A global boom in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) propelled by battery power instead of internal combustion engines is imminent. Worldwide, around 14 percent of all new cars sold in 2022 were electric, up from less than 5 percent in 2020. In the U.S., electric car sales increased from 0.2 percent in 2011 to 4.6 percent in 2021, and then jumped to 8 percent in 2022.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the West Bank of occupied Palestine, workers queue up at Israeli military checkpoints on their commutes to work. These workers are made to walk in single file through humiliating metal structures that are set up to restrict and monitor their movement. Many Palestinians crossing here are forced to work for their occupiers in territory governed by the state of Israel. The Real News Network was on the ground to speak these workers as they went through two checkpoints in the early hours of the morning.
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.
Produced and edited by Ross Domoney
Videography: Ahmad Al-Bazz
Interviews: Sarah Abu Alrob
Writing and narration: Nadia Péridot
Narrator :
It’s a public holiday, but not for these Palestinian workers at Israeli settlements.
Mu’ath Qasem :
Look at the workers, look at their faces.
No one is happy, all of them are in debt.
Narrator :
Here they line up single file to be filtered through checkpoints and authorized entry to work in land that they consider is occupied by Israel. For most here, there is little choice but to work for their occupiers.
Mohammad Toube :
They built the wall after taking our land and properties and now we [work] for them.
Is there anyone in the world who commutes to work at 03:30 am?
Narrator :
For most here there is little choice but to work for their occupiers.
Mu’ath Qasem :
I wake up at 1:30 a.m.
At 02.00 am, I leave from Jenin to the checkpoint.
It’s been an hour and a half that I have been waiting here for.
It would solve the problem if they would open this check point earlier.
Narrator :
Here in the West Bank, the Real News Network spoke to workers on the ground.
Haza’ Sabha :
It’s a hard situation and especially for old people because there is (human) traffic.
The checkpoints are complicated.
The relaxation does not exist.
But this is our daily life.
We have responsibilities and duties towards our sons and daughters because there is no work in the West Bank.
Narrator :
These workers and their communities are surrounded by checkpoints and are cut off from other villages and wider society.
Haza’ Sabha :
The difficult conditions of our life is forcing us to go to our occupied land and work because every Palestinian family they have sons, young people and university graduates.
It’s hard for parents to see their graduated sons sitting at home.
They have no jobs.
Fathers are forced to work when they are old.
For example, I’m 62 years old and I come here every day at 3 am because I see my sons who
are not able to build their future.
I want to keep helping them.
We are forced to adapt to the occupation.
Narrator :
Israeli settlers are not subject to the same treatment and can enjoy freedom of movement.
Haitham Omar :
I spend 30-60 minutes at the checkpoint.
The [Israeli] worker has no checkpoints.
They do not get inspected and are not asked to remove their clothes.
Also, there is a gap in the rate. Our rate is not like theirs.
They don’t need a [military] permit to work but we do.
I can’t cross the checkpoint without a permit.
They don’t pay for a permit.
They have insurance.
Everything is different.
Israeli workers have everything.
Haitham Omar :
[Israeli] settlers have their own checkpoints.
They drive freely and we have to wait, if we are in cars.
But at this checkpoint, we have to cross on foot.
Mohammad Toube :
The work we do is not done by Israelis.
All of the workers that are here are doing hard work.
Hard work.
The work they do is the nice and easy one.
All of these poor people that you see around you are doing exhausting work.
They work in construction, floors, ceiling and all other hard works.
Yes they need us [workers].
Narrator :
500 meters away from Al Tayeb checkpoint, Palestinian farmers wait for Israeli soldiers to unlock gates and allow them access to their own agricultural land.
Randa Abu Ma’mar :
I come here every day and usually it’s open Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
But last time I came it was closed.
So I decided to come today and they don’t allow me to cross.
Narrator :
A population ruled by Israeli military law, these citizens are granted entry to work only as cheap labor which amounts to what the U.N. and numerous humanitarian organizations call an apartheid regime.
Ali Ne’erat :
What can we say? It’s an occupation.
We have no power to change this.
I consider all of Palestine to be our land.
They built a wall in it.
It is a racist wall built by land grabbers.
But there are no solutions.
Don’t tell me the world doesn’t know!
All Arab and Western countries know and are complicit with the occupation.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
With the largest private sector labor contract in the United States set to expire on July 31 at midnight, the eyes of the American labor movement are on United Parcel Service (UPS) and the nearly 350,000 Teamsters who work there. The Teamsters announced a UPS strike authorization vote starting this week, with results to be announced June 16. Union leaders are strongly urging a yes vote.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In the premiere episode of the all-new series Edge of Sports, host Dave Zirin interviews DeMaurice Smith, outgoing Executive Director of the NFL Players’ Association. The episode also touches on the controversy surrounding Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson’s new $260 million deal—and how scrutiny regarding players’ salaries is never extended to the big bucks pocketed by franchise owners. Finally, sports journalist Professor Travers joins ‘Ask a Sports Scholar’ to discuss the right-wing hullabaloo over trans kids playing sports.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Taylor Hebden
Opening Sequence: Cameron Granadino
Music by: Eze Jackson & Carlos Guillen
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
To the uninitiated, Canada may have a reputation for friendly and folksy charm. For Black and Indigenous peoples of the ‘Great White North,’ this veneer belies a white supremacy as vicious as anywhere else. Since 2021, Black Class Action Secretariat has fought to take the federal government to task for rampant and systemic discrimination. The class action lawsuit seeks damages of $2.5 billion. Nicholas Marcus Thompson joins The Real News for a far-ranging discussion on the long history of anti-Black racism in Canada, as well as the efforts of Black Class Action to effect change through organization.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson is a Trinidadian-Canadian social justice advocate and union leader.
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.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
All right, so my name is Nicholas Marcus Thompson, and that’s how I go by my full name. So that’s Nicholas Marcus Thompson. I am executive director for nonprofit organization called the Black Class Action Secretariat, which was formed after workers organized and filed a class action against the entire federal public service of Canada. For anti-black discrimination, essentially failure to hire, and failure to promote black workers based on their race.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Nicholas, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us at the Real News Network. I really, really appreciate it. We are, of course, sitting here at the Action Network temp at the 30th Constitutional Convention of the Canadian Labor Congress and we’ve been talking to as many folks as we can, learning as much as we can about the state of the labor movement, what our fellow workers here in Canada are going through, and what struggles they’re involved in, and ultimately how those of us in the United States and beyond can stand in solidarity with our siblings across the Canadian border and beyond.
And this story is really, really important and I’m really, really grateful to you for sitting down and chatting to us about it because I really want real news viewers and listeners to understand what we’re talking about here. I mean, this Black Class Action lawsuit and in response to just the deep systemic racism and discrimination that black workers in Canada face. It’s sad to say that I have to imagine a number of folks in the US will just be hearing about this for the first time.
And so I want to make sure that they have all the essential information about how deep this goes, where the movement to redress this systemic injustice came from and how it’s grown and what role you’ve played in that. So I guess take us back to the beginning. Take us back to where the movement started to identify and address the systemic racism and how bad was it? And is it…
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
Let’s go back.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
And in order for you and your viewers to understand, we need to go way back. I’m going to take you back to the 1600s. So black people have been in Canada for over 400 years. It is one of the longest racialized groups that have been in Canada. And from the beginning of when black people were brought here as enslaved people, throughout the passage of time, black people have faced significant oppression in Canada. When slavery was abolished, laws were passed that prevented the full participation of black Canadians. If we fast-forward to the first World War, black people wanted to serve Canada. They tried to sign up and Canada told them, “This is a white man’s war.”
They eventually allowed a few black people to serve in the World War, but the majority were rejected. And then they eventually formed a black battalion, a construction battalion. So what that meant was that black people predominantly could not fight alongside the white soldiers. They were relegated to digging the trenches, disarming the landmines, cutting down the trees. And that’s exactly, fast-forward, 100 years later, more than 100 years later, that’s exactly where black people remain. Digging the trenches and those are still important work in Canada’s public service. And so throughout the passage of time, systems were created because black people were viewed as subhuman, not good enough. And throughout the passage of time, those systems continues. Now we have it in a very Canadian way. It’s not overt, it is covert now. It is with a smile. It is with, “I’m following the procedures.” It is with the law states this, and we’re following the law.
So Canada has had a very oppressive history when it comes to black people. And it has not come to terms with how it has treated people who have been here, lived here, fully participated, contributed, helped to build Canada into the economic powerhouse that it is while facing significant oppression from the Canadian people, from the Canadian government, state sponsored discrimination and racism because it’s happening at the state level intentionally and in some cases unintentionally.
So fast-forward to 2020 and the murder of George Floyd in the US. And we really felt that pain, we connected with that suffering because we had an economic knee on our necks. So for a long time we couldn’t breathe and we stood in solidarity with the Floyd family and Americans and global citizens to stand up and march and protest. And as I led a protest in Toronto and I looked around and I saw all the different races for once in the history of time supporting black people. And it came to me and I says, “Well, what if we really have this support where we can actually get changes to remove that knee from on our necks in every possible way?” And I had this thought and the thought was, this protest is going to end and things are going to go back to normal and nothing is going to change.
So how do we utilize this support now to try to bring about some tangible change? It was 2020 at that point, and nothing was changing for black people. It was just being dressed up in a very Canadian way. And Canada is known around the world as a beacon of hope, a country that thrives with multiculturalism and diversity and inclusion, welcoming and… It reminds me of one government department, that immigration and refugee board, it welcomes refugees from around the world. And here you have a white manager telling a black employee, we should go back to the good old days where we had slaves. That’s Canada, but it is not the Canada that we hope of, that we dream of, that we know it has the potential to be. So in that moment, protesting, I was determined that we had to take some type of tangible action to bring about massive change because we would never get the opportunity to do so again.
So I started looking in our workplaces. At the time I was employed by the Canada Revenue Agency. That agency is responsible for administering Canada’s income tax, excise tax and other legislation. Essentially the taxation regime for the country. It administers billions and trillions of dollars. It’s the only revenue collecting central body for the government. And essentially almost every Canadian has to deal with this. One of the only bodies in the government that every Canadian has to pass through somehow or the other. And at this employer, there were about 50,000 employees and 100s of executives. And there are about one or two black executives and rarely any black people in management positions. And we had been trying to address the huge gap from entry level employees who are predominantly black to management and some leadership and having some opportunities.
At the time, we had workers who were there for 30 years, no promotion, still in an entry level position, retiring. Their pension is based on their best five years. And the really the heartbreaking part is that these were mostly women. And when I look around, seeing faces that look like my mother, my grandmother, and the dispare and the hopelessness in their faces, I knew we had to do something about it. So I wrote to the commissioner of the CRA and I said, “Hey, we have a major problem here. You’ve issued a statement talking about anti-black racism in the US and your attention was on the US but we have a huge problem right here in Canada and it’s insulting that you’re not acknowledging that and it’s causing even more damage and we want you to address this issue.”
And so they set up a task force to look at the issue and there’s about 50 people on the task force and one black person. And when you-
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s almost, it’s so on the nose, I don’t even know what to do, but with myself.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
And when you look at the minutes, this should not be about anti-black racism. Let’s talk about all forms of racism now. So it equated it to an all lives matter approach and it did not specifically address anti-black racism. And then I wrote to the Minister of National Revenue, “I have a problem here, can you help us?” Then I wrote to the clerk of the Privy Council, that is the head of the public service. “We have a anti-black racism problem here, can you help us?” Then I wrote to the prime Minister, “Can you help us?” Then I says, “You know what, let me try to.” That point, I was an elected president within my union, the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the largest federal public sector union.
And I says, “Hey, we have a problem at the CRA with anti-black racism. Can you please help us? But before we go to the CRA, before we fight this outward, we have a problem in the union. Our union is not representative of our members and there isn’t enough that’s being done to ensure that racialized black and racialized candidates are being put forward or mentored or being supported. Our members do not see themselves in our union and our view, our union, as not supportive on equity issues, not representative of us. So they stay away because they’re already facing enough barriers and racism in the workplace to now join the union to fight there too, not everybody can do that.”
And at the time I was hearing from workers who were having suicidal ideation, who had been on sick leave for long term experts have told us how the discrimination impacts your brain, how it impacts your parenting, your social life. How it causes your brain to actually move in a particular way. So I was talking to all these workers and the response that I got from the union was not commensurate to the urgency that workers were experiencing. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. So I hosted a town hall and I just needed to find a space to give workers a forum to bring awareness to the leaders, to what their members and employees are facing.
So I brought on workers, I brought on an anti-racism educator, I brought on a therapist. Because part of the problem too, when employees go to the employer’s employee assistance program and complain, they they’re experiencing discrimination. They usually white counselor would say, “Well, discrimination’s not there. It’s your perception that you’re being discriminated against. They can’t do that.” Causing even further damage. So from that point on, we have all of these people in the town hall, and I also invited a lawyer, because I knew there were significant legal issues and I needed them to be, the employers and the unions to be aware that you have a legal obligation here to do something. And I wanted a legal expert to speak about that. And the town hall went very well.
And after that, the lawyer called me up and says, “Hey Nicholas, you’re onto something here.” And he says, “There’s a lot of negligence on the employer and on the union side.” And that lawyer, Courtney Betty, he’s a former Crown prosecutor. And having worked for the Justice Department yet a good understanding of how the system worked. And from there on we started exploring taking legal action. Our biggest challenge was finding a way to bring it before the court. Because as unionized workers, you have to utilize the grievance process, the Canadian Human Rights Commission or any of the mechanisms within the labor framework. You can’t just go to court. There’s a threshold for that. And then we realized there was a common theme. And the common theme in all the cases was, racism was happening, but it was around staffing. The staffing mechanism was weaponized to exclude one group and give preferential treatment to others.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So this is both, I imagine, in terms of hiring, who gets hired and who doesn’t.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
Correct.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And who gets promoted and who doesn’t.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
Correct. Yes. So what it means for a black person is that you could be how qualified you apply, they’d find a way to screen you out, or they’d find a way to give opportunities to act in higher positions to other employees, developing them in the process, preparing them so that when a poster comes out, they have the experience to apply for it. You can’t even apply because you don’t even have the experience acting. So they could prepare you and tailor a poster to what those operational needs are. And the staffing regime for the public service, a lot of it is discretionary. So the public service has predominantly uses staffing regime to promote non-black racialized groups, to promote white employees, to develop white employees at the expense of black employees. And that’s essentially what this case is about. It means for thousands of black employees from 1970 and onward, that’s our starting period, have faced systemic discrimination in the public service.
And when we were going, we’d finally developed this case, and then I started talking to workers outside of the CRA. I went around to the different departments and I was hearing the same thing from workers. The exact same tools and how they were being used. So it wasn’t just the CRA, it was the Treasury Board of Canada, it was the Canadian Human Rights Commission where you file your complained to, the only institution that’s supposed to be sacred and anti-discriminatory. Workers at that commission told me that they were facing discrimination. And how race-based complaints, when the commission receives race-based complaints, that it’s disproportionately rejected compared to other complaints. That is a much higher dismissal rate for race-based complaints. And that how the leadership of the commission is the same everywhere else in the public service, black and some racialized right up here, and the leadership is white.
I went to the intelligence community, the same thing, the policing law enforcement, the same thing. Essentially all of the institutions were practicing anti-black racism, and it was deeply embedded in all of their systems. It was almost normal, the status quo. And that’s when we decided to extend the claim to the entire federal public service, over 100 departments and agencies and crown entities. And we examine the Employment Equity Act and here’s how, this is the piece of legislation that the employer uses federally to exclude black workers. This legislation was created in 1976 assented to in ’77. And it creates for protection for groups, women, indigenous people, visible minorities, and people with disabilities. It’s worked very well for women, but it’s white women, mostly white women. And we’re happy to see women is now more than 50% of the public service. We didn’t have that before. And more than 50% of the leadership as well. So that’s incredible. But black women are not the beneficiary of that woman category or indigenous or. It’s only been white women have benefited from that category.
And the visible minorities category places every racialized group that’s say, if you’re not indigenous or you’re not white, you’re in this category. And it’s nobody’s defined in there. So to meet employment equity, when there’s a gap for visible minorities, I could pick any group. So if I want, I could always pick Chinese and I’m meetings or exceeding my visible… I picked the visible minorities. So federal employees and the CRA have always told me, “Nicholas, we’re following the law. The law says pick a visible minority and we picked a visible minority. It doesn’t say anything about black. If you want this address, you have to change the Employment Equity Act.”
That’s what they told me. So we set it upon a path to strike down the Employment Equity because how it’s being applied, because it was not clearly defined, how it’s being applied, it is sanctioning allowing discrimination against black people as federal employers have their preferred group for visible minorities. Whoever it deems is the harder worker, the smarter worker, the non-lazy worker. And then when those racialized group gets in, they perpetuates and continue the status quo. And in some of the cases, they ensure that people from their group follow suit. So I’ve seen where a leader of one department is this race and everybody in the department is that race. Or the majority of people.
So we’re seeking to strike down that part of the Act because we believe that how it’s being applied, it contravenes Article 15 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as it pertains to non-discrimination. So here we are at a press conference and a national broadcaster, CBC is carrying the story. December 4th, it’s coming out. I’m in front of a camera, I’m nervous, not sure what I was getting signed up for, but I knew we had to do something about it. And the story broke. We filed a claim and what is the claim? We are seeking monumental historic changes to how our public service run, how staffing functions. We want to ensure that our public service is strong and productive. Right now you have a lot of people injured showing up to work, serving Canadians in a minimal capacity due to the discrimination that they face in the workplace. Not performing at their best potential.
So we want to create a stronger public service where everyone is included and where you can reach your full potential, whether that’s at the bottom or mid-level or at the top, wherever that is. And you’d be able to reach your fullest potential based on merit and what you bring to the table. And that’s the public service that we’re fighting for, that is the public service that we’re demanding. It is what Canada purports to be. So we’re holding Canada accountable to the image that it is trying to show the world that it is. So it’s real hard work and a lot of determination and sweat and blood to get there, but we know it’s achievable. So we’re seeking amendments to the Employment Equity Act. We believe the only way to address the problem at the root cause is to amend the Employment Equity Act, is to remove black employees from the racialized category where it’s being left behind consistently and create a new designated group. And that’s the only way you’ll be able to solve the issue of black employee exclusion.
So now what is in a distinct separate category, employers will have to look to see if there is specifically a black gap in the workplace and then appoint a qualified, not just somebody because they’re black. That’s not what we’re trying to do. Appoint a qualified, competent black person to fill that gap.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I mean, this is really an incredible undertaking. Both in terms of the scope and scale of the problem. And I mean, we in the United States are no strangers to systemic anti-black racism. But then to study at the level of the entire workforce of the federal public service workers going back 50 years and trying to account for and atone for and repair. I mean, that’s what reparations means, is repair that which has been broken and those who have been broken by this flawed, racist, bad system that needs to be repaired. I’m wondering how you take on the task of accounting for all of that and fighting for not just fixing the issues within the hiring practices and the Employment Equity Act, but also compensating folks who have been affected by this. And I wanted to ask about that side of things and where the state of the lawsuit is now and what response you’ve gotten from the government and from the labor community.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
Those are very important questions. Well, let’s start from the top. The lawsuit is presently awaiting certification. So that’s the first legal hurdle. That’s where the court will determine if it meets the definition of a class action, not so much the merits of the case, but if it has a common class, if it’s clearly this undefined and whatnot and that it meets the definition for a class action. That hearing is scheduled for October this year. Of course, the government can consent to that certification and allow us to move further ahead, they have not. Their position has been completely different in the courtroom than publicly. Publicly most of the institutions have acknowledged that they have systemic discrimination. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that on many occasions. Most recently, there was a finding by the Treasury Board of Canada that the Canadian Human Rights Commission discriminated against its black and racialized employees.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Which just blows my mind. The Canadian, I’m sorry, I know you said this earlier and I was containing myself, but the Human Rights Commission that is supposed to be there to safeguard human rights within the office of that commission, they’re doing the same shit.
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
And it just goes to show you how bad the problem is. Those who are entrusted to protect human rights were violating human rights with no regard for their mandates. So if the Human Rights Commission was doing this, imagine for the rest of the public service. If the top, the beacon of hope was discriminating against black employees, then everywhere else that’s looking to the commission for direction and for help, for guidance and leadership, the system completely failed black employees. And black employees have no trust in our federal institutions, have no trust in our institutions for redress through the labor mechanisms and view the court as the only place to be able to get remedy on this situation.
Compensation remains an important part of what we’re seeking. So we’re not only seeking the legislative changes to address the present and future, but there has to be remedies to address the past damages. They’ve done it for other groups, for the LGBT community, and we’re not asking for anything new. You’ve acknowledged that there is discrimination, that there is damage, and the pain and suffering that it causes is real. That’s what the Prime Minister said. But with all of that, you’ve ruined a lot of lives, marriages, families, the generational impact. I keep remembering Carol, she’s one of the people that came forward. She’s retired, living in a basement apartment, can barely make ends meet after diligently serving this country for over two decades.
What about all those workers? Will a, sorry, be sufficient for all those lives you ruin? The impact on their children and then their children’s children. How do you just come back now and say, “We’ve passed a law and we’ve fixed this problem,” and you said all these nice things. But you’ve ruined tens of thousands of black people’s lives and the communities that they live in and their culture and their ability to fully participate as Canadian citizens. So there has to be remedies to address those damages, those deep, deep damages. So we’re truly seeking to address the issue from the past, to provide compensation for those who have been injured. To address the present by fixing the systems from the root no Band-Aid solutions. We’re seeking to remedy at the root cause. So let’s say if an employer could be how racist they want, they have to follow the law. If they don’t, we can hold them accountable. They would not be able to hide behind any category and say, well, they’ve hired a racialized person so they’ve met it. They wouldn’t be able to do any of that if we have appropriate legislative safeguards.
And we also want to ensure there’s proportional representation. If the black community makes up this amount of people, that should be reflected in the public service at all levels. And we have to, I started by telling you the history of black people in Canada. All of this has to be within that long history of oppression. So it’s not no special treatment we’re looking for, we’re seeking equality through equity. No handouts, but you’ve damaged us, so you have to compensate us for that, and then you have to stop damaging us. That’s what we’re seeking to do with the Black Class Action. And part of the reason why we’re before the courts is because our unions have failed us. And to understand that, I had to go back into the history books as well. And I found that when unions were just starting up in Canada, their constitution said whites only. So our unions were not built with us in mind. They were built to exclude us.
Attitudes and behavior throughout the passage of time passed down. And out of that fight, black people mobilized back then and formed their own union, their own table. Out of that fight, something came to being called duty to fair representation. It was black people that fought all the way through the courts and gave our labor system the duty to fair representation, yet still cannot benefit from that regime. So our unions have, which essentially come from a workplace. So if you have workplaces where discrimination is rampant, where black people are consistently being excluded, where white supremacy thrives, our unions are going to reflect that too. So it’s the same thing, or probably even worse, replicated within our unions. And our unions have a lot of work to do in terms of turning that corner, accepting responsibility. And we recognize the powerful vehicle that the labor movement is that the huge wins that it has brought home for workers, from maternity leave to sick leave, to childcare, to living wage, to weekends. These things were not given to workers, unions fought and won these things. So we accept and we support and we believe in unionism.
But when it comes to anti-black racism, our unions and unions in general have not mobilized. And that is our goal to galvanize Canada’s labor movement into combating anti-black racism, into actually fixing our systems. Because we recognize the power that labor has, and if one is impacted, then all of us is impacted. And if blacks are being marginalized, then all of us are in the fight together. And that’s really what part of this fight is about, bringing labor together. Because if we can fight this together, it means our workplaces would be barrier free. It means our members can fully participate. And that means our members can also now fully participate in the unions. So ultimately we’ll have stronger workplaces and stronger unions.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, and I guess on that note, and I can’t thank you enough for sitting and talking with me this long, man. I really, really appreciate it. And I just wanted to ask in the final couple minutes I’ve got you is, what should that look like from the union side? Actually rising to that occasion looking inward and fixing the problems that we have still within the movement. Excluding black workers or having leadership that is not representative of our membership or not making these issues enough of a priority in our contract fights and beyond. So I wanted to ask A, what should the union effort to address systemic racism look like? And B, what can folks in the labor movement and beyond in Canada, in the US and beyond, what can we all do to support y’all in this fight?
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
Well, let me say this. The labor movement knows how to fight, it knows how to mobilize, it knows how to bring people together, it knows how to run campaigns. That’s what we need. The full force of the labor movement coming together on this, sharing resources, running campaigns, lobbying, talking to MPs, mail campaigns, TV campaigns, social media campaigns, our labor movement knows how to fight for issues, how to fight for social justice. So we need our unions to fight for social justice. This is about human rights. So our unions know what to do. And the wider labor movement knows about solidarity. We’ve had issues in one area and it’s so egregious, unions from across the country come together. Because the same premise applies that if you touch one, you touch all, and that if you hurt me, you’re hurting all of my brothers, sisters and friends.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. Like you saw the national support for the Ontario educators like last year. Exactly. Taking on Doug Ford and trying to strip their rights. So where is that for this cause?
Nicholas Marcus Thompson:
That is exactly, unfortunately, we have to go begging for that support, we have to go running down leaders, pleading. There’s 17 federal unions and only two are providing some support for us. We want to be able to have the support of the entire federal public service, the entire labor community. Like unions, I don’t even want to say these things, but unions know they could just issue a letter of support, they can post a town hall, they can do stuff to raise awareness. This is about public awareness. This is about bringing to the Canadian public, to their attention, how our institution treats the workers that is serving them. It’s fundamental, basic human rights. And if we can do that and bring people together, I think that’s where we’ll win. So labor needs to come together to combat anti-black racism. And when it does that, we will all win.
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This story originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch on June 5, 2023. It is shared here under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.
At least 275 people have died following a horrific train accident in the Balasore district of the Indian State of Odisha on Friday, June 2. Over a 1,000 people were also injured in what is being called the worst rail accident in 20 years. As the country recovers from the shock, questions are being asked about the government’s policies towards the railways.
The accident involved three trains. On the evening of June 2, the Coromandel Express, a passenger train, rammed a stationary goods train that had been parked in the Loop Line of the Bahanaga Bazar railway station. According to a preliminary investigation, 21 coaches of the Coromandel Express derailed and some overturned, including on to the adjoining track.
Just minutes later, another passenger train, the Yesvantpur-Howrah Superfast Express coming from Bengaluru hit the derailed compartments of the Coromandel Express, and itself derailed, becoming what is called “a wreck on a wreck.” Both trains had an estimated 2,000 passengers on board.
On June 4, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw stated the root cause of the collision had happened due to a change in the electronic interlocking, which is a signaling system to ensure route safety for trains. He added that the people responsible had been identified.
Subsequently, he added that the Railway Board had recommended an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), identifying a “signaling interference” as the main cause of the accident.
The preliminary investigation found that the Coromandel Express had initially been given the “green signal” to pass through the Up Main Line (heading towards Chennai). However this signal was then taken off, following which the train moved into the Loop Line (which are lines constructed around station areas to accommodate trains ease operations). It then collided with the goods train.
Coromandel was not scheduled to stop at the Bahanaga station and it is not known why the green signal was taken off. It is also not clear whether the signal was displaying “red” or “green” when the Coromandel Express crossed it.
Balasore and neighboring areas were the site of a massive rescue effort as local residents joined National Disaster Response Force and fire department personnel. Meanwhile, distressing videos circulated on social media revealed a close-up of the tragedy.
Heartbreaking scenes have emerged out of Odisha of relatives searching for their loved ones amid the chaos, as piles of bodies were laden on trucks and in open halls. According to news reports, the local Bahanaga high school was turned into a makeshift morgue, while local hospitals struggled to accommodate patients.
The State and Central governments have since then announced ex-gratia payments. Alongside the looming CBI probe, the Odisha Police have also filed charges of “causing death by negligence and endangering life,” however the case does not name any specific individuals as of now.
The Indian Railways is one of the country’s most important institutions, employing over 1.1 million people. It is the fourth biggest railway network in the world and the second largest in size if we consider passenger miles. While the Balasore train accident is the worst India has seen for many years in terms of its sheer scale, the Indian Railways have continued to witness routine accidents, both “consequential” (entailing serious repercussions including loss of human life) and otherwise.
This brings to the fore the structural issues that have continued to plague the railway system and which have become a key issue in this context. In a letter from February, seen by news publication ThePrint, the principal chief operating manager of the South Western Railway zone had warned of “serious flaws” in the signaling system, adding that if the maintenance system was not corrected, it could lead to “re-occurrence and serious accidents”.
“Anything of this nature happening in one zone raises eyebrows everywhere,” an anonymous senior railway official stated in the news report.
The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) published a report in 2022 for the year ending March 2021. A section of the report stated, “Investigation of factors responsible for derailments conducted by the Inquiry Committees is an important exercise, which highlights the main factors responsible for the accidents.”
According to the report, the Zonal Railways (ZR) did not adhere to the timeline prescribed by the Railway Board for completing inquiries in 49% of the derailment cases. It also revealed that the Indian Railways neglected workforce vacancies and managed them through nominal outsourcing. This lack of proper staffing in the safety category compromised the railways’ vision of achieving accident-free, collision-free, and fire-free train operations.
The report revealed that track inspections were conducted in only 181 cases out of the required total of 350, indicating that over 50% of the mandatory track safety inspections were neglected. Furthermore, the data shows that out of the total 217 accidents between the years 2017 and 2021, 75% were caused by derailments. Additionally, there were 211 accidents attributed to signal failure. The report also acknowledged that essential safety measures were being disregarded, while funds were being allocated to non-priority projects instead of investing in rail safety.
Just two days before the accident, The Hindu published a report highlighting how the shortage of staff in Indian Railways was leading to major accidents. For instance, in the South East Central Railway, 35.99% of loco pilots had duty shifts exceeding 12 hours in March, 34.53% in April, and 33.26% during the first half of May.
For the year 2023, over 312,000 posts in the Indian Railways remained vacant. The failure to fill these positions has resulted in employees working overtime. A 29-year-old employee, working at the Central Railway ticket booking office in Mumbai, told The Hindu, “I have been working double shifts for up to 16 hours continuously as we don’t have enough staff to relieve us.“
Political parties in India condemned the failure to address many of these underlying structural issues. Communist Party of India (Marxist) General Secretary noted that a task force formed in 2017 had pointed out the urgent need for track renewals. However, in the 2022 budget, the allocation for track renewal was cut by 14%. He also called out the government for the vacancies of the position of gangmen, who monitor tracks for any loose bolts.
He warned against the CBI probe being used to divert attention from some of these issues.
Many observers also criticized the government’s focus on publicity campaigns boasting of super-fast trains while basic safety issues remained unresolved. Sitaram Yechury urged the government to focus on providing facilities for people to travel rather than on high-speed trains which only the rich can access.
Opposition leader Jairam Ramesh tweeted that “rail safety & track renewals have taken a backseat, while high-profile inaugurations & an obsession with speed get priority.”
His party, the Indian National Congress, and other political leaders demanded the resignation of Rail Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
(With inputs from Umer Beigh, Hrishi Raj Anand and Tanupriya Singh)
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This story originally appeared in Jacobin on June 2nd, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
One of the old clichés in Beltway reporting is that there’s some inherent good in “getting things done.” Centrist politicians have long adored the phrase too, largely because it’s so devoid of actual content. To centrist liberals, it has the added bonus of being a handy cudgel with which to bludgeon a Left they insist is too puritanical to muddy itself in the grown-up business of gutting social programs or genuflecting to Wall Street. Infantile progressivism cleaves to impractical ideas like people not being homeless or dying because they can’t afford to see a doctor; adult politics “gets things done.”
So it was probably inevitable that the Joe Biden/Kevin McCarthy deal to raise America’s debt ceiling would radiate some of the familiar rhetoric. Characteristic is Politico’s write-up, which reports the circumstances surrounding the agreement with a dollop of dramatic flair, breathlessly revealing the extensive maneuvers in political management that finally handed “a major victory [to] Biden,” the consummate dealmaker. With assists from elsewhere in the media, the White House is unsurprisingly spinning it this way too.
As ever, the whole thing falls apart the moment you look at what’s actually in the deal or consider what the alternatives to the periodic debt ceiling brokerage there might have been. The Democrats could have raised the debt ceiling at any time during their recent control of Congress and avoided this affair entirely. The debt ceiling being an unusual institution to begin with, they could also have eliminated it altogether (an option Biden casually dismissed last October, deeming it “irresponsible”).
Barring these, Biden could simply have invoked the Fourteenth Amendment, which states “the validity of the public debt of the United States . . . shall not be questioned,” and the government could have continued borrowing.
In lieu of these options, there is now a deal that prioritizes Republican cuts, adds Dickensian work requirements to food aid programs, and worsens climate change.
To this end, a measure included in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act to allocate an additional $80 billion to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) so it could be better equipped to stop rich people from evading taxes is being pared back by $20 billion. Construction of a new greenhouse-gas-spewing pipeline will also be expedited.
When asked about his deal’s inevitable pushing of low-income Americans into hunger, Biden simply waved away the claim as a “ridiculous assertion” — a contemptible dismissal given what detailed analyses like this one from the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reveal about the agreement’s impact on people in poverty:
The debt ceiling agreement, which includes almost all of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) changes from the House-passed debt-ceiling-and-cuts bill, would put almost 750,000 older adults aged fifty to fifty-four at risk of losing food assistance through an expansion of the existing, failed SNAP work-reporting requirement. The expansion of this requirement would take food assistance away from large numbers of people, including many who have serious barriers to employment.
Only in the hollowest and most superficial sense imaginable is the debt ceiling agreement any kind of political “win.” Indeed, it’s incredible to think there are people out there who could read a sentence like, “While the precise details were not clear, the deal raises the age at which adults will be required to work to receive food stamps from 50 to 54” and get the impression there’s some kind of victory to be found here. In a bizarro world where political outcomes are primarily about the elite characters who made them happen rather than the people they will actually affect, virtually anything — no matter how morally horrendous — can be declared a win.
If nothing else, it’s a timely reminder that, for many of the most prominent people involved in deciding how America taxes, spends, and supports (or doesn’t support) its citizens, all of this is barely more than theater.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
As shareholders gathered at the annual meeting of Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the United States following a 2019 merger, hundreds of unionized employees from across the country walked off the job on Monday to demand investors take action against what the journalists say is corporate greed at the top of the organization. The journalists, who are represented by the NewsGuild…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A bill introducing harsh penalties and extending the scope of a law applying to those who obstruct public places has been passed after an all-night sitting by the South Australian Legislative Council this week, reports veteran investigative journalist Wendy Bacon — herself twice imprisoned for free speech.
By Wendy Bacon
South Australia now joins New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and Queensland, states which have already passed anti-protest laws imposing severe penalties on people who engage in peaceful civil disobedience.
However, South Australia’s new law carries the harshest financial penalties in Australia.
Thirteen Upper House Labor and Liberal MPs voted for the Bill, opposed by two Green MPs and two SABest MPs. The government faced down the cross bench moves to hold an inquiry into the bill, to review it in a year, or add a defence of “reasonableness”.
The Summary Offences (Obstruction of Public Places) Amendment Bill 2023 was introduced into the House Assembly by Premier Peter Malinauskas the day after Extinction Rebellion protests were staged around the Australian Petroleum and Exploration Association (APPEA) annual conference on May 17.
The most dramatic of these protests was staged by 69-year-old Meme Thorne who abseiled off a city bridge causing delays and traffic to be diverted.
Meanwhile, the gas lobby APPEA which is financed by foreign fossil fuel companies has stopped publishing its (public) financial statements. Questions put for this story were ignored but we will append a response should one be available.
The APPEA conference is a major gathering of oil and gas companies that was bound to attract protests. Its membership covers 95 pecent of Australia’s oil and gas industry and many other companies who supply goods and services to fossil fuel industries.
The dramatic climate protest staged by 69-year-old Meme Thorne who abseiled off an Adelaide bridge last month. Video: The Independent
The principal sponsors of this year’s conference were corporate giants Exxon-Mobil and Woodside.
Since March, Extinction Rebellion South Australia has been openly planning protests to draw attention to scientific evidence showing that any expansion of fossil fuel industries risks massive global disruption and millions of deaths.
The new laws will not apply to those arrested last week, several of whom have already been sentenced under existing laws.
In fact, when SA Attorney-General Kyam Maher was asked about the protests on May 17 shortly after the abseiling incident, he told the Upper House that “there are substantial penalties for doing things that can impede or restrict things like emergency services. I know that (police) . . . have in the past and will continue to do, enforce the laws that we have.”
Sensing that something was in the wind, he said he would be open to suggestions from the opposition.
Fines up 66 times, prison sentence introduced
That afternoon, SA Opposition Leader and Liberal David Speirs handed the government a draft bill. This was finalised by parliamentary counsel overnight and whipped through the Lower House on May 18, without debate or scrutiny.
It took 20 minutes from start to finish: as one Upper House MP said, it would take “longer to do a load of washing”.
While Malinauskas and Speirs thanked each other for their cooperation, some MPs had not seen the unpublished bill before they passed it.
The new law introduces maximum penalties of A$50,000 (66 times the previous maximum fine) or a prison sentence of three months.
The maximum fine was previously $750, and there was no prison penalty.
If emergency services (police, fire, ambulance) are called to a protest, those convicted can also be required to pay emergency service costs. The scope of the law has also been widened to include “indirect” obstruction of a public place.
This means that if you stage a protest and the police use 20 emergency vehicles to divert traffic, you could be found guilty under the new section and be liable for the costs.
Even people handing out pamphlets about vaping harm in front of a shop, or workers gathering on a footpath to demand better pay, could fall foul of the laws.
An SABest amendment to the original bill removing the word “reckless” restricts its scope to intentional acts.
Peter Malinauskus told Radio Fiveaa on Friday that the new laws aimed to deter “extremists” who protested “with impunity” by crowd sourcing funds to pay their fines.
In speaking about the laws, Malinaukas, Maher and their right-wing media supporters have made constant references to emergency services, and ambulances. But no evidence has emerged that ambulances were delayed.
The author contacted SA Ambulances to ask if any ambulances were held up on May 17, and if they were delayed, whether Thorne was told. SA Ambulance Services acknowledged the question but have not yet answered.
The old ambulance excuse
Significantly, the SA Ambulance Employees Union has complained about the “alarming breadth” of the laws and reminded the Malinauskas government that in the lead-up to last year’s state election, Labor joined Greens, SABest and others in protests about ambulance ramping, which caused significant traffic delays.
The constant references to emergencies are reminiscent of similar references in NSW. When protesters Violet Coco and firefighter Alan Glover were arrested on the Sydney Harbour Bridge last year, police included a reference to an ambulance in a statement of facts.
The ambulance did not exist and the false statement was withdrawn but this did not stop then Labor Opposition leader, now NSW Premier Chris Minns repeating the allegation when continuing to support harsh penalties even after a judge had released Coco from prison.
It later emerged that the protesters had agreed to move if it was necessary to make way for an ambulance.
The new SA law places a lot of discretion in the hands of the SA police to decide how to use resources and assess costs. The SA Police Commissioner Grant Stevens left no doubt about his hostility to disruptive protests when he said in reference to last week’s abseiling incident, “The ropes are fully extended across the street. So we can’t, as much as we might like to, cut the rope and let them drop.”
In Parliament, Green MP Robert Simms condemned this statement, noting that it had not been withdrawn.
In court, the police prosecutor (as NSW prosecutors have often done) argued that Thorne, who has been arrested in previous protests, should be refused bail.
Her lawyer Claire O’Connor SC reminded that courts around the country had ruled bail could not be denied to protesters as a form of punishment.
Shock jocks, News Corp, back new laws
She said that, at worst, her client faced a maximum fine of $1250 and three-month prison term if convicted — but added she intended to plead not guilty.
“You cannot isolate a particular group of offenders because of their motivation and treat them differently because of their beliefs,” she said. The magistrate granted Thorne bail until July.
For now the South Australian government has satisfied the radio shock jocks, Newscorp’s Adelaide Advertiser (which applauded the tough penalties), authoritarian elements in the SA police, and the Opposition.
But it has been well and truly wedged. After a fairly smooth first year in power, it now finds itself offside with a massive coalition of civil society, environmental groups, South Australian unions, the SA Law Society and the Council for Social Services, the Greens and SA Best.
In less than two weeks, Premier Malinkauskas’s new law was condemned by a full page advertisement in the Adelaide Advertiser that was signed by human rights, legal, civil society, environmental and activist organisations; faced two angry street rallies organised to demonstrate opposition to the laws; and was roundly criticised by a range of peak legal and human rights organisations.
Back to the past
Worst of all from the government’s point of view, SA Unions accused Malinkaskas of trashing South Australia’s proud progressive history.
“South Australian union members have fought for over a century to improve our living standards and rights at work. It took just 22 minutes for the government to pass a Bill in the House of Assembly attacking our rights to take the industrial action that made that possible.
“Their Bill is a mess and must be stopped,” SA Unions stated in a post on their official Facebook page.
In hours long speeches during the night, Green MPs Robert Simms and Tammie Franks and SABest Frank Pangano and Connie Bonaros detailed the history of protests that have led to progressive changes, including in South Australia.
They read onto the parliamentary record letters from organisations condemning both the content and unprecedented manner in which the laws were passed as undermining democracy.
Their message was crystal clear — peaceful disobedience is at the heart of democracy and there can be no peaceful disobedience without disruption.
Simms wore a LGBTQI activist pin to remind people that as a gay man he would never have been able to become a politician if it was not for the disruptive US-based Stonewall Riots and the early Sydney Mardi Gras, in which police arrested scores of people.
Protest is about “disrupting routines, people are making a noise and getting attention of people in power . . . change is led by people who are on the street, not made by those who stand meekly by,” he told Parliament.
Simms read from a letter by Australian Lawyers for Human Rights president Kerry Weste, who wrote, “Without the right to assemble en masse, disturb and disrupt, to speak up against injustice we would not have the eight-hour working day, and women would not be able to vote.
“Protests encourage the development of an engaged and informed citizenry and strengthen representative democracy by enabling direct participation in public affairs. When we violate the right to peaceful protest we undermine our democracy.”
At the same time as it was thumbing its nose at many of its supporters, the South Australian government left no one in doubt about its support for the expansion of the gas industry.
SA Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis told the APPEA conference, “We are thankful you are here.
“We are happy to a be recipient of APPEA’s largesse in the form of coming here more often,” Koutsantonis said. “The South Australian government is at your disposal, we are here to help and we are here to offer you a pathway to the future.”
‘Gas grovelling’ not well received
This did not impress David Mejia-Canales, senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, whose words were also quoted in Parliament:
“Two days after the Malinauskas government told gas corporations that the state is at their service, the SA government is making good on its word by rushing through laws to limit the right of climate defenders and others to protest. Australia’s democracy is stronger when people protest on issues they care about
“This knee-jerk reaction by the South Australian government will undermine the ability of everyone in SA to exercise their right to peacefully protest, from young people marching for climate action to workers protesting for better conditions. The Legislative Council must reject this Bill.”
During his five-hour speech in the early hours of Wednesday, SA Best Frank Pangano told Parliament that he could not recall when a bill has “seen so much wholesale opposition from sections of the community who are informed, who know what law making is about.
“You have got a wide section of the community saying in unison, ‘you are wrong’ to the Premier, you actually got it wrong. But we are getting a tin ear.”
And it was not just the climate and human rights activists who were “getting the tin ear”: the SA Australian Law Society released a letter expressing “serious concerns with the manner in which the [bill] was rushed through the House of Assembly”.
It wrote, “This is not how good laws are made.
“Good laws undergo a process of consultation, scrutiny, and debate before being put to a vote. The public did not even have a chance to examine the wording of the Bill before it passed the House of Assembly.
“This is particularly worrying in circumstances where the proposed law in question affects a democratic right as fundamental as the right to protest, and drastically increases penalties for those convicted of an offence.”
The Law Society also sent a list of questions to the government which were not answered.
One of the last speeches in the early morning was by SABest MLC Connie Balaros who, wearing a t-shirt that read “Arrest me Pete”, vowed to continue to campaign against the laws and accused Labor MPs of betraying their members, the community and their own history.
No more baby steps. No more excuses. No more greenwashing. No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.
Early this year, UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez declared, “2023 is a year of reckoning. It must be a year of game-changing climate action.
“We need disruption to end the destruction. No more baby steps. No more excuses. No more greenwashing. No more bottomless greed of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.”
Climate disasters mount
Since he made that statement, climate scientists have reported that Antarctic ice is melting faster than anticipated. This week, there has been record-beating heat in eastern Canada and the United States, Botswana in Africa, and South East China.
Right now, unprecedented out-of-control wildfires are ravaging Canada.
An international force of 1200 firefighters including Australians have joined the Canadian military battling to bring fires under control. Extreme rain and floods displaced millions in Pakistan and thousands in Australia in 2022.
Recently, extreme rain caused rivers to break their banks in Italy, causing landslides and turning streets into rivers. Homelessness drags on for years as affected communities struggle to recover long after the media moves on.
Is it any wonder that some people don’t continue as if it is ‘business as usual’. Protesters in London invaded Shell’s annual conference last week and in Paris, climate activists were tear gassed at Total Energies AGM.
Is it any wonder that some people don’t continue as if it is “business as usual”. Protesters in London invaded Shell’s annual conference last week and in Paris, climate activists were tear gassed at Total Energies AGM.
In The Netherlands last weekend, 1500 protesters who blocked a motorway to call attention to the climate emergency were water-cannoned and arrested.
On Thursday, May 30, Rising Tide protesters pleaded guilty to entering enclosed lands and attempting to block a coal train in Newcastle earlier this year. They received fines of between $450 and $750, most of which will be covered by crowdfunding.
Three of them were Knitting Nannas, a group of older women who stage frequent protests.
This week the Knitting Nannas and others formed a human chain around NAB headquarters in Sydney. They called for NAB to stop funding fossil fuel projects, including the Whitehaven coal mine.
Knitting Nannas, Rising Tide
Two Knitting Nannas have mounted a legal challenge in the NSW Supreme Court seeking a declaration that the NSW anti-protest laws are invalid because they violate the implied right to freedom of communication in the Australian constitution.
A similar action is already been considered in South Australia.
In this context, fossil fuel industry get togethers may no longer be seen as a PR and networking opportunity for government and companies.
Australian protesters will not be impressed by Federal and State Labor politicians reassurances that they have a right to protest, providing that they meekly follow established legal procedures that empower police and councils to give or refuse permission for assemblies at prearranged places and times and do not inconvenience anyone else.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local 174 is outrageous — valuing property over workers’ rights. But it could have been much worse. Unions still have the right to strike. Employers still can’t generally sue unions in state court for losses caused by strikes. But the decision does open the door to whittling away those rights more in the future.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Amazon on Friday fired Jennifer Bates, a warehouse worker and lead spokesperson of the unionization campaign in Bessemer, Alabama, without cause. The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union (RWDSU) described Bates as the “woman who lit the spark of the current rise of labor activism.” Her termination comes as the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) continues to investigate RWDSU’s claims…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In The Great Escape, Saket Soni recounts how he organized a group of Indian migrant workers to free themselves from a human trafficking scam and hold their captors accountable.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on June 1, 2023. It is shared here with permission.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Glacier Northwest v. Teamsters Local 174 is outrageous—valuing property over workers’ rights. But it could have been much worse.
Unions still have the right to strike. Employers still can’t generally sue unions in state court for losses caused by strikes. But the decision does open the door to whittling away those rights more in the future.
Unions still have the right to strike. Employers still can’t generally sue unions in state court for losses caused by strikes. But the decision does open the door to whittling away those rights more in the future.
The practical impact of the Court’s decision is that employers will be suing unions more often for alleged property damage caused by strikes—and that therefore unions (and their attorneys) are likely to be more cautious.
But the Court did not do what many had feared it would do in this case: overrule longstanding precedent that employers generally cannot sue unions in state court over activities—like strikes—covered by the National Labor Relations Act.
Instead, it found that this case fell under an already-existing exception for intentional damage to employer property or failure to take reasonable precautions to prevent such damage.
Workers and unions are right to be furious at this ruling. But we should be careful not to sensationalize or overstate it—which could do more damage to the right to strike than the ruling itself does, by making workers scared to exercise it.
“American workers must remember that their right to strike has not been taken away,” said Teamsters President Sean O’Brien in response to the ruling. “All workers, union and nonunion alike, will forever have the right to withhold their labor.” His statement went on:
The Teamsters will strike any employer, when necessary, no matter their size or the depth of their pockets. Unions will never be broken by this Court or any other.
Today’s shameful ruling is simply one more reminder that the American people cannot rely on their government or their courts to protect them. They cannot rely on their employers.
We must rely on each other. We must engage in organized, collective action. We can only rely on the protections inherent in the power of our unions.
The question the Supreme Court considered in the Glacier case was whether the employer could sue Teamsters Local 174 in state court over damages caused by a strike when ready-mix concrete was allegedly left to harden in trucks.
Prior court cases say that an employer can’t sue a union in state court over activity arguably covered by the National Labor Relations Act. Instead, the employer has to go to the National Labor Relations Board.
The Supreme Court did not order the trial court to decide against the union, just that the case be allowed to proceed. And it left open the possibility for the state courts to dismiss the case again.
There is an exception, though, if striking employees intentionally damage employer property or don’t take reasonable precautions to protect employer property. For example, in one case, employees walked out of a foundry when molten iron was ready to be poured—which the court found could have caused substantial property damage.
This exception is narrow: property damage that is intentional or caused by a lack of reasonable precautions. It doesn’t include things like economic losses due to temporary closure of a store or factory, strawberries rotting in the field because farmworkers are on strike, or milk going sour in the fridge because baristas have walked out.
The trial court in Washington state dismissed Glacier’s claim because it found that the Teamsters’ strike action was arguably protected under the National Labor Relations Act. The Washington State Supreme Court affirmed.
The United States Supreme Court has now overruled that decision and sent the case back to the trial court, because it says that—assuming the facts alleged in the employer’s complaint are true—the union did not take reasonable precautions to prevent concrete from hardening.
The Supreme Court did not order the trial court to decide against the union, just that the case be allowed to proceed. And it left open the possibility for the state courts to dismiss the case again, depending on what the NLRB does about a pending unfair labor practices complaint against Glacier related to the same strike.
The NLRB issued its complaint against Glacier after the Washington State Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of the state court case. The U.S. Supreme Court explicitly did not rule on whether the lawsuit would have been preempted if the NLRB had issued the complaint earlier.
Depending on how future cases play out in state and federal court, Glacier could end up being a relatively small change to labor law or another in an escalating series of court decisions chipping away at the right to strike.
Already the laws are stacked against powerful strikes. Employers routinely obtain injunctions limiting where and how many strikers can picket; economic strikers can be permanently replaced; secondary targets often can’t be picketed; and so on.
Comparisons to other areas of law, like abortion rights, are useful. Roe v. Wade was not overturned in one night. It took nearly 50 years of legal battles in which courts questioned and undermined Roe v. Wade, until a conservative majority finally overruled it.
Similarly, right-wing attorneys and judges will try to build on Glacier to expand employers’ ability to sue unions. But for the moment, the labor movement may have dodged a bullet.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Greed is good, actually. At least that’s the journalistic line the Wall Street Journal has decided to take, with a recent headline (5/25/23) reading, “‘Greedflation’ Is Real—and Probably Good for the Economy.”
To refresh your memory, “greedflation” is the idea that corporate profiteering has contributed to inflation—a thesis that was, up until recently, generally downplayed or outright ridiculed by the media (New York Times, 1/3/22, 6/11/22; Bloomberg, 5/19/22, Washington Post, 5/12/22). As Axios (5/18/23) summarized earlier this month, however:
Once dismissed as a fringe theory, the idea that corporate thirst for profits drives up inflation, aka “greedflation,” is now being taken more seriously by economists, policymakers and the business press.
The change in tenor was captured by Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein on Twitter (5/26/23):
As recently as February, the Wall Street Journal (2/14/23) had completely ignored the role of corporate profiteering in a piece on rising prices for breakfast staples, blaming supply shocks instead. Writing for FAIR (2/21/23), Luca GoldMansour pointed out that the piece completely ignored strong evidence of price gouging by egg producers.
Now, in a piece by columnist Jon Sindreu, the Journal is changing its tune by recognizing the importance of profiteering. But instead of criticizing the practice, it’s celebrating it.
The Journal (5/25/23) provided a useful graph showing that corporate profits have contributed far more to price increases than in the past. Businesses have enjoyed historically high profit margins over the last several years, as supply shocks have provided them with ready excuses to hike up prices with little resistance from consumers.
In the column, which was published in the paper’s “Heard on the Street” section, Sindreu argues:
A bit of corporate greed may be helping the fight against recession…. Yes, inflation may be higher as a result of corporations flexing their pricing muscle. But it is probably also the reason why the recession everyone expects always seems to be six months away.
All this amounts to is a sleight of hand. As Sindreu admits towards the end of the piece, what’s actually saved the economy from a downturn is not corporate profits, but “the surprisingly strong spending patterns seen during and since the pandemic.” People keep spending money; the economy keeps chugging along.
You might say that exceptionally high corporate profits are a reflection of this strong spending—in which case spending would still be the reason why we have avoided a recession, and high profits would just be an outcome of that spending—but even that is misleading.
As Sindreu notes, “Companies, which in normal times are wary of angering customers with big price changes, seem to have seized on the excuse of generalized inflation to shield their margins.” Basically, in an environment where inflation is rising, and where outlets like the Journal (2/14/23) are portraying price increases as simply the result of “a perfect storm” of issues wreaking havoc on supply, companies suddenly have more wiggle room to raise prices without pushback from consumers. The result has been a more substantial surge in profit margins than we would have seen had companies not had ready excuses for their price hikes (Bloomberg, 3/9/23).
Thus, rather than simply being an indicator of a strong economy, the high profit margins we have seen throughout the pandemic years have reflected companies’ success in capitalizing on well-publicized supply shocks to redistribute consumers’ income to themselves—aided and abetted by a media eager to insist that no such thing was happening.
A business owner tells Bloomberg (3/9/23) that any national news event can be “an opportunity to increase the prices without getting a whole bunch of complaining from the customers.”
This point is made firmly by the advocacy group Farm Action in its January 2023 letter to the Federal Trade Commission on price-gouging by egg producers. After examining the evidence that supply issues could not explain the more than doubling of egg prices between 2021 and 2022—crucially, the fact that “the industry’s quarterly egg production experienced no substantial decline in 2022 compared to 2021”—the group’s letter concludes:
In the end, what Cal-Maine Foods and the other large egg producers did last year—and seem to be intent on doing again this year—is extort billions of dollars from the pockets of ordinary Americans through what amounts to a tax on a staple we all need: eggs.
And this sort of profiteering is not limited to the egg business; other industries have adopted the strategy of jacking up prices and seeing what the consumer will accept. Take Wingstop, which has continued pushing up prices for wings even as the price of wholesale wings has declined. As Bloomberg (3/9/23) notes, “The chain’s profit margins are up, and its stock has soared almost 250% from the low it hit during the depths of the Covid-sparked market rout in early 2020.”
That is greedy. It’s hard to see how it’s good for the economy.
Sindreu wants the wealthy to be able to defend themselves against claims that they have been rewarded excessively in the midst of inflation:
As for the political optics, investors should push back against notions that income distribution is the simple result of a power struggle between capital and labor. Profit margins need two to tango: Corporations have successfully increased prices only because—unlike in the 1970s—the rest of the economy has kept spending.
You see: If companies successfully dupe consumers into accepting price increases above and beyond their cost increases, while media spread word of supply chain issues and downplay the possibility of corporate profiteering, then who’s really at fault? Forget all that talk about class struggle, let me introduce you to victim-blaming.
The Wall Street Journal (3/2/23) sees wage growth as bad, even though it’s much more closely tied than profits to the consumer spending that it says is saving the economy—because the paper sees itself as being on Team Owner and not on Team Worker.
Notably, the way the Journal has decided to frame profit growth in this piece is completely different from how it and the rest of the media tend to frame wage growth. In the case of profit growth, the Journal tells us it’s actually good, because it’s supposedly helping stave off recession.
In the case of wage growth, by contrast, the media has consistently told us it’s bad, because it pushes up inflation:
But profit growth has also pushed up inflation. And while it’s true that wage growth has contributed to inflation (in a very mild way), wage growth has also helped stave off a recession, and has done so in a much more obvious way than profit growth has.
Strong consumer spending—the very factor that, by the Journal’s own admission, is preventing an economic downturn—has been possible partially due to strong wage growth. Rising wages give people greater purchasing power, which they can then exercise to keep the economy afloat. On the other hand, rising profits, at least in the context of the last couple years, have facilitated a redistribution of income away from consumers, draining them of purchasing power.
But the Journal says, Never mind that! Profit growth good. Wage growth bad. Why? Because high profit growth helps prevent a recession. (Forget about the fact that it’s also pushing up inflation.) And high wage growth drives up inflation. (Forget about the fact that it’s also helping prevent a recession.) See if you can spot the contradiction.
Maybe greed is good. Maybe the Journal has things exactly right. Maybe a newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch isn’t siding with his fellow billionaires over the vast majority of its readers.
Or maybe not.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Wall Street Journal at wsjcontact@wsj.com (or via Twitter: @WSJ) Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
FEATURED IMAGE: The Wall Street Journal (5/25/23) illustrated its defense of “greedflation” with a photo of an outlet for Ralph Lauren, which raised prices an average of 12% despite already sky-high profit margins.
The post WSJ Says Corporate Profiteering Is Good, Actually appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
UPS is a patriarchal corporation – on the corporate and labor side. Whether it’s sexual harassment or pregnancy discrimination, women at UPS confront particular workplace issues because of their gender. We spoke with Michelle Espinoza, a feeder driver out of Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis, about the gender discrimination she’s battled at the company and the work she’s doing to help other Teamster women.
Additional links/info below…
Show Notes
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
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity
Teddy Ostrow: Hello my name is Teddy Ostrow. Welcome to the Upsurge, a podcast about UPS, the Teamsters, and the future of the American labor movement.
For this bonus episode, I interviewed Michelle Espinoza, a semi-truck driver (or feeder driver in UPS parlance) out of Teamsters Local 135 in Indianapolis.
You may remember the story of Local 135 from episode 3. That is the local where rank and file pushed for a leadership change with the help of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. It’s an inspiring story and you should go back and listen if you like.
But I spoke to Michelle because of her experience and organizing as a woman at UPS.
As you might imagine, UPS is a male-dominated corporation, both on the corporate side and on the union/worker side.
And like across all institutions of our society, there are structural obstacles, challenges, prejudices, issues that women uniquely face at UPS. You could say the same thing about non-white and particularly Black UPSers, as well as LGBTQ+ UPSers.
There is a long history of women organizing at UPS that we can’t fully cover here. I’ll throw some links in the show notes that you should definitely check out. That includes the group UPSurge. Yes, UPSurge, which was a largely women-led militant group in 1970s pushing for a fair contract at UPS, members of which eventually merged into the movement we all know Teamsters for a Democratic Union.
And also I will include some links about some high profile issues women, particularly pregnant women, have faced at UPS, one such legal case even reached the Supreme Court.
But this episode is focusing on Michelle’s unique but also not so unique experience as a Black woman at the company, and that includes what she’s doing to organize and educate other women in the workplace.
Michelle Espinoza, welcome to the Upsurge.
Michelle Espinoza: Hi Teddy. Thank you for having me.
Teddy Ostrow: I’d love to hear you introduce yourself. How’d you come to UPS? What you do there, you know, how long you’ve been there, your local, those kinds of things.
Michelle Espinoza: Michelle Espinoza is my name. I have been with UPS for eight years now.
I’m currently a feeder driver, which means I drive the semi trucks. Prior to that I did package car driving. Prior to that I worked in the hub, at one of our local UPS facilities. It was a huge career change for me. I came from the hotel and retail management industry. So eight, nine years in, I’m still pretty new to the gang because a lot of UPSs are 25, 30 year employees.
I kind of got baptized by fire, got my feet wet quick, and here I am.
Teddy Ostrow: So as I understand it, you, your husband and your son, all of you guys work at UPS—you’re like a UPS family?
Michelle Espinoza: We are a UPS family; it’s my husband, myself and we have two daughters that are also UPSers. Our son is not a UPSer at this time. Not yet. But we have two daughters. One is a feeder driver along with us, which means she drives a semi as well. My husband is a feeder driver as well.
And we have a daughter that works inside of one of our main hubs here in Indianapolis.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. Really a family affair full of Teamsters. That’s so cool. I approached you initially at the TDU Convention in Chicago because I heard you speak before hundreds of people.
You responded to Sean O’Brien. You posed a question directly, mentioning some of the issues that specifically women at UPS were dealing with. Then we talked, and you kind of walked me through your journey at UPS and the obstacles you were forced to navigate because of your gender, your identity.
I want to get into your specific story, but first maybe we could start a little, generally: What are the specific gendered issues that women are having at the company?
Michelle Espinoza: Sure. These are my opinions, but I also gather information like this from other UPS women. I have a Facebook group of, I think we’ve reached about 8,500 women at this point, so it’s my experience and information that I get from them.
So, some of the things that I’ve had to deal with working in a smaller hub: initially, it was all men except for three women. Well, drivers anyway. As you’re going through a small hub like that, and it’s majority male, you can only imagine some of the male type of comments that may come past a female.
Anything that you can think about, probably it gets said to you and they like to pass it off as joking, but after a while, if you don’t develop tough enough skin, it can really get to you and tear you down.
A lot of the women deal with pregnancy issues, breastfeeding issues, how to navigate, how to cope. We have women in all facets of UPS careers, whether they’re working in the hub, whether they’re driving a package car, delivering packages to your home or driving the semi trucks.
So we hear a lot of different stories that women go through, even down to how a woman should dress working inside the hub. So we have to navigate [things] carefully. We have a few more landmines that we have to avoid that the men don’t. We just kind of try to stick together and help answer each other’s questions so that we can get through it.
Teddy Ostrow: Is it pretty rare for women to hold the feeder driver position? Can you tell me a bit about who works what job?
Michelle Espinoza: Being a woman in UPS, whatever your job is, you’re gonna be the minority.
The feeder department is the top of the line job that you could have for UPS. It used to take, in our area, 10 years or more to start in the hub and make your way up into the feeder department. My path and my daughter’s path was much quicker because the demand for semi drivers is so great.
Across the country, we’re experiencing a demand for semi drivers, but right here in Indianapolis, our workload has doubled or tripled. Like I said, I’ve just been in the feeder department for five years now, six years. Before that I worked a package car in the hub, so that would make my total eight years.
My daughter got hired in February of 2020, I believe. As she got hired, she was able to come into the feeder department six months later.
That is normally unheard of, but because of the need for drivers, that was her story. She was able to move much quicker to get into this high paying job.
Teddy Ostrow: Yeah, I’ve never heard of anything like that. That’s pretty incredible. Maybe you could bring us through your journey at UPS, and as I understand, throughout your time you’ve had to file grievances. You fought the company, you fought the previous administration of your local union.
Let’s start at the beginning of when you tried to rise through the ranks and started seeing obstacles; and what you did about that. So maybe we can start with when you were in the hub, trying to become a package car driver?
Michelle Espinoza: When I started in the hub, here in Indianapolis, I was at a very small hub. They called our hub the country club, because it was so small and full of men and they had everything situated the way that they like it. I came in as a seasonal worker.
I came in just as a Christmas helper where I would ride with a driver that delivered packages to homes and I would hop out, deliver a few at homes and hop back in. He’d drive a little bit, he’d give me some more. I’d jump out. Run the packages to the door, scan them, ring the doorbell, and then jump back in.
That was what my seasonal work as a helper looked like. At the completion of that season, I got hired on, it’s called permanent part-time, in the hub. So I started off, when the semis would pull in, I was unloading and loading those semis with the packages. Then as you progress, you move into loading the package cars or unloading them.
I did that for a little while and then I was able to qualify for what they call a premium hub job, where I moved into ‘small sort’, which is what they call it;. [sorting] packages you can hold with one hand or two hands that are smaller.
I was moving those through the building, putting them in bags and sending ’em on their way so that they could get loaded into trucks, and so forth. Then, I got word that my building needed to hire an early morning delivery person to get packages that had to be out before 9:00 AM delivered.
I thought I would be interested in that. So I signed up. That was the first fight. Because what I didn’t realize that was I was taking that early morning work from the head union steward at the building. If he came in early to do those early deliveries, he got paid time and a half—it’s a significant amount of money. With what they make, and he had been doing it probably three years at this point. So even though I had been awarded the job, it took three, four months for me to fight to get to actually do the job.
And mind you, it’s a pay increase when you move into something like that. But I had to fight him and my union hall to actually get the job and start doing it. I had to make phone calls to corporate people with UPS waving the flag saying, “Hey, I got the bid, it says I should have been able to start within 30 days. Help me.”
So finally I got that. They liked me delivering those little quick packages. So then the opportunity came to become a part-time delivery person in their hub; I would work in the hub part of the day and then deliver another part of the day.
So that’s when we get into, “Oh, well if you want to be more like a part-time or full-time package car driver for us, you’re gonna have to go to inter grad.” Inter grad is like a package car UPS driver bootcamp. No one in that building had ever been required to go to inter grad.
But when I come along and sign the list that I want to become one of your regular package car drivers, guess who has to go to UPS boot camp? So even getting the opportunity to get to the bootcamp, even though no one else had to do it, I had to fight for that too. They tried their best to put a couple other men in front of me that they thought should want that job and should go to the inter grad. Well, none of them were able to make it. One guy who was supposed to go with me, we were supposed to meet at the airport to fly to Chicago. He didn’t show up, he chickened out and backed out at the last minute. So from my hub, I was the only person going.
So I went. And they had bets, literal money bets against me that I wouldn’t pass. I did. So I came back, and instead of crediting me the time I had already spent delivering their packages for them after bootcamp, they wanted to put me through the 30 day training period with them.
So now I had to go through another training period and pass their requirements. That means you have to run so many packages in so many hours of the day called “make scratch”, and they didn’t think I would be able to do that either.
Honestly, Teddy, I didn’t think I was gonna be able to do it. I was scared to death every day for 30 days, wondering if I was gonna get into a small accident or if I’m gonna be able to make scratch. Well, every time they gave me my route every day for 30 days, Teddy, I made scratch.
Teddy Ostrow: When, when you say that they were making bets, who, who was making bets? Is this other people at your hub, union stewards or who was making bets on you?
Michelle Espinoza: Drivers at the hub, other drivers.
Teddy Ostrow: And normally the male drivers don’t have to go to this bootcamp. After that, this 30 day trial period, is, is that also normal for people to have to do?
Michelle Espinoza: Being that I had passed inter grad, I didn’t then and I had already been driving for them. I didn’t think they would make me do it again, but they did.
After all of that, I became a full-time package car driver. Once I have my sight set on something, then they’re set. After I became a package car driver, I heard that going into the feeder department might actually be possible because they were gonna be putting the annual list up for anybody that was interested.
Well, I found out the lists had gone up at a big hub and a smaller hub, but it didn’t come to my building. But per our contract, it says it was supposed to. Well, they said to me, because remember what I call this place, it’s the country club. They have everything set the way they want to have it set.
They had worked it out somewhere prior to me that the list doesn’t come to that building. Only if they don’t get the drivers that they need from the other two buildings. The contract said when it goes up at the other two buildings, it’s simultaneously supposed to go up at our building as well. That was my first grievance.
“You violated the contract because you didn’t post it at the exact same time that you posted the others”. Someone with lower seniority than me may be having the opportunity to go into feeders and I haven’t even been able to sign the list. That’s my first grievance. It didn’t take too much for that grievance to get a win.
I don’t even know if the grievance even had to be heard because our human resources department actually agreed with me and said, we just never have put it up over there, basically, because they didn’t want it, they didn’t want to lose any of their package car drivers to feeder, so the list just had never gone up there and HR agreed that’s not acceptable. Contract says it’s supposed to be up, so the list goes up. This is what I start hearing from my, now we’re talking managers. “Well, there’s a pecking order. You’ll never make it, here, you actually can use my pen and sign it, but I can guarantee you won’t get the call.”
I signed it. There were specific requirements that said you have to have your permit by the such and such date. When we call you, you need to be ready to go to the class and so forth. Well, when that date came and went, the list came down.
I was the only one that had her permit and was ready to go. They did not let me go. They said, we need to give these other four men in front of you a chance to get their permit to see if they can qualify to go into feeders. That’s where the next grievance was filed. NLRB charges were filed and EEOC charges were filed because it was very clear what the bid sheet said the requirements were. I was the only one to have it, and they started giving these men extra time to get the credentials they should have had. Two guys were able to get the credentials. One, unfortunately ended up not going into feeders because he had to go to prison.
The other guy got over into feeders. His first week, he has a horrible accident and tears down electricity in a small community. Well then guess who they’re looking at again? Me, I get my chance to go into feeders. I passed the first round to get my CDL, and I’ve never had to look back.
The union hall’s angry at me. Union stewards at the old building, at the new building, they hate me. I’m a troublemaker. I had to be willing to risk losing my job in order to get the rights that my contract said were owed to me, and that was very scary. That was very scary, to go up against UPS managers, and against your union.
But the reason why that happened to me that way is because, my heart just tells me, I was female. EEOC definitely was interested in the case and the NLRB was too. I got a phone call from one of the top leaders of my union hall; he said, ”darling,”—that was his favorite word to call me, darling—“if you pull those labor charges back, I know I can get you into that next class.” And I said, ”sir, get me into the next class and once I get into feeders, I’ll pull them.” And that’s what I did, and that’s how I got into feeders.
Teddy Ostrow: Wow. It’s incredible how you had to navigate both issues and resistance from your union as well as the company. Was it hard to kind of, you know, not just lose it at people who are clearly trying to just stop you from getting what you deserve?
Michelle Espinoza: My adrenaline. I can feel it right now, Teddy.
Just remembering it all, I can feel my voice kind of shake. It was one of the most frustrating and agitating and belittling events that I’ve ever had happen to me. I would go into work every day, I would keep my head up. I knew I was right and just trying to hold my chest up, but then when I would come home, I would pretty much collapse in tears and I would cry to my husband.
We’d pull out our union books, pull out paperwork, pull up the internet, looking at information, reading everything we could read to know what’s the next thing to do. And it was scary because you know you have to pull these levers, but you know you’re going to upset people that could affect your job.
They could find a reason to fire you, and because your union is angry with you for filing charges against them, they could find reasons to not help you get your job back. So I had to tell myself, I gotta risk it all in order to win it all. And that’s scary and a lot of people can’t do that. But because I had my husband and he was our provider, I could play that game a little bit, in order to get what I knew I deserved.
So it was very, very hard. It was excruciating at times. It got to a point where I would be on the phone with a union leader and we’re, I’m cussing, he’s cussing. I mean, we’re yelling and I’d get off the phone and I’d come home and I’d tell my husband, I’m probably not gonna have a job tomorrow, but that never happened.
I finally got the call and he said, I’ll get you in if it was still a negotiation, but it was a game that had to be played. I don’t know what you want to call it, Teddy, but I got it and that’s why I’m here, able to talk to you about it today. It’s one of my passions, helping women navigate the sea of UPS corporate and union [politics], because it’s not always cut and dry as the book says it should be when it comes to some of us.
Teddy Ostrow: It sounds like you aren’t just fighting for your own job. Can you talk a bit about what you’ve done to help other people, and what you’ve heard from other people?
Michelle Espinoza: As soon as I got into the feeder department, [soon after], I had been asked to become a union steward.
The only reason I looked to be a good union steward was because of all the fighting I had already done. I had to memorize our contract. And I wasn’t afraid to argue and fight with the Union Hall.
I wasn’t afraid to argue and fight with the company. So when I came over into feeders and they offered that to me, I said yes. One of the first things I start doing was comparing apples to apples, my husband and my insurance packages. What do I have? What does he have?
I found out that I had a supplemental policy that he did not have, and I’m talking about a million dollar coverage that as UPSers we were able to get. I’m talking cents on the dollar is what it cost us. And he didn’t have it. Well, as I start digging into that, many, most of the feeder drivers did not have this coverage because they were more senior drivers.
Well, seniority is seniority. There’s no way a junior driver should have more than a senior driver. When I started digging into that and found out what they didn’t know, it literally hurt my heart. I don’t like when people don’t know something because what you don’t know can hurt you. So I filed a group grievance.
We got it all worked out. We had to fight for about a year and a half to get everybody who wanted that insurance to get it. At the same time as a union steward, I realized we have a lot of women that don’t have a voice, we don’t have an ear, we don’t have a space. So I said, I’m gonna try to create a Facebook page for the women at my building.
Well, I did that with the feeder department and then I said, you know what? This isn’t just about feeders. This is bigger. Women are the minority at UPS. So I had this crazy idea. Let me open it up to all UPS women—that’s union and non-union women. We shared this page together and that’s where a whole new family was born.
Corporate women management supervisors, union women, we are all on this page and you see them talking, sharing, helping, sending phone numbers. Hey, I can’t talk about that here, but private message me, I can get you some answers. It took off on its own to where I had to get other women to help me administer the page.
I couldn’t keep up with just approving the women cuz we make sure you’re a UPSer or one way or another before we’ll let you on the page. And we definitely, it sounds back backwards, but we keep men off. But it’s because the women, what we talk about are UPS womens’ issues that if we were to ask, “Hey, what’s the best breath pump that we can use while we’re out here on the road? What have you guys been doing to keep the milk cold?” We can’t ask that with all those men. You can only imagine the jokes that would go if we were asked that question over there. But on our page, we talk about what we need. And that’s where I learned so much about how I’m not the only woman that’s had to be shorted or fight, or, the sad part is women are afraid to fight because many of them are the sole provider for their household, so they can’t risk losing their job to get what they deserve.
So, just trying to educate the women. I always try to tell ’em, educate yourself to make yourself equal. What you don’t know can hurt you. So I tell them, get your contracts, read your information. Get on a UPS site. Read what corporate wants to have for you. Put it all together with the union contract and then go demand it.
And we just kinda walk each other through it. Some women just will never be as tenacious as someone like me and put up that kind of fight for herself. But sometimes those that can’t, we just kind of try to give them support, encouragement, the best way we can. But that’s what the page is for and that’s how I call myself trying to help other people within UPS; just learning how to navigate and how to play the game.
Teddy Ostrow: Last time we spoke, you mentioned also starting a women’s caucus at your local. I know that those exist at different locals, and perhaps at the international level as well. Has there been any progress on that?
And alsom how some of these issues that women specifically face, have people tried to try to fold that into the current contract campaign that’s happening at UPS right now?
Michelle Espinoza: We haven’t had to focus on it as far as the contract campaign, but I am proud to say that we will be having our inaugural women’s meeting. We are ecstatic to be announcing that and sharing that with sisters and hoping we can pack the house and start some education and find out what their needs are on a local level and start giving them education to help themselves.
Teddy Ostrow: So what is on the horizon? What are the things that you want out of UPS, out of the union, specifically for women at UPS?
Michelle Espinoza: I would think for my union, because it’s not just UPS workers at my union hall; I want to know other teamster women here locally in Indiana. I want know who they are. I want to know what they do. I’m knowledgeable about UPS, but I’ve learned there are sisters that drive duck trucks. There are sisters we have that are airline stewards, they’re our sisters. We have those that are daycare providers. They’re everywhere in Indianapolis, and I don’t know who they are. Our new leadership has taken the bull by the horns. We were so segregated before, each company to its own.
It’s like they didn’t want us to talk to each other because they didn’t want one to know what the other had. It might create too much pencil work for them. So they kept us separate. For my local, I want to know who my Teamster sisters are, and I want to get to know them on a personal level.
As far as UPS is concerned, that is a bigger, bigger, bigger piece to bite off. I would like to see my Facebook group grow. I think last I asked a corporate lady, she said we had an estimated 22,000 women in the UPS system. That was her guesstimate at that time. I’d love to see that page get to 22,000. Then I’d like to see, Teamsters do a Teamster women’s convention. I’d love to see, it sounds selfish because they can’t do a men’s convention because it’d probably shut down the company, but something that was initiated by UPS for the hub and the drivers. Something for women that we could grab onto that was from UPS that would bring us together, educate us. I would love to see more career paths laid out for the women; have them be a little more hands on with the women knowing that they’re the minority group within this company.
I’m a mother of four daughters, and I was a widow early on raising my children. The thing that I always focused on with my daughters was education. I’m not talking just in the books.
I always said if they were old enough to reach it, they were old enough to learn how to use it. So I believe in teaching women and putting information in their hands to empower them to handle their own life. Now, I’m a married woman, but I know the struggle of being a widow. I know the struggle of being a single young mom. What you don’t know will have you behind and I don’t like women being in that predicament.
Teddy Ostrow: Is there anything else that you think is important to get across to people who might be listening about the issues we were just discussing or the contract campaign going on right now?
Michelle Espinoza: We may consider ourselves a minority because we’re the lower number, but what I don’t like people to do is use that as an excuse to not fight, to not educate. It’s too easy to say, oh, they’re gonna treat me that way because I’m this, or because I’m that. I’m a minority. They’re not gonna pay any attention. It’s very easy to sit back and just accept that type of plight.
That’s why I say Teddy, educate yourself so you can be equal. Education is what will make you equal. If you don’t know, you can’t speak. I don’t care if you’re a woman. I don’t care if you’re African American, your sexual background; those boxes, they make us check to say what we are. We fit ourselves into those boxes, and then we stop working and we stop fighting. I don’t want people to do that. What you want, you have a right to have and you have a right to have the seat at the table.
And I tell people, educate yourself so you can go there and demand it.
Additional information
The Upsurge is produced in partnership with In These Times and The Real News Network. Both are nonprofit media organizations that cover the labor movement closely. Check them out at inthesetimes.com and therealnews.com where you can also find an archive of all our past episodes.
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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. You can find a link in the description.
The podcast was edited by Teddy Ostrow.
It was produced by NYGP and Ruby Walsh.
Music is by Casey Gallagher.
The cover art was done by Devlin Claro Resetar.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Janine Jackson interviewed the National Writers Union’s Eric Thurm about the Hollywood writers’ strike for the May 26, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
More Perfect Union (5/22/23)
Janine Jackson: Whenever workers find their employment conditions, or those of their coworkers, so difficult or dangerous, so precarious, or simply so unfair that they make the decision to withhold their labor in order to effect change, it’s a big deal, sometimes a life-altering one for individuals, and sometimes a sea change for an industry. But folks who have never been in that situation don’t always understand it, and some don’t try.
What looks like public support for the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America may stem from the fact that it centers on the people who write the TV shows and movies that help many of us get through this thing called life.
But does that mean it includes an understanding of the role that power, and the balance of power, plays in all labor actions? That could definitely be an added benefit, no matter the particular outcomes here.
Eric Thurm is the campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. His explainer on the writer’s strike appeared recently in GQ, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Thurm.
Eric Thurm: Thank you. Happy to be here.
GQ (5/5/23)
JJ: Labor actions in various industries are definitely perceived differently, by the broader public and by the news media that report on them. I think that difference stems, in part, from just a lack of consistent worker-centered journalism generally, but also from this idea of just, well, if you make more money than I do, I can’t see your beef.
In the case of writers, it goes up a notch; as with athletes, “You make money doing something fun.” It becomes almost, “How dare you?”
And there’s a lot wrong with that, but part of it is this laser focus on money. Pay is central, often, and why wouldn’t it be? That’s the literal currency of valuing work. But labor actions are virtually always about something more than that.
So take your time, if you would, and break down, particularly, those behind-the-scenes industry specifics that we as outsiders might not see, but should see, as the central issues in what looks like an important strike.
ET: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there are a couple of things that are driving the strike. One of them is that, for all that there is a popular perception that writers get paid extremely well, that increasingly is not the case.
And in the same way that it is, like you mentioned, for athletes or for actors or for a lot of other highly visible professions, there is a very small number of people at the top who basically have a winning lottery ticket, and just get paid extremely well.
But in order to even have a chance at winning that, you have to spend a lot of time in the trenches, with much worse working conditions, often even less pay, with a lot less stability, and in particular, an original source of stability, and the reason that a lot of people have been able to make a career as writers is because of something called residuals, which basically is an amount of money that you get paid when something that you worked on and are credited on gets used in another context.
Slate (5/4/23)
So that’s why, if you ever have heard people talk about syndication, or getting to a hundred episodes: If you wrote, let’s say, one episode of Friends, and when that gets to the point where it just is on TBS all the time, you get a check every time it airs.
And that functions as an additional bit of stability, particularly because even people that have been successful often have very long periods without working, just because of the nature of the industry.
And that safety net, I think as safety nets for people in all industries are being slowly dismantled, or as bosses are trying to dismantle them, that is a safety net that a lot of writers don’t have anymore, especially because the residual payments for streaming are basically nothing.
So in theory, you could write something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are watching on Netflix or Hulu or something, and you will see no additional money from that.
JJ: I think viewers understand that we’re watching media differently today. I can watch a whole series that took months or years to create in a weekend. And I’m like, well, that’s that.
As media critics, we don’t blame the people, but there are things that we don’t see that could be useful for us to understand. And I think residuals is definitely one of those.
And then, also, you write about something called a mini-room, like it has to do with the pipeline of how you grow and get work as a writer, that I don’t see, just watching TV, but is very meaningful for the quality of what I see.
Los Angeles (5/5/23)
ET: Totally. And that’s something that if you, like me, are a big nerd about this sort of thing, you start to notice people’s names popping up in different contexts and credits of things. And if you pay a lot of attention, you start to see that pipeline. But for a lot of people, it definitely isn’t visible.
So basically a mini-room essentially means a writer’s room that has fewer writers in it, and is convened for less time. There are supposed to be basic minimums in the WGA contract, and there are the minimum basic agreements that stipulate if you are making this type of TV show, you have to have this number of writers, and they have to be employed for X amount of time.
And that is also an additional source of stability, but it also is how people learn the business, and how people learn how to produce, or how to eventually make their own shows.
So if you are the new writer, which in a lot of respects is still kind of a misnomer, because by the time somebody gets staffed on their first room, if they’re working in TV, it’s very possible, if not likely, that they have been grinding away at a lot of other things for a long time.
But once you get that credit, you spend time around the showrunners and the people that are more senior to you, who know a little bit more about the industry, and you observe them.
A lot of the time writers will go to set to supervise on episodes that they wrote, which can be really important for a lot of reasons, both because it is useful training for the writer, but also because a lot of decisions get made on a snap basis on set, and the writer is the person who knows where the show is going, where the show has been.
Vince Gilligan (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)
I think people have this assumption that everybody knows everything about the overall plan of the show at any given moment, but if you’re the director or the cinematographer or even some of the actors, you don’t know that. And so things that might feel disjointed to people, if you’re watching something that, for example, has a mini-room, would probably actually be much better and make more sense if there had been a writer on set to be like, “Actually, this is where we’re taking it. Let’s make a decision that’s more in line with the overall creative direction.”
And that also is how people learn all the ins and outs of this stuff. And without having that, there just is no way for people to get better at their craft, or to develop any of the skills that people need to have in order to make any of the stuff that we like.
Just to give one example: Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and this stuff that people really like, worked for quite a while on The X-Files, and wrote a bunch of episodes, and produced some of the episodes, and then eventually ran this very brief spinoff.
And you can really see how those careers develop. People don’t emerge out of nowhere knowing how to run the small army that is a TV production.
JJ: It also sounds just a little bit like a lot of other workplaces, where management says, “Ooh, if you work 40 hours, you get benefits….so we’re just going to book two people for 20 hours.” It sounds like evading valuing people.
And one of the things that you wrote in the GQ piece was, “Emerging technologies will continue to be a tool for companies seeking to reduce the amount they pay workers (or to get rid of them entirely).”
And I just think that’s another issue where people are kind of shadow-informed, halfway informed. It’s not that writers hate technology, obviously, or hate AI, or don’t understand it, but it’s another part of the power relationship here.
Eric Thurm: “Essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”
ET: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the piece is that technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts, because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.
And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.
And so of course the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.
And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying as much as possible to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.
Washington Post (5/30/23)
And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.
I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.
Literally, just the day before we’re having this conversation, HBO Max rebranded as just Max, and apparently they have changed the way that movies and TV and everything show up on their site, so that it just says “creators,” and that will include producers and directors and some other people, and you don’t really know who did what, rather than saying, this was directed by this person, and this was written by this person.
And I think that that attempt to obfuscate things, and make it harder to understand the people who are actually creating something, is the entire point of how the studios are trying to handle this, and part of why they’re so interested in AI.
CounterSpin (4/7/23)
JJ: I think a lot of folks would actually be maybe a little surprised, and certainly disheartened, to know that bosses in creative industries act a lot like bosses in every other industry. The response has been, essentially, you’re lucky to have a job, you ungrateful whelp. There’s a line of people just like you I could hire tomorrow. And then, also, I thought we were all friends!
This is the line that Starbucks gives baristas who go on strike. There’s a lot of similarities across industry that might be more important than the differences. And yet nobody asks the CEOs, “Aren’t you a creative? Isn’t this a labor of love for you?”
This sort of general societal understanding, which I blame news media a lot for, is that a strike is an interruption in a natural order of things, and the workers who go on strike are to blame for any disruptions or harms that come from it.
ET: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely true. And you could have long conversations, or write whole books, about the attempt of capital and bosses and corporations to make their profit-extracting mechanisms look like these very cuddly or friendly things.
I think there’s, like you’re saying, a real direct line to bosses saying, “Oh, we’re all a family here, and we don’t want a union”—that’s somehow a third party, even though it’s just the workers—”coming between us and our little family.”
Deadline (5/8/23)
And even in the context of these negotiations, one of the things that the writers are asking for is these more concrete minimums for staffing, in terms of numbers of writers and the amount of time that people are in rooms. And the studio response was to say, this is an unfair or arbitrary quota that is, and I think this is the direct quote, “counter to the creative nature of our industry.”
And it’s like, OK, you’re not the people making the creative decisions. And if you were, right, I would love to see what these people came up with, if they had to try to write a whole season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something.
And it’s funny, I think that that actually is something that comes out of, or is impressed into a lot of, not just news media, but entertainment media. I don’t really know exactly how to fully extricate these things, but I do think that it’s quite telling that one of the dominant forms of media, that makes the most money and gets the most push behind it, is the workplace sitcom, the central thesis of which is that your coworkers are supposed to be your family.
And it’s extremely rare to see anything like that, where anybody really talks about the material conditions of people in the workplace.
Jacobin (3/11/22)
JJ: That’s a great point.
ET: That’s a kind of bugbear of mine. And I am cautiously optimistic about what will come out of the strike, and what will come out of what I think is a much more increased labor consciousness among people, both in these creative industries, but also more broadly.
When I was growing up, and I think that for quite a long time, the dominant Hollywood depiction of labor is, oh, union bosses, corruption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that we’ve heard a million times.
And I think that in a lot of respects, that really is a lingering effect of the Red Scare, and a lot of purges of people in creative fields. And it does feel like there’s been at least some recovery, or attempts to change that.
Even something like Riverdale, this adaptation of a previously existing IP that’s a kind of silly CW teen soap, had a really fantastic subplot in one of the most recent seasons, where Archie from Archie Comics forms a union, and they have all these conversations about solidarity, and about the importance of music and labor formation, and this stuff that I would never have expected to see even two or three years ago.
Washington Post (5/16/23)
JJ: I’m going to ask you one final and also hopeful question on that. I did want to just kind of cram in this Washington Post piece that fits this template that we’re talking about, that was talking about the last Hollywood writers’ strike, which you referenced, in 2007–08.
And the Post piece said that that strike
cost writers and other workers an estimated $772 million, while knock-on effects did more than $2 billion in damage to the broader California economy. Promising shows were hamstrung, promising movies were shot with half-finished scripts, promising careers were cut short.
And if that wasn’t enough, the piece went on to say that because of those darn strikers, TV was forced to go to reality shows and, yep, Donald Trump. So I guess the idea was, maybe think about that when you’re supporting striking workers?
I don’t even think this piece was meant to be mean, but it was such the template of “the labor action causes damage, the labor action causes hurt, and what went before it was somehow not causing damage, and not causing hurt.” And so you’re supposed to be mad at the interrupters.
And I just want to attach that, though, to the idea that we know that many journalists have internalized the idea that they aren’t workers, they’re independent contractors. They’re just individuals doing a job, and unions are kind of icky, and who needs solidarity until it happens to you. All of which is just to say that you see change there, besides the landscape, you see change in that mindset among writers, among journalists, a change in the idea that, no, we’re not workers, no, we don’t need to band together. You see something different happening there.
New York Times (6/4/15)
ET: Yeah, definitely. That’s something that has been really heartening for me. I’ve been in and around digital media for a little over a decade now, which feels really wild to say, but the beginning of that period, I was in college, and I had no real understanding of a lot of these issues. And I definitely, I think if you had asked me, I really did feel, oh, I’m lucky to be here.
In the intervening years, and especially since Gawker unionized in, I think, 2015, the rush of solidarity, and the proliferation of unions across digital media, has been really powerful.
And I think that that has been both enormously meaningful for the people that are doing the work, and then getting a lot of people who, like I think you said, would not have ordinarily thought of themselves as workers to see themselves as such.
It also has created this broader awareness that I think has led to much better journalism in the last few years, even places like Vice or the Washington Post or Business Insider, and these people who were able to get jobs where they can cover this stuff.
And I think that there are a lot of reasons why, a lot of lines you can draw between the strength of these unions and the ability to produce this kind of coverage. But that also has led, I think, to a much stronger sense of worker solidarity across the industry.
So I am really involved in the Freelance Solidarity Project, which organizes freelancers across digital media as a division of the National Writers Union. We have done a lot to organize in parallel with, and supporting, people who are facing similarly precarious conditions.
And I think that a lot of people, who before would have been like, “I exist above things, and I would never think of myself as being in the same position as someone who has a gig-based job,” I think now people are a lot more aware of the similarity of those positions, and a lot more thoughtful about what’s driving that precarity, and what we can do to stop it, which also is something I think that you see as the WGA strike plays out right now.
A lot of people who are unionized with IATSE, which is the union that represents most below-the-line crew and production staff, a lot of IATSE workers have refused to cross picket lines. And all of these things are part of what makes production possible, and it’s part of why so many shows have had to shut down.
The economic damage that you reference, that this Washington Post article is talking about, not only is it caused by the bosses, but it also is the direct result of people being able to stand in solidarity and say, we are not going to allow this thing to continue to happen.
And it’s been really heartening to me to see so many people say, “I am so amazed by the Teamsters standing with us. If they have to go out this summer, we’re going to be right there.” I think that’s so great.
JJ: It sounds like you’re saying, better solidarity among workers leads also to better creations and better work.
ET: I sure hope so.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Eric Thurm. He’s campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union; they’re online at NWU.org. He’s a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, FreelanceSolidarity.org, and you can still find his explainer on the ongoing writer strike at GQ.com. Eric Thurm, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
ET: Thank you.
The post ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on FAIR.
We hosted a Working People live show at The Real News Network studio in Baltimore on May 18. In this panel discussion, co-hosted by Max and Baltimore writer and editor Rebekah Kirkman, we speak with a diverse panel of worker-organizers from around the city about their respective struggles to unionize their workplaces, what being in a union means to them and their coworkers, and what all of us can do to support one another and grow the labor movement in our town. Panelists include: Dever Cunningham, MOM’s Workers United (Teamsters); Martin Yepes, Teachers & Researchers United (United Electrical Workers) at Johns Hopkins University; Leila Grothe, Baltimore Museum of Art Union (AFSCME); Andre Elkridge, UNITE HERE Local 7; Rachel Leeds, Walters Workers United Museum of Art.
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Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
Post-production: Jules Taylor
The transcript of this podcast will be made available as soon as possible.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
This content originally appeared on Human Rights Watch and was authored by Human Rights Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The past two years have seen a fresh wave of graduate worker militancy marked by bold strikes, new organizing drives and whopping union election victories. Indeed, the six largest union filings with the National Labor Relations Board in 2022 were all for graduate worker unions. Amid this surge, one union is showing up a surprising amount: the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
GQ (5/5/23)
This week on CounterSpin: Going on strike is something that people with no personal experience are comfortable depicting as frivolous and selfish. That extends to many corporate news reporters, who appear unable to present a labor action as other than, first and foremost, an unwonted interruption of a natural order. However else they explain the issues at stake, or humanistically portray individual strikers, the overarching narrative is that workers are pressing their luck, and that owners who make their money off the efforts of those workers are not to be questioned.
It’s a weird presentation, whether it’s baristas or dockworkers or TV and movie writers. As we record on May 25, the Writers Guild strike is on its 23rd day, and having the intended effect of shutting down production on sets around the country.
Eric Thurm wrote a useful explainer on the WGA strike for GQ. Thurm is campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. We hear from him about some behind-the-scenes aspects of the strike affecting what you may see on screen.
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of San Francisco.
The post Eric Thurm on the Hollywood Writers’ Strike appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
It’s been over 100 days since the catastrophic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train carrying over 100,000 gallons of toxic materials occurred in East Palestine, Ohio, on Feb 3. Since then, residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania have had their lives turned completely upside down. Entire families have been uprooted from their homes, with many having to live in hotels or wherever they can find shelter, unable to return home out of fear of exposure to chemicals that were spilled into the water and soil from the derailment and spewed into the air from Norfolk Southern’s “controlled burn” of the vinyl chloride contained within multiple derailed train cars. Even though government and company officials have claimed the air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink, residents have continuously reported negative health effects from skin rashes, headaches, and dizzy spells to nausea, diarrhea, shortness of breath, and mouth numbness. Farm animals, pets, and crops have been contaminated, property values have plummeted, local businesses have shuttered or are barely surviving—all the while, frustrated residents report feeling lied to, misled, disregarded, and abandoned by Norfolk Southern and by their state and federal governments, and their ongoing nightmare has been gradually forgotten by the national media.
In this urgent episode, we speak with Ashley McCollum, Kayla Miller, and Christina Siceloff—three residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania, and members of the East Palestine Unity Council—about what they, their families, and their communities are going through, how they are banding together to provide mutual aid for one another, and what we can all do to help.
Post-Production: Jules Taylor
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Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
Ashley McCollum: Well, I’m Ashley McCollum. I’m a resident of East Palestine, Ohio. I live about a block away from the derailment. I’ve lived there for about eight years. Life was normally slow-paced, really friendly environment. In East Palestine, we had church events, everything. Before that, I really didn’t do too much other than spend time with my kids, go camping, really be in the outdoors. Not too much of TV, radio – Well, music was one thing. But kind of slow-paced. Bingo on Sundays, hanging out with family and friends.
And the night of the derailment, whenever that happened, it was odd, because the first thing I heard was ambulance or sirens, and at that time it’s not common to hear in town. So after I heard the second round, I was a little bit alarmed. Me and my son jumped up and we looked out the front door, nothing was going on. But as soon as I opened the back door, all you could see were flames. It almost looked like our town was on fire.
My son started to go into a panic, and it happened exactly like how you see in movies. I got down to his level and I said, everything’s going to be okay. Grab what you need. I’m going to move the car around front and I’m going to grab our animals. He got everything together. I called my mom and told her to be there. She came out front and sat with my son while I tried to get the last of my animals. I have two dogs and two cats, so it was a little bit hectic to begin with and trying to wrangle them all up.
I started seeing people come out of their houses in a panic saying, what’s going on? I spoke to a neighbor. At that point, he said, this isn’t a normal fire. Can you smell it? I’m like, yeah, it doesn’t smell normal, just a normal bonfire or burn, it smelled chemical. It was really odd. I started going to different houses saying, you guys we’re probably going to have to leave, start evacuating. And they’re like, no, no one’s come and told us that. And the second I start saying that, someone comes around to tell us to evacuate.
I looked at my house, and I honestly thought that was going to be the last time that I would ever see it again, because I just thought the town was on fire still. I drove over to the neighbor’s house, going and following my mom to her home to stay at, and I gave her my number and I said, if my house catches on fire, please call me. Please let me know what happens. And she said, I will. At that point, I had another person coming over to talk and said, you have to be evacuated too. So at that point, everyone that I could see was being evacuated.
When we got back to my mom’s, we couldn’t sleep. We were up all night. My son still had issues even days after whenever we knew what was going on, him waking up at night and reliving it in his dreams. So the whole event really, really turned things upside down and has even affected him to the point where when he hears a fire alarm, he starts to say, no, not again. And he’s only six.
So we’ve kind of started growing and adjusting to what’s going on around us, whether we like it or not, and we know we can’t go back home. Even early on, I knew it would not be safe to go back home
Kayla Miller: My name is Kayla Miller. I live three and a half miles away from the derailment. I live beside Leslie Run, which is the contaminated creek.
The night of the derailment, I heard through social media that it had happened, and I had a friend staying with me at the time, and we decided to go up and see what was going on. And he works at NAPA right beside the tracks there, and he wanted to make sure that the store was okay, because we didn’t have a whole lot of details exactly where it was. There were conflicting stories.
And so we went up, and it was terrifying. The flames were massive, the smell, it literally took your breath away. So we went up and we didn’t stay extremely long because once we started smelling it, we knew something wasn’t right. Even though we didn’t know exactly what was going on, like I said, it took our breaths away.
So we came home, and like I said, I’m three and a half miles, so at that point in time I didn’t really think anything of it. I mean, yeah, it was terrifying, but I was far enough away, I thought. And then, I caught word through some friends and neighbors on Monday that they were going to be doing the controlled burn. And I actually have a friend who works on the railroad and he told me, he said, you have to get out. I know what we haul on these trains. You have to get out. So he helped me get out. I live on a small farm, but I have 100-plus animals and three kids. So I had to make really hard decisions that day and I took as many as I could in that stock trailer and we evacuated.
I think the big thing that really got to me to make the decision – Because I was not told I had to evacuate, it was my own decision – Was when I went, there was a road down from me, there were cops sitting at the end of it, blocking it. And I stopped and I asked him, I said, person to person here, I have three kids, I have 100 animals. If you were in my shoes, what would you do? And he looked at me and said, I don’t even want to be standing here right now. And we are ordered to leave at 3:15. And I said, enough said. I went home, and we packed up, and we left.
My animals went to a different place than I did. I went to a friend’s house and we stayed overnight, but I had to come back the next day. We came back the next evening once I had heard through the grapevine that everything seems to be calmed down and the smell wasn’t so bad where I was at, so I had to come back ’cause I had to feed the animals. So I’ve been back ever since, and I have smelled it a few times. I’ve been down to the creek and as of right now, I was just down there not long ago, it is still pluming with the rainbow chemicals and stuff.
It’s been a very crazy rollercoaster ride. My kids, it’s like the same with Ashley, my kids have had… When we hear sirens and stuff, they ask me, Mommy, is that another train? I’m still not drinking my water because my test results are still not back. Yeah, it’s been a very, very hard rollercoaster ride through all of this.
Beforehand, like Ashley was saying, we lived a simple life. I have a small farm, homestead, whatever you want to call it, live off the land. Teach my kids how to live off the land, raise the animals. I hatch chicks, and I sell eggs, and I sell baby goats. And now I can’t eat my eggs, I won’t sell them to other people. My hatch rate has decreased this year. And whether or not that’s just coincidental, I don’t know. There’s no way for me to know. I have goats that will be due here in July, and I’m hoping that we don’t have any stillborn, that we don’t have any deformities. I don’t know if it would happen yet. That’s the thing is, they haven’t been transparent with us, so we don’t know what the future is going to be. We have no idea.
So it’s affected my life in that way. That’s my way of contributing, because I’m a stay-at-home mom and my husband works out of town, so that’s my way of contributing to our income, and that’s been affected. So that part’s been hard, because it’s been something I’ve worked hard for.
I was born and raised here. My parents are my neighbors and they live in the house that I grew up in. So my kids are able to walk through the woods and go to grandma and grandpa’s. And people talk about how much do you think, Norfolk Southern, we’re entitled to with them? And as far as financially and… Honestly, I don’t care about the money, that’s not going to fix this. If they were to buy my house plus some, I’m still not going to be able to leave and have the same life that I have here. I have worked so hard to get this life, years I have worked to get this life.
So that’s the biggest frustrating part, is knowing it’s not safe. My kids have been sick for three and a half months. One gets better, the next one gets sick, and it’s been just a revolving door. I’ll have two sick at the same time. I’ve had them at the doctors, they’ve already put on their charts they’ve been chemically exposed. I myself have been to the doctors, chemically exposed. But they keep saying, everything’s fine, everything’s safe, your water’s safe, the air’s safe. They won’t even test for my soil. They knocked on my door asking to test my well, but they won’t test my soil, which makes zero sense to me.
And through all of this, I have joined a nonprofit called Soup Mama Official, and they have been bringing in donations from the beginning and continue to do so. They’re great people. And we have a supply drop coming up on June 3. They’re really trying to focus on water because we’re having a shortage of it and people can’t find it. And we’re even having a hard time finding it. It’s very frustrating.
With this whole experience, it’s been, you get a door that’s cracked open, it gets shut in your face, because you think that you have information and then something contradicts it or you get shut down. Our own governor actually shut down a benefit concert that we were going to have in Cincinnati, and he shut it down because he said that we are not in a state of emergency, we do not need donations, we do not need a benefit. Which to me, I didn’t even know was possible, because it was at a private venue. And this is the kind of thing that’s happening. And I’ve heard that a few times about different situations that the state is stepping in and not allowing things to happen.
I know of a water shipment that was supposed to come in and it got shut down by the state saying that it’s not an emergency, we don’t need it. But yet there’s me here who’s still waiting on her test results from Norfolk Southern and the Health Department. And I’ve been told not to drink my water until I get them, and I’m running out of water. So that’s what we’re dealing with, with the frustrations of it.
Christina Siceloff: So I’m Christina Siceloff, 5.9 miles from the derailment. I’m in South Beaver Township in Pennsylvania. And I found out about the derailment through social media as well, and had just put my son to bed and was laying there next to him as he fell asleep, and saw that the derailment had happened and it had possibly affected one of the gas stations in town as well. And immediately I jumped up out of bed, go tell my dad, who we live with, what had happened. And we went to look outside. We live in the middle of the woods. And when we went and we looked outside, you could see fire in the sky and you could see smoke through the trees as well. And immediately, we thought East Palestine was on fire. We went and started calling our neighbors and telling them… My dad, he said to the neighbor that East Palestine was on fire because we didn’t know what was going on.
All through the night till about 4:00 in the morning I had paid attention to social media because, where I’m at, we don’t really have access to cable, and so we get most of our news off the internet. And everything was just really crazy, and not really getting a lot of answers from the news aside from social media and people talking.
And so whenever the burn happened, I was getting ready to take my son to school. And I was even telling people, like, I don’t know if I should take my kid to school because I had heard that they could detonate some of the rail cars, and wasn’t sure if we would have a place to come back to once they did that. So right before I took him to school, they evacuated the school district – And he goes to afternoon classes – So they evacuated, that made my decision for that. But then I started thinking, do we need to leave? And I started looking into hotels. They were all booked up, and really we didn’t even know how far we should go.
We got evacuation notices on our cell phones, but they weren’t for us. So we still weren’t sure if we were in the safe zone. And then, when I ran up to town in Chippewa, PA, I went up there to go get food for our animals in case we were told to shelter in place. And when we were up in town, there were a bunch of police vehicles rushing around and they were shutting down some of the roads so that they could do their controlled burn. And when I saw that, it panicked me and I was like, well, I got to get home and we got to leave.
But when we got home, my dad… He’s lived here for 40 years, and he said, I’m not leaving unless they come and tell me to leave. And so I just kept waiting and seeing what news would come out if we needed to leave and contacting people, like family members or friends, to see if we could go anywhere to stay, and couldn’t get ahold of anybody. So we ended up, 15 minutes before the release, we decided, well, I guess we’re going to sit here and see if we get blown away.
And we stayed at home, and we’ve continued to stay here, because for where I’m at, there’s no help from Norfolk Southern. We’re on a private well as well. And we’ve been told in PA too not to use our private wells. And so we’ve been trying to use bottled water for almost everything. We even give bottled water to our animals, like our dog, cats, chickens. And we rely on donations a lot as well, because using that much water, it’s hard to afford bottled water for everything.
So before the derailment, I was just getting ready to look for work again, since I had my son and then COVID happened, so I stayed home with him to make sure he’d be safe. And my dad has medical problems too. So anyway, we went and I stayed home, and I was just getting ready to start looking for work. And I actually ended up having an interview somewhere when the derailment happened and I was like, I don’t even know what’s going on right now.
So once I called the place back to do the interview, they had said, well, we have a hiring freeze now and we don’t know what’s going on. So since then, I’ve joined with the Unity Council because there’s not really been much help for people in PA, and some of the residents here felt like we needed to get involved and try and get answers for our community and try and get help for our community.
And I’ve still not had my water tested. I’ve not had any soil or air testing done either. That was from the government I didn’t have any testing done, but we did have a guy from Purdue University come out and check our well water a couple weeks ago. So we’re waiting on results from that. But the Pennsylvania Environmental Protection had told me that they were not going to test anybody outside of two miles because they didn’t find anything wrong. But yet our representative has told us if we were on the list to have our water checked, then we were supposed to get our water checked. But since they told us that, they have also checked, and the DEP told them the same thing. So now we’re waiting to see if we can get results from Purdue and see if we can get some kind of filtration or anything to help with our water situation.
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 within In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
So as y’all have been hearing over the past 15 minutes, we have a really important episode for y’all to listen to, and I really want to ask that y’all listen closely, because we are very honored to have Kayla, Ashley, and Christina joining us from in and around East Palestine, Ohio, including the surrounding area in Ohio and Pennsylvania. You guys know the basics of the story we’re going to talk about here today. If you’ve listened to our past episodes with railroad workers, if you’ve been following our coverage at The Real News Network or even the segments I’ve done for Breaking Points in the past couple months, then you know about the truly catastrophic Norfolk Southern train derailment that occurred on Feb. 3 of this year, followed a couple days later by a “controlled burn”.
This train, as we know, was carrying over 100,000 gallons of petrochemicals, including vinyl chloride. The decision was made at the time to, as we said, conduct what was called a controlled burn, but what looked to all of us like a massive fireball from hell spewing plumes of black gas into the air for miles and miles around.
And we’ve heard and read about the horrendous stories of the fallout of this train derailment. I mean, it’s been over 100 days at this point. And what you’re hearing from Kayla, Ashley, and Christina, this is what anyone who still listens and still cares about this catastrophe – Which we should – Anyone who listens will be hearing about people still getting sick, getting rashes, getting headaches, shortness of breath, other ailments, people not knowing if their water’s safe to drink, if the air is safe to breathe, if the soil has been contaminated beyond repair, if they’ll ever be able to grow crops on that land again.
Property values, of course, have plummeted. So who the hell is going to be able to sell their house and leave. Or those who want to stay, what kind of situation are they left in when Norfolk Southern itself has ostensibly taken charge of the cleanup efforts, and yet, residents like Kayla, Ashley and Christina are not getting their questions answered from Norfolk Southern? We’ve heard horror stories of people playing phone tag with the EPA, with government offices, trying to get basic answers like, can my children drink the water? and being given the runaround, not getting the support that they need. Trying to get money to pay for Airbnbs or hotels so that they don’t have to stay in their homes, which many suspect are still contaminated by the toxic fallout of that train derailment and the chemical burn that ensued.
So like I said, we have talked about this catastrophe in East Palestine, largely from the vantage point of railroad workers whom we’ve been speaking to over and over again for the past year and a half, as you guys know. As you guys also know, many of those railroad workers, back when we were interviewing them over the course of the high-stakes contract fight between the 12 rail unions and the major railroad carriers last year, a lot of those workers warned us that something like this was going to happen. That it was really only a matter of time before the railroad industry’s greedy practices: the cost cutting, the staff cuts year after year, reducing the size of the crews on those trains, reducing the number of people inspecting the cars, inspecting the track, responding to distress calls in the dispatch office, all while making the trains longer and heavier and piling more toxic materials on them, while maximizing their profits and their shareholder payouts. This was always a recipe for disaster. And the people of East Palestine and the surrounding area are the ones paying for that.
And so that’s what we’re here to talk about today. From Ashley, Kayla and Christina’s firsthand experience of what has really been happening on the ground over there in the East Palestine area, what folks are going through now, what help they’re getting or not getting, and what we, all of us, can do to support them and to get accountability from this company, from these government officials, and everyone who has failed the people of East Palestine – And many people have failed them.
And so again, I wanted to first start by thanking you three for taking time to sit down and chat with us amidst this hell that you are living through. I genuinely can’t express enough how sorry I am that you are going through this, how unjust it is, how unfair it is, how unforgivable it is. And I know it’ll mean very little, but I did just want to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I and all of our listeners are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all, your families, your neighbors, and we’re going to do everything we can to get this conversation out there to make sure as many people are as informed and up to date as possible.
Now, I want to take a step back for a second, because y’all did such an incredible job with those introductions, really taking us back to that nightmarish moment on Feb. 3 and the hours and days afterwards. I want to, before we return to that moment, the immediate time surrounding the derailment, I want to take a quick step back before this event upended all of your lives.
Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and the life that you had in and around East Palestine before this derailment happened? What did a typical week look like for you and your family? What does this area look like? What kind of businesses are there? What do folks do for fun? That’s been really lost in a lot of the reporting, is that the whole area and the people have become synonymous with this disaster, but you guys are so much more than that, and your lives are so much more than that. So I wanted to start by honoring that and letting our listeners hear a little bit more about you all and the town that you lived in before this Norfolk Southern train derailment blew everything up.
Ashley McCollum: Well, like I said, we had such an inviting town and a great community to be in. I did the stay-at-home mom thing, took my kids to sports: karate, wrestling. So it was kind of the normal schedule. Hanging out with the kids. The weekends, we had a full house, everyone hanging out and different things here and there in town. We’d go and let the kids ride bikes, go to the park, and now we can’t really do that. So we had the normal basic kind of life. And I always refer to it as being a boring life, but no matter how boring you think it is in the moment, when it’s gone, that was the best life you ever had. And that’s what I’m really sitting in and thinking about. And you miss those silly little things, even, oh well that cart that’s here, I stubbed my toe on it. I would love to do that again. And I can’t even go back into my home because I’m afraid we’ll get sick.
I mean, even with school, my kids did really well, straight A’s, had no problems. So we had the normal, average, everyday life that everyone else has. And you sit and think this isn’t going to happen to you. Or you see things on the news, well, I’m in a safe area, it’s not going to happen. But it sure did. And I couldn’t even explain really fully what you sit and think. Like, I had this everyday schedule: wake up in the morning, take the kids to school, get stuff together, and now you sit in a hotel and really blankly stare and think, this has got to be a joke. There’s no way things are handled like this. I had it made. I didn’t live in riches or anything, but that was my life.
Kayla Miller: Before the derailment, pretty slow life. Stay-at-home mom. I have three kids: eight, five, and two. My husband works out of town, so I run a small farm here. I have all sorts of birds: chickens, geese, ducks, the works, pigs, goats. So a normal day for me, or normal week would be, get up, get the kids ready for school, take them to the bus stop – Because we’re luckily open enrolled. I’m in the East Palestine school district, but we’re open enrolled at a neighboring town – So get up, take them to the bus stop, come home, I have my two-year-old, get him breakfast, your normal everyday stuff, pick up the house, do laundry, take care of the farm. On weekends and stuff and in the summer, we camp, we ride four-wheelers. We like to hike a lot, especially around here. My parents have 15 acres, and I have 13 that connect to each other. So we have a lot of room to roam. My daughter’s really into forging and hunting mushrooms and stuff. So that’s something that we really like to do.
And now, I haven’t been on a hike with them yet this year because I really don’t want them out, because a lot of the time we would go down by the creek that is contaminated here and skip rocks and find crawfish. We haven’t done that this year because I don’t want them anywhere around it. And trying to explain that to an eight, five, and two-year-old is next to impossible. They don’t understand it.
And it’s gotten so bad to the point of… My kids are country kids. My closest neighbor is my parents, and they’re over 500 yards away and we can’t see each other. So trying to explain to country kids that you don’t want them playing in the mud puddles. And as they’re out here playing, I can’t keep them in, I can’t. I have an 800 square foot house. It’s not emotionally, mentally possible.
So when they’re outside, they’re playing in this stuff and they’re touching their toys and they’re touching the ground, and I have a two-year-old; they eat everything. Everything goes in their mouth. And the entire time you’re thinking to yourself, is this hurting my children? Is them playing outside, being children, is it hurting them? And that’s the thing is, we don’t have the answers because they’re not giving them to us. They’re telling us what we want to hear. And I say that in very literal terms, because they tell us one thing, but we flat out experience a completely different thing, and they expect us to trust them.
So my trust in our government, our officials has plummeted since all of this has happened. My anxiety levels are so much higher, because like I said, I’m letting my kids out to play and I’m wondering if I’m giving them a slow death sentence at this point. My biggest thing is, am I going to be able to see my kids graduate, or am I going to end up with cancer through all of this? Are they going to end up with cancer? Are they going to be able to graduate? Is my daughter going to be able to have kids? Are my boys going to be able to have kids? These are all things that are effects of these chemicals.
But yeah, we had a small town, slow life. I live out in the country, I grow my own food. I’m not doing that this year. I can’t put a garden in; I don’t know if my soil’s okay, they won’t test it. I usually do meat chickens, not doing that this year, because guess what? They eat off the ground. So our lives have definitely been turned upside down. And it’s a constant not knowing what’s going to happen, are you doing the right thing? And it sucks. That’s the bottom line, is it sucks big time.
Christina Siceloff: So before the derailment, my son and I, we had really just started getting back out visiting people – And he’s in preschool, so he just went to preschool this year. So just really getting out and starting to socialize with people again. But we would go up to East Palestine Park, and last summer we would go swimming up there, we’d go to the park and play, and other parks in the area as well. But last summer, we had a garden and we got chickens, started living more off of what we could grow at home. And so he was starting to learn a lot of that kind of stuff. And my neighbors, they’re pretty far away from us as well, so there wasn’t really a lot of people to play with in our area. So we would go to other places like East Palestine to have interaction with people.
But my neighbors farm… And a lot of that is just done for now. We’re not planting a garden either. Our chickens have had a reduction in their eggs as well. And so we’re not really sure if they’re going to continue to survive, even.
And since the derailment had happened, we pretty much stayed at home again. My son, he likes to go outside and play. But like Kayla said, it’s a lot of, you don’t know if it’s safe to be outside and play. And I don’t know if it’s safe for us to go outside and breathe. After being sick for three months, you wonder if you’re ever going to be better again. And when you go outside and you feel sicker, then it’s hard to say that it’s okay to go outside and play. And it’s not just at your home, it’s every town you go to around here that you feel sick. But still, we’re waiting for answers as to what is really going on. Because stuff just doesn’t make sense when you’re sick everywhere you go, but yet everything is supposed to be fine.
Maximillian Alvarez: I don’t know how you all are holding it together enough to say that so calmly, because I’m over here shaking in my chair. Because like you said, you’re all going through this, you’re sitting there wondering if your damn kids can even play outside or if that’s going to give them cancer. You don’t know what you’re going to be able to do with your chickens, your crops, your house, so on and so forth. You’re sitting there amidst an actual, massive crisis. And it’s like Norfolk Southern, the company in the first quarter of 2023 brought in over $3 billion dollars in revenue. The media made a circus out of East Palestine for a couple weeks and now they’ve moved on. Politicians, elected officials, people working in agencies like the EPA, who are supposed to be there to help, are not giving you the answers that you desperately need. Unacceptable is the most understated word I can think of. This is so beyond unacceptable. I don’t even know what to do with myself.
Kayla Miller: I think it’s gotten to the point where we’ve just become numb.
Christina Siceloff: I was thinking that.
Ashley McCollum: I get to the point too.
Kayla Miller: Some interviews I can do and I can hold it together, and then other ones I’m a mess. It just depends on the day. I don’t know. Yeah, I think we’ve become numb to it because we’ve talked about it so much and we’re screaming from the rooftops for help and it’s almost like a routine at this point. And it’s sad to say that, but we’re fighting so hard to try and get the help that we need and get the officials to do their jobs properly.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I forgot to mention that amidst all of that, trains keep derailing. Like we kept saying in our interviews with railroad workers, it’s not as if this one-off, horrifying derailment happened, but it was a freak accident. It’s like no, there were like five derailments in the next week, and they just keep happening. It’s not just Norfolk Southern, it’s all of them. And it’s happening all over the place. Yeah, go ahead.
Kayla Miller: There’s a train on fire right now that is 10 miles from me.
Maximillian Alvarez: Oh, come on! Come on.
Kayla Miller: Right now, right before we got on here, we caught word of it. It is 10 miles from me and it is on fire.
Maximillian Alvarez: Unbelievable.
Ashley McCollum: In our group, we found this out in our group because we’ve come together, our community, we were strong as a community before, but it seems like after all this happened, I’ve met all these people, I’ve met these two ladies from that. And we’re constantly communicating, because if not, no one else communicates to us or with us. Even from the very beginning and from their stories, they didn’t know. They didn’t know what happened, and they found out more information from media and different outlets like that. And even at that point, it’s not full information. So everyone’s just sitting and waiting. And I get to the point where instead of crying, I kind of laugh because it’s just so insane. It’s the definition of insanity, because we’re sitting here asking –
Kayla Miller: If you don’t laugh, you cry.
Ashley McCollum: And that’s it. And even in the beginning, even sending kids to school, and I know we’ve all had an effect with the school. We didn’t know if we should send our kids there. I went to a town hall meeting in the school and I started to get rashes. I sent my kids two days and they got sick. My daughter complained she was having issues and feeling dizzy and her head hurt. And then my son kept saying his stomach hurt really bad. So at that point I had to pull them out of school, and now we do online school. It’s just been crazy.
And the school’s not acknowledging it. The EPA’s… They’re not communicating at all about anything. There’s a little newsletter that goes out, but we’re not getting any kind of answers. And even with what they said with the chickens, now we just heard two chickens aren’t producing properly. And that’s something that the EPA should really be looking into, because that’s their livelihood. That’s what they do, that’s what they consume, that was something that we could do where we live, and not many people have that option, but we can, so we choose to. And if that’s decreasing, what’s really going on with our health that we’re not seeing yet?
Kayla Miller: I had three chickens and three rabbits die two days after the derailment, all within 24 hours of each other. They literally dropped dead. I also had two chickens that were having neurological symptoms that ended up… I had to take down.
And they say that it’s just coincidence. All of my animals are well taken care of and healthy, and to have six animals within 24 hours of each other, two days after the derailment die, come on, give me a break. And they’re telling us this is all in our heads. My stepdaughter, who was living with me at the time, has since moved out because of all of this. Because every time she would come outside here, she would break out in hives all over her body. Every single time she would come outside. My kid’s stepdad –
Ashley McCollum: My daughter couldn’t handle it either. She’s with her dad now.
Kayla Miller: Yeah, my kids have had diarrhea, breathing problems, respiratory problems. And like I said, it’s a revolving door. When one gets better, the next one’s sick. And it seems like when we spend more time up in town, because I have family that lives up there, we get the headaches, we get the diarrhea the next day. And even when we’re here, I notice if they’re outside playing a whole bunch, if one of them’s out more than the other, guess what? In a day they’re going to be sick. It’s almost become like clockwork at this point.
Maximillian Alvarez: Again, gaslighting doesn’t even begin to cover what you’re going through. But when you’re seeing it, you’re feeling it, you’re seeing it in your kids, you’re seeing your neighbors, and everyone’s telling you, no, no, it’s fine. It’s all in your head. It’s like, motherfucker, no, it’s not! – Pardon my French – But like, what are you talking about? This is insane.
Kayla Miller: You’re going to sit here and tell me that my two-year-old, it’s in his head? Because he knows what’s going on. Give me a break.
Maximillian Alvarez: Give me a break. So I want to be clear that I want us to finish off by… Y’all have mentioned how you, amidst this chaos and this tragedy, as a community, y’all have banded together, and you have been providing each other with the essential support, the mutual aid, the information that you need and you’re not getting from the sources that are supposed to be supplying it. So I want to finish off by talking about that and talking about what everyone listening around the country and beyond can do to support y’all.
But I guess before we get there – I know we’ve covered this in bits and pieces in the conversation so far, so please don’t feel like you have to retread the same territory – But I know folks have a lot of questions about what the hell has been going on the past three months. Y’all have mentioned those town halls, and we were watching from afar. The first ones that Norfolk Southern didn’t even bother to show up to because they feared for their safety [laughs].
Or again, like you, I’m laughing because this is so horrifying and ridiculous I don’t know what else to do. But I guess, could you give us a sense, from your vantage points, of what has happened in those three months? What are you experiencing? What are you seeing your neighbors experience? What does the cleanup look like? What are they telling you in terms of what’s available to you if you want to move or if you want to test your water, your soil? There’s a lot of those details that I imagine folks listening to this don’t have. So anything that you want to say to fill in for people, what has been happening or not happening for you and your neighbors in the three months since the derailment?
Ashley McCollum: Well, from the beginning they started doing air testing and they put up air testers outside. They were testing in homes, but they wanted us to sign an access agreement, which was very odd in the wording and allowed a lot more people than who was there to test access to my property inside and outside. I wasn’t comfortable with it. A lot more people had the testing done. The testing was so vague. It would say VOC, but we all know if you look up what a VOC is, that is a range of chemicals.
So there’s a lot that goes into it with the way the testing’s being done, with how we’re getting the testing. If the testing’s even there. I’ve done my own independent air testing, I have results for that. Some wipe tests. We’ve had other scientists or people come in and do testing for us. But without that, we really wouldn’t have the exact answers. And it’s definitely coming up different from what the EPA CTAC, Norfolk, anyone that they have testing is coming back to us saying. I mean, it’s kind of alarming. And now the air testing is no longer available. But we’re still getting lodging provided by Norfolk Southern, lodging and food, but it’s very specific. It’s to the person that they choose, okay, well, we’ll pay for your groceries for this family, we won’t do it for that family. We’ll let you sit in here and argue with us and belittle you, sometimes laugh at you with your receipts.
I mean, to get a hotel is hard now because everything is booking up. They rent out things. Online, hotels, when someone’s going to travel over here, they book a hotel online, so they have no power over what’s being booked and what’s not. So we might not have anywhere to go, even if they’re paying for it.
I own my home, but I don’t want to go back. I don’t feel safe. If I can’t be in my house for more than a half an hour without feeling sick and having my teeth hurt and my mouth go numb and severe headaches, I couldn’t possibly live there. And the most they’re giving us is lodging, or some people they’re giving them rent. And it’s really not enough, because when they’re done giving this, where do we go?
It’s not okay how they’re doing this. And if they’re not going to offer testing after they’re done disrupting the soil and they think that it’s okay for us to be in a hotel, it doesn’t make any sense. So we can’t be in the area while they’re disrupting the dirt. But we can easily go back in without any more testing to say our home is safe. And that’s even what happened in the beginning. They let everyone go home before any testing was conducted.
Kayla Miller: And my situation’s a little bit different ’cause I’m a little further out. For us in Negley, number one, we are downhill, downstream, downwind from all of this. So it’s poured down into here. And we’re obviously outside the one mile. Like I said, I’m three and a half miles.
Since I live close to the creek, they did come down and I’m in zone two for my well to be tested. But not all of Negley has been able to be tested. So like she said, they’re picking and choosing. No soil testing down here at all. So like I said, they’ll test our wells, but they won’t test our soil. We don’t have public water down here. So we’re on our own. Filtration systems are expensive.
The biggest thing right now – And I know this is my side of things – I’m on the donations committee for the Unity Council because of the stuff that I’m involved in. But I’m involved with donating supplies and stuff that we need. And the biggest thing, like I said, is water. Because we don’t know… Even though they are testing and these wells are supposedly coming back negative for everything, I can’t even say that they’re coming back negative, because they’re not. They’re admitting that these chemicals are in people’s wells, but they’re under their threshold. The problem with that is these chemicals are bioaccumulative, so over time it’s going to get worse. So it’s literally a matter of when will my well not be okay anymore. And they’re also bioaccumulative in your body. So even if there is a low level, you’re still ingesting that. But they’re not letting us bring water in, and it’s hard to find.
And like I said, I’m involved with a non-profit, Soup Mama Official. If anybody that’s listening wants to donate or lend a hand any way they can, we are on every platform, basically. I am their social media director. So you’ll be talking directly with me unless you email, then you will be talking to our president. But anyway, yeah, if anybody wants to help, please by all means go on there. Any little bit helps. Just trying to get water. And we’ve also been trying to focus on food as well, because like we were saying earlier, we’re not putting gardens in this year. We’re not raising meat animals. So that’s going to be a big expense that we haven’t had to deal with in the past.
So our biggest focus, like I said, is food, water, and trying to make sure that this doesn’t go away. Keep us on your minds, talk to anybody that you can, keep the situation going, because as soon as we stop, losing attention, it’s going to be swept under the rug and we’re going to be screwed. Bottom line, we’re going to be screwed. Because when this stops being talked about, nobody’s going to care anymore to hear us.
Christina Siceloff: So in PA, there’s not really been, for my area, there’s been one soil sample done in my entire township. And a lot of the soil sampling that was initially done in PA and water and air sampling was up in Darlington, in the one- to two-mile radius that they set up. But down where I’m at, the DEP said they would not check our water. The Department of Agriculture will not check our soil. And for three months, I pushed for somebody to come and check my water just so I would have a baseline to go by. I’m not real far from Kayla, and so the creeks do run down my way as well. Eventually the water will be contaminated.
Last week I was talking to a guy from the EPA who had told me that before they leave this area, we need to put a demand out there that we have a water testing program put in place for our entire area for the next couple decades, because it’s going to be a problem.
So I think, like Kayla said, that we do really need donations for water. Some people as well, well, many people as well, need to be relocated. And there’s a group that is helping with donations for that as well. They have a GoFundMe and a GiveSendGo, and it’s East Palestine Off The Rails! And it’s through a doctor who is in town. They’ve been really great with helping with donations. They just helped one lady get out of town. With every $10,000 that they get, they’re helping somebody relocate. And so any kind of donation for them really helps as well. And one thing, though, is we do really need water.
And I think another way that people could help is also by reaching out to our governments here and pushing them to do testing that’s not just the EPA and the DEP, but letting independent testers come in and test for us as well.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I assure listeners that we will link to all of these sources that you’re hearing about, we’ll link to Soup Mama Official, East Palestine Off The Rails! so on and so forth. So if you want to learn more about those, please check out the links in the notes to this episode.
And one other bit of information to make sure that we get on the recording for everyone listening, news did break late last month, or maybe it was actually in March, late March, that the Department of Justice is suing Norfolk Southern over the East Palestine derailment.
I will link to this article as well in the show notes. But in a piece published by Politico on March 31 by Matt Berg, Matt writes, “The Department of Justice is suing Norfolk Southern over its February 3rd train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, last month, that spewed toxic materials and spawned weeks of furor over the Biden administration’s response. In the lawsuit unveiled Thursday, federal prosecutors accused the company of unlawfully polluting waterways with oil and hazardous substances from the derailed trains. The DOJ is seeking injunctive relief, cost recovery, and civil penalties to ‘ensure it pays the full cost of the environmental cleanup,’ according to the lawsuit. It does not accuse Norfolk Southern of negligence. ‘As a result of this incident, hazardous materials vented into the air and spilled into the ground, these substances contaminated local waterways and flowed miles downstream,’ the prosecutors wrote in the suit.
“Norfolk Southern spokesperson Connor Spielmaker said the company was, ‘working with urgency, at the direction of the US EPA,’ at whose request DOJ brought the lawsuit on, ‘cleaning up the site, assisting residents whose lives were impacted by the derailment, and investing in the future of East Palestine and the surrounding areas.’ ‘That remains our focus and we’ll keep working until we make it right,’ Spielmaker added, repeating a refrain that Alan Shaw, the railroad’s CEO, has said many times in his recent appearances before Congress, in which he’s apologized for the derailment.”
So I’m led to believe that part of this commitment that Norfolk Southern has made to the people of East Palestine is putting up a goddamn park or something somewhere [laughs]. Is that right? Isn’t that right?
Kayla Miller: He’s buying prom flowers and giving scholarships out, because that’s nice and all, but that’s fixing the problem. And if I hear him say he’s going to make it right one more time, I swear I’m going to throw the next piece of technology I have in my hand [Kayla and Max laugh].
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, again, like I said, I’m amazed that you aren’t doing more than that. I’d be [Max and Kayla laugh]… And so I just wanted to give that update for folks, because that is happening too. But yeah, I think as y’all have rightly pointed out, there are so many parties that have failed you all here in your communities. And I think one of the really, really effed up consequences of this that is trickling out to all of us who are watching is how connected the government agencies and Norfolk Southern are, to the point where no one trusts any of them.
And so when you feel like the EPA is taking directions from a billion dollar company that’s trying to cover its ass for what it did to this community and what it’s been doing to its railroad workers to increase the likelihood that catastrophes like this would happen in communities like East Palestine. When the government and the officials that we elect and we expect to serve us are showing that they’re just toeing the line of these companies and vice versa, and we can’t get the answers we need, who do you turn to there? That is a really, really distressing situation. And I don’t think people in government really understand how much damage they are doing. Or maybe they do, maybe they do, and maybe they’re just all crooked pieces of shit. I don’t know. Again, this is just such a dire situation that I can’t hardly wrap my head around it.
But on the very light glimmer of a silver lining here is that amidst all of this tragedy, amidst all of this chaos, and amidst this catastrophic failure of the people of East Palestine and the surrounding area, you all have come together as a community. You all found each other. You all are doing your best to support one another and give each other that aid that you so desperately need but aren’t getting elsewhere. So I wanted to ask if you all could say a little more about that. By way of rounding us out, how y’all came together, what that community support has meant for you all and the other folks who are involved in it. And if there are other things beyond what you already said about what people can do to support y’all.
Ashley McCollum: I would like to say Unity Council is something that we formed. Jamie was the main person that really got it together. We all spoke with her, gave her our stories, and it started snowballing into this big group. And that was another question you asked, about the meetings and everything. Jamie and I put together a meeting with the mayor and EPA member, and that really got people questioning things and asking more questions, and even brought up questions that stumped the EPA, or they said that, no, you’re right, that was wrong what we did. So that got us even more involved and more people coming to us and really making our group a lot bigger.
We just had a meeting yesterday, and we had Scott Smith, he’s been testing water filters in our homes, soil, anything he can test he is trying to test and get information out there. We have doctors helping us like Dr. Chai, like Christina said, these people have been avid and they’ve really been coming to our group.
Unity Council, we’re going to be doing a lot more, making it a lot more accessible to other people. We do have a Facebook group. We’re trying to keep the community together and not let anyone feel left out and giving the community a voice and letting them speak to the people they need to speak to or bring up these things that are not being addressed. There’s still so many concerns and nothing’s being answered, but we’re still not going to give up because we at least made a little bit of a ripple. So that’s enough. We’re going to keep going and keep going. I did encourage a lot of people to make independent GoFundMes for their families, because at the beginning we had a lot of pop-up foundations or people saying that they’re raising money for citizens of East Palestine, until it got to a substantial amount of money raised and it didn’t go to anyone.
So I started telling everyone, put on there EP or East Palestine and really tell your story. So then that way these people know exactly who they’re funding, where it’s going to, you can keep them updated on your stories. So we keep growing with this, and hopefully our Unity Council does do bigger things, and we plan on doing it.
Kayla Miller: As far as our community goes, down here in Negley, we’ve always been a very, very close-knit community to begin with. But I will say through this, I’ve had just about everybody tell me, they’re like, you’re the face of Negley, which is one of the reasons why I was asked to be on the Unity Council to represent our town. I’ve had them say, if we had a mayor, we’d vote for you. And that’s just because I won’t shut my mouth. I won’t give up. This is my kids’ lives and the other kids in our community, it’s messing with their lives. I don’t care about me. I care about them and their future.
But yeah, I’ve met so many people that I knew about but never actually met them, or I’ve gotten closer with people that I was just acquaintances with. And I’ve had volunteers, whenever we do our donation drops down here, we have a full semi come in and unload. And every single time I have called, I have had an army behind me. And that is an amazing thing. I have been so proud of my community and my town through all of this because we really have handled ourselves well and conducted ourselves well.
I helped organize our town hall down here because nobody was doing it. So I stepped up, went to the trustee meetings, started talking to officials, and like she said, snowballed from there. And we got a town hall together. We got every single representative here. They said it was the nicest town hall that they had been to because we conducted ourselves properly. It was very much policed that we didn’t do the name calling. We really wanted answers. We genuinely wanted answers. And even in the end of it, like they said, it was like the nicest one they had been to. We still didn’t get our answers.
So now people have been talking about wanting to do another one. And I’m hesitant because I don’t know if it’ll be conducted so well this time, because people, they’re getting fed up, is what it comes down to. But yeah, our community has become even more close-knit. Every single time I’ve called, I have an army behind me, and it’s been amazing. I’ve had people give me gifts thanking me, and that means a lot. It means more than you would think it really would. But it means the world. It keeps you going, because there’s days where I just want to give up. It’s like we’re getting nowhere, no answers. This is, it is what it is. But then little things like that happen and it keeps you going.
Christina Siceloff: My area, Jamie had reached out to me at one point in PA because I’d made some comment on social media about Pennsylvanians needing help as well. And nobody was doing anything here. Nobody was stepping up. And I’m usually a quiet and shy person. But after waiting so long, it was like, I think a month and a half I was waiting for somebody to step up, because sometimes it’s hard to do things with being a single mom. And so I waited, and nobody else was stepping up. And I said, you know what? I’m not going to sit here and watch my kid and everybody else’s kid be left behind and die.
And so when Jamie reached out to me, she came up with the idea to get in touch with other community members around my area, because where I’m at, it’s mostly wooded area and people live far apart from each other. So we decided that we would get a person from each of the surrounding communities in PA to East Palestine. And I was watching people’s comments on social media of, well, we need to do something to help our future generations. And I reached out to another lady who I saw she had three kids. And I was like, if you’re a mother, you’re going to fight for your children.
And so she joined the Unity Council. And then another lady, we reached out to her through comments that she had made on social media, and we all got together through that. And then the Unity Council, we’ve been sucked into it. Being in PA with just four people in our group, you don’t have a power in numbers. So we went and joined the Unity Council so that we would be stronger, because we can’t let Pennsylvania be left behind either. Because the plume went into PA. These chemicals, they didn’t decide to stop at the border like Norfolk Southern and the EPA think that they did. So we got involved with talking to each other.
And then I think that we’ve also developed a community in the Unity Council with everyone in East Palestine and from the surrounding areas. And I feel like we’re going to end up being stronger than what people think that we are. Even though we’re just a little community, we’re strong.
Kayla Miller: And to touch on that real quick, as far as the community thing goes, I also feel like on a bigger scale, like me personally – And I know multiple people aside from me – On TikTok, that is how I found out a lot of information. And like Christina was saying, I was not a very… To my friends, I’m a loud person, but when it comes to the public eye, I’ve always been in the background, do what I got to do, and it was what it was. But I made one video on TikTok about it, and it literally blew up. It had over 300 and some thousand views and I could not believe how many people didn’t even know what was going on. My video is the one that told them what was going on, and it has created a community on there. I gained thousands of followers for it.
So I think it’s helped us in our own communities, but it’s also helped us in our country as a whole. I’ve had a lot of people come and offer kind words and prayers, and it’s been a really nice thing to help with having that extra support system. So yeah, not only has it brought us together locally, but I think it’s also brought a lot of people together nationally as well.
Christina Siceloff: I agree with that as well.
Ashley McCollum: And for us being so calm and talking right now, there’s still things going on. We had just received a message that another person couldn’t be a part of a different interview. She had an emergency with her one-year-old, stopped breathing and had rashes. And everyone’s giving her prayers right now, and as calm as we’re talking, this stuff is just going on. It’s insane. Every hour we find out something new or something more traumatic.
Kayla Miller: It’s like I said, we’re going numb to it all. It’s almost like, okay, what next? What’s next? What else do they have for us?
[Echoing] What else do they have for us? What else do they have for us? What else do they have for us? What else do they have for us? What else do they have for us? What else do they…
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
The strike is back in Britain but the Conservative government is out to crush the unions. What lessons should labor learn from the 1980s?
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
Lasting labor victories depend on coordinating diverse strategies and building the relationships to sustain them.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
The GOP-controlled House is refusing to raise the debt ceiling unless Democrats agree to a long list of controversial policies. They want President Joe Biden to cancel his student loan forgiveness plan, for example, and repeal extra funding for IRS audits. One item in the House bill that Republicans passed last week stands out not only for its political divisiveness, but because it could increase hunger and poverty.
The Limit, Save, Grow Act would make it harder for millions of low-income Americans to buy food.
The bill adds stricter work requirements to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, more commonly known as SNAP or food stamps. Under current law, people younger than 50 who can work and don’t have young children must volunteer, work or receive job training for 80 hours a month to receive regular assistance. (Those rules were suspended during the pandemic, but will go back into effect in July.) The House bill raises the age of recipients required to work to 55 and makes it harder for states to waive work rules in areas with high unemployment.
Republicans and some Clinton-era Democrats have long claimed that giving money to low-income Americans without requiring them to work discourages them from getting jobs, creating a burden to U.S. taxpayers.
But a growing body of research shows that adding more work rules to SNAP will likely have zero impact on employment and will instead kick out a large number of poor people from the program.
A major study published in February from researchers at the University of Rochester, the University of California, Berkeley, Harvard and the University of Maryland found that SNAP work requirements did not boost employment or income in Virginia. On the contrary, they led more than half of adults in the program to lose food aid.
“The fact that [work requirements] don’t achieve the rationale behind the policy — to increase work — is pretty important,” said Adam Leive, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, who was one of the authors of the study. “And we found that it’s the people who are most economically vulnerable who end up leaving SNAP.”
Roughly half a dozen studies published since 2018 have focused on work rules for SNAP recipients. Three studies found that adding work rules has no real impact on a person’s earnings or employment. One concluded that it increased the number of hours people worked. Only one found that the policy increased employment — anywhere from 1.5% to 1.8%. The majority, however, found clear evidence that work requirements led many people to lose food assistance.
But even these studies had limits. They relied on government surveys to estimate SNAP participation, which tend to grossly undercount the number of people getting food aid.
The most recent study identified SNAP recipients and tracked their earnings with program data provided by the state of Virginia, which suspended work requirements for four years during the Great Recession, starting in 2009. Researchers tracked Virginians without children who were receiving food stamps before and after the state reinstated work rules in October 2013.
What they discovered was striking: The change did not lead people to work more or earn more 18 months later. Instead, it did “dramatically reduce” the number of people getting food aid. More than half of adults subject to the work rules in 2013 lost benefits because of the policy. They also found that 56% of homeless people in the program lost their benefits within 18 months, compared to 36% of all recipients.
Hunger and food insecurity have persisted in the United States for decades. Roughly one in 10 households experiences food insecurity, according to government surveys, and the rate is even higher for families with children.
Nearly 43 million poor Americans get federal money through SNAP to help buy groceries. It’s unclear exactly how many people would need to show proof of work if Congress raises the age threshold to 55 (the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs the program, only publishes data that breaks down participation by broad age groups).
The Limit, Save and Grow Act also adds stricter work requirements to other social welfare programs: Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Biden and Senate Democrats have vowed to block the House bill, so it’s unlikely that these work rules will go into effect at the national level. But many GOP-led states, such as Kansas, are pushing for similar restrictions locally.
The conservative Foundation for Government Accountability is one of the groups lobbying for these changes in state legislatures and in Congress. In a recent op-ed, CEO Tarren Bragdon warned of the potentially “disastrous” harm to the U.S. economy in letting so many people “get paid to sit on the couch.”
It’s hard to find evidence to back up his dire warnings.
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied new work rules in red states and concluded that changes to SNAP impact poverty rates far more than unemployment. The percentage of Americans receiving food stamps has more than doubled since 1971, even though unemployment is lower.
“At the very least, SNAP participation does not appear to impact employment nor serve as a disincentive to work,” Jonathan Coppess and Mark White wrote in their policy paper.
Leive, of Berkeley, wants to find out what other barriers — aside from work requirements — stop vulnerable Americans from getting food aid.
“The extremely large reduction in SNAP participation is not a good thing if we care about economically vulnerable people in our society,” he said.
The post Forcing more people to work for food stamps is harmful appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.
This post was originally published on Center for Public Integrity.
Washington Post (4/19/23)
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute.
New York Times (4/10/23)
Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.
The post Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone, Donna Murch on Rutgers Labor Action appeared first on FAIR.
This post was originally published on CounterSpin.
Despite the cold weather, dozens of workers and their supporters picketed outside the Marriott Waterfront Hotel in Baltimore in February, as they had been doing—and have continued to do—for months. The workers are demanding better wages and working conditions, which they say they are owed on principle—but also because of the heavy public subsidies their employer receives.
Andre Eldridge Jr., who has worked at the Marriott Waterfront since 2017, said that many of his colleagues live paycheck to paycheck and have to take on second jobs to make ends meet. “That’s just crazy,” he told The Real News.
Andre Eldridge Jr., who has worked at the Marriott Waterfront since 2017, said that many of his colleagues live paycheck to paycheck and have to take on second jobs to make ends meet.
Vilma Sanchez, a banquet server at the Marriott Waterfront for the past 18 years, said that the job is physically demanding and exhausting, requiring long shifts with few breaks. She believes that workers in such positions deserve higher wages.
The hospitality industry in general, including hotels like the Marriott Waterfront, suffered tremendous job and revenue losses during the pandemic, but it has bounced back in a big way. In fact, Marriott recently announced “record financial results in 2022,” including $2.9 billion paid out to shareholders. Meanwhile, hospitality has rapidly outpaced other industries in the country in terms of new hiring efforts, according to The Wall Street Journal.
However, workers argue that their paychecks are being squeezed in order to further enrich shareholders. At the Marriott Waterfront, workers claim the hotel has been offering smaller annual raises than other similar employers in the area, all while the regional cost of food and housing has increased by over 8% over the past year, as measured by the Consumer Price Index.
According to their union, UNITE HERE Local 7, which represents around 1,700 hotel, gaming, and food service workers across Maryland (down from 3,000 members before the pandemic), employees at the Marriott Waterfront are paid significantly less than other unionized hotels in the region. Banquet servers represented by Local 7 in other area hotels typically make $80,000 to $90,000 a year, while those at the Marriott Waterfront make between $40,000 and $50,000.
Marriott did not respond to an interview request for this story.
Banquet servers represented by Local 7 in other area hotels typically make $80,000 to $90,000 a year, while those at the Marriott Waterfront make between $40,000 and $50,000.
Workers at the Marriott Waterfront signed their first contract during the pandemic in November 2021 after voting to unionize in 2018, securing union job protections and a small raise. However, they have not received a raise since then, despite nearly double-digit inflation largely driven by corporate price gouging and higher prices passed onto consumers.
Amy Altvater, a banquet server at the Marriott Waterfront since 2011, told TRNN that low pay and decreased hours due to major renovations at the hotel prevent her from planning for the future. She says pay and working conditions have improved since the workers unionized, but the fight is not over.
The hotel charges a 25% service fee to guests, and workers receive tips that can range from $5 to $20 or $25 per hour. The first union contract gave workers the right to keep 51% of those tips, but workers are demanding a greater share.
Workers also claim that low wages force them to rely on public transportation or park far away from the hotel; combined with the fact that their schedules often require them to work late, some workers report being mugged as they walk to bus stops or distant parking lots.
Since opening in 2001, the Marriott Waterfront Hotel has benefited handsomely from public subsidies amounting to tens of millions of dollars’ worth in tax breaks. A Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) agreement with the city has exempted the hotel from $56 million dollars in taxes, according to a Real News analysis.
Tracy Lingo, UNITE HERE Local 7’s staff director, said that the whole justification for the subsidy was to bring good jobs to Baltimore, but the investment needs to filter out to the whole city, not just the harbor communities.
Lingo hopes that a recent contract approved by a 97% margin by workers at the nearby Horseshoe Casino—who are represented by Local 7 and other unions like the United Auto Workers, Teamsters, and IATSE—will pressure the Marriott to increase pay for workers at the Waterfront property. In the new contract, wages for non-tipped casino workers will rise from $14 to $17 within a few years.
Workers also claim that low wages force them to rely on public transportation or park far away from the hotel; combined with the fact that their schedules often require them to work late, some workers report being mugged as they walk to bus stops or distant parking lots.
“We’re saying to Marriott that we want to get up to the same level as the other hotel workers in Baltimore and workers around the country who have been winning unprecedented contracts right now,” said Lingo. The union resumed negotiations with management on March 20.
At an April 11 demonstration outside the hotel, Lingo told TRNN that, after months of bargaining, management has finally agreed to some of the concessions sought by workers, including a greater portion of gratuities, much of which is currently pocketed by management.
Lingo says the gains made during the negotiations were both testament to the will of the workers and the power of the public support they have received since they began picketing outside of the Waterfront Hotel in November.
“We’re standing firm in what we believe in and we’re not going to give up until we get what we need,” Altvater said.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Under the new leadership team led by General President Sean M. O’Brien, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters are re-introducing themselves to the bosses and to the world as a fighting union, and they are gearing up for their biggest test yet: the impending negotiations of the IBT’s contract with United Parcel Service (UPS). With UPS employing over 350,000 Teamster members around the country, theirs is the largest collective bargaining agreement in North America—and the current contract is set to expire on July 31. With national negotiations set to begin this month, Teamsters leaders are traveling to union locals around the country, mobilizing their members, and preparing UPS workers for a strike if a new contract is not reached on time. We attended an April 2 rally at Teamsters Local 25 in Boston (O’Brien’s old local) and spoke with folks on the ground about this new era for the Teamsters and what’s at stake in the UPS contract fight.
Episode includes interviews with and speeches from: Thomas Mari (Teamsters), Jane Fallon (Teamsters), Rob Atkinson (Teamsters), JJ Rodriguez (Teamsters), Fred Zuckerman (Teamsters), Julie (Workers United), and Sean M. O’Brien (Teamsters).
Post-production: Jules Taylor
Additional links/info below…
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Featured Music (all songs sourced from the Free Music Archive: freemusicarchive.org)
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:
Much more time. Who are we?
Speaker 2:
Teamsters.
Speaker 1:
Who are we?
Speaker 2:
Teamsters.
Speaker 1:
Who are we?
Speaker 2:
Teamsters.
Speaker 1:
That’s what we write. Awesome job. Brothers and sisters. This is what the Teamsters do. This is who we are. We are united more than ever before. And UPS better wake up and hear our call. Brothers and sisters is one thing that we do in Boston that is the secret formula for the labor movement. It’s called unity, and that’s what we do here. We are united more than ever before and we have a great program here for you today. We have the general president with us, we have the general secretary treasurer with us, and you know why? Because they want to come where it starts. This is where we get shit done is in Boston. That’s what we do.
Before I get into next speaker, I’m going to give you an overview of what’s been going on in New England. We’ve been meeting since January 22nd, I believe was the first day. We’ve met on eight different occasions. And I’ll tell you this, brothers and sisters, it’s actually disgusting. The company wants to come in and take away after you guys have killed yourselves for the last five years, given them the sweat equity is what you exchange for your contract every five years, and we’ve given them our sweat equity like never before through a pandemic that has kicked our along with everybody. So I got one thing to say to UPS. Concessions aren’t happening in New England. No concessions in New England. What do you say brothers and sisters?
Speaker 2:
[inaudible 00:02:17].
Speaker 1:
That’s right. What you got to understand is we put forward tons of proposals. We took every proposal that you put forward and we put it forward to the company. Company looked at those proposals and instead of coming in and saying they want to stick with what they got, they went the opposite direction. They’re going negative now. This company is doing exactly what myself, general President Sean O’Brien, general Secretary Treasurer Zuckerman knew was going in. We expect this. We don’t expect them this to give us what we want. We expect it to be a hard fight, brothers and sisters, but we’ve got your back because we’ve got the best negotiators in the country taking on UPS. We’ve got the best committee in the country taking on UPS in New England, brothers and sisters, I give you one promise, that promise is there’ll be no concessions. The concession stand is closed.
Jane Fallon:
My name is Jane Fallon. I work part-time at the South Boston UPS building. I’m a shop steward and I work the early morning shift. We go in about four in the morning and usually wrap up about eight or nine in the morning.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And that’s the side of the job that I think so many people don’t see. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about how long you’ve been doing that work and what that work entails, like that maybe folks don’t get the behind the scenes view.
Jane Fallon:
Right. Okay. So we get up very early in the morning and we head into work and some of the kids unload the trailers that come in with all the big packages and we unload them, put them through the process, and then we load them into the trucks for the drivers to deliver.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And how’d you become a shop steward?
Jane Fallon:
Actually, the union came to me and asked me if I would be interested in doing it. And I said, “I don’t know a whole lot, but I’ll learn.” And I’ve learned a lot and I love it. It’s empowering. It makes you feel like you’re a part of the system and you can help people out because some people don’t… Management will go after the quieter people, the people that really don’t stand up for themselves. And it’s nice to be able to tell them that you can come to me if you have an issue and I’ll try to help you and we can guide you in the right direction.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and that’s so important because as we know, so many people on the job feel like they have nowhere to turn.
Jane Fallon:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Right. And I’m just kind of blown away by the energy here. We’re obviously standing outside of Teamster’s, local 25 President Sean O’Brien just talked about the upcoming contract fight with UPS.
Jane Fallon:
Right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I was wondering if you could say a bit more about what you and your coworkers are going through. What are the sort of key issues that are going to be on the table during this contract fight?
Jane Fallon:
Well for us, we’re a part-timers. So we need a pay raise. The part-timers that really don’t get thought of too much and we get up early in the morning and work. It’s a tough shift. And your family has to adjust. You have to adjust. Typically, we go in at four and work till maybe eight or nine, like I said, but Christmas time, our time can be rolled back to midnight and we have to adjust to it. It’s not optional. Sometimes we’re forced to work six days a week and they don’t think of that. They just expect it and we do it. We adjust. We’re flexible. You have to be flexible. And for a company that makes billions and billions of dollars, I think they can afford to pay their part-timers a living wage.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I know from experience from talking to so many other workers like that, the bosses try to use those tiers of workers. The part-timers, the new hires, the old timers, they pit us against each other. I was wondering if you could, are you seeing that? Do you feel like at least on the union side, that folks are rallying more together across the different, part-timers, full-timers?
Jane Fallon:
Absolutely. They do try to use the part-timers when they’re cutting back on the full-timers hours. Right now they’re pretty strict with hours. They don’t want anyone getting any overtime, but they’ll kind of trickle a little bit of overtime to a part-timer just to get the full-timers outraged and vice versa do. And they try to separate us even as a steward. They’ll try to divide the full-time stewards and the part-time stewards. They want us to say, “Oh, he’s doing that. You guys should get that,” a grievance or whatever. But our building anyways, and I think all around we stick together. We are all one. We’re one union. We support each other and they’re not going to divide us.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I guess what are you hearing from folks as we gear up for the contract fight? We know that negotiations are set to begin later this month. Contract expires in the summer. We heard a great line-
Jane Fallon:
Yeah, 31st.
Maximillian Alvarez:
That if we don’t have the contract members won by August 1st, we ain’t working. Right. So is that the vibe that you’re getting from your members?
Jane Fallon:
Absolutely. And I think everybody’s standing by that. Everyone’s supporting and it’s great. It’s really great. People are trusting the union to do the right thing by them. They know we have to do it. And I don’t know anybody that isn’t willing to if the union makes a decision to strike, I think everyone’s a hundred percent behind them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess before I let you go, I wanted to ask if you have any messages for listeners out there who don’t work at UPS, maybe they’re not in a union, but what can they do to show solidarity with y’all and why is this fight important, not just for the Teamsters, but for all working people?
Jane Fallon:
You know what Sean was saying, that it sets a precedent for labor unions going forward. And if we get a good contract, we realize that unions can stand up and they can get a living wage and they can get what they need and supported from management. And management can’t play games. They will throw to the new people this market rate adjustment, the MRA. So they’ll put that out there and people start at that rate. I think right now, I’m not sure what it is. And people come in and they’re thinking, “Okay, we’re making this money not so bad.” Then they snatch it away a couple of months later and people are up in arms like, “We were making this. What happened?” And they’re coming to the union and we’re saying, “We need to get that in the contract. It’s not contractual, it’s management. They can take it, they can give it and they can take it and it’s not right.”
Rob Atkinson:
I have a question. Are you all ready to kick some ass for the working class?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Rob Atkinson:
Hell yeah. As Tom said, my name is Rob Atkinson and I’m the UPS contract campaign coordinator. I started at UPS back in 1988 in the small center in Western Pennsylvania, right outside of Pittsburgh. There’s one guy here from Western Pennsylvania. Good friend of mine. I worked there for 27 years until they fired me back in 2015. In retaliation for union activity, I’ve seen firsthand how this company treats their central workers. What UPS did to me is a perfect example of how they respect Teamsters, who work there. You all worked there through that pandemic. UPS went from making $4 billion a year to $14 billion a year. What has UPS done to show that they respect the sacrifices that you all made working through that pandemic while they increased their profits by 250%? Nothing. Well, I got news for them. We’re here to collect our share.
We demand what we’ve earned and we demand what we deserve. We ain’t asking for nothing that we shouldn’t be getting. We kicked off this contract campaign back in August and we’ve been coordinating actions at the gates in the parking lots with every local in the country since then. And what I’ve seen at every local is a hunger and a desire to do what it takes to force this company to share the wealth that they’ve accumulated from our hard work and sacrifices. Soon you will see contract action team trainings coming to your area near you. I urge you all to sign up and attend these trainings that will be conducted by our training and development team. These trainings are a critical and vital component for us to get the knowledge and skills we are going to need to fight for the wages, the benefits, the working conditions that we’ve earned and deserve.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Woo.
Rob Atkinson:
For years we said if we only had leadership that would fight for us at the bargaining table. Well, I got news for you. We have that leadership now.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Woo.
Rob Atkinson:
All that we need to do is stand behind them. Are we going to stand behind them?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Rob Atkinson:
Damn right, we are. We’re Teamsters. And when we all stand together, there’s nothing, there’s nothing that we can’t achieve. And that is what UPS is about to find out.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Rob Atkinson:
Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just start by introducing yourself.
JJ Rodriguez:
JJ Rodriguez from the Franklin Building, Mass.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you worked at UPS.
JJ Rodriguez:
UPS, yep.
Maximillian Alvarez:
How long you worked there?
JJ Rodriguez:
10 years.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Damn. What do you do?
JJ Rodriguez:
I drive.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay. And how are you feeling about today’s rally?
JJ Rodriguez:
Oh, I felt great.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah?
JJ Rodriguez:
I’m pumped. I’m ready to go home with the sweater tomorrow. I’m telling you, I’m pumped.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and I was wondering if you could tell me a little more about what that job entails, because a lot of folks, we get our packages from you guys, but then we don’t see all the shit you go through on a day-to-day basis. So what does a typical day look like for you?
JJ Rodriguez:
It all depends. Every day can be different. Some days you can have a great day and some days just everybody just buying stuff. So it’s just like, it all depends. Other than that it’s tough because it’s like you don’t know what day you’re walking into. Every day is different.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what sorts of key issues are going to be on the table with these contract negotiations? What are you and your coworkers going through on the job that need to be addressed during the contract fight?
JJ Rodriguez:
There’s the whole thing they call dishonesty, people get fired for, they can lie to us but they don’t get fired. You know what I’m saying? It’s messed up. Because we will tell the truth and they’ll still say we’re lying, but they can actually lie to us when we have proof and nothing happens to them. So hopefully that changes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Have you noticed any changes in the attitude of management since Sean came in and you got this new energy in the Teamsters over the past year?
JJ Rodriguez:
No.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No.
JJ Rodriguez:
They’re still the same people. They haven’t changed. And some of the time it’s not even from the managers, it’s from up top. The people that you don’t see, the people that tell them what to do, I’m like, you guys never drove ever in your life. So once you come down here and do it for once, you know what I’m saying? Before you tell us how to do our jobs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And yeah, I guess tell me a little bit about how you’re feeling about the potential for a strike.
JJ Rodriguez:
I have mixed reviews, but if we go on strike, we go on strike. If we don’t, we don’t. We have to go with the time going, so I’m waiting. Whatever happens, happens. I’m ready for the fight and we can go.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. But I guess, do you have any final messages for folks listening about the importance of this contract fight and the work that you guys do?
JJ Rodriguez:
Just keep doing what you’re doing. Follow the contract, do the right thing and stay strong. Stay united. That’s all left.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, perfect. Thanks so much, man.
JJ Rodriguez:
No problem.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Appreciate it.
JJ Rodriguez:
Appreciate you.
Rob Atkinson:
Good morning.
Speaker 2:
Good morning.
Rob Atkinson:
Good morning. Good to see you, everybody out there and I appreciate you coming out. Want to talk about the UPS contract just a little bit. Five years ago, next month, the general president and I stood in front of this building and announced that we were going to run for office because we saw all the things going bad in our union, particularly with the UPS contract, negotiate a concessionary contract, then implement it when it was turned down, that was just unforgivable. That’s why we ran for office. So we have turned the union around quite differently these days to accomplish different things. One of the things higher on our priority list was unity. We had to unite the union to get together to negotiate good contracts. When we first took office, the general president told everybody in the building that we are not negotiating contracts and we’re going to get the contracts done on time.
That goes for UPS. We started this battle with UPS back in August. We had the rallies, we got out and informed membership. Sean and I have been traveling all around the country talking to everybody we could talk to at UPS. We’ve been visiting pre-loaders at five o’clock in the morning. We’ve been visiting package car guys when they get off their routes. We’ve been visiting feeder guys, mechanics and everybody else to find out from them what’s important in this contract.
And we think that we have gotten enough information to go to the table and negotiate with UPS everything that the members want. It’s very important to us. We got the supplemental negotiations going on right now. We told UPS, there will not be any concessions, you will get done on time. They’re falling behind right now, not getting the supplements done by April 17th because that’s when we want to go into national negotiations. But you know what? They’re going to have to pay a price for that. They are going to have to explain to the general president on April 17th, why the hell they ain’t done with the supplements and they don’t want to be in that position. I have got the distinct pleasure of working with the general president every day. I’m a 44-year Teamster. I have seen six general presidents in my career and I am working with the best general president today that we have ever had.
And everybody of you that knows him ,knows that he’s tough. He’s a tough guy when it comes to negotiations. He’s tough when it’s representing the members. He’s tough when he tells the companies that we will settle for nothing less than a great contract for everybody in the union, particularly UPS because this is our fight coming up. When we first took off as we had a couple contracts come up, we had Carhaul come up. We had about 67 days to negotiate that contract and the general president was very clear, no concessions, on time.
We got the best contract in Carhaul that we have had for a very long time. We had American Red Cross come up, same thing on time, good contract. Got a great contract out of there. Not only is it a great contract, but we are organizing more American Cross Red Cross workers today than we’ve been doing in the past. And we had DHL come up and DHL, the last sticking point in that contract was inward facing cameras. And we all know that story at UPS, right? We don’t want them. Right. And we are going to fight like hell to make sure that we get the same thing DHL gave us that they will not have inward facing cameras.
Speaker 2:
Oh yeah. Hell yeah.
Rob Atkinson:
So this is going to be a long fight. We need everybody to stick together, which is crucially important to us. We are going into negotiation, Sean and I, in two weeks with the company at the national level. Hopefully they will hear our message today getting these supplements done because we have got to get them done before we start negotiating the national contract.
Now we’re going into negotiations and we’re telling UPS very clearly that we want a good contract for our members and we want it done on time. If they don’t get it on time, we’re going to pick a fight with them, August the first. If we don’t have the contract that you guys want by August the first, we’re not working no more. We will continue to negotiate with the company, but there won’t be a UPS person working on August the first if we don’t have what we want. And being general secretary treasurer of the Teamsters Union, I can assure you that we will take care of you guys. We have over $300 million in our strike fund and we will spend every penny of it to make sure that UPS employees get what they want in this contract.
Julie:
Hey, my name is Julie. I currently work for Workers United as a staff rep in Massachusetts for the Starbucks campaign. I’m a former Starbucks partner. Started with the company in 2005 and worked on and off with them until just this past January when I moved over to the union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, and I was very excited to see you. We’re obviously, and apologies listeners, it’s a little windy, but we are here outside of Teamster’s Local 25. We just watched a rally with Teamster’s president Sean O’Brien talking about the upcoming contract fight with UPS. And I’ve spotted your Starbucks Workers’ United sweater here. I’ve seen you talking to Teamsters. I guess I just wanted to ask you, why was it important for you to come out here and what have you been hearing from folks?
Julie:
Well, it was important for me to be here because the teamsters were here for us. So last summer, a Starbucks location in Boston went on a 64-day strike, there was no intention or understanding of when the strike would end when they started, it was indefinite and the Teamsters showed up for us every single day, did not cross the picket line and helped that store maintain that strike until they were ready to end it. And so now the Teamsters are out here fighting for their own contract. I want to help show support. The Starbucks workers are here to help show support. And we know that without inter-union solidarity and without worker solidarity all across all industries, we have less of a chance. So when we work together, we fight together, we win together.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, and I have to ask, since we, this past week, we got to see old Howie Schultz on Capitol Hill. I was wondering if I could get your thoughts on that testimony.
Julie:
You mean when he perjured himself under oath by saying-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Which time?
Julie:
Denying, denying, denying that he has done anything wrong, that Starbucks has done anything wrong. They haven’t broken any laws, they’re just… It’s despicable. It’s gross. And when we heard the testimony from those partners, from the workers, you can really see how blatant this company is lying. It’s all about ego with him. It always has been. I drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago when I started working at Starbucks in 2005. I was like, “Man, this company is great. The benefits are great. Howard Schultz is great, when he runs for president, I’m going to vote for him.”
I’ve changed my mind. This company let me down. And it’s let a lot of other workers down. And watching him testify the way he did in front of Congress, the Senate, it really sort of sent that message home for me that he will never be on the worker’s side. He just doesn’t get it. And I think our senator, Ed Markey really, really hit that home that he just does not understand because he’s now in this place of privilege. He’s so disconnected from the experience on the ground and what the workers are going through. He’s never going to get it. And just because he’s not the CEO anymore, he’s still on the board and he’s still pulling strings and this fight isn’t going to end. So we’re just going to keep fighting.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I constantly tell people, right, you have to stay committed to the Starbucks workers’ struggles because as we saw from those testimonies, as I’ve heard time and time again from workers, people get excited when a new store files for an election, when they win the election. But then after that, that’s when management fucks with your schedules. That’s when people get fired for flimsy reasons or even entire stores get closed down. So I wanted to ask if you had any kind of message for folks out there listening about why they need to stay committed to supporting y’all and what they can do to support you all?
Julie:
I’ll start by answering the second question. What can they do to support? So go to your Starbucks if you know it’s union, let them know that you support them. That energy is contagious. And when they know that they feel supported by their community, by the people who that they see every day, their regular customers, it goes a long way to maintaining that morale and that energy and helping them get across the finish line for this. The first part of your question, I have completely forgotten what you asked.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just why it’s important for us to support each other. Like you’re out here supporting the UPS folks.
Julie:
Yes, absolutely. So the Starbucks campaign, what’s going on right now with partners, baristas all across the country, is sending a message to corporations that we’re not going to let them get away with treating workers like this, regardless of what industry they’re in, regardless of what job they perform, every worker deserves to have protections, to be protected from people who do not have their best interest at hand. And that is exactly what happens when they’re working for these big corporations. They do not have the worker’s best interest at hand. It’s all about profits for them. So when we show up as Starbucks partners, we’re not only showing up as baristas, we’re showing up as workers. And I think that that’s really inspiring to remind everybody that you deserve a better workplace too.
Speaker 1:
So one more time, who are we?
Speaker 2:
Teamsters.
Speaker 1:
Who are we?
Speaker 2:
Teamsters.
Speaker 1:
All right, let’s hear for our general president, Sean O’Brien.
Sean M. O’Brien:
Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 1:
Is it working.
Sean M. O’Brien:
Is this working? Yeah. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It’s a great honor and privilege to be back home where it all started. I want to thank you got the best hottest working president, local 25’s history. Tom Murray. Let’s hear for Tom Murray.
Listen, we have 15 days before we go sit across the table from this white collar crime syndicate known as United Postal Service. Okay, 376 days ago, we had the honor and privilege to be elected by you to serve and protect the greatest institution in America. That is the international brotherhood of Teamsters. And because of you putting the fate in us and our leadership team, you have proven that you want change. You have proven that we are not going to take and accept what UPS gives us. We’re going to demand take and punish if they don’t give us what we want moving forward.
Now we have from April 17th until July 31st, we have 12 weeks. 12 weeks to negotiate the largest collective bargaining agreement in the private sector throughout the entire United States. So what does that mean? That means that we are going to set the tone for organized labor. If you are a pipe fitter, if you’re a plumber, if you’re a bus driver, what we do in these negotiations, it’s going to set the tone for the entire country, the entire labor movement moving forward. And you know what? There’s no better organization to set that bar high than the international brotherhood of Teamsters.
So we have been crisscrossing the United States every single week. We’ve hit 30 states and all multiple hundreds of hundreds of UPS facilities. We’ve also hitting freight, we’re hitting construction. We’re hitting every single workplace we can find because our message is clear. UPS’s fight today, may be your fight tomorrow. And if we are not united, one vision, one direction, one mission, it’s a protect, preserve and improve working conditions, then we are going to fail. I am so proud of what I see going on around this country. I am so proud when I talk to people and they have fire in their eyes, they’re got intestinal fortitude. They got burning desire in their stomachs to take on this company. A company that three years ago didn’t care about you, didn’t care about your families, but you were providing goods and services to keep this country moving. And what happened?
They thought you were heroes. They were telling everybody, we have the best employees in the world. They’re providing goods and services, making sure this country keeps going. Well, it’s funny how fast they forget and all they care about is the bottom line of their balance sheet. Our wages stayed the same. In some cases they went down, but their balance sheet kept expanding. They made $100 billion off the pandemic, $100 billion with a B. And what did we get? We got nothing.
Well, that’s going to change April 17th because when we go to the table, we go to table, there is going to be, there is going to be no niceties across the table. We’re going to have rank and file members looking at this company giving true testimonials on how bad this company treats their people, how they don’t appreciate what we do or you do every single day. And we’re going to remind them and we’re going to remind the entire country, because I’ve been going up to Capitol Hill every day. Tell them you got a promise with supply chain solution, July 31st, when Big Brown is shut down, you’re going to see supply chain solution come to a halt.
And you know what? We’re not afraid to do it, we are not afraid to do it. We have a motto at the IBT with our leadership team. We would rather ask for forgiveness than permission. And the good thing about us right now is that because of… I get to work with the greatest general secretary treasurer and the entire Teamster movement and the entire labor movement and what he’s responsible for, he’s responsible for the finances of this great international union. 1.3 million members strong and UPS has to know and every other employee needs to know that we have $300 million in a strike and defense fund, $300 million to take on this fight. And look, I get the greatest job in the world. I get to write the checks. He’s got to find a way to pay for it. So here’s the reality of it.
Prior negotiations before we went to the convention in 2021, we always look for vulnerabilities, right? If you’re fighting in the street or you’re fighting in a ring or you’re in a football field, you’re in a hockey rink, you look at your opponent and you try and find their vulnerabilities, you try and find their weaknesses. We do the same in the labor movement and the companies do the same. Prior to 2021 in June, we were financially compromised, our members. You know why? Because you had to wait eight days before you got paid on strike. Now, I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait. I can’t go eight days without a paycheck. I’ve got bills, I got tuitions, I got boys to pay for, I got homes to pay for. I like everybody else, right?
So we made certain that we changed that. So we are no longer financially compromised. I say we, the strongest link in our chain, that’s our rank and file members. So moving forward, we take UPS out on the street or we take Yellow or we take anybody that wants to take our members on, we will be getting paid from day one. And you will not have to worry about the security of family or anything else.
So look, this is going to be real easy. We have the most amount of leverage we’ve ever had in the labor movement. Think about it. We’ve got 1.3 million members strong with 360,000 deep throughout this entire country. We are unified. We know the issues, we’ve identified them, but most importantly, we have stated our intentions. And when you state your intentions for people and you look them in the eye, I believe they take you serious. And we’ve stated our intentions with the UPS, 22 fours are going, or you’re on strike, PVDs are going, or you’re on strike. Part-time wages need to go, need to go up. And we got to reward the longtime part-timers as well. We need to make certain that we fix subcontract and get these gypsies out of our yards and make sure that team [inaudible 00:32:31] are in these seats. We need to make sure we fight against technology. Technology that has held all of you hostage for the last 10, 15 years. They do not need to be looking at us while we’re doing our jobs. That will be a strike issue.
We also need to make sure that we protect and create as many jobs as possible for part-timers. We need to create jobs as a result of technology. We need to capture every single thing we can. And look, failure is not an option. Failure is not an option. If you’re not in this fight, you better find another career. Because look what we’re going to do in these negotiations. We are going to make history. We are going to make an example, our Fortune 500 company so that when we go to the table locally, when we go to the table regionally, we go to the table nationally with any employer, they’re going to remember the beating that UPS took and the leverage that we had. And they’re going to say, “I don’t want any part of that.”
Now, in any battle, in any battle, in any fight, we’re going to get bruised up. We’re going to get banged up. But you know what, we’re going to get up and go one more round UPS, one more round. Look, the reality of this, we are going to get the best contract that this company has ever seen before. You and your families, our goal is to make sure that we set this up for the next generation coming in. We’re going to make sure that we leave this organization better than we found it. But we also need to take this contract, right? And I’m telling UPS, again, stating our intentions. We’re going to be able to take this contract and we’re going to go to the non-union Amazon workers and say, “When you’re on Teamster, you’re going to get health and welfare, you’re going to get pensions, you’re going to get guaranteed wages, you’re going to have a path to a long-term career.”
And that’s what’s important about this contract. It’s not just about winning because we’re going to win. There’s no doubt in my mind, right? No doubt in my mind. But it’s about organizing our competition, making certain that we level the playing field and we continue to set the bar as high as we can so that every single labor organization out there has the intestinal fortitude. And we lay the template down where this is achievable. This is going to be a victory for success through the entire labor movement.
And I’ve been up in Capitol Hill telling these politicians, “You don’t come with us. You’re done. No more money. You don’t support our members. No more money.” Fred and I were in South Africa where we got support from 118 countries represented by unions. 118 countries are supporting this fight. They want to make certain that when we make an example out of ups that not even nationwide but globally UPS feels the pain because they need to reward the people that make them the greatest success. And that’s the Teamsters that go to work every single day.
So look, in closing, I got a message for UPS. I got a message for any employer. Number one, watch what’s going to happen. Because if you don’t want this to happen to you, stop behaving accordingly. Right? Two, when you take on 1.3 million Teamsters, 360,000 UPS workers, it’s a full contact sport. Put your helmets on and buckle your chin straps. It’s on. Thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re here at Teamster’s Local 25 in Boston, the old local of current president of the International Brotherhood of Teamster, Sean O’Brien. I’m standing here with the man himself. Sean, it’s been about a year exactly since your administration came in. What are you?
Sean M. O’Brien:
I think it’s 376 days.
Maximillian Alvarez:
376 days. So what have you been hearing from the members in that time? What are you seeing?
Sean M. O’Brien:
This tremendous energy, not just in the UPS but in the labor movement general in the Teamsters. Our leadership team, we’ve made certain one thing, biggest priority from day one to make sure that we unify our strongest [inaudible 00:36:45], our strongest leverage is our membership. Make sure they understand that we’re going to fight for them, we’re going to take direction and we’re going to deliver for them. Look, I’m back here at the greatest local union in the entire country. But look, the reality of it is we’re going to fight hard. We’re going to get the best contract and we’re going to make UPS reward the people that make them the success.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what can people around the country, whether they are unionized or not, whether they work for UPS or not, what can a working people around the country do to support you?
Sean M. O’Brien:
They have to embrace this fight. Because what I said up there, and I meant today’s fight may not be yours, but it could be yours tomorrow. So if you’re not engaging, paying attention, then you’re selling yourself short because this could be you tomorrow. It could be all of us tomorrow. UPS is going to be the most important critical fight that we have in the labor movement. It’s just not a Teamster issue now, it’s a labor movement issue. And if we can do it, which we’re going to do it and we’re going to get the best contract, we are going to set the tone for organized labor for generations to come.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And well, what’s your message to UPS management right now?
Sean M. O’Brien:
Buckle up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I’m sure they’re listening.
Sean M. O’Brien:
Buckle up baby. Buckle up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thanks so much, brother, appreciate it.
Sean M. O’Brien:
And then after we’re done, I’m going to tell them to ice up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Beautiful. Thank you so much.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
From strippers in North Hollywood to service workers in Atlanta and graduate students in Michigan, workers across sectors of the economy are taking direct action and fighting for what they deserve. But they are also facing retaliation, union busting, and even violence on the picket line. If we want to see the labor movement grow, we need to be there for workers when it counts the most, and we need to do whatever we can to make sure they win their fights.
In this worker solidarity livestream, recorded on April 5, 2023, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of workers about their respective strikes and struggles at the Star Garden Topless Bar in North Hollywood, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the University of Michigan, and more.
Links to strike/hardship funds:
Studio Production: David Hebden
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. The Real News is an independent nonprofit, viewer supported media network. We don’t do ads. We don’t do paywalls. And we don’t take corporate cash, which means we need each one of you to become a supporter of our work so we can keep bringing you coverage of the voices and issues you care about most. Before we get going today, I just wanted to ask if you could head on over to therealnews.com/support and become a supporter of our work because it really, really makes a difference and it allows us to keep doing work like these Worker Solidarity livestreams that we are trying to put on every month. And that is what we are here to do today.
If you subscribe to The Real News Network, you know that we have been putting together these monthly Worker Solidarity livestreams in order to lift up the voices of folks on the front lines of different strikes and worker struggles around the country. We are going to continue to do these. We are going to continue to broaden the voices that we bring on and put in conversation with one another. We want to broaden that out internationally as well, and we can’t do that without your support. And we thank you all so much for tuning in, for caring, and especially thank you to all of you who are already supporters of our work because it’s because of you that we’re able to do this.
Now, we did not have a Worker Solidarity livestream last month. As folks know, we were dealing with the passing of our comrade and colleague, Marshall Eddie Conway. We thank all of you for your patience as we took time to grieve and prepare Eddie’s memorial service.
But we are back at it in the month of April, and we will continue to put on more of these livestreams as the year continues. Because workers in industries and sectors across the economy, across the country in different states, different types of jobs, from academia to media, from entertainment to education and healthcare to logistics, workers everywhere are standing up and fighting for what they deserve.
And when that happens, all of us are called to action. We all have a stake in workers winning their fights against the bosses, winning their fights for better, safer workplaces, for more dignity on and off the job, for the respect that they deserve from management. And workers deserve to have more of a say in their jobs. And that is exactly what workers all across this country and beyond are doing by organizing into unions, or even if they’re not in unions, taking direct collective action.
And we all need to support that because as I said, not only do we all have a stake in workers improving their lives, their workplaces and the world that we share, but also because as you have no doubt learned from the past livestreams we have done and as you have no doubt heard from the voices of workers on strike at CNH Industrial or railroad workers, workers at Warrior Met Coal and beyond, it really, really matters when the public is behind workers who are on strike, workers who have been unjustly fired, workers who are being retaliated against or harassed at work by their bosses and managers. When we all stand up for each other, when we show up for each other, it allows us to hold the line one day longer, one day stronger. It gives us the strength that we need to keep fighting the good fight and ultimately helps us win our struggles.
And when we win, more folks are encouraged to get off the sidelines and to get involved in the fight. This is all of our struggle. We all have a role to play here, and if we want to see the labor movement grow in this country and beyond, then we can do that right here right now by supporting one another and lifting up one another’s struggles.
And I could not be more honored to be joined by another incredible panel of folks today who are going to do just that. And we’re going to go around and introduce you to our amazing panel in just a second.
But before we do, I wanted to shout out a couple of crucial struggles going on right now that we wanted to shout out, but we couldn’t get folks from those struggles on the call today. There’s only so many spots we can have on a livestream. And of course, when folks are on strike, that’s a very intense time and schedules don’t always permit an hour and a half livestream.
But in case you missed it, there was a really important action that spanned multiple states in the South yesterday led by the Union of Southern Service Workers. On Tuesday of this week, fast food, retail, and warehouse workers walked off their jobs in three states, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina to protest dangerous working conditions.
And on top of that, the Union of Southern Service Workers filed a groundbreaking civil rights complaint alleging South Carolina’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration “engages in egregious discrimination based on race”, by failing to inspect workplaces with disproportionately black workforces. This is really important stuff that’s happening in the south. And if you want to follow along, which you definitely should, we have included a link to the website of the Union of Southern Service Workers in the YouTube description for this livestream. Follow them on social media, check out the work that they’re doing. Vocalize your support for Southern Service Workers in the South who are standing up and fighting back against exploitation, racism, sexism, and so much more.
We also wanted to shout out Cisco workers who have been on strike since the end of March. Teamsters at Cisco, Louisville, and Cisco, Indianapolis went out on strike at the end of March, citing unfair labor practices and bad faith bargaining with Cisco management. Cisco, as we know, is one of the most massive food product distribution services, multinational corporation. And this strike is very important and it’s spreading because the workers in Louisville and Indianapolis have actually been joined by Teamsters locals in California where workers walked out at Cisco facilities in solidarity, bringing the strike to about 1,000 Teamsters, Cisco workers around the country. If you want to follow up on that strike, you can follow the Teamsters, their social media accounts. You could also follow the social media accounts of Teamsters for a Democratic Union. They’ve been posting a lot about the Cisco strike.
And of course, I also want to shout out our brothers, sisters, and siblings who are on the streets as we speak all across France and have been striking valiantly for weeks and weeks protesting President Emmanuel Macron’s deeply unpopular overhaul of the country’s beloved pension system. He has undemocratically invoked special powers from the Constitution to override parliament in order to ram through these reforms raising the retirement age and workers across France are pissed, rightfully so.
And you no doubt know about this if you subscribe to The Real News Network because we have published multiple on the ground documentary video reports from the streets of France on the strike over the past couple weeks. You can also watch my latest segment of the Art of Class War on Breaking Points where I spoke to Mattieu Bolle-Reddat, train driver and General Secretary of the Versailles Branch of the CGT. We were also joined by Gaz Jackson of the RMT Union in England. And we spoke about the strikes there.
And if you want to know what you can do to support our siblings in France, Mattieu lays it out in that Breaking Point segment as well as a recent Working People episode where we had Mattieu on along with rail workers in the UK and the United States. Shout out to our siblings across the pond. Stay strong, keep fighting. We are with you.
Lastly, before we get to our panel, if you watched our previous Worker Solidarity livestream, you know that one of the panelists that we had on there was the great Erin Zapcic from Medieval Times Performers United in Buena Park, California where workers at the dinner performance experience of Medieval times. I grew up right down the road from that Medieval Times in Buena Park, so this hits very close to home, quite literally and figuratively.
But workers there are fighting a really important fight, and they went out on strike on February 15th and have been holding the line ever since. We actually checked in with Erin before this livestream, and Erin is in bargaining right now as we speak. She couldn’t join us on the livestream to give us an update on the state of that strike, but she did send in a video update for all of our Real News viewers, and we’re going to play that now. And then we’re going to get right into the livestream with our incredible panelists. Here is an update from the Medieval Times strike in Buena Park, California from Erin Zapcic.
Erin Zapcic:
Hi everyone. My name is Erin Zapcic and I am a member of the organizing team at Medieval Times Performers United Buena Park. We organized back in November and we have currently been on strike now for 53 days. We walked out of a Saturday shift right after our first show of the day. We walked out ahead of our second show of the day on February 11th, and we have been on strike now for 53 days.
This is my cat. She’s very excited that I just got home because I have been away all day at the bargaining table with the company. Why is that significant? Well, these are not emergency sessions that have been called. These are part of our ongoing negotiations. I say that because Medieval Times has not made any attempt to try and end the strike. These are not, again, as I said, emergency sessions. These are part of our ongoing negotiations as we introduce a collective bargaining agreement to try to get our first contract.
What does that mean? It means that in 53 days, the company has not expressed any interest in trying to end the strike. They are very much carrying on business as usual. They had scabs flown in from other castles by day two of the strike, and they have continued to put on shows.
We have had some significant wins in the time that we’ve been on strike. We were able to get their Canadian scabs turned away at the border. They tried to fly in replacement workers from Toronto without the proper work documentation. We got them flagged at the border and turned away before they could come into the country. We also just found out that our brothers and sisters in the sound and lighting Department have just filed their petition for election to organize with IATSE. They just got their election date that’s scheduled for the end of this month so we’re very, very excited for them.
And we also, this is not good news necessarily, but since we’ve been on strike, we have come into possession of some photo and video evidence of something that we have witnessed with our own eyes for a long time and have raised a lot of concerns to management about and have repeatedly been ignored, which is the subject of animal cruelty and animal mistreatment happening at the Buena Park castle. Some very brave individuals shared some photo and video evidence taken inside the castle since we have been out on strike. And we did take that evidence public.
And so the reason I’m sharing all of this with you is that because an abused animal is a dangerous animal, and these are animals that we work with day in and day out. And the performers that are in there right now, even though we don’t agree with what they’re doing, they are also working with these animals and putting their lives at risk by performing alongside abused and mistreated animals.
How can you help? First and foremost, awareness is the biggest thing. We still have a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on, who are still coming to the show. The Buena Park Castle is in a very high tourist area so there are a lot of people who feel like if they don’t live in Southern California that this is not something that applies to them or involves them at all. But the more people that know about this, hopefully the fewer people will cross the picket line.
Secondly, we have a GoFundMe for our strike fund. It looks like there’s a lot of money in there right now, and folks have been very generous. But the bottom line is that we have been out on strike for 53 days. Even though it says we have $34,000 in our strike fund, we have been continuously dispensing those funds to the members of our bargaining unit who really need it. And we have also been really good about being working on the honor system. Anyone who does not need it has not taken any money. The money that goes to the strike fund, 100% goes to the people in our bargaining unit who need it the most. We do have someone who has been living out of his car since before we went on strike, and obviously he is still living out of his car. Please just spread the message as much as you can. Do not cross the picket line.
The sooner we can start making a real financial impact on the company, the sooner we can all go back to work and address these real issues that need addressing so we can go back to doing what we love. And if you are able, please make a small contribution to our strike funds. No contribution is too small, we promise. We really, truly do appreciate it because the more money that’s in the strike fund, the longer we can stay out as needed.
Thank you so much to the Real News Network for giving us the opportunity to share our story. And please follow us on social media @mtunitedca everywhere, accepts TikTok and follow along with us. And we cannot wait to be back at work performing and doing the show that we love for all of you. Thank you again.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, thank you so much, Erin, and we are sending you nothing but love and solidarity from here in Baltimore and I know everyone watching, everyone on this panel is doing the same. Huge shout out to Erin, to everyone at Medieval Times Performers United Buena Park. Huge, huge shout out to Erin’s cat.
And yeah, please, I just wanted to underline what Erin said. Financial support is really, really crucial. We have included a link to the Medieval Times Buena Park Strike Fund in the show notes, the YouTube description for this video. Actually, I should point down. If you click on the description for this video, you will find links to the petitions and the strike funds and the websites pertaining to the different strikes and struggles that we are covering on the stream today. If you want to support Erin and her coworkers, you can find that GoFundMe link in the YouTube description down there. Please don’t forget about them. Please do not cross the picket line. Please keep doing everything you can to raise awareness about their vital struggle.
All right, so with all of that upfront, I’m honored to bring on our incredible panel of guests today to learn more about them and the struggles that they are involved in, and most importantly, what we can all do to show solidarity with them.
I wanted to start by just quickly going around the table with short introductions. Folks have heard enough from me already, so why don’t we start Yeager with you and if you could just give us a quick intro of who you are, where you are, and just a little tidbit about the struggle that you’re involved in. And then we’ll go back around the table and give you all a little more time to give viewers and listeners the deeper context on those struggles. Let’s start with Yeager.
SN Yeager:
Yeah. Hey, thanks. I am SN Yeager. I go by Yeager and I use they/them pronouns and I’m with the Graduate employees organization at the University of Michigan. I am a fourth year PhD candidate in classical studies, which basically just means I am doing a lot of research to write a really long paper while teaching students.
At my union, I’ve had a couple officer positions in the past, but I’m currently one of the co-chairs of the Queer Trans Caucus and one of the lead organizers of one of our strike committees, strike headquarters. We do logistics and materials. And as of now, we have been on strike for over a week and we have been bargaining with the university since November. And so help me and us all, we will be striking until we get a fair and just contract.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah, solidarity with everyone out there at the University of Michigan and GEO. And just full disclosure, as I said on the latest episode of my show, Working People, where I interviewed Alejo Stark, also a member of the GEO there in Ann Arbor. I was a grad student at the University of Michigan. This is my old union, so I’m not going to pretend to be objective here. I’m going to try to make sure we get you all the info that you need.
But I have a very personal stake in this. And this is the second strike that GEO has weighed in three years. I have seen how this administration works, I know how they work, I know how they treat their workers, and I think this is really, really important. But I did, just for the sake of transparency, just want to let everyone know that. So take what I say for whatever it’s worth, but please listen to everything that Yeager has to say.
Karen, how about you? Can you introduce yourself to the great Real News viewers and listeners?
Karen Carlin:
I sure can. Thanks for having me on Maximillian. My name is Karen Carlin. I’m a longtime employee of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I’ve been a copy editor there for more than 25 years. And I’m also a proud member of the newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which represents the newsroom employees at the PT.
This month, the Guild and four other Post Gazette unions who represent the typographers who handle advertising, the press operators, the mailers, the drivers, we are all marking six months being on strike. But our labor issues with the company that owns the Post Gazette blocked communications, go back much further than that. On March 31st, we marked six years since the expiration of our last negotiated collective bargaining agreement. It’s been six years since we’ve had a contract and we’ve been on strike for six months.
After our contract expired in 2017, we kept going back to the table, we were negotiating, and then unfortunately the pandemic hit. And then July of 2020 at the height of the shutdown, the company imposed new work rules, obviously not agreed to or negotiated, and they did that based on illegally declaring an impasse.
Back in October, our production unions walked out when the company refused to pay $19 per week, an increase in healthcare premiums. And then on October 18th, the guild also went on strike on an unfair labor practice. There we are, unfortunately a strike veteran looks like in this group. And we’re still hard at work trying to stay at it, tell people about our cause and how people can support us, and we’re just still trying to fight the good fight.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And so why don’t we keep going around the table. We’ll go to Grace, then Zach, then Reagan.
Grace Bichanga Larson:
Hi everyone. My name is Grace Larson. I use she/her pronouns. And until last Tuesday, March 28th, I was a float support staff in the state of Minnesota. Float nurse in the state of Minnesota for Planned Parenthood North Central States, which means I service the Twin Cities as well as greater Minnesota.
I am also part of PPNCS’s first union bargaining team. Last spring, we overwhelmingly voted to form our union with over 90% support, and we have over a hundred job classes within our union. We began negotiations in October and they have been contentious, to say the least. There’s been lots of union busting tactics. The entire bargaining team has already been under investigation as well as received severe punishment and I was terminated last week. I will share more about my story on that next pass around, but thanks for having me here tonight. I appreciate it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you for being here. Grace and may I just say for all of us here at the Real News, boo. Boo, hiss, hiss. I hope everyone in the live chat is booing. That’s bullshit. Okay, Zach, then Reagan.
Zach Lennon-Simon:
Massive boo, massive boo for all the union busting we put up with. My name is Zach, I’m with the Hearst Union Bargaining Committee. We’re organized with the Writer’s Guild of America East. We represent about 500 members at 28 different magazine brands such as Cosmo, Oprah, Esquire, Seventeen, the list, the list goes on and on.
We first announced back in 2019 our intent to unionize and Hurst wanted us to go to a vote so we went to a vote. There was a very long union busing campaign, lots of the classics, know your rights kind of emails and meetings on the 43rd floor where we were told we didn’t need a third party and if we don’t like working here, we can get out, that kind of stuff.
But we persevered. We won our election in July, 2020 and started bargaining in January, 2021. And it’s April, 2023 and we’re still bargaining. It’s been a long couple of years, but we’re getting closer to the end of it.
Hurst has been union busting for over a hundred years, so they’re a pretty strong enemy on that front. They have a tendency to reject every proposal we have, be it just like providing masks in the pandemic or gender neutral bathrooms. They’ll redline everything and call it, “Well, we can’t say yes to that, this isn’t company policy,” forgetting what bargaining is, which is negotiating over how to change company policy for the better of the worker.
But we’re reminding them of that pretty well. We had a walkout last week or two weeks ago, I’m sorry, where we had hundreds of our employees walk off the office floor in New York, Alabama, Easton, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. We’ve had Slack actions where we’ve scheduled messages to every channel.
… actions where we’ve scheduled messages to every channel every hour on the hour saying, “Fair contract now.” And we’re getting pretty close. We almost finished our contract last Tuesday. We were up until 4:00 AM bargaining, and then her lawyers said that there’s too much work to do and they had to go home. One of the bigger things was they don’t have a roster of who works for them and what their job titles are and what salaries we make. And so without that, we can’t negotiate over salaried minimums, which is very important to our unit. We have people making 40,000, 45,000, which is very low in terms of digital media shops. We don’t really have any guaranteed salary increases, so we have a lot of stagnant wage folks that would like to be able to pay rent. Working for a legacy brand is nice, but we got to feed ourselves and we got to pay rent. So we’re still bargaining and we’re hoping to wrap this up and get back to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Reagan, why don’t you round us out and then we’ll go back around the table and we’ll get deeper in on these different struggles.
Reagan:
Hi, my name is Reagan. I am representing the Stripper Strike Noho. I’m really happy to be on the show again. The last time I was on the show I think was almost a year ago. It’s been a year into our labor struggle. We are the dancers at the Star Garden Topless Dive Bar in Los Angeles. We wrote a petition and delivered it to the management at the bar over safety concerns. That’s what our campaign was built on, that we didn’t feel safe, we didn’t feel supported by the managers and we didn’t feel supported by the security guards either. The petition went unheard, and so there was a walkout and then a strike. And then we were fortunate enough to get a lot of public attention and media on our campaign and surprisingly very kind and favorable media coverage, which is surprising. It’s something that we didn’t necessarily expect.
And so, actually, this is a good story so far. No terrible endings yet, although it is still unresolved. We are now post strike, we are in a legal battle with the club, which is extremely union busting. They’re trying to do everything possible to avoid being held accountable for all of the safety concerns. As well as the other thing that we are fighting very hard for is an end to racist hiring practices in the club because they to date have never hired a single black dancer at this club. So that’s also something that we are fighting against. Right now, the club is in bankruptcy court. I think that they thought that that was a really boss move, was to try to call our our bluff by filing for bankruptcy. We in turn pivoted by announcing a fundraiser to buy the club from them out of bankruptcy. So now they’re trying to get out of bankruptcy.
Tomorrow is actually a hearing where we find out if they’re able to do that. So cross your fingers that they can’t get out of bankruptcy court. We will find out tomorrow, so more on that soon. Another pertinent note is that we are organizing with the Actors Union, the Actors Equity Association, they represent theater actors and stage managers. We have a really wonderful support system with that incredible 100-year-old union. Yeah, it’s been a very exciting time. It’s been over a year now, so we’re definitely hoping for some resolution soon. The big hearing coming up with us with the NLRB is on May 15th. That’s when some exciting things are going to be happening and we’ll be able to finally move forward with our election results for our union as well as all of the ULPs. There are six ULPs that we filed. So in the thick of it right now, but it’s going well, question mark, but happy to be here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re so happy to have you back on. I know you’ve been running around juggling eight million things, so I’m grateful to you for making time for this, Reagan. It is genuinely really, really good to see you again. If folks want some more context on this important struggle in North Hollywood, you can go back on our YouTube channel and check out that interview that Reagan and I did about a year ago.
I just wanted to remind everyone before we go back around the table that, again, we learned this from the first Worker Solidarity livestream that we did, to put the important links that are going to be mentioned on the livestream in the YouTube description for the livestream itself. So again, if you want to find the Linktree for the Stripper Strike in Noho, including links to where you can buy merchandise to support their strike, links to supporting their fund to buy the Star Garden Bar from the current managers, or follow them on social media, that link is in the YouTube description along with a petition that has been started to get Planned Parenthood to rehire Grace, Strike Funds for Medieval Times, and different links for how you can support our fellow workers at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and the Hurst Union, so on and so forth. I just wanted to remind everyone of that before we go back around the table, but if you’re looking for those links, they are in the YouTube description.
Also, please follow these unions, these different accounts on social media. As Erin Zapcic said in her video update, keeping the awareness up is really important. Every boss I’ve ever known and reported on banks on all of us just forgetting about these struggles. They count on it. They know that there’s going to be maybe an initial rush of support on social media, but they expect, like everything else, that our attention spans are going to wane, that people are going to stop showing up to picket lines, they’re going to stop donating to strike funds, they’re going to stop sharing posts on social media. That is when they turn on the screws. And so again, just to reiterate what I said in the opening, we all have a part to play here in keeping these struggles going and supporting our fellow workers and making sure that they win.
Now, let’s go back around the table and give viewers and listeners some deeper context here on these respective struggles. Obviously, we’re talking about a mix of things here, an unjust firing, an effort to unionize and to even buy a bar in North Hollywood, but also ongoing strikes in academia and in the journalism industry. I want to leave things open for you all and ask if you could take about five minutes each to give viewers and listeners a deeper sense of what led us to this point, how we got to where we are with some of y’all out on strike, some of y’all fighting to get your jobs back, so on and so forth, what the response from management has been, what the key issues that y’all are fighting for really are. I guess if you could give yours and listeners more of a sense of how it’s been for you and your coworkers while you’ve been on strike or since you walked out to protest unsafe working conditions. So Yeager, why don’t we start back around with you.
SN Yeager:
All right. That’s a lot to get to in five minutes, but I can do it. We’ll get to some basics and we’re going to get to the juicy stuff. I think I said before that we’ve been bargaining since November. That bargaining is in air quote because for the first, I want to say, two months, HR was really interested in how many people were in the room and who was going to pay for the rooms and who got to be on the bargaining team. It was all logistics, all like just table, how are we going to do this bargaining stuff? And it wasn’t until February where we got our compensation counter passed. It was abysmal, to be nice maybe. We’ve been bargaining, but on paper it doesn’t look like it because HR has been dragging its feet for so long.
Now, in terms of our demands, we have a pretty diverse platform because, of course, we have a diverse union, a lot of graduate students here at the university. We are a fighting for bread and roses, we’re not limiting ourselves here. So in a couple bullet points, we’re fighting for a living wage of $38,500 for all graduate students every year. Currently we make 24, which is below the living wage for Ann Arbor. And in fact, if we continue at the raises that HR is suggesting, we will be below with the poverty line and will be eligible for SNAP benefits, which I guess are not that important to them. We’re also looking for transitional funding for survivors of harassment and abuse, affordable and accessible child care for graduate students who are parents, equitable and just healthcare for all graduate workers, especially trans and disabled grad students, an unarmed non-police emergency response on campus, protections and financial support for international grad students, and basic COVID protections.
When I said diverse, I mean, we know that all of these things affect our workplace and are relevant to our contract and our ability to do our jobs. It’s been really cool to see all of the new members or new graduate students in my department realize what is possible through a union and realizing how much goes into our work. Now, I said juicy stuff, and I’m going to see if I can get through all of it because, y’all, I got so many interesting little stories for y’all. In terms of the good things with our strike for a week, we have organized a strike kitchen. So a few times a week, thanks to donated space and generous donations of food from our community, we feed ourselves. We do a vegan meal. We did chana masala the other day, we did chili the other day. And it’s just all grad members and volunteers who are putting this together, and it’s a great way to build community during the strike.
On the first day of our strike, we had a walkout from our offices, from our departments at 10:24 to start the strike, and thousands of people showed up in the rain. We’ve also been looking for ways to evolve how we strike. So in addition to not working, we usually do the picketing and the rallies, but also tomorrow we’re trying a knit-in instead of a sit-in as a way for people to still do visibility for our union without having to walk in circles for three hours and without all of the sensory overload that comes from picketing. Sometimes you need a break from all the loud noises.
In terms of the bad for our strike, it’s been raining and snowing on us a lot, but we got Geo Pancho, so we’re doing great. Now, the ugly is where it can get scary, but it also gives us moments of real community and power. The university has tried a couple forms of retaliation. In particular, I’ve got a couple stories on a picket line the other day. One of the departments in a building that actually I work in, one of the departments threatened to call cops on picketers, especially because they were using a bucket drum. Apparently they didn’t know that it’s our right to picket and protest. Another department is currently trying to disband its own diversity, equity, and inclusion committee because that committee was looking for ways to support graduate students. The university is now committed to attestation forms and, well, maybe more like snitching forms, for people to inform on striking workers so that those workers will not get paid.
In addition, the big retaliation is we are facing an injunction. This was basically the university suing us. Ironically, this week is Graduate Student Appreciation Week, so in appreciation, they sued us, that’s really considerate of them. The firm that they’re suing us through is the same firm at Butte Long that blocked investigations into the Flint water crisis. So the university is really showing whose side it is on right now. I have a little bit of good news to end off on, at least right now. We had a hearing yesterday. We marched en masse with allies and even our students and our professors to the courthouse in Washtenaw County in advance of the injunction and the temporary restraining order that would’ve forced us off strike and back into our classrooms while we were still bargaining was denied. So we are still on strike and we have an evidentiary hearing on Monday. So we are going strong despite the rain, despite the retaliation, and despite the injunction.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell. Yeah. I think you did that with a minute to spare. That was expertly done. And so I’m going to just say I’m going to pass this off to Karen and then I’m going to shut up. So then, Grace hop in after Karen, Zach after Grace, so on and so forth. But I just wanted to say, again, as an alum of the University of Michigan, as a former GEO member, as a former graduate student, I’m not paying shit to that university until the administration does right by the workers who make that university run, the workers through whom the mission of the university actually lives, the people teaching the students, grading the papers, doing the research, doing a shit ton of bureaucratic administrative essential work that keeps the university going. These are the people who make the University of Michigan run, and the university administration needs to recognize that instead of running to the courts every time that workers are demanding safe COVID polity policies or, Jesus Christ, a living wage in a cost of living crisis. Instead of paying graduate workers a living wage so they can actually pay rent and put food on the table, the fact that the university administration is doing what it did during the strike in 2020, running to the courts, filing an injunction, suing the union, and trying to break the strike instead of coming to the bargaining table with serious proposals.
As an alumni, I’m frankly disgusted with the University of Michigan’s actions, and I call upon other alumni and anyone who supports this struggle to make those feelings known to the university administration. Okay, I told you, guys, you can take my comments for what they’re worth. Now, Karen, please, yeah, give us some more context on the struggle over there in Pittsburgh. I know that, as you said, has been a long drawn-out process that’s been building for a long time and y’all have been facing some really vicious union busting yourselves.
Karen Carlin:
I have to say, yeah, it’s been a hell of a slog. Boy, Yeager, I can really relate when you put bargaining sessions in quotes. I think we’ve had four since the strike began, and it’s very frustrating because I remember there’s so many of my colleagues that we would be sitting there at the bargaining table and we’re not bargaining. We’re coming forth with proposals, “How can we do this? How can we change that?” And all the company can seem to say is “No, no, no.” “We stand firm on what we wanted do at 2020.” “Well, that’s not what we wanted in 2020. That was something that you imposed on us that we didn’t agree to.” So that’s been frustrating.
In fact, we had two bargaining sessions scheduled last week. One was with the production unions and one was with the guild, and the company didn’t show up to those even though they had agreed to those dates beforehand because now they’ve decided they do not want to participate with federal mediators, which was also something that they had agreed to earlier, as we had. Frustrating is just the word I’m going to keep repeating, and I’m sorry about that, but it seems to be the most apt way to describe all that.
Meanwhile, while all that is going on, the company is just pouring money into things such as having the paper printed at another facility, people who have crossed the picket line and who are still working at the paper getting raises, getting bonuses, money being paid to increase security because, I mean, I don’t know what’s scarier than a mob full of journalists. I can understand that, I guess. But it astounds me as to the amount of money that the company is willing to pour out when with that same amount they probably could have settled the strike three at least three, four times over. People tell me at least six times over that they could have just settled this. We could have gone back to our jobs, the jobs that we love, informing the community, letting them know what’s going on. Local journalism is so important.
Like I said, it’s just incredibly frustrating because this is keeping us from our jobs. We want to make the paper an attractive place to work. We’re not just doing this for ourselves, but we’re doing this for the future of other people who will come. We want to make the paper an attractive place to work. I mean, nobody gets into journalism for the money, that’s what we all say. But we at least want to have a job where our wages, where we can raise families, we can stay in this great town of Pittsburgh, because it is a great town, it is a union town. These are the things that we would like to see.
I would like to mention, one good thing that has happened is at the end of January the NLRB agreed with us that the actions of the company have been particularly egregious, and an administrative law judge ruled in our favor, unfair labor practice, that the company did violate federal labor law. They’ve ordered the company to bargain in good faith with guild and restore the terms of the contract that expired in 2017 and rescind the imposed working conditions from 2020. That law judge also said that the company must make its employees whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits that resulted from its unlawful, unilateral changes, again, from the working conditions that they illegally and unilaterally imposed on us in 2020.
Well, of course the company disagreed with that and they’ve appealed to the NLRB in DC. If the NRLB rules in our favor, which we expected it will, the company will take it to the Court of Appeals. So again, more money paid to lawyers. Who knows what kind of fines or anything they’re going to have to pay out. Again, it just shows how much the company is willing to just spend money on the wrong thing. It just keeps bringing to a point that then the whole point of this is that they’re trying to bust the union. I mean, why else would they go to this expense, this much trouble this much with the lawyers, with the printing elsewhere, with everything else? I mean, they want to bust the union. They figure if they can drag it out, then hopefully people will leave, they will get other jobs, and there won’t be that many left of us. That’s just a frustrating thing to watch them try to do this and just break us down and rub us down to a nub.
But we’re not willing to let that happen. We’re strong. We’re committed. We know what we’re doing is right and that we’re on the right side of this fight. We’ve had some really incredible support from our community when we have rallies, the people that turn out, the Starbucks workers. The steel workers have been wonderful supporters of us. There are so many other unions that have come to our events, that they have given donations to our strikers’ fund, which anyone can donate by going to the unionprogress.com/donate. Speaking of Union Progress, it’s one of the things that we have been doing is our award-winning journalists, photographers, designers, editors, we’re all working on a strike public strike publication called The Union Progress. People can go to unionprogress.com in order to keep up with our strike and also find out some of the activities that we’ve been doing and learn how to participate and support us.
Grace Bichanga Larson:
Awesome. Yeah, so I’m Grace Larson, she/her pronouns. Like I said, until last Tuesday, March 28th, I was a nurse working for Planned Parenthood of the North Central States. That is a five state affiliate, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Nebraska. We historically unionized our five state affiliate, including 100 different job classes, so we’ve got support staff, we have admin staff, we have front desk clinicians. Basically everyone who is not supervisory is included in our union. So that’s been really awesome just in and of itself. In the beginning of this fight, we were really excited because although they did make us go to a vote instead of just acknowledging us after we went public, they did… they being Planned Parenthood of the North Central State… said that they were going to support the union and the voice of their 400-plus employees.
And then so 14 of my colleagues, including myself, were elected by our constituents to represent our union. We began bargaining in October, and out of the gates, things started pretty hot and contentious. Our lead negotiator from SEIU wanted to start things a little differently because we were doing this progressive unionization and like, “Let’s start things off a little different. So let’s come to the table and talk about the ideas and the thoughts of what we want out of this contract.” We spent eight hours collectively making this beautiful vision and values statement for what we thought was going to go in the contract. There was a lot of intense words exchanged across the table from our 14 passionate representatives to our very white executive team that was sitting across from us. There is one person of color sitting across the table from us, but the rest are all lawyers by education. So that’s interesting that those are the people they selected to choose to represent Planned Parenthood.
And then the next time we met at the table, they told us, “Just kidding. That was a cute joke that we just wanted to appease you with. Your hard work and your words and what you want for this contract is not going to go into this. So that was just a fun joke.” Rightfully so, we started really upset, but we did know that we had a lot of support from our larger group in the union. So we started handing out swag, t-shirts, lanyards, buttons, all the things, and wouldn’t you know, as soon as people start showing up to work in their union t-shirts, our dress code that has never been enforced is suddenly enforced. If you show up outside of the one day a week that you are allowed to wear a t-shirt, you will get written up if you do not choose to change out of that. We have had some comrades fight the good fight and be like, “Write me up. It’s a t-shirt. I have worn other t-shirts before that have never been an issue, whether they’ve been-
T-shirts before that have never been an issue, whether they’ve been reproductive justice or not, so that’s kind of had administration kind of boiling and upset. And then in January, there was an incident between two bargaining members. Ultimately, we did ask a bargaining team member to step down, and shortly after, the remaining bargaining team was placed under an investigation. Our investigation was led by someone sitting across the table from us, although we do have an entire compliance department that could have led this investigation, and would not have been a conflict of interest, being that she was investigating the entire bargaining team. Ultimately, one person was terminated. She actually was not placed under investigation, so, I’m sorry, one person was terminated, one person was asked to step down, 12 were put under investigation.
All 12 of us ended with a final written warning, which I would like to say no one in the affiliate had heard of until it was placed in our file. That final written warning states that any violation moving forward, whether it pertains to the alleged initial violation or not … just any violation of any conduct … can and will lead to our immediate termination; that discipline had no end date; and, as I stated, management and people who have been in the organization for over 12, 15 years have been like, “We’ve never heard of that.” Typically, a discipline has a start and an end date, and then you move on.
So, that investigation ended March 3rd, the same day that a group of us made some really powerful statements on why it is imperative that we codify language to diversity, equity, and inclusion in our contract. We have not heard back on a response from the employer since November, and that didn’t sit well with a lot of us, especially since we did survey our larger group and everyone, that was a big concern, especially being that we are in Planned Parenthood. We say that we show up for DEI, and we wanted that language codified, so we made some really strong speeches.
Five days later, I was placed under investigation. This time it was just me, and it was in regards to a whistleblower email that I sent to a third-party organization on my own time, from my personal email address, in regards to a concern that I had about an employee that worked for that third-party organization, as well as within my organization; because this person was in charge of educating youth on safe and healthy practices, I wanted them to be aware of information that I had about an alleged assault. And I never heard back from that organization, but within two days, Planned Parenthood had me under investigation.
So, I pressed them as to how my personal time can be brought into my workspace. I did not get answers about that. I told them that I am a mandated reporter by law; forget Planned Parenthood. I already gave them my report. They had done nothing with it, so I went to the next step, and they said, “We will let you know in writing how this pertains to your employment.” Immediately, I took a 12-day leave of absence for my mental health because it has significantly deteriorated since the beginning of January. I have started taking medication. I’ve began experiencing suicidal ideation. It’s been intense.
So, I took a 12-day leave of absence, came back to work March 28th. Was not ready to come back to work. Had a very massive panic attack that day, left, and was subsequently terminated on a six-minute Zoom call by the same person who was the conflict of interest in the initial investigation.
So, since then, as we’ve stated, there is a petition going around to have my job reinstated. I am currently still working with my union to get my job back. There have been a few, a multipart unfair labor practice charge filed against Planned Parenthood, in addition to prior unfair labor practice charges that had been filed throughout this short stint of bargaining, and we did a little rally yesterday, we’ve got a big rally on the University of Minnesota campus next week for a public action, and right now we just want people to sign the petition so I can get back to providing abortion care and family planning to the people who need me, especially my Black and brown patients, and put some pressure on Planned Parenthood, because we’re progressive and shouldn’t be union busting; but it is absolutely union busting. So, thanks.
Zach Lennon-Simon:
Grace, I have signed the petition while you were talking. I hope everyone else watching does as well. That’s truly horrible that, on the face of it, such a progressive brand is just the bottom of the barrel kind of boss behavior that we’ve all experienced. I’m so sorry that’s happening to you.
Over at Hearst, we’ve also been experiencing … it feels like a broken record, but also a lot of union busting as well. It’s a broken labor system right now, so it’s going to be the same kind of stories.
From the beginning of our announcing our union efforts, we were hauled up into these intimidating meetings on the 43rd floor. That was an issue enough, but the other problem, I think, with organizing digital media shops is there are a lot of frills. There’s a free table of books you can take home, there’s seltzer in the fridge. And so … I mean, I had this as well when I was first approached of, “Do you want to sign the union card?” I was like, “Well, this is the coziest kind of job I’d have. I’m indoors, no one’s attacking me physically; I feel like this is … We’re okay here.”
And then you think about it more, and you realize no amount of free seltzers can make up for the bullying that people have been … put up with, or the stagnant wages like we’ve mentioned, or the incredibly long hours. I know someone who worked 26 hours to get an assignment done, and then was told he could show up an hour or two late; like, no, that’s almost a full week. He should not work that hours. And we’re not saving lives, we’re making magazine articles. It should not be this insane.
Another big hurdle I think that we’re experiencing with bargaining is, like I said earlier, Hearst management is constantly saying no to proposals or policies that, on the surface, you’re like, “I don’t know why we have to explain why this is necessary, or why it’s important to our unit.” One of our proposals they are flat-out refusing to go along with is, we would like union members to bring a union rep with them to HR when they’re reporting sexual harassment or bullying. This is obviously a very important issue everywhere, but it feels extra important at Hearst.
In recent years … I think around the summer of 2020 … the president of our company, Troy Young, there was a number of articles about him in the New York Times and the New York Magazine about horrific sexual harassment comments. It’s really gross stuff I won’t repeat here, but you can look it up. The New York Magazine has a great picture of him in a garbage can that I quite enjoy. And it’s because of that kind of behavior he was allowed to rise to the top of this corporation, even though everyone kind of knew what he was doing, and who he was, it’s because of that that our members have identified like, “Yeah, we want a union rep in the meeting,” and the company has refused; and it’s hard to try to explain humanity to a place where that doesn’t exist.
We also have a number of ULPs, unfair labor practice charges. We have about three currently still under investigation. We’ve had more. One is for, they laid off part of our fashion hub, and then refused to negotiate severance. Another is they had regressive bargaining, where they took back their proposal on giving us an annual salary increase for the first year. And the last one happened at my brand, Delish. There was a recording of a union meeting where we were talking about a supervisor who was bullying our union members, and that recording was passed to HR and a few other editors-in-chiefs, and a number of our members were retaliated against; were questioned about the meeting, were told their tone was inappropriate … And we’re talking about trying to have each other’s backs, and the things that we’re being criticized for is our tone.
Eventually, our original bargaining committee member and organizer, June Zee, she was terminated, and we believe it was because of her advocacy for the union, so that’s still outstanding. You can read about that in Business Insider.
So, we’ve had a lot going against us, but what we have going for us is each other. I never really talked to many of the people, both at my brand, or especially at other brands, and now they’re the people I talk to the most, because of organizing calls and things like that. We just had an action where we handed out leaflets in the Hearst executive neighborhoods that said, “Have you seen this union buster?” and it was pictures of the Hearst executives, in their neighborhoods. And we had a bunch of people from the Financial Times Specialist who volunteered to join us, and they’re not even in our union. And they showed up for us, and we’re going to show up for them.
So, I truly think that kind of action, while it has been a very hard road for us, we’re going to get there, we’re going to get the better rights and the better pay for each other, because we’re all in this together. It’s not just about what I’m going to get out of a contract, it’s about what I could do for those who have less than me, and it’s about building a place that we can agree is a better place to work.
Reagan:
Wow. I just want to say, hearing all of these stories from everyone on the panel is really inspiring, and I’m just so proud to be a part of this community, and happy to be supporting you all, and I will be signing all the petitions and amplifying all of these struggles.
So, I just wanted to talk about some of the highs and lows of our struggle with the Stripper Strike Noho. I wanted to say that I feel very lucky to have such a strong solidarity bond with the dancers who have been involved, who have walked out, who have been striking for a year, and are now embroiled in this whole labyrinthine legal battle. I talk more about this in the interview that I had about a year ago, just sort of the conditions that allowed for this strike to even happen, which is kind of, I think, unique; but not unique in the way that it couldn’t be repeated, but special, a special set of circumstances, kind of like the correct ingredients in the Petri dish for a set of dancers to really have each other’s back, and to be willing to put their selves on the line, and to also be lucky enough to be able to put themselves on the line, if that makes sense.
And another high of the campaign has been the picket lines, which we’re no longer doing at the moment. We are not on the picket line anymore, but we were picketing for seven or eight months, and we’re sort of known for re-imagining the picket line. So, for us, that meant having a different theme for every night. We needed to make the picket line something that was fun, something that people wanted to go to and wanted to be a part of, and so we kind of re-imagined it as a party; so, different themes, costumes, putting on different skits, like street theater style, and then also making a bunch of content creation, really using social media to our advantage to get the word out. And it made our strikes pretty popular, and then that led to another high of the campaign pretty early on.
Last June, we were invited to represent ourselves at the labor conference, Labor Notes, that was held in Chicago, and I was one of the dancers representing our movement, and also presenting. We were invited to speak on a number of panels, and one of them was about our picket line, and about using social media and stuff.
And so, for me, that was a turning point in the campaign, and also in my life, because I was introduced, I think, for the first time … in a real way … physically being in a space with thousands of workers who just had my back. I just had never … I had never felt that before, and the sort of outpouring of support and comradery, solidarity, and acceptance from the labor movement was truly eye-opening, life-changing, and really very significant to our campaign, because we were welcomed into the labor movement, no questions asked. It wasn’t, “Do we deserve to be here? Do we belong here?” Everyone just made us feel so welcome, and that we did belong, and that we were a part of this, so that was a really, really inspiring part of the campaign.
And then, we also had an opportunity to go to speak at the Department of Labor in front of OSHA, which was … We had a mixed experience. That was an honor, but it was also definitely a mixed experience of highs and lows, kind of emulating the whole rollercoaster of this whole campaign, but basically being treated with respect sometimes, and then dealing with some really inappropriate comments from people at OSHA, and trying … Yeah, there was a representative from OSHA who tried to convince us to be saved by Jesus, and that was right after we had given our testimony in a room full of workers, like healthcare workers and construction workers, and then someone literally approaching you to sort of sermonize was very bizarre, and kind of … well, extremely off-putting.
So, it was definitely a mixed experience, but getting to travel to DC and be, I think the first out dancers at a strip club, giving testimony to a government agency was a huge step forward. That’s never been done before, so that was definitely a high, even though it was a mixed bag.
And then, I also just wanted to say, we also got the opportunity to stump for a politician who had actually showed up on our picket line. He was running for city council, and he was … He’s a member of UNITE HERE Loca 11, very pro-union, and he ended up winning, and so just … And that isn’t the only time that we’ve sort of been building relationships with politicians; something that I thought that that would never happen, you know? Since when are the strippers and the politicians working together, out in the open? So, I think that that was really cool.
And then also, we have the opportunity … What we’re doing right now is we’re working with the LA Coop Lab, and that is a great organization that is helping us to form a co-op. It’s called the Stripper Co-Op. It’s something that we have been incubating and working on, doing pop-up shows over the past year-and-a-half, and we are now looking to … That was a project that many of us were sort of already working on, and now it’s a part of our strike, our plans for how our campaign is moving forward, because now we’re trying to buy the club out of bankruptcy … Hopefully good news about that, hopefully, hopefully coming soon …
But, basically, we are following in the footsteps of the first and only, up until this point, unionized co-op strip club, which was The Lusty Lady that was formed in the 1990s. It ran successfully for, I think 13 years before it closed due to gentrification in San Francisco, but we are in contact with those lusty ladies, and they are a part of our strategy and our building of our co-op, and so they’re sort of our mentors, and we are looking to follow in their footsteps to open the only current … and only since The Lusty Lady … the only unionized stripper co-op. So, that’s what we’re doing now.
And then, the only other thing … A downer that I wanted to mention is dealing with discrimination, and not just things that people say or what people think, but trying to do all of this above the board, trying to do all of this legally, trying to do all of this legitimately is difficult, because there is so much discrimination from organizations of power, like banks. Just something that we’re dealing with just this week is, we opened a bank account for this co-op, with a business model and an operating agreement. We’re doing everything legitimately, and we were just informed that the bank is closing our account. We can’t apparently appeal that or anything. And it’s simply for having the word ‘stripper’ in the title. And we were in the process of changing the name because we just got an LLC that does not have the word ‘stripper’ in it, to try to avoid this in the future, but we also had our Venmo and PayPal permanently banned for the same reason.
So, there’s just … Trying to operate legitimately when you have a perfectly legal business, but that is just not conventional, is a real problem, and something that strippers and sex workers, and other marginalized people, face more often than you might hear about, because it’s not talked about, and that’s why a lot of these businesses don’t operate on the aboveboard way. And we’re trying to change that, so, just one step at a time, these are just some of the struggles that we are facing in this uphill battle.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man. I mean, I’m so, so grateful to all of you for laying all of that out, and just like in previous worker solidarity livestreams that we’ve done here … and like I said, we’ve talked to so many different folks working in journalism, higher education, lunch ladies in Minnesota, and all of you folks, folks working on the railroads, in coal mines, folks on strike at the University of California, and the new school, so on and so forth, and I guess I’m constantly just floored by the diversity of our struggle, our collective struggle, the different kind of nuances to those struggles, and how the kind of different circumstances of those struggles shape the kind of union busting that people face, the kind of demands that they’re making, the ways, the strategies that they’re developing for achieving their goals, wherever they happen to be.
And I think what comes out of these stories … I’m sure everyone else was hearing it … is just for as diverse as your struggles are, there’s so much that connects these struggles. There’s so much that I’m hearing echoed in your different testimonies, and the different crap that you all are dealing with, from bosses to banks to moralizing, sermonizing shitheads at OSHA. I mean, there really is, I think, some common threads there, and I wanted to kind of pick up on that, because we don’t have a whole lot of time left, and I do want to go back around the table. I was looking at the livechat, and I really appreciate everyone in there sharing their thoughts, and I’m seeing tons of people expressing support and solidarity with y’all.
Folks, again, if you want to find the links to the strike funds, to the hardship funds, to the petitions, and so on and so forth, we have included those links in the YouTube description for this livestream, which you can access at any time.
And we won’t really have time to kind of go into viewer questions, but what I’ve been seeing in the chat is really … I think the main question that we always try to end these livestreams with, and that I try to end every interview with, which is, what can people do to stand in solidarity with y’all, and to show support for you all, and to help you in these struggles, and to … What can we all learn from each other, right?
I mean, even in your different testimonies, I feel like y’all have been talking about some incredible examples of real robust, tangible solidarity, from lecturers and even tenured faculty showing up, and students showing up to picket lines to support their graduate student workers at the University of Michigan. I’ve seen pictures of folks from Reagan’s club, and The Medieval Times that we mentioned in Buena Park, on each other’s picket lines, supporting each other.
That is incredible. That is what the bosses fear. They try to isolate us, they try to convince us that our struggles have nothing to do with each other, that our interests are unique, particular, and not something that working people elsewhere can sympathize with or understand, but I hope … to anyone who watches this livestream or any of our previous livestreams … it becomes apparent, just by listening to our fellow workers, how much we do have in common, and how much stake we all have in these struggles, because–
… and how much stake we all have in these struggles because ultimately, what we’re talking about is the struggle for human dignity. We are all working people. Or as the great speech in the movie Matewan says, “There are two kinds of people in this world. There are people who work and people who don’t.” You work. They don’t. The bosses don’t, right? The ruling class doesn’t. Wall Street, they don’t work. They don’t produce shit. We produce everything. As Matthieu Bolle-Reddat, the train driver I mentioned at the beginning who’s on strike in France right now, says more beautifully and more Frenchly than I ever could, “It is we, the working class, who make the world run.” As he said to me, “We are the only useful class. We are the only class that produces anything and without us, society stops.”
That is true of everyone on this panel. It’s true of all of you watching. It’s true of the workers that we speak to week in, week out, here on The Real News Network. And yet, I think also, the bosses kind of showed their hand because they are invoking very similar union busting, strike-breaking, worker disciplining tactics to crush us back into subservience. You can hear echoes, like they’re learning from each other. The bosses are all watching each other. This is what I would say on previous live streams when people would get into those debates of like, “Oh, well the Starbucks workers, they’re not real workers, so we’re not going to support them, but we should go support these coal miners in Alabama who are on strike.” Then we get Starbucks workers and coal miners saying like, “Well, fuck that. We should all be supporting one another.” It’s not that hard. We can support one another.
The thing is that whether or not you think Starbucks baristas are “real workers,” compared to coal miners or industrial manufacturers, I guarantee you every boss, from university administrators to strip club owners to everyone in between, they have been watching what Howard Schultz and Starbucks have been doing to try to crush the unionization wave happening across the country right now. They have been watching intently how the government has been responding or not been responding, how workers have been responding or not been responding, how the public has been responding or not been responding. The bosses are sharing notes on how to crush us back into subservience. We need to share notes on how to beat them.
That’s what I want to do with this final turn around the table is to just ask our amazing panel, if you could say a little more about the support that you’ve received and where we can all do better. All of us here on this call, everyone watching, the public at large, I guess, what can we learn from your respective struggles on how to better support one another and why we should be supporting one another? If you could put in a final plug for how folks watching can support you all and your fellow workers right here, right now, we’ll close out on that. So Yeager, kick us off again.
SN Yeager:
I have the wildest thing that’s going to tie together a bunch of things that was said, starting straight from it mattering that we learn from each other, and it matters that we all, from different industries and different states all over the place, learn from each other the way the bosses are learning from each other. I was at Labor Notes as well, and I went to the Labor Notes panel on picketing with [inaudible 01:21:45] and Reagan, and you know what we’re doing with our picket lines this year that we didn’t do in 2020? We’re dancing, and having parties and music. We didn’t do that. We didn’t know that was something we could do. Immediately, we learned from y’all. So I know you shared something horrible, but our strike is indebted to you, Reagan, and I am so excited that I got to share that.
Another immediate way that I think we underestimate our power is with social media. Listen, I am… The only reason I don’t consider myself Gen Z is that I teach Gen Z and I can’t keep up with them, but it matters how we present ourselves and how much we can clown on our employers on TikTok, and on Twitter, and on Facebook. As an extreme example, earlier this week, the graduate school at University of Michigan was having a webinar in honor of Cesar Chavez Day, and it was hosted by Christine Chavez, but Christine Chavez found out that we were on strike and she said, “Absolutely not. I’m not crossing a picket line. You need to bargain with your workers in good faith and get them a fair contract.” We are standing on shoulders of people who are giants in union history, and people who are in the same fights as us right now. Our university really wants to look good, and it wants to look so good that our new university President Santa Ono, canceled an event rather than have us get a picture of him crossing one of our picket lines. It actually matters when we are sharing stuff on social media because we see it and the broader community sees it.
We also learn from each other, not just strategy, but what we are able to do through a union. So in GEO, we have an abolition caucus and a housing caucus because we know that the community fights are the same thing as worker fights. In fact, something that I think GEO has done really well, and that’s not just because I’m a co-chair of the Queer/Trans Caucus, is that we are busting down doors to Trans Health. We have one of the best contracts for Trans Health across higher ed. 10 years ago, I don’t know. People didn’t think that trans people deserve to have rights in our contracts, but the reality is trans rights are our union fight because trans workers are workers. If you’re a worker, you deserve union rights. We can learn so much from each other and the fights that each other, all the other unions, are fighting. We inspire each other.
I’ll do a final plug. We can only be so inspiring when we can’t pay our rent, or can’t pay our childcare, or can’t pay our medical expenses so in addition to the social media and the learning from each other, the hardship fund really matters, too. Like someone else said, a little bit, a lot. That $5 might not be a lot to you, but it might be a lot to the person who can’t buy food otherwise. We’re all in it together. It’s not just your $5, it’s everyone else’s money that’s being put in. So our strike fund has a link that I’m sure is in the notes, but don’t… It’s long, off the top of my head. The amount of bitlys I’ve had to learn in the last week has been astronomical, so go to our website, geo3550.org. It is in a dancing floating button that you just simply can’t miss.
Karen Carlin:
Well, I’m just going to basically echo what Yeager has said. I can’t, again, the same emphasizing how important our struggle fund is to help out our members who are having a lot of difficult financial times; making rent, car payments, buying food, paying other sorts of bills. I would encourage people to donate to that, follow us through the Pittsburgh Union Progress or Strike publication to find out what we’re doing, how people can be part of our rally, some of the campaigns that we’re doing. It’s been wonderful, really uplifting to see the support that we’re getting from the community. We’ve had solidarity pledges from groups and also from politicians who refused to talk to the Post Gazette and will only speak to us. So that’s been really helpful. We just recently had a bunch of yard signs that were printed up that people are picking up and putting in their yards, and we’ve already had to do a reorder of those. It’s just really, really been amazing. And again, follow us, follow the Guild, the Union Progress on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Grace Bichanga Larson:
I am also going to echo everything that Yeager so eloquently laid out, especially about social media. I personally am aware that our organization thing, there is always something happening because there’s things. There’s lots of issues. They are definitely counting on that two second goldfish attention span. If we just keep sharing articles that are coming out about Planned Parenthood, honestly, just putting out Tweets that Planned Parenthood is union busting because it’s Planned Parenthood, just kind of getting the word out that we are still in the fight for a fair contract, and let’s flood our pro-union CEO’s email with demands for my job back. Then just to keep up on the unionizing process, you can follow PPNCS United, which is a union led group. That’s our Planned Parenthood social media for the North Central States on Instagram and Twitter. Then you can also follow our SEIU Minnesota and Iowa on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, I believe. Thanks for everyone having me here tonight.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to hop in real quick before I toss it to you, Zach, because A, I wanted to just put in another plug for everyone. Please sign the petition. Let people know about Grace’s unjust firing, and let’s really raise hell about this. Secondly, Grace, I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you, just because I know it’s probably a question on a lot of people’s minds, and I know that even some of my shithead colleagues in the media love to opine about the fact that abortion rights are under attack. No shit. We all know that. It’s getting very dark in the country. People’s rights are being stripped left and right. The right is not only attacking our right to privacy, and thus people’s rights to have abortion, but launching a full fledged fascist attack on queer and trans people, writ large. We know that we are in a very dark state.
Some people, even some so-called progressives are using that as an excuse to say, “Well, we shouldn’t deal with unionization right now. Let’s not unionize Planned Parenthood. That’s too much right now.” I was wondering if you just had any closing thoughts on why in fact, this is the time to ensure that workers like yourself at Planned Parenthood are unionized to protect the rights of all of us.
Grace Bichanga Larson:
It is even more imperative right now with all of these rights being under attack that the people able to provide care for these valuable humans are also protected. We can’t pour from an empty cup. People can’t be cutting meds in half. We need livable wages, workers’ rights, and abortion rights and trans rights, our human rights, and we’re all humans on this big earth. It’s not time to pit any movement against each other, but you cannot separate workers’ rights from the humanizing of all of these other issues.
We got to be able to take care of us at Planned Parenthood so that we can continue the mission because nobody wants to leave. Nobody works at Planned Parenthood just for a paycheck. We all work there because we are passionate about the work that we do and the communities that we serve. To be in this moment where abortion rights are under such attack and trans rights are devastatingly at risk, it is unfathomable that these are the fights that we are having to go back and forth with against our bosses, and have to unfortunately blow the whistle and publicly call them out because we had talks about calling them out December, but we were like, no. We don’t want negative press right now because we care about what we do, and we want people to continue supporting all of the work that we do because it is so important But, people are burning out left and right and it’s like we have to uplift what we’re doing so that we can continue doing the imperative work for the communities that we serve. Som thank you for that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell, yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that. All right, Zach, Reagan, take us home.
Zach Lennon-Simon:
Yeah, massive echo of what everyone’s been saying. Personally, I don’t quite like the internet a lot these days. All comment sections are minefields of toxicity. But, I joined this call specifically because I’m such a huge fan of each of the unions on this call. I was on a Pittsburgh Post Gazette Union meeting a while ago, hearing about your strike line and what you’ve been going through. I say the thing that is definitely most helpful in these kinds of things is donating to everyone’s strike funds, following those accounts, keeping aware, retweeting, re-sharing, talking about it. These bosses, they at the core, hate to be embarrassed. They really hate to be embarrassed. They really don’t like everyone knowing exactly who they are, and we should show the world who everyone is because then maybe we’ll get some rights back.
So, you can sign for Hearst. You can sign a letter and send it to our bosses, telling them to get back to the bargaining table, grow up, and get this contract done. You can follow us on social media, Hearst Union, on Twitter and Instagram. I think in the end, my biggest thing that I’ve learned from union work and I love about union work is just it’s an opportunity to have each other’s backs. I think no matter what union you’re in, you should support other workers. We deserve better than what we’re getting because without us, without our work, it’s just a name on the wall. They have nothing but the name without us, and we deserve a fair share of the profits they’re making. Finally, listen to some union songs. It’s been a long process, and I love listening to union songs. It gets me through a lot of really bad bargaining sessions and a lot of frustrating conversations. So shout out to Art, shout out Matawan the movie, and shout out to shows like this for highlighting what we’re all going through. Solidarity to all workers.
Reagan:
Well said everyone. I’m so grateful to be going last because I can just piggyback on everything great that has already been said. I guess the only thing I wanted to add to all of that is when your cup is full, pour some out for someone else. To illustrate what I mean by that is when we started our strike and people were showing up from other unions, I didn’t get it at first. I was like, like, “Oh my God, thank you so much.” They would show up. They brought signs. I mean, we didn’t even have signs at first. We didn’t really know how to do it. We’re like, how do you strike? They showed up with pizza. They showed up with water. They showed up with a megaphone. All these different folks from different unions coming out to support our strike was so meaningful and touching, and we didn’t forget that.
Our cup was empty, and then our other union friends filled it. Now that we’re no longer on strike, we love hearing… I mean, we don’t love hearing that anyone is on strike, but we love being contacted for things that are happening in different communities, in the labor community, in the dancer community, it’s exciting. There’s a lot of dancers now who are starting to stand up for themselves. We were just contacted yesterday by a club that they walked out yesterday in Portland, and they were asking us to amplify them, and sign a petition, and post their strike fund. We’re so happy to be able to do that. For all the other workers in the other unions that just came out, not knowing who we were, not having any personal connection other than we’re in this fight together. They knew that before I knew that, and now that I get it, I’m so happy to support them. I’m so happy to go down and stand with the Medieval Times workers. I’m so happy to go to different strikes and events that unite Here is Holding because of the support that they’ve shown us. It just goes on and on so when your cup is full, try to give some back, especially if you can give it back to folks that filled up your cup in the first place.
The final thing is in the description there is a link to the Strippers Strike NoHo Link Tree, and so I encourage you to check it out. I think the first link on the Link Tree will be our fundraiser to buy the club. It is a slow and steady climb upwards to our massive goal, which the goal might even not be enough to buy the club, but it’s a starting point, and anything helps. This is a grassroots movement. We are hoping for some forthcoming or upcoming celebrity endorsements or something to get it moving a little faster, but everything helps.
Then also, you can buy… I think the next link or a little bit further down the Link Tree is a link to our merch. I’m wearing one of our shirts. It says union, with a Platform Stiletto. We have new shirts. We have updated merch on our merch site, and that goes to help us as well, in our fundraising efforts. So check it out and of course, follow us on Instagram because we are always posting updates. We’re always amplifying other folks in the struggle. That’s @StripperStrikeNoHo on Instagram. Yeah, so thank you everyone for… Oh, I’m so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, I genuinely can’t thank… You all are incredible panelists enough, but I’m going to do it anyway. I really, really want to thank you, Yeager, Zach, Karen, Reagan, Grace. Thank you so much for taking time to speak with us, to share these stories about your struggles, and for fighting the good fight. I want to also thank all of you watching for caring about this. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for donating to these strike funds. Thank you for buying the merch. Thank you for lifting up these and other vital struggles because as you heard from our incredible panelists, we need all of it. We can’t forget about one another. When it comes down to it, I think that’s what I hope these live streams accomplish, and I hope that’s what we leave y’all with, is that it really is that basic sometimes.
We got to show up for one another, and we got to keep showing up for one another and then we got to bring a friend with us and keep showing up for one another. We got to put the bosses on blast. We have to do whatever we can, especially when politicians and corporate media aren’t going to do it for us. We are all we’ve got, but that’s a hell of a lot. We are a hell of a lot, and together, we are one hell of a formidable force. We have way more power than they want us to believe. I think that you can feel that when we do these live streams. You can see that when you look at these different struggles and the ways that working, people are supporting one another, overcoming those divisions and really providing the support that we all need to keep fighting for what we all deserve. What we deserve is the world, because we make the world run.
Thank you all so much for watching. Thank you for caring. I also want to thank our incredible Real News production team who are working behind the scenes, and without whom we could not make this happen. Thank you to our Director of Production, Kayla Rivara, our Studio Director, David Hebden. Thank you to Cameron Granadino for getting me all set up here. Thank you to our Associate Editor, Mel Buer, for hitting it up in the live chat. Really, really love and appreciate all of y’all.
For the Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez signing off. Before you go, please head on over to the realnews.com/support. Become a monthly sustainer of our work so we can keep bringing you important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
This post was originally published on The Real News Network.
Recent news reports have revealed that child labor is not just a historical relic in the United States—and some politicians want to undermine existing regulations, claiming that less oversight is good for business.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
