly and building out a base. So there was about 20, 22 of us and there was some questions on who could be in the unit because we did have supervisors and managers and things like that present, but we ended up getting about 17 union cards signed. And it was great because it was electronic. With COVID one of the benefits that came out with it was you didn’t have to go and sign a union card anymore and go all over the city and track people down. It was like, “Hey, here’s a link and fill it out.”
And then what we did was we built a community within the Discords, we made up a server, and then it was like, you signed a union card, you get an invite. And then once you’re in, then you can chat to everybody else who’s already signed a union card and talk about workplace issues and talk about what’s bothering you and building this group up from the ground.
And we reached out to everybody. Everybody got a chance to say yes or no. And then by the end, we had about 17 cards signed. So in much to some of our members enjoyment, we submitted our application on April 40th, or sorry, April 20th, 4/20.
Maximillian Alvarez:
On brand.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. So we submitted that and then we took off from there. And that’s sort of how I got my start and how we got the whole ball rolling with the unionization.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow. I mean, that’s incredible because those basic questions that you reached out and asked your coworkers, because like you said, going back to the office… From work from home, to transitioning to five days a week in the office, that wasn’t just a, “Oh, I don’t get to wear sweatpants anymore,” which is how it’s talked about in the mainstream media. It’s like, no, this is an immediate chunk of my take home pay that just is gone.
James Russwurm:
Yep. Mm-hmm.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I don’t know, just I’d really want to emphasize for people watching and listening to this that just taking that step to turn to your left, turn to your right, ask your coworkers, “What is this going to mean for you?” That is organizing, that is where it starts and look where it grew from there. Right?
And I wanted to just hover on the technical detail for a second.
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because I talked to so many workers in the United States who are similarly trying to unionize their shops, whether they’re Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, graduate students, nonprofit workers, so on and so forth. And as you probably know, the US is not a very labor friendly place.
James Russwurm:
Unfortunately.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So when I talk to people outside of the US about the Rube Goldberg system of rules and hurdles just to get to a union and election, most people’s question is how does anyone get a union in the United States? And the sad fact is most don’t.
But I say all that to say that for us, the standard process is to get people to sign union cards. If you get above 30% of the eligible bargaining unit members in your shop to sign cards, that triggers a National Labor Relations Board election. But it’s a long, drawn out process. You get a date for an election that’s usually a month or months away. In that time, that’s when the boss can turn on the screws and hold captive audience meetings. The election process is not easy to navigate.
So there, there’s a lot of shit put in people’s way. I wanted to ask if it’s the same or-
James Russwurm:
A little bit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. So I’m from Alberta, we have a conservative government right now that just recently in their last term, repealed sort of the majority card rule. If you had majority of the workers sign a card, boom, you’re just unionized.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
So they got away with that. They’re just threw that out the last time they got elected. So we still had to have that month process where we had pretty well, everybody on the team had signed the card, and we had a few that were just like, “I’m just a little uncomfortable with signing the card. I’ll vote yes when the vote comes around, but I don’t want to be involved in any of this organizing system if it all goes bad.” And we respected those people and we knew we don’t want to pressure you or really lean on you. We respect your decision. We gave everybody the option to say yes or no.
So we went in with a majority. I think we had almost 70% of the team had signed cards at that point. So we knew we were in a good spot for going through the vote, but we still had our employer try to claim people who didn’t even work with us in the province to sort of dilute that pool. Right? Yeah. Because if they think, oh, maybe they just hit the minimum threshold for cards, we’ll throw some more people in there. Oh, now you don’t have them many people anymore. Too bad, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
It turned out to be a little bit funny because when we still passed the review, they’re like, “Yeah, they got more than enough cards.” Suddenly those people are no longer a part of that bargaining unit. We don’t want you to represent those people kind of stuff. So we were like, “Okay, well, we have the cards, so what happens next?”
We had some executives fly into Edmonton, never before have we seen anybody from any other regional office or anything like that come into Edmonton. They booked like a hotel conference room and said, “Hey, we’re going to be here for two days. Come by. Tell us what your problems are. We’d love to help you solve them.” I don’t think anybody went. And I think that sent a pretty clear message to them as well.
And so after that, I think that died off a bit. We didn’t really get any captive audience meetings, I think that a lot of people get. It also helps that we’re remote. We’re all in our different homes, so they can’t come into work and ambush us and be like, “Hey, we’re all having a meeting in the office right now.” It’d be send us a Zoom link and then it’d be whatever, just minimize it and go do something else while they talk about anti-union stuff or whatever.
But never had that happen. And then eventually we got to the vote and the vote was, oh, it was also virtual. So we had signed our mail-in ballots. So we had all received them at our home, mailed them back in, they all go to back to the labor board, and then the labor board counts them. And when I was watching it on Zoom, because there was me and another member from UFCW there, and then of course a representative, their lawyer from Keywords Studios, and she opened them all and went through them all. And I’m like, “Oh, is she just checking to see that they’re all there and then she’s going to do a count?” And once she was done with them all, and she was like, “Unanimous. It’s a unanimous yes.”
And I just was like, “Yes.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Do the slow motion pump.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. That says a good message. So I was super proud of our team there to just come together unanimously, because we didn’t want to be in a position where we had a portion of people who didn’t feel like this union was for them or it wasn’t the right fit. So just the team sending that signal to us as the organizers and to the union and UFCW and to our employer, that’s a resounding message, “Hey, we’re ready to go. We’re ready to fight on this.” And then that’s sort of… After that vote, we started getting into contract negotiations, which we’re still in today. We’re working on our first contract, and it’s slow-going, but we are talking about a lot of things that don’t exist in other union contracts. Right? We’re talking about work from home.
That is something that we want enshrined in our contract that’s sort of like, “Hey, if our workers don’t have a demonstrable need to be at the office, they should not be required to be there. And if you do require them to be there, then you got to give them some sort of stipend, a monthly allowance or something like that for parking, for fuel costs, et cetera, et cetera.” So that was one of the big factors that we wanted to do.
And funny enough, we kind of already got it because after the submission to the labor union, they have what’s called a freeze. You can’t change working conditions on the workers anymore, which means… you can’t send us back to the office. So that would be changing our working conditions. So our members have actually been able to continue working from home for the last year, and we’ve in some cases saved people about 3000 bucks a year in parking and fuel and things like that.
So it’s been nice that we’ve been able to already enact some of those changes that we were going for, which one of the big ones being work from home. We already have it right now and then when we get it enshrined in our contract and it’ll all be official.
And the other thing is obviously wages, because we get paid minimum wage, if you’re sort of a starter, just game tester, which is about 15 bucks an hour. The average price, I think about a one bedroom in Edmonton right now is $1,200 a month. So we have people who are spending almost 50% of their paycheck just to go to rent. We’ve got members who can’t move out of their parents’ place because they can’t afford a place on their own. So we’re really trying to get those wages up, at least at a living wage for Edmonton, which is about, I believe right now is $22.50. But yeah, I don’t know the way inflation’s going maybe that changed since last week.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. No.
James Russwurm:
It’s just our way of battling back against these high prices in these inflationary environment. Right? It’s all we can do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I mean, that’s without a doubt the biggest common thread that I’m hearing from workers across industries, not just here in Canada, but in the US, the United Kingdom, France, I mean, all over the world. We are in the midst of a really intense cost of living crisis.
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Even just the phrasing of that always creeps me out. But I mean it’s been this really big equalizing factor that I feel has brought folks in from industries that may have in the past seen themselves as separate from your standard blue collar worker. Right? I mean, you’re seeing more nonprofit workers, folks in tech, not just you all in Edmonton, but down in the states we’ve had really critical union drives and labor actions in tech, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Activision. So something’s really happening here. And what I’m hearing from more and more folks is cost of living is a big one. Right?
Regardless of the industry that we’re in, there are of course some exceptions, but by and large, people are noticing the same trend, that we’re working longer, we’re working harder, and yet it is taking more and more to make ends meet with rent, with groceries, gas, and electric bills, so on and so forth. So it really does feel like we’re all taking in water and people are turning more to unions, collective action, worker mobilization to fight for what working people deserve. And I think that’s really, really exciting to see.
And I wanted to ask in that vein if that was a difficult part of the process for you, was to get folks to see themselves as workers who should unionize in the first place? Or did y’all see yourselves as part of this groundswell that we’re seeing in tech or even beyond with the increase in immunizations, the strikes? Yeah. Was that-
James Russwurm:
Yeah. A little bit. Actually, the way we work… I look at it as we’re all workers, right? If you go to work for your money and you got to work, you’re a worker. It doesn’t matter if you work in video games, it doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber. Right? We work for our dinner, we all do. So there’s no sense in us being like, :Oh, well, we’re above this, or we don’t need collective action because we’re treated so well.” Because the reality is we’re not. The video games industry is highly exploitative in across, not even just for testers, even developers.
I don’t know if you’ve heard the phrase crunch before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No.
James Russwurm:
But what that essentially is when you’re working on a project and you’re getting near the end and you’re going, “Okay, we have this release date that we can’t really move because we’ve shipping our products to vendors and they’re going to put it on their shelves and it’s going to be ready to go, but there’s all this work left, so we’re just going to do 80-hour weeks until that happens.” And there’s been projects that our members have worked on where that has lasted for six months.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Geez.
James Russwurm:
Just unrelenting overtime, no breaks. People sleeping under their desks is not uncommon in the sphere. And the industry’s trying to change that culture a lot, especially from the studio levels, they’re trying to get away from that, better planning, delaying games, that kind of stuff. But the reality is, for a long time, and still even to this day, that is what’s happening. These people are being exploited because they love what they do, and it’s really hard to watch and that was part of the reason that I really wanted to get a feel for how the team was feeling. Because coming into this, when I was starting, I didn’t really have any experience in video games, but the people on my team had been around the block and they had seen a lot, and they could see it a bit into the future of where we could be heading and wanting to protect ourselves against that. Right?
We’re in our contracts, overtime is a really big thing that we’re talking about, because generally that’s been the safety net for the studios is, “Oh, shit. If you can’t make our deadlines, we’ll just grind our workforce until it’s done.” And it’s not healthy, people burn out, it’s terrible for mental health. And that’s what we want to protect ourselves from is those sort of exploitative measures.
And so, yeah, we absolutely feel like we’re in line with all the other labor, because that’s what happens to almost everybody. Grocery store workers are getting hosed, this pandemic with their hero pay. And then that was taken away. We were lucky that we weren’t out on the front lines during COVID, but we 100% support everybody who was. And we want to make sure that we can make all labor better for everybody regardless of what sector you’re in.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’m like the hero pay is the perfect example. It’s the one that I always go back to because it makes the case to any worker out there. Even if you are in an industry where you feel like you got it better than a farm worker or a service worker or something like that. A boss’s promise is temporary, a union contract is in writing. Right? Because we saw that in the states, like Amazon got all this publicity in the early days of the pandemic when it offered hero pay, not hazard pay. Because if you call it hazard pay, then you have to keep paying as long as the hazard persists. But when you call it hero pay, it just seems like something that you’re giving out of the benevolence of your own heart. Right?
James Russwurm:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Very calculated little shits there. Pardon my French.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. They can be creative.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But it does really make the case that if we have an inflation crisis or we’re in the kind of circumstances that we’re in now, a lot of those promises, the working conditions, the pay, they can go away, they can be changed out on a whim-
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… And passed down unilaterally. And if workers don’t have a union, a collective voice on the job, it’s like, “What do we do? What do we say in that regard?” So it’s really is in everyone’s interest to have that organization in their workplace. Even if you like your job, which is another thing that I’ve heard from y’all is, “We don’t want to leave and just find something else. There is a lot, we’ve invested in this, but we should be paid a living fricking wage.”
James Russwurm:
And you want to be able to pay your bills at the end of the day. And that’s any worker, I feel that works a full-time normal job should be able to do that. And our members can’t right now because of the pay. And I think it was, I don’t want to say easy, because it’s organizing’s not easy. It can be difficult at times, but it’s necessary.
And if you feel that way about your workplace, if you look to the people to your left, their right, they’re being exploited, or you feel like you’re being exploited. Just talking to your fellow workers and saying, “Hey, this decision that just happened, how does that affect you? How does that make you feel?” I never knew how far that would take me to being able to organize. And I think that that’s really the message that we want to put out there is, yeah, it’s work, but it’s worth it because at the end of the day, what we have now is more than we had even before we unionized.
And we don’t have a contract yet. We have legal protections that are protecting us from just them firing us all. Right? It’s a lot harder to do those types of things once you have union recognization and then the contract comes afterwards and then whatever you can agree on. And it was an easy sell for a lot of our people because there’s not a lot of guarantees in the games industry for working, especially us as contractors. You may work on a title and then at the end of that title, they say, “Well, we don’t need any testers anymore. You’re all laid off and you can all go on EI or whatever, and next time that there’s a project you can apply and then maybe you get the job.” And the carrot that they dangle in front of you is these studios, they say, “Hey, if you know do a really good job on this, the studio’s going to want to pick you up and hire you.”And there is some truth to that. But the reality is, say you have 60 people, maybe two of those people are going to the studio.
And it also creates this sort of intercompetitiveness of people trying to stand out and one-upmanship that we really want to get away from. Right? Because what my conversation was to them, I said, “Well, what if instead of that, we could get recall legislation into our union contract that says, ‘Hey, if you worked on this project, if there’s another one coming up, they got to hire based on [inaudible 00:27:03] market.’” And that’s something else that we’re talking about with our employer as well. Because right now there is no guarantee that when you’re done a project, you’ll ever work in games like this again. Right? Maybe there was a manager that just didn’t like you and you’re just never going to make it past the interview phase. We wanted to make sure that it’s fair and that based on how much time you’ve put in, you can come back and then you can continue your work, which is more of a guarantee than we ever had before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, James, I want to thank you for sitting down and chatting with us. I want to thank Action Network for letting us use their booth. And I wanted to just end on a final question. Where do things stand now with the fight for the first contract? And more importantly, what can folks watching and listening to this do to stand in solidarity with y’all?
James Russwurm:
Well, to answer your first question, sort of where we are today, we’re still in the midst of negotiations. Actually. I’m doing some virtual negotiations Wednesday, Thursday with my employer. And then we’re still building out the contract, but we’re hopefully going to be done by the end of the summer, is sort of our goal. And we’ve seen movement from the management side as well as sort of a, “Okay, yeah, let’s get this wrapped up. We want to finish this.” Because they’ve been at it a long time too. They got to fly to Edmonton from Ireland anytime they come to negotiate with us. So we’re hoping that in the next couple months we’ll be able to come out and be like, “Hey, this is our contract. This is what we got.” And sort of be an example for anybody else who wants to follow afterwards.
And so what I can say to people who are maybe out there listening to this, what they can do to support us, hey, if you work in video games, find a way to reach out to us. You can probably find us through a lot of ways. We’d be happy to talk to you, share our stories and help them. But also if people could change their perspective a little bit on what we do is… we came up against us a lot, especially when the story broke. The people say, “Oh, those video game testers, they just sit around and play games all day.” Remember that we’re workers just like everybody else, and we’re just trying to get a fair deal. Just all we’re asking for is a living wage. And share that knowledge with other people. So when maybe you hear about another games worker who’s down and, “Oh, my job is killing me.” Say, “Hey, look at these people. Have you considered unionization? Because so far it’s worked well for them.” And yeah, that’s what I’d like.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Legalizing pot has opened the floodgates to a new multibillion dollar industry in multiple states. But where there are high profits, there’s often high exploitation. The experience of unionized cannabis delivery drivers and warehouse workers who belong to Grassdoor Workers provides an instructive example of exploitative practices found across industries, and how workers can organize to fight back. Despite the best efforts of management to keep employees isolated from one another, Grassdoor workers managed to organize in response to company wage theft and successfully joined their Teamsters local. Grassdoor Workers organizer “G” speaks with The Real News.
Studio Production: Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: David Hebden
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. Today we want to get high. Talk a little bit about the cannabis industry. One that’s been booming since the legalization in various states in the past couple years, and one that is unfortunately highly exploitative of its workers. Today we’re going to paint that picture for you guys, speaking to our special guest, G, from over in California, an organizer at Grassdoor. G, thanks for joining us, man, and making the time. How are you today?
G:
Thank you, Vince. I’m doing really well. Really appreciate you guys letting me tell our story, and I’m really happy to be representing all the workers who are actively working at this company and actively fighting to get better working conditions for themselves and for every worker in the cannabis industry.
Vince Quiles:
Oh yeah, and I think that’s super, super, super inspirational. And getting to know a little bit of your story, it’s really interesting to see the obstacles that you’ve overcome as well as some of the things that organizing in the cannabis industry can maybe teach people in other industries organizing. And so with that being said, I just want to get a little bit into who are you? What is your role at Grassdoor? What did you do? What did that fight look like?
G:
Thank you. I started off at Grassdoor around the spring of 2019, and I started off as one of their delivery drivers. And it seemed like a cool job at the time because I got to be alone in my car for eight to 10 hours a day and just mostly listen to podcasts, listen to music and deliver weed to people. And for a while I was really content with that until the pandemic hit. Right around when the lockdowns started clamping down on everything that’s when I got moved off the road and behind a desk and I became one of their logistics specialists. A router. I did that job for three years, and after about the second year, right around December, that’s when I could just see how miserable the entire fleet that I was working with and part of my job as a logistics specialist and the router was to help out the drivers with all their issues, whether they were having issues with customers or whether they were having issues with their system or whether they needed to find a good place to use the bathroom. Because like I said earlier, they’re out there for 10 hours a day.
Some people who could stomach it will stay out there for 12 hours a day sometimes. And when I saw the type of conditions and the type of dangers that had been getting progressively worse for these drivers and workers, that’s when I knew that these workers needed some protection. And so I had reached out to a union and … Well, I’m not going to say their name. But I reached out to a union and they never got back to me. I never really had any type of correspondence until they said that there was another group that already had a deal with Grassdoor for exclusivity, but they didn’t tell me who they were and I felt like I hit a dead end.
And I had seen from how workers who had brought up union efforts in the past in that company had been treated and reprimanded, soft union busting, I knew that it was not a good idea for me to go around asking my managers who would I go talk to get a union formed. I was very fortunate when a driver reached out to me in July of last year and just through some of our conversations that we would have at work, they started to realize that I might be sympathetic to a little plan that they had cooking. We exchanged private info and started talking on our non-work lines. And through a series of very specific and poignant questions, she was able to deduce that I was able to help out with this effort and that it wouldn’t have any legal conflicts with my position because I was not in charge of hiring or firing or no one’s job performance was on me and I didn’t really have a say in the conditions of that workplace. I wasn’t a supervisor of any sort.
Starting around July of last year, I went to a meeting at Teamster’s Local 630 over in Skid Row. And that was the first time I met most of the drivers at my work. And I had already been working there for three years at that point and I really only knew one or two people at that company and there was about 500 of us at that time. And especially once I started working remote during the pandemic, that’s when I really never saw anybody. And so it was a really big moment for all of us to finally see who were the people that … For me to meet some of the drivers that I had been talking to for years now and never having shaken their hand or looking them in the eye before. And we all came together and met with the Teamsters crew, the organizers over at Teamsters Local 630. And we all had the common goal of changing the working conditions for these people who were risking their lives, destroying their cars, taking so much time out of their lives during a period when everybody else was receiving assistance and receiving EDD, unemployment.
And here in California, the government assistance that people received … I’m not sure how it compared to other states, but a lot of lower wage workers ended up earning more money with the Covid protections than they did when they were going to work. Once everybody shook the fear of traveling off a little bit, I started to see people go out and enjoy their lives. Meanwhile, all of us who are still working at this company, we missed out on all that quality family time that people really got to enjoy during the lockdown. And I was listening to people over the phone describing robberies that they had just had, or sometimes some other people in my department, they would listen to phone calls as somebody was actively getting robbed.
Because these delivery drivers, they are a last mile delivery drivers, so they deliver it to people’s houses and you’re in a very vulnerable spot. These drivers drive an excess of a hundred miles a day and all those miles are going into their cars and it’s destroying their cars. A lot of the drivers at this company are so close to homelessness, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there were drivers who had to live out of their cars because of just the cost of inflation and the fact that people had to pay for their own gas, people had to pay for their own maintenance. And this company was ruthless in just demanding more time and asking for more and more of these minimum wage workers who really didn’t have any help outside of whatever emotional support I was able to provide them over the phone because managers never went out of their way for anyone in the company. And I think that’s a pretty universal feeling amongst the drivers.
So when we got together and started organizing, we were finally able to discuss a lot of the things that people had felt were unusual about our workplace. There was a lot of soft union busting tactics that had been put in place and presented as policy without ever really being written down anywhere. It would be policies like if you get an order from us … Which why wouldn’t you order from the company you worked for? At the time when I started our discount was 50%. And then that slowly changed and until after a year it went down to 30%. When you would order, you were not to out yourself to the driver who delivered to you that you were an employee for Grassdoor. There was this rule that was passed down by the now head of security. He would discourage any communication between the drivers. He would instruct drivers that when you’re waiting at the hub, roll up your passenger side window so that you cannot talk to the driver on that side. And if the driver on the other side also raises their passenger side window when they start their shift, then no one is essentially able to cross that glass barrier that’s between all the drivers.
That system was pretty effective for years at keeping people isolated, keeping people in their little bubbles. And so the unintended consequence for them was nobody developed any trust with anybody because nobody spoke to each other. And the only person that they would speak to were the people in my department providing them driver support and logistical support. There’s never really been more than five people in my department. So you’re talking about … At least at first, for the first number of years, there was never really more than five of us or six of us who were taking calls from the drivers. And we’re talking about a fleet of almost 500 drivers. There was never a time when we were all staffed at the same time either. And so because of that and because of the disorganization of management at that company, the only voice that people really got acclimated to were the people that they were calling and that were helping them. And so once I got involved with the union effort, I was able to use the trust that I built just by being myself over the phone, just by being-
Vince Quiles:
The guy that people go to for problems. Yeah.
G:
Right. Right. And people would call me even if I wasn’t working, just to see if what the other person told them was even real or not. And I would always tell people how to work around whatever barriers people had placed in the systems whenever I could. But even then, there was only so much that I could do. And so when July of 2022 came around, I started making calls to drivers and there was a serendipitous event that happened at around that time where one of our former employees had filed a … It’s an acronym. It’s called PAGA. It’s a labor law in California that protects employees against wage theft. It allows workers to be deputized by the Attorney General’s office and collect a reward for reporting unfair labor practices or wage stuff. And so this employee did that. And people who had been affected started receiving a letter and telling them that they had won a settlement and they could be expecting a check in the mail.
And so I was able to use that as a gateway into starting this conversation with the drivers that I would call. And a typical recruitment would go like this. A driver would call with a work-related issue and I could hear the frustration on their phone. And this is probably a driver that has probably vented to me several times before. And sometimes they would come at the people that they were on the phone with with a lot of frustration and a lot of hostility. It was understandable because they were put in these very dangerous situations day in and day out. I would sense that in what they were describing to me, and I would ask them like, “Oh, would it be okay if I reached out to you on a different line? I have to keep this line open for other drivers in case there’s an emergency or something like that, but I’m more than happy to continue assisting you on a separate channel if you’re comfortable with that.”
And every driver was cool with that. And thankfully I had everybody’s personal information because that’s just part of the contact information that I had access to and that I would use in certain situations. If I couldn’t get ahold of drivers on their work lines, we would be encouraged to reach out to them on their personal lines. And so I would call them on their personal phone, and I would feel them out at first because I was really scared of potentially outing myself and jeopardizing what I thought was a really good opportunity to make a lot of change for a lot of people in the company that we were all working at. And so as I would be talking to these drivers and they’d be venting their frustrations, I would say something like, “Oh yeah, did you know that Grassdoor’s been breaking the law and stealing money from its employees? Yeah. They just got busted. In fact, you probably received a letter. What time did you start working?”
And so people would look in their mail or dig through the mail, and they might have set it aside and they see this letter from this law agency. And I would tell them, “Oh, check page two. See how much money you’re getting on this.” These were not insignificant amounts of money that had been stolen from these employees by this company. We’re talking somewhere … I’ll be completely straightforward. I received roughly $900 from the settlement, and that goes a long way. And so it was really easy to get people going about their disdain for this company. And because the company had been so dehumanizing to their employees, I became the only real voice that people felt comfortable talking to and I would get them going. And once I felt that I had a real connection with these drivers, I would present them with this option of I know how we can change this workplace, and I know how we can make actual change happen. And the only way we’re going to do that is by organizing. The only way that we even have a say in our working conditions is by organizing.
And everybody would ask, “Well, how do I do that? Who do I talk to?” And I would just tell them, well, you could meet so-and-so and we would have a Teamsters organizer somewhere by the facility at Grassdoor and I would just tell them, “Go talk to that person. They’ll have a support card. All you got to do is sign the support card. The company will never find out that you signed a support card. I’ll never tell the company.” And they knew that was true because people would tell me secrets all the time. That was a very effective recruiting method because not only did they feel comfortable talking to me because of whatever personal relationship we had established, but they also got to talk to somebody from Teamsters and ask them questions and make a real face-to-face connection with somebody, which is something that’s severely lacking in our company. Nobody has real face-to-face interactions with anybody else in that company.
Vince Quiles:
I think that’s so fascinating to consider. I reflect on my own organizing drive at Home Depot or various organizers that I’ve talked to. I guess you take for granted the fact that it’s like, hey, yeah, if you want, you can go just openly engage with your coworkers that work in the department next to you.
G:
We didn’t have a break room.
Vince Quiles:
And to your point, Grassdoor just went through so much effort to try and keep you guys little islands, basically. In a way, it’s crazy to think about because it’s in a moment of providence, you come down, you make a connection with one of the drivers and so now the drivers go from being these little satellites to now there’s a connecting through line that can bring them all together. It’s absolutely amazing to consider because again, I just feel like that adds such a degree of difficulty. And again, something where I guess I took for granted being able to just go and walk up to a coworker, “Hey, let me get your phone number real quick.” Man, it just sounds crazy what you guys had to go through. Even for all of those dominoes to fall in place for you to make that connection with that driver, for you guys to be on the same wavelength, and then for you to just have the wherewithal to understand the position that you’re in and the outreach that you have, that’s absolutely insane to consider.
G:
I’ve honestly never been prouder of anything that I’ve done for my coworkers. Because the empathy that I had for them, it cut deep. I would even tell my family about some of the situations that I would hear over the phone and some of the traumas that these drivers were sharing with me and I just felt so guilty because I was comfortable. I was at home with my pets, sipping on tea whenever I felt like it. I could use the restroom. I didn’t have to look for a Target or deal with any line at the restroom. And another thing that made it really easy to organize is the state of California has … When cannabis became recreationally legal in California, Governor Gavin Newsom put in this stipulation for anyone trying to get their cannabis license that they had to sign what’s called a labor peace agreement. And we just shortened that to an LPA.
And what that is, it’s essentially a terms of engagement that the recreational cannabis company had to make with a major union. And so the DCC mandated that. You had to have this labor peace agreement in place but not a lot of people … I didn’t know what a labor peace agreement was. And even other organizers that I’ve spoken to since then that are not involved in the cannabis industry have never heard of the term. I would’ve been right there with you had I not been working at this company. And one of the things that made it easier for us was part of this labor peace agreement was an acknowledgement from the company that they would not retaliate against workers in the driver and warehouse department for engaging in this concerted activity. If they wanted to unionize, the company said they wouldn’t put them in any of those captive audience meetings, and that they wouldn’t harass them or discourage them at all from joining. They were supposed to stay out of it. In return, the union would not try to put together a strike or a boycott or badmouth them to the press or anything like that.
So what that did provide us with was also a shortcut. Because another term of this labor peace agreement was that we would not have to have an election in order to be recognized as a union. All that would have to happen is they would need 50% plus one of the eligible workers to be recognized formally by the company as a union. And so it just became a numbers game. And so the company was also supposed to provide teamsters with a list of who all the drivers were, what their categorization was, and contact information so they would be able to reach out to them and pitch them their collective bargaining rights, and ask them if they wanted to band together and unionize.
And so by avoiding the election, all we needed was people to sign these anonymous support cards. The culture of fear in that company was so ingrained that a lot of people were so scared that some people would even get cold feet in front of the organizers because they would still think that it was a setup. And it took a lot just to convince people that we were not trying to pull one over on them. The other thing about this labor peace agreement that was supposed to happen was Grassdoor management was supposed to provide a captive audience meeting for Teamsters where they would bring everybody in a room, introduced Teamsters, and then Grassdoor management and execs, they were to leave and let the Teamsters people have an hour with this audience in order for them to make a pitch to see if they wanted to exercise their collective bargaining rights. And these are all measures that the state of California put in place specifically because they saw the potential for workers to be exploited by this new industry that had a lot of money in it.
One of the things that I found very inspiring about that, and one of the main messages that I really want to get across to every cannabis worker in California, and this might even be the case in other states that have recreational cannabis, is that for sure in California, if you work for a recreational licensed cannabis company, there is a labor peace agreement in place with that company and a major union. And more than likely, that labor peace agreement is going to expire in 2025. So clock’s ticking. If you are in a cannabis company, and you … First off, if you’re in a cannabis company, you should want to organize your workplace. I cannot tell you how much your employers are lying to you about how much money they’re making. I do not believe for a second whenever any of these executives or these bosses tell us that they’re not making any money or that they’re losing money on cannabis, because there’s just no way. There’s just no way. Unless they’re really bad at managing their money, cannabis is literally a cash crop. It’s money that grows from the ground and you light it up and you smoke it. There’s nothing more magical than that. It’s a literal money tree.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah. And to that point, I would say for regular viewers of The Real News Network, Max, the editor-in-chief, did an interview with a couple cannabis workers, and that was a sentiment that was echoed there as well, to your point, that this is a very lucrative industry. From the conversation that he had as well as the conversation we’re having here, it seems like part of the reason why it’s so lucrative is because it’s built off of the backs of exploiting their workers. To your point, that labor peace agreement, and from what you’ve described in this conversation, they’re aware of it obviously. That’s something that was passed into law, yet they still continue to participate, as you said, in soft union busting and trying to isolate workers, which it feels like contributes to the apprehension that workers have. I think that’s so reasonable for people to feel scared and to be like, “Oh, is this a setup?” Because of the fact that part of this movement, part of organizing is the feeling of solidarity, but how can you feel solidarity when you’re alone all the time, when you’re always feeling alone?
And I think that’s just, again, such a testament to someone such as yourself, stepping up to your point in a position where you felt comfortable, where you honestly had more to lose than to gain. And to go in to make that argument to people and to try and be the rallying point for the drivers. It’s such an important point to make in something that I definitely want to double down with you onto other workers in the cannabis industry where it’s like, this is something for sure that is important for you guys, because to your point, there’s a lot of money to be made. But what it seems like is happening just as it’s happening in other industries, is the workers are the ones making all the money that then the executives are running away with while the workers hold the bag. I find it important to also bring up from our previous conversations, you faced retaliation as a result of this. You weren’t able to get away from this scott free. Can you tell the listeners some of the retaliation that you faced?
G:
I’m happy to go into that. So that labor peace agreement protected the drivers and warehouse workers. It did not protect anyone in my department. In the logistical customer service department. For that reason, I had people that I really cared deeply about in my department. One of the people in there has been my best friend my entire life. We went to middle school together, did improv all throughout our high school careers and kept in touch. We’ve always lived about five minutes away from each other. Even when we moved to different cities, somehow we’d always end up roughly in the same neighborhood. So I did not want anything to happen to any of my coworkers. And this was a risk that at first I was willing to take on by myself because I knew that they didn’t have the protection and I knew I would feel awful if anyone else got reprimanded or retaliated against because of my actions. But things started getting so worse in my department, and I could feel that same level of anxiety that was happening to the workers that were on the road now starting to creep into the workers that were comfortably at home. And we had people in our department who were pregnant, people who were sick, people who were taking care of sick relatives. That’s a boat that I’m currently in. I’m taking care of my dad who had a stroke last year. It’s been difficult.
It was only made possible by the community that we ended up building for ourselves, that we were able to encourage each other to stick with it. And we encourage each other to take action and band together and try to exercise those same protections that the drivers and warehouse workers would get by collective bargaining. Now, we wouldn’t have the protection of the LPA, but section seven of the National Labor Relations Act protects all workers on a federal level. Not federal workers, but it’s a federal protection granted to all hourly workers. You are protected from voicing your concerns for your fellow coworkers or for a group of coworkers if it pertains to safety or other working conditions. That stuff is protected. So with the help of the organizers, the people in my department, we put together a letter and sent it over to the CEO and we listed all these safety concerns that we thought that the new management was ignoring and needlessly putting drivers’ lives at risk. That was a strategic effort made by our part so that we could have a signed letter as to when we started our concerted activity.
And I still could not at that time convince most of my coworkers that banding together was a good idea. So I started with the people that were closest to me first, and then when I showed them, look, we’ll go and we’ll talk to the CEO and then we’ll see what his response is and go off of that. We were all underwhelmed by the response of the CEO. The CEO brought in the management team that we were complaining against so that we could tell them these things in person. And it’s like you do that at your own peril. When you tell your bosses what’s really going on in the company, you might have the best intentions and be looking out for their best interest, but they don’t want to hear it. They really don’t care because that’s all part of the plan for them.
They strategically try to make these jobs so miserable so that they have these high turnover rates, and to discourage people from trying to build careers at these places that they’re making a fortune off of. Our CEO who employs about 500 minimum wage drivers and workers just bought a $4 million house and he tells us time and time again that he has no money. That there’s no money in this company. There’s no money in cannabis. And after four or five years of running this company, he just moved to a $4 million house. Something’s not adding up in that scenario.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah. Can we take a look at the balance sheets? Because what you’re saying and what you’re doing, they’re not quite consistent.
G:
Exactly. The leadership of this movement, they were all very supportive when I started presenting the issues that the people in my department were facing, and we decided that it was time for us to get a seat at the bargaining table as well. And this was before any of the unions. This was before the driver and warehouse union had been recognized. This was still a few months before they were able to succeed in that effort. It was just serendipitous that it was right around Halloween time and for whatever reason, we started throwing parties and that’s when people started to feel like, “Well, it’s now or never. I don’t know if I’m going to have this job much longer, so I might as well just get to know my coworkers now.” And so around Halloween time, I dressed up as a star fleet captain from Star Trek. I had the gold uniform and the badge. I remember going to my coworkers’ houses before a Halloween party dressed up like Captain Kirk and just asking, “Hey, are you down to band together and changed the conditions of your work?” Let me tell you, the uniform works. There’s a reason why these uniforms are iconic because they just demand a sense of … They have such gravitas to them.
And it was really surreal because within the two weeks going up to Halloween, I was able to get half of my department signed on. And unfortunately that was not enough because as the labor organizers at Teamsters let me know that they were really looking for 66% because inevitably people signed the support card but if you have to go into an election and especially an election for remote workers where they mail you a ballot and then you’ve got to mail it back and you only have a small one-week window to do it, it was going to be an obstacle that I did not not see us being able to jump over with just 50% support. So we decided at that point that it was time that we reached out outside of our bubble, and we started reaching out to the people in the customer service department that worked with us, but we didn’t really have the same type of daily interactions that we had in our department.
And so with that 50% support, we felt comfortable in actually going public with our efforts. And by going public with our effort, we were able … We wrote a letter to … Again, another letter to the CEO. We all signed it. And we said, “We’re the organizing committee. We’re going to be organizing your workplace. Please stay out of our way.” And with that freedom, I no longer had to remain as covert as I had been and I was able to reach out to the rest of the people. And by the time that we submitted our petition, our NLRB petition to unionize, I think we were at around 80% of my department altogether. Meanwhile, while all this is happening, there are two simultaneous campaigns in this company, much larger campaigns than the one in my department. My department had less than 20 people in it. When you lump in the logistics team and the customer service, it’s about 17, 18 people total.
Meanwhile, over on the driver and warehouse side, we knew that it couldn’t just fall on the people in my department to do this recruitment. And if we were to get this done in a timely manner, it was essential that the drivers had to break that barrier of communication, and they had to be the ones that started reaching out to each other and that they … That they were the best people to make the cases for themselves. And nobody really had any experience talking to other drivers on the phone because why would you? They had never had a reason to talk to any other drivers on the phone. So they knew their own issues, but they didn’t really know how to connect it to other people’s issues. Whereas I had a bird’s eye view as to what everybody was saying because everybody would pass their grievances along to me.
So it just so happened that my roommate was a PhD student at UCLA, and they are studying sociolinguistics and communication. And so they did an extracurricular activity where they would listen to my phone calls, they would only listen on my end, and they would break down what the strategy was for recruitment. Then they made a workshop. And originally we titled it the four C’s. And the four C’s were covert because at the time we were being covert about it, consent, connect, commit. So you would have that person’s consent, make that connection, and then commit. Have them make that commitment. I will be here on this day and sign this card. And with that workshop that was made by my roommate … We taught the organizing committee these tactics, and that’s when the movement really spread like wildfire, because now it’s not just one person who’s making who’s reaching out to drivers and trying to get them to sign up. Now we had eight people making these calls.
At the time, it did not feel like we were making a lot of progress. And then next thing you know, we have more than 50%. And next thing we have 60% and we’re trying to … 60% support card signed in the drivers and warehouse departments. And the company knew that they had already lost that match. They tried to stall as much as they could in recognizing the union. They did not want to have those support cards counted. And so they had to get an arbitrator to come and do the count. And all this started happening close to Christmastime of last year. And on the Friday before we got laid off, we had submitted this petition. One of the Teamsters organizers submitted the petition from my department requesting to be recognized as a collective bargaining unit to the company. And then five days later, they laid us all off. The entire US logistical department gone in the five days after we submit that petition to unionize. The timing could not be any more suspect because there was no … Just in my position alone, we had a really high turnover rate.
I don’t know if it was because of inadequate training methods or if it was because of the nature of the job. There’s a lot of multitasking involved. It’s a very stressful job. Very high stakes, and you don’t really have that much support outside of the one other, two people that you might be working with at that time. So a lot of people just quit because I understand it’s not worth it taking all these phone phone calls all day from drivers who are reasonably upset, have every right to be mad and frustrated at this company over the phone. And so when they let us all go and outsourced our jobs to India, to people over in Goa, we knew it was going to be a disaster. And because of the secret Signal chats that had been established for the drivers and warehouse workers, that they were gracious enough to let myself and other people from my department participate in that. They had every reason to be suspicious of us.
And had it not been for us making the effort to earn their trust, then there wouldn’t be this in-depth communication happening between the departments that the company never, ever wanted to happen. I’ve had directors at this company … Because I used to pitch a lot of ideas at this company of like, “Oh, what if we start a group for the drivers to get together? They could share places to eat.” I had all these ideas, and one of the directors told me, point-blank in a meeting, “We really don’t want these drivers talking to each other.” He wouldn’t go into the reasons why, but just straight to my face. And after we got laid off, because we already had these strong lines of communications within our department, we were able to set up a meeting with a legal representative from Teamsters, and her name is Renee Chavez. She was amazing in just laying out where we were in that moment. It’s a very scary moment for a lot of people.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah. For sure.
G:
I’m sure we’ve both been through that, right?
Vince Quiles:
Yep. Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. That targeted termination for organizing.
G:
And so 75% from the customer service logistics department just gone in a flash. They had been spacing these layoffs out during the week, but we caught wind of them on that first day. And within a matter of hours, we were able to have a Zoom meeting with the legal representative from Teamsters, and she was able to lay out exactly what our options were. And that’s when a lot of us had to make the decision as to whether or not we were going to accept the measly severance package that they had offered us, or if we were going to try to continue our fight in court and have the NLRB take up our case and make the argument to the judge and that case is in front of the judge as we speak. And the agents from the National Labor Relations Board are making the argument for us, and we are keeping our spirits high and our hopes alive that the outcome will serve justice and will deliver justice for the people that were illegally retaliated against by this greedy company.
And the support that the drivers and warehouse workers have shown the people in my department by consistently making noise, telling management how dangerous it is that they are now facing these long wait times to reach anyone over the phone, that these small technical issues that I used to be able to fix in seconds are now taking hours to resolve. That’s not an exaggeration. There are some little hiccups that the system will have that it only takes a few clicks to make it go away, but for whatever reason, they didn’t know about it because when the new management took over, they didn’t know a lot of the steps and procedures as to how our very inefficient logistics system … It’s an in-house logistics system developed by some overseas developers that work in a tech farm for this company. They don’t have the greatest quality control standards. I’m very comfortable just trying to find whatever gaps or whatever inefficiencies are in a system and finding ways to get around them just so that we could all go home safe and get our job done.
And with all that, now that we’re on the sidelines at the moment, the drivers and warehouse workers have been working really, really hard to just let management know just what are the dangers and what are the new set of grievances that they have having to call outsource workers for issues that they are not qualified to handle in the least sense.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah, absolutely. Man, that’s a wild story and it seems like it continues to unfold. And so we’re definitely interested in hearing how it is that we can keep up with what it is that’s going on at Grassdoor and potentially how our viewers can support you in your fight. So where can we keep up with what’s going on?
G:
I recommend everybody check out our Grassdoor’s Worker United Instagram account. It’s shorthanded to … Let’s see. Let me find the link of it. I’ll share with you the link.
Vince Quiles:
Yeah. And we can post that with the story.
G:
Grassdoor Workers United. I think it’s shorthanded, @GrassdoorWorkers. There are two accounts. One of the accounts is ran by one of the other drivers who is the main … Who is one of the … They’re actually the bargaining rep now because the drivers and warehouse workers in both Los Angeles and San Francisco, they have both successfully won their union campaigns. And we had our election and we were allowed to vote even though we had been laid off for the election in our department to help the few people who were still in the department. And currently the union status of that department hinges on whether or not we get our jobs back. So that’s where that’s at at the moment.
The real legwork for this company, for the union efforts of this company have definitely been the drivers and warehouse workers. They had to overcome so much hostility, so much fear, and so much anxiety just talking to each other because of how deeply ingrained that system and culture of fear had been permeated through every aspect of this job. And for them to finally break free of that oppression, and finally be able to vent freely about what it is that they face at their workplace and in their lives day to day has been monumental. The company never helps out with any automotive repairs or maintenance that the drivers need to do in order to keep working and they will let you go if you are unable to drive your car to work. They’ll put you on leave for a little bit, but after a certain amount of time, if you’re not able to cough up the cash to get your wheels back on the road, then forget it. You’re straight out of luck.
Vince Quiles:
That sounds like something we see very common in this country. They socialize the cost and they privatize the gains. So G, I could talk to you all day about this, my guy. Thank you so much for taking the time to just walk us through your effort to share your insights and to hopefully inspire some workers in the cannabis industry to take on the fight like you guys have and successfully won. We’re very interested to see how your story continues to unfold, and we’re very much looking forward to hearing from you in the future. Thank you so much, man.
G:
Absolutely. Any cannabis workers out there anywhere, but especially in California, if you folks want a better working, a better workplace, better working conditions, better wages, better benefits, hit me up. I will help you organize your workplace. I will get you in contact with the organizers that you need to get in contact with. I will do the research necessary to help that movement advance as far as possible.
Vince Quiles:
There you go.
G:
I’m here for everybody. And I think the experience that we all had is invaluable. And I am fighting to see a California where working in cannabis is a career that you could comfortably live off of at any level.
Vince Quiles:
There you go. And we’ll make sure to put the links for your guys’ Instagram page and the description, so that way anybody watching this who wants to get in touch with you and wants to learn more about how they can engage in organizing their workplace within the cannabis industry, we’re going to try and help make that connection. So my friend, thank you so much for your time.
G:
Likewise. Thank you, Vince. Much appreciated.
Vince Quiles:
All righty, everyone. That was G from over at Grassdoor Workers. And I think an important thing to consider in listening to his story is the concept of sacrifice. And it can be daunting. It can be frightening. I remember even within my own organizing effort, you consider what it is that you’re potentially giving up, the comforts that you have, the secure paycheck. Ultimately, G paid the ultimate price in losing his job. But I think there’s something very valuable to look at in that. I’m drawn to a line in a movie, The Matrix. And it’s at the very end where Agent Smith is saying, “Why? Why do you persist? Why?” And Neo looks at him and says, “Because I choose to.” And I think that that’s such an important thing and something that’s encapsulated in G’s story. And so when you find yourself frightened and you feel like God, this is daunting, this is scary, remember that it is a choice to either do something or to not do something. And hopefully hearing these stories, you guys decide to do something, and we want you to know from G to myself, should you decide to do that, we’re here for you. This is Vince for The Real News, until next time, y’all.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The independent board that will have the final say on investments through the Albanese government’s flagship $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund is close to being appointed. Industry and science minister Ed Husic told InnovationAus.com that the selection would be made “very, very soon”, with the initial list of candidates already with the government for consideration….
The post Govt to appoint NRF board ‘very soon’: Husic appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Far right Gov. Greg Abbott (R) signed a bill last week that nullifies local laws mandating water and heat breaks for construction workers as work-related heat deaths in the state are rising and temperatures are hitting record highs. The provision is part of a bill called the “Death Star bill” by its opponents, which nullifies a host of local regulations that enact additional protections for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, headlines have focused on union organizing victories at Starbucks and Amazon. But a recent New York Times story declaring “New York Delivery Workers Are Getting a Bump in Pay” reminds us that workers outside the union movement are part of the labor movement too. However important, unions are just one part of a larger labor movement that consists of all workers who collectively struggle to improve their conditions of employment, whether through union based collective bargaining or by taking to the streets for political action. New York’s delivery workers provide a good example of the latter.
New York City’s more than 60,000 gig delivery workers, who navigate through hazardous traffic on electric bikes, currently net about $11 per hour, including tips, after deducting expenses. That’s significantly less than New York’s $15-hour minimum wage. But not for much longer. On June 12, Mayor Eric Adams and the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DWCP) announced that the minimum wage for food delivery workers in New York City will be $17.96 per hour before tips beginning on July 12, 2023, and increase to $19.96 on April 1, 2025. Thanks to the political efforts of the delivery workers, New York has now become the first major city in the country to guarantee a minimum wage for gig delivery workers.
How did the delivery workers achieve this milestone? Delivery gig workers are independent contractors who work primarily for Door Dash and Grub Hub. Since they are not employees, they are not protected by federal labor laws. They lack collective bargaining rights and do not have unemployment insurance or workers’ compensation. To get a decent minimum wage and better working conditions, political action was their only option. They turned to the City government for relief. The Workers Justice Project (WJP) – a workers’ center funded in part by the City Council – assisted first by creating an educational center in Brooklyn to inform these mostly immigrant workers of their legal rights as workers. The WJP then initiated a successful organizing campaign that eventually enabled workers to form a new organization, Los Deliveristas Unidos. With the backing of the Service Employee International Union (SEIU) and the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and support from a coalition of community groups, the delivery workers launched a political campaign. They lobbied the Council and held mass public demonstrations designed to bring their plight to the public. In September of 2021, the City Council responded to their efforts by passing six bills that provided a decent minimum wage, public shelters with bathrooms, and more transparency from the company apps that track their activity and pay them. The DWCP delayed implementation until July 12, 2023, in order to review thousands of public comments. The May 23 issue of CUNY’s New Labor Forum provides a detailed analysis of the workers’ successful struggle. But the point of the case is clear: unions played an important role in the workers’ battle, but workers had to take political action independent of SEIU and TWU. In short, the labor movement means more than the union movement.
While New York’s delivery workers were making real gains through political action, union efforts at Amazon and Starbucks have stalled. Despite all the media attention, only one Amazon warehouse is unionized, and it has not yet negotiated a first contract. Several other organizing attempts at Amazon failed, including a nearly 2 to1 union defeat at a warehouse near the unionized plant on Staten Island. The Starbucks union drive has organized about 300 stores of its more than 15,000 locations, but not one of these newly unionized Starbucks stores has negotiated a first contract. Advised by the high-powered union busting law firm of Littler-Mendelson, Starbucks uses the strategy of delay to fight unionization. The company doesn’t negotiate in good faith, harasses current union workers until they quit, and replaces them with new employees less amenable to unions. This anti-union strategy is working: several of the unionized Starbucks, including one of the first to vote in a union, have recently voted to decertify. If workers don’t give up and kick the union out, Starbucks can close stores, which is just what it did to all the company’s locations in Ithaca, New York, a big college town. Closing stores doesn’t violate labor laws; harassing workers for their union activities does, but legal remedies are slow and unpredictable. Without labor law reform making organizing easier and providing more protections for union activists, the deck remains stacked against unions.
In contrast, New York’s delivery workers are not alone in using their collective power in the political arena to gain a decent minimum wage and improve their terms and conditions of employment on an industry-wide basis. Gig and fast-food workers across the United States – often with the help of unions – have had equal success by taking to the streets to pressure local and state governing bodies. With federal labor law reform unlikely, Starbucks and Amazon workers should consider adding concerted political action to their arsenal of organizing strategies. Collective bargaining is not the only path to a decent wage and good working conditions.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Scheuerman and Sid Plotkin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Democratic staff on the House Education and the Workforce Committee announced on Thursday that they have filed a petition to form a union, the Congressional Workers Union (CWU), marking the first committee staff in congressional history to unionize. If the workers’ union is approved, they will be able to collectively bargain for provisions like salary, sick leave and better working conditions.
Trade unions in Indonesia are mobilizing workers by the thousands to protest the 2020 Omnibus Bill, which significantly undermines many labor protections won under the 2003 Labor Law. President Jokowi Widodo argues that more labor flexibility is necessary to attract foreign investment. Workers note that the promise of increased prosperity comes directly at their expense. The Real News reports from Jakarta.
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: Akbar Rafsanjani
Videographer: Lexy Rambadeta
Video editor: Leo Erhardt
Raiis Rathib (Narrator): Thousands of workers have been resisting the Indonesian government’s Omnibus Bill on job creation, which the House of Representatives passed on October 5, 2020. This new law attacks labor rights since it does not provide job security and provides leeway for employers to fire workers.
Sunarno, Chairman of the Congress of Indonesia Unions Alliance (KASBI): “Today we want to convey our aspirations to the House of Representative, But what have we witnessed here my friends? In front of us we stand valiantly, firmly, on the walls and barbed wire my friends, is this what is called the people’s right to express opinions but is never heard, but only the walls to listen!”
Raiis Rathib (Narrator): The new law significantly reduces protections for workers under the 2003 labor law, including on minimum wages, severance pay, vacation, maternity benefits, and health and child care, and abolishes legal protections in permanent employment contracts. The roughly 1,000-page law was largely drafted by the business community, with little consultation from labor unions and other affected groups.
Sunarno, Chairman of the Congress of Indonesia Unions Alliance (KASBI): People who have just started work or are in the recruitment process, on average they are no longer permanent employees. The system implemented is outsourcing, internship and daily freelancing. For the contract outsourcing systems there are also changes for up to five years.
This means that workers who work in this system have low probability of being appointed as permanent workers. Later they will still work as contract laborers, it may even be difficult for the younger generation to become permanent employees. They no longer have freedom of association.
Even the title of this omnibus law is The Job Creation Law or government regulation in lieu of law, it actually contradicts with the goal of creating jobs itself. In fact, these two or three years have seen massive layoffs. When hiring takes place, the approach typically involves outsourcing and giving internships.
Emilia Yanti Siahaan, General Secretary of The Center of Indonesian Labor Struggle (GSBI): Deprivation of labor rights, deprivation of our rights, deprivation of union rights. There is no certainty of work, no wages. The Omnibus Law of job creation opens the way and gives more legitimacy to employers to deprive workers of wages, to exploit workers.
The same thing also happened in the agricultural sector experienced by the peasants. The Job Creation Law became a way for Jokowi (president of Indonesia), became a way for capitalists to monopolize foreign land to further monopolize to continue to seize people’s land.
In several practices, companies have begun to eliminate women’s rights, such as menstruation leave because menstrual leave is equated with sick leave. Where the previous legal regulations, menstrual leave was a right that could be obtained by workers on the first and second day when they menstruate.
But now the company’s practice is that they have to be really sick before they get time off and have bed rest during their periods. This is one of the impacts where the government through the law equates the position of workers with employers as equals, so that they can negotiate for themselves.
Sri, Member of the Congress of Indonesia Unions Alliance (KASBI): With this Omnibus Law they will make permanent employees become contract employees, so that companies don’t need to issue THR (religious holiday allowance), severance pay, and BPJS (Social Insurance). So, this oppression is real.
The Indonesian’s condition is just sad now. Politicians say “I defend the people”, “I defend the people’’
And that’s a lie.
No one cares about us anymore. The proof is that many parties support the Omnibus Law. If we want to change our own fate, we have to fight alone. There is nothing to rely on anymore. So sad.
Rathib (Narrator): The Constitutional Court ordered the government to amend key parts of the legislation within two years of the law’s passage. Jokowi’s emergency regulation, which required parliament’s approval, was designed to fulfil the court’s request. The new regulation isn’t radically different from the original legislation; it contains some improved provisions, including minimum wages for outsourced workers.
Jokowi first proposed an Omnibus Law to boost Indonesia’s regional competitiveness in October 2019 aimed to simplify the application process for business licenses across all business sectors, including land acquisition permits, to create more jobs, boost infrastructure development, and attract foreign investment.
Public consultation was lacking, and it was difficult for the public to obtain an official version of the draft bill, which contains about 185 articles in 15 chapters.Government told parliament that the new law was necessary to bolster Indonesia’s competitiveness in uncertain times, including climate change, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the continuing economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The trade unions aim to continue putting pressure on the government in the hope more protections will be provided for workers. If it’s up to the workers here today, they will continue to take to the streets until the government listens.
It should only take two minutes, and all answers are confidential.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.
Caught between COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis, Canada’s workers have been pushed to the edge—and it’s spurring a revitalization of the labor movement. From Ontario educators’ defiant strike in 2022 to a massive national strike of 155,000 federal employees in 2023, Canadian workers are fighting back. Labor journalist Emily Leedham sits down with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez from the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress in Montréal to explain what’s driving Canada’s strike wave, and where the labor movement might be headed.
Emily Leedham is the Prairie Reporter for PressProgress and editor of Shift Work, PressProgress‘ weekly national labour newsletter.
Studio Production: Jesse Freeston
Post-Production: Jules Taylor, Cameron Granadino
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Emily Leedham:
My name is Emily Leedham. I’m a senior reporter with PressProgress. We’re a progressive news website based in Canada. And I cover the Prairies, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan in the middle of the country. But I also cover labor, and I have a weekly newsletter called Shift Work, which provides a roundup of all the strikes and lockouts across the country. It’s the only place you can find a list like this, as well as a roundup of the labor news from across Canada. So it’s looking at mainstream local sources and independent news sources to see what’s happening across the country. So it really gives you a snapshot of what’s happening in the Canadian labor movement once a week.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Emily, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the Real News Network. We are obviously here in Montreal at the Action Network tent in the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. And the Real News is here to talk to as many folks as we can to learn as much as we can about what working people across Canada are going through, fighting for, what the state of the organized labor movement is in Canada. And you are the one that I normally go to get that pulse read. So first I just wanted to say big fan of your work and everyone watching and listening to this should go check it out. We’ve actually been fortunate enough to have you on the Real News.
And we’ve republished a couple of your great pieces for PressProgress. Yeah. And you were on my colleague Mark Steiner’s show. Yeah, it’s great to finally meet in person. I wanted to just sort of start there. As someone who is doing this important labor reporting week in, week out, I was wondering if you could just set the scene for people watching and listening. What crucial stories have you been focusing on over, say, the past year? Because there’ve been some pretty explosive stories in Canadian labor, but what have you been focusing on?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, definitely. I mean, the interesting thing is coming out of the pandemic, it was obviously a really, really hard time for labor, a hard time for workers, a lot of stress about what is labor doing, what are workers going to do? And what we’re seeing right now is, it’s been a couple years. And a lot of this organizing has been happening behind the scenes. You haven’t always been seeing it. But workers have been frustrated. They’ve been agitating. And we’re starting to see that coming to the surface. We saw that with the education workers just last year. They went on an illegal one-day strike. They defied legislation that would impose a collective agreement on them and ban their right to strike. And they defied that legislation. And they got it repealed in Ontario, the conservative premier back down. And that was a really big moment. Right now, we also saw the national strike of 155 public sector workers across the country. This is the first big strike like this in 30 years since 1991. It was the last time there was a strike of this magnitude of public-
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s like 155,000 workers across the country, right?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. Yeah. So there were 250 picket lines across Canada. So they did strategic picketing. So they weren’t all out at once, but they were kind of doing rotating strikes, strategic strikes. But it was 155,000 workers that were in those bargaining units that were represented in the strike. And it was like bookkeepers, ships, crews, people in lighthouses. I talked to some lighthouse workers. It was so interesting. Just a wide spectrum of workers, but a lot of them were women, women of color. A lot of them making $40,000 to $60,000 a year, and they were on strike over wanting higher wages and remote work policies. And this is not typically thought of as a militant union. So it was a surprise to a lot of people that this strike actually happened because I was watching the strike votes happen. A lot of times unions will take a strike vote as a bargaining chip in itself, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Emily Leedham:
We have this in our pocket. But then to actually do the next step and go on strike, that was a really big moment. So for the past two weeks, we covered the strike fairly regularly. And it was very fascinating because a lot of the workers were on strike for the first time. And a lot of them were learning what their union is and what their union does, and it’s very transformational moment. And so they were able to win some wage increases, some improvements to remote work. There’s a bit of debate, could they have got more? Should they have more? The ratification votes are about to happen. But what I’ve heard from a lot of activists is that this is a transformational moment that will impact the union for years to come, because now you have people engaged in their union, debating stuff within their union, wondering how can we get more?
And that’s something to build on, is what they have right now. So that’s really been a really interesting moment. Another thing about that strike is that it was very political because the employers like the federal government. And so you had the three major parties, the liberals, conservatives, and the NDP. They all want to portray themselves as the friends to workers. They don’t want to be coming across as anti-worker, an which labor. So very interesting watching them, how they navigated it. And it was quite an unusual precedent for this kind of moment. So you can really see that workers’ issues are at the forefront of a lot of political leaders, a lot of reporters as well. And so yeah, it’s very interesting time to be watching labor right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I would say so. Because you mentioned the Ontario educators strike, that was pretty badass. I mean, defying Doug Ford’s draconian attempts to strip. Basically kind of do what Joe Biden did with the railroad workers. Force them back to work, force a deal down their throats. And even for us in the States, watching this massive federal public surfers workers strike. It was like, well, I guess that’s why the US government doesn’t let us do that. So this is why Ronald Reagan was able to fire all the air traffic controllers in the ’80. It was because federal workers in the United States don’t have that legal right. And it’s just incredible to look northward and see the strength that that many workers taking collective action has. And the interesting, like you said, dynamics that it creates within the different parties. And across the labor scene when the employer, the boss is the government.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. And normally there would be talk about back to work legislation because they are federal workers, and they provide a lot of really essential services. But the fact that that wasn’t nobody overtly called for back to work legislation. And it became very clear early on that the government wouldn’t move in that direction because it would look so negatively on them to be so oppositional to workers. Whereas before, the conversation might have been different because other workers have been legislated back to work, postal workers just a few years ago right before the pandemic happened. So things have really shifted a lot. And I think the fact that we didn’t see the government or any politicians, even the conservative ones who normally do not like unions, they had to watch what they said as well. So I think that really shows that there is a moment to be taken advantage of for workers and unions right now. That politicians want to be seen as appeasing them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that real quick. Again, is someone who does such great essential reporting week in, week out. You’re talking to, like you said, lighthouse workers, clerks, and so many folks across the labor spectrum. I was wondering what’s, what you’re hearing from these different groups of workers that… What’s your impression of the key issues that workers are struggling with and fighting against in Canada? I mean, because we’re all in the midst of a cost of living crisis. I mean, this is why we’re seeing strikes by workers all over the place in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the States. So I know that that’s a key issue. But I was wondering, yeah, if you could say a bit about what you’re hearing from folks as the really galvanizing issues for workers and how the labor movement such that it is responding to those?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, definitely. Well, like you just said, cost of living. People are recognizing that, “Oh, my union is a place where I can actually engage and we can bargain. We can do cost of living adjustments, put those into collective agreements”. There’s talk about incorporating that more into negotiations. And I cover strikes and lockouts across Canada. Wages, wages, wages. That’s like the number one issue that people are striking over right now. And I think we’re going to see even more strikes. I was talking to some labor, leaders at a conference as well, and they’re like, “Yeah, this is the tip of the iceberg.” Our members are upset and they’re ready. And another main issue is migrant workers in Canada as well as there’s like… Employers are talking about like, “Oh, there’s a labor crisis, labor shortage.” They don’t want to pay for good jobs. So they’re saying-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. We get that in the states too.
Emily Leedham:
Nobody wants to work. It’s like, well, yeah, maybe increase your wages, your working conditions. People will want to work. But they are wanting to exploit migrant workers as well. And there’s a lot of that that’s been happening. But right now there’s talk about Irregular program for migrant workers. The federal government has been promising it, and they’ve been talking about putting it together, which would basically grant status, permanent resident status to migrant workers across Canada, hopefully. So there is a movement right now of migrant workers that is organizing to really push this forward and make sure that when they come up with this regularization program, it is expansive and covers all workers across Canada. And that is a really crucial moment because migrant workers are able to have union or have employment rights the same as any other workers. That means they can join a union. That means they can organize. That means they don’t have to be scared, and that they’ll be deported for even going to a know your right session or anything like that.
And so that will really strengthen the labor movement overall if we have all these workers that are able to be here, and fight, and organize. So that’s something that’s on the horizon. And hopefully we’ll get pushed through this year. So that’s something really important to keep an eye on. Definitely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just a quick follow up on that, have you seen the organized labor movement, the established unions… Have they been part of that push? Have they been receptive to it driving him?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, there’s been some definitely who have been supportive of the movement. But there is a bit of a disconnect for sure, because some unions can be very insular and just like, “We want to secure improvements for our members, and they don’t really step back and they take a big picture, look at it. Even working with other unions or non-unionized workers, much less migrant workers. So it definitely is a mixed bag. There is a lot of support for the Migrant Worker Movement. But it is really led by independent organizers outside of the union movement. So any support that institutionalized labor can throw behind that, I think will really benefit everyone in general. You lift the most exploited workers up and it lifts everyone up
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I think it’s also really important for folks watching and listening to this to not just assume that the dynamics that are true in the states automatically translate to what’s going on in Canada. I mean, we can say the same for any country. But I know there’s a tendency to assume that basically Canada is going through the same stuff that we are. So there’s a one-to-one comparison. The reason I say that is because I was wanted to ask quickly if the public has been behind these labor mobilizations. Because I think that’s been an important factor in the states. Unions have not been popular for most of my lifetime. And now suddenly, they are more favorable in the public’s estimation than they’ve been in decades. Are you seeing something similar here in Canada?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, I think the tide is definitely shifting for sure. There’s been the big Starbucks Union drive in the States, which has been so amazing. We’ve seen a bit of that spillover here. We’ve had some Starbucks locations unionized, which is so great. I mean, even just a few years ago, I was in the Fight for $15 movement. And the talk about unionizing franchises, it was like, “Oh, it’s so hard.” So it’s just like, look, it’s happening. It’s not impossible. So that has been happening here in the PSAC public sector strike. It was really interesting because there’s a dichotomy between public and private sector unions. And the conservatives and the right wing movement, business lobby movement. They kind of tried to divide workers along those lines and say, “These are government workers. They’re making so much money. They’re just bloated. Big government.” And they use that as an excuse to erode the labor rights and to drive down wages. So that was really interesting to see. During the federal strike.
There was a poll done, and there was support for the workers. There was quite a lot of people understood what they were fighting for. And there was, I think, 60% support across the board for the workers. So it was higher than would be expected for federal public sector workers. Especially since you really did have the business lobby going hard to try to demonize these workers and be like, asking for too much, basically. So I think the tide is shifting, for sure.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, and on that note, I wanted to ask before I let you go about the role that media is playing in that. And kind of what the state of the labor beat is in Canada. I mean, the US it’s not great. I mean, we used to have way more local newspapers. It was a staple of most newspapers to have a designated labor reporter back in the day. And with the kind of gradual and not so gradual collapse of the media industry in the digital age, a lot of those beats were axed. A lot of those papers had been shutters. And it was looking really dismal until quite recently. So we’ve had a bit of a resurgence of the labor beat, mainly driven by freelancers and independent outlets.
So I mean, great folks like Kim Kelly, Sarah Jaffe, Michelle Chen, Luis, Felix, Leon labor notes in these times, us at the Real News like. “We’re doing the best we can, but we’ve got a long way to go.” And so I wanted to ask, what does the labor media landscape look like here in Canada? And what role do you see your work and PressProgress playing in the movement that we’re talking about here?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, definitely. It’s been kind of the same here where there wasn’t a lot of labor reporting for a while. But because of the pandemic, every story became a labor story. And so a lot of the mainstream reporters were just forced to cover labor, and forced to learn about labor, and talk to workers, talk to unions. So you definitely saw bit of a resurgence there. There’s a reporter at The Globe and Mail, one of the big newspapers. She was a business reporter, and she basically turned her position into a labor reporter because she’s like, “This is a crucial moment. We’re not talking to the right people. We need to be talking to the workers”. So I think that was so great. There’s another lay reporter in BC, a brand new position at the TA And so it is kind of having a resurgence and in progressive media as well, independent media.
But of course, the state of the news industry in general has been very stressful. And that impacts, of course, the kind of work that you can do. So the scope and the quality of the kind of reporting that you can do. So yeah, you have this rise of the labor reporting. But then also just the conditions of the news industry kind of keep getting worse. So for us at PressProgress. One thing that I’ve been trying to do with shift work is really highlight labor journalism. This is what I tell. We do labor internships. We’ve had interns that we bring on in the summer, and we teach them how to do labor reporting. It’s been so exciting.
And what I’ve been saying is you have to be an advocate for the beat as well. You have to learn about the labor movement, do these stories, but you have to learn how to fight for these stories and fight for the beat itself, because that’s going to be how it’s built. It’s why journalists pushing it forward. So I’m really excited about that. And that’s what I’m trying to do at PressProgress with the shift work newsletter, and covering the strikes and lockouts that we do. I’d like to build up labor reporting more at PressProgress.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, we stand in solidarity with y’all. We would love to keep collaborating and supporting that important work. And in that vein, I just wanted to close by asking, give us some plugs. Where can people find you and follow your work?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, so pressprogress.ca/shiftwork. That’s where you can go sign up for the newsletter. Pressprogress.ca, that’s where you find all of our reporting. We report on right-wing political movements, business lobbyists, political movements. But then we have all of our labor reporting there as well. And then you can find me on Twitter, just look me up at Emily Leedham on Instagram as well. And yeah, that’s where you can find me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah.
Emily Leedham:
Thanks so much for having me on as well. It’s always really great to talk to you and be connected to outlets in the States as well. Like you said, a lot of the labor reporting, I’ve learned from people in the States who’ve been pushing it forward as well. That’s been a real inspiration for me in learning how to do it here. So thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Right back at you. Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Emily.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on June 7, 2023 and was co-published with Labor Notes. It is shared here with permission.
With the largest private sector labor contract in the United States set to expire at midnight on July 31, the eyes of the American labor movement are on United Parcel Services (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 (IBT) 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 1. If this happens, the strike will be one of the largest in American history.
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.
As the contract expiration looms less than two months away, other workers across the economy 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 fair 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 percent of US GDP daily, but also because the issues at stake in this fight are representative of those faced by workers across the economy.
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.
At UPS, the first vision of work comes from rank-and-file Teamsters. As Alex Press and other labor journalists have detailed, the roots of this contract fight go back decades.
UPS was once a hallmark of secure union jobs. Now, 60 percent of the workforce is part-time, making around the minimum wage in many regions. Drivers in many locations are forced to work six days a week and up to fourteen hours a day in forced overtime. Managers follow drivers in personal vehicles and relentlessly harass workers to scare them into working faster. In 2018, former Teamsters president James P. Hoffa forced a contract upon members, despite a majority no vote, that kept part-time wages low and established the second-tier “22.4” driver position (named for the section of the contract that establishes the position), which resulted in new drivers making less money than existing drivers despite doing the same work, and giving them fewer overtime protections.
The rank and file responded to this onslaught by organizing through the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and fought concessions the whole way, building a movement in the process. TDU activists organized a “vote no” campaign in 2013 and again in 2018 against concessionary contracts. Then in 2021, TDU led the successful charge to elect a coalition slate of reformers to the union’s top leadership, on a platform of taking on employers like UPS more aggressively to reverse these concessions.
Now, UPS Teamsters are demanding a significant pay increase for part-timers to $25 an hour, the elimination of 22.4’s two-tier wages for package-car drivers, the end to forced sixth days of work, raising pension payouts for sixty thousand workers so they’re more equal across the country, no driver-facing cameras, more holidays, and an end to subcontracting and the use of gig workers.
The expectations of rank-and-file Teamsters are high. If the two-tier wage structure of drivers is not eliminated on day one of this contract, it is a strike issue. If part-time workers do not get a significant pay increase, it is a strike issue. If all workdays beyond the five-day workweek are not totally voluntary, it is a strike issue.The Teamsters rank and file will not accept a half-deal, trade-offs, or ‘sharing the burden’ with UPS.
Some of these demands are about regaining ground that was lost by past union administrations. For example, the two-tier driver wages were only implemented in the last contract under Hoffa Jr. But for many workers, especially those hired since the last contract, this is about fighting for more. They kept the economy running throughout the COVID-19 pandemic without a penny of hazard pay and watched UPS make record profits off their backs while working forced overtime. Of course they now want their fair share.
The widespread support of these demands through the union’s ranks and the willingness to fight for them point to a simple truth: the Teamsters rank and file will not accept a half-deal, trade-offs, or “sharing the burden” with UPS. Teamsters are demanding more.
The other vision of work comes from Wall Street, which is the real force that the Teamsters are fighting against at UPS. Seventy-two percent of UPS stocks are owned by Wall Street firms; the two largest shareholders are Vanguard Capital and BlackRock. These firms and others own and control most of the rest of our economy, meaning not just UPS but its main competitors, including FedEx and the railroads.
What does Wall Street want out of the UPS contract? Steady and massive profits.
From their perspective, UPS is one of the great success stories of the pandemic. From 2012 to 2019, UPS yearly profits ranged from $7.1 billion to $8.2 billion. In 2020, when the rest of the economy was suffering from the pandemic, UPS made over $8.7 billion in profits. In the years since, it reported the largest profits in its history: $13.1 billion in 2021 and $13.9 billion in 2022.
The biggest impediment to Wall Street dictating terms for the entire logistics industry is the Teamsters’ UPS contract.
UPS will try to further increase these profits in the 2023 contract by asking for “flexibility” to schedule employees to work any of the seven days in a week, the installation of driver-facing cameras to further harass workers, and the continued use of gig workers to deliver packages.
The biggest impediment to Wall Street dictating terms for the entire logistics industry is the Teamsters’ UPS contract. Simply look to the competitors to see what corporations would do without an unionized counterforce at UPS: Amazon drivers paid nearly minimum wage and having their hours cut next week if they do not meet inhumane production standards this week; FedEx moving to eliminate all direct hires and switching to a 100 percent subcontractor model; workers forced to eke out a living in their cars, delivering packages, people, and food until enough money is made to pay off the car expenses and cover that month’s rent — if they’re lucky.The biggest impediment to Wall Street dictating terms for the entire logistics industry is the Teamsters’ UPS contract.
But Wall Street does not just want profits. They want power — hoarded for themselves and as far away from us as possible. They are constantly working to create the best possible economic conditions for profit-making, and there is no better condition for that than demobilizing and dividing the working class.
For that reason, far more important than any particular concession, Wall Street wants a deal at UPS without a strike, and they will be willing to give up a few of those concessions to get it.
A two-week strike could cost UPS approximately $3.2 billion. But more important, a strike at UPS would be the largest demonstration of working-class power seen in the post-COVID-19 economy. Every worker across the economy would learn that they have the power to win better conditions through the collective action of simply withholding their labor. That result is what Wall Street fears the most.
Unfortunately for UPS, the Teamsters will not be shaken. A strike authorization vote for UPS Teamsters is set to begin this week; IBT general president Sean O’Brien has urged all members to vote yes. TDU will work to ensure that the national negotiating committee receives the largest “yes” vote possible.
The UPS contract fight matters for the entire working class. If we want workers at Amazon, FedEx, and throughout the country to know that organizing a union leads to better pay and working conditions, greater control over their working lives, and opens the door to a better world, then there is no better opportunity to show what we mean than a strike victory against UPS and Wall Street this summer. A national, high-visibility strike led by a newly reformed union could point the way forward for many workers across the economy and reinvigorate the labor movement as a whole, by demonstrating that our collective power does not come from leaders at the bargaining table, but from the essential labor that rank-and-file workers perform to keep society running, and our power to withhold it.
The contract fight at UPS started nearly a year ago. Last August, Teamsters had contract kickoff rallies around the country. In the fall, UPS workers around the country filled out contract surveys, affirming the popularity of ambitious demands. Over the winter, thousands of Teamsters stood at gates and in break rooms handing out contract unity pledge cards, to educate each other and build support for the major contract demands they are willing to strike over.
In the spring, they held contract action team trainings around the country to map their workplaces, select picket captains, and develop organizing plans to engage their coworkers. And in the last month, rank-and-file TDU activists began petitioning at dozens of UPS “barns” to demand the company accept a higher national pension plan and raise part-time pay to $25 an hour. They remain firm in their high expectations. They want to win the best contract in Teamster history, and they’ll be willing to hit the streets in a walkoff on August 1 to do it if they have to.
While UPS will do everything it can to negotiate a settlement before August 1, ultimately, the decision to strike will come down to the 340,000 UPS Teamsters who have fought concessions for decades and now have the wind at their backs. At the 2021 IBT Convention, TDU activists led the successful charge to end the hated rule that allowed Hoffa Jr to force the last contract on UPSers in 2018. Now a simple majority vote will rule on a contract vote.
Will a majority of UPS Teamsters even accept a tentative agreement without striking, given the immense power they know they have, the ground they need to recover, the public support they enjoy, and how much they have to gain? Thanks to decades-long reform efforts, that will be their decision to make.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
From May 8-12, the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress took place in Montréal. Reporting for Working People and The Real News Network, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez attended the convention and spoke with a number of rank-and-file workers, organizers, and union officers about the state of the labor movement in Canada.
In Part 1 of our two-part dispatch from the CLC, we talk to: Emily Leedham, the Prairie Reporter for PressProgress and editor of Shift Work, PressProgress‘ weekly national labour newsletter; Guy Smith, president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees; Mary Newman, a journalist and producer for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and member of the Canadian Media Guild; James Russwurm, a quality assurance tester for Keywords Studios, where workers formed the first union in the video gaming industry and affiliated with UFCW Local 401; Liz Ha, 1st Vice President of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU) Local 154, chair of the OPSEU provincial human rights committee, and vice-chair of the OPSEU Coalition of Racialized Workers.
Additional links/info below…
Permanent links below…
Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
Studio Production: Jesse Freeston
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Emily Leedham:
My name is Emily Leedham. I’m a senior reporter with PressProgress. We’re a progressive news website based in Canada, and I cover the Prairies, Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the middle of the country, but I also cover labor, and I have a weekly newsletter called Shift Work, which provides a roundup of all the strikes and lockouts across the country. It’s the only place you can find a list like this, as well as a roundup of the labor news from across Canada. So it’s looking at mainstream, local sources and independent news sources to see what’s happening across the country. So it really gives you a snapshot of what’s happening in the Canadian labor movement, once a week.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Emily, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at The Real News Network. We are obviously here in Montreal, at the Action Network Tent, in the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. And The Real News is here to talk to as many folks as we can, to learn as much as we can about what working people across Canada are going through, fighting for, what the state of the organized labor movement is in Canada. And you are the one that I normally go to to sort of get that pulse read. So first, I just wanted to say, big fan of your work, and everyone watching and listening to this should go check it out.
We’ve actually been fortunate enough to have you on The Real News. We’ve republished a couple of your great pieces for PressProgress. And you were on my colleague Mark Steiner’s show. It’s great to finally meet in person.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I wanted to just sort of start there. As someone who is doing this important labor reporting, week in, week out, I was wondering if you could just sort of set the scene for people watching and listening, what crucial stories have you been focusing on over, say, the past year? Because there’ve been some pretty explosive stories in Canadian labor, but what have you been focusing on?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. Definitely. I mean, the interesting thing is, coming out of the pandemic, it was obviously a really, really hard time for labor, a hard time for workers, a lot of stress about, what is labor doing? What are workers going to do? And what we’re seeing right now is, it’s been a couple of years and a lot of this organizing has been happening behind the scenes. You haven’t always been seeing it, but workers have been frustrated. They’ve been agitating. And we’re starting to see that coming to the surface. We saw that with the education workers just last year. They went on an illegal one day strike. They defied legislation that would impose a collective agreement on them and ban their right to strike. And they defied that legislation, and they got it repealed in Ontario. The conservative premier backed down, and that was a really big moment.
Right now, we also saw the national strike of 155 public sector workers, across the country. This is the first big strike like this in 30 years, since 1991. It was the last time there was a strike of this magnitude of public-
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s like 155,000 workers across the country, right?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. So there were 250 picket lines across Canada. So they did strategic picketing. So they weren’t all out at once, but they were kind of doing rotating strikes, strategic strikes. But it was 155,000 workers that were in those bargaining units that were represented in the strike.
And it was like bookkeepers, ships crews, people in lighthouses. I talked to some lighthouse workers. It was so interesting. Just a wide spectrum of workers, but a lot of them were women, women of color, a lot of them making $40,000 to $60,000 a year, and they were on strike over wanting higher wages and remote work policies. And this is not typically thought of as a militant union. So it was a surprise to a lot of people that this strike actually happened. Because I was watching the strike votes happen, a lot of times, unions will take a strike vote as a bargaining chip in itself, right? Like we have this in our pocket. But then to actually do the next step and go on strike, that was a really big moment.
So for the past two weeks, we covered the strike fairly regularly. And it was very fascinating because a lot of the workers were on strike for the first time. And a lot of them were learning what their union is and what their union does. And it’s very transformational moment. And so they were able to win some wage increases, some improvements to remote work. There’s a bit of debate. Could they have got more? Should they have got more? Their ratification votes are about to happen. But what I’ve heard from a lot of activists is that, this is a transformational moment that will impact the union for years to come, because now you have people engaged in their union, debating stuff within their union, wondering, how can we get more? And that’s something to build on is what they have right now. So that’s really been a really interesting moment.
Another thing about that strike is that, it’s very political because the employers’ like the federal government, and so you had the three major parties, the liberals, conservatives and the NDP. They all want to portray themselves as the friends to workers. They don’t want to be coming across as anti-worker, anti-labor. It’s very interesting watching them how they navigated it. And it was quite an unusual precedent for this kind of moment. So you could really see that workers’ issues are at the forefront of a lot of political leaders, a lot of reporters as well. And so, yeah, it’s very interesting time to be watching labor right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I would say so. Because you mentioned the Ontario educators strike, that was pretty badass. I mean, defying Doug Ford’s Draconian attempts to strip… Basically kind of do what Joe Biden did with the railroad workers, force them back to work, force a deal down their throats. And even for us in the States, watching this massive federal public servers’ workers strike.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It was like, well, I guess that’s why the US government doesn’t let us do that. So this is why Ronald Reagan was able to fire all the air traffic controllers in the ’80s, right? It was because federal workers in the United States don’t have that legal right. And it’s just incredible to look northward and see the strength that that many workers taking collective action has. And the interesting, like you said, dynamics that it creates within the different parties and across the labor scene when the employer, the boss, is the government.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. And normally, there would be talk about back to work legislation because they are federal workers, and they provide a lot of really essential services. But the fact that nobody overtly called for back to work legislation, and it became very clear early on that the government wouldn’t move in that direction because it would look so negatively on them to be so oppositional to workers. Whereas before, the conversation might have been different, because other workers have been legislated back to work, postal workers just a few years ago, before the pandemic happened. So things have really shifted a lot. And I think the fact that we didn’t see the government or any politicians, even the conservative ones who normally do not like unions, they had to watch what they said as well. So I think that really shows that there is a moment to be taken advantage of for workers and unions right now, that politicians want to be seen as appeasing of them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that real quick. Because again, as someone who does such great essential reporting, week in, week out, you’re talking to, like you said, lighthouse workers, clerks, and so many folks across the labor spectrum. I was wondering, what you’re hearing from these different groups of workers that… What’s your impression of the key issues that workers are struggling with and fighting against in Canada? I mean, we’re all in the midst of a cost of living crisis. I mean, this is why we’re seeing strikes by workers all over the place in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, the States. So I know that that’s a key issue. But I was wondering, yeah, if you could say a bit about what you’re hearing from folks as the really galvanizing issues for workers, and how the labor movement, such that it is, is responding to those.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, definitely. Well, like you just said, cost of living. People are recognizing that, oh, my union is a place where I can actually engage and we can bargain. We can do cost of living adjustments, put those into collective agreements. There’s talk about incorporating that more into negotiations. And I cover strikes and lockouts across Canada. Wages, wages, wages. That’s like the number one issue that people are striking over right now. And I think we’re going to see even more strikes. I was talking to some labor leaders at a conference as well, and they’re like, “Yeah, this is the tip of the iceberg. Our members are upset.” And they’re ready.
Another main issue is migrant workers in Canada as well. As there’s… Employers are talking about like, oh, there’s a labor crisis, labor shortage. They don’t want to pay for good jobs, so they’re saying-
Maximillian Alvarez:
We get that in the States too.
Emily Leedham:
“Nobody wants to work.” It’s like, well, yeah, maybe increase your wages, your working conditions, people will want to work. But they are wanting to exploit migrant workers as well. And there’s a lot of that that’s been happening.
But right now, there’s talk about a regularization program for migrant workers. The federal government has been promising it, and they’ve been talking about putting it together, which would basically grant status, permanent resident status, to migrant workers across Canada hopefully. So there is a movement right now of migrant workers that is organizing to really push this forward and make sure that when they come up with this regularization program, it is expansive and covers all workers across Canada.
And that is a really crucial moment because if migrant workers are able to have union or have employment rights the same as any other workers, that means they can join a union. That means they can organize. That means they don’t have to be scared that they’ll be deported for even going to a know-your-right session or anything like that. And so that will really strengthen the labor movement overall if we have all these workers that are able to be here and fight and organize.
So that’s something that’s on the horizon, and hopefully, will get pushed through this year. So that’s something really important to keep an eye on, definitely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just a quick kind of follow up on that, have you seen the organized labor movement, the established unions? Have they been part of that push? Have they been receptive to it, driving it?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. There’s been some definitely who have been supportive of the movement. But there is a bit of a disconnect, for sure, because some unions can be very insular and they’re just like, “We want to secure improvements for our members,” and they don’t really step back and they take a big picture, like look at it, even working with other unions or non-unionized workers, much less migrant workers. So it definitely is a mixed bag. There is a lot of support for the migrant worker movement, but it is really led by independent organizers, outside of the union movement. So any support that institutionalized labor can throw behind that, I think, will really benefit everyone in general. You lift the most exploited workers up and it lifts everyone up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I think it’s also really important for folks watching and listening to this to not just assume that the dynamics that are true in the States automatically translate to what’s going on in Canada. I mean, we could say the same for any country, but I know there’s a tendency to sort of assume that basically Canada is going through the same stuff that we are. So there’s a one-to-one comparison.
The reason I ask that is, or say that is, because I wanted to ask quickly if the public has been behind these labor mobilizations, because I think that’s been an important factor in the States. Unions have not been popular for most of my lifetime. And now, suddenly, they are more favorable in the public’s estimation than they’ve been in decades. Are you seeing something similar here in Canada?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. I think the tide is definitely shifting, for sure. There’s been the big Starbucks Union drive in the States, which has been so amazing. We’ve seen a bit of that spillover here. We’ve had some locations, Starbucks locations unionized, which is so great. I mean, even just a few years ago. I was in the Fight For 15 Movement, and the talk about unionizing franchises, it was like, oh, it’s so hard. It’s just like, look, it’s happening. It’s not impossible.
So that has been happening here in the PSAC public sector strike. It was really interesting because there’s kind of a dichotomy between public and private sector unions. And the conservatives and the right wing movement, business lobby movement, they kind of tried to divide workers along those lines and say, these are government workers. They’re making so much money. They’re just bloated, big government. And they use that as an excuse to erode the labor rights and to drive down wages. So that was really interesting to see during the federal strike.
There was a poll done, and there was support for the workers. Quite a lot of people understood what they were fighting for. And there was, I think, like 60% support across the board for the workers. So it was higher than would be expected for federal public sector workers, especially since you really did have the business lobby going hard to try to demonize these workers and be like, they’re just asking for too much, basically. So I think the tide is shifting, for sure.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And on that note, I wanted to ask, before I let you go, about the role that media is playing in that, and kind of what the state of the labor beats is in Canada. I mean, the US, it’s not great. I mean, we used to have way more local newspapers. It was a staple of most newspapers to have a designated labor reporter back in the day. And with the kind of gradual and not so gradual kind of collapse of the media industry in the digital age, a lot of those beats were axed. A lot of those papers had been shuttered. And it was looking really dismal until quite recently.
So we’ve had a bit of a resurgence of the labor beat, mainly driven by freelancers and independent outlets. I mean, great folks like Kim Kelly, Sarah Jaffe, Michelle Chen, Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes, In These Times, us at The Real News, we’re doing the best we can. But we’ve got a long way to go. And so I wanted to ask, what does the media, the labor media landscape look like here in Canada? And what role do you see your work and PressProgress playing in the movement that we’re talking about here?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah. Definitely. It’s been kind of the same here, where there wasn’t a lot of labor reporting for a while, but because of pandemic, every story became a labor story. And so a lot of the mainstream reporters were just forced to cover labor and forced to learn about labor and talk to workers, talk to unions. So you definitely saw the resurgence there.
There’s a reporter at The Globe and Mail, one of the big newspapers. She was a business reporter, and she basically turned her position into a labor reporter because she’s like, this is a crucial moment. We’re not talking to the right people. We need to be talking to the workers. So I think that was so great. There’s another labor reporter in BC, a brand new position at the Tai Ni. So it is kind of having a resurgence and then progressive media as well, independent media.
But of course, the state of the news industry in general has been very stressful, and that impacts, of course, the kind of work that you can do, so the scope and the quality of the kind of reporting that you can do. So yeah, you have this kind of rise of the labor reporting, but then also just the conditions of the news industry kind of keep getting worse.
So for us at PressProgress, one thing that I’ve been trying to do with Shift Work is really highlight labor journalism. This is what I tell. We do labor internships. We’ve had interns that we bring on in the summer and we teach them how to do labor reporting. So it’s so exciting. And what I’ve been saying is, you have to be an advocate for the beat as well. You have to learn about the labor movement, do these stories, but you have to learn how to fight for these stories and fight for the beat itself, because that’s going to be how it’s built, is by journalists pushing it forward. So I’m really excited about that, and that’s what I’m trying to do at PressProgress with the Shift Work Newsletter, and covering the strikes and lockouts that we do. I’d like to build up labor reporting more at PressProgress.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, we stand in solidarity with y’all. We would love to keep collaborating and supporting that important work. And in that vein, I just wanted to close by asking, give us some plugs. Where can people find you and follow your work?
Emily Leedham:
So pressprogress.ca/shiftwork. That’s where you can go sign up for the newsletter. PressProgress.ca. That’s where you find all of our reporting. We report on right-wing political movements, business lobbyists, political movements, but then we have all of our labor reporting there as well.
And then you can find me on Twitter, just look me up, @emilyleedham, on Instagram as well. And yeah, that’s where you can find me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah.
Emily Leedham:
Thanks so much for having me on as well. It’s always really great to talk to you and be connected to outlets in the States as well. Like you said, a lot of the labor reporting, I’ve learned from people in the States who’ve been pushing it forward as well. That’s been a real inspiration for me in learning how to do it here. So thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah. Right back at you. Thanks so much for sitting down with us, Emily.
Emily Leedham:
Yes.
Guy Smith:
Hi, I’m Guy Smith, president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, and it’s a great pleasure to be here. Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Guy, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with me. It’s a real honor to get to meet you in person. And we are, of course, here at the 30th Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. It’s my first time coming here, so I’m trying to soak in as much as I can, talk to as many folks as I can, learn about the state of the movement here in Canada, what workers are going through, what organizing efforts are happening, and ultimately what we, in the States and beyond, can do to stand in solidarity with our siblings up here to the north.
I’m really excited to get a chance to talk to you because The Real News where I work came from Canada. We have a lot of folks who are connected to Alberta. And so I’m always hearing a lot about the kind of changing political wins in Alberta, stories that we want to look at. And so I’m really, really curious to learn more about how you and your union are organizing amidst that. But before we get there, for the great podcast listeners, I was wondering if we could start by learning a bit more about you and your path to union leadership.
Guy Smith:
So I’m 61 years old now, and I’ve been involved in my union for the last 35 years. I was a Government of Alberta employee, on the front lines of child and youth care, working in a center to help disadvantaged and youth at risk, and as a result, I was a AUPE member. And started noticing that I had concerns at the work site about health and safety, staffing levels and that sort of thing. And I wanted to find out from my union how I could get involved to help.
So I started on the shop floor as an activist and an agitator. Became a union steward, elected to work site positions. And actually led our members out on a strike, which our employer deemed illegal, which I guess technically was in 1990, around workload issues and pay equity issues. And so that was a very fundamental experience for me, realizing that, yeah, I’m right and march out the door and then having other folks believe in themselves to do the same. And then realizing I had the responsibility to help them stay out there. And so that was formative for me.
And shortly after that, I got elected as the vice president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees in 1993. And at that time, we were taking on a very anti-union regressive government that was basically privatized a whole swath of government services. And we lost a lot of those battles. And I think it’s really important to learn from the losses as well. But we also won some fundamental ones as well. And really, I look at it from the perspective of worker’s power, that you don’t leave things to leaders.you don’t leave things to a collective agreement. You leave things to the collective action, direct action on the work site in the streets where it needs to be. I come from a fairly radical background there.
I’m from England originally, and in the ’80s, I was living in England, doing things like the minor strike and the various things that were going on then. And I got fairly involved with the Trotskyist movement called Labor Militant. So it really sort of formed my radical tendencies, which interestingly, while I’ve held in increasingly more responsible leadership roles, you actually have to learn how to moderate that for the situation and your audience. Because it’s not about you and how well you can spout some theory of revolution, it’s about how well you can connect with workers.
And AUPE is extremely diverse. Now we have about 95,000 members. And within those 95,000 members, they’re all range of folks. And I think it’s important that they feel that they’re being heard, just as much as you think you’re able to preach to them, which turns them off. Anyway, I digress.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I was going to say, coming out of Thatcherism in the UK, that’ll radicalize anybody.
Guy Smith:
Absolutely. Yeah. And it was really good lessons to learn there from comrades there. And also hooking up with comrades from the US as well during that time with… What was called militant in the UK, it was called Labor Militant in the ’80s in the US. So I got to know some really good US comrades.
Having said that, being involved in AUPE, I stepped back a little bit, from being a vice president, to help raise two wonderful young girls who are now wonderful young women. But I became president of AUPE in 2009, so that’s 13 and a half years I’ve been president. And again, it was on a platform of reinvigorating, reinspiring workers to stand up and fight back. And we have been through an awful lot in those 13 years. Again, it’s not necessarily about the government of the day because we’ve had conservative government that was in power for 40 years, very quickly get changed to the NDP government in 2015, and recognizing fairly quickly that the world didn’t change, that it’s not up to governments to change the world. It’s up to workers and the power of workers.
So out of all the struggles we’ve been through, a lot of wildcat strikes. We’re known as the union that likes to wildcat, and again, some more successful than others, and you learn each time. But the whole goal is to ensure that our members know that they’re the ones with the voice and the power, and choose that collectively, there’d be an unstoppable force. And we’re still on that perspective.
And yeah, when the NDP got defeated in 2019, and a very reinvigorated right wing government took power and very suddenly started changing legislation, labor legislation and making it very anti-worker, we started demonstrating against that. So we were out in the streets every week, rallying, picketing. And we felt something was… You could taste it in the air, really building up a great head of steam.
I remember being at our 2019 convention and having a resolution on the floor to, not only support, but encourage direct action wherever it exists, to put that power directly in the hands of our members. And that resolution being passed unanimously by a thousand delegates was an extremely powerful feeling.
And then COVID hit. And we took the necessary steps like every organization across the world had to do, where that became our focus. Most of our members are healthcare workers and others work in social services and then law enforcement. So they were there on the front lines with this scary thing that nobody knew anything about at the time. So our main focus was to make sure they had the protection and the support they needed to safely do their work. But we lost connection with a lot of our members. Yeah, we were on Zoom or Teams, it was all done in video, but we lost that personal connection and it really hurt us. And again, that’s not unique to AUPE. I think that existed everywhere.
So coming out of that, we are rebuilding, methodically. We are putting into place some pretty stringent strategic plans that each of our locals are coming up with. And it’s really about taking those small steps forward. And ultimately, it’s to build capacity to take on some very tough negotiations next year. And that’s our main focus at the moment, so.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I want to circle back to something real quick, because having come from the UK and out of that furnace of the ’80s and the kind of Thatcher and Reagan revolution, I guess not everyone will have that same experience. But I can’t help but think back to my own trajectory, which we’ve talked about on this show many times. But I grew up very conservative. And my dad, Jesus Alvarez, when he became a citizen of the United States, the first person he voted for was Ronald Reagan. And my mom as well was very much a Reagan democrat. So I guess we’ve met coming from very different points, but we’re here now, which is very exciting.
But it always makes me reflect on how little labor consciousness I had growing up, how little I understood what unions were, why they were essential. And what flowed downstream from that was how little worth I felt I had as a working person, how little right I felt I had, in the United States, to demand better at my job, let alone to band together with my coworkers and fight to improve our conditions. So I say all that to ask, from your perspective, having come to Canada, and now spending decades working in the movement, I guess, what’s your read on the general sort of labor consciousness that people have, at least in the areas that you organize with? Is there more of a sense of the value of unions in Alberta?
Guy Smith:
Well, first of all, Alberta is an extremely tough jurisdiction to organize in. I mean, it has historical roots sort of in the settler movement, the pioneer movement. It’s a very much an agragarian kind of society where it was until oil was found. And then it became very much Texas of the north. So it’s always had values, which probably, and I hate to generalize, but probably with some would say more conservative.
Having said that, entwined in that is a real sense of community, that when we need to, we have to stick together. And I see that in Alberta communities, regardless of political stripe or ideology, that that’s a very strong feeling in Alberta. So I’d say that workers that I represent, we’re not raised with a class consciousness, at all. Some learn it like I did, through getting involved in radical politics. I do want to mention, going back, that my radicalism was sparked by my mom, who was very much a pioneer of the feminist movement in Alberta in the ’70s. And it intrigued me how passionately she addressed very complex issues and I really learned at her knee on that.
So obviously, there are individuals, workers and groups of workers and communities that learn through their life experiences. We’re not taught any sort of labor history in school or anything like that. Union density is pretty low in Alberta. We’ve had, historically, if you go back 80 to a hundred years, there’s been some really good radical struggles in Alberta, but nobody would know about that from what they learn at school. So class consciousness is limited, but there’s a real sense of community. And I think that when we are organizing, it’s building, it’s tapping into that, if you like.
We’re also much like rest of Canada. We’re a land of folks from other parts of the world who do bring more radical ideas and bring different perspectives. The face of Alberta is changing for the better, becoming much more diverse and open to different ideas. And of course, when that starts fermenting on the shop floor as well, that’s great. We’ve got a lot of workers from the Philippines, from Central and South America, and they come with some really great passion for workers’ rights, so…
Guy Smith:
And they come with some really great passion for workers rights. So I think you take your opportunities where you can to tap into that, but also recognizing that, as I said earlier, you shouldn’t be preaching, you shouldn’t be trying to change someone’s ideology, the way they were brought up. And so working with our members who maybe not only don’t have that consciousness but aren’t interested in having it, you have to get them engaged in other ways as well. So it really is a balancing act, Max, quite honestly, to get folks passionate about the things that they need to be for their work, their families, their community in a way that resonates with them.
So I would suggest that unions are the labor movement in Alberta. I’ve always played an essential role and I think that they are starting to find their feet again. I think our voice is starting to be more collective and resonating more. And I think that’s because the right wing has become so extreme because the kind of things that they want to do to change society, right? It’s scary whether it’s LGBTQ2-spirited rights, labor rights, the whole thing around not supporting vaccines or the science behind the way we were trying to get over COVID. It’s radicalized on the right. And we do have an election in three weeks today where the ruling party is being led by someone who has bought into that stuff. And whether she actually believes it or not, it doesn’t matter. She had to tap into that element of society to get herself elected as leader of the United Conservative Party and is now beholden to them. And they’re organized, they’re organizing way better than the lefters at the moment. It’s kind of concerning.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I would say so. And that’s kind of what I meant earlier when I said that the folks that I work with who are from Alberta or know people in Alberta, that’s kind of the tenor of our conversations, and it’s something that is very familiar to us in the States, especially on the kind of local municipal level, the right and the far right are more organized than a lot of folks on the left, or even there’s a greater sense of urgency than there is even among the labor movement, which is very, very concerning. And in fact, I recently did a great interview for this show, for a bonus episode with Ominous Sheik about that and how organized the far right is becoming in Canada and what labor and the left’s response should be. And it’s really, I want to focus on that question for a second because it’s not just that, right?
We’re talking amidst a cost of living crisis that is pummeling poor and working people in Canada, in the US, across Europe, across the world, really. At the same time we’re seeing so many corporations raking in record profits. Take your pick. We could be talking about the railroads in the United States. We could be talking about Amazon, we could be talking about the oil and gas industry, so on and so forth. But there is still that kind of crucial sense that, for the vast majority of us, things are getting worse, but for a small few they’re making out like bandits. And so that’s, historically, the scene in which radicalism on the right or on the left grows. And so this is a really pivotal moment where we have to pick the path to the future that we want. And so I wanted to ask if you could say a little more about your membership and about the union, the folks that you work with, and how amidst COVID, cost of living crisis and these shifting political winds, how you are able to still do the crucial organizing work that y’all do.
Guy Smith:
Yeah, so as I said, AUPE has about 95,000 members. The large majority of those are in healthcare. So we represent licensed practical nursing and healthcare aides and all the general support services workers who really, to me, are the backbone of the healthcare system. It frustrates me, just as a side note, when you hear politicians talking about doctors and nurses, doctors and nurses. Well without our members, our folks on the front lines, so the doctors and nurses, and love them, they work extremely hard too, couldn’t do their jobs. So we represent a lot of healthcare workers in the public system. But where our area of growth has been is in the private long-term care sector. 20, 25 years ago, the government started contracting out privatizing continuing care, long-term care. And it’s a huge moneymaker for the companies that run them. And obviously, the oppression of those workers is horrendous.
So we’ve been organizing a lot of those sites and that’s been our area of growth because we’ve actually grown a lot since I was became president 13 years ago. We’ve grown by about 30% in terms of numbers. So that’s healthcare. And then we represent the direct government frontline workers as social services, corrections, sheriffs, lot of administrative support workers, a lot of workers that work with handicapped folks. So all those sort of government programs, we represent those workers. And then we represent support workers in a number of universities and colleges and a few school boards and other sorts of government agencies, boards and agencies and that thing. So it’s very much public sector focused. However, I would argue that our members who live and work in the private long-term care, that’s very much profit-driven private industry. So those are our members. And again, as I said, very, very diverse culturally and experientially. And it’s wonderful. I just love looking out at our convention floor and we have a thousand delegates at convention and it’s just amazing how much collective experience there is there. So sorry, what was the other part of your question?
Maximillian Alvarez:
How, amidst all these challenges, COVID, reactionary, political wing taking power, cost of living crisis, how you were still able to grow the way that you are and mobilize folks who are as heterogeneous of a mix as you have amidst all of that.
Guy Smith:
Yeah, I think that we have not been able to continue to grow. I think we’ve been hit hard with the restrictions of COVID, but also very aggressive employers that were I coming to the bargaining tables last time around with massive rollbacks and us forcing them off those rollbacks and concessions and squeaking out minimal wage increases, and then the inflationary pressures hit. So our members, rightfully so, are not very happy at the moment, and it’s about capturing that anger. I’ve told them they need to be angry, and if they’re angry at their union, that’s legitimate, but let’s turn that anger into something more productive when we need to. And so I think we’ve been knocked back a bit, and as I said before, we’re incrementally moving forward. And I think that’s the key. I often see unions sort of put out these big campaigns, we’re going to do this and have a vision of where they want to get to without seeing the steps.
We’re really taking those baby steps. And we don’t do things like massive ad campaigns. That doesn’t turn on any worker. And they say, “Well, we need that the public on our side.” Well, let’s get ourselves on our side first. Make sure that the workers, your fellow workers on the shop floor are on your side before we worry about what the public thinks about us. So we’re really doing it methodically and slowly and actually holding the ground and obviously fighting back wherever we need to, if there’s threats of privatization. And we have lost members even recently to contracting out privatization, but it’s really getting them to find their voice again, Max, because I think they lost it for a while. And I see it building again. We’re having more rallies, information pickets, and getting our members out there actually enjoying standing up and fighting back.
So it’s a very slow, methodical process, but it’s going to be a lot more sustainable and it’s going to be a lot more sort of foundational, I think, than what we’ve done in the past because it was easier even a few years ago to be able to just put a call out for action and have it happen. Workers need more convincing now because of the pressures you were talking about, the horrendous cost of living stresses. They’re working short, the fact that they’re constantly understaffed, they’re exhausted. They’re concerned for their families and their communities takes precedence sometimes over putting in an effort for their unit. I totally understand that. So if we can incrementally move them to come to the conclusion that that important work that they do and the things they worry about can be solved eventually through their own collective action, that’s where we’d like to get to in just about a year’s time when we’re at the bargaining table. And regardless of who wins the election in three weeks, they’re still the boss.
I know some unions who I respect a hundred percent. And that’s one thing I wanted to touch on, my relationship with other unions, and Alberta’s fantastic. We work very closely together, but some unions are really pinning all their hopes and dreams on the NDP winning in three weeks. Personally, and I’ll go on the record here, I don’t think it’s going to happen unfortunately, because that would take a lot more pressure off of us if the NDP were in government. But even if they are, they’re still the boss. And this is what we’re trying to encourage our members to deal with a boss as a boss, regardless of what political stripe they are. So that’s how we continue to at least hold our ground for the moment. I think we’ve done well doing that, and now we’re incrementally slowly building again, probably for something big in next year.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that real quick and then I promise I’ll let you go. But we’ve got these contracts up next year, and like you said, regardless of who’s in office, boss is a boss. Sadly, a lot of workers in the US have learned that during Biden’s presidency. Mr. I’m going to be the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen. Also, I’m going to squash railroad workers and make it impossible for them to strike. So it’s important to keep that in mind. Not to say that you can’t make more gains when you have a friendlier administration, of course, and you got to take all that in stride. But ultimately, a boss is a boss, like you said, and ultimately, the labor movement should not entrust the decision-making power to people in high places and just hope to curry favor with them.
As you said in the beginning, the power comes from the rank and file and they should always be the one sort of driving the change that we need to see, not just hoping that gets handed down from on high. So in that vein, I wanted to ask, A, what is going to really be at issue during these bargaining sessions in the year? And B, because I want to ask how we can all, across borders, better support one another. I wanted to ask if you feel there is an existing sort of connection or sense that what’s happening in Alberta and what workers with the AUPE and beyond are going through there? If folks feel a sense of connection with the other labor actions we’re seeing in Canada. You guys just had a massive federal workers strike. Across the United Kingdom, you’ve got lecturers, teachers, NHS workers, ambulance drivers on strike. France is still on a general strike. The US is kind of like we’re running up behind, but we’re still seeing more union elections, more strikes than we’ve seen in many, many years. Is that your sense too? Is there a sense that there’s something, there’s more of a groundswell amongst the members, and how can we all support you guys going into bargaining next year?
Guy Smith:
I think the actions we’ve seen have been inspirational. And I think, for us, it was the education workers in Ontario, the massive strike that they had in the defying the government. That’s inspirational. And that’s an example that I use for our members. The recent PSAC strike, again, they got their demands met as far as I know through that strike action. And these are tangible examples that I can provide our members, but there’s a sense that it happened overnight. I get asked, “Why don’t you just call a strike, a general strike?” I’m going-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let me snap my fingers here.
Guy Smith:
I was going to say, “Oh, why didn’t I think of that?”
Maximillian Alvarez:
You get that in the states. Just a quick aside, you get that a lot. And for us, it happens with a lot of people who I think don’t know about the nuts and bolts of labor organizing, but you get more lefties in the US being like, “Why don’t we just general strike?” It’s like, “Well, mother fucker, why do you think?” It takes a lot to get that many people to take collective action. It’s not that easy. Yeah, that would be great, but how are we going to get there? Like you said, how are we going to get the intermediary steps to mobilize that many people?
Guy Smith:
Yeah, so I use these recent, and also, you mentioned what’s happening in the UK, which I find inspirational as well, the amount of strikes there and saying to my members, this is a place that I’d like us to get to, the threat of strike is sometimes more powerful than the actual strike. I’d like us to be that confident collectively for us to be able to take on our bosses that way. But remember also the work that, like you was saying, that gets there. It’s not just about waving the magic wand, right? Because otherwise I would’ve done that a few hundred times in the last few years. And I think the fact that we are focusing so much on this sort of very methodical, strategic plan that it’s getting there. And just a little bit of an aside on that, we asked them to pick the area that they wanted folks on.
We gave sort of four areas, and the vast majority pick workplace power because they see that as the root of everything else we need to achieve. So yeah, we have some time to build and we’re going to continue to work with other unions as well. I know that a lot of the strategies we’ve used over the years, other unions emulate us, and we take stuff from them. We got very close relationship with not only Alberta unions, but with the BCGU, which is our sort of fellow comrades in BC, very close with them. We’re learning all the time from them and they learn from us. So we are sharing that information and support. And you can find, wherever there’s a picket line in Alberta, you’ll find AUPE members out there supporting it. And I think that’s so key that workers are seen as supporting each other. It’s not union presidents sort of shaking hands, it’s actual workers in the streets. So I think it’s there, the glue is there holding us together.
There is a challenge, of course, when we’re all in bargaining together because other unions with the same employer will be also in bargaining. And I think it’s incumbent upon us to make sure that we are supporting each other as well on our various demands because we would have different demands. So that support is there. And I think we’re always looking for really good examples of struggle around the world to use as an example. And I haven’t had a lot of experience with the US labor movement, but when Wisconsin happened in 2012, I think it was, as soon as that happened, we sent folks down there and there’s wonderful video of my vice president who was exhausted from traveling for like 24 hours, standing in the state legislature with an AUPE flag and bringing greetings of support from AUPE to the workers in Wisconsin. That was amazing. You never forget that power. And then cheering them on it.
And then I actually went down there as well, and we shot a little documentary. And I could have been in Madison, Wisconsin, I could have been in London or anywhere in the world. It’s the sense of solidarity that you feel supporting each other when we’re in struggle. And that was fundamental. And it happened so quickly, Max, that’s the thing. It’s just a matter of reaching out and offering support across borders or even across the sea. Having said that, the amount of work that it takes to get our own house in order and to build the good foundation for that is where I think union should focus quite honestly on their own own struggles. But once you’ve built something, then you can look around, okay, we got something solid here. We can actually not only support ourselves, we can support others. And I really get a sense of that building, nationally and probably internationally too.
So I do feel it, and I think as we were saying earlier, I think it is in reaction to the fear of a right-wing mobilization across the world. Again, doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you’re see the same elements, Nazi elements almost, and fascist element. It’s very scary. And then you say, well, it never happened here in the liberal democracies that we have. It’s happening in Alberta and I’m sure everywhere else as well. And it’s scary. And these are the kind of lessons that we have to learn as leaders, I think, is when we’re talking to workers, it’s about explaining why we feel terrified of the potential of a right-wing taking over. It’s not telling them, “Oh, those guys are nut bars”, because that doesn’t do it. It’s got to be a much more deeper engagement to explain why we as workers have to stand up and push back, not only against our bosses, but against certain elements in society which are very dangerous.
Emily Leedham:
My name’s Mary Newman. I am a journalist working with the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s majority publicly funded media organization. Elon Musk has labeled us government funding. To be fair, we get about 70% of the funding from the government.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, so you guys snagged one of the state affiliated media things?
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, we did.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Fun times we’re living in, right? Well, Mary, geez, it’s so cool to get to meet you in person and sit down and chat here. We’re at obviously the 30th convention of the Canadian Labor Congress, and you and I have connected before this for other great media work that you’ve been doing with the CBC. I wanted to ask how you got into doing that work?
Emily Leedham:
Well, when I was back in the UK, I worked for the BBC again as a casual, and then I moved here and I emailed people, phoned people to try to get work at CBC, and it was pretty rough. Started out in radio, worked in radio for five months. And then out of the blue, no more shifts, moved to TV, been working there for about three years. And even after five years there, I’m just, only now I do, I have a weekend only contract, and I’m one of the lucky ones. And our department just found out that we’re having lots of cuts. So they’re axing a show and other shows, they’re having some of their staff scale back and all the staff are casuals, or at least the vast majority are casuals. And it sucks.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus, man. Yeah, that sucks. Like we were saying before we started recording, I think you said we’re definitely in the start of a recession, and it’s been so tragic to watch across the media landscape. Folks were focusing, at least in the US, more on the kind of high profile stories of Fox News firing Tucker Carlson, CNN firing Don Lemon. And of course, everyone hates the kind of that level of corporate media, but what a lot of folks aren’t seeing is that at the same time, we’re seeing mass layoffs at publications across the board, ESPN, Vox, the Washington Post, Vice News Tonight, so on and so forth. And it’s just so depressing to hear that those cuts are happening up here too. And I want to ask you about that in a second.
But I guess just before we do, while I’ve got you here, I was curious if you could say a little more about the sort of working environment at the CBC. In your time there. You mentioned that a lot of folks are casuals. Could you just tell us a little more about what it’s like to actually work at the CBC? Because I imagine most folks listening to this have no fucking clue what that looks like.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, well, working in news, I have to work all hours. Sometimes I start work at four in the morning, sometimes I have to work late. Often I work doubles to fill in for people. So yeah, the working conditions aren’t ideal, but I think people go into journalism because they care about what’s going on in the world, and they want to inform people. And people working at the CBC, they really believe in public service and they want the CBC to be as good as possible. And people give a lot of themselves to the work, but unfortunately, CBC relies heavily on temporary, casual employees. There’s people who have been there for literally decades who are still casuals, and it’s difficult to plan your life when you don’t know how you’re going to be working. You don’t know if you’ll even have a job. And it happens to people, it just happened to the department I work in, and I’m one of the lucky ones, as I say, having a weekend only contract. But yeah, it’s difficult at the best of times being a journalist and with this uncertainty in the labor market, it’s even more difficult.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And again, it’s something that we down in the states have been feeling as well. And it’s really sad to say, it just gets worse at every step down because I don’t know, we don’t even have fucking healthcare that people can rely on. And I’ve been talking, we just interviewed folks with the Writer’s Guild who are on strike now. Hollywood writers are on strike. And we heard from there that as similarly, you’re on kind of a project by project employment model. And with the rise of streaming services, those contracts have been getting shorter and shorter. They’re trying to squeeze as much labor out of the writers as they can in a short amount of time as they can. But what that translates to is, a lot of people aren’t racking up enough hours to pay their rent, to afford their healthcare, yada, yada, yada. So we’ve got a real fucking crisis, pardon my French, across the media landscape right now.
And like you said, the CBC, you got at least a little more stability, but not a whole hell of a lot. And we’re talking about the CBC. This is an institution, I was watching at my hotel last night. So tell me a little more about the cuts that just kind of came down the pike.
Emily Leedham:
For American listeners, it’s probably important to say that although we do have publicly funded healthcare in Canada, as in the UK where I’m from, it’s definitely not universal. And people at CBC and across Canada do rely on benefits that come through their jobs to afford things like dentistry. And for instance, recently I had to pay over four grand to have dental work done and it wasn’t cosmetic. I really needed it. And even having a union job, they covered a small part, a few hundred bucks. But yeah, it’s not universal by any means. Some people I work with really rely on the benefits that come through working at the CBC. For instance, I work with a refugee, she came to Canada four years ago and she relies on her benefits for speech therapy, and now she’s gone from five days to one day a week. So she’s not going to be eligible for her benefits, so she can’t get the speech therapy she needs, and she’s terrified as lots of people.
So even though Canada has this reputation for being progressive and having these universal services, they’re not as good as they should be. And in provinces like Ontario, where I live, I live in Toronto, the government there has been rolling back on healthcare and lots of other public services. And it’s not just an Ontario problem, it’s happening across Canada. So people’s reliance on the benefits they get through their job are even more important, even heavier now. So a lot of my colleagues, well, I’m a bit tired still because I was up with a colleague the night before last, just commiserating with her because she found out her hours have been cut and it’s pretty depressing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus. Yeah. I’m so sorry that you and your coworkers are going through this, and of course, sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all and really hope that, I don’t know, I hope that across the US, Canada and beyond, we can find better, more sustainable models for supporting journalism because this is just nuts. This is unsustainable. I just interviewed for the third time, these amazing, striking journalists at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. And that paper is an institution that’s existed for as long as the United States has, going all the way back to the Gazette back in the Pittsburgh area, and it’s just been taken over by these corporate shitheads who want to kill the union, want to turn it into just a kind of money generating content factory. It’s just a really, really sad state of affairs right now. But the good thing is that, because of the union representation there, these owners can’t just do whatever they want. They still got to sit down and talk with the workers and negotiate the terms of whatever decisions are made. So I wanted to ask about that really quick, and then I know you’re tired and I’m going to let you go, I promise.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… to ask about that really quick. And then I know you’re tired and I’m going to let you go, I promise. But could you say a little more about the union? And I guess what your experience with the union has been and where they fit into the current situation y’all are going through at the CBC.
Emily Leedham:
Sure. So at CBC, we’re with the Canadian Media Guild and they’re very supportive. And, actually, in response to the way CBC treats temporary workers, there’s been a temp worker collective formed. But it’s actually led by a guy, a friend of mine, Julian Uzielli. Shout out to Julian. Once he got a staff job, he then used that as an opportunity to advocate for temporary workers because I think a problem, definitely at CBC and across the board, is it is hard for temporary workers to advocate for themselves because by the nature of their job, they’re precarious, and they know that already, even if they aren’t seen as rocking the boat, they could just lose their job out of the blue. So it does make temp workers meek and the CBC relies so much on temp workers.
And because these workers are precarious, they start work early, they do unpaid work, because they’re so desperate for a staff job. And there’s no recognition that the temporary workers, they come up with the ideas for the show, they do all the pitching, they get the guests. Without them, there wouldn’t be content.
And it’s just a bit dispiriting to see that the head of CBC is on nearly half a million dollars per year, yet they can’t afford to give temporary workers a contract. And it would benefit them for everyone to have some stability because living without stability, it takes its toll and it means your health isn’t as robust, it means you’re more likely to have mental health problems. It is in their interests as well as ours. But yeah, it’s not a priority for them. And they say they have to keep people temporary because it makes things, I think they use the word fluid and they can get rid of shows-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Flexibility.
Emily Leedham:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The fucking, the term the gig economy loves to use.
Emily Leedham:
Yes. Yeah. So my union, CMG, it’s a good union, but I do think more or workers with staff jobs need to step up and advocate for the temps because not many do. And it just makes this sort of a two tier system, which definitely works in CBC’s benefit because as I say, it means that the temp staff, they will work for free. They’ll start work two hours early to come up with pitches just so that they’re seen as a good worker and are more likely to get a staff job.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I guess on that note, final question is we’re having this conversation literally at the Canadian Labor Congress. I guess, how does that struggle, both media workers in general, but also temporary and part-time employees? I guess, how do you see that fitting into the labor movement ,such that it is in Canada right now?
Emily Leedham:
Just about every sector, they’re relying more and more on temps and casuals the way things are going, even the federal government does. There’s no industry that really treats the workers with the respect that we deserve, and it’s just going to become more and more of a problem.
So I think coming to an event like this is really important just to learn from other activists about how they’ve advocated for their workers, especially their casual workers. And last night I went to an event with international activists, and that was really inspiring just to see the sacrifices that other people will go to, not just for themselves, but for their colleagues as well in order to advocate for better working conditions. And the struggle isn’t just confined to Canada or North America, this is a struggle across the world, and we have more power if we stand in solidarity with people from other countries as well. Like last night we heard from delegates from Haiti and Mexico, and I mean, comparing what we go through to them, I mean, it does… On one hand, it makes me feel lucky, but on the other hand, and we can advocate for more for ourselves and a better deal for them as well. And really, our fates are all linked because often jobs in Canada, they’re taken away and they’re shipped to places like Mexico and Haiti because the labor’s cheaper. And having international solidarity is really important, especially going into a recession.
James Russwurm:
My name’s James Russwurm, I’m with UFCW 401 out of Edmonton. I’m representing a group of video game testers that unionized last year in April.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, James, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the Real News Network. We are, of course, here in Montreal at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress. And The Real News is here to talk to as many folks as we can, learn as much as we can about what workers like yourself are going through, struggles you’re involved in, the state of the labor movement in Canada, and ultimately how we can support one another better across international lines. Right?
And I’m really, really excited to connect with you and talk about your guys’ campaign because you’re the first video game union to form in Canada. Right?
James Russwurm:
That’s correct, yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. Yeah. So I want to talk all about that and I want people to know where things stand with that campaign and what they can do to support y’all. But before we get there, let’s take a step back because I love to talk to folks about how they got into doing this work and what that work looks like, because I frankly have zero fucking clue of what video games developing, testing, what the day to day of that job looks like. So I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about your path into that industry and in so doing, just give us a sense of what the day-to-day work in that industry looks like.
James Russwurm:
Absolutely. So to answer your first question of how I got into it, I actually worked in a different capacity. I worked in hospitality and tourism prior to COVID. During COVID, I was laid off, as were so many other of my fellow employees. So I took it at the time, I always wanted to get into video games development that way. So I went back to school. I went to the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, and while I was there, I applied to work with Keywords Studios and they got back to me and said, “Hey, are you interested in taking this job?” I said, “Yeah, that’s great. What’s the pay?” “Well, It’s minimum wage?” And I went, “Okay. Yeah. I’ll still take it.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Was that a shock to hear it?
James Russwurm:
I was hoping for a little bit more than that. I wasn’t expecting them to go… just so everyone knows Alberta minimum wage is $15 an hour, so that is the bare minimum that they could pay us. But it’s sort of a passion industry, you want to get that foot in the door. So I said, “Yeah, I’ll take the job.” Started working on it and it was great. So I started there. So what that looks like, it’s not just like you’re just coming in every day, just sitting down playing a video game and testing it. So our-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Is that what most people think you do, is just-
James Russwurm:
Yeah, that’s it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… sit on a beanbag and just play Sonic the Hedgehog all day?
James Russwurm:
Exactly. I don’t even have a beanbag. I wish they’d give me a bean bag. But yeah, so we were actually working from home because it was the pandemic and everybody was working remotely. Then we had a meeting, I would say in April of last year that sort of changed things, but the actual day-to-day work is a lot of coming in, someone will tell you, “Hey, go to this level, check out these things, write a report on it, send it back to us.” We’re going to write or report files and issues, we’re going to give that back. So I did that for about a year, and then I was promoted up into a next level where I am now a quality analyst. And that throws people for some loops because they don’t really know what a quality analyst is. And what that is, so instead of being the one that writes the test, or sorry, that runs the test, you create the test. So you’re creating the test for the workers to go do, they are testing what you need to do, and then you relay that information back to the developers and they make changes and stuff. So like a middleman between the testers and the developers. But it’s a quite a technical job. It requires a lot of technical writing skills and a lot of know-how in sort of broader video games and how they work.
So we wouldn’t consider ourselves unskilled laborers because you pretty much need a post-secondary degree to even be considered for these types of positions. And we have people from all different types of backgrounds and degrees, everything from drama to technical design. So we really represent quite a broad selection of individuals all working as video game testers.
So in, I believe it was February of last year, we got sort of called into a meeting with our managers from Keywords Studios that said, “Okay, starting next month, you’re all going back to the office full time. That’s just what’s going to be happening.” And we had been working for the last three years from home, there have been no issues regarding metrics or performance or anything like that. So it took us as a bit of surprise that there wouldn’t be any leniency, there would be no hybrid. It was just, “Nope, back in the office five days a week.” We’re what’s called embedded services, so we work directly in the offices of the studio, which is currently BioWare. Their employees were not required to come in every single day.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh wow. Wow.
James Russwurm:
They were offered fully remote, hybrid, whatever they wanted. So we sort of scratched our heads a little bit at that and went, “Well, why are we being forced back into the office?” And then for those of you who don’t know, we’re in Edmonton and downtown parking in Edmonton where our office is about $250 a month. When you’re only making minimum wage-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Jesus man.
James Russwurm:
… over the course of a year, it’s almost 10% of your wage that you’re just paying to parking and gas and car insurance, et cetera. So plus the additional 45 minutes on your day there and back, and that’s if you’re driving, if you’re taking public transit… Edmonton public transit’s pretty bad, so you’re going to be at an even further disadvantage, and you’re going to spend more time on the public transit, you’re going to spend money on transit passes. I mean, it’s over $100 a month for a transit pass in Edmonton. So we were all going, “Can we afford to keep working here? If I’ve got to go back to the office, I’m already cutting it close. I’m saving costs because I’m at home. I don’t have to commute. I can make my own food at home. I don’t have to go out for lunch or I have to work socials and all of these other things.”
And so we decided, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation.” And I approached one of our members and said, “Hey, how does this affect you? If we have to go back to the office next month, five days a week, what does your life look like now?” And they were telling me, “Well, I don’t have a car, so I’m going to be spending over two hours a day on public transit, just going to and from work.” And we were just like, there’s got to be a better way. So I said, “How about unionizing?” I said, “Are you interested?” And they went, “What’s the union? What does that do? What does that mean?” And then that’s sort of where I started.
So I had previous experience with unions in the sense that my dad worked for the Power Workers Union in Ontario for 30 years, and it’s one of those industries, you work 30 years, you retire, you got a great pension. So I understood the power of unions at the time, and it’s been a topic in the video game industry for quite some time where people are say, “Hey, you know, guys should unionize.” Because a lot of people don’t know that it’s quite an exploitative sector. Because we work in something that is a passion industry, like I said earlier, I’m willing to accept minimum wage for the experience and the opportunity and the exposure to get into that role. And we just sort of said, “Hey, we got to do something.”
There were some questions on who would be in the bargaining unit and who couldn’t be. So what I started to do was just sort of reach out to our members just discreetly. So we’re all remote, we’re not in the office. So I couldn’t just grab somebody by the arm after work and say, “Hey, let’s go get a beer. I got something to talk to you about.” So I had to be a little bit more cryptic than that being… I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the application Discord. So we had sort of a out of work social Discord that had a lot of our members on it. And so I just started reaching out to them directly on that with little cryptic at first, being like, “Hey, could I talk to you about something?” Yeah, I never reached out-
Maximillian Alvarez:
You up?
James Russwurm:
It kind of felt like that at times where you’re just like, “I don’t want to say it’s not serious, but when you got a minute, can we talk?” And that’s sort of how I started reaching out to our members sort of discreetly and building out a base. So there was about 20, 22 of us, and there was some questions on who could be in the unit because we did have supervisors and managers and things like that present, but we ended up getting about 17 union cards signed. And it was great because it was electronic. With COVID, one of the benefits that came out with it was you didn’t have to go and sign a union card anymore and go all over the city and track people down. It was like, “Hey, here’s a link and fill it out.”
And then what we did was we built a community within the Discords, we made a server, and then it was like, you signed a union card, you get an invite, and then once you’re in, then you can chat to everybody else who’s already signed a union card and talk about workplace issues and talk about what’s bothering you and building this group up from the ground.
And we reached out to everybody. Everybody got a chance to say yes or no. And then by the end, we had about 17 cards signed. So much to some of our members enjoyment, we submitted our application on April 40th, or sorry, April 20th, 4/20. Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
On brand.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. So we submitted that, and then we took off from there. And that’s sort of how I got my start and how we got the whole ball rolling with the unionization.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow. I mean, that’s incredible because those basic questions that you reached out and asked your coworkers, because like you said, going back to the office from work from home, to transitioning to five days a week in the office… That wasn’t just a, “Oh, I don’t get to wear sweatpants anymore,” which is how it’s talked about in the mainstream media. It’s like, no, this is an immediate chunk of my take home pay that just is gone.
James Russwurm:
Yep. Mm-hmm.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I don’t know, just I really want to emphasize for people watching and listening to this that just taking that step to turn to your left, turn to your right, ask your coworkers, “What is this going to mean for you?” That is organizing, that is where it starts and look where it grew from there. Right? And I wanted to just hover on the technical detail for a second.
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because I talk to so many workers in the United States who are similarly trying to unionize their shops, whether they’re Starbucks workers, Amazon workers, graduate students, nonprofit workers, so on and so forth. And as you probably know, the US is not a very labor friendly place.
James Russwurm:
Unfortunately.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So when I talk to people outside of the US about the Rube Goldberg system of rules and hurdles just to get to a union and election, most people’s question is, “How does anyone get a union in the United States?” And the sad fact is most don’t.
But I say all that to say that for us, the standard process is to get people to sign union cards. If you get above 30% of the eligible bargaining unit members in your shop to sign cards, that triggers a National Labor Relations Board election. But it’s a long, drawn out process. You get a date for an election that’s usually a month or months away, in that time, that’s when the boss can turn on the screws and hold captive audience meetings. The election process is not easy to navigate. So there’s a lot of shit put in people’s way. I wanted to ask if it’s the same or-
James Russwurm:
A little bit. Yeah, so I’m from Alberta, we have a conservative government right now that just recently in their last term, repealed the majority card rule. If you had majority of the workers sign a card, boom, you’re just unionized.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
So they got away with that. They just threw that out the last time they got elected. So we still had to have that month process where we had, pretty well everybody on the team had signed the card. And we had a few that were just like, “I’m just a little uncomfortable with signing the card. I’ll vote yes when the vote comes around, but I don’t want to be involved in any of this organizing because if this all goes bad.” And we respected those people and we knew, we don’t want to pressure you or really lean on you. We respect your decision. We gave everybody the option to say yes or no.
So we went in with a majority. I think we had almost 70% of the team had signed cards at that point. So we knew we were in a good spot for going through the boat, but we still had our employer try to claim people who didn’t even work with us in the province and sort of dilute that pool. Right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
Because they think, “Oh, maybe they just hit the minimum threshold for cards, we’ll throw some more people in there. Oh, now you don’t have them many people anymore. Too bad,” right? It turned out to be a little bit funny because when we still passed the review, they’re like, “Yeah, they got more than enough cards.” Well then suddenly those people are no longer part of that bargaining unit like we don’t want you to represent those people kind of stuff. So we were like, “Okay, well, we have the cards, so what happens next?”
We had some executives flying to Edmonton, never before have we seen anybody from any other regional office or anything like that come into Edmonton. They booked a hotel conference room and said, “Hey, we’re going to be here for two days, come by, tell us what your problems are, we’d love to help you solve them.” I don’t think anybody went. And I think that sent a pretty clear message to them as well.
And so after that, I think it died off a bit. We didn’t really get any captive audience meetings. I think that a lot of people… It also helps that we’re remote. We’re all in our different homes, so they can’t come into work and ambush us and be like, “Hey, we’re all having a meeting in the office right now.” It’d be send us a Zoom link and then whatever, just minimize it and go do something else while they talk about anti-union stuff or whatever. But I never had that happen.
And then eventually we got to the vote, and the vote was, it was also virtual, so we had signed our mail-in ballots. So we had all received them at our home, mail them back in, they all go to back to the labor board and the labor board counts them. And when I was watching it on Zoom, because there was me and another member from UFCW there, and then of course a representative, their lawyer from Keywords Studios, and she opened them all and went through them all and I’m like, “Oh, she’s just checking to see if they’re all there and then she’s going to do a count.” And then once she was done with them all, and she was like, “Unanimous. It’s a unanimous yes.”
And I just was like, yes,
Maximillian Alvarez:
Do the slow motion pump.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. Yeah, that sounds a good message, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
James Russwurm:
So I was super proud of our team there to just come together unanimously, because we didn’t want to be in a position where we had a portion of people who didn’t feel like this union was for them, or it wasn’t the right fit. So just the team sending that signal to us as the organizers and to the union and UFCW and to our employer. Right? That sort of resounding message, “Hey, we’re ready to go. We’re ready to fight on this.”
And then after that vote we started getting into contract negotiations, which we’re still in today. We’re working on our first contract, and it’s slow-going, but we are talking about a lot of things that don’t exist in other union contracts, or we’re talking about work from home, that is something that we want enshrined in our contract. That’s sort of like, “Hey, if our workers don’t have a demonstratable need to be at the office, they should not be required to be there. And if you do require them to be there, then you got to give them some sort of stipend, a monthly allowance or something like that for parking, for fuel costs, et cetera, et cetera.” So that was one of the big factors that we wanted to do.
And funny enough, we kind of already got it because after the submission to the labor union, they have what’s called a freeze. You can’t change working conditions on the workers anymore, which means, you can’t send us back to the office, that would be changing our working conditions. So our members have actually been able to continue working from home for the last year, and we’ve, in some cases, save people about 3000 bucks of a year in parking and fuel and things like that. So it’s been nice that we’ve been able to already enact some of those changes that we were going for with one of the big ones being work from home. We kind of already have it right now. And then when we get it enshrined in our contract, then it’ll all be official.
And the other thing is obviously wages, because we get paid minimum wage, if you’re sort of a starter, just game tester, which is about 15 bucks an hour. The average price, I think about a one bedroom in Edmonton right now is $1,200 a month. So we have people who are spending almost 50% of their paycheck just to go to rent. Right? We’ve got members who can’t move out of their parents’ place because they can’t afford a place on their own. So we’re really trying to get those wages up, at least at a living wage for Edmonton, which is about, I believe right now is $22.50. But yeah, I don’t know, with the way inflation’s going, maybe that changed since last week. So it’s just our way of battling back against these high prices in these inflationary environment, it’s all we can do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I mean, that’s without a doubt the biggest common thread that I’m hearing from workers across industries, not just here in Canada, but in the US, United Kingdom, France, I mean, all over the world, we are in the midst of a really intense cost of living crisis. Right?
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Even just the phrasing of that always creeps me out. But I mean it’s been this really big equalizing factor that I feel has brought folks in from industries that may have in the past seen themselves as separate from your standard blue collar worker. Right? I mean, you’re seeing more nonprofit workers, folks in tech, not just you all in Edmonton, but down in the states. We’ve had really critical union drives and labor actions in tech, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Activision. Right? So something’s really happening here. And what I’m hearing from more and more folks is cost of living is a big one. Right?
James Russwurm:
Yep.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s like regardless of the industry that we’re in, there are of course some exceptions, but by and large, people are noticing the same trend, that we’re working longer, we’re working harder, and yet it is taking more and more to make ends meet with rent, with groceries, gas and electric bills, so on and so forth. So it really does feel like we’re all taking in water and people are turning more to unions, collective action, worker mobilization, to fight for what working people deserve. And I think that’s really, really exciting to see. And I wanted to ask in that vein, if that was a difficult part of the process for you, was to get folks to see themselves as workers who should unionize in the first place? Or did y’all see yourselves as part of this groundswell that we’re seeing in tech or even beyond with the increase in unionizations, the strikes? Yeah. Was that-
James Russwurm:
Yeah, a little bit, actually. The way we look at it is we’re all workers. Right? If you go to work for your money and you got to work, you’re a worker. Right? It doesn’t matter if you work in video games, it doesn’t matter if you’re a plumber. Right? We work for our dinner. We all do. So there’s no sense in us being like, “Oh, well, we’re above this,” or, “We don’t need collective action because we’re treated so well.” Because the reality is not, the video games industry is highly exploitative across not even just for testers, even developers. I don’t know if you’ve heard the phrase crunch before, but what that essentially is, is when you’re working on a project and you’re getting near the end and you’re going, “Okay, we have this release date that we can’t really move because we’ve shipping our products to vendors and they’re going to put it on their shelves and it’s going to be ready to go, but there’s all this work left, so we’re just going to do 80-hour weeks until that happens/” And there’s been projects that our members have worked on where that has lasted for six months.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Geez.
James Russwurm:
Just unrelenting over time, no breaks. People sleeping under their desks is not uncommon in the sphere. And the industry’s trying to change that culture a lot, especially from the studio levels. They’re trying to get away from that, better planning, delaying games, that kind of stuff. But the reality is, for a long time, and still even to this day, that is what’s happening, is people are being exploited because they love what they do. And it’s really hard to watch. And that was part of the reason that I really wanted to get a feel for how the team was feeling. Because coming into this, when I was starting, I didn’t really have any experience in video games, but the people on my team had been around the block and they had seen a lot, and they could see it a bit into the future of where we could be heading and wanting to protect ourselves against that. Right?
In our contracts, overtime is a really big thing that we were talking about. Right? Because generally that’s been the safety net for the studios is, “Oh shit, well if you can’t make our deadlines, we’ll just grind our workforce until it’s done.” And it’s not healthy, people burn out, it’s terrible for mental health and that’s what we want to protect ourselves from is those sort of exploitative measures.
And so, yeah, we absolutely feel like we’re in line with all the other labor, because that’s what happens to almost everybody. Grocery store workers are getting hosed this pandemic with their hero pay and that was taken away. We were lucky that we weren’t out on the front lines during COVID, but we 100% support everybody who was. And we want to make sure that we can make all labor better for everybody regardless of what sector you’re in.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I’m like the hero pay is the perfect example. It’s the one that I always go back to.
James Russwurm:
Oh yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because it makes the case to any worker out there, even if you are in an industry where you feel like you got it better than a farm worker or a service worker or something like that. A boss’s promise is temporary, a union contract is in writing. Right? Because we saw that in the states, like Amazon got all this publicity in the early days of the pandemic when it offered hero pay, not hazard pay. Because if you call it hazard pay, then you have to keep paying as long as the hazard persists. But when you call it hero pay, it just seems like something that you’re giving out of the benevolence of your own heart. Right?
James Russwurm:
Right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Very calculated little shits, they are. So-
James Russwurm:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… Pardon my french.
James Russwurm:
They can be creative.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But it does really make the case that if we have an inflation crisis or we’re in the circumstances that we’re in now, a lot of those promises, the working conditions, the pay, they can go away, they can be changed out on a whim-
James Russwurm:
Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… And passed down unilaterally. And if workers don’t have a union, a collective voice on the job, it’s like, what do we do? What do we say in that regard? So it really is in everyone’s interest to have that organization in their workplace. Even if you like your job. Right?
James Russwurm:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Which is another thing that I’ve heard from y’all, is we don’t want to leave and just find something else. There is a lot, we’ve invested in this, but we should be paid a living fricking wage.
James Russwurm:
Yeah. Right? And you want to be able to pay your bills at the end of the day. And that’s any worker, I feel that works a full-time, normal job should be able to do that. And our members can’t right now. Right? Because of the pay, and I think it was, I don’t want to say easy, because organizing is not easy. It can be difficult at times, but it’s necessary. And if you feel that way about your workplace, if you’re saying… You look to the people to your left and right, they’re being exploited, or you feel like you’re being exploited… Just talking to your fellow workers and saying, “Hey, this decision that just happened, how does that affect you? How does that make you feel?” Right? I never knew how far that would take me to being able to organize.Right? And I think that that’s really the message that we want to put out there is, yeah, it’s work, but it’s worth it. Because at the end of the day, what we have in…
James Russwurm:
It’s work, but it’s worth it because, at the end of the day, what we have now is more than we had even before we unionized, and we don’t have a contract yet. We have legal protections that are protecting us from just them firing us all. It’s a lot harder to do those types of things once you have union recognition. Then the contract comes afterwards, and then whatever you can agree on.
It was an easy sell for a lot of our people because there’s not a lot of guarantees in the games industry for working, especially us as contractors. You may work on a title, and then at the end of that title they say, “We don’t need any testers anymore.” You’ll lay off, and you can all go on EI or whatever, and next time that there’s a project, you can apply, and then maybe you get the job.
The carrot that they dangle in front of you is these studios. They say, “Hey, if you do a really good job on this, the studio’s going to want to pick you up and hire you.” And there is some truth to that, but the reality is, say you have 60 people. Maybe two of those people are going to the studio.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow.
James Russwurm:
It also creates this intercompetitiveness of people trying to stand out and one-upmanship that we really want to get away from because what my conversation was to them, I said, “What if instead of that we could get recall legislation into our union contract that says, ‘Hey, if you worked on this project, if there’s another one coming up, they got to hire based on seniority.’” And that’s something else that we’re talking about with our employer as well because right now there is no guarantee that when you’re done a project, you’ll ever work in games like this again, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right.
James Russwurm:
Maybe there was a manager that just didn’t like you, and you’re just never going to make it past the interview phase. We wanted to make sure that it’s fair and that, based on how much time you’ve put in, you can come back and then you can continue your work, which is more of a guarantee than we ever had before.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. James, I want to thank you for sitting down and chatting with us. I want to thank Action Network for letting us use their booth. I wanted to just end on a final question, where do things stand now with the fight for the first contract? And more importantly, what can folks watching and listening to this do to stand in solidarity with you all?
James Russwurm:
To answer your first question of where we are today, we’re still in the midst of negotiations. Actually, I’m doing some virtual negotiations Wednesday, Thursday with my employer, and then we’re still building out the contract, but we’re hopefully going to be done by the end of the summer, is our goal. We’ve seen movement from the management side as well as a, “Okay, let’s get this wrapped up. We want to finish this.” Because they’ve been at it a long time too. They got to fly to Edmonton from Ireland anytime they come to negotiate with us. We’re hoping that in the next couple of months we’ll be able to come out and be like, “Hey, this is our contract. This is what we got.” And be an example for anybody else who wants to follow afterwards. So what I can say to people who are maybe out there listening to this, what they can do to support us, “Hey, if you work in video games, find a way to reach out to us.”
You can probably find us through a lot of ways. We’d be happy to talk to you, share our stories, and help them. But also, if people could change their perspective a little bit on what we do, you came up against us a lot, especially when the story broke. People say, “Oh, those video game testers, they sit around and play games all day.” Remember that we’re workers just like everybody else, and we’re just trying to get a fair deal. All we’re asking for is a living wage and share that knowledge with other people. When maybe you hear about another games worker down and, “Oh, my job is killing me.” Say, “Hey, you look at these, have you considered unionization? Because so far, it’s worked well for them.” And that’s what I’d like.
Liz Ha:
My name is Elizabeth Ha. I guess my most important role is, I’m a mother to two girls, and I am from Windsor, Ontario. The work that I do in labor would be, I’m part of the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. We’re a provincial government union. My activism is in not just labor but also the community. I’m currently the vice president at the OFL, which is the Ontario Federation of Labour, representing workers of color, and then also ACLA and CBTU. I am a member of both those, which is Asian Canadian Labour Alliance and the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh yeah.
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Elizabeth, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at The Real News. I really, really appreciate it. We are, of course, sitting here at the Action Network tent at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labour Congress,-
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… and we’ve been talking to as many folks as we can over the past two days, learning as much as we can about the state of the labor movement here in Canada, what our fellow workers across industries are going through, and how folks are fighting for the working class. I really wanted to sit down and chat with you because of all the incredible work that you do, really, but especially in terms of your work fighting for workers of color and fighting for migrant workers in Canada. I think that this is something that really I have a personal connection to.
It’s something that we try to cover extensively at the Real News Network as well, because as exciting as the energy we’re seeing in the organized labor movement is, and as exciting as it is to see more established unions nominally support the energy of young workers at Starbucks and Amazon and service industry workers across the board, that’s all very exciting. But there’s still so many workers who are left out of the movement or who are written out of the movement itself, because, like migrant farm workers, for example, in the United States, farm workers were deliberately written out of the National Labor Relations Act for very racist reasons and are very underrepresented in the movement as a result of it. That doesn’t mean that we forget about them.
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That means that we have to fight that much harder to support them as they are dealing with hyper-exploitation,-
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… rampant discrimination and harassment, wage theft, so on and so forth. I wanted to ask if you could just say a little more your organizing and advocacy work as it pertains to workers of color and migrant workers in Canada.
Liz Ha:
When you talk about migrant workers in the States, it’s very, very similar to migrant workers in Canada. I know this because I’ve talked to workers in the States, and when you hear their stories, a lot of it happens here in Canada. Being from Windsor, we’re about 30 minutes, 40 minutes from Leamington, and we have one of the highest population of migrant workers in Ontario. It’s just, I’ve been doing this work for years, and I think because of the pandemic in the last couple of years, it’s really put a spotlight on what’s happening, and people in the community are starting to see it. Growing up in Windsor, you’d go to Leamington for field trips and stuff, and you would see migrant workers, but I don’t think people really knew their working conditions or their living conditions. When COVID happened, initially, when the borders closed, they weren’t allowed into Canada. The farmers, they couldn’t find anyone to do this work. Canadians don’t want to do this work. I think most people know the health and safety risks and the lack of everything. Nobody wants to do this hard labor.
Maximillian Alvarez:
You get paid like shit. You’ve got no bathrooms. You’re getting harassed by supervisors. Not great.
Liz Ha:
The other thing is, I think the employer wants migrant workers because they are able to do whatever they want, pay lower wages, not pay them. They’re working overtime but not getting paid overtime. They are doing work that they’re not supposed to do, like demeaning personal errands for their employer. There’s on and on. When they weren’t coming in, the employer went to the government, was able to lobby, and the government, so if you have money, basically the government listens, and they opened the borders, then they were deemed essential. They came in. The problem was, when you look at essential workers, healthcare workers were essential workers. There’s a number of them. We called them heroes. We put signs on our lines and all this stuff. But when the migrant workers came in, they were essential, but they didn’t get the same welcome.
They didn’t get the same protections as other essential workers got. We started to hear about workers getting sick in the workplaces. What happened was, in Canada, if a certain workplace, a worker got sick and they got COVID, and I don’t know the numbers, but the health unit would come in and basically close the business. We knew there were hundreds of workers getting sick on these farms, and we had to go and make sure someone checked on them. We were able to get a lot of information from the workers because we’ve done so much work. We have a history, and there’s a trust. They were able to share pictures of what they got to eat. They told us how they didn’t get PPE, and without them even telling you know, in certain workplaces, you cannot social distance. You’re literally working beside another person.
In their housing, there’s definitely no social distancing. You’re sleeping in bunk beds with another worker or two bunk beds, so there’s four workers in a small room with shared bathrooms, shared kitchens, and things like that. On top of all that, they’re restricted. They can’t leave the property anymore because the employer were not letting them leave the property, take groceries, or anything because their reason was to protect the community in case somebody had COVID. Meanwhile, they come in knowing they didn’t have COVID. These employers were given money to quarantine their workers. We know a lot of them were not quarantined, and there was no accountability. No one asked the employer, “Can you show us a receipt that this worker was quarantined?” No, they just pocketed this money, and the workers were maybe quarantined for a day, two days a week, and then they were working.
But with that said, they still do not have COVID. The reason people were getting sick was, some of these farms were bringing in people from the community to do the work. They were actually bringing COVID into these workplaces, and the migrant workers were getting blamed for bringing COVID into the country. I remember going to a store and purchasing all this stuff, and the cash register lady, whatever, she said, “Oh, you’re buying all this stuff. Are you stocking up?” Because I’m like, “No, I’m bringing them to Leamington and all.” And this guy behind me, and I had my daughter, which bothered me, he said, “Why are you bringing this stuff to those people? They bring all these diseases in, brought in COVID.”
This is what’s happening with micro workers. The good thing is, people started to see how these workers were being treated. Even though I’m telling you the story of this one person, there was a lot of people that brought in PPE and brought in donations of food. Businesses were cooking culturally appropriate food so that we can bring it down to Leamington. We had boxes and boxes of fresh produce coming in from Toronto that we would try to get to these farms, to the workers.
We had grandmothers making masks for them. It really showed people still cared, and they were able to get up and take care of each other. These workers, it’s not like this is their first time. Some of the workers have been coming for 10, 20, 30 years, even generations, and they’re still treated like this.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. We’re talking, in this corner of the country, primarily agricultural workers?
Liz Ha:
Yes, like farm workers.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I just wanted to clarify that because in the states, and I know in Canada too, there are definitely pockets across the labor market where employers exploit migrant labor and even migrant child labor, as we’ve been hearing about in the United States. We’re talking meat packing plants. We’re talking construction sites. But we’re also talking about farming operations across the country. What you were saying is that when COVID hit, farm workers were deemed essential along with other classes of workers, but no one wanted to do those jobs. So the farmers lobbied the government to essentially ease migration restrictions so that migrant farm workers could come in.
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The farmers would get paid for having those essential migrant farm workers come in, and they would get paid to quarantine them, but they wouldn’t actually do that. They would just pocket the money and kick the workers out into the fields. Then they would pen the workers in, not let them leave, and occasionally bring in workers from around town who would get them sick, and then they would be stuck there in a locked pen. Do I have that right?
Liz Ha:
Yep. That’s exactly what was happening.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Cool. That’s great. Jesus, man, that’s so dark, and I’m so grateful to you and to others who are doing everything you can to fight for and fight alongside these workers who, as we said, are too often left by the wayside. I wanted to ask about that for a second. I would say, in the United States, there are some exceptions. There are established unions that have gone to the mat for the most marginalized and exploited of workers. You’re seeing positive developments like Laborers’ Local 79, the construction workers union in New York City. Instead of doing what people typically think of construction workers in New York City doing, which is blaming undocumented workers and non-union workers as the enemy who are undercutting our jobs and our wages, they’re reaching out to these workers,-
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… largely migrant and undocumented workers in the city or returning citizens coming home from prison, who are ripe for hyper-exploitation and have to work for the most union-busting, exploitative, corner-cutting demolition and construction companies in the city.
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The unions reaching out to these workers and fighting for them, creating things like an excluded workers fund because they weren’t eligible for federal COVID or state COVID benefits, that’s really positive to see, but it’s still, in my assessment, the exception that proves the rule. So I wanted to ask where the plight of migrant farm workers specifically, in your experience, where that fits into the broader labor movement, if at all, in Canada.
Liz Ha:
The work that I do, it is community work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Liz Ha:
I was lucky enough where we were able to pass a resolution at my union to say, “Okay, let’s start doing some work with organizations like Justicia.” The resolution was about when we do training or reaching out to the community, sometimes we need the resources and funds to do this work and making unions recognize that you have that potential, and these are workers too. We were able to get that convention floor to pass a resolution. So that allowed me, who moved the resolution, to be able to do some more of that work.
I’m hoping that it was moved because they want to help workers. But I think at the same time, there is just a part of me that thinks it’s about also, not advertising, but, a lot of unions do things for the wrong reasons. They want that stamp, like their logo on stuff, or they want recognition for things. As I did this work, I sometimes will mention my union, but I wasn’t forced to, so I just continued doing it. I do think more unions need to look at not just their own members. When you look at unions historically, they don’t just advocate for your dues-paying membership. Historically, they fought for workers in general. That’s what our unions, all unions everywhere, should be doing. They need to see why do we have a problem. Why is this low percentage of our population not part of a union? Why? How are people viewing unions?
As a racialized woman, I think that in our communities, we don’t trust unions because they’ve historically discriminated or they’ve used our communities for certain things. If you continue to do that, why would we want to participate in a union when, even after you join, only a certain group of people get to benefit from some of those things? I think the labor movement needs to wake up. I think this is the time. I believe it’s the time. I’ve never heard the words equity, diversity, inclusiveness in spaces like this as much as I’ve heard it in the last two years. But with that being said, I’m just hearing it. I need to see it. As a human rights activist, you need to show me, or I can’t continue making you look good because I’m part of a community that has been there for me, and that’s where my fight is.
But I do see this as a moment where there is so much opportunity for unions to do the real work for them to survive, really, in the long run. Because right now you can have a rally to fight for whatever the issue is now, but after a month later, when you’re done fighting, the bigger issue is still out there. There is still not enough housing for people there. The price of food has gone up. People cannot afford groceries anymore. Where I live, the cost of rent, there’s so much homelessness, the unemployment rate in my area has gone up, everything. I feel like workers are at a point where they’re angry. They see what’s happening.
I think that’s where unions need to tap into it and say, “Listen, what can we do to help and not take over what you’re already doing? Here’s a space for you to speak. Tell us what your experience is. What is it that we need to do?” Because when you talk about affordable housing or whatever, labor will say, “Okay, this is what we need to do.” But we’re not the ones struggling. If you’re part of a union, you have a collective agreement. You make pretty good money, and you have a union that protects you. You probably have benefits, a pension, all this stuff, and you’re fighting for people that can barely pay rent or you’re trying to increase wages. Meanwhile, you’re getting paid $25. We need to start moving aside and letting the people who are living these experiences be the voice.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just on that note, to really underline the stakes, first and foremost, they’re the obvious human stakes, which you laid out. People not being able to sleep under a roof, people not being able to feed themselves or their children, people not being able to access the healthcare that they desperately need, people who can be fired from their jobs like that just for who they are, what they wear.
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No just cause whatsoever. We have so far to go in fighting these injustices and fighting them for all working people, like you said, not just those who are fortunate enough to have a collective bargaining agreement. There are those basic first-principle human stakes of like, “We need to do this because it’s what’s right.”
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Then there’s the second secondary stakes, like you said, it’s like, “We need to do this, otherwise the labor movement will die. We’ve been in decline for decades. So for our own salvation, we need to be thinking about how we can expand our movement and reach as many workers as we possibly can and think in that mode.” And then on the third order that I was thinking of as you were talking is like, “We’re not the only ones making a play to appeal to working class people who are feeling that pain right now.” There is a rising increasingly fascistic right wing that is speaking to this pain and harnessing it for its own political agenda.
Liz Ha:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I think the question is, as the great labor organizer, Aminah Sheik, put it in a recent piece that she publishes, “How are labor in the left rising to meet this discontent, this frustration, anger, and pain with the cost of living crisis, with the eroding social safety net, with increased climate catastrophe, and endless war?” All of this stuff is happening, and working people are feeling it. What are labor in the left doing to meet that, meet people where they are, speak to that pain, and harness that into something, a movement that can fight for better? Because at the same time, the right is making those appeals and tapping into that anger and doing what they always do, which is directing it back towards migrants, people, trans people, just carving out certain privileged sectors of the real, true working class, and everyone else is trying to steal something from you. I guess I meant to ask in that regard, when we’re talking about the migrant farm workers in your area, are these primarily workers coming from Latin America and the Caribbean?
Liz Ha:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay. I assume that, like in the United States, they get sucked into that reactionary fervor and painted as the ones who are stealing our jobs and the ones that need to be targeted for elimination.
Liz Ha:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Anyway, you’ve said so much that it’s just making me really, really think about how important it is to act now because this shit isn’t going away and the stakes are only going to continue to increase dramatically. So I guess I just wanted to ask in that vein, “What would it look like or what should it look like for the labor movement, but also for all of us to make that commitment to fighting for the working class writ large, not just organized labor?”
Liz Ha:
That’s a hard question. I think that the key piece is to make people realize it’s not just about themselves and to really think about, “Who are you doing this for in this moment?” Because as activists, we became activists because we wanted to be the voice of someone that didn’t have a voice, or we’re fighting for the rights of our workers. But when you’re thinking about that, I think about the future generation. Even as an activist before I had kids, it’s very different now that I have kids. Because as I go to a rally, it’s like, “I don’t want my kids to go to this rally. I don’t want them fighting for this.” And it makes me think of everything that I have and all the people that came before me so that I can have those things. I think people need to understand, sometimes people think activism might be a bad word.
I think if you want to do the right thing and be that voice, then, to me, you’re an activist and you’re doing the right thing. I think labor needs to be like, I don’t know, I can’t see this as being a quick fix because labor, the structure of the movement, needs to be reinvented. I don’t want to say, “Just smash it down and build it.” But in a way, you have to really look at the structure of your union and the people that are making these decisions, like, “Are you including voices?” Every union has equity groups, like workers of color, people with disability, all these different equities.
You’re giving them space and sometimes a voice, but are you really listening? Are you really taking what they’re saying and saying, “How do we fix this? How do we open this door? What do we need to do?” And I think that’s the problem. We’re doing things because we have to. We have a committee because we have to. But then, are you going to do something? I’ve got so many things going through my head to answer this question, but I don’t really have one solution, I guess, because it’s so hard. I think that the key thing for me right now doing this work is trying to get unions like the labor movement to see how important it is for them to connect with the community, not just workers in their unions, but all workers as a whole. They definitely have the resources to do this, and this is the moment to do it because I think people are ready. I think workers are ready to say, “Enough is enough. We’re not going to take this anymore.” People can’t survive, survive, survive, survive.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Relying on the private sector to decarbonize is a recipe for abandoning workers.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Jessica Van Briggle was excited to begin her career as a nurse when she applied to work at Centinela Hospital in southern California. Centinela sent her to a staffing agency to complete the hiring process, and the agency’s representative told Van Briggle she had to work for the staffing agency (not the hospital) for two years or pay $15,000 if she left early. This amount was agreed to by the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
On May 16, Minnesota lawmakers passed the nation’s strongest Amazon warehouse worker protection legislation with the Warehouse Worker Protection Act, which ensures that workers can take breaks during the workday and have access to relevant quota and performance standards and data on how fast they’re working. The bill’s passage marks a significant victory for migrant workers — especially Minnesota’…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Despite endless disinformation from charter school promoters that charter schools are public schools, they differ profoundly—legally, organizationally, fiscally, and philosophically—from public schools. They are not the same. The dissimilarities are numerous by design. Calling them “public” 50 times a day does not spontaneously make charter schools public. Nor does receiving public funds automatically make charter schools public under U.S. law. In the U.S. legal system, several other criteria must be met before an entity can be called public proper.1
Unlike public schools, charter schools are governed by unelected private persons, cannot levy taxes, frequently cherry-pick students, are mostly union-free, spend millions on advertising, and regularly hire uncertified teachers.2 Currently, charter school laws in some states and the District of Columbia explicitly permit charter schools to not require any of their teachers to be certified, while other states allow charter schools extensive wiggle room in this regard. Charter school teachers, moreover, are treated as “at will” employees, meaning that they can be fired at any time for any reason. Likewise, charter school teachers are generally not considered public employees, which is why they do not have the same constitutional protections as their public school counterparts. Charter school teachers also generally work longer days and longer years for less money than public school teachers. Many charter school teachers also lack the retirement plans and benefits available to public school teachers. For these and other reasons, the turnover rate of charter school teachers (and students and principals) remains very high, thereby undermining collegiality, stability, and continuity, which in turn damages education.
Another important difference between public schools and charter schools is that charter schools are often owned-operated by large private corporations. Such businesses are notorious for gaming the legal system to maximize profit as fast as possible (e.g., through shady real estate deals and self-serving business contracts). Conflicts of interest are pervasive.
Importantly, as deregulated schools, charter schools are exempt from most laws, rules, statutes, policies, and regulations upheld by public schools. This is why they are considered “independent” or “autonomous” schools. Charter schools are not beholden to the authority of the public school district they are located in. They are typically authorized by charter school authorizers comprised of unelected private persons and they have to pay these entities large sums of money every year.
In addition, non-profit and for-profit charter schools often dodge open-meeting laws, evade audits, and do not provide the range of services and programs offered in public schools. Many charter schools across the country, for example, do not provide meals or transportation. Charter schools typically have fewer nurses than public schools as well. And when it comes to students, charter schools frequently rely on discredited behaviorist (Skinnerian) practices. Such reward-and-punishment behavioral conditioning practices extend beyond infamous “no excuses” charter schools that have come under fire for years. These practices are directed mainly at low-income minority students.
All of this is possible because charter school promoters openly embrace the ideologies of the “free market,” competition, individualism, and consumerism. They routinely and casually refer to parents and students as customers and consumers, not humans or citizens that have rights that belong to them by virtue of being humans and citizens. This survival-of-the-fittest setup compels parents and students to fend for themselves in their quest for a good education. Subjecting parents and youth to the law of the jungle is seen as a healthy thing. In this way, parents and students are guaranteed nothing. Thus, every week thousands of teachers, students, and parents are abandoned by charter schools that fail and close (often abruptly).
This marketization and commodification of education necessarily brings to the charter school sector the same chaos, anarchy, and violence that imbues a “free market” economy. Among other things, such a setup escalates and normalizes widespread fraud, nepotism, and corruption in the charter school sector. It is no surprise that news of arrests of charter school employees appears weekly, sometimes daily, in headlines across the country.
It is worth noting as well that, over the years, courts at many levels and in many jurisdictions have ruled that charter schools, legally speaking, are not public schools; they are not state actors; they are not political subdivisions of the state; they are not state agencies; they are not governmental entities. This is why they do not follow the same laws followed by public schools and cannot levy taxes. Charter schools are private entities established by private citizens. Their control and supervision are not vested in a public authority. They also receive millions of dollars from Wall Street every year. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), an independent agency of the federal government, has also ruled that charter schools are not public schools. The NLRB was established in 1935 and protects the rights of workers in the private sector.
The main reason charter schools are called “public” under the law is to “justify” siphoning billions of dollars a year from constantly-demonized public schools to enrich narrow private interests under the facade of high ideals. This is self-serving to the extreme. It is no surprise that many billionaires and millionaires have promoted, owned, and used charter schools for decades. Even sports celebrities and movie stars own and promote charter schools.
Many realize that the charter school realities and conditions mentioned above violate public education, the public interest, the economy, and the national interest, yet they believe that charter schools can be responsive and susceptible to pro-social reforms. They think that charter schools can be changed for the better—if we just try hard enough. They harbor the illusion that charter schools can be reined in and made to act more responsibly and ethically.
The stubborn notion that charter schools can be improved by regulating them or by changing charter school laws stems from not taking experience seriously and from an aversion to theory and analysis, from a failure to sufficiently theorize the actual relations among the rich, the state, and the law. The class nature of the state remains undertheorized and analytically-challenged. Profundity is missing. “Bad” policy is not cognized deeply as the class policy that it is. Policy-making is seen instead as something neutral or a matter of technical expertise. Consequently, a no-class outlook prevails. It is not enough to simply recognize that charter schools are organized and promoted by major owners of capital; deeper analysis is needed. A robust political economy of charter schools needs to be developed to help open the path forward.
Those who fail to theorize charter schools as a form of savage class war assume that the many problems plaguing charter schools are largely or merely a result of fixable “bad” ideas or “bad” policies emanating from misguided or unenlightened individuals and groups who are presumed to be unaffected by class interests. Such a notion operates anti-consciously. According to this no-class outlook, if only these individuals and groups could just be brought to see how bad things are with charter schools, if only they would seriously consider the vast evidence against charter schools, if only they could be properly persuaded of the ills of charter schools, then “better” ideas and policies could prevail. “Good” policy could then replace “bad” policy and everything would be better. Again, the fundamental relationship between politics and economics is highly undertheorized in this approach to charter schools.
The fact of the matter is that despite being around for over 30 years, problems in the crisis-prone charter school sector, as well as the difficulties these problems have caused for public schools and the public interest, have not abated in any meaningful way. They have only multiplied. So far, no significant lasting pro-social changes in charter school regulations or laws have taken place. Charter schools keep proliferating and wreaking havoc. Scandal and controversy are ever-present. Those who believe that regulations and laws can be passed to restrain charter schools believe that a charter school can be something other than a charter school. Charter schools can supposedly be more like public schools, more accountable, more transparent, less profit oriented, less reckless, less unstable, and less corrupt.
Such forces do not recognize the need new for completely new arrangements imbued with a public authority worthy of the name. They do not see existing political arrangements as irrelevant and obsolete. They overlook or trivialize the need for thorough-going change that favors the general interests of society. Because the antagonism between the neoliberal state and modern requirements is not properly grasped, they believe meaningful pro-social changes can be established through legislatures beholden to the rich. They think that the existing capital-centered political setup can somehow lend itself to ending serious problems caused by charter schools. This usually takes the form of begging or “pressuring” unaccountable politicians for years just for a few crumbs and changes—an exhausting and humiliating process that leaves many burnt out and cynical.
It should be recalled that the first charter school law was established in Minnesota in 1991 and that the neoliberal period began in the U.S. in the early 1970s, well before Ronald Reagan became president in 1980. Charter schools, in other words, emerged firmly in the neoliberal period.
Charter schools have always been a top-down scheme organized by the rich and their political representatives; they have never been a grass-roots phenomenon. It is not the case that charter schools once upon a time started out as a progressive, promising, benign, grass-roots phenomenon but were hijacked by major owners of capital along the way, causing them to become the crisis-prone schools that they are today; they were always a top-down coup of public schools. It is no accident that more than 95% of “innovative” charter schools are not started, owned, or operated mainly by teachers—or that 90% of charter schools have no teacher unions.
In this sense, charter schools are one of many pay-the-rich schemes hatched by the rich and their political representatives under the gloss of high ideals in the context of a continually failing economy. They are a form of state-organized corruption to further enrich major owners of capital in a crisis-ridden economy. The inescapable law of the falling rate of profit constantly coerces major owners of capital to devise new schemes and arrangements to funnel more of the social product created by workers into private hands. This law endemic to capitalism operates with a vengeance and it is why privatization is proceeding rapidly in all sectors and spheres at home and abroad. Major owners of capital are relentlessly targeting every public service and enterprise on every continent.
Obviously, the rich are not going to undermine or eliminate parasitic economic arrangements that help them maximize profits under difficult economic conditions, no matter how damaging this is to the social and natural environment. Their class position does not make them open to reason, logic, evidence, and persuasion. They are not interested in modern arrangements that serve the general interests of society. Objectively, their class will overrides their personal will. Their personal will is subordinated to their class will. Hence the rapid non-stop commodification of education through a variety of “school-choice” schemes over the past few decades. To be sure, privatization is not the result of “bad” ideas or “bad” policies emanating from confused but otherwise “smart” people; it is a direct response to the inescapable law of the falling rate of profit intrinsic to the capitalist economic system.
It is better, healthier, and more effective for parents, students, teachers, education advocates, women, and workers to unite together to end the flow of all public funds and resources to charter schools than to try to “fix them.” This can be done through non-stop collective action with analysis. It can be achieved by making a clean break from the old way of thinking and doing things and by recognizing that the rich can be defeated when people unite and speak up in their own name.
No one is under any obligation to tolerate any arrangements that violate the public interest, harm the economy, and undermine the national interest. Public funds, facilities, services, and resources belong only to the public, not narrow private interests masquerading as “saviors” of low-income minority youth.
Minor legislative “wins” or crumbs here and there are not lending themselves to the kind of affirmation of rights being demanded by the people. The existing authority is only becoming more callous and violent with each passing day, which is why a new independent politics with a new aim is needed. People’s energies are better spent on this than begging and “pressuring” politicians for years for what rightfully belongs to them. A good example of how neoliberal politicians put people in a humiliating position and betray them is the case of charter schools in New York state. Several months ago it looked like politicians in both chambers of the New York state legislature were being responsive to public demands to not raise the limit on the number of charter schools allowed in New York City. But, in the end, neoliberal forces prevailed and a “compromise” (a sellout of the people) was reached to allow more than a dozen additional charter schools to operate in the city. This will further harm public schools while enriching wealthy individuals. People should take these lessons seriously and not view such things as an “acceptable compromise” or “tolerable partial win.” Clearly, a handful of neoliberals are still able to impose their anti-social will on the majority. Where is democracy?
In this regard, an important front in the fight against school privatization is public school boards. In recent years, to their credit, hundreds of public school boards across the country have rejected charter school petition after charter school petition. (Most of these petitions, incidentally, are poorly-written, poorly-formulated, and full of basic writing mistakes.) Public schools and the boards that govern them are not naïve and understand the dangers that charter schools pose to public schools and the public interest. Parents, students, teachers, education advocates, women, and workers can join forces with these boards to further strengthen efforts to say no to charter schools and yes to public education. This starts with consciously tracking the efforts of public school boards opposing charter schools and connecting with them to forge relationships that promote a pro-social agenda that restricts and reverses the anti-social offensive of the rich. This is a two-way street: members of public school boards should also actively seek and forge relationships with all forces defending the public interest. Such unity can become formidable.
In a broader and more general sense, it is important for people from all walks of life to engage in uninterrupted individual and collective investigation and discussion of privatization and its tragic effects on the general interests of society. Ignoring or dismissing such activity will only allow privatization to continue to take a heavy toll on everyone. It will make problems worse. In this regard, teachers, teacher educators, principals, superintendents, higher education workers, and others need to actively put investigation and discussion of privatization on the agenda. Privatization should not be relegated to a secondary issue or a backburner topic. There is a reason why the rich and their political and media representatives work so hard to promote disinformation and block analysis, coherence, investigation, and unity.
Today about 3.7 million youth attend approximately 7,500 charter schools across the country. By contrast, about 45 million students attend the nation’s 100,000 public schools which originated in the U.S. 180 years ago.
ENDNOTES
1 See Charter Schools Are Not State Actors for a discussion of the many differences between public and private. It is also important to appreciate that, while the state has always been capital-centered, it is becoming more capital-centered over time, especially in the neoliberal period which started in the early 1970s. Neoliberal restructuring of the state has made the state even less public over the past 50 years.
2 Extensive up-to-date evidence for all facts and statements in this article can be found in my articles at Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Amazon: The company we hate to love, for its convenient next-day deliveries, and we love to hate, for its egregious treatment of the workers that execute that miracle.
It really needs no introduction. Amazon is a corporate giant with 1.5 million employees, most of which are in the Teamsters’ bread and butter industry: logistics, meaning warehouse workers and delivery drivers. Only, these workers are almost entirely non-union. But the problem with Amazon is not just its own non-union pay and working conditions. Left unchecked, Amazon may just start a race to the bottom for the working class as a whole.
The Teamsters, alongside other unions and worker collectives, are trying to change that. And in April earlier this year, 84 of Amazon’s delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California joined Teamsters Local 396 and won a first contract. This is a huge deal, but it’s not an uncomplicated victory.
In this episode, you’ll hear from one of those Amazon drivers, Arturo Solezano, about their working conditions, and why he and his now-union siblings joined the Teamsters. We also spoke with Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine, who unpacked why Amazon is a threat that needs to be taken seriously by the Teamsters and the rest of organized labor.
Finally, you’ll hear an update on UPS contract negotiations from Greg Kerwood, a package car delivery driver from Teamsters Local 25 in Boston.
Additional links/info below…
Hosted by Teddy Ostrow
Edited by Teddy Ostrow
Produced by NYGP & Ruby Walsh, in partnership with In These Times & The Real News
Music by Casey Gallagher
Cover art by Devlin Claro Resetar
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Alex Press: what does organizing Amazon do for u p s workers? Well, if they don’t organize Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers soon, they may just not exist as a union.
Teddy: Amazon: The company we hate to love, for its convenient next-day deliveries, and we love to hate, for its egregious treatment of the workers that execute that miracle.
Arturo: On the side, I have to donate my plasma to make the extra money for anything that. I can’t cover with my, Hey, it’s all my days off.
I have to go do something to make sure I have that money for us to make sure we can’t get by.
Teddy: See the problem with Amazon is not just its own non-union pay and working conditions. But that left unchecked, it may just start a race to the bottom for the working class as a whole.
(music transition)
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. We are currently in a patron drive right now. We’d like to reach 200 monthly supporters of our Patreon by July. We are pretty far off from that. We are at 67, which makes this show completely unsustainable.
Now you may be thinking hey, the strike may happen in August, it’s already June, how much can I really help them. Well, a lot actually. For two reasons: First, We’ve done a lot of work already with very few patrons, so your support will help make up for that time.
And second, we may not be going anywhere after the Teamsters contract fight is done. Can’t share many details, but The Upsurge may continue and we’ll need your help to do that. So please, head over to patreon.com/upsurgepod and become a supporter today. You can find the link in the description.
Also a reminder: The next 24 people to become patrons, will get a free one-year subscription to In These Times magazine.
Alright onto the show.
*
I’m gonna make this intro pretty quick because we have a lot of ground to cover. In this episode we’re unpacking the existential threat – to UPSers, to the Teamsters, to unions in general, and the working class as a whole: Amazon.
It really needs no introduction. Amazon is a corporate giant with 1.5 million employees, on pace to become the largest private sector employer in the country. And the majority of that workforce is in the logistics industry. Warehouse workers, delivery drivers. And surprise, surprise, they’re mostly unorganized.
But Teamsters, alongside other unions and worker collectives, are trying to change that. Indeed, the Teamsters has its own Amazon Organizing Division, with organizers around the country, which it launched a few years ago.
And in April earlier this year, 84 of Amazon’s delivery drivers and dispatchers in Palmdale, California joined Teamsters Local 396 and won a first contract. Now, this is a huge deal, but it’s not an uncomplicated victory.
For this episode, we’ll get into why and we spoke to one of those drivers, Arturo Solezano, about the working conditions at Amazon and why he and his now-union-siblings joined the Teamsters.
But before you hear from Arturo, we’re gonna zoom out with Alex Press, staff writer at Jacobin magazine, who was one of the key reporters covering Amazon workers’ conditions and organizing over the past three years. She’s gonna help us understand why Amazon is a threat that needs to be taken seriously by the Teamsters and the rest of organized labor. And she also recently wrote an excellent article about the UPS contract campaign that you should definitely read and I’ll put in the description.
Now, before we even get to Alex, it’s been a little while since we discussed the state of the contract campaign and negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters. I spoke to Local 25 UPS rank and file, Greg Kerwood, in Boston this past weekend about what’s been happening since negotiations at the national level started.
But we did speak before Monday, June 5, when important two things happened: First, there was some progress made on some specific issues at the bargaining table, like making supervisors being made identifiable in facilities and lodging reimbursement for semi-truck drivers.
But the big news is of course that the international union called for an in-person strike authorization vote.
That means that UPSers at the gates of their hubs, at their union halls. will be voting on whether or not the union has the permission to call a strike in the event there is no new contract by August 1.
The results will be known Friday, June 16. The IBT is recommending UPSers vote yes.
Now, how this vote goes – what percentage of UPSers vote yes and what percentage of the workforce participates at all – it’s an important test of how successful the contract campaign has been over the past 10 months.
How successfully locals and rank and file around the country have been organizing their ranks, educating Teamsters on the stakes of this contract, and why the threat of a strike is the greatest leverage any union has in bargaining.
Now for an update with Greg Kerwood.
*
Teddy Ostrow: Greg Curwood, thanks for joining me on the upsurge.
Greg Kerwood: Thanks for having me today. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Teddy Ostrow: So I just wanna make clear to everyone, Greg is not speaking on behalf of the Teamsters [00:07:00] National Negotiating Committee. He’s just an informed rank and file, member of the International Steering Committee of the Teamsters for Democratic Union, also local 25 in Boston.
He’s a union activist and he does a lot of work organizing and educating his union siblings. So that’s why he’s gonna give us an update. and since we last reported on this podcast, the supplemental or the regional agreements, they weren’t going too well. They’ve since almost been completed entirely.
There’s two left. and of course all of them will have to be voted on by the membership. But Greg, can you bring us up to date? We’re, we’re speaking on the weekend right before negotiations. We’ll start up again. there was a week break, but perhaps you can summarize just how things have been going as far as we know.
Since negotiations started at the national level?
Greg Kerwood: Well, so far, it seems to be, a case of more of the same from the company. I know our committee put forth the elimination of the 2024 [00:08:00] position. I’m not sure how that worked out or what the company’s response was. they’ve also spent a week discussing, technology issues.
again, I don’t really know for certain how the company responded or whether any of that was resolved. I know there is an agreement that came out this week, to limit some of the, package flow into the SurePost system. not too many specifics, but in general it seems to be very slow going.
there seems to be a lot of posturing on the part of the company. not a whole lot of seriousness, still. and so the clock is continuing to tick down. we’re down under 60 days at this point. and so it’s really just, it seems to be more the same. I don’t think the company has really taken this seriously since the beginning of negotiations, and it appears as though they’re continuing down that path.
Teddy Ostrow: So we’re talking about some progress made perhaps on invasive [00:09:00] technology. on everyone’s mind. Of course. Are those inward facing cameras? Sure. Post. Just so everyone knows, progress seems to be made. On basically ups giving teamster work away to the post office. and the, the big demands, 22 fours, PVDs wages, that, those sorts of things, we’re gonna have to wait and see.
But given what’s happened so far, Greg, which doesn’t seem like very much, what’s your perspective on the possibility of a strike? we’re speaking eight weeks out from contract expiration. Is there a chance, that you believe they’ll get to everything or. Are you guys barreling towards, hitting the picket line?
Greg Kerwood: I would say that given the current pace of negotiations, a strike almost seems inevitable. now obviously it’s in the company’s hands if they want to change that approach and come to the table and address issues in a more reasonable and more timely fashion. I haven’t seen any indication of them doing that.
perhaps that [00:10:00] will change and perhaps, you know, the laundry list of major issues that we have, can be addressed, I believe. I think our proposals, to my knowledge, are all there and ready and waiting.
It’s just a question of whether the company wants to take them seriously and, and bargain in good faith. So it is still possible that that could be done, but if things continue on the current pace and with the current attitude of the company, I, I think it very likely that we be on strike. come August 1st.
Teddy Ostrow: Greg Curwood, thanks for giving us that update and offering your perspective. My
Greg Kerwood: pleasure. Thank you.
Teddy Ostrow: Alex Press, thanks for joining me on the
Alex Press: Upsurge. Thanks so much for having me. Happy to be here.
Teddy Ostrow: So I, I wanna open with the threat of Amazon. Why should Teamsters UPSers, but really the broader working class, be concerned about this one company?
Alex Press: Yeah, so I mean to say Amazon is just one [00:11:00] company is sort of downplays how big of a scale we’re talking about when we talk about Amazon as well as the different kind of core functions.
Amazon has different parts of its business, so I feel like a lot of people maybe who are listening to this show would know that obviously Amazon is a gigantic employer. Of warehouse workers as well as delivery drivers, though, you know, important caveat that we’ll get into, which is, those delivery drivers are not direct employees of Amazon, but, so this is a gigantic workforce, second biggest private employer in the United States.
but it’s also, you know, the sort of, the joke I make is Amazon kind of functions as a pacesetter of sorts, a vanguard of capital, if you will.you know what Amazon can get away with. Other companies will then follow in that direction.
That often, quite literally, is true in that Amazon executives will go on to be hired as consultants, especially in human resources for other corporations, who will pay them gobs of money basically to implement [00:12:00] and replicate Amazon’s model. Amazon’s model being squeezing workers a very high pace of work.
incredible use of surveillance technologies on the workforce. Um, and this doesn’t just mean warehouse workers or say delivery drivers like u p s workers, but actually, you know, white collar workers as well. Amazon is sort of exporting these technologies and this sort of way of squeezing workers.
in a way that really applies to all kinds of people, including those who think I have nothing in common with an Amazon warehouse worker. You do. Um, you know, specifically about u p s I think it’s a pretty obvious argument here. You know, u p s has already been existing as this sort of island of unionization within the broader, logistics industry.
you know, they. Have fought very hard to have decent wages and benefits and, you know, a, a sustainable schedule for delivery, for example. Um, Amazon exists to undercut that, right? That’s, if it’s not its aim, it’s its function. so Amazon famously [00:13:00] of course, will get, uh, something to your door within a few hours if you pay enough money for it.
and that means that, you know, they have this entire gigantic network. Of both warehouse workers and delivery drivers who are being, you know, worked at all hours, who work seven days a week, who have a very high pace, of delivery. The famous stories about how no one who’s delivering for Amazon has time to pee at all.
you know, because there’s nowhere to go, right? You need to get your next delivery out immediately. I mean, I think I often say this to people where I’m like, Have you ever really had a conversation with an Amazon delivery person who is delivering packages to your apartment building? Um, no. They don’t have time for that.
They, you know, even if you tried to stop them, you would actually be annoying them because they have a schedule to stick to. and so that undermines the standards. That u p s workers have fought for a very long time, um, to get, and I think, you know, especially the new leadership of the Teamsters, Sean O’Brien recognizes that existential threat that you cannot exist forever.
with this [00:14:00] growing behemoth, constantly undercutting your standards, you know, u p s. We’ll use Amazon as kind of a, a wedge and say, well, we can’t agree to this in the contract cuz you know, we’re gonna go out of business if we keep having these heavy labor costs. And while that’s nonsense, you know, up s has a enormous amount of profits.
it is a real argument, that the teamsters need to take seriously. And the best answer to it would be organizing Amazon workers themselves.
Teddy Ostrow: You sort of, uh, began with this, but I, I do wanna take a step back. What even is Amazon? is it a logistics company, retail tech? Can you give us a sense of the huge landscape that is this, uh, one or multiple companies?
Alex Press: Yeah. So it’s a surprisingly complicated answer. so it’s all of those things. It is a logistics company. It is an e-commerce. Retail company. It’s one of the, you know, largest e-commerce companies, in existence. it’s [00:15:00] also importantly the web infrastructure that other companies rely upon. So, you know, if you’re on a Zoom call, you’re using Amazon Web services or aws, which is the company’s most profitable arm.
Right. if you’re using Uber, you’re using Amazon’s computational power and space. they’re also smaller things like selling se surveillance technology to law enforcement. Amazon is a major cultural producer. It is a member of the producer organization that currently is being struck. by the Writer’s Guild of America.
You know, they make television and films, and this is something Jeff Bezos really likes, you know, the cultural arm, the cache and glamor. it’s also importantly one of the biggest platforms for third party vendors, right? So other companies, small businesses using Amazon’s websites, as well as Amazon’s warehouses and delivery drivers to get their goods to customers doors.
So there are all these different arms going on. so while in the labor world, we speak the most [00:16:00] about the warehouse workers and you know, maybe to a lesser extent the delivery drivers, and rightly so, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of workers. It is also all of these other things and they’re integrated together, right?
You. You need the computational power of a w s for the warehouses to function surveillance technology is tested in the warehouses and then exported not only to other companies, but to other countries as well. Um, and so Amazon, you know, I think in trying to think about this, you know, I think one, there are a couple metaphors we could use.
One is, you know, the, the company in the company town. Right. A sort of private government, that functions kind of as an overlord of sorts or a control mechanism. or, I think one kind of metaphor I use a lot is kind of a toll collector, right? Amazon wants to be a. The thing you have to go through to get to everything else, whether it’s goods, whether it’s the internet and infrastructure, all of these things.
Amazon kind of [00:17:00] has been very good at warming its way into the middle of, so that it gets a cut as a middleman from everything. and so I think there are all those different ways to. To think about it. Um, but finally I would just say, you know, thinking of it as a utility because it’s so kind of inescapable for all of the reasons I just mentioned, also can be kind of productive in starting to think about what regulation of Amazon would look like.
Teddy Ostrow: That’s a really interesting point to think of it as a utility. So, so this logistics side of Amazon that’s integrated into this sort of expanding hole, uh, you did really great work covering the organizing at Amazon over the past few years.
could you give us a sense of how. Union organizing or organizing otherwise at the company has been going, you know, what, what are people fighting for or fighting against and what are the different efforts we’ve seen, the obstacles, um, and the future of Amazon.
Alex Press: Yeah. So I often start to answer this question by sort of giving some perspective [00:18:00] here in the form of an anecdote, which is, I was at the Labor Notes Conference, a biannual gathering of labor activists, rank and file workers and so on. I was there I think five years ago, and there was a sort of little secret side conversation going on, about salting Amazon.
Meaning, you know, purposely getting jobs at Amazon warehouses to then organize those warehouses. And this was a pretty controversial conversation. A lot of people were very negative on it. Um, they thought this was, you know, a doom strategy, that this was actually in fact sort of dangerous and that these efforts would fail.
and aren’t there so many other warehouses with kind of decrepit unions? you know, for example, u p s warehouses, that might have kind of less active locals that would be much better uses of kind of young radicals time. if they really felt the need to kind of intentionally get a job, with the purpose of organizing.
and it seemed very obvious to me at the time that. That all was true, [00:19:00] that none of these people were incorrect about the problems with this idea, but also these young people in particular were gonna do it anyway, right? Like this was exciting. This is on, you know, on pace to be the largest private employer in the United States.
and so these efforts were going to start and we sort of saw them start to, you know, the outcome of those early efforts is, has been finally going public over the past couple of years. So you know, everyone’s heard about Bessemer, which, you know, was the first, Amazon warehouse in the United States to hold an N L R B election.
That was in 2021. It failed. there were, there are endless back and forths about Amazon violating labor law during that election. But you know, as it stands, they did not vote to unionize, um, that facility. You know, it the sort of, I think it’s an interesting example in that, you know, even failed efforts leave a trace on work, the working class in that, you know, if you speak to Chris Smalls, the, the founder of [00:20:00] the Amazon Labor Union out in Staten Island, he’ll tell you that it was Bessemer and watching that failure that led him to.
Decide to organize his own facility. and you know, and it’s why he decided to go with an independent union. He felt there were certain failures that, you know, came from the existing union trying to do it, and that actually it would only be an independent union that could win. for reasons that I think are arguable.
But certainly he was proven correct at JFK eight. so that was the first. And only Amazon warehouse to win an an L or B election. I think that was what, April of last year? April 1st. Cuz I remember it being a very funny. April Fool’s joke that they had actually won.
and, and from there, there are, you know, efforts at, at different levels of, or different stages, in the works, right? So the a l U has tried, um, to, to hold other N L R B elections at other Amazon facilities. They’ve yet to win any of those. there are other efforts underway. So there’s a warehouse in North [00:21:00] Carolina, that’s being organized by a group that calls itself cause, whichstands for a way.
I wrote this down. I. Carolina Amazonians United for Solidarity and Empowerment. so their facility is in Garner, North Carolina, just out just outside of Raleigh, which is not where one would expect an Amazon effort to succeed. Um, you know, North Carolina has one of the lowest unionization rates.
In the country. but when you talk to the workers there, as I have, you know, they’ll tell you that. It sort of just happens organically, right?
Racism is a huge issue in this warehouse, which you’ll hear from Amazon workers at just about every warehouse. you know, it’ll often be a majority, non-white. Worker, population, and then management will be almost entirely white. at that’s the case at this facility. And that’s sort of organically led to certain kind of unrest in the warehouse that then led to this organizing effort that’s still underway.
they have not filed for an N L R B election. And then there are other efforts, you know, in kind of earlier [00:22:00] stages.
I think also just in closing it’s worth mentioning this warehouse in Minnesota. That has been kind of a, for a long time, the site of organizing by Somali workers in particular. and yeah, so that’s just a short list. I mean, it’s very funny that at this point my head is full of all of these incredibly indecipherable to anyone else.
Names of these warehouses. R D one, JFK eight. This is what Amazon calls its facilities, and now it’s, thank God the laundry list is getting really long. It used to just be JFK eight that I would talk about. but, so that’s what’s going on. as far as the warehouse, organizing.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah. Thanks for going through so many of those, efforts. I mean, you know, there’s also Amazonians United, the international efforts to make Amazon Pay campaign.
Alex Press: yeah. And I, I did wanna say, Amazonians United has been this interesting, you know, effort that has, That preceded Bessemer, and continues to exist. And that’s a sort of minority unionism shop floor unionism, you know, where they don’t have the majority of the [00:23:00] workers, you know, involved.
And they’re not trying to build towards an NLRB election. They’re just functioning as a union on the shop floor. And they have actually notched some real victories around working conditions. That I think is, anybody who’s interested in this topic really should also, look into that because, you know, when it comes to Amazon, I often kind of explain to people.
There’s just a throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. You know, no unions up until these recent years have been able to breach the impenetrable fortress of Amazon. And so there are all different approaches going on, and while there’s real disagreements and you know, kind of, differences between these efforts, there is a sense in a larger kind of, meta view here.
That everyone is on the same page, that you just have to be willing to try some creativity, um, and that everyone kind of needs each other if anyone is gonna win at Amazon.
Teddy Ostrow: I think that’s a great perspective to bring. And now let’s, let’s dig into one of the efforts right now that is pretty unique, and exciting, [00:24:00] especially for teamsters.
So 84 Amazon drivers and dispatchers, just recently unionized with Teamsters, local 3 96, that’s out in Palmdale, California. And, uh, that of course was super welcome, really, really exciting for labor folks. but it, it’s not. An uncomplicated victory. this is because of something you hinted at the structure of Amazon’s last Mile Delivery Services, which poses barriers to unionization, certainly getting a contract.
Can you unpack, why this is such a big deal, but also why it’s more complex than one would hope such that this battle, of the teamsters in Amazon really is just getting started.
Alex Press: Yeah, so the most basic thing to mention is what I said at the top, which is these delivery drivers are legally, technically, not Amazon employees, which is absurd because as probably anyone listening to this show knows they drive in vehicles that are branded with [00:25:00] Amazon branding.
They often wear Amazon branded. Uniforms. but Amazon very cannelly set up this delivery service partner program, to give themselves distance from kind of the legal responsibilities of being an employer. so these workers have to petition their bosses, for redress on all kinds of things, and their bosses are usually these.
Small business owners who just started this company specifically to service Amazon, There are around 3000 of these companies nationwide, these delivery service partners or DSPs. and there are nearly, I think almost 300,000 drivers now who are driving for them at at least part and full-time.
so that means under US labor law right now until, and unless Amazon is declared a joint employer. So also having the legal responsibility to bargain with these workers. Right now, they have to petition, you know, just their small business, their D S P, which is what happened at that company, battle tested [00:26:00] strategies, in Palmdale.
And, you know, the interesting thing that I think people should know about this is that, you know, when the news came out that the, you know, not only had they. Organized a union, but the owner of b t s had given them voluntary recognition, you know, which is a sort of, while I think every boss should voluntarily recognize workers.
It’s pretty unusual these days in the United States. And it’s sort of displayed something that has since been kind of panned out in the reporting, which is that the, the owners of these DSPs often have just as many problems with Amazon as their workers. Um, you know, there have been cases of these. These companies, their owners, you know, shutting down their companies in protest against Amazon’s expectations for them.
You know, they work these drivers through the bone and it, you know, often they’re not lying when they say Amazon makes us do this. and so they have limited autonomy here. And it’s very funny in that, you know, if Amazon has set up this, this totally [00:27:00] arbitrary distance, um, to pretend that these drivers are not their workers, well, the owners of these companies are gonna realize that in fact, they too are just lower level managers for a workforce.
And so it’s no surprise that they might end up kind of tacitly supporting unionization. so anyway, just to keep it short here, What happened was the teamsters announced that these workers had unionized, that they had gotten recognition, and in fact, they have voted and accepted a tentative agreement, so they have a contract.
Amazon immediately came out and said, One, these are not our workers as laid out in the law. two, we actually already told this guy who runs this company that he’s gonna have his contract canceled, for failure, you know, poor for poor performance. Um, and this is just a kind of PR play on his part and on the teamsters part, that hasn’t been, we haven’t figured out yet.
No one has gotten the documents really about when the timeline of Amazon’s contract cancellation happened. You know, if it happened after Amazon became [00:28:00] aware of the union organizing, you know, you could make the case that that was a violation of labor law. So that’s all gonna play out in the courts. I think the b t s owner himself is now kind of going along with trying to sue Amazon.
it is worth noting though that that’s the complication is, you know, Unions specifically the Teamsters have tried this before and Amazon has just canceled the contract with that D S P, because they have the right to do that. and they do have total control over these DSPs. Um, you know, the owner of A D S P is always instructed to fight any union efforts.
Amazon, you know, kind of by every legal standing should be considered the employer, but they also, as it stands right now, Can simply retaliate by canceling a contract, effectively making these workers out of work, come the end of that contract. so we’ll see what happens. You know, I think it’s just worth noting as a last point on this, that the teamsters have kind of anticipated that this would happen.
so in May they did file a complaint with federal Labor re [00:29:00] regulators, um, saying that Amazon should be considered a joint or sole employer of the Palmdale workers.
I am not in the prediction game, especially when it comes to extremely, untested unionization efforts at Amazon.
I think Sean O’Brien, um, and all of the rank and filers who are sort of leading this organizing at the ground level really understand that they need to find a way to break through at Amazon, even though the legal structure of these delivery.
Driver’s employment. You know, it makes for immense obstacles. so I’m very glad that they are, again, throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks.
Teddy Ostrow: Well, I certainly won’t ask you to look into the legal crystal ball here, but, um, Yeah. I think it’s also worth just noting that while there is this complex, complicated barrier to, for these workers, uh, what they want in their contract, would be life changing, right?
Like, so $30 an hour, like right to refuse unsafe delivery, which is a serious problem across delivery [00:30:00] services. Um, a number of things, um, that they won’t. We will see if they’ll get it. but it, it’s, it would be a real shift and including, uh, no, no strike clause. Right. Yeah. So this is somewhat, this is kind of transformational stuff,
Alex Press: uh, that implemented.
I just wanna add that another thing was like, I. When you talk to those Palmdale drivers, like a key kind of impetus for the organizing was that just like Amazon warehouse workers, just like u p s drivers, heat on the job was becoming incredibly unsafe. they’ll say that one of these workers, I think last summer passed out and had to be taken to the hospital.
That it’s, you know, I think I read a quote from someone in the bargaining unit who said, it’s like being in Asana. You know, just, it’s completely unbearable. This has also, you know, led workers to organize across industries and, you know, these are very serious issues that Amazon certainly has proven it is not taking seriously and cannot be trusted to take seriously.
[00:31:00] I know u p s workers similarly have been agitating not only for u p s to be responsible, for regulating the temperatures both in the vehicles and in the, the buildings, but, you know, this is. I, the Amazon warehouse workers that I talked about earlier, often, that’s also a leading thing. You know, they want higher wages, they want better benefits and better schedules.
they want less unsafe work in the sense of. Less of a strenuous quota on them, but they also often are passing out in these warehouses or having heat stroke. And so this is again, a unifying kind of issue across the industry. Um, no matter what type of logistics work you’re doing with rising temperatures, especially a summer approaches, you know, this becomes something that is not so hard to under, um, to understand for anyone who works these jobs.
Teddy Ostrow: let’s bring in the Teamsters Up s contract campaign.
Mm-hmm. Uh, you wrote a great piece about it in Jack bin, uh, that I encourage everyone to read. And you, you noted how [00:32:00] organizing Amazon as well as negotiating a better UPS contract, um, Was central to Teamsters United, uh, Sean O’Brien’s bid to the Teamsters general presidency. And I wanna try to thread these goals together.
What, what are the stakes of this contract campaign for the unionization of Amazon? And then what are the stakes of unionizing Amazon for the future of the Teamsters Union? Um, And, you know, the greater working
class.
Alex Press: Sure, sure. so it sounds complicated, but it really is not. Right. So when you walk up, say you’re a U p S driver and you walk up to, whether it’s an Amazon warehouse worker who lives on your block or it’s an Amazon delivery driver who is parked outside of the same apartment building as you.
And so you start chatting about unions, they’re gonna say, well, how’s your union contract? Like, why, what do you get? you know, not to to pretend that workers are only interested in that, but of course that’s what they want to know. and you know, I think it’s not a secret that [00:33:00] the teamsters negotiated a very weak contract, in the last round of negotiations.
So weak that it ended. Hoffa Jr’s career and led to Sean O’Brien becoming the President of the Union. Um, and so, you know, and it has tears. It has all these things that you’ve talked about on the show before. and so that is not something a worker can confidently approach an Amazon worker with and try to, you know, convince them that their union is, has their back, will never sell them out, we’ll never abandon them, um, and is democratic.
None of those things were true in that last contract. It was in fact, You know, a democratic vote was overridden by arcane union bureaucracy rules, you know, the classic kind of worst version of unionism. and so it’s very important that Sean, you know, can go out there and actually win a strong contract.
you know, pay for part-timers will be part of that because Amazon workers are often part-time and they’re going to have more in common with the inside workers at up s than they, you know, might have with the ups. Drivers, you know, as far as the direct Amazon [00:34:00] warehouse workers. but similarly the delivery drivers at both companies.
You know, there needs to be this sense of victory that’s very rooted in real progress, including undoing concessions. So that’s on the one side, very practically, it’s just you can’t. It, it’s almost like suicide to go tell your rank and file organizers, your kind of best union militants to go pretend to another worker that you have a great contract when in fact they’re the ones who are most certain that they don’t have good contract.
so that is existential. And then on the flip side, you know, it’s, If, you know, if I, I think I’ve kind of laid this out earlier of what does organizing Amazon do for u p s workers? Well, as I said, if they don’t organize Amazon warehouse workers and delivery drivers soon, they may just not exist as a union.
I mean, that’s like catastrophism that I’m saying. But Amazon has so much power and is, has so much growth and so much political control as well. I mean, with the lobbying arm and the tax. Breaks that they get, and the sort of [00:35:00] influential people in their realm. it’s hard to imagine how the u p s.
U like the bargaining unit stays together going forward. They will be chipped away at every single contract round with U P s executives saying through their lawyers across the table, we can’t do it because there’s Amazon workers, you know, that are, they’re gonna undercut our business and they’re gonna take our business and we’re gonna go out of business unless you agree to concessions.
So these things are incredibly tied up with each other, and I think Sean O’Brien did a very good job of laying that out throughout his campaign. And my understanding from speaking with the UPS workers who lead this Amazon organizing, you know, sort of behind the scenes and on the ground, is that they really do feel like they’re being charged with trying a.
What they can to sort of organize certain facilities to support things at legislative levels that gives a little more power to workers, makes it a little easier, to actually organize them in the first place. and so, you know, my hope is that [00:36:00] that vision continues to stay kind of connected in that integrated way, that it was laid out during the campaign.
Teddy Ostrow: And while I have you, uh, the, the Amazon guru of labor journalism, is there anything else that we didn’t touch on on Amazon that you think is really important for, the Teamsters listening for non Teamsters listening? Anybody out there?
Alex Press: Yeah, I mean, I think this is, I’m sure it’s been said on your show before if Amazon has come up, but you know, as I tried to say, there are very different efforts going on among Amazon workers, right?
There has been, you know, formal organizing with R W D S U in Bessemer, and with the teamsters, both among warehouses, workers and delivery drivers. There has been minority unionism like Amazonians United. There’s been independent use unionism like cause in North Carolina or the A L U. And again, like there are real tensions of course, and some of that comes from these workers fueling.
As they would say to me [00:37:00] before any of these efforts started many years ago, they would say, our working conditions are so terrible. This work is so dangerous and detrimental to our bodies, and the pay is so low. Why aren’t unions helping us? You know, there was a real sense of like, Kind of loss or betrayal or just confusion about, you know, isn’t the labor movement supposed to be here for us?
And so it’s very hard to just immediately undo that distrust. but I think I’ve seen, just in the course of my short five years since that opening anecdote about the Labor Notes Conference, there have been real ties being built across these efforts, across these divisions of strategy. and I just think u p s workers, everyone I’ve spoke to already understands this, but I just wanna underline it, that like, Everyone needs each other if anyone is gonna win, right?
Whether a teamster’s organized warehouse down the line is gonna win, whether the a l u is ever gonna win a contract, it requires every single person on this, in this broader kind of ecosystem of organizing logistics to have each other’s backs.[00:38:00] Despite, and even with those differences. Um, and so that’s really the thing I try to say to people, you know, often I think people outside of the labor movement or outside of, you know, the left, want to play up the divisions and say like, so do these people hate the teamsters?
Do these people hate the A L U? And it’s like, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day, everyone has each other’s phone numbers and they need each other. and so that is kind of the perspective I try to take. And I certainly would hope u p s workers. Would take that kind of bigger view, whether it’s about organizing or about the fact that Amazon workers seem to undercut their job standards.
You know, everybody has the same enemies here. In fact, their enemies are like friends who hang out at dinners in dc um, the c e o of one company or the other. and I just, I never want people to lose sight of that.
Teddy Ostrow: Alex Press, thanks for joining me on the upsurge.
Alex Press: Thanks for having me.
Teddy Ostrow: Arturo Sono, welcome to the upsurge. [00:39:00] Thank you for having me. So to start off, I just wanna hear about you, you know, tell, tell everybody about yourself. How do you come to the job, what exactly you do, how long you’ve been doing it, uh, and where you are. Uh, right now
Arturo Solezano: I live in Port, California.
I have a fiance, a baby on the way in August, it’s gonna be a girl. We trying to find a big future together. You know, I got through Amazon, Before I battle tested, I was actually at a fulfillment center, but the drive was too far from me and
Teddy Ostrow: this was a lot closer. And so you’re a driver. How long have you been doing that?
About
Arturo Solezano: two and a half years now.
Teddy Ostrow: And what, what exactly does that entail? Can you kind of explain like on a day-to-day basis, uh, what do you do?
Arturo Solezano: So, in the mornings We’re supposed to have a stand [00:40:00] a meeting, but we really, it’s only once in a while, we grab our pouches, we check the vehicles, make sure there’s like no nails, nothing damage, line up load of our vans and go get gas if we need to, and then just start
Teddy Ostrow: our routes.
So it’s very similar, to what perhaps a, a number of other, so-called last mile delivery drivers do, like at FedEx, like at ups, uh, you pick up the packages, you drop ’em off at people’s homes as I take it. Yes. So I, I’m curious, you know, around the country, we’ve been hearing a lot about some of the issues that drivers at Amazon deal with.
Some of them are pretty similar to the issues at U P s, listeners of this show certainly know about those. maybe you could get into some of those issues, that you and your coworkers have with the workplace.
Arturo Solezano: Uh, in the summertime. [00:41:00] Those, those, they feel like saunas and they don’t have ac so all day we’re just sweating and being dehydrated and the sun is so much in like two water bottles can douch for us, but we, and then they get mad at us if we are trying to take our breaks cause. It’s just hot, you know, we’re trying to recover.
I had her friend who actually had to go to the hospital cause she over, um, overheated. But thank God now she’s, you know, she’s safe. But she had to leave the job because it
Teddy Ostrow: was just too dangerous for her. Wow. So you, you guys don’t have air conditioning at, at all, or they, it doesn’t function or, and you guys have to deal with that on
Arturo Solezano: some fence.
The air condition is supposed to work, but it is very like light. And then we have like just the little fans, regular fans, but they just throw hot air.
Teddy Ostrow: Do you feel unsafe when you’re doing this and [00:42:00] you’re in Southern California, right? So I assume it gets ridiculously hot. Mm-hmm.
Arturo Solezano: Yeah. So it, I try to, whenever I can just try to find somewhere where she, uh, I’ll be behind, uh, sometimes, but I’m trying to protect myself first.
Teddy Ostrow: And have you ever, you know, told your employer like, Hey, look, it’s, it’s too hot out here. What, what kind of responses do you get? Or is it not even worth going that far?
Arturo Solezano: we told ’em and they told us like, Amazons are the ones that can cut the routes, but they really don’t. If anything, they may take like 10 stops and that’s nothing.
You know, you get a hundred, 200 stops. You know, one 90 stop is not gonna do anything and we’re out there in the sun. Sometimes the, the temperature would read 1 30, 1 40 even. We had customers that come out there and look at us and they [00:43:00] feel so bad they’ll rush back inside their house and get those ice and stuff.
Cause they see how bad it is.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. And that isn’t, that’s, I mean, that’s a major safety issue as I understand it, that that isn’t the only safety issue you guys have, right? Mm-hmm. I heard something about dogs, um, I’m sure a lot of delivery drivers deal with that. Can, can you tell me about some of those other issues that have to do with your safety?
Arturo Solezano: Uh, yeah. I actually got bited by the dog once, um, it was hiding underneath the step van, and as soon as I was stepping in, I just grabbed him by the ankle, pulled me. And it was a stray dog. Uh, but there was other houses and none of them cleaned. So I ended up getting handed to get a clean shot. Wow.
Teddy Ostrow: Uh, and do you ever feel like that might happen again?
That you, you see a dog in a yard and, you know,
Arturo Solezano: feel like you’re not able? Yeah, so now I [00:44:00] can’t, I don’t even feel safe to go into people’s yards to drop off their packages. And sometimes they’ll order like heavy things and I don’t like to leave it on the sidewalk, you know? And I’ll call ’em and I’ll wait.
But eventually I can’t stay there forever Cause Amazon is tracking my movement. They said you gotta do, you know, certain amount by this time.
Teddy Ostrow: And you know, UPSers for example, they can, if it seems like it’s unsafe, they’re generally allowed to say like, Hey, this is an unsafe delivery.
I’m not gonna make this delivery. what would happen if you told, uh, your employer that, Hey, this is too, this is too risky for me. They,
Arturo Solezano: they’d rather have us, uh, try to risk it. And deliver it anyway, cuz Amazon just try, tries to analyze us and then we end up losing days, you know, hours. And that’s money that we need to provide our families.
Teddy Ostrow: Speaking of money, um, [00:45:00] there, the pay I’ve heard is, is, is an issue. Um, can you talk, can you talk about that? Maybe your, your personal experience, but also those of your coworkers. What, what is the pay like at Amazon? Is it enough, um, uh, where you are?
Arturo Solezano: No, we feel like we’re getting underpaid. We should be unpaid.
At least the same as, as, uh, ups they get 40 or 30. Yeah, I’m not really sure, but we feel like we should get somewhere similar cause we’re doing the exact same thing as them. And we’re do, and our conditions are probably a lot less, uh, safe than theirs.
Teddy Ostrow: And what is it like to not get enough money? I mean, you, you live in Southern California.
I can imagine the cost of living is high, where you are. Um, what does it mean to not make the same as other drivers for you? You mentioned you have a, a fiance and, and [00:46:00] child on the way.
Arturo Solezano: Yeah, like, um, like on the side, I have to donate my plasma to make the extra money for anything that. I can’t cover with my, Hey, it’s all my days off.
I have to go do something to make sure I have that money for us to make sure we can’t get by.
Teddy Ostrow: Now, the the last thing I wanted to touch on, just because it, it seems like such a major issue, not only, um, among delivery drivers, but, but in the warehouse too. Um. Is like these performance requirements that at times seem really extreme, seems to loop into the, the safety issues them saying you can’t not deliver.
Can you talk about, uh, the pressure on you guys, and how Amazon is, tracking you and wanting you to perform at a pace that is probably unsafe?
Arturo Solezano: yeah. So Amazon tracks our [00:47:00] system through their van. And in our package count and they’ll see, hey, we only done certain amount at this time. Uh, let ask them and ask them why they’re behind cuz they need to catch up.
And when I tell ’em, you know, we gotta wait for this, we gotta do that. Apartments, sometimes it takes forever to get in. Customers don’t wanna come out to get their packages cause their dogs are outside and they, they get mad at us and then we end up having to skip our breaks and stuff. Because we have to go and try to catch up.
Teddy Ostrow: have people been disciplined or, or fired or cut? what kind of, uh, retaliation do you see?
Arturo Solezano: a couple of my friends have been let go. A lot of people have been cut their hours. They just like to monitor every little thing with us. they actually let go of someone.
It wasn’t, uh, our, the BTS people, it was Amazon that let [00:48:00] go one of our workers instead. Like they just denied on their flex thing. But I don’t know that much details about it.
Teddy Ostrow: Well, I’m glad you brought up that it was Amazon doing this. Um, So, you know, you, as I understand it, you drive a, an Amazon truck and you wear an Amazon uniform.
Uh, and it seems like Amazon has a lot of control over your employment, but, but technically you don’t work for Amazon. I’m curious, what do you think about that? Is, is Amazon not really in control of you, or are they, who, who do you really work for?
Arturo Solezano: Mm, it’s even though it says, they say we’re not, We really are.
Cause they get mad at us if we don’t wear their Amazon uniform. If, but yeah, like the people inside the fact, inside the building, they wear like their pajamas and whatever they want. But if we get something like that, wear different color shorts or jeans or something, they get, they [00:49:00] send us home. Even though we’re like, we’re not really Amazon though.
But yet you’re still trying to send us home for not being with you guys.
Teddy Ostrow: so we, we, we actually have you on the show because you and, and your coworkers did something really exciting that everyone seems to be cheering you on for, um, rightfully, uh, you unionized, uh, your D S P or delivery service provider.
It’s called battle tested strategies. You guys unionized with the Teamsters Local 3 96. Um, You know, that’s, that’s kind of a brave thing to do. I’m, I’m curious, why, why did you guys want to unionize with the teamsters?
Arturo Solezano: We just wanted our fair pay and everything, you know, and safety with this job. Cause, you know, being in those vans, it’s just extremely, it’s just there, just very hot. Like Asana. Um, they, I doing this just cause I wanna be able to provide for my family. You know, my little daughter is on her way. [00:50:00] I wanna make sure she’s taken care of growing up.
Teddy Ostrow: I feel
Arturo Solezano: like they’re the ones that are actually trying, that are actually looking out for me. They’re the ones that have my back a lot more than Amazon ever did.
Teddy Ostrow: Have you noticed any sort of, retaliation from Amazon since you guys, joined up with Local 3 96?
Arturo Solezano: uh, yeah. Actually the very first day they grounded my van for something so small that, and it was a easy fix, but it took him an hour to clear it. And one of the Amazon people actually came up to me.
kind of like talked to me like, oh, are you gonna be able to finish a route? I’m like, dude, we’re still working. You know, why? Why do you think we’re here? Of course I can deal with my route. It’s gonna take me a little longer now cause you guys are making me wait more, but I could still get it done.
Teddy Ostrow: And you think this has something to do with [00:51:00] organizing?
Mm-hmm.
Arturo Solezano: Cause now they’re like picking, they’re picking with every little thing they can with us, with our vans. They’re, they’re cutting down our routes. sometimes they’re very hostile towards us, and we’re just like, yo, we’re just here just to do our jobs too. Why you guys even being hostile towards.
Teddy Ostrow: yeah. So, uh, you guys, you guys not only unionize, but you want a union contract and a, as far as I understand, you want some pretty transformational stuff.
So some of it may not be enforceable yet, but nonetheless, can, can you talk about some of the things you guys won, in this contract? Yeah,
Arturo Solezano: we fought for advance, so they’re now more safer for us. we’re able to refuse, uh, deliveries that are actually, you know, unsafe that we can’t do. and we’re fighting for a bigger race.
Teddy Ostrow: How, how much money do you guys win? I, I, it’s, it’s pretty [00:52:00] high, right? It’s, uh, $30 a hour. Is that gonna make a difference for you? Yeah,
Arturo Solezano: it’ll help me out so much to provide for my family.
Teddy Ostrow: I’m, one thing I’m curious about is, uh, How you’ve interacted with other delivery drivers or other delivery, uh, or other logistics companies like ups.
Uh, have you interacted with any UPSers?
Arturo Solezano: Uh, yes. Uh, some of them actually come and help us pick it. Uh, I see, I’ll see someone my delivery route and they’ll say, Hey. Welcome to the Union brother. You know, congrats.
You know, this is what
Teddy Ostrow: we’re here for.
Arturo Sono, thanks for joining me on the Thank you. Yeah, have a good
Arturo Solezano: one.
You just listened to episode 8 of The Upsurge.
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
You can also show your support by sharing the episode on social media, giving us five star rating and writing a review.
Follow us on Twitter @upsurgepod and Facebook, The Upsurge. You can also listen to us on our YouTube channel, The Upsurge.
But the best way to show your support is by becoming a patron of the show at patreon.com/upsurgepod. We are listener-supported and can’t continue without you. Please help us reach our goal of 200 monthly subscribers by July. You can find a link in the description.
Thank you to all our patreon supporters, but a very special thank you and shout out to our patrons at the Business Agent tier or higher.
Shane Lynch
Greg Kerwood
Emil McDonald
Yoni Golijov
Jason Cone
Jason Mendez
Richard Hooker
Tony Winters
David Allen
Justin Alo
Tim Peppers
Dan Arlin
Dimitri Leggas
Juliette Kang
Rand Wilson
Randy Ostrow
Mack Harden
Timothy Kruger
Nicole Halliday
D Bo
Ed Leskowsky
Chris Schleiger
Corey Levensque
Martin Labut
Dane Rohl
Jeremy Brake
Matt Cooper
And
Marlon Russo
All of your support means so much.
The podcast was edited by myself
It was produced by NYGP and Ruby Walsh.
Music is by Casey Gallagher.
The cover art was done by Devlin Claro Resetar.
I’m Teddy Ostrow. Thanks for listening and catch you next time.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Vincent Quiles, a 28-year-old father and union organizer in Philadelphia, is part of a fledgling labor effort to support the months-long protests against construction of the notorious Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, popularly known as “Cop City.”
For Quiles, this also means speaking out against his former employer: Home Depot.
When he was fired from a Home Depot store in northeastern Philadelphia in February, Quiles was already struggling to support his toddler son on his salary, which he says never felt like enough, given the meager benefits. He says he was forced to lean on his “very strong support system.” This was despite his demanding job as a receiving supervisor, he notes, in charge of tasks like tracking incoming merchandise and overseeing maintenance of machinery in the store.
Quiles had been with the company for almost six years and played a leading role in a unionization drive that sought better pay, staffing and training. The drive was inspired by the successful unionization of an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. His store’s effort, he says, was met with a “vicious union-busting” campaign from Home Depot management and culminated in an unsuccessful union election in November. Quiles, who comes across as friendly and direct, is adamant that he was fired about three months later in retaliation for trying to organize what would have been the first union in a Home Depot store. He says he is currently pursuing a wrongful termination charge with the National Labor Relations Board.
“The company would dispute this,” he says, “but I was fired for organizing.” Home Depot did not return requests for comment about Quiles’ claims or any of the other assertions about Home Depot in this article.
But Quiles is not only concerned with his own situation—he is deeply upset about how the company’s policies and priorities are playing out in a city 800 miles away. Tax returns show that the Home Depot Foundation is a funder of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the private entity driving the fiercely opposed plan to build a $90 million police training center in the South River Forest, which protesters refer to by its Muscogee name, the Weelaunee Forest. Cop City is slated to include a shooting range, a driving course, and a mock city to train police from across the country in urban warfare, as activists put it, and would raze an important ecosystem and carbon sink in a majority-Black part of the Atlanta metro area.
“So Home Depot has money to allocate toward things like this, things that many people in that community don’t want because of the harm to the environment,” says Quiles, “but you can’t pay people more for the measurable value they bring to your company?”
Approved by the Atlanta City Council in 2021, the plan has been met with months-long opposition from neighbors and protesters concerned with the destruction of the forest at a time of intensifying climate change and environmental racism. Protesters are also alarmed by the expansion of policing and its associated violence, and “Stop Cop City” has become a national rallying cry for environmental and racial justice movements. Law enforcement, in turn, has responded with a ferocious crackdown that has left one forest defender killed (Georgia state troopers riddled 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán with 57 bullets in January) and 42 charged with domestic terrorism. Three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, are now facing money laundering and charity fraud charges, following SWAT arrests at the end of May.
Quiles is not alone in expressing concern; his voice is part of an emerging labor effort publicly speaking out against police repression of the “Stop Cop City” protests. He is flanked by two unions—United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a list that activists hope will grow—and quickly.
Quiles, meanwhile, is the president of Home Depot Workers United, an independent union which he says is in touch with workers at 25 stores around the country, some of which are actively planning union campaigns. He declined to disclose the exact number because he was concerned about retaliation and union busting tactics from the company. Home Depot Workers United released a statement in early April calling on Home Depot “to pull their support, both financial and otherwise, from the Atlanta Cop City project.”
The Home Depot Foundation gave $25,000 to the APF in 2021, $35,000 in 2020, and $50,000 in 2019. When asked about these payments, Terrance Roper, a spokesperson for Home Depot, said over email, “I can tell you we haven’t donated to The Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed training facility. We have specifically donated to The Atlanta Police Foundation’s veteran housing program.”
But Maurice BP-Weeks, a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, says, “This doesn’t pass the smell test. A dollar is a dollar, and Home Depot’s dollars have helped enable APF’s programs. Cop City is the signature program of APF at the moment.”
The corporate relationship goes beyond funding: As LittleSis pointed out, Daniel Grider, Home Depot’s vice president of technology, sits on the APF’s board of trustees. (Grider is also on the leadership team of the Home Depot Foundation.)
“Corporations the size of Home Depot don’t have executives join boards like this by accident,” says Maurice BP-Weeks, a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization. “They are sophisticated political actors, and when you see someone on a board, it’s a sophisticated action. Home Depot clearly expects something out of the relationship.”
Grider isn’t the only connection. Arthur Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, has a family foundation that pledged $3 million to the “Public Safety First Campaign,” which is the term the APF uses for the project. (In a statement to In These Times reporter and editor Joseph Bullington, the foundation sought to distance itself from the project by claiming the funding went to a different project of the APF.) Furthermore, Derek Bottoms, vice president of employment practices and associate relations for Home Depot, is the husband of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta who supported the construction of Cop City.
I spoke with a Home Depot worker and organizer who played a lead role in drafting the Home Depot Workers United statement—he requested anonymity to protect himself from retaliation. The worker said he was especially outraged to learn about these direct donations. “Home Depot’s profits come from my labor,” he says, “and we get a tiny fraction of that. The rest they get to decide what they do with. So often, what they do with that money is they enrich themselves or they give it to organizations or other things that don’t help the associates, and that actively harm workers.”
Some union leaders say the fight to stop Cop City has significant stakes for the labor movement as a whole. “Working people always have to be wary of any repression against protesters, because there is a history in our country that once it’s used against anyone protesting government policies, it can be turned against workers in their union,” Carl Rosen, the general president of UE, says over the phone from Erie, Pennsylvania, where 1,400 UE members who work for Wabtec Corp. could soon go out on strike.
This is especially concerning amid increasing enthusiasm about unions, even if density remains low. “At a time when workers across the country are increasingly willing to strike and use other militant tactics to oppose rampant corporate greed, working people must remain vigilant and united against any attacks on our right to peacefully protest against injustice,” UE officers, including Rosen, wrote in a June 2 statement. UE says it represents at least 30,000 workers.
The leadership of IUPAT was the first major union to weigh in, a significant development from a construction trades union that says it represents “over 100,000 workers across the United States, including across the Atlanta metro region.” A late March statement from general president Jimmy Williams Jr. emphasized racial justice issues at the heart of the matter.
“The IUPAT was proud to stand in solidarity during the height of the pandemic with the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington D.C.,” according to the statement. “Today we stand in solidarity with the protesters in Atlanta who are facing egregious and unnecessary violence by the Atlanta Police force and others for simply disagreeing around matters of public policy.”
When Williams became president in September 2021, he was hailed as a progressive new leader, unafraid to talk about tough issues like racism.
The unions that have spoken out in defense of activists only represent a tiny fraction of the labor movement. But BP-Weeks says, “We are at the very beginning of reaching out, and the support we have is really exciting—good on them for getting out in front.” BP-Weeks is part of an effort to circulate a sign-on letter so that unions can show their solidarity.
“Larger institutions generally don’t move as quickly, so we are continuing to reach out to the rest of labor, and we expect more sign-ons in the future,” BP-Weeks continues. “And we also realize not all of labor is in the same place on that. This moment can be a tool to organize and do some political education with unions as well.”
But even where union leaders—or their memberships as a whole—have not signed on, some workers and union members are involved in Stop Cop City organizing. Among them is Bill Aiman, a part-time United Parcel Service (UPS) worker who is a member of the Teamsters and is also involved in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a rank-and-file movement for improved democracy and militancy. He is based in the Atlanta metro area and says over the phone that he has “been attending protests, and trying to organize where possible.”
“When I talk to coworkers,” he says, “the Cop City project is extremely unpopular.”
“Cops are the first line of defense for business owners and employers, so I think it makes sense for labor to be opposed to Cop City,” he says. “These cops are being trained at Cop City and will use the tactics they learn to crush our strike if we go out.” The UPS contract will expire on July 31, and around 350,000 Teamsters could go on strike.
Some union leaders say, in addition to the immediate interests of labor, there are bigger principles at stake. In their statement, UE officers noted that, “In a democracy, decisions about the use of publicly-owned land and public funds should be driven by robust public debate, including the right of members of the public to peacefully protest. Instead, Atlanta has chosen repression.”
Early Tuesday, Atlanta’s city council approved the allocation of $67 million in public funds for the project: around $31 million in public funds for the construction of Cop City, along with $1.2 million a year over 30 years for use of the facility. This was approved despite an outpouring of impassioned public opposition. The rest of the funding will be raised privately. The APF’s board is filled with a host of Georgia-headquartered corporate leaders, ranging from Delta Air Lines to Waffle House to UPS. Protesters say that the supporters of Cop City—in government, the corporate world, and police-aligned nonprofits—are ramming through the project without meaningful democratic input. Emory University conducted a survey in March which found that a plurality of Black Atlanta residents oppose Cop City. Many protesters say the funds should instead be invested in public programs that improve human and environmental wellbeing.
Kerry Cannon, the interim vice president of Home Depot Workers United, says, “Home Depot has a set of core values they like to say they live by, and their financial and other support of Cop City is in complete contradiction of their values, from destroying a forest to ignoring the will of the people of that area.” The company advertises a wheel of “core values” on its website—these include “respect for all people” and “taking care of our people.”
Cop City is not the first time Home Depot has come under fire for the actual values it promotes. Another co-founder, billionaire Bernie Marcus, has donated to the campaigns of far-right politicians, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In 2021, a coalition of Black faith leaders called for a boycott of the company, which is headquartered in Georgia, for its “indifference” to a sweeping law to curb voting rights, even as other corporations spoke out. Numerous Home Depot employees have also spoken out about a host of nightmarish working conditions, ranging from sexual harassment to timed bathroom breaks.
After losing his job, Quiles is organizing for Home Depot Workers United in a strictly volunteer capacity, and says he is having to “limit expenses in the household” and is “cutting it fairly close.” The “current corporate culture in the country” is what inspires him to keep organizing, he says, and speaking out about Home Depot’s links to Cop City is a critical part of that.
“The point of labor organizing,” he says, “is to improve society as a whole.”
This article is being co-published with Workday Magazine and The Real News.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.