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When Nike’s shareholders convene in a virtual meeting room on Tuesday, they will hear from dissatisfied investors who hope to shift the company’s approach to climate change, gender equity and labor rights using one of the only tools they have: transparency.
They’re offering a record number of proposals to make the company investigate the problems they perceive and report the results publicly.
But if history is any guide, none of the investors’ proposals will pass.
Every one of the 18 Nike shareholder proposals to reach a vote since at least 1996 has been rejected, according to news archives and securities filings reviewed by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive. As in past meetings, Nike’s board of directors — the majority of whom are selected by a holding company for co-founder Phil Knight’s stock — opposes this year’s measures.
The demands being made of Nike come from investment funds whose customers wish to back companies that deliver on corporate responsibility, an effort sometimes labeled “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG. Their uphill fight at annual meetings reveals limitations to the influence of shareholder activism on corporate policy.
Among the five proposals that Nike investors will decide on are those asking the world’s largest athletic apparel brand to explain its failure to cut carbon emissions and to evaluate ways to improve working conditions in its supply chain.
Lisa Hayles of Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based sustainable investing firm that owned $11.7 million in Nike stock as of June 30, said Trillium and others have been “stonewalled” by Nike on questions about labor rights, including allegations that two of its suppliers owe $2.2 million in unpaid wages at two Asian factories shuttered during the pandemic. Nike has said it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.
Hayles said she also wants to know why the company eliminated 20% of its employees working full time on sustainability. The layoffs, first reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica, were part of a broader cost-saving effort but went deeper than cuts of 2% companywide and 7% at Nike’s Oregon headquarters.
“It’s very disappointing to see this lack of response, lack of engagement from the company, coupled with what we know about the layoffs and restructuring of the staff working on sustainability,” she said. “It calls into question: What is the company’s commitment?”
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ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at 503-221-4386, and on Signal at 971-319-3830.
The proposals mainly aim to change Nike’s response to climate change and its handling of women’s and workers’ rights. They also include one from a conservative think tank challenging the company’s support of LGBTQ+ organizations.
Nike declined an interview request. The company said in a statement: “We greatly value the opportunity to engage with and solicit feedback from our shareholders, and we believe that maintaining an open dialogue strengthens our approach to corporate governance practices and disclosures.” The company said it did not engage with the conservative think tank.
The company’s annual meetings are required by law and play out with scripted precision. Investors elect Nike’s board and have a chance to submit questions to top executives. But they aren’t handed a microphone by someone passing through the audience. Unlike meetings of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which draw thousands of people to Omaha, Nebraska, Nike’s meetings are virtual and succinct. Last year’s finished in under 41 minutes.
The activists have to make their case quickly. A two-minute, 58-second audio clip by one activist shareholder group in 2023 appeared to have been edited to remove pauses between sentences. It finished playing just seconds before the polls closed for shareholder voting.
An individual or investment group needs to own only $25,000 in company stock to file a shareholder proposal. For longer-term shareholders, that threshold drops to $2,000, which is roughly 25 shares of Nike. The company is worth about $120 billion.
Investors possess few other ways to force changes at publicly traded companies. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission does not permit investors to micromanage. They can’t require a company to pay men and women the same. But they can try to compel it to say whether it does. Even when investor-led proposals don’t advance, activists say, a public airing of concerns can sometimes spark impact.
In 2018, after The Wall Street Journal and others reported on allegations about a boys’ club culture at Nike, representatives of Trillium asked the company to set diversity goals. Trillium withdrew the proposal after Nike committed to engaging and subsequently announced additional plans to increase the representation of women in its global workforce. (The company faces a sweeping lawsuit, filed in the wake of the 2018 news coverage, from female employees alleging gender discrimination; the company has denied the allegations in court filings.)
Trium Sustainable Innovators, a London-based fund, is behind the proposal asking Nike to explain its record on climate change. The investors want Nike to study and report on why it missed many of its 2020 climate targets and subsequently abandoned some of the metrics. Nike hasn’t seen its emissions budge in the past decade, despite promises to sharply reduce them.
Pointing to Nike statements that consumer preference and marketplace demand drove the 2020 misses, Trium’s proposal says Nike appears “to absolve itself of responsibility” and could have influenced demand through pricing, supply volume and product visibility.
“They will need to pay for carbon emissions one way or another,” Raphael Pitoun, a Trium portfolio manager, said in an interview. “Being so slow in carbon transition is a mistake.”
Pitoun did not specify how much Nike stock Trium owns but put the investment fund’s stake at “a few million dollars.”
Trium wrote three letters to Nike in 2023, then filed the shareholder proposal after the investors said they did not get answers to their questions, including on a call with Nike. Pitoun described the shareholder proposal as the last step in a two-year escalation process.
Nike, for its part, said the report Trium wants would be duplicative, writing in a securities filing that while it is now working toward achieving its 2025 targets, it is “also striving to do more.”
Two groups that advise institutional investors on how to vote on shareholder proposals, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, recommended approving the climate proposal. ISS also recommended a yes vote on a proposed study of gender- and race-based pay gaps at Nike.
The climate proposal and the Trillium labor proposal also got a boost on Thursday after Reuters reported that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which owns a $1.05 billion Nike stake, is backing them. The fund is Nike’s ninth-largest investor, according to the report.
While proposals like the ones facing Nike this month have grown more common in American business, they continue to face long odds, said Douglas Chia, president of Soundboard Governance and a former corporate secretary of Johnson & Johnson.
Chia, who also teaches at Rutgers Law School, said of Nike: “Companies where founders, someone like a Phil Knight, own a huge chunk, it’s very difficult.”
The U.S. presidential campaigns both have their eyes on the critical swing state of Pennsylvania — and Pennsylvania, as ever, has its eyes on energy. The state is the nation’s second-largest producer and exporter of fuels for energy — mostly natural gas and coal. The future of those industries is sufficiently important to the state’s voters that one of Vice President Kamala Harris’ first political decisions as a presidential candidate this summer was to drop her support for a ban on fracking.
But even with continued fracking in the western part of the state, the state’s fossil fuel industry jobs are poised to dry up, and they have been showing signs of doing so for years. The future for the state’s energy industry is beginning to look much different than its past: Polling shows that Pennsylvanians broadly support an expansion of clean energy. That support is not just limited to climate-conscious Democrats in the state’s urban areas — it’s also beginning to show up in the industrial professions that have long depended on Pennsylvania’s legacy fossil fuel industry. In the latest sign of this shift, last week a coalition of trade unions launched a new advocacy group, which is led by the state’s AFL-CIO president and is aptly titled Union Energy, to try to ensure that workers in Pennsylvania get a “just transition” to a fossil-fuel-free economy.
So far, lost jobs in fossil fuel extraction have yet to be fully replaced by clean energy jobs. “They’re beginning to emerge — we’ve seen some solar, we’ve seen some wind — but as these industries are emerging, that’s where we’re saying we want to be a bigger part of this conversation, and ensure that what is coming is going to be driven by good quality union jobs,” Angela Ferritto, the president of Pennsylvania’s AFL-CIO, told Grist.
Union Energy is a collaboration between two unions — the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO and the Pennsylvania Building Trades — and the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, an organization whose signature strategy has been to rally union support for climate projects in states across the country. Perhaps the group’s biggest success story thus far has been organizing the coalition of unions and environmental groups that backed a pioneering climate law passed in 2021 in Illinois.
Union Energy’s launch event was held at the Cleveland-Cliffs plant in Steelton, PA, which is the nation’s oldest operating steel mill. Labor leaders spoke against a backdrop of a giant American flag and metal letters reading “Good Work is Done Safely.” The location was symbolically important not only because of its history, but also because Cleveland-Cliffs represents the kind of progress that Union Energy is seeking to champion in the present. Just a week before the event, Cleveland-Cliffs had been awarded $19 million from the federal Department of Energy to electrify its steel-production furnaces at another of its Pennsylvania facilities. This will help the company reduce fossil fuel emissions by using induction heat, an important step for the notoriously hard-to-decarbonize steelmaking process.
“Cleveland-Cliffs built this country, and it will build the steel of tomorrow cleaner than it has ever been,” said Robert Bair, the president of the Pennsylvania Building Trades union and the secretary-treasurer of Union Energy, at the event.
The argument for unions’ involvement in the energy transition is not only about unionizing the burgeoning clean energy sectors, although that is indeed beginning to happen. According to a federal report on energy employment released last week, the (slim) proportion of clean energy workers who are in a union has for the first time surpassed that of the energy sector overall. Even beyond making sure that the new jobs are well paid and unionized, labor leaders argue, unions are crucial partners in actually making the energy transition happen. For one thing, they’re uniquely equipped to build out the high-skilled trades workforce that is in woefully short supply for what is, after all, a massive industrial project in a country that hopes to rebuild industrial employment.
In particular, union apprenticeships and training programs are valuable pathways for large numbers of people to join relatively lucrative blue-collar trade professions. One such apprenticeship program was launched in Pennsylvania on August 26 by the United Mine Workers of America in partnership with the state’s governor, Josh Shapiro. Through the program, the mineworkers union will train workers to remediate the hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells that blanket the western half of the state, pollute drinking water, and leak huge amounts of planet-warming methane gas.
Besides training workers, unions can also play an important role in building political support for the actual projects where new jobs will be deployed — as Climate Jobs’ campaigns in states like Illinois have shown.
Alongside the launch of Union Energy, an affiliated research institute at Cornell University released a report envisioning the range of similarly ambitious, worker-centered efforts that Pennsylvania could take to decarbonize every sector of its economy, from energy to transportation to agriculture. It’s a vision whose realization would require a degree of cooperation between the labor and climate movements that once sounded implausible — but in Pennsylvania, now seems a little less far off.
“We all want the same thing, at the end of the day,” said Ferritto. “We want clean air, we want clean water, we want to be able to see our children and grandchildren run around the earth like we did as children — and we also want to be able to go to work, come home and know that we’re gonna be able to take care of our families.”
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sep. 4, 2024. It is shared here with permission under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
“The new jobs of the South will be union jobs,” said Tim Smith, a regional director for the United Auto Workers, after the union announced Tuesday that 1,000 workers at Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, Tennessee had voted to form a collective bargaining unit.
The vote made the electric vehicle battery plant the second Ultium Cells workplace to join the UAW, and the second auto industry plant in the U.S. South to vote in favor of unionization following the launch of a major $40 million organizing effort in the region this year.
Anti-union companies such as EV automaker Tesla have eyed the South as a region to make a manufacturing push, due to its historical antagonism toward labor and low levels of unionization.
But Smith said the vote at Ultium Cells proves that “in the battery plants and EV factories springing up from Georgia to Kentucky to Texas, workers know they deserve the same strong pay and benefits our members have won. And we’re going to make sure they have the support they need to win their unions and win their fair share.”
The first Ultium Cells battery plant to join the UAW was the Lordstown, Ohio location, where employees ratified a contract in June that included a 30% raise over three years for production workers, an immediate $3,000 bonus, and health and safety protections.
“Being unionized will help us reap the benefits as far as better healthcare, better pay, and overall, just having decency within the workplace—not just for us, but future generations,” said Tradistine Chambers, a worker at Ultium in Spring Hill.
Battery workers are seizing their power! Today, 1,000 workers at Ultium Cells in Spring Hill, TN, voted to join the UAW. They are the second Ultium plant built in the US and the second to go union. The first was Lordstown, OH, in 2022. pic.twitter.com/dOlbED34if
General Motors, which jointly owns Ultium Cells with South Korean company LG Energy Solution, voluntarily recognized the new union on Tuesday.
“The workers organized without facing threats or intimidation and won their union once a majority of workers signed cards,” said the UAW.
Trudy Lindahl, a worker at the plant, said it was “a great day for Ultium workers and for every worker in Tennessee and the South.”
“Southern workers are ready to stand up and win our fair share by winning our unions,” said Lindahl. “And when we have a free and fair choice, we will win every time.”
Two months after the UAW launched its organizing drive in the South, workers at a Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee overwhelmingly voted to join the union. A vote at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama in May failed even though a majority of workers had signed union cards, and the UAW filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board that the automaker had launched a union-busting campaign.
Despite that setback in Alabama, organizer Keith Brower Brown of Labor Notes said the union in Spring Hill could serve as “a potential union anchor for massive factories under construction for the emerging Southern battery belt.”
Tens of thousands of new EV battery jobs are expected to come online across the South in the coming months, including at plants owned by Ford in Tennessee and Kentucky.
The past few years have seen a wave of unionization among U.S. food service workers, most notably at Starbucks, where Starbucks Workers United has organized nearly 500 stores. The Starbucks union drive, which went public in August 2021, was born in Buffalo, New York. Locally, other workers inspired by the Starbucks campaign, as well as the earlier SPoT Coffee union drive, went on to organize…
As part of our Labor Day special, we remember the longtime labor organizer and scholar Jane McAlevey, who died in July at the age of 59. She dedicated her life to empowering rank-and-file workers, training tens of thousands around the world to effectively strengthen their unions. She gave one of her last interviews to Democracy Now! in April after she announced she was entering hospice. “We like to win,” says McAlevey, “and we like to teach workers how to win. What are the methods? What is it we can do?”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
In 1980, historian Howard Zinn published his classic work, A People’s History of the United States. The book would go on to sell over a million copies and change the way many look at history in America. We begin today’s special with highlights from a production of Howard Zinn’s Voices of a People’s History of the United States, where Zinn introduced dramatic readings from history. We hear Alfre Woodard read the words of labor activist Mother Jones and Howard’s son Jeff Zinn read the words of an IWW poet and organizer Arturo Giovannitti.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
New York City, the city that never sleeps, is also an incredibly hard place to take a break — if your job is jetting across town on a bike delivering takeout and groceries. “As things stand, there isn’t a designated place for us to rest while working,” Antonio Solis, an app-based delivery worker from Veracruz, Mexico, who moved to New York City five years ago, said in an interview in Spanish. “A lot of workers live in Queens or the Bronx, and they have to go as far as Manhattan for work.” Rather than ride the 10 or 20 miles home, they look for small pockets of shade in parks and plazas, or shell out for a coffee or sandwich to take advantage of eateries’ indoor seating.
The challenge of finding an acceptable break area in a city full of concrete, skyscrapers, and traffic exists year round for the more than 60,000 delivery workers in New York City. But summer makes the problem even more urgent — and this summer has been particularly brutal. Oppressive heat arrived early in New York City — the first heat wave struck in mid-June, just days before the official start of summer. By mid-July, the city had had two more heat waves (defined by the National Weather Service as streaks of three or more days with temperatures at or above 90 degrees Fahrenheit), and had already seen as many days at or above 90 degrees F in 2024 as it normally does in an entire year. Spending long periods in this kind of punishing heat presents real health and safety risks for outdoor workers. But delivery workers are getting organized — in ways large and small — to keep themselves safe in the heat.
“Protecting yourself from the heat is always complicated,” said Solis. “But you have to be prepared.”
Solis is part of Los Deliveristas Unidos — a New York City-based advocacy organization that has been tremendously effective at campaigning for the rights of delivery workers. Many of its members, known as deliveristas, are immigrant men who speak English as a second language. Since its founding in 2020, the organization has won industry-leading labor protections — most notably the city’s first ever minimum wage law for app-based delivery workers, which went into effect last summer.
While groups promoting labor rights for app-based couriers exist all over the country, the organizing landscape for Los Deliveristas is fairly specific, because of the sweeping popularity of e-bikes, mopeds, scooters, and other forms of micromobility among New York City delivery workers. These forms of transportation allow workers to cover more ground and complete deliveries in shorter amounts of time by maneuvering through traffic — a crucial advantage for providing the speed and convenience consumers expect from delivery apps.
Because couriers in New York City are necessarily exposed to the elements, hot days leave this workforce vulnerable to heat exhaustion, heat stroke, sunburn, fatigue, dizziness, and fainting. These risks are exacerbated by the urban heat island effect — in which buildings and concrete absorb and give off more heat from the sun than trees and vegetation. Climate change makes days of excessive heat more likely, heightening the need for infrastructure that protects vulnerable communities from heat waves — such as cooling centers, green roofs, and robust tree canopies.
What makes things complicated is delivery orders surge during moments of extreme weather, like heat waves and thunderstorms. “Any conditions in which the city is recommending people to stay home, and the people who have the option to stay home are staying home, that’s when the demand for our jobs is the highest,” said Josh Wood, a Los Deliveristas member who lives in Brooklyn and has been doing deliveries since 2016. “Because we’re the ones who are more willing to be outside.”
E-bikes, mopeds, scooters, and other forms of micromobility are popular among New York City delivery workers. Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images
Wood spoke to Grist on the phone from a public park on a Friday in early August, a week when the city declared a heat emergency; going into the weekend, the National Weather Service warned of heat indices that could reach the low 100s F. “Everyone kind of has their own strategy” for surviving the heat, said Wood. He says he’s used the city’s public cooling centers — air conditioned spaces like libraries and community centers — but notes that they are only open during certain hours. In Manhattan’s Midtown and Financial District, “they still have some commercial buildings which have public atriums. Sometimes you just have to deal with it and find shade and drink lots of water.”
The need to make do is familiar to delivery workers who worked through the pandemic, when restaurants stopped serving customers on-site and homebound New Yorkers relied heavily on delivery.
“We risked our health for the delivery companies during COVID, and now we are doing it again,” said Bimal Ghale, a delivery worker from Queens who is a member of Justice for App Workers, a national coalition of rideshare and delivery workers. For Ghale, the COVID-19 pandemic represented a public health crisis that both proved the necessity of delivery work and compromised the safety of those who do it. Extreme heat creates a similar squeeze.
In order to stay safe, many delivery workers in New York City have an informal checklist of tools to get them through the day. But since app-based couriers are classified as independent contractors rather than employees, workers like Solis say they pay for protective equipment out of pocket. “You have to use sunblock, you have to cover your face and body, because it can be a bit dangerous if you get a sunburn or heat rash,” said Solis. “You have to remind your coworkers to drink a lot of water, so they can stay hydrated and avoid getting heatstroke.”
Ghale said many of his colleagues have their eyes on a tactical vest lined with panels of ice cubes that would help regulate their body temperature, but few can afford the price tag. “The jacket is a minimum of $100,” said Ghale. “Who can afford that?”
Without proper protective gear and measures, like taking sufficient breaks, workers can find themselves in dangerous situations. “We have noticed that workers with heat fatigue, dizziness — there are workers who have experienced accidents,” said Ligia Guallpa, the executive director of the Worker’s Justice Project, the nonprofit that organizes Los Deliveristas. When workers need to take time off to recover after getting injured on the job, she added, they are often penalized by the apps — such as by having their hours reduced or accounts deactivated.
“Extreme weather and climate change have turned app delivery work into one of the most dangerous jobs, and also have an economic impact on the lives of workers,” said Guallpa.
Julian Crowley, a DoorDash spokesperson, denied that DoorDash deactivates the accounts of workers who take time off after being injured, calling this claim “incredibly loaded and frankly totally wrong.” He pointed to the company’s free occupational accidental insurance program, which covers U.S.-based couriers who are injured while making a delivery for DoorDash. Claims of sudden account deactivationsare not new for the company; recently, DoorDash launched an in-app appeals process for workers who believe they’ve been unfairly deactivated.
Crowley also touted the company’s severe weather protocol, through which the company monitors real-time extreme weather conditions, provides couriers with alerts, and may temporarily adjust or suspend operations in an impacted area. “At DoorDash, we take the extreme heat impacting millions of Americans very seriously and have implemented several measures to help keep Dashers safe,” said Crowley. (DoorDash refers to its independent contractors performing deliveries as “Dashers.”) During extreme weather, the company urges delivery workers to follow local safety precautions. “Importantly, Dashers choose when they dash — if they ever feel unsafe or that it’s too hot, they can and should stop immediately,” said Crowley.
Oppressive heat arrived early in New York City this year — the first heat wave struck in mid-June, just days before the official start of summer. Gary Hershorn / Getty Images
A Grubhub spokesperson told Grist, “During extreme weather, especially heat waves, we encourage our delivery partners to exercise caution and take breaks when needed.” The spokesperson mentioned that the app partnered with e-bike rental platform JOCO last year to open two indoor rest areas for delivery workers in New York City, and that workers have access to occupational accident insurance and RapidSOS, an app that makes it easier to send location data when placing a 911 call. “We encourage customers to be patient with delays and extra generous with tips during tough conditions,” said the spokesperson.
UberEats, another popular delivery app in New York City, did not respond to requests for comment.
Solis said he thinks the apps that profit off of delivery workers’ labor have ignored them for too long. “I think there’s a long list of things the apps should do” to keep deliveristas safe, he said. “They never see the person who is doing the work.”
Los Deliveristas argues that delivery workers aren’t just in need of stronger labor protections; they also need better urban infrastructure designed with their specific needs in mind.
When the need for adequate rest areas became undeniable during the pandemic, Los Deliveristas developed a vision to reuse existing public space, like areas with abandoned newsstands, to better serve its members. The organization came up with the idea for what they’re calling deliverista hubs — sheds that can be equipped with HVAC systems so they can stay cool during the summer and heated during the winter. Hubs will also have e-bike battery chargers and water stations so delivery workers can properly rest and recharge on the go.
With the support of Senator Chuck Schumer, the first deliverista hub — which will be built near City Hall, in Manhattan’s Financial District — is likely to go live by the end of the year, said Guallpa. These hubs have been subject todelays, in part because of the various permits and permissions they require, but Los Deliveristas says there’s no good reason why there shouldn’t be hubs in every corner of the city. “For us the deliverista hubs are a blueprint that we’re going to continue to adapt and evolve,” she said.
“We’re proud to be part of a creative, first-of-its-kind effort to support app-based delivery workers with a safe and supportive workplace, using our public spaces in a new and innovative way,” said Kelsey Jean-Baptiste, a press officer for the New York City parks department.
Now that Los Deliveristas has identified the need to reimagine the city’s infrastructure, Guallpa hopes public agencies will include delivery workers in conversations around urban planning and disaster preparedness. This hasn’t happened yet, but she said the organization is increasingly pushing for it. “We are the eyes and the ears of the city,” Guallpa said. “Who knows better than a deliverista how our roads [are] and how to respond when it comes to emergencies?”
The death toll in Gaza continues to climb, with conservative estimates putting the numbers of dead around 40,000, but a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the actual death toll could be 186,000 or even higher—that’s roughly 8% of Gaza’s population. And with each passing day, the humanitarian crises unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank gets orders of magnitude worse.
Seeing the dire situation in Palestine, seven major US labor unions collectively drafted, signed, and sent a letter to President Biden demanding that US military aid to Israel stop immediately. The letter reads, in part: “Large numbers of Palestinian civilians, many of them children, continue to be killed, reportedly often with US-manufactured bombs. Rising tensions in the region threaten to ensnare even more innocent civilians in a wider war. And the humanitarian crisis deepens by the day, with famine, mass displacement, and destruction of basic infrastructure including schools and hospitals. We have spoken directly to leaders of Palestinian trade unions who told us heart-wrenching stories of the conditions faced by working people in Gaza.”
In this episode, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez and Staff Reporter Mel Buer speak with George Waksmunski, president of the United Electrical, Radio, & Machine Workers of America (UE), Eastern Region, and Brandon Mancilla, Region 9A Director for the United Auto Workers, about why their unions signed onto this call for an end to US aid to Israel and what organized labor can do to end the genocide in Gaza.
Featured Music… Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
George Waksmunski:
Hello, my name’s George Waksmunkski. I’m the UE Eastern Region President. That’s the United Electrical Radio Machine Workers of America, UE. I oversee 14 states for UE from North Carolina, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and New York and all the way up through New England and everything in between. I’m very happy to be here and be part of this conversation. Thank you.
Brandon Mancilla:
I’m Brandon Mancilla, the UAW Region 9A director. We represent 50,000 active and retired members from New York to Maine and Puerto Rico and Region 9A director sits on the International Executive Board of the International UAW.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focus shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to.
And please also support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle across the US and across the world. My name is Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I’m Maximillian Alvarez.
Mel Buer:
And today, we’re bringing the focus back to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the role that organized labor is playing to try and stop it. In July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorching address to Congress in which he vowed, “Total victory in Palestine,” and called American protesters standing in opposition to the genocide, “Useful idiots,” earned him a standing ovation for many US representatives and underscored, yet again, the deep involvement of the US in the ongoing carnage.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Over the last year, both Mel and I have sat down with many workers and organizers who have been agitating within their unions to pressure leadership to take a public stance against the genocide in Palestine and to draw attention to the US involvement in Israel’s brutal campaign. Since October 7th, the United States government has sent more than $12 billion, that’s billion with a B, to Israel, with billions more earmarked for the next four years. The death toll in Gaza continues to climb with conservative estimates putting the numbers of dead near 40,000, but a recent report in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, estimates the death toll could be far greater than that, over 186,000 people or more. That’s roughly 8% of Gaza’s population. And with each passing day, the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza gets orders of magnitude worse.
Seeing the dire situation in Palestine seven major US labor unions have collectively drafted, signed and sent a letter to President Biden demanding that US military aid to Israel stop immediately. The letter reads, in part, “Recent reports only underscore the urgency of our demands. Large numbers of Palestinian civilians, many of them children, continue to be killed, reportedly often with US manufactured bombs. Rising tensions in the region threaten to ensnare even more innocent civilians in a wider war. And the humanitarian crisis deepens by the day with famine, mass displacement and destruction of basic infrastructure including schools and hospitals. We have spoken directly to leaders of Palestinian trade unions who told us heart-wrenching stories of the conditions faced by working people in Gaza.”
Mel Buer:
The seven unions, the Association of Flight Attendance Communication Workers of America or AFACWA, the American Postal Workers Union, APWU, the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, IUPAT, the National Education Association, NEA, the Service Employees International Union, SEIU, the United Auto Workers, UAW, and the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers, UE, collectively represent about 6 million American workers. As Alex Press reported in Jacobin, this letter to Biden is a product of relationships built through the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, a coalition of unions that formed around a statement initially sponsored by UE and UFCW International Union Local 3000, that statement called on Biden and Congress to “push for an immediate ceasefire, an end to the siege of Gaza”, stopping short of calling for an end to US military aid to Israel.
This new letter represents a significant escalation in pressure from the US labor movement and an effort to address this ongoing humanitarian catastrophe with us today to discuss this important escalation in the campaign to pressure the US to end its involvement in Israel are Brandon Mancilla and George Waksmunski.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, gentlemen, it’s so great to have you on the show today. We really appreciate you all making time for this. We know how busy you are, but we know that you know how important this issue is to all of us as human beings, as fellow workers and to the unions that you represent and the union members that you represent. And I really want to pick up on that last point Mel was talking about in the introduction about how this has been building over the course of months, if not years, right? This strong forceful push from organized labor to oppose the brutal occupation and genocidal violence happening in Palestine is something that UE has been on the frontlines of, really a leader in the labor movement.
And I was wondering if we could start with George going back there and talk a little bit for our listeners about the Labor Network for Ceasefire, like how it was formed and the UE’s role in pushing this call for a ceasefire and now an end to military aid to Israel within the US labor movement. And then, Brandon, I’d love for you to hop in and talk about UAW as well, your president, Shawn Fain of course being one of the earliest and most vocal union leaders to call for a ceasefire earlier this year. So, George, give our listeners a little background here on UE’s role in this fight and how far that goes back.
George Waksmunski:
Sure. Thank you very much, brother. Well, UE has been in this for a very long time. For many decades, we’ve had a policy about the situation in Palestine and Gaza and as it relates to Israel. So that goes back many decades. And every two years, we have a national convention and we take up resolutions which our members ultimately vote on. And so again, for each of those conventions over the decades, similar resolutions were passed. In 2015, we passed a resolution called Justice and Peace for the People of Palestine and Israel and that called for an end military aid to Israel back then. It also endorsed BDS, boycott, divest and sanction, because we believe that Israel is acting similar to an apartheid state and that’s how apartheid was dismantled, at least one part of it. And so we were the first union to sign onto that back in 2015.
And again, every two years since then when we’ve had our conventions and we’ve had similar resolutions regarding military aid to Israel and calling for peace between the two parties, calling for a two-state solution. So this last convention in 2023, that resolution come up again, and again, we passed that resolution, calling for an end to all military aid to Israel. And that was about two weeks before the horrific attack of the citizens of Israel that occurred. So even prior to that, we were already calling for an end to military aid to Israel. So once the attack occurred and after several weeks of seeing how this was playing out, we were already in a position, long held, to be able to take the lead on it and that’s what we did.
As you mentioned, we initiated along with the UFCW 3000 a petition to get all labor unions signed onto to call for a ceasefire. Since then, our members have been out in the streets rallying, protesting on college campuses, at congressmen and senators’ offices, doors, wherever we can catch those folks to give them help. And fortunately, Congresswoman Summer Lee here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania is a strong advocate for peace in the Middle East and a two-state solution, so we’ve got a good congresswoman here. But so again, as the months have gone on, yes, we’ve been part of the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, working and gathering other unions into the coalition and we weren’t seeing any …
I mean, we got a lot of false hope given to us about a potential ceasefire and about a potential ceasefire and about a potential ceasefire, but it never happened. And we knew it never was going to happen, because Netanyahu, that’s not his goal, that’s not his road to success and the United States just backs Israel no matter what and even if it means that we’re going to be involved in genocide, supporting it with our bombs that we make. So again, we’ve put together our coalition to now put forward this letter to President Biden, going more than just calling for a ceasefire, but an end to all military aid to Israel, especially during this time.
So we’ve always been at the forefront of this and we’re very proud and excited by the number of national unions that you read off and especially the UAW and being part of this. And we are excited, because in the past, these things took years and years to get a coalition together. In this, it took seven months. So there’s a change going on, I think, not only in our membership, but at the leadership levels as well, to understand that the injury to one is an injury to all. Because there was a time in our history back during the Red Scare when McCarthyism, part of that was to silence unions from being active in political affairs, international affairs such as this. And for a long time, that worked. And although UE has never been silent on it, a lot of other unions on various issues have been.
So we’re very excited to see the other unions stepping forward as quickly as they are, even though in some cases it might seem like it’s been too long, but it is progress and we’re excited by it. Thanks.
Brandon Mancilla:
Thanks for having me on. I think just to add to George, unions like UE and Mark Dimondstein, his leadership with the postal workers and some of the other unions originally listed in that letter that UE helped lead really paved the way. I think it was really smart to realize that this moment was, number one, the demand needed to be serious of our government and of our elected officials to be held accountable to find a pathway to peace and the retaliatory violence that Israel was going to set upon after the October 7th attack by Hamas, right? But I think they also realized that it wasn’t going to be enough to just rally the same unions that have internationalist stance or a solid progressive stance on this issue. It needed to be an opening to the rest of the labor movement and I really commend, I think, UE and Mark and so many others for doing that because I think it forced the rest of the labor movement to have this conversation.
So I think intertwined with that is the fact that the international UAW has been going through its own reform process over the last few years. The election of Shawn Fain after one member, one vote, and my slate, which we ran with Shawn and the big three, Stand Up Strike and our commitment to new organizing, I think this is another chapter in that story. I think it’s in the same book that we’re writing and I think that’s been powered by our members. So I think two things played a factor in us joining that call in December, one being that a lot of our members, especially in Regions, 9A, mine, and Region 6, but also in places like Dearborn, Michigan, took to the streets and demanded peace, demanded a ceasefire from October 8th, right?
And why October 8th? Because everyone knew what was coming after October 7th, right? So they didn’t have to wait until November, December, January to know the scale of the violence that was going to be unleashed on the people at Gaza, right? So what happened thereafter was a lot of street protests demanding that we wouldn’t see the scale of suffering. That didn’t happen, of course. We supplied the weapons. Israel began its counteroffensive and led to the death of tens of thousands, which the numbers only increased and I do think that it’s far higher than the conservative estimate of the round 38,000 to 40,000 that most media outlets report nowadays.
And I think, with those members going out to the streets, they were demanding that their union, I think realign their own politics around this issue. I think that’s the key part of this. It wasn’t just, “Oh, I just happened to be a UAW member,” or, “I happen to be a union member,” or, “I happen to be a university staff member,” “I am doing this. I’m out on the streets also as a member of my union, not just as an average citizen, as an average worker. I want my protest also to be seen as a demand of my own union to join this explicitly,” right? And I think those were the conversations that started to happen, within local unions, within our political councils. Eventually 5 and 9A, explicitly as political councils, came out in support of a ceasefire sign on to the letter that UE mobilized and that gave myself and Director Mike Miller the leverage to be able to take that to the International Executive Board, have conversations with people like Shawn Fain and others on the International Executive Board to educate and inform.
Shawn was very supportive from the very beginning on being vocal on this. We just needed to find new way to do it. And at the International Executive Board at the end of November, we decided to sign on. So between October and December 1st when we finally came out. We were definitely early on in the sense that a lot of the major unions who have usually been silent or ignorant or on Israel’s side, on critically on this when these bombing campaigns would happen. We’re early in breaking with that silence or changing course, but we weren’t the first ones obviously, but I think our leadership on this, when we did come out, did allow an even further opening of the door for other unions to come out.
And I think that’s when you saw the numerous local unions, central labor councils, international unions, and then eventually, the AFL-CIO itself come out for a ceasefire. And now I think the discussion is like, “Well, listen, we’re now seven months after this kind of momentous moment of labor union ceasefire statements. What’s next?” right? And I think that’s what this escalation is with the letter to call for halt of arms. And I just think the key thing to remember through this process is that it is a process of political education for our own unions, right? It’s not fast enough, but it’s also historic. So those both things are happening at the same time, and at the end of the day, this is not going to end until peace is secured and there’s a true path to justice for the Palestinian people.
Mel Buer:
Thank you for that. Brandon, I wanted to direct this question to you first. We’ve talked about why calls for permanent ceasefire were really the start or temporary, a ceasefire, and now we’re seeing through, what is it now, months of negotiations, almost reaching an agreement or one side agreeing and then Israel walking back or broken promises that the Biden administration has spent a lot of time saying, “We’re close,” or these negotiations are breaking down for one reason or another, or at some point, it seems like almost a cynical sort of ploy for votes in November sometimes, right? And so I really want to drive home, one, Israel is receiving at least every year until 2028 3.8 billion in military funding from the United States. I think it’s something like 15% of the Israeli defense budget is made up of money that comes from the United States, which is wild to me, right?
I guess I want to ask, why do you think this is the appropriate pressure on Israel to really hone in on the US pulling back its military aid in a way to pressure them to actually accept the terms of a permanent ceasefire in this conflict?
Brandon Mancilla:
I think that’s a great question. I think there’s a few reasons. The first one that comes to mind is precisely because of what you pointed out, that the amount of political backing, arms, resources we supply and arms we supply to the state of Israel is astronomical, right? I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that President Biden could make a phone call and end this war today, right? How the state of Israel reacts to that is a separate question, but they cannot carry out the scale of violence without our support as the United States as a country, right? At the UN, it’s a countless international bodies, right? In front of the international courts. We are consistently one of few allies that the state of Israel has to give what it’s doing right now, legitimacy or coverup, right?
And I think that’s really important for us as leaders within the labor movement to emphasize for our own membership and for our ability to wage our own political stance, is to say, “We know we are complicit and responsible in ways in which we are not over the actions of a group like Hamas. And we are not and disproportionately in this conflict over so many others,” right? This is why it’s not because people want to talk about Israel more than other countries, it’s because we are directly involved and complicit in ways that really far outweigh anything else. So I think that’s really important.
I think, second, the fact that this opens up the door to talk about the fact about our defense budget, right? The fact that we spend so much on defense, on military spending in lieu of actually trying to solve deep social crises in this country of inequality, of healthcare, of food access, of education, of so many social goods that working people need, union and non-union alike, to be able to survive and make stable good lives in this country. So these things are all intertwined to each other. And I think, even though the majority of the defense industry is not unionized, there is some union representation within defense, right?
So we don’t make the corporate decisions that these defense contractors and manufacturers make and we’re not out there signing the contracts with foreign governments, our own government about supplying weapons, but ultimately, many workers do make the arms that end up getting sent, the bombs, the arms, tanks, etcetera to different foreign wars and conflicts. And I think that means that we have also responsibility to say, “We have to have an economy that is able to run in a different way under humane principles.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
I want to hop in here and definitely ask both of you from your respective vantage points at the UE and UAW, what response you’ve gotten from the Biden administration, if any at all, and also from your own members? I’d love to just hear a bit more about that. But, George, I was wondering if we could start with you and if you could tug on that thread a little bit more. When you mentioned the Red Scare, when you mentioned the role that organized labor used to play as a force fighting for social good and fighting for political causes that it’s the labor movement saw as fundamentally intertwined with our ultimate goal to make life better and the world better for working people across the board.
And it seems as if over the past 50, 60, 70 years, and we can’t go into the whole history there about why unions have taken less and less of a strong political stance, deindustrialization, offshoring, the open season on organized labor from the 1980s on, all of these things, of course, compound and put additional pressure on unions to basically be a bit more guarded over what they have while they’re losing so much over the course of the past few decades. But at that same time, unions as political engines for expressing the political will of working people have been largely captured by just this idea that we can endorse a presidential candidate or our job is to endorse and support candidates or parties, but that’s really it.
And yet, you have more independent unions like UE and the International Longshore and Warehouse Workers Union who played a critical role in striking against the apartheid in South Africa. I just wanted to ask if you could tug a little more on that for our listeners and with your experience and your union’s history, if you could say a little more about how unions got so complacent when it came to taking strong political stances like this and how you see that changing now. And then I would love to hear from both of you about what response you’ve gotten from the Biden administration, all the way down to your members.
George Waksmunski:
There’s a lot there for me to cover. Well, we’ve always been a union that believed in independent political action. We’ve never been a union to get in bed with the Democratic Party. We think we’ve long believed that both parties are corrupt and do not serve our best interest, especially since the McCarthyism and the Red Scare when the unions were divided and they just busted up the militancy of the labor movement to the degree that unions were running scared because of the McCarthy effect and UE was attacked severely. We were almost killed. It’s taken us decades to overcome all of that.
So an example, I think we were a pretty good example to other unions about why you need to fall in line. And I can’t speak for other unions or what their history is or what their thinking was, but we’ve always seen ourselves as being a union that is not in the mainstream and it comes from our principles of aggressive struggle and militancy and the members have to run the union from the bottom to the top. When the members are running the union from the bottom to the top and it’s their nickels and dimes they’re fighting for, they tend to be a little more militant about it when they believe that they have some investment in their union, some control over their union. And they really do in UE. Anything that happens at the local level is all the members business. We don’t get involved with that.
So we’ve always had this history of being militant and being aggressive. It’s written into our preamble and that the members run the union. So the feedback we’ve gotten from our members has been positive for our positions for the most part. Certainly, there’s every once in a while some member who’s expressing his right to speak hot and disagree with us and that’s okay. That’s healthy. We embrace that. But for the most part and overall, members from coast to coast are out in the street on their own with our support and approval. We have to give them approval. They run the union, but they’re out there in the street and on the campuses picketing and protesting. I’m leaving right now after this to go speak at a rally over to University of Pittsburgh.
So again, during that period of McCarthyism, it just really destroyed the labor movement because there was factions that were very militant and those factions were one by one annihilated. And we were one of the only ones surviving, us, the Longshoremen, maybe the United Mine Workers. I’m not sure if they were in there as well, but there aren’t too many of us left. And the other unions, they fell in line. They signed the pledge, the non-Communist pledge, which we refused to do for many, many years. Ultimately, we had to surrender or we would’ve died. So we’ve been through some tough struggles in our history and we’ve learned some hard lessons, some good lessons, lessons we always knew, but sometimes you got to stand up for your principles and even if it costs you and it nearly costs us, but we still have our principles and we are thriving today even after all of that.
So on response from the Biden administration, to my knowledge, we’ve not gotten any. I think I would’ve been notified of that. I did talk to our national president, Carl Rosen, in the last 24 hours about this call. So he did brief me on some things that I should know or share with you and he did not say anything about a response. So I don’t believe we got anything.
Mel Buer:
Brandon, do you want to share? I don’t know if Fain has gotten any sort of notification from the administration that they even acknowledged that the letter freaking exists or has there been communication just from the rank and file in general about the direction that the UAW and this coalition are moving towards in terms of their call for ending military aid? What has been the response that you’ve gotten on your end?
Brandon Mancilla:
Yeah, so as you can imagine, when we did not endorse Biden last year and also had our Stand Up Strike, which had a lot to do with the way that subsidies to companies were being dished out by the Biden administration for the transition to EVs and battery plant assembly, etcetera, the Biden administration took note of that and got very involved in our contract negotiations. They did not … Ultimately, that’s not what made the difference, right? What made the difference was our strike and our membership power, but we opened the door to the Biden administration in order to basically set a new tone, which is to say, “From now on when you build these new assembly plants for EVs and batteries, etcetera, you’re going to have to keep labor in mind. You’re going to have to set labor standards. You’re going to have to regulate these places for health and safety standards. They’re really dangerous plants. And also you’re going to have to make this a just transition. If we’re going to actually accelerate EV production, it’s going to have to be a just transition,” right?
So I think that was the beginning I think of conversations with the Biden administration, and then of course, October 7th and the war on Gaza came right around this time, right in the middle towards the end of our strike, right? So when we passed our ceasefire resolution, and since then, Shawn has been very blunt with the president, President Biden about our union’s position. I personally had a little bit of a flareup with Biden’s staff when I wasn’t allowed to go on stage with my ceasefire stickers on. I was ultimately, but they threatened that Biden would leave if I was up there. I didn’t give that up. And ultimately, nothing happened. He went up there, gave a speech for our endorsement and also I had my stickers on. But after that, Shawn has been very clear to him, this is especially after the uncommitted vote in Michigan especially, that, “You’re going to lose this election in places like Michigan because there’s no change in direction,” right?
And unfortunately, we haven’t seen a dramatic change in course. Some rhetorical I think changes, I think a commitment to find a framework and negotiate towards a ceasefire, but no real actual I think leverage from the government to actually make it happen. And recently in conversations with the Harris team, since Biden stepped down from the candidacy, I know that President Fain has also brought up the fact that we have to see a change in course on Gaza and we also have sent that letter demanding and to arm shipments and did not expect the Harris team nor anyone in the administration to immediately, I think, change course because of those things, right? It’s going to be continued pressure and growing to movement that’s going to ultimately, I think, deliver.
But I think, in part, what we saw from Kamala Harris in that press conference she gave after she met with Netanyahu, I think that is in part because of the continual pressure, right? Because of pressure from the labor unions and generally just I think the US public, is at a place where they just don’t want to see this happening anymore. So a ceasefire, I think, if you poll the majority of Americans, they want to see an end to war and genocide and that’s it, right? So I think you can call that political calculation. I don’t know what you can call it, whatever, but I think they’ve taken note of it. And I think we just have to see now with continued pressure, continued mobilization, how much the Democratic Party will want to change course.
And I think events that happened this week in Iran, I think, are going to be really indicative how the US responds to the assassination of a key Hamas leader through the peace talks.
Mel Buer:
I think that’s a really good of segue into our final question to wrap up the conversation. This question is for both of you, Brandon, if you’d like to start. Now that the letter has been published and we see groups like Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine also picking up this thread to calling for an end to US military aid to Israel, I think it’s an important way to end this conversation by really bringing it back to a call to action for those who are listening. What can rank-and-file union members or organizers workers, individuals who care, what can they do to join this anti-genocide movement and how can we continue to keep this pressure up? What are the things that you think of?
Brandon Mancilla:
Well, I think just to start from the UAW side, the UAW 4811, the 48,000 academic workers of the University of California, I think that something historic in going on strike against the unfair labor practices that the university committed when they repressed protests and silence speech on campus during the encampment period. So I think the fact that we had our first ever … George, you can correct me, but I think it was the first ever authorized strike for Palestine. I think that’s a historic breakthrough. So what UAW 4811, I think that it goes … Honestly, to me, it’s like the biggest advancement of this movement beyond statements and letters, which are all important, but to actually go out on the line defending your co-workers for the simple right to speak out against injustices is crucial because that’s what the labor should be about, aside from also fighting for our benefits and our wages and so many other protections we need on the job. This one’s just as important.
So I would say, for workers across different industries, just know that having a voice on the job is protected. That’s important, right? And if your boss is retaliating against you for political activity, union activity, you have rights and you can organize around that and I think that’s really important. Similarly, I think this wasn’t a strike, but Local 2325 in my region represents public defenders and legal services workers across New York City. Many of those unions, those units within the amalgamated local have passed their own ceasefire resolutions. Ultimately, this became a solidarity resolution that then some of our pro-Israel members sued the local four, which made us exploded it into a whole legal fiasco, which to me was ridiculous because this is a internal democratic union decision of members, not something to bring the courts.
And of course, the reactionaries in Congress caught onto this and brought the president forward to a deposition and there was a hearing about this, and this is just ridiculous. This is the kind of stuff that is reminiscent of the McCarthyist period in this country. So I think workers and folks should know that. I think, number one, the strongest protection you’re going to have is a union in all of this because there will be retaliation. We take risks and speak out politically, but there’s no stronger defense than a union that’s going to have your back in these situations. But second, we need to take those risks. We need to step up and stand up and speak out on all of these issues, because if we don’t do it, no one’s going to do it, right?
And I think the solidarity movement for Palestine in this country I think has really, I think, constantly spoken about how labor entering the fight has really changed the dynamic, right? Because it’s not just a protest of groups that have usually come out for these things, now it’s got another added muscle to it, which is the labor movement. So don’t get discouraged, is my kind of message at the end of this.
George Waksmunski:
First we got to have discussions. We have to be talking to each other worker to worker have to have … Workers on the shop floor, they’re having these discussions and they have like-minded people. Those like-minded people should bring themselves together, come to their union meeting, exercise their rights within the union too to speak at those meetings and make your voices be heard that we need to express ourselves on this issue, because again, an injury to one is an injury to all. These are workers who are being murdered and injured and starved in Palestine, in Gaza, in the West Bank. And so it is a workers’ issue and we should take these conversations to our locals, seek for them to pass resolutions in support of a ceasefire and in support of end of all military aid to Israel.
Workers can be seeking out community groups. There’s rallies in every city, in every town at some point, maybe not every town, but almost anywhere you go, you could find a rally in support of the people of Palestine and go to a rally, find somebody. Find a group who sponsored that rally. Get involved with that group and they can share information with you that you could take back to your local union and have more discussions and more conversations about this very important issue. And we got to educate people. We got to mobilize people. That takes time. We got to get people out of their comfort zone because, “Why is this important to me? That’s way over there. I have nothing to do with that. Why should I care?”
Well, we got to educate people on that and we got to get them out of this decades’ old way of thinking that, “What is happening over there don’t affect me,” because it does affect us. We’re paying the taxes. We’re building the bombs, we’re sending the bombs, we’re sending the bombs and the bombs are dropping on innocent children and women and men, citizens indiscriminately. And that has to end because what happens there can happen here and we’re in a living in a crazy time. Our country’s under a severe attack and this political season is very scary. We’ve seen an attempted assassination right here in Western Pennsylvania and we’ve seen multiple other acts of violence against political leaders all across the country.
So we really have to be talking to each other, taking it to our union meetings, having these discussions, educating people, getting involved. There’s all kind of ways. You can go to the National Labor Network for Ceasefire. You could come, look up the UE’s website at ueunion.org, reach out to us. We will try to find you somebody to get in touch with. Many of our locals are active. Like I said, I’m going today here in Pittsburgh area. We have three or four locals who are very active in the struggle. A lot of them aren’t active, but here we definitely have a few who are out there all the time, but thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap it up for us here at Working People. I want to thank our incredible guest, Brandon Mancilla, UAW Region 9A director, and George Waksmunski, Eastern Region president of the United Electrical Radio and Machine Workers, for coming on the show today and talking to us about this important issue. And I want to thank the great Mel Buer for co-hosting with me. Mel and I want to do more of these conversations. We want to keep talking to more folks, union and non-union and getting more perspectives on these and other issues as we continue into the election season and beyond. So please do reach out to us if you have recommendations for folks you’d like us to talk to or topics that you want us to discuss.
And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the great bonus episodes that we’ve got there for our patrons. And of course, go explore all the other great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the frontlines of struggle. Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. It really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez.
Mel Buer:
And I’m Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
Nicholas Petris, born to Greek immigrants in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1923, could remember a time when electric trucks were a common sight on the streets of Oakland. In fact, just a couple decades before his birth, both electric and steam-powered vehicles — which were cleaner and more powerful, respectively, than early gas-powered cars — constituted far larger shares of the American car market than combustion vehicles. The electric cars of this era ran on lead-acid batteries, which had to be recharged or swapped out every 50 to 100 miles, while the steam cars relied on water boilers and hand cranks to run. But for a few historical contingencies, either model could have rendered its gas-powered alternatives obsolete.
By the time of Petris’ childhood, however, cars with internal combustion engines had become dominant. Gas guzzlers won out thanks to a combination of factors, including the discovery of vast oil reserves across the American West, improvements in the production and technology of gas-powered cars (including the invention of the electric starter, which eliminated the hand crank), the general population’s limited access to electricity, and the occasional propensity of early steam cars to explode.
Whereas electric car pioneers had envisioned communal networks of streetcars and taxis, the gas-powered automobile promised independence, unconstrained by the relatively limited distances battery-powered vehicles could travel without a charge. This meant more Americans than ever were driving on their own, rather than sharing mass transit, such as the railroads on which Petris’ father worked as a mechanic. Petris grew up in a California increasingly dense with traffic and crisscrossed by freeways.
But with the rise of combustion cars came smog. Named for its superficial resemblance to both smoke and fog, the lung-punishing, eye-burning, occasionally deadly mixture of air pollutants began settling on cities — most famously Los Angeles — in the mid-20th century. In 1949, for instance, a blanket of ammonia-smelling vapor settled on Petris’ hometown; a newspaper in nearby Palo Alto, where Petris was studying law at Stanford, declared smog “a growing menace.” By the early 1950s, scientists had identified its cause: exhaust from gas-powered cars. Legislators and regulators — especially in California, the biggest auto market in America — raced to limit the fumes that cars were permitted to spew into the atmosphere.
Los Angeles as seen from Griffith Observatory in Griffith Park on a smoggy day in February 1957. USC Libraries / Corbis via Getty Images
In 1958, a still-youthful Petris won election to the California Assembly and was immediately placed on its transportation committee. Just months later, the legislature ordered the state department of public health to establish air quality standards such as maximum allowable levels for auto pollutants. In 1966, the year Petris won election to the state Senate, a California agency required all new cars to reduce certain pollutants in exhaust. Yet federal clean air standards remained far weaker than California’s, and Detroit-based car companies expended tremendous resources aimed at slow-walking regulation. Industry representatives begged for delays, claiming they needed more time to improve pollution-control technology.
Over the seven years Petris spent in the legislature’s lower chamber before his election to the Senate, he had been fielding a steady drumbeat of constituent concerns about air pollution. Doctors showed up at his office begging him to do something about the brownish haze poisoning their patients. He read of the thousands who died from breathing polluted air in Los Angeles alone. A turning point came when a scientist brought Petris a report attributing his state’s infamous smog problem to the automobile and suggesting that, despite its protests, the auto industry had the tools available to reduce its emissions. Despite seven years of incremental legislative progress, Petris realized the government hadn’t done nearly enough. “Oh, we can’t wait any more,” he would recall remarking. It was time, Petris concluded, for something “extreme.”
On March 1, 1967, the newly elevated state senator announced his intention to introduce a bill that would limit each California family to just one gas-powered car beginning in 1975. “[The] internal combustion engine is pouring out poison,” Petris told the press. “So why not limit it?”
The press responded with scorn. Petris’ hometown newspaper, the Oakland Tribune, dismissed his proposal as “so ridiculous that it is difficult to select from the variety of arguments that demonstrate its absurdity.” Even the senator’s campaign manager was furious. Yet rather than watering down his bill, Petris altered it to simply ban all cars with internal combustion engines by 1975.
California’s other legislators were uninterested, so Petris asked merely that his Senate colleagues study the subject further during the legislative recess, during which time he could regroup. Few of these colleagues could have suspected that Petris’ crusade was just beginning. In fact, in the years to come, the California legislature would come shockingly close to heeding his call and banning all gas-powered cars. Copycat efforts would erupt across the country and within the U.S. Congress. For a brief moment, Petris’ pipe dream would be at the vanguard of the burgeoning environmental movement.
California state Senator Nicholas Petris at the Capitol in Sacramento, 1996. Rich Pedroncelli / AP Photo
As we now well know, this fight to ban the internal combustion engine ultimately failed, stymied by aggressive auto industry lobbying. But more than 50 years later, history appears to be repeating itself. Late in the summer of 2022, a California state agency announced a ban on the sale of new cars containing internal combustion engines. This ban, set to take full effect in 2035, ignited explosive reactions across the political spectrum. In a matter of months, almost a dozen other states had followed suit, enacting bans modeled after California’s, and the European Union appeared poised to do the same.
As it had a half-century earlier, fierce pushback came from the auto industry and its political allies. In Europe, the government of Germany (home to several powerful automakers) forced a wide loophole into the ban, and other countries (including Italy, home to other big car companies) are now pushing to delay implementation. In the United States, the House of Representatives passed a bill to strip all states of their ability to impose such bans. Though the Senate has not done likewise, the Supreme Court may well be preparing to eliminate California’s authority to set tougher auto emissions standards than the federal government, a position that former President Donald Trump would undoubtedly support if he wins another presidential term in November.
Largely unmentioned in this ongoing fracas is the fact that nearly all of this — California leading the charge to prohibit gas-powered cars, other governments following suit, intense industry resistance — has happened once before. Petris’ crusade, though it made the front pages of newspapers across the nation, is little-remembered. Yet the history of his fight and eventual failure has only taken on increased relevance as climate change has revealed the necessity of decarbonizing transportation, which accounts for almost a third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Never-before-cited archival material documenting this lost history reveals vital lessons for an effort whose time, a half-century later, may have come at last.
It was a warm, clear Wednesday in March 1969, two years after Petris’ bid to limit and then ban gas-powered cars had apparently died a quiet death, when the state senator reintroduced his bill — and received a very different reception. Just weeks earlier, the largest oil spill in U.S. history had begun off the coast of Santa Barbara, and the California legislature had recently concluded hearings that criticized American automotive companies for failing to tackle smog. This time Petris cannily decided to submit his bill not to the Senate transportation committee, as in his initial attempt, but instead to the much more welfare-oriented health committee. The bill proposed to add the following language to California’s health and safety code: “On or after January 1, 1975, no motor vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine shall be operated on the highways of the state.”
The big car companies “laughed at first,” Petris later recalled, their lobbyists writing off the bill as too radical to merit opposition. But, as contemporaneous reporting and documents in the California State Archives show, Petris brought in doctors to tell the health committee about the “violence” smog enacted on the human body; he brought in William Lear, creator of the Lear Jet, to talk about advances in steam-powered car technology. Supportive letters poured in. On July 24, the health committee unanimously approved the bill. Late that evening, in a move even Petris acknowledged to be a “surprise,” the full Senate passed it by a vote of 26 to 5. The senators had amended the bill only slightly, to have it ban the sale of gas-powered cars in 1975, rather than their possession.
A participant of “Smog-Free Locomotion Day” on September 28, 1969, in Berkeley, California. Robert Altman / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images
“Detroit went crazy,” Petris recalled in another oral history interview. The big car companies deluged the state with lobbyists and money; they mobilized the state’s car dealers’ trade association, which sent an “all-out alert” to local members, rallying them against the bill. The state chamber of commerce, in turn, condemned the bill’s “serious economic consequences.”
But California residents mobilized, too: In Los Angeles, a group of mothers and children picketed outside a General Motors plant, telling the press they supported the bill. Ultimately, the issue reached a boiling point in a seven-hour hearing before the Assembly’s transportation committee; the chamber was packed with high-priced lobbyists and irate car dealers. As the clock approached midnight, Petris realized he was going to lose by a single vote. He tried to soften the bill’s language to persuade the last legislator, changing an outright ban to an effective one via stringent emissions standards, but to no avail.
Nevertheless, the bill’s opponents did not revel in their victory. “The damage has been done,” lamented one San Jose car dealer. “The car is now looked upon like some kind of dangerous drug.”
Indeed, even before his bill died in the California Assembly, Petris had begun traveling the country, urging other legislators to try to ban the internal combustion engine. Soon, copycat bills appeared in Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawai‘i, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Washington.
“We want to scare hell out of the industry,” a New York legislator told Washington Monthly. “We want them to come up with a clean alternative, now.”
Multiple members of Congress also introduced copycat bills at the federal level. One would have phased out gas engines by 1978; another sought to ban them outright within three years. The federal bill that attracted the most support was that proposed by Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, the founder of Earth Day. His bill was fashioned as an amendment to the Clean Air Act, which was being debated in 1970.
“I do not believe that the automotive industry will shift to a low emission engine unless the Congress acts and requires it by statute,” Nelson wrote in a contemporaneous letter.
Perhaps the most surprising fact about the whole saga is just how popular the campaign to phase out gasoline-powered cars was among members of the public. Multiple polls in 1969 found that more than 60 percent of respondents favored banning the internal combustion engine within a few years. Supportive letters and petitions streamed into Nelson’s office. Newspaper editorial boards, including that of The Washington Post, endorsed Nelson’s bill.
“Given a choice between the fetish of the automobile and suffocation, at least some would prefer to go on breathing,” declared The Tennessean. In California, a group called The People’s Lobby gathered a reported 425,000 signatures in an attempt to put the issue on the ballot so that state residents could vote on Petris’ proposal directly.
Bending to popular will, Mercedes started experimenting with hybrid electric buses, while General Motors tried out next-generation steam-powered cars. Even then-President Richard Nixon, in a 1970 address to Congress, announced the creation of a public-private partnership “with the goal of producing an unconventionally powered, virtually pollution-free automobile within five years.”
Among the loudest supporters of Senator Nelson’s bill was the United Auto Workers, or UAW, one of the most politically outspoken and vocally environmental unions in the nation. “I do not believe we can live compatibly with the internal combustion engine,” declared Walter Reuther, the union’s president, in 1970. As public statements and unpublished documents in the union’s archive memorialize, UAW officials demanded cleaner cars despite the fact that it could theoretically put union members’ jobs in jeopardy.
Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, speaks before the Senate’s Government Operations subcommittee on December 9, 1966. AP Photo
“We’re concerned first as citizens as to the poisoning of the atmosphere, obviously,” Leonard Woodcock, Reuther’s successor as UAW president, told NBC’s Today Show later in 1970. But he was confident that the transition to clean cars would actually create morejobs for UAW members, rather than fewer. In fact, he thought that public outcry over the dangers of auto emissions could reach such a fever pitch that car production would be jeopardized if the industry didn’t find an alternative. UAW members themselves told legislators that they wished fervently for better jobs, hoping to be freed from the horrific health and safety conditions that predominated in auto plants.
As they had in Sacramento, auto industry representatives descended on Washington to fight Nelson’s bill. Publicly, they blasted the senator as ignorant, having “little or no knowledge of the facts of automobile design.” Nelson lamented the effectiveness of such attacks. “The chief obstacle to more stringent control of the internal combustion engine or to developing alternatives to it,” reads one memo in his archival papers, “has been the auto industry itself.”
Ford Motor Company’s production lines sit still during a nationwide UAW strike in 1976. Bettman Archive / Getty Images
All of the bills, state and federal alike, failed in the end. Nixon’s program to create a “pollution-free automobile,” meanwhile, was underfunded and soon folded. The car companies quietly shelved their greener experiments, and much-vaunted private efforts — such as William Lear’s steam car — couldn’t attract sufficient financial backing to become true market competitors.
Yet the midcentury crusade to eliminate the internal combustion engine was not a complete failure. In California, Petris pivoted quickly, throwing his support behind the most stringent emissions standards he could get. “I’m a realist,” he told the press. “So I settle for the next best thing.” Soon the California Air Resources Board — the same agency that 50 years later would announce a phaseout of gas-powered cars — adopted the strongest emissions regulations in the nation, which effectively forced auto companies to begin installing catalytic converters en masse.
Nationally, Senator Edmund Muskie — the legislative force behind the Clean Air Act — introduced a bill requiring automakers to reduce pollutants by 90 percent by 1975, the very same deadline Petris and Nelson had set in their crusades. Despite fierce industry lobbying, that bill passed, and a reluctant Nixon signed it into law. “I won after all,” Petris later told an interviewer. But in the years that followed, industry lobbying successfully pushed the EPA to extend the deadline. In 1973, the U.S. was hit by an oil embargo from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which battered car companies’ bottom lines and gave them an argument for further delays.
Testifying before a 1972 Senate subcommittee on air pollution, auto executives said that despite millions of dollars in research and development, they were unable to meet government clean air emissions standards for 1975. Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Nonetheless, the companies significantly reduced emissions in the following years, leading to “99 percent cleaner” vehicles compared with 1970 models, according to the EPA. A study commissioned by the agency found that, in the two decades following its passage, the act saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.
Today, as the fight to ban the internal combustion engine is in the headlines once again, the story of Nicholas Petris’ fight for an emissions-free engine is instructive: It takes state pressure to get industry to shoulder the expense of innovating cleanly, and it takes public pressure to turn a zany bill into a national movement.
Conversely, however, even national popularity can fail to realize legislative or legal success in the face of concerted industry opposition. As the recollections of Petris, Nelson, and many others testify, the Detroit car companies were deft and dedicated opponents of the bills to ban the internal combustion engine, and their resistance stymied the most far-reaching efforts to curb auto emissions. This history, then, counsels constant vigilance for the proponents of contemporary efforts to phase out the gas-powered car. Even the passage of the Clean Air Act did not stop beneficiaries of the status quo from slow-walking change at every step.
Above all, this history demonstrates the power of solidarity in the fight for environmental change. Even at the expense of their own convenience, members of the public united to demand a different world. “I will sell bicycles if I have to,” one car dealer reportedly wrote in a telegram to Petris. “You go get ’em.” Leaders of the UAW — a union definitionally dependent on the automobile — threw their support behind a bill to ban the very thing they produced; some called for expanded mass transit, and some went much further still.
“Better we tear the factories to the ground,” one UAW regional director wrote of the pollution problem, “than continue this doomsday madness.”
In the years following the defeat of Petris’ bill, however, the UAW dropped its environmental advocacy. The energy crisis, the escalation of union-busting, the spread of offshoring, and the rise of Ronald Reagan united to deradicalize the union, and by the late 1970s it was lobbying for weaker emissions standards. Yet in 2023, in the UAW’s first direct election, the radical candidate Shawn Fain became the union’s new president. Fain, known to sport an “eat the rich” T-shirt, has since led a drive to unionize the electric-vehicle sector.
“We have to have a planet that we can live on,” Fain told a rally. It’s a message that evokes both a long-lost past — and a hopeful future.
Studying capitalism, Karl Marx examined the Industrial Revolution in Europe. He explored conflict between worker and employer. In their bookCapital and Imperialism (Monthly Review Press, 2021), authors Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik emphasize that Marx’s followers believed that, with the onset of capitalism, “accumulation [has] occurred only on the basis of the generation of surplus value.” (Surplus value signifies that part of a product’s commercial yield which labor generates and employers keep.)
The Patnaiks recall that Marxists mention another kind of accumulation of wealth, one that “occurred only in the prehistory of capitalism.” According to the authors’ reckoning, however, so-called “primitive accumulation occurred throughout the history of capitalism,” along with surplus value. The term primitive accumulation refers to expropriation, plunder, or stealing.
Many U.S. political activists oppose the overseas wars and interventions their government uses to maintain worldwide political and economic domination. More than a few know about stealing in the peripheral regions of the world at the hands of capitalism. They are aware of U.S. imperialism.
The stolen goods include: land, bodies, raw materials, food crops, forests, water, extractable underground resources, exorbitant interest on debt, and funding owed the world’s poor for subsistence. Non-payment for social reproduction is a kind of stealing.
The more these activists learn that capitalism from its start did call for oppression in the undeveloped regions of the world, the more likely might be their inclination to build an anti-capitalist international solidarity movement. The book authored by the Patnaiks contributes to this end by documenting that colonialism and, implicitly, imperialism have been essential to the development of capitalism.
In describing India’s colonial experience, their book – by no means reviewed here in its entirety – provides an explanation taken from Marx as to why capitalism needed colonialism. It details the workings of capitalist-inspired colonialism in India.
The Patnaiks declare that, “not only has capitalism always been historically ensconced within a pre-capitalist setting from which it emerged, with which it interacted, and which it modified for its own purposes, but additionally that its very existence and expansion is conditioned upon such interaction.” Capitalists sought “appropriation of surplus by the metropolis, under colonialism.” (“Metropolis” is defined as “the city or state of origin of a colony.”)
They explain that “Marx’s basic concept of capitalism [as expressed] in Capital is of an isolated capitalist sector … consisting only of workers and capitalists,” also that an isolated sector implies a capitalism “stuck forever in a stationary state or a state of simple reproduction … [and] with zero growth.” They insist that “a closed self-contained capitalism in the metropolis is a logical impossibility.”
There is “nothing within the system to pull it out of that state.” The economy “will necessarily get to that state in the absence of exogenous stimuli.”
The Patnaiks envision three kinds of exogenous stimuli: “pre-capitalist markets, state expenditure, and innovations.” The first of these represents the colonialism that would be essential to capitalists as they built the economies of European industrial centers.
Inflation a concern
Outlining how British capitalism dealt with colonial India, the authors highlight money as a device for holding and transferring wealth. The object has been to preserve its value. The system had these features:
* Officials in London used the surplus derived from Indian exports of primary commodities to finance the export of capital to other capitalist countries.
* British officials taxed the land of small producers in India, using the revenue to pay the colony’s administrative expenses and purchase commodities for export to Britain; some were re-exported to other countries.
* Britain exported manufactured goods. The flood of them arriving in India led to “deindustrialization of the colonial economy.” Displaced artisan manufacturers became “petty producers” of commodities.
* British officials dealing with “increasing supply prices” for commodities exported from the colonies, faced “metropolitan money-wage or profit margin increases.” Seeking to “stabilize the value of money,” they imposed “income deflation … [on Indian] suppliers of wage goods and inputs to the capitalist sector.”
* The claims of heavily-taxed agricultural producers in India were “compressible” especially because they were located “in the midst of vast labor reserves.”
Colonialism provided British capitalists the option of cutting pay or jobs in India so as to carry out the currency exchanges the system required and to “accommodate increases in money wages” in Britain, both “without jeopardizing the value of money.”
Global economy
The book outlines post-colonial developments. Colonial arrangements persisted throughout the 19th century and collapsed after World War I, due in part, say the authors, to a worldwide agricultural crisis that peaked in 1926. The circumstances gave rise to the Great Depression. Spending for World War II led to recovery, mostly in the United States.
These were “boom years” for capitalism. The United States, confronted with increasing military expenses, turned to deficit financing. Western European countries took up social democracy and the welfare state. Some former colonies, now independent nations, sponsored agricultural and industrial initiatives aimed at relieving economic inequalities.
At that point, the centers could no longer impose income deflation on working people in the periphery to ward off loss of monetary value. Bank holdings increased and lending pressures mounted. In 1973 “the Bretton Woods system collapsed because of the emergence of inflation.” “The capitalist world of the stable medium of holding wealth …[through] the gold-dollar link” took a hit.
Next came worldwide take-over by global finance capital and neoliberalism. The Patnaiks explain that, with “barriers to capital flows” down, “state intervention in demand management becomes impossible.” “[A] regime of income deflation on the working people of the periphery” returned in order to “control inflation and stabilize the value of money.”
Concluding
This story is of continuities. One is capitalism at its start taking up with colonialism. Another is capitalism using colonialism to preserve the value of money in cross-border commercial and financial dealings. One more is the oppression and beggaring of the world’s working people to prevent inflation.
Karl Marx may have found data and other information on colonialism scarce as he studied capitalism. Additionally, his life of research and political activism may have been so full as to distract him from investigation of the colonial connection. Even so he championed international worker solidarity.
He and Engels supported India’s independence struggle. Marx defended “heroic Poland” beset by Czarist Russia. He writes to Engels that, “In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of [John] Brown and on the other the movement of the serfs in Russia.”
Addressing the International Working Men’s Association – the First International – in 1864, Marx reported that events “have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments.”
The wreckage of people’s lives caused by capitalism now extends widely. The venue of capitalism is global, by its nature. Political support for workers and their political formations in the Global South hits at the essence of capitalist power. The promise of basic change lies in that direction, and that’s so too with alternatives to the capitalist system.
Those struggles for social justice and equality that are confined to the world’s industrial centers do target aspects of capitalism, but without far-reaching expectations. The full effort consists of: pushing for reforms that ease burdens placed upon working people, building mass opposition, and – crucially – advancing the international solidarity movement.
The DNC showed a party that has successfully metabolized movement energy and insurgent campaigns while distancing itself from demands deemed harmful to its electoral prospects.
The United Auto Workers union has become a major political force in the US, and the union’s endorsement of Kamala Harris carries a lot of weight in the lead-up to the general election in November. But that endorsement doesn’t mean the union will stop pushing Democrats for bolder, more worker-friendly economic policy, or for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to military aid to Israel. At the DNC in Chicago, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with UAW Region 9A Director Brandon Mancilla about the UAW’s endorsement of Harris, the threat Donald Trump poses to labor, and the critical role that unions are playing in this election.
Videography: Kayla Rivara Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Brandon Mancilla: Brandon Mancilla, UAW Region 9A director.
Maximillian Alvarez: Brandon, thank you so much for talking to me, man. So we are here on day three of the DNC. UAW’s got a significant presence here. Organized labor has a significant presence here. I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about how the reception has been for you guys, especially after President Shawn Fain’s speech on Monday.
Brandon Mancilla: Yeah, well, definitely on Monday we had a lot of labor leaders speak. Shawn had a prime time spot to talk about our message, our working class agenda moving forward within the Democratic Party, and just making sure that we organize as many workers as possible and get our issues fought for.
I think labor has always had a place within the Democratic Party. But I think right now something is shifting, which is instead of us going to the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party has now realized how important labor actually is to them winning, and also moving forward and recapturing working class votes, because working class people deserve a party that actually fights for them. And that has not been the message that the Democratic Party has relied on for the past 20, 30 years.
And I think the rise of Trump and the MAGA movement says a lot about that. They don’t care about working class people, they don’t fight for working class issues. They definitely do not support the labor movement. But the Democratic Party has not been there, especially with its support of free trade policies such as NAFTA that have led to the immiseration of our industrial towns and so many good union jobs, or jobs with union standards.
So, that’s what we’re fighting for. Our message is pretty clear. We’re fighting for a living wage, we’re fighting for retirement security, we’re fighting for healthcare. And we’re fighting to get our time back. Workers are working two to three jobs, seven days a week, 12-hour days or plus. And that’s just not a life. So, that’s what we’re fighting for, and that’s the path we’re trying to chart with this new labor movement.
Maximillian Alvarez: The UAW quite famously refused to endorse a presidential candidate before the stand-up strike at the Big Three automakers. And in many ways, sending a very clear message that, depending on how you guys respond to the strike, we’re going to make our decision thusly.
What does that say to rank and file members and to workers out there about the change in strategy for how unions in general, but the UAW specifically, is approaching its relationship to the Democratic Party right now?
Brandon Mancilla: Yeah, so essentially what happened last year after Shawn got elected president of our union was that we had to take a conversation forward with President Biden and his administration about the fact that even though he had passed landmark legislation such as CHIPS, IRA, wanted to subsidize a green transition, green energy, infrastructure, et cetera, a lot of this was done with very little consideration of labor and with unions at the table. A lot of the things that were in Build Back Better, for example, were left behind, things that a lot of unions were hoping would make it in the final version of what became the IRA.
And with that, the EV industry, for us. That was the big question. Were we simply going to give Ford and all these companies millions if not billions of dollars in subsidies to just get rid of the UAW? Or were we going to actually fight for these plants to have union jobs and a pathway for our membership to actually keep jobs, to keep jobs in their communities and not get immiserated like they’ve done over the past 20, 30 years of all these plant closures?
So, that’s what the future was. The future was plant closures. And then our strike and finally having Joe Biden move on this issue was crucial. But he only moved because we’ve pushed. We didn’t endorse right away. We forced the conversation that I think he lived up to in the end with our pressure and our strike. And I think that’s how he earned our endorsement.
And going forward, Kamala Harris, same idea. We needed to have a conversation about the future of the party, where the working class program fit in her agenda, and what she was going to do for working people. And so far, that’s what we’ve been able to push with this campaign.
Maximillian Alvarez: It really is a historic moment. Because of course, it was during your guys’ strike last year that President Biden became the first sitting US president to stand on a picket line. So that visually, symbolically, in so many ways, really did signal the changing of the times.
And we are hearing some of that change in the rhetoric over the course of the Democratic National Convention. A lot of folks have mentioned, say, the PRO Act, and the protections that we need for union workers and improving people’s ability to organize in this country. But of course, we also know the PRO Act has not been made a legislative priority for either party. It’s stalled in Congress.
So what conversations are you getting into with members who don’t want Donald Trump to win. Your guys’ shirts all say “Donald Trump’s a scab”, so clearly, your position’s clear there. But we also know there are a lot of members who are still fighting for these other issues that they want to see and they’re not currently getting. How do you navigate that space, pushing the Democratic Party without just giving an endorsement and letting the chips fall where they may?
Brandon Mancilla: So the future of this country is going to depend on two things: protecting jobs, especially union jobs, and also growing the labor movement. Under Trump, we couldn’t protect jobs because he did absolutely nothing about plant closures. When Lordstown closed, he told everyone, don’t sell your house, don’t move. Plant closed, he did absolutely nothing. During the GM strike of 2019, he did absolutely nothing.
The difference with the Biden administration was Stellantis had plans to close Belvidere. Our strike forced them to actually agree to a plant reopening and getting more investment, more product in Belvidere with a battery plant and a PDC. And right now, the struggle is to get Stellantis to keep their promise and actually live up to the commitment. That wasn’t a promise verbally. It was in writing, it’s in the contract. We need to hold them accountable for what they agreed to and get them to live up to their promise.
And with the Biden administration, that pressure is possible. With the Harris campaign, the same thing. We’re going to keep pushing that. Because we want good union jobs in this country, good manufacturing jobs in this country. Not just for the sake of it, but because we know that working people need solid jobs to build communities, to have a life.
And I think what the labor movement needed to grow, we need the PRO Act passed. The PRO Act should be the floor. We should be repealing Taft-Hartley, we should be doing so much more to make it easier for workers who want a union, who want a better life, who want a union contract to be able to get that without so much resistance, and honestly, just employers being able to get away with breaking the law.
Under Trump, we know what he did to the NLRB. He put a bunch of his corporate friends in charge of the Labor Board, and they reversed a bunch of decisions. They came after labor. They did not support labor whatsoever.
So the Democrats aren’t perfect, but we need to absolutely push. And it’s only possible for us to do that with an administration that understands the importance of labor and in both Houses of Congress, in Democratic control. And then we keep doing our thing, we keep organizing. So, that’s the mission right now. If we want Medicare for all, if we want green jobs, green union jobs, we need to have a political voice in this country and need to build power to be able to do that.
Maximillian Alvarez: And I just wanted to ask, because I know so many of our viewers and listeners have asked us this very question. We interviewed International Teamsters Vice President John Palmer days after Sean O’Brien spoke at the RNC last month. Very controversial speech that was also historic. Sean O’Brien first Teamsters president to address the RNC at Donald Trump’s invitation.
The tenor of his speech and the reception of it and the discussion around it is markedly different from what we saw here this week, from the message of Shawn Fain on Monday, from the “Trump is a scab” shirts. What do you see in these two visions for how labor is approaching the electoral process and the pitch that it’s making to the working class out there?
Brandon Mancilla: I think our message is clear. We know what the experience of our members have been under both administrations. And we know how we’re able to move under these two different administrations, and how we can push forward our program and our vision for what the country can look like and what this movement can look like.
And so, we’re not under no illusions about what a Trump Administration would look like for working people, and beyond that, for humanity, for social justice issues, and just keep going down the line.
These are all issues that, no matter how they’re labeled, they’re all working class issues. Because working people have lives and so many different issues that affect them on a day-to-day. If we care about economic justice, racial justice, climate justice, et cetera, we need to have an administration that’s going to listen. And under another Trump Administration, we’re not going to have that.
So, other unions are free to do what they want and talk to whoever they want to talk to. And we know that the membership is not uniform. Members, for whatever reason, are going to have different political parties, backgrounds, candidates. But I think as leaders within the labor movement, it’s our responsibility to put the facts out there and analyze what the reality is.
Under one candidate, this is possible, under another one… And we know their history already. It’s not that we have to make things up. We know what they did. This is going to happen. And we know it’s going to happen because of who they put around them, what their agenda is, Project 2025, all of that stuff. It’s all in writing, it’s all out there, we know what they’re going to do.
Maximillian Alvarez: Last question, I just want to ask you this, because we’ve actually spoken about this at The Real News before. Of course, while the Democratic National Convention is going on, the genocide in Gaza continues. The United States continues to be the primary supporter financially in terms of arms and political support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
And the UAW has also been a real leader in the labor movement, being among the first to call for a ceasefire earlier this year. Also joining other unions and signing on for a call to end arms sales to Israel.
And I just wanted to ask A, about that. For folks who are saying, well, why has the UAW taken a position on this? Why is that important to you guys? And how is that part of your overall message for the working class?
Brandon Mancilla: It matters because it matters to our members. We’ve got many members who are Arab-American, live in Dearborn, Michigan, and have family who have been directly affected, who have been killed because of the war on Gaza. We also have members of the University of California who struck to defend their right for free speech last spring. So, we know the situation on campuses where we also represent thousands of UAW members as well.
And just generally speaking, UAW members, union members, they’re citizens of this country. And if you look at the polls, most people, there’s a democratic majority for a ceasefire. And in order to get that ceasefire at this point, we need an arms embargo because we’re the ones that supply the fire to the state of Israel and its military campaign to carry out these atrocities. So, that’s what we need to see. We need to see concrete action to end this.
And it’s also a political issue for the Democratic Party. We know what the uncommitted movement was able to accomplish, especially in a state like Michigan, over 100,000 voters who came out and voted uncommitted. Those voters still have those same concerns because the war isn’t over. The genocide continues. And in order for us to move forward in this country and build social justice and economic justice in this country, we can’t turn a blind eye to what’s been happening in Gaza over the past 10, 11 months. So, we need to see real change there.
We’ve had conversations. Just like we’re having conversations about working class issues on the economy, on green jobs, and all this other stuff, we’ve also talked to the Harris campaign about the need for a ceasefire and an arms embargo. And to their credit, they’ve listened. They’re saying some of the right things in engaging with these topics. They have spoken to many activists about these questions.
And I was at the panel the other day at the DNC for… That we heard from Palestinian-American and Palestinian activists about the situation in Gaza. But we need action at this point. And I hope we get to hear from a Palestinian-American on the stage this week too.
On Aug 23, dozens of labor organizers and allies joined the thousands of demonstrators marching within sight and sound of the DNC for the final March on the DNC action in Chicago, Illinois. The Real News spoke with union members who showed up to demand a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and an end to military aid for Israel about why they felt it was important for labor to be represented in the movement for Palestinian Liberation.
Video/Post-Production: David Hebden
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Mel Buer:
We’re here at the fourth and final day of the Democratic National Convention, outside at Union Park for the final night of the march on the DNC. For the last week, we’ve seen thousands of demonstrators stream into this park, all demanding an arms embargo on Israel and a ceasefire, permanent ceasefire, in Palestine.
Today, a large contingent of the Chicago Labor for Palestine Coalition have come out today to support the march on the DNC and its demands. We talked to a number of members of various unions about why they’ve come out today, and what they think labor can do for this movement in the future.
So, we see a huge crowd out here, the Labor for Palestine, particularly the Chicago Labor for Palestine. Why is it important for you to be out here, part of this group, and be represented at the march today?
Speaker 2:
Well, Palestine is a labor issue because we should care about humans no matter what part of the world they live in. And what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank now is a crisis, a humanitarian crisis. It’s a genocide that our tax dollars are paying for. So, there’s just that. It’s wrong on that standpoint. The fact that it’s our tax dollars paying for it is even worse. The fact that we’re spending money on that.
And in this country we have people who don’t have healthcare, that don’t have proper housing, they’re struggling to buy milk and eggs because prices are through the roof, rent is through the roof, and pay has not gone up with that.
And so, there’s money to destroy, to maim, to murder children, women, men in Gaza and the West Bank, and yet we don’t have money for healthcare. We don’t have money for housing, transportation, all the things that people in this city deserve and work very hard for. So, I think those are reasons why we’re out here today. We want to stop arming Israel. We want an immediate end to aid to Israel. And we should be funding our communities and healing them, not providing genocidal war funding.
Speaker 3:
I think witnessing a genocide unfold in real time on my phone has permanently changed me. And I can’t look my students or my children in the face, after knowing intimately what dead toddlers look like, and then seeing… I would doomscroll through my phone every night, and then sneak into my children’s room to give them a kiss and make sure they were okay, and that’s just not a world that I can be okay with, and I cannot look in the faces of my children and my students if I’m not doing something about it.
Speaker 4:
Well, in my experience, I was on strike last year. I’ve been to many picket lines. Workers stand in solidarity with other workers around the world, and we’re just here to show our support for the Palestinian trade unionists, and also the people of Palestine and their right to self-determination.
And we just want to make sure that our presence is known, that it’s here. We support as a ceasefire, we support an end to sending military aid and weapons that contributes to the genocide in Gaza, and it’s our tax dollars that are funding this.
And that’s the way I talk about it with people, with other workers, that might not understand or know exactly what’s going on. They’re like, “Why does this matter? Why should this matter to me?” I’m like, “Well, we look at our neighborhoods and our communities, and my daughter’s school’s falling apart. And they say, “Oh, there’s no money to fix anything in our infrastructure,” but we have billions of dollars to fund a genocide. And that’s not right.”
Mel Buer:
As a member of the UAW, how do you feel about your international president not only speaking at the DNC, but also continuing to advocate for a ceasefire and an arms embargo in Israel?
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Well, I’m glad that he did mention that. Just wish it would’ve gone a little bit further. Even with AOC’s remarks today, the uncommitted delegates are demanding to have a Palestinian voice in the DNC, in the convention, and they were denied, so they’re doing a sit-in.
One of my friends who’s a delegate is also there, participating. And I wish they would’ve not just mentioned a ceasefire, but also ending the aid to Israel, ending the… No more bombs, no more weapons, no more money to fund this war, or this genocide.
Mel Buer:
So, the last four days have been full of these incredible marches. I’ve been out here every day since Sunday watching these thousands of people walking in the streets. How does it feel on a personal level to be part of this movement?
Speaker 2:
It’s inspiring. The Democratic Party does not talk about Palestine. I was listening to one of the panels chaired by Zogby, and the only time Palestine ever got mentioned was when Jesse Jackson was running for president as part of the Rainbow Coalition. It’s absolutely stunning. I had no idea. It’s fitting. Both parties have backed Israel to the hilt because it’s part of the Us international policy and project for many years, so it’s heartening that those ideas are being challenged by so many people.
The fact that they’re having to talk about it now, within the DNC spaces and without the DNC, is a testament to all the work that people are doing. Because they’ve been moved by what they’re seeing in Gaza, they’ve been moved by what they’re seeing in the West Bank, they have to act. They have to get out in the streets. And so, it’s inspiring to me that people are seeing that regular people can stand up and make a difference.
At least it’s just getting the issue to the forefront. I think the next step for us is, how do we start to actually put pressure on the decision makers to do what’s right and stop arming Israel immediately? That’s going to be the more difficult challenge. Because we’ve had these protests, we’ve had mass movements in this country since really October. In my own union, Chicago Teachers Union, and November 1st at our House of Delegates, we passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, which is one of the earlier unions to do so.
But the city of Chicago also passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire, but obviously Netanyahu and his war buddies, war criminals really, don’t care about that. And so, the question I think for us, as workers in this country, as citizens, as activists, as people who live in the city, not just citizens, but anybody, how do we take it to the next level so that we can actually stop this funding and this material support for this awful genocide?
Speaker 3:
I think labor has a unique ability to mobilize a lot of people, and a lot of people quickly. As a CTU member, I have seen the ways that we can get tens of thousands people into the streets at a moment’s notice. And I have also, having been teaching for about a decade, and involved in CTU for about a decade, have been really proud to see the ways that CTU has evolved over the years, evolved in our politics, evolved in our engagement with our communities, and I am just excited to be part of this campaign.
Mel Buer:
As a member of the labor movement, do you have any thoughts about how the labor movement can continue to put that pressure, or escalate that pressure?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. I think one of the things we’ve done in the Chicago Labor Network for Palestine is start with education. The mass media, the politicians, give this story that this all started on October 7th. Hamas just sprung out of the ground out of nowhere and launched this unprovoked attack on Israel. And that’s just fiction. This goes back to ’48. It goes back even before then, earlier, if you really want to get into history.
So, one of the things we’re trying to do is just educate people, saying, “Here’s actually what is going on.” We had a forum over at the Chicago Teachers Union. We brought educators, Palestinian educators, talking to about 150 unionists about what the history of Palestine is, what the history of Israel is, how Zionism is not a religion, but a political project, and how we as people in this country should learn what our country has supported. Why is that we should be against political Zionism? Why we should oppose funding in the state of Israel.
And I think those kinds of things are a start to get people’s minds changed, to get them educated. And then, I think further, we have to do things like take action within our unions. Are our unions investing in Israel? Are there pension funds that our unions contribute to that may be associated with either war profiteers or the state of Israel itself? Is there work action that we can take, like docks that are providing shipping services to bring material to Israel’s war?
Those are the kinds of things I think we should start to talk about and organize and activate around now, to support this Palestinian struggle.
Mel Buer:
Any of the delegates, the attendees at the DNC, the Harris campaign, is there a message that you would like to send to them as a member of the labor movement also involved in this kind of work?
Speaker 4:
Yeah, for sure. To demand that, not only to call for a ceasefire, but to also stop sending aid to Israel. Stop sending bombs and weapons.
We want amnesty for all our newcomers, our new arrivals. I was just at a rally in Lockport for Julian Electric. They’re trying to join the UAW. Most of those workers are undocumented, so we need to stand in solidarity together, because all these issues are related, and let’s hold these electives accountable.
They’re not going to get a guaranteed vote from everyone just because we don’t want Trump. Obviously we don’t. Nobody wants another four years of that nonsense, but it’s sad that these are only two options. I see Kamala as just Biden 2.0, and we need to have a Labor Party. We need to have other parties that can have candidates that people will want to vote for, and not just have this two-party system.
Speaker 5:
Thank you so much for watching the Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most. And we need your help to keep doing this work, so please tap your screen now, subscribe, and donate to the Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
The morning after a string of labor leaders took the Democratic National Convention’s (DNC) Monday night stage, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates was feeling optimistic. As Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson walked across the stage to open the DNC, she was reminded of his background as a middle school teacher and labor organizer. Remembering SEIU President April Verrett’s own…
A decision by the National Labor Relations Board on Thursday marked “the beginning of the end for Amazon’s favorite legal loophole,” said one grassroots labor group, as the board ruled that Amazon is a joint employer of its drivers — making it legally required to recognize and bargain with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters union that represents dozens of the delivery workers.
Regional CleanTech and manufacturing investment will be coordinated through a single federal government agency after legislation to create the Net Zero Economy Authority passed the Senate. The bill passed after months of debate on Thursday, with the Greens and independents securing two amendments that add a statutory review and adjust the board’s minimum member count…
Nurses at the University of Illinois Hospital on Chicago’s West Side have gone on strike after a prolonged contract negotiation that union representatives say management hasn’t taken seriously. The Real News speaks with members of the Illinois Nurses Association from the picket line in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention is simultaneously taking place.
Videography: Cameron Granadino, David Hebden Post-Production: Cameron Granadino
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Speaker 2:
UI nurses do enough.
Speaker 4:
Management should level up.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re here at the University of Illinois near West Side Hospital in Chicago. It’s Wednesday, August 21st, and on Monday of this week, the same day that the 2024 Democratic National Convention began in the United Center, less than a mile away from where I’m currently standing. Hundreds of UI health nurses went on an unfair labor practice strike, demanding safer staffing ratios, better safety protections, and better pay for healthcare workers. The real news is here on the picket line, talking to these healthcare workers about what they’re fighting for and what message they have. For the folks who are currently congregating at the Democratic National Convention.
Speaker 3:
We are fighting for three main issues. One is workplace violence, which has had an increase in the past four years since the last contract. So we are fighting to ensure that a hospital is a safe place to work. No one should go into the hospital ever and feel like they were going to be injured. Sadly, that has happened to multiple nurses where they even have required surgeries because of this. Secondly, we’re fighting for fair staffing. We want every unit to be able to care for the patient acuity that they are comfortable with and with the amount of nurses that is needed to deal with that. Third, we fighting for fair wages. This is for all nurses. We are one of the lowest paid nurse states. If you look at something like Sacramento, they get paid over double us with only having a 5% higher cost of living. We have one of the highest paid CEOs for an academic hospital at $1.3 million, and this last fiscal year, the hospital made 75 million dollars in net position and they’re only giving us less than inflation.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I know this is an unfair labor practice strike. Y’all are in the midst of your own contract fight. This is not a political strike, but we are here while the Democratic National Convention is in town at the United Center, less than a mile away from where we’re standing. We’re going to be back there tonight and I was just wondering if there was a message that we would carry from this picket line into the convention center. What would you want folks in there to know about your struggle and what they could do to help?
Speaker 3:
The Democrats love saying that they’re pro-union. They can come out and support every single union. Every hospital in the United States deserves the union because there are bedside nurses-hundreds. We have 1700 at this hospital and the only way we can get our voice heard is by a union. So they need to actually show that they want to actually be pro-union and support every union that’s out there. They help every single person when you’re in a union.
Chicago is a city. We live just a few miles just from downtown. That’s where this hospital is. The typical one bedroom apartment in Chicago is 1800 dollars. A new grad, BSN nurse, which means they have a bachelor’s degree is being paid close to about $34 an hour. When you look into that, it is very tough to survive and have your own apartment as a new graduate nurse. We need better wages.
There’s a multiple reasons why nurses burn out, and it’s one of the highest burnt out professions from the bedside. One is because we don’t get paid enough. Two is because we’re constantly dealing with this workplace environment. And three, because it is a taxing job, especially when you’re understaffed and have to constantly work over your ratio.
Speaker 5:
My name is Lori. I’ve been at UI Health since 1998 and I’ve seen a lot of changes. We serve the state of Illinois residents, we serve the underserved, and our reason we’re on strike is workplace violence. We’re also looking for safe nurse-patient limits. Our American Nurses Association supports that and we want that here for our patients so we can provide better care.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, Lori, thank you so much for talking to us, and I was wondering if you could just say a little more what y’all are out here fighting for. What brought you to this point of going on a week long unfair labor practice strike at UI Health?
Speaker 5:
Well, our management team has been in negotiation since June. They’ve been preoccupied. They have actually not been engaged with giving us proposals back. It’s kind of been one-sided, and we just decided when it was getting towards the end of our contract that this is the steps we would have to take: doing without a week of pay, and it was worth it.
Speaker 1:
And can you tell us a little more about the issue of workplace violence being so central to this struggle right now?
Speaker 5:
Well after Covid, it’s really been on the increase and we are seeing nurses that are off as long as a year. Our ER and our psychiatric units are getting hit the hardest, and these nurses want to sit on a workplace committee and they’re not allowed to. It’s all upper higher management that have no direct patient care.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What kind of violence are workers being subjected to here?
Speaker 5:
It’s a lot of physical violence: getting hit on the head with objects, actually taking nurses and throwing them to the floor. We had a nurse that had to have surgery and that nurse was off a year. So really significant injuries where they’re not able to return to work.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And as we know RNs-well actually a lot of people don’t know this, but RNs suffer some of the highest workplace injury rates out of any worker in the country. So there’s that on top of the other workplace violence we’re talking about here. And you started here in 1998, you said?
Speaker 5:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
I was wondering how you have seen this hospital system change over your career here?
Speaker 5:
Well, we’re a public institution. Like I said, we support and serve the state of Illinois residents. We, over the years, are still just a 455-bed hospital, but we went from one CEO and one CNO to now we have 16 chiefs. They make anywhere from $200,000 all the way up to $500,000. But yet, workers are told there’s no money. And I really think, this being a public institution, the taxpayers need to be aware. The 1% at this hospital need to be taken out and the 99% of us, as workers, we need to be compensated.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And as we said, this is an unfair labor practice strike. This is not a political strike, so I’m not trying to make this a political thing, but we are here covering the Democratic National Convention, the protests. We’re going to be back in the convention tonight. If we could take a message from this picket line into the United Center, what would you want folks in there to know about your plight and what they could be doing to help?
Speaker 5:
I think everyone at the convention, and really all workers need to unite behind unions as well as unionize themselves. Unions have a great value to the workplace. We have weekends, we have eight-hour shifts because of unions. We got to continue to unionize against the 1% who want to take it all at the top.
Maximillian Alvarez:
What do these issues-when folks out there who don’t work in healthcare hear these, what do these translate to on a day-to-day, shift to shift basis for healthcare workers like yourselves?
Speaker 6:
It means that we have less time to focus on our patients when we’re bouncing from room to room, so that creates a patient safety issue where sometimes I feel like I am neglecting one room when I focusing on three others.
Speaker 7:
I would agree. If you’re overworked and you don’t have enough people there, then you’re doing the jobs of two and three people. So it’s hard to complete something or take the time that you need to do it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And as we were discussing off camera, I know this is an unfair labor practice strike, not a political strike, but of course we’re here in Chicago covering the Democratic National Convention. Your guys’ strike started the same day the DNC began, on Monday. We’re going to be back on the convention floor tonight, reporting from there. If there was a message that we could bring from the picket line into the United Center tonight, what would you want folks in there to hear about your struggle and what they could do to help?
Speaker 7:
I would just say some support so that we can make sure our patients are safe. Anyone can be a patient. Sometimes we’re a patient, so we want to always make sure we’re doing our best to protect them and give them the best care, but we also want to make sure we’re not overworking our nurses, burning them out. Like I said, we have families to take care of as well. This is what we signed up to do. We love what we do, but we want to also be mentally and physically healthy as well at the end of the day.
Speaker 6:
If they want our vote, they’re going to have to support us as well. We’ll support them if they support us. We are the heart of this hospital and the hands and the feet.
Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, didn’t mince words in his speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention. Wearing a shirt with the words “TRUMP IS A SCAB” emblazoned on the front, Fain told the crowd, “For the UAW and for working people everywhere, it comes down one question: what side are you on? On one side we have Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class. On the other side, we have Trump and Vance, two lap dogs for the billionaire class who only serve themselves.” In this exclusive interview, TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Fain at the DNC about why the UAW has endorsed Harris-Walz, what is at stake in this election for working people and the labor movement, and which side of the class war Donald Trump is on.
Studio: Kayla Rivara Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So we’re here on day three of the Democratic National Convention. I’m standing here with the one and only Shawn Fain, president of the mighty United Auto Workers union. Brother Shawn, you gave a raucous speech on Monday that was well received. Unions supporting Democratic candidates, unions endorsing the Democratic Party is not a new thing. But something new is happening here. You headlining the opening of the DNC, people using the language of labor like Trump is a scab. What do you think it says about today’s labor movement and today’s Democratic Party that this is happening right now?
Shawn Fain:
Well, I just think the party’s realizing getting back to the roots. I mean, the roots of this party were embedded in supporting working class people, and that was always the hardcore base. I believe after the Reagan years and the Bush one years, I think people went a little more center and a little more business friendly, thanks to trickle-down economics and all that under Reagan and working class people continue to go backwards.
And I just believe as we’ve met over the last year and a half with the Biden administration, Vice President Harris, and with a lot of our congressional leaders, we’ve been very, very apparent, very real with them about what we expect, that we have expectations and that we’re not going to just blindly endorse candidates. There are expectations with our endorsements. They’ll be earned and they’ve delivered. And it’s a great thing.
I mean, I can’t tell you in my lifetime when I have heard a presidential candidate talk about corporate greed ever. And it’s awesome to hear Kamala Harris talk about corporate greed. And that is the reason why working class people have been left behind in this country and not affirmative action, not LGBTQ plus people, not those people trying to cross the border that are destitute and desperate, trying to find a better life. We’ve been left behind because of greedy corporations and all the wealth being concentrated in the hands of a few people at the top.
And it’s time we change that. And the one thing I say, the billionaire class and the corporate class have the money, but the working class have the votes. And so as long as they support our initiatives, they’re going to win.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And in that same time span where the party and politics in this country in general made a very hard neoliberal shift, like you said, organized labor itself was on the decline. And of course, you yourself being elected president of UAW represented a sort of shift in the other direction as well. I was wondering what role, what has changed in organized labor over that time as well, and what does the UAW doing that lead that charge?
Shawn Fain:
Well, I mean, look, when Chrysler went through the bankruptcy, I mean, I was 11 years old, ’79, ’80 or 10 years old. But I mean there was a shift I think in the UAW at that time where they endorsed joint programs, the jointness with the companies and we’re in this together type mentality. And working together goes so far, working together to me means we have issues we want to see happen. You have issues, let’s figure out a way that we both come out good in this.
But the way jointness has worked for us over the last 40 years has been the company wants this, and if you do what they want, we’re working together. If you don’t, you’re not a good person. And so it doesn’t work for our workers. Our workers have fallen further and further behind. I believe our leadership for decades has been too complacent.
And there’s a saying, one of my favorite Kennedy quotes, they’re risk and cost to a program of action, but they’re far less than a long-range risk and cost of comfortable inaction. And I believe that’s been applied of our union for the last three decades is just our leadership at the top’s been comfortably inactive, rested on the laurels of people from the fifties and sixties, and that’s not what we’re here for.
We are here to affect change for working-class people. And it’s a fight. And the wealthy, the billionaire, the elite, the few at the top are not going to share anything and we have to fight for it. And so we have three families in America that have as much wealth as the bottom 50% of Americans. That’s inexcusable in this nation. And so we have to fight for that.
And I was a frustrated member for 28 years of my life, but I was always active. And when we were able, thanks to the work of UAWD to get one member, one vote passed through my name in the hat, and I’m standing here today because of that. And I didn’t run to play around. I ran to reform this union and to get this union on the right track and lead our job as union leaders and our job as organized labor should be to lead. We have an obligation to lead the working class, union or not.
And we’ve seen the work of that already. We bargained a great contract and you saw within two weeks, Toyota gave big raises to their people. Honda followed suit, Nissan did because they know we’re coming for, and we call that the UAW Bump. And that’s what happens when you have vibrant unions working hard bargaining the contracts, everyone benefits.
Maximillian Alvarez:
When I was growing up, admittedly as a deeply conservative guy who didn’t know shit about unions and in fact grew up in a kind of anti-union family 20 years ago, 30 years ago, anytime folks started to talk about economic populism or the kind of issues that you’re expressing now, it was immediately like that’s class warfare. That’s class war. But you are, and the labor movement is really not shying away from the language of class war. What do you think has really changed?
Shawn Fain:
Well, because here’s the problem. Class warfare has been going on in this country for 40 years. I mean, the problem is when the billionaire class has taken everything, they don’t consider it class warfare. As long as they got… When they structure the laws and everything to benefit them while workers suffer, it’s not class warfare to them. But it’s exactly what it is.
It’s been going on for 40 years, but the only difference is now we’re going to call it for what it is. And I’m not going to run from that. I mean, yeah, we’re in a class or we’ve been in one for 40 years and it’s time the working class fights back. And whenever the working class fights back, they don’t like it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just two more quick questions. One, it was historic that President Biden became the first sitting president to walk a picket line during the UAW’s stand-up strike. For folks out there who are also asking what beyond that is important, symbolic historically, what else has the Democratic Party done to support working people in the labor movement? And what else would you like to see them do to support working people in the labor movement?
Shawn Fain:
I mean, they’ve done a lot. I mean, under the Biden administration, they have done a hell of a lot. You look at the Teamsters for instance. I mean, you had Teamsters here yesterday speaking about the fact that the Biden administration bailed out their pension fund. That’s a big deal, hundreds of millions of dollars. You look at the IRA with the money they created there, the programs they created to build a bunch of factories, battery and EV factories and in the United States, contrary to anything Trump ever did, which was watch factories leave the country.
They’re actually building factories in this country because of the work the Biden-Harris administration did. We benefited from that in Lordstown, Ohio, a plant that closed under Donald Trump’s presidency. Workers were left behind. They were sent all over the country. Now we have a battery plant there, and those workers who were left behind by Trump are coming back under Kamala Harris and Joe Biden.
And you look at the PRO Act, I mean, and this is the biggest indicator to me of why we look at party lines and why people talk about why do we always endorse Democrats. When we tried to pass the PRO Act, every Republican voted against it. Not one Republican supported it. Only Democrats supported it and it didn’t pass, unfortunately. But at the end of the day, it’s very clear.
When you look at the body of work of Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, the Biden administration, you look at the body of work of a lot of the Congress people of how they vote, and it’s very clear who supports working class people and who don’t.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Last question about Trump, because speaking not as a member but as a guy who’s been interviewing workers for years, I interviewed workers at the Lordstown plant. I remember Trump going there and telling people explicitly don’t sell your homes. We’re bringing all those jobs back. Then, of course, GM closed the plant. 14,000 jobs lost. On top of that, Donald Trump gave Mary Barra GM a giant tax cut. What does that say?
I feel like when people hear Trump is a scab, they don’t see that. What does that actually say about Donald Trump and his politics and what they mean for working people?
Shawn Fain:
It’s a testament to who Donald Trump represents. He represents the corporate class and the billionaire class. And I’ll go a step further. Look just last week, Donald Trump and Elon Musk on the Twitter podcast, whatever the hell it was. I mean laughing Donald Trump saying, Elon Musk, you’re the best cutter. You’re the greatest cutter, and laughing about firing striking workers. That is a federally protected right for workers to go on strike for better conditions. And they laugh about the fact that they fire people.
That says it all for working class people. It says it should say it all for union people that if you go on strike and Donald Trump’s your president, you may be fired. That won’t happen under Kamala Harris and Tim Walz presidency and vice presidency. They walked the picket lines with us. Joe Biden walked the picket line with us. Kamala Harris was on the picket line in 2019 with us, and Tim Walz was on last year with us.
So it’s just more of the same. Donald Trump has one interest, and that’s for the rich to get richer and everybody else to be left behind. He serves himself. And Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, they’re one of us. They’re working class people with working class roots and they care about people.
And that’s what this is all about. This election’s about coming together as a nation, standing together, people of all walks of life unifying and taking back our lives. And Donald Trump and his party, they preach division. They want to keep us divided so they can conquer. And that’s what they’ve been doing and we got to change it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you so much for watching The Real News Network, where we lift up the voices, stories and struggles that you care about most, and we need your help to keep doing this work. So please tap your screen now, subscribe and donate to The Real News Network. Solidarity forever.
We discuss Chicago’s storied history of organized labor and the state of the labor movement today with Alex Han, a longtime union organizer and now the executive director of the Chicago-based progressive magazine In These Times, and with Stacy Davis Gates, the current president of the Chicago Teachers Union, of which Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson — who opened the 2024 DNC last night — was previously a member. As the Democratic Party increasingly embraces union rights as a major part of its policy platform, “It’s pretty remarkable to think of how far we’ve come. It’s also important, sitting here in Chicago, [to] understand how far we still have to go,” says Han.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Since the start of the pandemic (and really, before that), frontline health care workers have been rightfully lauded for the tireless work that they have done to keep the health care system from cratering in this country. This is no easy task, as we have seen the devastation that the pandemic has wrought among our communities, and especially within the health care field. In Southern California, the cost of living crisis has filtered into the workplace, with many health care workers finding themselves priced out of their neighborhoods due to rising costs and unchecked gentrification, their stagnant wages and dwindling access to health care benefits compounding an already untenable situation. More than 2,200 health care workers at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California are fighting for improved working conditions and a chance to combat the cost of living crisis with a new contract. So far, they have been met with an aggressive management that is hellbent on freezing wages and striking some of the most important benefits that health care workers enjoy from the contract. Represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers, or NUHW, these workers —medical technicians, respiratory therapists, licensed vocational nurses, housekeepers, and nursing assistants— have made clear their demands for improved working conditions at multiple USC health care facilities across Los Angeles, and we’ve brought on Francisco Cendejas and Noemi Aguirre, two worker-organizers at Keck Medicine, to talk about the ongoing contract negotiations.
Note: This episode was recorded on July 18, 2024. Negotiations with Keck-USC are still ongoing.
Studio Production: Mel Buer Post-Production: Jules Taylor
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Francisco Cendejas:
Hi, morning. I’m Francisco Cendejas, I’m the director of our hospital division for our union here in Southern California.
Noemi Aguirre:
Hi, good morning. I’m Noemi Aguirre. I work as respiratory therapist at Keck USC. Also, I do hold a position within the union as an executive board member, as well as a steward in my department.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back 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 these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network. If you love what we do and are looking for more worker and labor-focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network. And please support the work we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers, friends and family members. Leave positive reviews for the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that we do with The Real News by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
Since the start of the pandemic and really before that, frontline healthcare workers have been rightfully lauded for the tireless work that they have done to keep the healthcare system from cratering in this country. This is no easy task as we have seen the devastation that the pandemic has wrought among our communities and especially within the healthcare field. In Southern California, the cost of living crisis is filtered into the workplace with many healthcare workers finding themselves priced out of their neighborhoods due to rising costs and unchecked gentrification, their stagnant wages and dwindling access to healthcare benefits compounding in already untenable situation. More than 2200 healthcare workers at Keck Medicine at the University of Southern California are fighting for improved working conditions in a chance to combat the cost of living crisis with a new contract.
So far, they have been met with an aggressive management that has hell-bent on freezing wages and striking some of the most important benefits that healthcare workers enjoy from their contract. Represented by the National Union of Healthcare Workers or NUHW, these workers, medical technicians, respiratory therapists, licensed vocational nurses, housekeepers and nursing assistants among them have made clear their demands for improved working conditions at multiple USC health care facilities across Los Angeles. And we’ve got two worker organizers here today to discuss this important negotiation. To start off this conversation, I think it would be probably a good idea to give our listeners an idea of what your working conditions look like. What are the issues that you’re currently working through on a daily basis? What does your regular workday look like for you?
Noemi Aguirre:
Sure. Hi everybody. This is Noemi again from Respiratory. I’m a respiratory therapist here at Keck. I’ve been here since 2002, so it’s been a minute. Obviously, it’s changed a lot throughout the years, but ever since the pandemic a little bit more recently, my workday consists of, well, any of a million things because respiratory therapists, they come in and they basically get assigned to go to different ICUs or areas in the hospital. I specifically will go to a specialty area today, for example, I would go to the bronchoscopy suite and we will have had scheduled outpatient visits for procedures. Usually, it’s every two hours. They’re spaced by two hours, so sometimes it’s 7:00, 9:00, 11:00, 1:00, 3:00. This is a lab that’s been growing in the last two and a half years because of COVID it was interrupted, so we had started growing the lab and then COVID came.
Because interventional pulmonology is a growing field, it’s a bit of a hit or miss for us in terms of how we’re doing these bronchoscopies and what the physicians are expecting. But basically we are going nonstop, so we don’t have any particular lunch that’s pre-planned, we just are winging it. It’s starting to lose its luster because in the beginning it was like, “Don’t worry. Once this becomes a well-oiled machine, so to speak, like cath lab or something, then everything will be… It is going to fall into place.” But two and a half years later, we’re still waiting to fall into place and we haven’t fallen into place. What we’ve fallen into is losing a lot of therapists to other facilities that pay better and do a lot less work. And who wouldn’t want to get paid more money to do a lot less work? And this being a specialty hospital, they just think that using their name is a laurel that they’ve been resting on for way too long that people are going to be working in their place because it’s such a great name, “I want to be associated with it.”
But after quite some time and a lot of changes in leadership, it doesn’t seem to change much. I’ll have an eight o’clock case, a 10 o’clock case, we set up, we assist in the procedure, we break everything down. We do an initial wipe down before EVS comes in and the housekeeping cleans the room, sterilizes it. And then we take all the samples that we took, whether it’s a biopsy or any kind of washings, and then we get those samples together. We label them all, we log them all in. We take them to their perspective areas, whether it’s pathology, cytology, microbiology. And then after we do that, we come back, we set up for the next case. A lot of times we are by ourselves sometimes on Mondays and Wednesdays when it’s busier, we do have two therapists, but it just barely hits the minimum at the moment as to, we’re not even thinking about lunch until you start to feel hungry.
And then it’s like, “Hey, when are we going to take a break?” We do have staffing issues. We do have issues with when we’re going to sign our breaks and we’re trying to keep up with what is interventional pulmonology out in other facilities like UCLA and other places that have it a little bit more down pat but we’re still waiting. And it doesn’t help that we’re in the middle of negotiations. I also am part of the bargaining team, and it doesn’t help to have their reactions or the looks on their faces when you’re asking for just basic stuff, which is more money because of the inflation you mentioned and also to have a better structured department, and they just look at you like, “Why haven’t you done this for yourself?” Well, here we are.
Mel Buer:
Francisco, I did want to really dive in here and really talk about one of the bigger issues that… Let me give you some context. My mom is a retired OR surgical nurse who throughout my entire life really had something to say about staffing issues at these hospitals that she worked at. And I really do believe, and I’m sure you agree, that when you have a staffing shortage or when you have workers who are putting in extreme hours handling caseloads that are way above normal, that what it translates to is a reduction in the quality of patient care.
When you’re talking about wanting to improve the working conditions for the workers in these hospitals through better pay, because yes, I got some information about starting wages for some of the workers in your unit and way too low for the speciality that they’re doing. But also really just this draw attention to, skeleton crews mean the work is not… You’re not being given the time to be able to really spend that time that you need with patients to be able to take care of these cases on a case by case basis in a way that provides high quality care. Would you agree that when you have these better working conditions and better staffing, that you really do have a better quality of care for the people who come through your hospitals?
Francisco Cendejas:
I think that it’s obvious, and it’s clear that that’s true. The rate of burnout of healthcare workers starting with the pandemic, even after the pandemic has just been, it’s unmatched. It’s never been as bad as now. And so knowing that is the case and the employer, Keck Medicine of USC having literally over 100 open positions at any given moment knows that what is being offered now knows that what’s on the table currently isn’t sufficient and is having the effect of just increasing the workload for so many other people, and it’s driving them out of the industry as well. And it’s just this vicious cycle.
Now, Keck is also, Keck Hospital and Norris Cancer Center are two highly specialized hospitals that do pride themselves in the specialties that they operate in and the quality of care there. But how is it able to be maintained as long as we’ve got this persistent, almost structural staffing crisis? This is why we make the proposals that we do. This has got to be fixed, and it doesn’t require individual efforts. It means that we need to have a contract that actually builds in fair wages, better control over workloads, guarantees that people have a reason to stay at their-
Francisco Cendejas:
… owns, guarantees that people have a reason to stay at this hospital for the length of their career. If the company’s not willing to agree to that, then they’re saying that they’re not willing to agree to having stability in their staffing, which is so necessary for the quality of care that patients do deserve.
Mel Buer:
Noemi, you had mentioned too, it’s not enough to be able to see that you’re at this illustrious hospital. The name is not enough to keep you around. The reputation of the name is that this is a hospital that has presented high quality of care, that is highly specialized in providing life-giving cancer care, right? Things of that nature. But for an employee there, eventually you start to look somewhere else, especially when a university like the University of California and UCLA’s Healthcare Centers offer 10 to 19% more in starting wages based on specialty, right?
The question that I want to ask then is throughout these negotiations and the proposals that you’ve brought to the table, not only are you talking about retention of the talent that you have and being able to keep people fed and keep them feeling like they are being respected and wanted in the workplace, but also trying to attract new talent that can help kind of shore up these staffing shortages. As of right now, it doesn’t seem like the reputation of Keck is that it’s a good place to work. Does that seem accurate?
Noemi Aguirre:
I mean, I think so. I’ve seen it with the new hires. We have a lead who’s like, “Hey, my wife just got hired at Kaiser, 10 bucks above me, and I’m a lead here. I’m the leading supervisor of the shift with a nighttime differential.” So we all laughed actually as we presented that across the table. But it’s one more thing that’s laughable almost about a place like this because you see their mottos, that’s the one that kills me, right? And for some reason in my mind, they have these mottos that are ever-changing, right? Like, “Exceptional, beyond exceptional care.” And you’re just like, “Okay.” And then, “Now, we’re limitless.” And it’s not that you don’t feel that your work is good work, right? It’s just that they’re seeing themselves in a way that makes you laugh because you know how quickly you did something that you should have taken a little bit more time with, right?
And it just, in my own mind, when I look at those things and I laugh inside, it just reminds me of Enron. When they used to ask associates like, “Well, you saw this all going down, didn’t you?” “Yeah.” Well, they’ve got all these mottos that sound like, “Beyond exceptional, limitless.” And so now it’s so extremely out there that it’s almost a running joke. When we’re going to start to do something and, “Oh, I’m missing this. I couldn’t start.” “Well, we’re limitless.” That’s why we run out of this. Or when we had supply issues, right? We had all these supply chain issues during COVID, of course, that’s no fault to the university, but then you start to hear these whispers that they’re just hoarding this stuff, should something else happen, but they don’t want to use it. And you’re just like, “How much stuff can you store when you need it now?” And you’re just like, we look at each other and we go, “Well, we are limitless.”
And so then when you’re working, and it’s a little bit sad too, because I don’t want to work in an organization where I’m almost like, “I feel like it’s a bit of a running joke.” But it’s a running joke to the workers because we’re here, right? It shouldn’t be good if I’m an administrator to hear that someone’s like, “Hey, our new model is limitless.” We’re like, “Yeah, limitless ability to be short on this, limitless short staffing, limitless low pay.” And so your own motto for your own company is the joke to your workers. It’s like, “Come on, dude.” It’s like, “It sucks.”
Mel Buer:
Yeah, yeah. Let it be known to all our listeners that you don’t give a shit about your job, right? You care very much, right? And you wouldn’t be asking for these things at the bargaining table if you didn’t care about what’s going on at the hospitals that you work.
Noemi Aguirre:
And we’re still going and getting the education. I, for one, before I came here, I didn’t have these little interventional pulmonology, one more year, get a certificate, just to assist. We have people that are actually really engaged in what they do, and they want to learn what’s out there and we’re constantly getting education on our own, even though they cover very little of it, we still go out and do it because I would feel like I’m doing a disservice. If my mom walked in the door and I have to do something and I don’t even know what the doctor is doing.
I’ve got to learn everything to make sure I could be able to function and make sure that if the doc has a moment where he needs something, I can sort of already know in advance what it is they need, so we can keep it smooth and make sure that everyone’s getting the best care that they’re getting, but it’s a trade-off. How do you do it? These are people you’re dealing with. You’re not… And I don’t think management sees it. That’s how we feel. We feel like we go and they forget they’re not making T-shirts that say “USC” on them. They’re actually taking care of people.
Mel Buer:
Well, I mean, that’s something that my mom, God bless her, used to talk about all the time that these patients aren’t patients, they’re just numbers of people who come through the door, right? And it’s unfortunate that our healthcare system, in large part, due to our insurance system, is set up that way. When you know that every worker who is coming through that door to take care of patients is there specifically to do that job and to take that seriously.
So when there’s a breakdown in scheduling or in staffing in general, and suddenly you’re finding yourself between a rock and a hard place, trying to take care of as many patients, up to 20 patients per shift, which is obscene. It’s tough to handle that caseload when, as you say, you might be the only person in that section of the hospital on that floor for eight hours. That’s incredibly… I don’t know how you do it, power to you, and I really hope that that can change.
Speaking of that changing, Francisco or Noemi, do you want to talk about how the negotiations have been going? What are the demands that you’ve brought to the administration? How has management responded? I got a little fact sheet and the way that management seems to be responding is frustrating, to say the least, so if you would like to talk about how those negotiations are going?
Francisco Cendejas:
Yeah, I can give you a quick summary. Look, this is the first contract to be negotiated at this hospital since getting over the worst of the pandemic, right? In that time, almost 20% inflation in three years, which is the duration of the last contract, right? So this is a time where the employees are looking for a way to not just fix everything that has been wrong for years now, right? But then also, yeah, make back everything that they lost as their wages just declined and declined and declined in their actual value, right?
So what are we looking for? Wages that actually match the premier hospital employers in LA County, right? It’s one thing for Keck Medicine of USC to say that they’re top of the market, leading hospital, and it’s another thing to actually recognize that in terms of compensation to employees. So yeah, that’s one thing.
Maintaining benefits for all members. How absurd that hospital workers have to be fighting for free family healthcare, right? Which our members do have. But this is something that the employer wants to take away based on their proposals. We’ve also proposed to ensure that we are properly recognizing people’s loyalty and time of service with the company, which is something that they’ve also been rejecting.
But see, what we’re looking for here is, of course, to maintain a strong contract that’s been in place for a long time, make the necessary improvements to make up for the last three years of terrible inflation. And what we’ve seen from other hospital employers is that look, they know that something has to be fixed, so they come to the bargaining table and they say, “All right, look, this is after the pandemic, those were strange times, and this is now a unique occasion and we need to fix things.” That’s been the posture that we’ve seen from a lot of other employers, and that’s why healthcare workers and in other industries too, right? Union members are winning better contracts than have happened before.
And instead, what we’re seeing from Keck, is just tons of takeaway proposals, which are terrible on their own, but just wildly misplaced considering just the strength of unions and the labor movement now, right? Shocking to think that they’re going to propose, for example, that union members can’t meet with their union reps in the break rooms, right? That’s an absurd thing. It’s an absurd thing at any point that they would propose to get rid of seniority-based hiring, right? And say, “Well, we want to have more discretion in determining whether someone is more skilled and therefore more qualified.” Right? Things like being able to dredge up old disciplines that are more than a year old to be able to stack on top of current issues…
Francisco Cendejas:
… stack on top of current issues, and instead of letting old disciplines expire over time, which is in the contract currently. But I think maybe even just maybe some of this is some of the most shocking that now would be the time that the employer would say, “We want to be able to subcontract all of your jobs, not without bargaining, but we want to send any position that we want over to another company to do.” Or if Keck were to sell a hospital or a clinic, can’t guarantee you that your job is still going to be there. We want to get rid of what’s called a successorship guarantee. Right? That your job and your union contracts or union representation would stay in the proposing to get rid of that too.
These are the kinds of things that are just, like I said, they’re terrible takeaway proposals to issue to union members at any point, especially now when folks are so ready to fight for the contract that they deserve. I mean, here’s the thing about our history with this company. We’ve never settled a contract with Keck Medicine of USC without at least authorizing a strike against them. And at times, even going out. It doesn’t look to be different this time, it doesn’t look like they want it to be different this time. And it’s shocking to think that that’s what you would want to have happen, as we emerge out of the worst of the pandemic, the first contract to be negotiated after the worst of it.
Mel Buer:
Has management given any sort of rationale for why they would submit these takeaway proposals? Is there some sort of perceived economic reason for this or anything at all that would clue you in as to at least what they’re attempting to present as the reason for why they’ve asked to do include these?
Francisco Cendejas:
I mean that the company gives reasons, sure, they give reasons. But they give the same reasons about whether they’re talking about hospitals or whether they’re talking about any other industry, and say, “Well, we need to have greater flexibility in operations. Management needs the rights to be able to determine staffing levels, and that’s why we can’t agree to add a few more positions in your department where you are so sorely understaffed.” And so on and so on. So we could be talking about a widget factory, we could be talking about a clinic. And the reasons are the same, that they’re saying, that any boss is saying to a union bargaining committee of just, “Well, we want to have more power here in the workplace.” So sure, they’ve got their reasons and they’re not new ones.
Mel Buer:
Right. Yeah, that’s a good point, and it’s something that I bring up a lot when I talk to union workers who are in the midst of contract negotiations or organizing drives. Noemi I’m sure you have these conversations with your fellow workers on the floor. It comes down to power, because often when we’re about these corporations, whether it’s a hospital or Kellogg’s or Amazon or Starbucks or whatever, it could be a small business down the road. But oftentimes they either give you that more flexibility excuse where they tell you there’s not enough money for those proposals. But what it comes down to is, they don’t like it when workers come together collectively to organize for better working conditions and assert their rights in the workplace.
And it is really a power struggle. And so, I think it’s good to kind of zoom this out a little bit and to give that context to our listeners. What is the biggest thing that you want our listeners to know about perhaps this contract struggle, but maybe about healthcare work organizing in general that you think is really important for folks to know who have not had the same exposure to it that you and I may have had?
Noemi Aguirre:
I mean, healthcare is the only place that I’ve been in, so I can’t really say as it compares to something else. But what would I want folks to know? What I want them to know is that at the end of the day, since this is a power struggle, you just have to find the more clever way of letting them know that this is what’s going to happen while maintaining that they feel like they’re still in control. Because it doesn’t seem like their power hunger ever ends.
We’ve been negotiating under NUHW for our contracts since 2009, its inception into the union world. But it’s the same thing every time. They want to rewrite the whole book. They want to rewrite from start to finish. Why do we still have to argue about whether the entrance is on the north side or the south side? All this stuff that is seemingly unimportant, when people say, “Hey, well, how’s it going in bargaining?” How’s it going in bargaining? It’s not. It’s slow. It sucks and it makes no sense.
And then you think, “Well, maybe they’re just that much smarter than you. You start to question yourself, but don’t question yourself. Because you start to think, “Maybe what I’m asking for either doesn’t make sense or I’m not getting the bigger picture.” And it’s not true because the turnover rate, even for admin, is the same as the turnover rate for the workers. So, what’s happening in the bigger picture? This organization that calls itself USC, does the right hand know what the left hand’s doing? I don’t know. It’s because they entrust all these people that, at the end of the day, are human. And even if it’s a smaller department, as long as they’re overseeing two or three people, we cannot trust them to do the right thing. I don’t know why we still are where we are.
An employer like USC, that’s humongous, still has to be forced to do the right thing. Every single time we have to, “Oh, we’re going to strike you. Oh, we’re going to this you. Oh, we’re going to that you.” Why haven’t we already knocked out… Why don’t we already know where we’re parking? We should. We park in the same place. Maybe a block over, maybe not a block over. What does it matter? Why are we still discussing things? Why do we rewrite this entire thing every time? And one of our negotiations, a couple of contracts ago, we had a second year anniversary for negotiations. What the hell’s going on?
And then they look at you when you get something that’s status quo, they’re like, “Oh, you see, you got your parking back.” What are you talking about? You are the one that opened up the can of worms that should have never been opened so that we could talk about what’s happening now in 2024 or whatever year it is that we’re negotiating. We need to talk about our circumstances now and the climate and how crazy everything is getting, so that we can deal with people that are tired of working just in general. Or even everybody in respiratory, everybody in nursing, even the people that PCTs and EBS workers that had to clean during COVID that just saw… I mean, it’s not normal. I mean, unless we’re in a war zone, which we didn’t think we signed up for, it’s not normal to see people just being carted off and carted off. And you couldn’t do anything and you couldn’t do anything. And you’re just like, “What is going on?” It just doesn’t make any sense.
So, it is a power trip. And don’t let it sway you and think that you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing, because you’ve been doing what you’re supposed to be doing all along. It’s just these human beings that think that if the trustee is giving money and he wants more bang for his buck, he needs to make more money. And in the end, what do we do? Oh, we get our towels are cheaper. Our linen is cheaper. Because if they only cut 10 cents here, they can make more money. And you’re just like, “Okay, great. Now I need two sets of linen because the patient’s freezing because you switched the thick blanket for the thinner blanket. But now I got to use two.”
So, it’s like this common sense stuff. And you think to yourself, “What is going on here?” Do they care? No. They just want to be able to tell you what to do. It is nothing but power. Do not second guess yourself. You know what you’re doing, you’re good at it, and you should exert your rights. You should always exert your rights. But anyway.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. Well, and those small cuts, and Francisco, I’m sure you can speak to this too, those small cuts and the cheapness or the quality of supplies, for example, don’t do anything to pad the pockets of the workers. It’s not like they’re making those cuts to save money so they can raise wages. I’m staring at executive salaries to the tune of millions of dollars per year that have not changed, I’m sure, except to go up. While your average Keck healthcare worker makes $61,000 a year, which after taxes in California, it’s probably what, less than 50 take home. That’s untenable. It’s not a livable situation in a county like Los Angeles, because the cost of living here is way too high.
And so, I guess here’s a question just to kind of drag all those nebulous thoughts together so that you actually have something to respond to. Francisco, you talked about the fact that every contract has at least had a strike authorization. If you would like to talk about that, do you see that in the future for this one as well? Or are you hoping to avoid that and to actually have a fruitful negotiation that doesn’t end up there?
Francisco Cendejas:
Yeah. I mean, anyone on the bargaining committee will tell you, what we’re trying to do is get to a fair contract that is good for the membership. Right? Anyone will tell you that that’s the first thing that they want to see happen. Also, the history with this employer is the history with this employer. And their proposals right now are what they are. Right? So, is this noticeably better than in the past? Absolutely not. It’s…
Francisco Cendejas:
… Is this noticeably better than in the past? Absolutely not. I think these takeaways are terrible and the thing is our members are not going to tolerate them. So as a strike authorization possible, it’s absolutely possible. And it’s a decision that our bargaining committee who are elected by their coworkers because that’s who our union is, right, all the decisions about whether a strike is going to happen or going to be called for, it’s going to be for up to our bargaining committee.
And I don’t see it going in the direction where we’re not going to having to ask ourselves that question. I mean, just remembering who USC is here, they’re the largest private sector employer in LA. The tone that is established then in these negotiations is felt far beyond just what happens in this clinic or within this one unit in the hospital. Because of their sheer size, they are a premier employer in certain aspects, just not in the ones where they don’t want to be in, the ones that really impact the thousands of members that we represent there that do the actual work of keeping LA healthy. So where is this going? I think our members are going to have to answer that question pretty soon.
Mel Buer:
Thank you so much, both of you, for coming on and talking about this really important negotiation. Before I get your final thoughts, I will say just listening to this conversation and talking about what it means to be a premier sort of healthcare employer in the city, Keck has the ability to really set itself up to be a community leader in this way. And there’s nothing here that says that coming to a fair agreement with its workers is going to not do that.
And if they care about their reputation, both as an employer and as a trusted and safe set of hospitals and healthcare clinics that can actually take care of some of patients who are in the worst sort of illnesses of their lives, this is an important piece I think. So those are kind of my final thoughts and I really appreciate you both coming on. Before I do my little outro, do either of you have any final thoughts that you would love for our listeners to know? Is there a way to reach out to your union to offer support? Any major dates coming up in terms of negotiations or information sessions or anything that you think our listeners might be interested in?
Noemi Aguirre:
I can do my last thought and then Francisco can give you the important dates.
Mel Buer:
Cool.
Noemi Aguirre:
Okay. Just as an example, I wanted to let you know that priorities… I mean, again, biggest employer in Southern California. Are their employees a priority? Well, doesn’t feel that way. They interrupted… Our contract expired in April. We started negotiations in March. We had beaucoup dates in March. We were not getting anywhere, but at least we had dates. Come April, they basically blocked us out for an entire month because they interrupted our negotiations to run and see if they can go and do something football related. Because that is where their priorities lie. And we know it and we felt it. And when people ask why didn’t we meet in April? We’re like, “Well, they have bigger priorities, their football team.” That money over there has bigger priorities. So we’ve felt that. We felt that the entire time. And it’s a symptom of everything and it’s the bigger picture all the time.
But what I am happy about and I want everybody to know that I am happy to know that it does feel like labor is having the sort of a rebirth, a renaissance because of everything we see. So people are actually excited to go out there and fight. And they’re not afraid right now. They weren’t afraid last year. They weren’t afraid this year. And I think that that momentum hopefully holds and it feels like it is going to hold that when you look up employment, you know what? I don’t want to leave this place. I want to hold [inaudible 00:34:28] accountable to what they need to do to my coworkers and to everybody else in this hospital. I could very easily go to county. I could very easily go to UCLA. I have the experience. I know people… Every community is a small community when you just take it for itself and we can go anywhere and get more money and work less, but I’m not going to.
I like my commute. I’ve done a lot here. I think there’s still a lot to do. I think there’s still a lot to learn because we learn something every day and I’m glad. I’m glad that labor has this great awakening and that we’re no longer afraid that if I lose my job, I’m going to be a destitute next week because I feel like I have learned enough and I’m capable enough that I can just go somewhere else. And that absence of fear is also what’s been driving… And I guess we could thank COVID for that. That there’s a lot of some jobs in certain sectors. But that’s the great part about it, is that more people are willing to speak up and I love it. So I think keep it up. Working people should keep it up because we’re the ones that have to dictate everything. We’re the ones here.
Francisco Cendejas:
Noemi said it right. Look, we are still in negotiations. We have bargaining dates both multiple this week and next week too. So this is a very much evolving situation. Techuschealthbeforewealth.nhw.org, that’s where the public can see some of the updates about our bargaining and also of course following us on social media. But this is an important critical time for the labor movement, in LA, in our state across the country, And this fight is hopefully one more drop in the big wave that is necessary for the rebirth of our movement. Thanks a lot for having us on.
Mel Buer:
Absolutely. And we’ll make sure to put that link in the show notes and any relevant of informational… I got some good informational packets as part of doing this research for this. So for any of our listeners either in Southern California or elsewhere in the country who want to see the updates and get a sense of what’s been going on in healthcare organizing, I will make sure that those end up in our show notes. Thank you as always for coming on and taking the time to talk about this. I think this is an extremely important piece of contemporary labor organizing, which is why I’ve even brought on working people to really talk about is the struggles that are happening now that are affecting the material conditions of workers, union organizers, and folks in the community that these workers serve. So thank you so much for coming on you both.
As always, I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We’ll see you back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. And please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories of the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News Network newsletter so that you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel Buer and we’ll see you next time.
This story originally appeared in Pittsburgh Union Progress on Aug. 14, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
The National Labor Relations Board on Wednesday filed for an injunction seeking to have a federal court step in to end an almost two-year strike and put striking Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers back to work.
The rare filing, in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, asks a judge to order the company to follow federal labor law and take striking journalists back to work, at least temporarily, under the terms of their last illegally violated contract while their union and the company negotiate a new contract.
The filing also seeks to have the company reimburse other striking workers — in unions representing advertising workers, pressmen and mailers — for health care coverage the company was legally supposed to pay for but did not, as well as for subsequent health care costs. That significant financial remedy would get those workers to end their strike, return to work, and resume bargaining for a new health care plan and new contracts.
The next step: A District Court judge will consider the injunction request and issue a ruling, a process union officials say could take from a couple of weeks to several months.
Within days of a federal judge’s ruling fully in favor of this request for an injunction to stop “irreparable harm” to the workers while the legal process drags on, a total of about 60 strikers could be back to work.
The filing is the most significant development in the strike since an administrative law judge ruled in January 2023 that the PG is breaking federal labor law in multiple ways, including not bargaining in good faith with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.
The injunction supports the specifics of that administrative law judge’s ruling, which the company appealed, by asking a U.S. District judge to order the company to be “enjoined and restrained from”:
• Failing and refusing to bargain in good faith with all the unions over successor collective-bargaining agreements and any interim agreements over health insurance benefits.
• Making unilateral changes to the journalists’ last contract, which expired in 2017.
• In any other manner interfering with, restraining or coercing employees in the exercise of the rights guaranteed them under section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act.
The request also asks the judge to order the company to:
• Immediately bargain collectively and in good faith with the unions, upon their request, for contracts and health insurance benefits.
• Immediately rescind any or all of the unilateral changes that the company unlawfully implemented in July 2020 and “restore, honor and continue the terms” of the parties’ 2014-2017 collective-bargaining agreement. That would include the company making all prospective increased health care insurance payments required by the Western Pennsylvania Teamsters and Employers’ Welfare Fund, in accordance with the December 2019 arbitration award on this issue.
• Make whole the affected employees in the pressmen’s, typos’ and mailers’ unions for any direct or foreseeable financial harms caused by the loss of health benefits, including prospective reimbursement for out-of-pocket medical and substitute health insurance expenses, suffered as a result of the company’s unlawful bad-faith bargaining and unilateral changes.
• Within five days, post physical copies of the District Court’s injunction order setting forth the relief granted at the company’s Clinton and Pittsburgh facilities, as well as email and mail them to all employees.
• Within seven days of the issuance of the District Court’s injunction order, convene one or more mandatory meetings to read it to all employees.
• Within 21 days, submit to the District Court and the NLRB’s Regional Director Nancy Wilson a sworn affidavit stating in detail how the PG has complied with the injunction order.
The filing isn’t yet the end of a saga that’s been difficult to follow, even for those workers who have been living for nearly two years with what has become the longest strike ever in Pittsburgh and the longest ongoing strike in the country.
The production unions went on strike on Oct. 6, 2022, over a dispute over their health care coverage, for which the company stopped paying because of a dispute over a cost increase of $19 a week. The journalists of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh voted — 38 to 36 — to go on their own unfair labor practices strike on Oct. 18, 2022, and about 60 of its then 95 members did.
The Guild that fall had just presented its case before NLRB Administrative Law Judge Geoffrey Carter. On Jan. 26, 2023, he ruled overwhelmingly for the journalists. But on March 23, 2023, the company, as expected, appealed that case, which continues to be pending before the five-member board in Washington. Other unfair labor practice charges and other unions’ cases vs. the PG also still are pending.
Meanwhile, the strikers have been getting by on weekly strike benefits from their unions and by applying for money available to them from donations from supporters, including the Communications Workers of America, the parent union of three of the locals. Through July 2024, according to the CWA, donations totaled more than $781,000.
In the journalists’ unfair labor practice case, Carter further ordered the company to “make its employees whole for any loss of earnings and other benefits that resulted from its unlawful unilateral changes” in 2020, such as reductions in salary and vacation. Union officials had estimated at one point that the company’s bill for all union and striker losses would be more than $4 million, but the NLRB’s request for an injunction doesn’t seem to address this directly.
Wednesday’s filing in the Western District of Pennsylvania Court on Grant Street, Downtown, came more than three months after the striking workers expected the local NLRB to seek what’s called a 10(j) injunction. Such injunctions are rare — Only four have been authorized this year. The NLRB page about them notes, “These temporary injunctions are needed to protect the process of collective bargaining and employee rights under the [National Labor Relations] Act, and to ensure that Board decisions will be meaningful.”
In fact, union officials said, the local office was set to file the injunction this June when the U.S. Supreme Court ruling — in a case involving Starbucks workers — changed the standards that all such NLRB 10(j) injunction requests must meet. So over the past several weeks, the union officials said, the NLRB adjusted its 90-page brief and supporting documents for the news workers before filing it — something noted in the injunction request.
Other twists in the long road included one of the PG production union locals, the Teamsters representing transportation workers, in April secretly settling its strike by taking severance payments in exchange for dissolving their local, something the other unions consider a betrayal.
Then in June, the remaining four unions met with the company to hear its plans to close its printing facility in Findlay by August 2025 while going all in on its longtime business plan to deliver its news products digitally. The company wouldn’t need its own pressmen (eight of whom, including one woman, still are on strike with Printing Packaging & Production Workers Union or PPPWU), nor any mailers (CWA 1484 has 10 full-time employees on strike and five part-time employees on strike). But the company still will need advertising workers (nine of whom are still on strike with CWA 14827).
All this is occurring during a backdrop of lawsuits and feuding among members of the Block family that runs Block Communications Inc., which owns the PG, The Toledo Blade, and a cable company and several broadcast stations in Ohio. One point of contention is the board looking into the possibility of trying to sell the Pittsburgh newspaper, which has been created and published, online daily and in print two days a week, by workers who didn’t join the strike and workers who were hired after the strike started.
Through it all, many supporters — from longtime customers to U.S. senators — have avoided buying, reading or talking to the Post-Gazette so as not to cross the picket line and undermine the workers’ right to strike for better conditions for all workers at the company.
Union leaders stress that the Post-Gazette’s illegal behavior predates the strike by several years and that the company has spent millions more to fight the unions than it would have cost to treat them legally and fairly.
“With the money the Post-Gazette has spent on anti-union attorneys, private security firms, printing the paper at the Butler Eagle, which we estimate to be close to $12 million, they could have given every employee a raise and funded the health care instead of terminating it,” said PPPWU Local 24M/9N President Chris Lang in a news release. “This is the beginning of our eighth year in negotiations, and hopefully the 10(j) injunction will bring all of this nonsense to a close. The employees have given their lives to this company and deserve that respect.”
In terms of journalists, there are 27 strikers and about 75 who are working. Many of those have been hired since the strike began. Meanwhile, several strikers decided to take other jobs, sometimes in other cities. Only a handful of strikers went back to work at the PG. Per federal labor law, strikers who did not take similar jobs would be legally entitled to getting their former job titles back; the fate of replacement workers would be up to the company.
The majority of Newspaper Guild members who did not go on strike believe that they have resigned their union membership, but in fact they remain members of the bargaining unit, and it continues to be a condition of employment to be a member in good standing to retain their jobs. The Newspaper Guild executive committee recently voted to require those workers to catch up on all unpaid dues, dating back to 2021 in some cases, and may also levy fines some would be required to pay to return to good standing.
Zack Tanner, striking interactive designer and Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh president, said he’s happy for the workers to get their day in court. “It’s really exciting that this is coming down finally,” he said. “You can see from the size and scope of it how much the PG is breaking federal law.”
Marian Needham, executive vice president of the NewsGuild-CWA, said in a statement, “We are hopeful that the Blocks will not demonstrate the same contempt for the federal courts that they have shown their employees and this entire bargaining process. We are resolute in our intention to bargain a fair settlement for our members, and we will continue to fight until we get there.”
Should a District Court rule in the unions’ favor, the PG may request a stay from that same judge and possibly appeal to a U.S. Circuit court.
The company could comply with the administrative law judge’s 2023 order at any time, and it and the unions also could negotiate a settlement, or the outcome of the cases still could be decided by the five-member NLRB board in Washington or on appeals. There are no deadlines for that to happen.
The filing notes, “Unless injunctive relief is immediately obtained, it may fairly be anticipated that [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] will continue its unlawful conduct during the proceedings before the Board and during subsequent proceedings before a court of appeals for an enforcement decree with the result that PPG’s employees will continue to be deprived of their rights guaranteed in the [National Labor Relations] Act.”
The striking workers and unions plan to hold a news conference in response to the injunction request at 2 p.m. Thursday in front of the Post-Gazette’s newsroom at 358 North Shore Drive, Pittsburgh 15212.
During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.
Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.
Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.
In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.
Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.
The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.
Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it. In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.
By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.
Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses. As the AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.” Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.
During his four years as President of the United States, Donald Trump was remarkably active and often successful in sabotaging the health and safety of the nation’s workers.
Trump, as the AFL-CIO noted, targeted Medicare and Medicaid for $1 trillion in funding cuts, eroded the Affordable Care Act (thereby increasing the number of Americans lacking health insurance coverage by 7 million), and “made workplaces more dangerous by rolling back critical federal safety regulations.” Trump’s administration not only refused to publicly disclose fatality and injury data reported to the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but slashed the number of federal workplace safety inspectors and inspections to the lowest level in that agency’s 48-year history. According to one estimate, with these depleted numbers, it would take 165 years to inspect every worksite in the United States.
Furthermore, the administration repealed rules requiring employers to keep and report accurate injury records, proposed eliminating the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, and cut workplace safety research and training programs. The Trump administration also proposed revoking child labor protections, weakened the Mine Safety and Health Administration’s enforcement of mine safety, and reversed a ban on chlorpyrifos, a toxic pesticide that causes acute reactions among farmworkers and neurological damage to children.
In April 2019, the Trump Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service put into place a rule to allow an unlimited increase in the line speeds for hog slaughter. In an industry already notorious for endangering workers―with more than 4,700 occupational injuries and more than 2,700 occupational illnesses per year―this was a sure-fire recipe for undercutting worker safety. Even so, the Trump administration completely ignored the impact on workers’ safety and health before issuing the rule.
Downplaying workplace hazards, the administration scrapped new rules on styrene, combustible dust, infectious diseases, and silica dust―a mineral that can cause silicosis, an incurable and often fatal lung disease carrying an increased risk of lung cancer. Eager to reduce business expenditures, it also canceled a requirement for training shipyard and construction workers to avoid exposure to beryllium, a known carcinogen. In addition, the administration delayed and proposed a rollback of the Environmental Protection Agency’s chemical risk management rule, thus increasing health dangers for workers, the public, and first responders.
The Trump administration’s callous disregard for the health and safety of workers became particularly apparent during 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through American workplaces. Trump refused to issue binding rules requiring businesses to institute safety measures to protect nurses, bus drivers, meatpacking and poultry workers, and other particularly vulnerable workers. Quite the contrary, in April 2020 Trump issued an executive order to require the nation’s meat production plants to stay open. This fact, plus an April 2020 authorization by Trump’s Department of Agriculture for 15 large poultry plants to increase their line speed, led by September to the sickness of more than 40,000 meat and poultry workers and to the deaths of hundreds.
Other groups of workers were also hard-hit by the absence of key Trump administration health and safety measures during the pandemic, including its failure to use the Defense Production Act to expand production of personal protective equipment for endangered workers. According to National Nurses United, by September 2020 more than 250,000 health care workers had come down with the Covid-19 virus and at least 1,700 of them had died from it. In addition, according to Purdue University’s Food and Agriculture Vulnerability Index, 147,000 agricultural workers had contracted Covid.
By that fall, although more than a thousand meatpacking, food-processing, and farming facilities had reported cases of Covid-19, Trump’s OSHA had managed to cite only two of them for violations of health and safety regulations. JBS (the biggest meat-processing company in the world, with annual revenues of over $51 billion) was ordered to pay a fine of just $15,615, while Smithfield (owned by the WH Group, the largest pork company in the world, with more than $25 billion in annual revenue) was ordered to pay only $13,494 (about $10 per worker sick with Covid). Both companies refused to pay the fines. Meanwhile, Trump’s OSHA remained ineffective and rudderless, with an acting director yet to be named.
Even in the ostensibly “good” years before the onset of the pandemic, the absence of adequate health and safety measures contributed to an appalling number of work-related deaths in the United States. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the annual number of worker deaths on the job rose between 2016 (the last year of the Obama administration) and 2019 (the last pre-Covid year of the Trump administration) to 5,333. In addition, an estimated 95,000 American workers died in 2019 from occupational diseases.
Moreover, occupational deaths during the Trump era were dwarfed by occupational injuries and illnesses. As the AFL-CIO reported: “In 2019, nearly 3.5 million workers across all industries, including state and local government, had work-related injuries and illnesses that were reported by employers.” Furthermore, added the union federation, “due to limitations in the current injury reporting system and widespread underreporting of workplace injuries, this number understates the problem. The true toll is estimated to be two to three times greater—or 7.0 million to 10.5 million injuries and illnesses a year.”
The grim fate of millions of American workers―crushed by dangerous machinery, riddled with carcinogenic chemicals, or gasping their last breaths with Covid-19―apparently did not matter enough to Donald Trump, as President, to safeguard their health and safety. But it might be of greater concern to Americans when they go to the polls this November.
There are always two sides to the Olympics: the glamor of the games broadcasted throughout the world, and the gritty reality of evictions, anti-homeless sweeps, and securitization faced by local working people. The Paris 2024 games have been no exception to this uglier side, but it’s also been an occasion for French unions to score victories. Axel Persson, General Secretary of the CGT Rail Workers Union, explains how French workers used the impending Olympics to their strategic advantage in collective action, and how workers in Los Angeles can draw on these lessons ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
Studio Production: Jules Boykoff Post-Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Dave Zirin:
Hey, this is Dave Zirin from Edge of Sports TV, only on the Real News Network, and I’m thrilled to be speaking to Axel Persson right here in Olympic Paris. Axel Persson is a rank and file labor leader with the Railway Workers Union. Axel, thank you so much for joining us.
Axel Persson:
Thank you.
Dave Zirin:
First things first, Axel. I was hoping you could share with our audience a story that hasn’t gotten a lot of attention, and that’s how the workers of France were able to pressure the government for concessions in the lead-up to the Olympics. Can you speak about that?
Axel Persson:
Yeah. For example, in my industry specifically — Unfortunately this cannot apply to all industries to be fair — But in my industry and others, for example, as a transport industry, the railway industry, we managed to force through a deal saying very simply and putting a very simple message saying that, if you don’t give into our demands in a satisfactory manner, there will be no Olympics.
Because, as in any of these events, these events can only happen if workers make them possible, whether it be transport workers, hotel workers, restaurant workers, all the workers who run the city, basically, who make it a livable place. If we’re not here to do the work, there can be no such a thing as these events.
We said, we have demands, and if you don’t cave into them, we will strike at these occasions. So in industries such as mine, for example, the railway industry, already back in April after several 24-hour strikes that paralyzed the network, we managed to force through a deal that gave back not all of the ground we have lost, but that, for example, allowed me and my colleagues to retire earlier despite the fact that the government had forced through pension reform in 2023.
To make things a bit understandable for the wider audience, I, for example, in my personal situation, will be able to retire at 53 with a full pension. My demand being, our demand being 50, so we haven’t gotten there yet, but we’ve gotten closer.
We’ve also managed to secure a deal, after a few strikes, that basically doubles our pay during the Olympics period, which we found not necessarily satisfactory in the terms that we thought that more people should have been covered by the deal, but quite a lot of the transport workers in Paris are covered by the deal, and so we have benefited from raises in the wages.
But the gist is, and the lesson to be taught, is that in order to force through your demands, you have to wield your industrial muscles and strike, threaten or strike, be good on your threats when you do it because without our labor, nothing can be done. And they have no choice but to give into our demands because they can only comment on society. They can only give their opinion, but without our labor, nothing can be done. That is not the case of our enemies who rule the society. They’re the real parasites, not us.
Dave Zirin:
Yeah. Also, because you work for the Railway Workers Union, I do need to ask you about what happened before the Olympics, if you had any thoughts about that, the sabotage that took place on the train lines that prevented thousands of people from coming into Paris. A story that has seemed to be wiped off the front pages in the whole fever around the Olympics here.
Axel Persson:
Yeah, for the opening ceremony of the Olympics last Friday, so on the 26th of July, if I remember correctly, there was this organized, coordinated sabotage that took place at four different places in the territory very far away from each other, where groups of people basically arsoned installations that are vital for the railway network, which led to major disruptions.
Out of these four attacks, one was thwarted in the sense that there were colleagues, railway workers who were doing maintenance work, spotted these people, and when they saw them, these people fled. The perpetrators fled.
As things stands now, well, the disruptions were minimized by the fact that, for once, we were not understaffed because of the Olympics. So actually the disruptions were important, but were managed to be resolved and treated actually quite quickly by industry standards. Within the day after, things have started getting back to normal, which is actually quite a feat given the spread of the damage that had been done.
But nobody knows exactly who did this. There are many people and forces speculating on who did this. Of course, the right is pointing towards what they call the ultra left, but no group has claimed the attack.
There’s been an anonymous group that have expressed support for the attack, but has not claimed it. It can very well be a foreign power given the current geopolitical situations with rivalries between the different powers and Russia with the war in Ukraine and France standing with NATO countries against Russia. It could be foreign interference, destabilization, or it can be any other reason.
Nobody knows for now. The inquiry hasn’t yielded results yet, but maybe it will at one point. But for now, unfortunately, nobody knows who and why they did it.
Dave Zirin:
Now we’re here at Père Lachaise Cemetery, a famous place here in Paris, and we’re just steps away from the Wall of the Communards.
Axel Persson:
Yes.
Dave Zirin:
I’m asking all of that because, at the Olympic opening ceremonies, they paid tribute to someone named Louise Michel, but they didn’t exactly give a lot of context to who Louise Michel was. I was hoping perhaps you could.
Axel Persson:
Yeah. So Louise Michel is a very famous political figure in France. She’s a woman and a teacher who was a leader of the Paris Commune, one of the many leaders of the Paris Commune.
The Paris Commune in itself is widely acknowledged to be the first worker state. It was very, very short-lived because it arose and was born in a very peculiar context in France, in Paris, actually, in 1871. It was a consequence of an uprising of the French working class in Paris that seized power, kicked out the ruling class of Paris, and administered the city in an autonomous fashion and instituted workers’ democracy, direct democracy, voting rights for all the workers, even immigrants, because they said nationality doesn’t matter. What matters is if you work or not, forbid the child labor, forbid the prostitution, which heralded a lot of the social rights the working class still benefit from today.
It was very short-lived in the sense that it was completely crushed, very violently so, by the newborn third French Republic that arose after the second empire led by Napoleon III, and it was crushed almost in a genocidal fashion. Some people qualify it as a genocide, some qualify it as a massacre, but that’s pretty irrelevant. It was a massacre which ended up in 15,000 to 50,000 depending on the estimates, of workers being randomly executed in the streets of Paris.
The last stand these commune fighters managed to take was in this cemetery. And in one of the walls here of the cemetery that we call the Communard Wall or the Wall of the Federates, [inaudible] the same place, and the last one was executed there. So you can still see the bullets where the last one was executed.
Since then it has become acknowledged that this part of the cemetery more or less belongs and is administered by the radical labor movement, so mainly the CGT Trade Union of which I am a member and representative of, but also the French Communist Party, given the very importance and weight and influence it had in the working class.
So that’s where all, not all, but many of the heroes of the French working class are buried or where monuments paying tribute to their memory and to their fight, their legacy, are here. Not all of them, but quite a lot of them.
History is gazing upon you when walk through these areas going back from the Paris Commune to all those who were deported and exterminated by the Nazis and those who fought for the liberation of the working class and also from the liberation of Nazism.
So I find it a very interesting place, and very often when we have international guests, such as you, we insist on taking you to visit it because it’s part of the history that is less taught in history books, and it is only taught by the working class. So that’s why we insist on bringing … I know it may sound a bit peculiar people when they hear it, no, we insist. We have to meet at the cemetery, but there’s a reason for it.
Dave Zirin:
So the Olympic organizers, just to put a fine point on it, paid tribute in front of a global audience.
Axel Persson:
Exactly.
Dave Zirin:
To one of the leaders of the first successful revolutionary workers state in world history.
Axel Persson:
Exactly. Exactly.
There’s also a funny anecdote about this I mentioned to you a bit earlier is that I don’t remember if it’s a footage or if it’s just a picture, but there’s an anecdote, at least, of Lenin, the Russian revolutionary who danced in the snow in the winter of 1918. The people asked him, comrade Lenin, why are you dancing? Tovarishch Lenin, why are you dancing? He said, you didn’t notice, but it’s been 72 days now since we’ve seized power, and the Paris Commune lasted for 71 days. So ourhistorical purpose has been filled. We managed to last one day longer.
This is also why the Paris Commune — And we actually saw that before, there were Chinese people who came here and took pictures in front of that area — Working class organization from all over the world, even the US, from Africa, from Asia, from Central Asia, from Iran. Everywhere across the world, people from the working class movement come to the cemetery to pay tribute to the heroes of the Paris Commune.
Dave Zirin:
Amazing. One last question for you, Axel. 2024 Olympics here in Paris, 2028 in Los Angeles.
Axel Persson:
Exactly. Exactly.
Dave Zirin:
A place with a real labor movement.
Axel Persson:
Yes.
Dave Zirin:
There is strong labor movement in Los Angeles by US standards.
Axel Persson:
Yes. Yes, I know.
Dave Zirin:
I’m hoping that perhaps you could give some advice to the labor movement, to the radical workers’ movement of Los Angeles about what they should do when faced with the Olympic monolith.
Axel Persson:
Well, I’d like to start by giving a very personal shout out and hi to all my friends in the Roofers Union, LA Roofers Union Local 36, because they’re in Los Angeles, as the name indicates. But I know they’re not alone because, as you said, Los Angeles has a very strong labor movement by US standards, and what applies in Paris and Los Angeles is pretty much the same.
Events such as these will only be made possible if transport workers show up, if those who build the facilities will do it, if those who will take care of the tourists who come there in the hotels, who will eat at the restaurants, if they show up, the event will be able to happen. If you decide to not do it, if you decide to withdraw your labor, things will not be possible because we make the wheels of society turn.
The advice I would have to give is that use that power. We have the power, we just need the conscience and the awareness that we have that power, and we have to wield it. So put forth your legitimate demands. I’m not saying you have to wait until the Olympics in 2028 because, of course, if you have an opportunity to do it now, you have to do it now.
But when the time comes, use it as leverage to bring forth and force them to give into your demands, whether it be over wages, over public services. Any demands you have, it will be an occasion to turn this into an opportunity for the working class to rise up and set forth their demands.
I think the most important is that the working class wins their own medals, and those medals are measured by other standards than those of the capitalist state. It’s measured in terms of workers’ rights, wages, pensions, and just the right to live in a dignified manner out of the fruit of our labor. That’s what I would have to say.
Dave Zirin:
Wow. Hey, Los Angeles, go for that gold medal in striking.
Axel Persson:
Exactly.
Dave Zirin:
What do you think? Okay [laughs].
Axel Persson:
I would agree completely to that. [Speaking French], as they say in France —
Dave Zirin:
[Speaking French].
Axel Persson:
Which means long live to the strikes.
Dave Zirin:
Axel Persson, thanks so much for joining us [crosstalk].
Axel Persson:
Well, thank you for being here. It was a pleasure.
