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.
The California-based think tank Energy Innovation on Wednesday published a report showing that the right-wing Project 2025 manifesto, if implemented by a Republican administration, would increase U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2.7 billion metric tons by 2030 and cause there to be 1.7 million fewer jobs in that year, compared to the current trajectory. The analysis illustrates the stakes of…
In 2024, Working People officially crossed the 300 episode mark! Since we published our first episode back in 2018, the show has grown in ways we never could have imagined, and the world itself has changed in radical, hopeful, terrifying ways, the labor movement has undergone incredible changes, and we’ve done our best to document that change and this moment in history through the conversations we’ve had with workers across industries, from all walks of life, about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles.
Over the past seven seasons of the show, we’ve interviewed working people, young, old, and middle-aged, union and non-union, worker-owners at worker cooperatives, workers who were just laid off, workers on strike, workers unionizing, families of workers who were killed by their jobs, Indigenous workers living on reservations, workers whose children were murdered in a school shooting, sex workers, academic workers, manufacturing workers, railroad and airline workers, educators, yoga instructors and professional massage therapists, social workers, baristas, journalists, healthcare workers, service workers, construction workers, coal miners, lumberjacks, Amazon workers. We’ve spoken with working people in Cuba, Canada, Brazil, Slovenia, Turkey, Myanmar, the UK, France, and more. In this special episode commemorating 300 episodes of Working People, Max and new cohost Mel Buer reflect on how far the show has come and where we’re going next.
To all of our listeners and supporters, to those who have been with us since the beginning and to those who found the show at some point over the past 7 seasons, to everyone who has ever listened to the show, shared our episodes, donated to our Patreon, to everyone who ever reached out to remind us that someone was listening and encouraged us to keep going, to everyone who has supported us , THANK YOU. We love you, and we wouldn’t be here without you. We hope to keep making you and all our fellow workers proud with this show, and it’s an honor to be in this struggle with you.
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.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times Magazine and The Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry 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 that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you.
Share our episodes with your co-workers, your 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 or stories you’d like us to investigate. And please support the work that we do with The Real News Network by going to therealnews.com\donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the U.S. and across the world.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez
Mel Buer:
And my name’s Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And Mel and I have got a special little update episode for y’all today, and we’ve got some big announcements regarding the show. Now, in one sense, this is kind of a prelude to a larger celebration that we’re going to work on over the summer. As you guys probably noticed, we recently crossed a pretty significant milestone on Working People. In 2024, we officially crossed the 300 episode mark since I recorded, edited, and published that very first episode with my dad, Jesus Alvarez, back in 2018 we’ve been on a wild ride.
The show has grown in ways that I frankly never could have imagined back then when I was producing it as a broke grad student with rented equipment from the library. The world has changed in radical, hopeful, terrifying, violent, unpredictable, and in fact very predictable ways. And my own life has changed in dramatic, beautiful, intense, fortunate and devastating ways, and the labor movement in this country has undergone incredible changes, and we’ve done our best to document that change and what it’s like to live through this moment in history through the conversations that we’ve had with workers across industries from all walks of life about their lives, their jobs, their dreams and struggles.
Over the past seven seasons of the show, I’ve interviewed working people, young, old, and middle-aged. Union and non-union worker owners, worker cooperatives, workers who were just laid off, workers on strike, workers unionizing, families of workers who were killed by their jobs, indigenous workers living on reservations, workers whose children were murdered in a school shooting, sex workers, academic workers, manufacturing workers, railroad and airline workers, educators, yoga instructors and professional massage therapists, social workers, baristas journalists, healthcare workers, service workers, construction workers, coal miners, lumberjacks, Amazon workers. I mean, I’ve interviewed working people in Cuba, Canada, Brazil, Slovenia, Turkey Myanmar, the UK, France, and more.
I’ve never made any money from this show, we’ve only ever brought in enough Patreon earnings to pay Jules and to support other independent shows and journalists. And to be honest, I’ve struggled and failed to make the show anything resembling a commercial success, but I am incredibly proud of this work and I’m incredibly excited about where we’re going to take the show over the next 300 episodes. And that’s what we’re going to do today, we’re going to reflect a bit on how far the show has come and give y’all a sense of where we’re going next, but as we annoying journalists love to say, “We don’t want to bury the lead.” And I figured that we should start with the big announcement, does that sound good to you, Mel?
Mel Buer:
That sounds pretty good, I think. I do want to take a small moment, if I can leave the audience in suspense for a little bit longer, just to really hammer home what a monumental achievement the last 300 episodes have been of this podcast. Just hearing you talk about the myriad people that you have invited onto this platform to share their stories, their personal struggles, their triumphs, their moments where they have come to know solidarity for the first time is nothing short of amazing.
And I know that Working People was sort of born out of this inspiration of what would it be like if Studs Terkel had a podcast? And I think that you have done his memory extremely proud, and the work that you have contributed is there’s no understating how important it is. So I just want to just really hammer that home.
Congratulations on 300 episodes, that is mind-blowing, how cool that is, truly. And fuck it being a commercial success to be honest, because that’s just a small marker in what is a really truly impactful piece of work that you’ve been working on these last, what, six years now? I think that’s incredible. So congratulations, Max, that’s so cool.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you, Mel, that really means the world to me. And it’s hard, frankly, to wrap my head around it, but just once I start thinking about all the people that I’ve met through doing this show, yourself included, I mean as a fellow podcaster, that’s kind of how our paths eventually intertwine. And that was also what set me on the path and for us to both end up eventually at The Real News. And when I start thinking about it in those terms, when I start thinking about the people I know, the connections I have, the things that I’ve learned, the ways that I’ve developed as a person through this show, then yeah, I really start to get a sense of just kind of what a monumental undertaking this has been and how much of a collective effort it’s been.
I mean, everyone who’s ever listened to and shared the show, anyone who’s ever recommended the show or put in a good word for me so that I could get an interview with someone who had no idea who I was, just there are too many people to thank. But truly, if you’ve ever helped me on this show, if you’ve ever helped me and Jules, if you’ve ever done anything to help us keep going on this quixotic endeavor, trust me when I say it means the world to us and we would not be here without you guys.
And yeah, to sort of build on that, like we were saying, this show led me and Mel to connect years ago. And as you guys know from this show and the work we’ve done at The Real News in recent years, that led me and Mel to get really invested in covering the ongoing labor struggle on the nation’s railroad system. And we interviewed countless railroad workers two years ago in the midst of their intense contract fight with the Class I rail carriers. We don’t have to go over that whole saga, and I think we all remember what happened, looked like was going to be a strike or a lockout and Biden and Congress conspired to crush a potential rail strike, and then two months later, East Palestine, Ohio happens.
And as you guys know from listening to our coverage over the past year, our railroad coverage led me directly to East Palestine and I have not left, frankly. My heart in many ways is still in East Palestine because you can’t hear what those folks are going through, you can’t know all that from the interviews that we’ve done about how the railroad system has gotten to where it is now and how we are all in danger and have been put at hazard because of relentless corporate greed and government under regulation. But these people in East Palestine are the ones paying the price for all that corporate greed, just like working people across this country are paying the price for corporate greed, and deregulation, and government disinvestment, and the systematic devaluation of labor and life itself.
And so I say that all to say is that, as I’ve gotten into reporting on the struggles of our fellow workers living in and around East Palestine, Ohio where the Norfolk Southern Train derailed on February 3rd, 2023, this has become something of an obsession of mine. East Palestine led me to investigate more cases of working class folks living and working in what we ghoulishly call sacrifice zones. These are areas where people live that where life is becoming unlivable because of industrial pollution, because of contamination from government sites like Department of Defense, Department of Energy. But also areas where life as we know it is being sacrificed to the elements. And that could also mean the climate chaos that we’re experiencing right now in areas that people inhabit that have just been sort of given up on. And folks there have been left to flounder like so many other working people in so many different areas of this country.
And so that is really where my focus needs to be and in order to give that coverage the focus that it needs, and to do the research, make the contacts, talk to folks living not just in East Palestine, not just in areas like South Baltimore here where we are, where I’ve been interviewing folks there who are being industrially poisoned by rail companies as well as other polluters, but that has led me to Portsmouth Ohio where we also interviewed Vina Colley, who’s a former electrician who worked at the Gaseous Diffusion Plant there and has been fighting for half a century to get her community the recompense that they deserve for the poisoning that’s happened there.
That led me to Red Hill in Hawaii and back to Navajo Nation where the uranium gold rush left generations of indigenous people poisoned and cancer-ridden. That led me to ‘Cancer Alley’ Louisiana where poor and working-class, predominantly black communities are being systematically sacrificed by industry and their own government. That led me back to West Virginia and the mining and fracking booms that have decimated the ability of some of the most beautiful parts of our country, some of the most beautiful parts of the world where people can’t drink the water.
Speaking of drinking the water Flint, people in Flint still don’t have water that they can trust to drink or serve their children coming out of their faucets. To say nothing of Jackson Mississippi, North Carolina where PFAS is in basically all of the water. Rural parts of Maryland, Wisconsin, Iowa where concentrated animal feeding operations and the off-run of those operations is contaminating the water and poisoning the environment. This issue, this problem, is so monumental in scale and so monumental and devastating in terms of the human and non-human impacts that are already being felt across this country that are being felt across the world.
Frankly, Americans have no idea how poisoned we already are, and I feel like I’m at the very beginning of a very long journey into this dark side of our history and our present, and I want to keep talking to working folks, living and working and fighting for justice in these areas. I want to help put those communities in touch, I want to help folks understand that this is all of our problem just as we’ve tried to do in East Palestine. But that’s obviously going to mean that I can’t give that my full attention, I can’t juggle all the responsibilities I’m juggling as editor-in-chief here at The Real News and co-executive director here, and also continue to cover contemporary shop floor and labor organizing stories with the full rigor that I’ve been able to over the past seasons.
And so that is why I couldn’t be more excited to be bringing Mel onto the show as a co-host, we’re going to be tag-teaming this while I go deeper into our sacrificed series. And so you can expect a lot more coverage from me in that vein. Mel has graciously agreed to come on the show and really help us stay on top of worker and organizer focused interviews that really keep you up to date on the critical labor struggles that are happening all around us right now.
I mean, autoworker, union drives in the South, Amazon Labor Union just affiliated with the Teamsters there are huge contracts up for hundreds of thousands of postal workers with the American Postal Workers Union and National Rural Letter Carriers Association. We’ve got questions about the role unions have played and we’ll continue to play in fighting against war and genocide. What a second Biden or Trump term will mean for the National Labor Relations Board and for unions and for working people in general. How things like AI and climate chaos are reshaping our working and non-working lives and how working people are fighting back.
There’s so much here to cover, and I’m so excited that Mel is going to be coming on and helping us basically bring you guys these two critical areas of coverage on the podcast. And Mel, I just wanted to kind of toss it to you and ask if you could say a little bit since we’re in a reflective mode here, I was wondering if you could say a little bit about how your own path into labor reporting has brought you to this point, and what you’ve seen in the labor world over these past couple years, and what you’re really looking forward to covering on this show this year and beyond.
Mel Buer:
I came into labor reporting because there was a strike in my community in 2021, Kellogg’s went out on strike. One of the big manufacturing plants that makes cereal is in Omaha Nebraska, and I had a unique connection to that plant. I drove past it every single day on the way to school, it was part of our backyard where I grew up it’s always been there, and it was a unique moment to be able to sort of step beyond the gates that we always drove by and see the people who were making the food that we eat and they were on strike.
Prior to that, I was in mostly movement reporting and I had a sort of widening interest in what the labor movement does in the U.S. and how it operates and who benefits and who could benefit and this was the sort of trial by fire, you know? And I was just freelancing at the time, and Max graciously paid me a decent amount of money to write an article, and I got a chance to sit down and talk to my literal neighbors about working conditions. And it was a revolutionizing sort of moment for me. And I came to the realization that when I was still living in the Midwest, as you know, I’m living in Los Angeles now, but when I was still living in the Midwest, there was something unique about being able to reach across this perceived union fence, if you will, and to really kind of reach into the lives of folks who really care a lot about the work that they do. And as you know, Max, that is a really radicalizing sort of thing just to be able to have these conversations with people that you probably wouldn’t meet otherwise.
And my journey further into labor reporting has led me to all sorts of places to the middle of Iowa, small towns in Iowa to talk to railroad workers and to manufacturers of tractors who are on strike. And now I’m in on the West coast, which has unique sort of and vibrant organizing around entertainment, and media, and fast food workers, and healthcare workers, and service workers, and academic workers, and I’ve been able to see the sort of transformative power that solidarity has on the sort of micro bits of the movement and how they all kind of fit together.
And now, I mean, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this week and last week’s Supreme Court decisions about dismantling the administrative state essentially and what that does for the NLRB and how folks are going to react to that within the labor movement and the organizing spheres that I now can sort of rub elbows with.
But it’s clear to me that as we move farther into sort of worsening material conditions that our latest stage of capitalism has presented to us that labor organizing is no small part of what it means to sort of build community in the face of that. And I think that in the future, the more earnest conversations that we have about the organizing that is happening right now and the lessons that we can take from both the triumphs and the failures of these both high profile and not so high profile organizing drives, and strikes, and pickets, and all of those things, I think is going to be invaluable information into how we can push back against what I believe to be the fascist creep turn sprint frankly, in this country. And imagine new ways that we can participate in the social fabric of this country and I mean that in a holistic sense that includes the sort of materialist analysis that the communists in the audience would love us to talk about.
But in the grand scheme of things, I’m no Kim Kelly, I haven’t been writing about labor for 10 years like Sarah Jaffe, you know what I mean? Alix Prest has got her amazing sort of work, but I am hoping to contribute something and this is where I can be in this sphere talking about this kind of work and hopefully putting it not only in the contemporary world that we’re living in and helping the audience, our audience now, get outside of themselves and throw open the curtains and be able to see what’s outside of your immediate concerns and how your neighbors and community members and people who look, and sound, and work, just like you are taking on this challenge and what we can get out of that.
So yeah, I mean, I’m stoked. I was very surprised to get this invite and I’m very honored and I feel like this is a very unique privilege to be able to contribute something to a project that I think is very invaluable in our current shit hole media landscape. So I don’t know, should I be cussing? Are we putting this on the radio?
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, for right now we’re still a cussing podcast. But that is one of the things that we want to do moving forward is we want to get working people on more radio stations, like parts of the show do end up on the radio through our friends at the Labor Radio Podcast Network, so some of y’all may have found us through the radio. But we want to get this show syndicated on more stations, which may mean that we may have to cut down on the cursing a little or rely a little more on bleeping knowing me and Mel, it’ll probably be the latter, but-
Mel Buer:
Incoherent screaming every time we talk about corporations.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, I mean it’s the most natural thing in the world to cover what we cover and let the expletives fly because yeah, I mean so much of what we cover is fucked up. But also so much of what we cover is just so astonishingly beautiful and inspiring, and I think that one thing that Mel and I both agree on and we’ve talked about is that that’s the thing that gets us through the really rough days, the days when the weight of the world itself as we descend more into like nakedly corrupt corporate oligarchy and fascistic gangsterism in our own country, to say nothing of climate chaos and increased war around the world, it’s a lot. We understand that believe us, we’re in the news, we work here and it fucking sucks and it’s really depressing. But the connections that you make with other working people and the stories that you hear, the fight that you see and learn about and hopefully that we are able to communicate to you guys on the show, I mean, that is where you find hope.
And I wanted to kind of just say something about that because I really loved how you were talking about why that matters and it really spoke to where this show came from in the first place. It’s funny that over the years we’ve become more known, you and I as union folks, labor folks, people who are in the know, on the organized labor movement, and you get to be that way by reporting on it and learning about it and learning from a lot of other people who told us a lot of stuff that we did not know a few years ago.
But to be honest, this show, it was never meant to be a union show, I didn’t know a whole lot about unions when I did that first interview with my dad. As I’ve talked about many times, I didn’t have a union job until I was a grad student and our family was not a union family and so there was a lot that I had to learn myself about how unions worked, labor law worked, how to report accurately on things like strikes and organizing drives. But going back to that very kind of core idealism of the beginning of this show, again, I didn’t want to do this show because I wanted to get everyone to join a union, although you should join a union if you don’t have one to join, you should start one.
But I started the show from a much more basic place. I started this show because of what was happening to my family, because of what I myself was going through and we were all going through in the Great Recession. And not only the economic hardships, not only losing our house, not only working any low-wage jobs we could just to try to keep what we had, but also just the deep soul rot that comes with that, that comes with living in a country that we will throw all of its resources around protecting the big banks while letting millions of families like mine just fall through the cracks and lose everything. Living in a country where in most states you can get fired just because the boss doesn’t like your face right, or who you are as a person. And most people don’t even know they have rights in the workplace, let alone the courage or wherewithal, or frankly the practical ability to exercise them in the workplace.
That’s where the show grew out of is from that general condition that so many working people are in this country and the ways that we start to convince ourselves that we’re worth that, that we’re worth as little as the system tells us we’re worth, that we’re worth as little as we get paid, that we’re as small as the customers and managers who berate us, lead us to believe, and that the society leads us to believe. That’s why I started the show is because I wanted working people to believe that they were worth more than their lot in life in this shit hole society. I wanted my dad to not go to his grave feeling like a failure and to not feeling alone. And that was really just the star that guided me through from the beginning to now. I’ve learned a lot since then, but that’s really what it’s all about.
And that’s where you naturally end up reporting more on organizing efforts, whether they be union efforts or non-union efforts to lead a walkout or to form a worker cooperative. There are many ways that working people can organize and fight to change their circumstances, but what I have found just endlessly inspiring and heroic in the stories that we’ve covered on this show, the stories that Mel has covered at The Real News, is just that effort, that decision by working people to say, “I’m not going to accept this and this is unacceptable, and I’m going to do something to change my circumstances, rather than just roll over and accept whatever the bosses and the powers that be give me. I did not know that I had more options as a low-wage worker than just staying at my job and sucking it up or quitting and trying to find something else. I really didn’t.”
And that’s why I will always find it so incredible whenever I talk to another working person who along with their co-workers has made that jump to say, “No, we’re going to do something about this in our workplaces.” And it starts there, but the more that you start to organize and work with your fellow workers and build power and fight through adversity and build solidarity, you start to realize the power that working people have collectively, and you start fighting to build more of it beyond the shop floor.
And in fact, if we can work and organize to change our circumstances at our jobs, we can do the same in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our apartment buildings, in our cities, our towns, country, and beyond. It’s that spark of getting yourself to believe that you are the change you’ve been waiting for. That is the spark of hope that you hear throughout this show, throughout the struggles of our fellow workers across the world. And that’s the thing that Mel and I have seen that, yeah, even though we didn’t get formal training in journalism school or weren’t trained as union organizers or what have you, that’s the thing that we follow and we learn so much from the stories that people tell us.
Mel Buer:
I think it’s also important to note that what we’re talking about is really simple. We live in a society that everyone, you can feel the sort of, as the materialists like to say, the alienation, the atomization of people, you feel like you’re walled off from yourself, you feel like you’re walled off from your family, from your neighbors, from the people that you go to school with, from your co-workers. And it is a wholly isolating, lonely experience to be a working person, a member of the working class in the western world, surrounded by distraction, surrounded by rampant sort of consumerism that is purpose-built to sort of take your eye line elsewhere from the problems that are causing such deep troubling experiences within yourself.
And to anyone who’s organized even a potluck with your neighbors for 4th of July. There is something about that feeling of being connected to someone outside of yourself, outside of your immediate circle, that is absolutely intoxicating. And building that sort of whether you’re in a union, or you’re deciding to march on the boss who’s stealing your tips, or you collectively assert your sort of humanity within the workplace or outside of the workplace, once you get a small taste of what that can feel like, you never want to go back to whatever nightmare you were living before.
And I think in my short time, the last couple of years, three years or so, reporting on the labor movement and talking particularly in the Midwest, talking to workers who are either organizing union drives or out on the picket line, they’ve never experienced a sit down with someone on a different shift at the same job before where they had the time to sit together in front of a barrel, a fire barrel, and just talk about life. And you realize that their kids go to the same school, or you may have gone to the same football games, or you attend the same church, you just had no idea that you also worked in the same place and you were experiencing the same sort of herring working conditions. And now the two of you from first shift and second shift are sitting on a picket line and you get to have that moment where you get to reach across just these gulfs of relation where you have this void to be able to build that.
So when we talk about building community, when we talk about solidarity, and when we talk about mutual aid, these aren’t these theoretical concepts that left us to throw out into the ether when we’re talking about how to respond to the sort of nightmare conditions that are being perpetuated by people who have amassed massive power in this country. These are real concepts, and you do them every day whether you think you do or not, and if you put a little bit more effort into it, I’m going to get off my soapbox here in a second, but if you really try to reach through whatever fear you have about organizing, about talking to your coworkers, about talking to your neighbors, about going to a community event and just reach through whatever fear and anxiety you have about it and actually try and meet people where they’re at, you’ll find that they’re trying to do the same thing, and you have a lot more in common than you think, and that is what the powers that be, whatever you want to call it, are fucking scared of.
They don’t want that to happen because that really is a truly powerful moment and that little bit of euphoria that you feel is magnified fucking a million times over and I don’t know, I think that it’s really for my part sitting as a quote outsider in the media, I’m sure Max, you feel this as well, we still feel that warmth, what the sunlight of solidarity can do. And we have these skills as journalists, as podcasters, whatever you want to call us, media individuals and we hope to share those stories so that more people can understand that sometimes all it takes is just hearing about someone similar to you doing something that maybe you were too afraid to or didn’t know that you could do.
So, hopefully that’s what we can do with this podcast, and hopefully I can provide examples of one way in which to build that sort of power in your community. I’m off my soapbox, so that’s all I got.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. No, no, hopefully about it, baby. I know you’re going to, and it’s going to be incredible and I’m super excited again, started this show in my dinky little apartment in Ann Arbor never knowing that we’d make it to 300 episodes, let alone that we’d be talking about the next 300. So even just the fact that we’re here now, bringing you on as co-hosts is just really, really exciting for me. And I hope our listeners are just as excited, and I hope that you guys are just as excited as Mel and I are about how we’re going to be able to grow the show in this way. And I wanted to sort of round out by kind of talking about that places we want to go and appeals we want to send to our listeners right now because we want you guys to reach out to us. We want to make this show always what is the most useful for you as you struggle to get what you’re worth and to fight for a future worth living in for yourselves, for all of us, for our children.
And so we want this show to be that resource. We want it to be a place where you can feel that solidarity, where you can learn about struggles that your fellow workers are going through that you didn’t know others were going through, you’re learning about how they and their coworkers are and winning. Or when they are fighting and losing, what can we learn from those experiences? How do we keep the struggle going? And we want to hear from you guys about the kinds of working people you want us to talk to here in the U.S. and around the world. This show has been growing internationally as well, and certainly we want to continue that growth on this show and at The Real News, we are all ears.
And as you guys know from the past 300 episodes, whether we’re talking explicitly about a strike or whether we’re more talking about a person’s life and the work that they do, or something that they in their community are going through even if we’re not necessarily talking about their jobs, but they’re still working class people dealing with the realities of working class life like here in capitalist America. I mean, we try to take a really broad scope here in trying to cover again, the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of our fellow workers wherever those stories may lead.
And so Mel just wanted to ask, yeah, if you had any sort of prompts or ideas that you wanted to just toss out to the audience about what you are going to be looking into, or what sort of areas you’re excited to expand into, or the kinds of folks you want to reach out to us?
Mel Buer:
A bit of a broad sort of ask for me. Not only do I want to hear about the picket lines, the strikes, the contract negotiations, the minutiae around organizing drives, the various things that are kind of the capital U Union sort of news. It doesn’t matter where it is, if it’s in SoCal, I’ll see you in person, if it’s elsewhere in the country or in the world let’s get on Zoom and let’s talk about it. My email will be in the description of this episode, it’s Mel, M-E-L @therealnews.com. Send me an email. Even if you think it might not be a story, I guarantee you it’s interesting to me and it will be interesting to our audience, so talk to me about that.
But not only do I want that, I want to hear about the sort of small triumphs that maybe you as a union member, or you as a labor adjacent person, or someone who is affected by some sort of moment of solidarity around the labor movement in your community, hit us up about that.
Did a union hold a fundraiser for someone who was ill? Did you have a really fun softball tournament that allowed you to reach out and start to build these bonds of solidarity between union locals? It doesn’t matter. If it seems minor, it’s likely not. But what I am hoping is that we can kind of build this conversation around not only just the sort of “official contemporary labor struggles” in the United States and elsewhere, but to also kind of, again, draw the curtain back on what it means to be a union member. What it can do for your life, who it can affect in your life or around your life, and what that community looks like. Especially if you’re a union member who really feels that sort of community, let’s talk about it and let’s give folks ideas on how to build something in their own backyard.
And this is just an offhand ask, and it’s not really something that I’m expecting will come through my email, but if you’re a freaking laborer historian nerd and you want to talk about an anniversary coming up, or you can draw these parallels between say, Amazon delivery drivers and some obscure Teamsters fact that from a hundred years ago, hit me up, let’s talk about it. Let’s really try and build this place to be one of the many podcasts that kind of helps us demystify what it means to be a member of the labor movement in the United States, and to be part of an international coalition that really builds international solidarity, let’s talk about it.
And again, my email is melattherealnews.com. Do not send me a DM on social media, I won’t read it, my Twitter DMs are closed. You just got to send me an email or you can hit me up and ask for my signal number and we’ll get on the phone and talk about it. All right, that’s my ask, thank you.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yes, all right, gang, reach out to us and again, we want to make this show more interactive too, right? I mean, send us voice messages, we always include a link to our digital voicemail service in the show notes we always want to hear from you. What we’d love to do, and I’ve expressed this desire and in seasons past, I’d love to start each episode playing a listener submitted a voicemail like either thoughts that you have on a previous show, updates about what’s going on in your neck of the woods, or in your workplace, or at your union local. Just I think the more that we can get, more of y’all’s voices on the show we’d love hearing from you, even if it’s just sharing your thoughts about an episode, your critiques, your suggestions, we want to hear from you. So please, yeah, reach out to Mel, reach out to me, give us story ideas, let us know your thoughts.
But also, yeah, please send in voice messages if you are so inspired to make a piece of art after hearing a story that one of our interviewees has shared, share it with us and we’ll share it with our audience as well on our social media accounts and all that good stuff. We do want to keep making the show as interactive as possible, we want to hear from you guys, and I’m so, so excited to hear the episodes that result from what you guys send into Mel and the things that she’s already investigating.
And for my part, as I said, I want to give this Sacrifice Zone series my full attention, not just because in many ways every sacrifice zones different. In other ways, they are eerily similar or the conditions that working people are left in, the things, the bureaucracy that they have to navigate, the lack of legal recourse that they have, the symptoms that they’re developing. Sadly, a lot of those are very similar. But it’s important to, if I’m going to do this series justice, if I’m going to do the folks that we talk to justice like with East Palestine, I’m going to have to really learn as much as I can about the specifics of each community, the sources of their pollution or their larger sacrifice. Like I said, I want to expand our understanding of sacrifice zones to not just include areas where people live near heavy industry, but to also include zones where life is becoming unlivable because of government sources of pollution.
I mean, one of the most consistent sources of PFAS contamination are military bases across the country. And as I already mentioned, the way that climate chaos continues to get more and more chaotic. And as we were discussing with the great journalist Mike Fox recently, I mean this is already impacting poor and working people across the globe. It’s already turning millions into climate refugees making their sources of food, and water, and their livelihoods unsustainable, where they live, where they’re from, where their roots are. And that’s I think one of the real kind of crucial reasons that I can’t move away from this series is because I think that in our imaginations, we tend to think of, again, working class people and working struggles and labor struggles in one bucket, and then climate disaster and industrial pollution and these other sorts of things in another bucket.
But as Mike Fox and I talked about in that episode about the floods in Brazil, it’s like, who do you think is living in these communities? They are our fellow workers, they are people that you probably go to work with, or that you yourself are experiencing this. The fact that you go work one place and you may be getting polluted or poisoned at work does not negate the struggle that you and your fellow workers are going through at home when you’re being blasted with toxic chemicals or coal dust, or there are contaminants in the water coming out of your faucet that your children are bathing in. I mean, the struggles of working class people do not begin and end on the shop floor.
And so again, that’s why Mel and I are going to really be trying to do a full court press on these two key areas of coverage to give you guys as broad of a swath of coverage as we can on the realities of living and working in modern day America and beyond. And I just wanted to say another by way of rounding out just what I hope really comes across to folks in the reporting that we’ve already done for this sacrifice series, primarily on East Palestine and Portsmouth and South Baltimore, but as we continue to go down this road and in fact this is going to be the focus of my next book of interviews, is working people living in different sacrifice zones.
And the reason that I felt this justified not only committing myself to it in this podcast series, but for another book, is because East Palestine Ohio, as we know, is not an anomaly like many other poor communities in this country, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous, and colonized communities, they already know what it means to be sacrificed` and they have long been familiar with life on the great American chopping block and other White and mixed working class communities have felt it too. And increasingly more communities across this country are learning what that feels like.
I mean, as I already said, four hours away from East Palestine for the past four decades, as you guys heard in our interview with Vina Colley, it’s been people working and living near the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Pike County, and that’s one of Ohio’s poorest counties. In Navajo Nation, it has been generations of Dine’ people poisoned by the Cold War uranium mining gold rush, and who are now being doubly squeezed by climate change and the not so slow moving water crisis in the Southwest, to say nothing of hundreds of years of violent settler colonial domination.
In ‘Cancer Alley’ Louisiana between Baton Rouge and New Orleans it’s the majority black parish communities that have been poisoned by the petrochemical plants surrounding their homes, and that includes the coastal communities where people’s homes and ways of life are already in the process of being sacrificed as the climate crisis intensifies.
In Hawaii, where the U.S. military owns like 200,000 acres of land across the islands, it’s the military native and non-native people living and working in Honolulu near the Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility, a U.S. Navy facility that has been leaking fuel and poisoning the local water supply for the past decade, and probably a lot longer than that.
And across the Cape Fear River Basin between Fayetteville and Wilmington and North Carolina, it’s communities of people connected by the same waterways that are just teeming with PFAS that’s coming from multiple sources. So why am I going so deep into this? Because as I said, it’s not just East Palestine, it’s so many other communities and accepting the wholesale sacrifice of communities like East Palestine, like South Baltimore, that in itself should be like in every sense of the word unacceptable.
And yet, in the good old U.S. of A, not only has it been accepted as a thing that corporations, shareholders and policymakers can get away with, but after forty-plus years of runaway deregulation, public disinvestment, and capitalist domination, America’s sacrifice zones are no longer extreme outliers. They are, in my estimation, a harrowing model of the future that lies in stores for most of us, especially as the world continues to spiral further into climate chaos and bringing all the economic, political, and humanitarian crises that come with that. And if these corporate monsters, corporate politicians, and Wall Street vampires poisoning our communities aren’t stopped, that’s where we’re all headed. And it’s going to be us, the ones directly in the path of all this reckless and preventable destruction, working people fighting as one who are going to stop them. I believe that in my heart, and I see it in the folks that I’m talking to, and we’ve got to fight with everything that we’ve got because the depth of pain and injury being inflicted on all of us right now, our people, our planet, it is impossible to communicate in raw numbers.
And because something fundamental in our society and our economy needs to change. And yet we find ourselves in a situation, as Mel said, where the ruling corporate, financial, military, and political classes just currently have our society’s collective foot slammed on the gas barreling in the wrong fucking direction towards more death, more war, more global warming, more unfathomable and preventable misery, and more sacrifice because we have to fight to get what we deserve. And frankly, we deserve so much better than this and that has always been the message of this show. And I am so incredibly grateful to everyone who has stuck with us over these past 300 plus episodes, these past seven seasons, everyone who has been patient with me and with Jules, as we’ve been struggling to keep the show going while keeping our lives going, and jobs, and relationships, and deaths in the family, just your support has really meant the world to me and to us.
And I just can’t thank you guys enough for listening, for caring, for sharing these episodes, sharing the stories of these great folks that have given us their time and shared their life stories so openly with us, that is ultimately what it is all about. And you guys listening to those stories, sharing them, learning from them, that’s the greatest gift that any one of us can give to one another is listening, and seeing each other for our whole human selves when we trust each other enough to open up the way that people open up on this show.
And so I wanted to really end by thanking you guys, the listeners, the folks who have stuck with us from the beginning, the folks who have found us somewhere in the middle or even recently, like thank you for keeping the show going. Thank you for keeping us going even when we wanted to quit. And thank you for constantly inspiring us by fighting for a better world wherever you are, thank you.
For the last two years, Cecilia Ortiz has worked as a passenger service agent at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. She typically has to walk 10 to 15 miles a day, up and down ramps, pushing heavy wheelchairs and carrying passengers’ luggage. This summer, temperatures have reached over 110 degrees Fahrenheit on the airport’s jet bridges, and yet she says she’s been denied breaks and water by her supervisors.
“I have heart failure myself, and it is especially dangerous for me to work in extreme temperatures,” said Ortiz in a press briefing. “I shouldn’t have to work in these conditions. Nobody should.” Accessible drinking water, a cool place to rest, breaks as needed, and training to understand the signs of heat exhaustion, are what Ortiz sees as a “very simple” way to make her workplace more safe during searing temperatures.
Airport workers like Ortiz are being joined by laborers in fast-food, retail, and the farm sector this week to demand on-the-job heat protections from employers and the federal government. From Atlanta to Los Angeles, a string of rallies, town halls, and delegations are taking place in 13 cities as laborers and coalitions escalate their demands to elected officials.
On Tuesday, service workers rallied at major airports in Charlotte and Phoenix. They called for immediate action from employers to ensure their safety in the workplace, including adequate breaks and access to drinking water during periods of extreme heat.
In Phoenix, where earlier this year local officials enacted a heat ordinance mandating many of these protections, workers and legislators sounded the alarm that the ordinance has led to inadequate improvements, and questioned how the protections are being enforced. “Why is it after passing an ordinance we’re still asking for the basics? Water. Breaks. These are humans rights,” said City of Phoenix Councilwoman Betty Guardado at the rally. Later this week, laborers across the country will be taking a coordinated water break to signify the need for access to drinking water at work.
As human-caused climate change continues to make the planet hotter, extreme heat in the workplace is increasingly becoming a lethal threat. Organizers say “Heat Week” is also spurred by the recent sudden deaths of Wednesday “Wendy” Johnson, a postal worker in North Carolina, and Ronald Silver II, a sanitation worker in Maryland. Both Johnson and Silver are believed to have died, in part, because of on-the-job heat exposure, which kills dozens of workers every year.
Service Employees International Union president April Verrett, whose organization is one of the groups helming Heat Week, said that these deaths could have been prevented by safer working conditions, before calling on the Biden-Harris administration to strengthen, finalize and implement a federal heat rule. “Dying on the job is just simply out of the question, and it should never be a part of anyone’s routine. Yet employers are failing to act, and in doing so, they are failing to protect workers’ lives and their health,” said Verrett.
“Heat is a silent killer. It is the biggest weather-related killer in our community,” said Representative Greg Casar, a Democrat from Texas, in the briefing. “I was born and raised in Texas. We know it’s hot, but it’s never been this hot, this early, for this long. So, as the climate crisis worsens, we need to come together and take federal action at the national level, guaranteeing everybody the right to these rest and water breaks.”
At a rally on Tuesday, August 13, outside of Charlotte Douglas International Airport, service workers call on lawmakers to hold corporations accountable for putting their health and lives at risk. Service Employees International Union
In July, the U.S. Occupational and Health Safety Administration proposed a federal rule that would mandate employers provide indoor and outdoor workers with cool rest areas, drinking water, and breaks once temperatures approach 80 degrees Fahrenheit. But that rule hasn’t yet been finalized, and it still faces a likely lengthy review, additional revisions, potential legal challenges, and an upcoming presidential election that could derail the political will to get it done. Casar said elected officials on every level need to do more to ramp up the urgent push for heat protections.
This is particularly important given that some policymakers are pursuing legislation that goes in the other direction, noted Casar — referring to a law signed last summer by Governor Greg Abbott that barred Texas cities from enacting local worker heat protections. A similar law went into effect in Florida this year. The proposed OSHA rule, he stressed, if finalized, would “override laws like Governor Abbott’s that get rid of heat protections.”
“We could have these heat protections codified in federal law this month, if the Republican Speaker of the House would put this up for a vote … but we can’t hold our breath,” said Casar. (In fact, House Republicans have put forward spending bills that would hamper OSHA’s ability to enforce existing rules.)
The offices of Governor Abbott, and Congressman Mike Johnson, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, did not respond to requests for comment.
Last week, Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat from Arizona, blasted the Biden administration for not doing enough to address the impacts of extreme heat. Beyond advocating for an OSHA standard, Gallego has also put forward legislation that would add extreme heat to FEMA’s list of major disasters, The Hill reported. “Once again, the Administration is all talk, no action when it comes to extreme heat in Arizona,” Gallego said in a statement following a speech made by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, who deigned extreme heat in Phoenix a “public health crisis.”
“When hurricanes or tornadoes hit, federal officials offer resources, but with heat they just offer advice,” said Gallego. Others, like Senator Alex Padilla — a Democrat from California — have also pressed the administration to implement the proposed OSHA rule. “With climate change shattering heat records every summer, holding employers accountable to provide commonsense heat-stress protections has only become more critical,” Padilla told Grist. California is one of six states that have enacted heat protection rules for outdoor workers.
In June, Shae Parker was working at a convenience store in Columbia, South Carolina, when she suffered from extreme heat exhaustion because of brutal temperatures and a lack of access to free water. “I had to leave work on a gurney. I was vomiting. I was profusely sweating, light-headed, nauseous. It was unbearable,” said Parker. “We only get one body … we want to go home to our families at the end of the day.”
Lourdes Cardenas, a farmworker in Fresno, California, has also grappled with the consequences of sweltering heat. This summer, she has endured multiple 110 degrees Fahrenheit days in the fields; which, compounding with a lack of water, shade, and not enough breaks, led her to experience dizziness and dehydration on numerous occasions. Despite raising the alarm to her supervisors, water still isn’t easily accessible, and she and her coworkers work nowhere near shaded areas. “The heat has been really difficult, and every year it gets worse,” said Cardenas in Spanish.
“We ought to be able to have the right to have water, the right to have shade, the right to have rest from the heat. But that’s not the case,” she said. “I know that one job is not worth my life.”
The United Auto Workers announced Tuesday that it filed federal labor charges against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk after the former president heaped praise on the world’s richest man for firing striking workers. During a rambling and lie-filled conversation on X — the social media platform owned by Musk — Trump hailed the Tesla CEO as “the greatest…
Next week, from Aug. 19-22, the much anticipated Democratic National Convention will kick off in Chicago, and protestors from Chicago and around the country are preparing to descend on the DNC in full force. For organizers and the over 200 organizations that comprise the Coalition to March on the DNC, Palestine is at the top of the agenda—and the city of Chicago seems determined to keep protesters from making their dissent known to the nation and the world. For months, march organizers have been locked in a legal battle with the city over protest permits and approved march routes, but Hatem Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the DNC and national chair of the US Palestinian Community Network, says the protests are happening one way or another. What is the current plan for the DNC protests? What should protestors, DNC-goers, and Chicago residents expect during the week of the DNC? The Real News speaks with Abudayyeh to get an insider perspective and the latest updates on the coalition’s plans to march on the DNC.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network podcast. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor-in-chief here at The Real News.
Mel Buer:
And I’m Mel Buer, staff reporter.
Maximillian Alvarez:
It’s so great to have you all with us. Before we get rolling today, I want to remind y’all that The Real News is an independent viewer and listener-supported grassroots media network. We don’t take corporate cash, we don’t have ads and we never put our reporting behind paywalls. Our team is fiercely dedicated to lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle across the US and around the world. But we cannot continue to do this work without your support. And we need you to become a supporter of The Real News now. Just head over to therealnews.com/donate and donate today. It really makes a difference.
Mel Buer:
We’re recording this episode on Saturday, August 10th. We are now officially less than three months away from the general election and we are just over a week away from the start of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, which is set to take place in Chicago. The Real News is going to be on the ground reporting from the grassroots, showing you the side of the DNC corporate media won’t. One of the many critical stories we’ll be covering are the organized protest demonstrations that will be taking place in Chicago while the DNC is taking place at the United Center. On Monday, August 19th, I’ll be reporting from what is expected to be the largest protest of the week organized by the Coalition to March on the DNC.
Maximillian Alvarez:
As the March on the DNC website states, “The March on the DNC Coalition fights for the rights and liberation of oppressed people and against the exploitation of workers. Beginning on August 19th 2024, we will march on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to bring the people’s agenda to within sight and sound of the Democratic Party leadership. Genocide Joe Biden has stepped down from running for president as the Democratic Party nominee. His decision doesn’t change the policies of Democratic Party leadership, specifically their support of the genocide in Palestine. So our movement must continue to apply pressure. On August 19th, we will March on the DNC for Gaza regardless of who gets nominated for the presidency.”
Mel Buer:
Over the last eight months or so, groups like the Coalition to March on the DNC have been fighting the city over permits for their marches. Ultimately ending up in federal court to settle the permitting issue. Multiple groups have sued the city on First Amendment grounds, saying that the city’s denial of march permits is unconstitutional.
Maximillian Alvarez:
With us today is Hatem Abudayyeh, National Chair of the United States Palestinian Community Network and a spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the DNC. We’re going to discuss with Hatem these upcoming marches on the DNC, the latest updates on the permitting situation and what listeners, protest attendees and Chicago residents can expect from the week of the DNC. Hatem, thank you so much for coming on the show in the midst of your crazy schedule right now. We really appreciate it.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Yeah. I’m really honored to be here as well. And I want to promote your work to the masses too and I hope people can continue to donate and support the great stuff that you do as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Thank you so much, man. That means the world to us. It really does. And yeah, our listeners are eager to know about what they can expect. Many of them are going to be attending. If not, they’re going to be watching closely. And so just to jump right into the conversation, I’d like to take a moment to check in and get the latest update on the permitting battle that you and your fellow march organizers have been embroiled in for months. So I guess the big question is have the permits been granted? Like we mentioned in the intro, this has been a protracted battle over the permits that has been largely focused on the march route. The Coalition has proposed a route that would take marchers within sight and sound of the DNC while the city has been trying to relegate the marches to a shorter route, farther away, out of sight and sound from the United Center. So what’s the latest on the marching permits and the march route?
Hatem Abudayyeh:
So the first thing I’ll say is that organizing works and folks from the movement, progressive social justice activists in this country, for decades and decades have proven that. We have already won a part of this battle. They did, as you mentioned, try to bury us four miles away from the United Center when we first submitted our applications. Of course, we rejected that immediately, described how ridiculous it was that they thought that we would accept something like that. And they knew they were going to lose that on First Amendment and constitutional grounds. So finally, after many months after this lawsuit, they rejected a fourth permit application of one of the lead organizations of the Coalition. But this time when they offered an alternative, they did put us within sight and sound. Now, the challenge that we’re dealing with right now is really a common sense political challenge even for the city.
When we say it’s in the best interest of the city as well as the protesters that we need to extend the march, it’s based on decades and decades of experience. Understand that my organization, the United States Palestinian Community Network, the National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression, Students for a Democratic Society, anti-War Committees across the Midwest, Students for Justice in Palestine, Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, all of these organizations, and now there are over 200 who have joined the Coalition. We have decades of experience organizing these things. We’ve been the lead organizers for RNC and DNC protests since 2008 and we were the lead organizers in the 2012 NATO protests in Chicago. So we’re professionals at this sort of thing. Even if you’re not a professional, it only takes a little bit of common sense to recognize that for tens of thousands of people that we expect to have there on Monday, August 19th, you’re not going to be able to put them on a route that’s only a mile long.
Because what will happen is people from the front of the march are going to get back to Union Park, before thousands have even left Union Park. So even though we are within sight and sound, we’re still not upholding the First Amendment and constitutional rights of everybody because the folks in the back are not going to get within sight and sound. The folks in the back are not going to be able to express their messages, which are first and foremost, end USAID to Israel, stop the genocide, free Palestine and stand with Palestine. That is the center of these protests. But it wasn’t always the center of these protests. The other thing to recognize is that USPCN joined this Coalition in April of 2023. The day after they announced that it was going to be in Chicago, we helped form the Coalition to March on the DNC. Because we’re not a one-issue organization and we’re not a one-issue community. Palestinians and Arabs here who have been fighting for decades for Palestinian self-determination and liberation care about all the other issues that the Coalition to March on the DNC cares-
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Care about all the other issues that the coalition of March on at the NC cares about as well, immigrant rights, police accountability, stopping police crimes, black liberation, women’s rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights. All of these issues are also at the forefront. But when October came around, we recognized that this was a US supported genocide. We saw that thousands and thousands were being killed in these massacres and that the US not only was not saying anything about it, they were openly supporting it unequivocally, diplomatically, politically, militarily, financially. We knew. We knew immediately, and everybody in the coalition knew immediately that we were going to have to center Palestine for the DNC. And ever since we have, and all of the 200 organizations that have signed on to this thing have had to say that they accept that we’re centering Palestine here. And that’s why it’s incredible that it’s this big. It’s incredible that it’s this broad. But nobody who has been watching the United States and the rest of the world in the last 10 months should be surprised that Palestinians have such incredibly broad support within the movement.
Mel Buer:
So they’ve still rejected your permits. Are these hearings still happening in federal court? Have you received a ruling from the judge? Because last I checked, you had had a hearing on the fifth about the permitting situation and about the route.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Yeah, we expected a ruling on that day or within a couple days of that, but the judge has still not ruled. We have a status hearing coming up on the 13th, which is Tuesday at 2:30 Chicago time, and I can’t imagine that she’s not going to rule on that day.
Now, again, they’ve met the legal burden after real strong political and legal pressure. These city attorneys are the same city attorneys who advised Rahm Emanuel mayor one percent to not show the video and disclose the video of the killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago a few years back, if you remember that case. They are the ones who recommended that he not release that tape. They said, “You will lose the election if you release this tape.” And the tape did not get released before the election. That’s the kind of city attorneys that we’re dealing with here.
They have not been negotiating in good faith with us. They have blindsided us a number of times after making agreements and promises to us. And so, we’re not surprised that that’s happening from that entity. But we also live in a different Chicago now. In fact, I’ve said this to some people kind of laughingly, which I wish it was Rahm Emanuel that was the mayor, because in a battle against a Zionist pig like him, I know that we knock people over the head. But today’s administration in Chicago is a friendly one. It has friends of ours in it. It has people from the movement in it. It has organizers in it. The mayor himself is a former organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union. And so we are negotiating with the city, but at the same time, we’re dealing with this reactionary backwards elements within the city attorney’s office, what they call corporation council in Chicago. And they’ve blindsided us, like I said, a number of times.
What we’re dealing with now is that they have not budged on the issue of the route. The other thing that they’ve done is they’ve made an argument that we needed to turn onto side streets. Again, same thing. You turn onto side streets, you cause a big logjam with these thousands and tens of thousands of people. A logjam potentially for folks like you all and others who are experienced with these kinds of things is going to have people actually stopped for minutes at a time, 10, 15, 20 minutes. And you know what happens inevitably in that situation. Somebody sees that there’s an open street, they want to try to run to it or walk to it or get some space. And we’ve asked the cops directly, what is going to happen when we’re walking down this thoroughfare, Washington Boulevard, and you force us to turn to make two sharp turns onto narrower streets and folks see that the bigger street that we were just on is open and they want to walk to it. Will they be subject to arrest? We asked repeatedly and finally they answered and they said, yes, they’d be subject to arrest.
So we’re saying, why do you want that? We don’t want that. The city doesn’t want that. So just give us the longer route. Give us the wider streets. And they have not budged. They continue to claim that we don’t know where the Secret Service is putting their fencing, but at what point are we going to know that and at what point are you going to disclose that information so it’s on the public record so that you can make an argument and the world can hear why it is that you’re restricting our rights.
Mel Buer:
Seems to me that the city is deliberately creating a dangerous situation for 20 plus thousand people when you’re on side streets with front yards. First off, it’s a nuisance for the people who live there. You’re not trying to create a nuisance for these folks in these neighborhoods. You don’t want people walking over people’s lawns and potentially creating dangerous conditions if someone has a medical emergency in their house or something like that. But yeah, these smaller streets are, if you’re going to be filling it up with 20,000 plus people, the potential for dangerous situations to come from panics in the crowd or any of that nature should be something that is paid attention to. You would think that the city would be wanting to avoid situations like that.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Yeah, that’s what we’re saying. Ball’s in their court at this point. And Mel, it actually sounds like you might’ve listened to our Instagram video that we made at the last court hearing because we said just that. This is a community that is mostly Black, it’s the west side of Chicago, the historic west side of Chicago, folks who are already going to be burdened so unimaginably by the DNC already. There’s going to be checkpoints. People are going to have to be searched when they’re trying to leave their homes, trying to get back to their homes after work. There’s going to be street closures everywhere. And now they’re saying let’s also allow tens of thousands of people to march on lawns and step on flower beds and that sort of thing. We don’t want to burden that community.
In fact, we have a number of Black-led organizations, including the main Black-led organization, in our coalition, the National Alliance against Racism and Political Repression, together with the Alliance USPCN and many others have been fliering and door knocking in those communities. And people have been great. They’ve been so gracious in accepting us and recognizing how important this DNC is. This relationship between Black communities and Palestinian communities in Chicago especially, but across the country as well, is a very, very important and special relationship. Like Black-Palestinian Solidarity has the people in power up in arms.
When the movement for Black Lives put out a policy position paper a few years back, the Zionists lost their shit, essentially, and they attacked the movement for Black Lives, ADL, and JUF, the Anti-Defamation League and the Jewish United Fund and Jewish Federations all across the country came out and just attacked the Black community and the movement for Black Lives for their support of Palestine for calling Israel an apartheid state.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
…Palestine for calling Israel an apartheid state and calling for the end of occupation and colonization. So that’s who we’re dealing with in terms of the support for Israel in this country among the Zionist organizations. But of course, it’s not just Zionist organizations, it’s the top leadership in Congress and of course the Biden and Harris administration as well. So this thing is going to be huge. It’s going to be historic. It’s going to be the largest mobilization for Palestinian rights in the history of Chicago. And it is going up against the strongest, most powerful empire in the history of the world. We recognize who’s in power. We recognize who the enemy is. People are asking, why are you protesting against the Democrats? Well, if the Republicans were in party and the Republicans had the President, then the event of the season would’ve been the RNC.
It turns out that the folks who are most responsible, who are most complicit for the genocide, for the killing of 40,000 people, for the killing of 100 people at another school that was bombed just yesterday by the Israelis, 70,000 people in Khan Yunis in Gaza have been pushed out of their homes again just yesterday. And the responsibility is on genocide Joe and killer Kamala, so that’s why it doesn’t matter that there’s been a change to the top of the ticket. It doesn’t matter to our coalition. It doesn’t matter to the organizations that are joining and have joined the coalition and that are going to be mobilizing. In fact, Netanyahu was here two weeks ago. He met with Biden directly. He met with Harris directly, and then a day later he bombed Beirut and a day after that he violated the territorial integrity of the sovereign state of Iran and killed a Palestinian leader there. The US itself went and bombed I Iraq and they’re all threatening Yemen as well.
That means Netanyahu got the green light directly from Biden and Harris. He must have. The timing of it means that he met with Biden one day, he bombed Beirut the next, he got the permission. And so Netanyahu for months has wanted to expand this into a regional war and we as an anti-war movement in this country, not just Palestine support and Palestine solidarity, but we need to make sure that we stop an expanded war on Lebanon or on Yemen or on Iran. And that’s incumbent upon us and the listeners of this show and the social justice and anti-war movement in this country as well.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Moving to kind of pick up on that and sort of bring it back down to the street level here because I know we got to let you go here in a couple of minutes. I wanted to just bring us back to week of the DNC itself and what folks listening to this can and should expect. Now, of course, as we said at the top, we’re recording this on Saturday, August 10th. We have on Tuesday another critical hearing. Things may change by the time you guys hear this. But Hatem, I wanted to ask just based on everything that we currently know on the existing plans and on where you see this battle going, what should protest attendees and Chicago residents expect on the week of the DNC? How can folks who are planning to be in Chicago get involved and what should they expect on the days of the marches themselves?
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Yeah, so folks who are coming from outside of Chicago and can stay the entire week, should stay the entire week because the largest of the protests on the first day is going to be Monday the 19th at 12 noon. We’re going to be at Union Park. You should probably get there early because like I said, there’ll be tens of thousands of people in that beautiful historic park. It’s historic because if you remember in 2006 when the Immigrant Rights Movement rose up against the racist Census Burnett Bill, that’s where the first protest in the Immigrant Rights Movement first happened. That’s where 500,000 people gathered to protest against those racist policies. And then later that year, 750,000 were in Chicago and a million were in Los Angeles. And it was incredible, we took back May Day for the Immigrant Rights and the Workers’ Rights Movement in that year.
And so I remember those so vividly, and I remember that park so vividly and that’s where we’re going to be. It’s a few blocks away from the United Center where the convention is happening. Like I said, we’re starting at noon but folks should get there early. We got a really, really powerful program. Jamila Woods is joining us, the wonderful singer-songwriter from Chicago who’s like nationally and internationally renowned now. She’s going to be there singing and protesting with us. And we got a great schedule of speakers as well that we’re going to make public in a couple of days. And then we’re going to march. The other thing I’ll say Mel and Maximilian, is that from day one we said, permit or not, we’re going to be marching. We expect that we will have a permit. We expect that we’re going to win this fight of ours.
But people need to be there because the whole world is watching, and it’s very, very important for us to stop the genocide to be able to protest that week. On Thursday we’re book-ending. First day and the last day on Thursday, the Coalition of March on the DNC will organize at 5:00 PM at Union Park as well, kind of a closing protest. On Wednesday evening at 4:00 PM, the local Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine of which USPCN is also a leader, will be leading a protest on Wednesday. So there’s a lot of activities going on, a lot of protests going on, and a lot of opportunities for folks to join in. If you can only come for the first day, and we know that working people can’t take four days off to protest necessarily, if you can only come for the first day and you’re coming from across the Midwest or from the West coast and the East Coast and the South, and we know folks are coming from there as well, make sure you come on Monday at noon.
And if you could stay for Wednesday at 4:00, stay for Thursday at 5:00, join us the whole week and continue to put out the call that says, free Palestine. Stand with Palestine, end USA to Israel and stop the genocide.
Mel Buer:
A bit of a follow-up question, what about the folks who can’t make it to Chicago for the DNC? What is your message to people out there about how they can get involved, why they should, what they can do from their home or from a distance to support the coalition and to support these marches while the DNC is happening?
Hatem Abudayyeh:
I think what we need to continue to do, one of the things that has been really incredible about this movement as well is the escalation. I remember vividly a week or so into the genocide in October, USPCN, I believe was the first organization and working with the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and political Repression to shut down a congressperson’s office, Jan Schakowsky in Chicago. We had seven people arrested on that day. The next week we shut down Sean Casten’s office. He represents a huge number of Palestinians in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. We then shut down the street in front of Schakowsky’s House, the street in front of Casten’s House. We shut down Lake Shore Drive in front of Dick Durbin’s house, and Dick Durbin is the second most seen-
Hatem Abudayyeh:
McDermott is the second most senior Democratic senator in the country, represents a huge Arab Palestinian population, pays lip service to how much he cares about us and our rights, and never, ever has stepped up truly and strongly in support of Palestine and in condemnation of Israel. So I think people in other places should pay really close attention to the Coalition to March on the DNC’s social media. There’s a lot of information there, a beautiful toolkit that folks can use with flyers and action alerts and social media storms and all of that sort of thing. How to contact your congresspeople, how to contact the White House and continue to work together with us in making these demands.
But find out who the people in power are, and even if they’re Democrats, and even if they got a little bit of better policies domestically than the Republicans do, which we also recognize and understand, but hold them to account, escalate, go to their offices, do these advanced actions. I think right now, when we see these massacres continue to happen day after day, when we’re up to 40,000 killed, 90,000 injured, 2 million displaced, we do need to escalate.
I know that a lot of your listeners are also organizers and social justice activists, and they know what it means to escalate. Power concedes nothing without a demand, and we have to escalate because the people in power continue to support Israel unequivocally. It’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable. It’s unacceptable to hear Kamala Harris say we need humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. To be honest with you, absolutely we knew that we need that. The US is responsible for those people being killed and displaced, so the US is responsible for providing aid.
But the people of Gaza are a very, very proud people. For decades they’ve lived under siege, for almost 80 years they’ve lived under occupation and colonization. They’re not begging for your rice. They don’t want you to drop bombs one day and then try to drop bags of rice the next day. That’s not what we’re asking for. I don’t care about Kamala. Harris saying that maybe she’s a little bit more empathetic to the Palestinian cause than Biden might’ve been. That means nothing to us. What she needs to do is to stop the genocide. What they need to do is utilize the power of the United States in this situation because we know the relationship between the United States and Israel. The US is the imperialist power that supports Israel unequivocally because Israel secures the US interests in the Middle East and in the Arab world. That’s the relationship.
Biden said it himself. If Israel was not there, we would’ve had to manufacture an Israel. And because Israel is a white settler, colonialist, manufactured state that the United States needs to continue to support to secure its interests. So we have the power. This country, this government has the power to stop it. And if they don’t stop it, that means they support it. That’s exactly what our position is. And that means that Biden supports it, that means that Kamala Harris supports it, that means that Antony Blinken supports it and Durbin and Jeffries and Schumer and Pelosi and all of them.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that once again is Hatem Abudayyeh, National Chair of the United States Palestinian Community Network and a spokesperson for the Coalition to March on the DNC. Hatem, thank you so much again for coming on The Real News Network and giving us this critical update on the Coalition to March on the DNC. Mel and I are greatly looking forward to being there on the ground, covering this for The Real News Network. And we look forward to seeing you and everyone there in person in just over a week.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Sounds great. Thank you both, Mel and Maximilian, and the Chicagoans and the Coalition are good hosts too. So hit us up as soon as you get here and looking forward to meeting you in person.
Mel Buer:
It’s going to be great. Thanks so much for coming on.
Hatem Abudayyeh:
Of course.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And to all of you listening right now, we are going to be on the ground, Mel and I, with our team covering the events of the DNC, covering the protests happening around the DNC, talking to working people in Chicago, Palestinian Americans, immigrant communities and regular folks about what they are feeling and thinking about the state of the country right now, the state of the Democratic Party and what they feel we need to do to move forward as a country, as a class. So stay tuned to The Real News Network, subscribe to our YouTube and podcast channels because we got a lot of great work coming for y’all on the week of the DNC and beyond.
For The Real News Network, this is Maximilian Alvarez.
Mel Buer:
And I’m Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Once again, please head over to therealnews.com/support so we can keep bringing you more important coverage and conversations just like this. Take care of yourselves, take care of each other, solidarity forever.
If one views the classic 1993 Claude Berri film Germinal one can see what 19th century feudalism was all about. It took place in a mid-century Northern France mining region. Here in the USA we had John Sayle’s 1987 film Matawan, which portrayed the 1920 Matawan, West Virginia miner’s strike. Both films gave viewers a taste of how feudalism operates. Well, hang on gang because Amerika 2024 is fast approaching the evil of Capitalism on steroids.
We have less than 10% of private sector workers here in unions, and about half of our states have what are called Right to Work laws. In a nutshell, this allows workers at a company to NOT join the union at that workplace, and still get ALL the benefits from collective bargaining agreements between the union and the company. Thus, you can refuse to join a union and still get ALL the benefits the union contract accomplishes. In 2018, the right-wing dominated Supreme Court allowed public sector AKA government workers to get the same benefits from union contracts WITHOUT having to join or pay union dues. Yes, the MAGA baseball cap should be MAFA (Make America Feudalist Again). Getting back to the private sector for a minute, just imagine that 90+ % of those workers don’t even have a union to represent them! So, the former cleaning lady we knew had a husband who was a highly skilled carpenter who worked at a local cabinet company — of course non-union. He and his three other cabinetmakers colleagues were really at the mercy of the owner, with no guarantee of sick days, paid vacations or health coverage paid by the company. The icing on the cake was when the owner decided to purchase new BMWs for himself, his wife, and their two kids — who were all on the books for great tax write-offs.
In the winter of ’73, I was getting ready to finish my last year of college and was engaged to be married. I decided to look for a management trainee job and found one in the good old Sunday Times. My first day on the job, the sales manager of this linen supply company took me for a tour of the plant. First, we went into the humongous area where the dirty linens were washed and dried. This was mid January in a very cold and snowy Brooklyn, NY. That area of the plant had a number of massive dryers, which made that area heat up like one was in the subtropics. I looked at the workers and every single one of them was Afro American, the men dressed in white pants and shirts and the women looking honestly like the Aunt Jemima character from the pancake box. I was told later that these folks were non-union hourly waged employees. The sales manager, a sweaty, too fat for his tight suit Italian American like myself, leaned over to me as the terribly loud noises of the washers and dryers made it almost impossible to talk. He said, “Kid, the more we save the company the more we get in bonuses!” He then turned me over to the plant manager for more training.
The next week, I was directed to spend it with a different delivery driver each day. I had to be there at 6 AM, and the truck garage was as cold and damp as the January winter would extend. I found out that these guys were actually in a union, but repeatedly each one of them told me how this was a ‘Sweetheart Union’ which did not do much for them. Sitting in an old truck that seemed to have arthritis, with a terrible heater and obviously balding tires I could see that point. These drivers did not just stop at a pickup at some bakery, butcher or supermarket, run in, drop off the new linens and run out with the old, dirty ones. No sir! I went in with each guy on each day and saw for myself how disgraceful this job was. We went into our first stop, a butcher in the Bronx. The owner said that he didn’t have time to have the dirty linens in a pile for pickup, so we had to go and find them. When we went down the dark, squeaky stairs to the basement, I could see a few sets of eyes peering at me in the darkness. The driver laughed. “They’re rats, they won’t bother you if you don’t go too close. Part of the job kid.” This seemed to be the same on just about every stop. We had to search for the linens just about every time. The rear or basement of these stores all looked like they needed an intensive cleaning.
I quit the job after my third day on the trucks. Each driver told me how the company paid as little as possible in benefits and bonuses — and these guys had a union! Some union! The only caveat was that they could not get fired so easily because of the union. And, they got two or three major holidays off with pay. A one-week paid vacation and maybe a handful of paid sick days a year. They had to contribute towards their health coverage, and that insurance had high deductions, very high. When I found out what these guys were earning for the **** they had to go through, I couldn’t believe it! Driving a dinosaur in freezing cold weather with a terrible heater, or in the hot 90+ degree summer with NO AC, I really felt for these guys.
Well, whenever the Amazons or Wal-Marts decide to squeeze their workers a bit more, that linen company in ’73 would look like Nirvana. How about the tens of millions of small businesses nationwide with no support at all for the workers? Do we have to continue to hope for the kindness of the bosses, and overlook the fleet of BMWs for family while many of us are treading the economic waters? You decide.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced an emergency order this week suspending all use of an herbicide known to cause irreversible developmental damage to human fetuses. The now-banned pesticide — dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, or DCPA, marketed under the trade name Dacthal — stops the growth of certain annual grasses and weeds, and was registered for use with broccoli…
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced an emergency order this week suspending all use of an herbicide known to cause irreversible developmental damage to human fetuses.
The now-banned pesticide — dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, or DCPA, marketed under the trade name Dacthal — stops the growth of certain annual grasses and weeds, and was registered for use with broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, and onions, among other crops, as well as turf. But mounting evidence has shown the chemical is dangerous to people — ”so dangerous that it needs to be removed from the market immediately,” as Michael Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a statement.
As of Tuesday, farmers won’t be able to buy more DCPA or use up their existing stock. It’s the first time in nearly 40 years that the EPA has exercised this emergency authority for a pesticide.
Farmworker unions and advocacy organizations are hailing the decision as a major victory for environmental justice, as pregnant people working on farms can be exposed to DCPA levels between 4 and 20 times higher than what the EPA estimates is safe. Nearly 80 percent of farmworkers nationally identify as Hispanic, while 70 percent are foreign born, and 20 percent of agricultural worker families live below the federal poverty line. Economic precarity, language barriers, and fear of being reported to immigration authorities can make it difficult for farmworkers to push back against dangerous working conditions.
“The EPA’s order will protect farmworker women and girls who bear the heavy and dangerous burden of pesticide exposure every day,” Mily Treviño-Sauceda, executive director of Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, an organization of female farmworkers, said in a statement. “It will spare their children lifelong harm when they are growing food to ensure families around the country have food on their tables.”
The EPA’s decision is the result of a regular review process conducted every 15 years to ensure registered pesticides cause “no unreasonable adverse effects on humans and the environment.”
For DCPA, the EPA gathered toxicity data from the AMVAC Chemical Corporation, DCPA’s only manufacturer, between 2013 and 2023. After receiving a long-awaited study on the herbicide’s effects on fetal thyroid development, the EPA said last year that there were serious health risks to people handling the chemical or working in areas where it has been used.
Although DCPA product labels warned workers not to enter treated fields for 12 hours after the chemical was applied, EPA found that, in many cases, fields remained too dangerous to enter for periods of 25 days or more. A phenomenon called “spray drift,” where pesticides float from the point of application to other fields or neighborhoods, also posed potentially unmitigable risks to human health.
A farmworker picks broccoli at a farm in Valley Center, California.
Ariana Drehsler / AFP via Getty Images
In April, the EPA issued a warning to farmworkers about the “serious, permanent, and irreversible health risks” associated with DCPA — including concerns that the chemical could induce changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels, which are linked to low birth weight and impaired brain development, and motor skills. AMVAC voluntarily canceled DCPA registrations for use on turf in December 2023, but the EPA said the company’s proposals to mitigate the chemical’s many health risks were inadequate. The agency notified AMVAC earlier this year that it would be taking regulatory action “as soon as practicable” under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA.
Under less urgent circumstances, that might have meant issuing a cancellation order but then keeping DPCA on the market for several months or even years while the agency fulfilled procedural requirements like collecting input from stakeholders and the public and negotiating with the product manufacturer. In this case, however, the EPA said the risks were so great that it could suspend DCPA while those cancellation proceedings unfolded.
The AMVAC Chemical Corporation did not respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Amy van Saun, a senior attorney for the nonprofit Center for Food Safety, commended the EPA’s decision to no only stop the sale of DCPA but order companies not to use the Dacthal they already have on hand: “No more sale or transport unless you’re giving it back to the manufacturer to dispose of,” she said. “If the EPA does a good job of telling everybody that this is happening, that you can no longer use this, then farmworkers who are working around [DCPA] will immediately not have to be exposed anymore.”
She added that farmworkers represent the “backbone” of the United States’ agricultural system but have historically “been treated extremely unfairly.”
Anne Katten, director of the Pesticide and Worker Safety Project at the nonprofit California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, said the suspension will also protect farmworkers’ families. “It’s often very hard to completely eliminate take-home exposures,” she said, explaining how DCPA can cling to field workers’ clothing and follow them home. Farmworkers are generally concerned about pesticide exposures, Katten added, but they often don’t know which ones have been applied to the fields where they work.
Katten and van Saun said they’re now eager to see the EPA use its authority to suspend other toxic pesticides, including paraquat and the weed killer glyphosate — known by the brand name Roundup. Long-term exposure to paraquat, which is banned in the European Union, has been linked to Parkinson’s; some studies link glyphosate to cancer, as well as liver and kidney damage. In 2021, the EPA banned the pesticide chlorpyrifos after research linked it to neurological damage in children.
“We really encourage EPA to keep doing this,” van Saun said. “We hope they continue to cancel more pesticides that are harming people’s health.”
Dina Velasquez Escalante is a poultry worker in southwest Minnesota. She spends her workdays inspecting the chicken millions of Americans eat every day. She looks for tumors, stray bones and organs, and removes bile. After six years of hard work and cultivating expertise on almost every position on the line, she’s now in the laboratory testing samples of poultry to ensure the highest quality.
Nick Lubecki has been an urban farmer in Pittsburgh for the last 15 years. The heat has noticeably intensified over that time, with back-to-back summers of sweltering temperatures affecting when he harvests produce at Braddock Farm, a small urban plot nestled next to an operating steel mill that grows vegetables like lettuce, collards, and tomatoes. His current strategy for beating the brutal heat: a wide brim hat and plenty of water. Lately, farming consistently throughout the day has been “significantly more exhausting,” he said. “It’s really hard to keep going.”
Summers are getting hotter everywhere, and that is especially true in cities including Pittsburgh, which this year has seen more than four times the number of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit than it does in a typical year. That’s due in part to the urban heat island effect, in which a city’s infrastructure traps heat, making it hotter than in neighboring suburbs. To combat the growing health risks for outdoor workers like Lubecki, scientists and designers are developing a slate of new fabrics to counteract extreme heat. But worker-safety specialists and labor advocates are concerned that commercializing wearable technologies — even with the best of intentions — may end up aggravating existing issues with worker exploitation.
To cope with climate change and stay healthy outside, humans need adaptations, and heat-reflecting textiles have the potential to play a crucial role. Such solutions are “super important to not only show that there’s some really cool technology that’s resulting from this need,” said Enrique Huerta, legislative director at Climate Resolve, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable climate solutions, but also that there is “a need to deploy it responsibly. That’s really, really important to highlight.”
What makes the urban heat island effect so dangerous is its cumulative nature. During the day, the built environment — concrete, asphalt, brick — readily absorbs the sun’s energy. At night, a city slowly releases all that built-up heat, keeping temperatures extra-high into the morning. If you don’t have air conditioning and your body can’t cool down at night, and a heat wave continues day after day, the stress builds and builds. Nellie Brown, director of Workplace Health and Safety Programs at Cornell University, says that workers exposed to such conditions without relief are vulnerable to illnesses like heatstroke, but can, in extreme cases, experience serious brain damage, kidney failure, and even death.
In a recent report, Climate Central, a nonprofit that communicates climate science, studied the urban heat island index, or UHI, in 65 large U.S. cities to calculate how much the built environment boosts temperatures. “The other major component … is population density, because we as people create a lot of waste heat with our activities,” said Jennifer Brady, senior data analyst at Climate Central. “So cars, buses, trucks can create waste heat.” Of the 50 million people included in Climate Central’s analysis, 68 percent lived in areas with a UHI of 8 degrees or higher.
Lower-income neighborhoods also tend to be zoned for more industrial activities, with less trees and more asphalt and large buildings, all of which absorb and then radiate heat. That’s especially perilous if those workers live and sleep in high-UHI neighborhoods elsewhere, and they’re coming to work after a night of still-sweltering temperatures. This is where a fabric that can alleviate some of the physical symptoms of heat on the body could end up serving as a lifeline.
Special textiles exist already to help cool a wearer by scattering direct sunlight away from the body or by emitting infrared radiation — which would be handy when you’re out on a hike or, say, working in a backyard garden. A legion of U.S. apparel companies manufacture clothing that helps mitigate the heat from direct sunlight, but those fabrics aren’t designed to offset the oppressive heat that gets trapped in cityscapes. In a city, the built environment radiates heat from below, too, presenting an additional engineering challenge.
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In June, researchers presented a clever new textile design that can indeed counter the urban heat island effect. The top layer is made of plastic polymethylpentene, or PMP, fibers, which let in heat radiating from roads and buildings. Underneath that layer is silver nanowire, which is very good at reflecting that heat back through the PMP fibers and away from the body. Below that, against the skin, is a layer of wool that acts as a buffer.
“It provides very good mechanical support, because those PMP and silver nanowires are extremely thin,” said University of Chicago materials scientist Po-Chun Hsu, coauthor of the new study. Like a plain white shirt helps bounce some of the sun’s energy away from the body, this new textile can deflect the heat that comes from below, like from asphalt and city sidewalks.
But, as with any new product created to counteract extreme heat and other climate impacts, there’s the possibility of exploitation, says Dominique O’Connor, who works at the Farmworker Association of Florida. The growers and contractors in charge of farms, for example, “might feel that they can push [workers] even harder or have less need for giving them breaks or water.”
Any heat-resistant clothing adopted by outdoor workers at the behest of their employer could also end up being a financial burden if they’re expected to pay for it, according to O’Connor. Another concern is the question of garment care, as she doesn’t expect employers will offer laundering services for designated work clothes — she points out many already don’t offer enough bathroom facilities or breaks — meaning workers themselves will have to pay for multiple shirts, or otherwise be stuck cleaning the same item after every shift. This underscores the need for some sort of regulation to protect the misuse of such a solution, she said, although the likelihood of said regulation is low, given the fact that a federal heat standard for workers is still not finalized.
Some labor groups say that while such materials and fabrics may be able to play a role in mitigating individual impacts of heat, such surface-level solutions shouldn’t be substituted for policy interventions that target the core problem: a lack of protections for workers from heat stress.
Nellie Brown at Cornell, who provides training and technical assistance on occupational safety and health issues, noted that the customization of any prospective fabrics to what individual workplaces and jobs demand should be the biggest safety consideration. All proposed solutions should go through the “hierarchy of controls,” Brown said — a method by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration that identifies and ranks safeguards against hazards in the workplace.
Hsu compares the newly designed materials to the introduction of air conditioning, which has saved countless lives, especially as the world rapidly warms. “It’s proven to be an extremely huge boost to people’s productivity, especially in tropical countries,” says Hsu. “Then you will run into the question of whether this will introduce overworking. But I think that comes after you solve this heat stress or heatstroke issue.”
Though the textile that specifically targets the urban heat island effect is not on the market yet, other heat-repelling fabrics are. O’Connor’s team in Apopka, Florida, is considering whether to move forward with investing in clothing already on the market to freely distribute to the farmworkers they serve. The shirts, from an apparel company called Fieldsheer, are made with a brand of technology intended to mitigate a wearer’s body heat.
Her colleague Jeannie Economos, however, remains conflicted — will heat-combating apparel be useful, or end up creating more problems for outdoor workers, whether in the city or the fields, many of whom are already beleaguered by issues? “We have been hesitating buying them,” said Economos. “We don’t want to promote the shirts as some kind of miracle thing.”
Patrick Deighan, a spokesperson at Fieldsheer, told Grist that their fabrics, made from a blend of recycled polyester and spandex and “infused with minerals,” effectively “pull moisture and heat from the skin and use the body’s heat to evaporate at a faster rate, enhancing the evaporative cooling effect, leading to enhanced comfort and performance.” He noted that the line of shirts are designed to be used in multiple environments, including outdoors and indoors, and on the job, but didn’t comment on the concerns raised by Economos and other labor advocates.
Others, like Lubecki, are more open to the idea. “If it’s something that might help, I’ll give it a shot, if it’s any good,” he said. Still, he’s cautiously optimistic, and can’t help but wonder how accessible solutions like heat-resistant workwear are to the agricultural workforce. “Honestly, like every year I hear about some new thing that someone is excited about. It’s supposed to make things cooler, and I don’t know, maybe it does. But the cost point has to make sense.”
Today we have an urgent and important conversation with members of the NEA Staff Organization, the union of staffers at the National Education Association, who have been locked out of their workplace by NEA management for the past four weeks. The NEA, representing over 3 million members, is the largest union in the country. Staffers working for the NEA have been bargaining for higher wages and fairer treatment by the union, and have instead been locked out of their workplace after a 3-day ULP strike a month ago. We’ve brought on former educator Rowena Shurn and national board-certified teacher Ambereen Khan-Baker, both of whom are NEASO members and Senior Policy Program Analysts at the NEA, to talk about the lockout, what it means for a union to engage in union-busting tactics with their own staff, and how NEASO members are keeping each other’s spirits up on the picket line.
Featured Music… Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez 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.
Rowena Shurn:
Good afternoon. I am Rowena Shurn, a senior policy program analyst at the National Education Association for about five and a half years now. I was a previous educator in Maryland, prince George’s County, where I was on the board of directors of P-G-C-E-A, which was my local affiliate in my state board, MSEA as well. And currently also a doctoral student along with my colleague who’s going to fiercely introduce herself in a moment. And so we are rocking and rolling in so many ways.
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
And hi everyone, my name is Ambereen Khan-Baker. I am a National Board certified teacher renewed. I am a senior policy program specialist and analysis in teacher quality in the Center for Professional of Excellence along with Rowena here. And my job has been focusing around supporting affiliates and organizing professional learning. So how do you create professional learning? How do you create systems and structures for it? Previously, before coming to NEAI was a special ed and English teacher for about 13 years, taught all over Maryland and DC and became really active in my union as a coach. And so that was for my entry away, and I was a teaching fellow for a year before coming to NEA.
Mel Buer:
Welcome back everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, dreams, jobs, and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by the always wonderful Jewels Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. And if you’re hungry 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 of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks that you’d like us to talk to.
And please also support the work we do at The Real News Network by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world. My name is Mel Buer and today we have an urgent and important conversation with members of the NEA staff organization or niso, the Union of Staffers at the National Education Association who have been locked out of their workplace by NEA Management for the past couple of weeks. The NEA representing over 3 million members is the largest union in the country. Staffers working for the NEA have been bargaining for higher wages and fairer treatment by the union and have instead been locked out of their workplace after a three day ULP strike a month ago. I’m so glad that you both have come on on such short notice.
Talk about a really important struggle that’s currently happening with the NEA. I’d really like to dive right into the conversation, but first I just want to make a point of clarification for our audience. Some of our audience members may not know that there are staff unions at unions, union locals, international union offices are themselves workplaces often with the cadre of union staffers that are employed full-time by the union. These folks may be full-time organizers, comms folks, individuals who are kind of keeping the union, whether it be a union local or an international union running smoothly. And often these locals and IUs across the country, they are themselves represented by their own union, which is what is happening here with the NEA. The N-E-A-S-O is the staff union that has what, 350 members and just like any other workplace staff unions will bargain contracts with their employer, in this case the National Education Association.
So that’s just kind of a point of clarification for our listeners who may not quite understand where this is coming from. Every worker deserves a union including workers who are employed by unions themselves. So just to clarify that at the start, let’s just start off Rowena, if you could, for the members of our audience who aren’t really familiar with what’s been happening at NEA, could you give us a short rundown of the events that led up to this lockout of which it’s now what been four weeks since the start of the lockout? Yeah, if you’d like to start there.
Rowena Shurn:
Today is day 21 of the lockout. Wow. We began negotiations back in April, if I’m not mistaken, since from April until May 31st is when our contract actually ended. We could not come to agreement on everything. There are segments of our contract in which agreement were reached, but then there are certain parts of it in which agreement wasn’t met, if you will. And so in June actually our Center for Professional Excellence, along with two other centers had a one day ULP strike. And basically that’s an unfair labor practice. And so something took place in which we were like, that’s not okay. And that was around the end of June when that happened. And then negotiations continued and at some point we received updates around how over time would work for our representative assembly and a couple of other things. And they were outside of the win, which we proceeded with our contract in previous years years.
And so it resulted in us calling for a strike July 5th through seventh as well. And what folks saw on the news was absolutely unfortunate it because one of the things that you talk to most of us, they’ll say that this is a calling. This isn’t just a job for us, this is a career. This is a profession. We dedicate our lives and our heart to this work because we believe in education. All of us attended school and we thoroughly believe in the right to education. We believe in the right because that is a part of freedom. Education literally liberates you. It gives you access to so much past, present, and future. And so for a lot of us, it wasn’t easy. I am sure I speak for my colleagues when I say that that wasn’t an easy place to arrive at, particularly when you believe in the very vision of great public school.
And that’s something that we feel that every student should have access to. And so when Sunday night, July 7th, all of us in our personal inboxes received a message from the executive director telling us that we would officially be locked out starting July 8th. And that’s where we’ve been since then locked out from working with our members, locked out for making those connections. And currently we see the political climate and our membership group will be supporting this. One of the things that’s really interesting is that most unions have a professional learning aspect of it, and that’s the work that Amber and I do. We look at the career continuum from those who are interested in becoming teachers to those who are veterans and experts and accomplish at their work. And so this entire time we’ve been forced to not work with our folks forced for the work to be left undone and untouched. And that’s really been difficult.
Mel Buer:
I think you bring up a good point, and Amber, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I also, I’m a former teacher. I taught higher education, so I worked as an adjunct instructor at state colleges teaching composition and got a crash course in workplace conditions and how management often will take this idea that teaching as a career as a vocation is really about the, if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day. This is about the students management likes to kind of use that as a way to not hold up their side of the bargain sometimes to allow working conditions to deteriorate and to say, well, you’re in it because this is such an important thing. And so when you are actually sitting in negotiations and you are asking for rightfully asking an improvement to wages or overtime pay or any of those things that would make it easier and more enjoyable for you to be able to do your job effectively, they often just will hand wave it away.
And I think especially when it comes to, and this is more the question for you aine, this lockout seems to have come as a complete surprise, especially after you sit through weeks of bargaining where you understand that hopefully both sides are coming to the table in good faith, that they want to come to a conclusion that will be a contract that works for everyone. And when things start going sideways and you’re trying to use your leverage, something that a union should know is part of the sort of tool in the toolbox, their response is to lock you out and union bust. And I think the question here is why is it so important for a union like NEA to walk the walk, which is what you’re asking them to do in negotiations? What does it say about the NEA that they would rather lock out their workers instead of bargain fairly with them?
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
Mel, I really resonate with what you said about as teachers and I have had these conversations and we’ve had these experiences as teachers where you are expected to work all of these hours outside of your day to grade papers. I grade so many English papers on the weekends on weeknights with no pay. And there is this expectation when you do it for the kids. And a lot of our leadership roles in our districts were voluntary. If we wanted opportunities, we had to volunteer more of our time to do that. And that was a shift I saw in leading activities and professional learning in our union. It was also there was some compensation involved, but there was plenty of opportunities. And these were opportunities that I had coached by my colleagues in our bargaining unit in Niso, and that was so important because that helped me become a teacher leader and helped me grow in my profession.
And so going to your question about what does this say about why this is so important right now? Lockouts are really rare and lockouts are something that’s in the boss’s playbook. It’s a tactic that bosses and corporations use to oppress suppress their, it’s not something a union should be doing to another union and we as the largest union in the country, we need to be modeling the practices of joint labor management collaboration. We need to be modeling the practices of how we should collaborate and how we should care. This culture that we create in our organization is so important because everyone is looking at us right now. Every single district is watching what’s happening right now because these are some of the tactics that they will use. And that is one of my biggest fears. I think one of the ramifications is that this is something that we’re going to see in with our local unions and what’s that as they’re bargaining, that if their district can lock them out, they could.
And so we’re normalizing has normalized this practice of locking out your staff and it has gone on for four weeks this extent of time and the threat of taking away our insurance really demoralized and impacted our emotional and social wellbeing to such an extent, I got sick as a result of this. I’m literally getting a prescription right now because there’s so much trauma that we are experiencing that’s impacting our bodies right now. And this isn’t the message we should be sending. It should be that we care for each other and I have absolute hope in our members. I know that they are the ones leading our union and I have complete hope and solidarity in this work, but it’s something that we really need to emphasize is that we have to care for each other and there’s just this lack of, I think empathy and humanity and these actions by any day over the past few months. That’s just very concerning.
Mel Buer:
I also want to throw out to you, and I do, again, I want to kind of underscore here for many of our listeners who maybe have not been through a contract negotiation before, I’m also a member of a staff union here at the Real News. Our negotiations, thankfully were not like the ones that you have gone through. They happened pretty quickly, but negotiations are tough and having to have a conversation about what you can do to materially improve working conditions and have this back and forth requires openness, honesty, and empathy across the table. And oftentimes management doesn’t do a good job of making that apparent. Right. And so I really, again, it’s disappointing to see a union like NEA that represents what over 3 million workers, who has this decades long experience and what contentious bargaining looks like, what good bargaining looks like, and not be able to apply those skills with their own staff union. Rowina, I wanted to have you jump in and get your thoughts about what it means for the union to walk the walk and why it’s important to continue to pressure them to live up to the values that they espouse every day. I’m
Rowena Shurn:
Glad you asked that question and to contextualize it a little bit, and I’m sure that within education folks, this will resonate. Nearly about 30% of our union members have second jobs, and I don’t know if folks really realize that because there’s this seamlessness of the work that we do that you don’t even know. Some people exist in the context of it gets done. It’s almost the invisible hand sometimes in the background. There are so many folks that Reen and I rely on so that we can help members be great. They may see Amina and they may see Rowina, but behind Amina Rowina, it is this whole network that is moving seamlessly so that we can create the space for our members to be fully great and live in the possibility of who they are. And so to that, to do that, some of our folks are working second jobs.
I myself do too. You mentioned being an adjunct professor. I work as an adjunct professor as well. We have student loans too, and our loans are not forgiven because we work for a union. This is the level of commitment and dedication that so many of us have. And so this is why this is important. We haven’t had a step in 12 years for our contract. It’s been 12 years since folks have moved up steps. And so there’s so much that folks we don’t talk about because again, we become passionate about the work, we recognize the gifts that our members have, and so we show up. We really, really, really know the importance. Like I said previously of what’s going on, and sometimes I believe folks forget, they forget those of us who’ve been teachers. When some folks become administrators, they forget what it’s like being in a classroom with upwards of 42 students.
They forget what it’s like grading all of those papers, those assignments, right? When the narratives have to be edited and revised seven to 11 times and you have a student load of 1 25, they forget. And to some degree, some of the folks on that side, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be in this space and they’ve been there. Let’s be clear. Everyone who’s on the other side, they’ve been in the spaces that we are in right now. And to some degree it’s like you’ve forgotten what it’s like. You’ve forgotten the moments and times that we live on the east coast, but we stay up to 10, 11 o’clock at night because we don’t want our members in Hawaii to always have to give up their Saturdays and Sundays. We want to stay up so that when they get off at four o’clock, I’m there virtually, but I’m there.
Or we don’t want our folks in Alaska to have the same experiences. We want them, the very thing that we work and advocate for on their behalf. We try to give to them as well as staff. And I really believe oftentimes you guys have forgotten what it’s like to be the frontline, to be in the trenches when the pandemic happened. If you could have heard our meetings and the ways in which as staff, we showed up big time for our members, some of us with our own health being compromised, but it was so important. Like everything they dealt with, we dealt with too. We were right there with them coaching them. We were right there mentoring with them. We were right there with them and talk about the systems and structures. We were right there with them in it. And we’re there day to day, we get the calls.
Some of my work is around national board and I just held a convenient back in May, one of the members, she became sick and had to go to the hospital who was right there with her. Rowina was there with her, Rowina was there in the background, working with staff members to secure it so that her family can get there. These are the things that we do, and we don’t do it in a context for the accolades. We do it because we see their humanity. We do it because we are people. We do it because we love and are gifted and we believe in this work. Again, it is a calling and we actually believe, trust us and value it. Show us what the value looks like because it’s okay at the end of conferences and things to tout and say, publicly we did a good job.
But it’s also showing it. And to say love is an action. It is an action, and we want to see the action with it, the action that demonstrates it. And so if it’s around the idea of fair compensation, then let it be fair compensation. Let it reflect the value of what we do for 3 million members. If it’s around the idea and a concept of work location, then let it be about a fair work location. There are so many aspects of what we do that members don’t see because we get it done. But at the end of the day, as Amber said, we want to be seen as complete full humans as well. I don’t want to have to work two jobs because I also have my student loans to pay for and in a doctoral program and paying for it as well. These things aren’t inexpensive.
But because I believe in what I do, I always want to make sure that my professional learning mimics and mirrors what our members are doing. I never want to be in a space in a place where I’m not knowledgeable. And so I continue learning too, but I can’t do that if I’m not fairly compensated for it as well to help in that. And so these are the things that I think sometimes that when we elevate in our career and our profession, we forget. We forget what it’s like at this space in this juncture. And so we’re asking them to remember and not only remember to demonstrate it, what it looks like in all authenticity. So that would be what I would add.
Mel Buer:
Amber, you had some extra thoughts to add.
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
Yes, Raul, you are saying it so perfectly, and both of us, we believe in this because these have been our experiences. As a teacher of color being in the classroom, I almost left the classroom my third year and going through the national certification process really helped me find my why and help transform me as a teacher. And then that was the moment where I decided to coach other teachers to go through the process, and I can only do that through our union and being part of a number of leadership opportunities. It was all through my union and they were supported by staff, like the role that Row and I are doing right now. And so we’ve had these lived opportunities, these lived experiences. We see firsthand why this work is so important because it’s influenced both of us as educators of color and as female educators of color.
The lack of opportunities that existed my district for me, having these doors open for me in my union was so critical to me staying in the profession. And so a lot of the members that we work with through our professional learning, we’re supporting them and their journey. We’re also ensuring that they stay in the classroom and this is just part of that experience and that journey for them so that they can become leaders in NEA and they can identify other Aines. Other Rowenas, right? They can identify other educators of color who can lead in the profession.
Mel Buer:
I think that’s a really great way to kind of segue into a really important question in relation to this lockout, which is to say what are some of the effects of it? What is not being taken care of? Because you have been locked out of your work. You heard some stories about some congressional staffers texting, NEA staffers and asking where these conversations, these emails, these phone calls were, and having to tell these congressional staffers that, Hey, our workplace has locked us out. We’re not doing this work. What other effects are you seeing? What work isn’t getting done? Rowena or Rine? Feel free to kind of clue in our listeners as to what the effect of a lockout like this is.
Rowena Shurn:
So when I say our membership, niso touches almost every aspect of NEA, it literally does. So yes, we have the congressional folks who work folks on the hill at the federal, state and local levels. We have our finance folks, literally the folks in the finance department, these are those folks. So the systems and structures that help run the organization, those are our members, the folks that work with private and public partnerships, whether it’s through our Center for Social and Racial Justice, those are our members, the folks that works with Campaign and Elections, those are our members. That’s a separate group from the Congressional Hill. So you have us, the Center for Professional Excellence, you have education policy folks. So the entire organization, we pretty much touch in some shape, form or fashion. More of it is direct than indirect. And so we are all getting the calls, the text messages, school is about to start and we’re not there.
The vice president, shout out to our vice president because I am from Oakland and a graduate of Howard University, so shout out to her for being a presumptive nominee for the Democratic ticket. All of that is going on, and that’s where we come in as well. And so when I tell you that we touch so much of the work that is done and the ways in which the public know NEA niso is so important to that work, we do so much. And again, we’re the hidden gems, the ones you don’t necessarily see because we’re in the background navigating everything to make sure it happens. I mean, most recently, and I want to shout out one of our colleagues who helps with education international, she was on her way back from a trip and her plane wasn’t canceled, but her phone was shut off when we initially went into the lockout.
That’s the impact. She was internationally traveling and her systems were shut down. Granted the plane, she still had that because she was connecting. But that’s the impact of this lockout folks have. We have a couple of colleagues who have kids with health concerns and issues that must see their doctors every month. That was a big thing about the health insurance. We have folks who have chronic ailments and they must see physicians regularly. That was the impact of this. We have folks with kids who are on their way to college this fall and imagine what that’s looking like right now because their parents are not being compensated for that. So there are so many ways in which our personal lives are being touched that it’s really unfortunate. And as Reen said, why would you make this a part of the playbook? Why would you do this? The largest labor union in the country and what you put in your playbook is to lock out. Imagine what this is going to look like for our staff who do this work with districts. What are they going to do now when districts, because it’s only a matter of time before some of them follow the lead and we look kind of weird. How do you tell us not to do it When you did it, you didn’t have a word for that, right?
Mel Buer:
Well, it’s part of the dirty tricks kind of playbook. When I was covering the Kellogg strike in Omaha, Nebraska, I used to live there born and raised. These are my neighbors who are striking. And I remember standing on the picket line with workers. This is a multi-billion dollar corporation who’s shut off the health insurance of workers who are fighting cancer and who are standing on this picket line really for each other. And you see some of the actions of NEA and you go, man, this is the kind of shit that monopoly men fucking corporate billionaires do. Why is this happening at a union? And unfortunately, this sort of management boss playbook, I’ve seen it happen with other union locals. It happened with SEIU 10 21. They locked out some of their workers like what I don’t know 15 months ago who were also in the midst of bargaining.
It’s like, what? To your point, Rowena, how did you forget this? Right? You know that you’ve been on the receiving end of some gnarly shit in your career that bosses have done this to you that have played fast and loose with your livelihood in service of what? Holding onto a little bit more power in the workplace. Come on now, let’s be real. Can we be humans with each other? Is there an adult in the room that can kind of remind you of that place to say that you are supposed to be standing in solidarity with the staff that you have hired to do this work? Shouldn’t that be the sort of baseline frustrating, right? Absolutely frustrating. Maybe a corollary question, Amber then is how is this beyond just the immediate sort of material and emotional whiplash from the lockout beginning at the beginning of last month, what has been the way that you have rallied your fellow workers within the staff union to hang on and really try and see this through to the end? What are some of the things that you guys are doing as a collective group to kind of keep each other from falling through the cracks?
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
A lot of things on the picket line, and one of the things I’ve been trying to do is taking pictures of my colleagues and capturing some of those stories. I was writing about some of my own stories and I as a relational organizer, I’ve always, I build relationships. I listen to people, I listen to their stories. I try to come from a place of empathy and heart because the stories are so key because this is how we remember our union values is through these stories of understanding our experiences. And so I’ve been trying to capture, and I feel like on the picket line, truly we are checking in on each. When I see a colleague not feeling well, I go to the side, I sit down with my colleague and I’m like checking in. What’s happening in your life? What’s going on? This is a collective trauma that we 300 of us are all experiencing the same time.
And so giving each other water, Gatorade, here’s a paper towel. Literally that whole collective chair is very critical online in our virtual picket line, which has been amazing. And kudos to all of our a virtual picket line captains. They are amazing. And there is an emphasis on self-care, on giving space to just talk through your feelings, but thinking strategically about our say or about our day or about our pay, what does this really mean and how do we want to move forward? It just does collective hope that I’ve been able to see. And on the picket line the other day, we broke out in, we call it the Miso Dance Squad, and a bunch of us, including myself and my tambourine, we were just dancing to all sorts of solidarity songs at one of our colleagues. Kai created a new newer version of one of our popular solidarity songs and made it to our context, and it just made us laugh and made us and this terrible, complete, horrible times.
It just made us feel like we belong to each other. And that is an incredible feeling. This is what it means to have union values. And I’m so grateful, so grateful that I’m not alone, that this is not a solitary journey, that at least we have each other, that we can laugh together, we can sing together, we can check in with each other because we’re not alone. And I’ve been also sitting down and talking to individuals. We’ve been sort of creating some affinity groups and some affinity spaces. A number of us have health issues. And it kind of goes to what we were talking about a little bit earlier, about some of the impacts of this lockout, like the whole threat of losing your health insurance. I sat down and I listened to my colleagues cry and I cried. I broke down and sobbed hysterically a few days because I have autoimmune disease that impacts my entire wellbeing.
My son has five autoimmune conditions and my husband has an aneurysm and a heart defect. And so the threat of losing our health insurance, I can’t even describe it in words, just for someone to mess with our health insurance, and I’m not the only one. So many of her colleagues went through that same experience. And I sat down and I listened to them. I listened to them crying. I listened to them talking it through. I talked through what are your COBRA options? And a lot of my colleagues couldn’t afford Cobra and they were going to wing it to hear that they were going to wing it. And so we were trying to try to make space for each other to just share out because that is how we’re going to get through this pain and that is how we’re going to feel and how we can able to move forward.
Rowena Shurn:
Mel, if I can add one thing, absolutely, please do. There is definitely a resolve with Niso that we will get through it together. There’s this togetherness that has, I’ve never experienced this depth of togetherness, and that’s the word we’re going to call it in my professional career, in the ways in which we are moving. And I’ve been in places where it has been incredible, but the togetherness of this largely because the depth of hurt that this lockout caused really, really motivated us to better connect with each other, to find out each other’s names. I mean, some of the basic things, we don’t see each other that much because we’re all over the country. And I don’t know if people really realize, yes, it is all the states. It’s also US territories. It’s also those who are part of D-O-D-E-A. We represent all of them. So at any time we can be anywhere.
And so we don’t always see each other and we’re actually learning about people. I’m like, I didn’t know that person was there. I just knew it got done. I didn’t know. But there is a resolve that we have, and there are folks who have been, and I’m going to speak for myself. I flew in for a month out on the line. I don’t live in the area anymore, but I flew out and was out on the line for a month because it was a resolve that if my colleagues are going to be out there for us, I need to be there with them. There are folks who are taking the trains in every day who are outside of the DMV area because they’re like, I have a resolve to be here to support my colleagues. We don’t want the ones who live close in proximity to feel like they’re carrying this on their own.
And so there have been folks who’ve flown to other places and done so many different things on behalf of niso that it has been an incredible, incredible journey. Not a way in which we would have wanted to connect, but nonetheless, this has been an incredible journey in ways in which we’ve got an opportunity to know each other, to build collective collaborations, not just around our work, but around people. And we are humans first. There are folks in which we’ve found out, hey, we share a love for pets. And so we have a community and affinity group talking about our pets and what are some things we could do because financial resources have been strained and what are ways around it to even support our pets? And so when I tell you that there is a connected collectivism and togetherness that is unheard of. It is real. It is true. And I don’t think that folks were really ready for that. They were not ready for us to be together. And let’s be clear, niso is together, one voice, one sound, our say our pay and our day is where we’ve been united on.
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
And I really have to say, it’s like really to all of the departments, all of the groups among our staff union, there’s so many talents I didn’t know. And it’s incredible. And one thing I want to really point out is that our work supports all 50 of our state affiliates. So and now you mentioned this about how unions have unions. Our state affiliates also have staff unions, and a lot of the local affiliates have different varying degrees of staff unions. And everyone is watching this because this is a tactic that can become normalized. And that is one reason why we cannot back down and we will not because we know what that impact could look like. I’ve never been on the picket line before. I’ve never been on strike. I have never been locked out, and I hoped no one ever experiences this feeling and I don’t want them to. And so we have to keep alive. We have to keep bargaining because this work is so important and it’s important to our members because I don’t ever want a single one of our members to have this experience. And our solidarity is just, it’s important.
Mel Buer:
Yeah, there’s something, and this is something that I’ve noticed. I’ve joined a number of picket lines prior to becoming a labor reporter when I was organizing with the IWW. And now that I spend a lot of time on picket lines, in general, reporting on labor struggles across country, and there is something unique and magical about the way that a picket line can just bridge the gap in between workers. I always think about this, strike a case New Holland. It’s a tractor manufacturer in Burlington, Iowa, and first shift and second shift and third shift workers had never met each other before. And now all of a sudden they’re sharing space on a picket line and they’re realizing that their neighbors, that they have things in common, that their kids go to school together, that all of a sudden, whatever management was hoping to do by keeping these groups separate from each other doesn’t matter anymore. The relationships are being formed in a way that are much more lasting than any lockout or strike will be. And so it’s really heartening to hear that folks with NISO are really trying to reach across that sort of divide and to stick it out. Because ultimately what this is, is sort of a, I don’t know, showdown. You’re playing a game of chicken with the management.
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
It’s
Rowena Shurn:
A shit show. That’s what it’s,
Mel Buer:
Yes. And the longer you can stick it out and stay together, the less leverage they have as this lockout goes on, because the more pressure is going to start coming from the outside, which is my final question for you both. What can my listeners, people who are interested, people who care about this struggle, what can they do to show support for your struggle? Is there a lockout fund for individuals who are in financial straits here, or is there a way that they can use their small little bit of power to pressure NEA management to really get back to bargaining in good faith in reopening the doors to its workers? What can folks do?
Rowena Shurn:
So the first thing they can do is go on a website, niso matters.org, N-E-A-S-O-M-A-T-T-E-R s.org. And on there they can sign up to be allies. And we have a list of things that they can do to support us. Also on, there’s a link to our GoFundMe for the strike fund as well. And we want to say thank you. There has been such an outpouring of love and support from our members and other stakeholder communities. It has been unreal, and I think Amber and I both can attest to it, the dms, the text messages. Are you okay? I saw the person besides you, do they need something? It has been phenomenal. The way that our folks have responded, you all are making it so that we can do this. I really wish that our members understood. The reason why we’re able to do this is because of the love outpouring support that we receive from so many people, which has been, I couldn’t even fathom it. As we said, this is not something you want to go through, but if you have to go through it, this is the way to do it. But definitely need, so matter.org is where they’ll get all of the information on how to connect with us on all of our socials because we want to make sure we take care of everyone as well. And so that is definitely a way to do it. And I’m sure Amber is going to add some more S sauciness to it.
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
S saltiness, yes. One, if you’re not part of a union joining union, that’s super important because there’s a bigger picture here with the labor movement. And then just to add on to what Rowena X really amazingly said is look at us on social media. You can follow us on X, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, but a number of us in Niso are actually, and you can follow me at Amber and KB on X and on Instagram uplift our messages. What we’re trying to do is share our stories, share our experiences. So if you have a social media platform, please by all means, share posts, whatever you like. We have been just trying to get this message out there so folks can understand because there are messages from our management and what they want to control and what they want to say. And we really want our stories to be out there.
Members can, obviously, they can write letters. We have on our website that Rowena mentioned, they can send letters to governance and any leaders expressing their support. But members can also write letters with their locals, affiliates, with their state affiliates or any group of members and just letting them know. And any organization can send letters. And so feel free on behalf of your union, express your concern or on behalf of a group of individuals, express your concern. Why do you think this is important? Urging the end of this lockout, but also to negotiate a fair contract. These are just basic union values and so remind, let’s remind everyone what our union values are.
Mel Buer:
Thank you so much, you both for coming on and talking about this. This is extremely, extremely important struggle. I hope that NEA comes to their fricking senses and ends this soon. And in the meantime, anything that we can do to help keep your spirits up and keep this moving in a positive direction, we’re here for. So thanks so much for taking the time to chat and don’t be a stranger. I really hope you come on the show again soon to talk about the cool things that NEA does once this block out is done. We
Ambereen Khan-Baker:
Would love to. We would love to and just want to thank you ma so much for having us, for hosting this podcast, for listening, and for all of you listeners, just for taking time to listen to our stories here. It means so much to us and we’re very grateful for everyone’s solidarity, for everyone’s support.
Rowena Shurn:
I echoed the sentiment and the only thing that I would add is we would not be able to get through this without people like you, Mel, and I know the magnitude of your just willingness to hear us. And that’s what it is about voice. It’s that someone is out there listening and someone hear us and they recognize and notice that we are here and that’s important to us. And so we heartfelt say thank you for this opportunity to hear us, to listen to us, and to make sure that the public knows that we are people back here and what we want is to be valued and we want that value demonstrated. So thank you all so much.
Mel Buer:
That’s it for us here at Working People. I wanted to again, thank Rowena and Ambereen for taking time out of their busy picket schedule to talk to me about this important struggle. I want to do more of these conversations and we want to keep talking to more folks, union and Non-Union and getting more perspectives from you. We want you guys to reach out to us, give us your thoughts, send us a tip, leave a comment, send me a message at mel@therealnews.com with ideas and tips so that I can keep pulling the veil back on the important struggles in our contemporary labor movement. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and thank you for caring. We see you back here next week with 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 the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism, lifting up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and become a supporter today. Once again, I’m Mel er and with all the love and solidarity in my heart, thanks for sticking around. We’ll see you next time.
Labor unrest has been a part of history for generations. Some sources even point to the first ever recorded strike taking place in 1170 BCE Egyptover delays in receiving building materials. With the emergence of organized labor, it was a dialectical inevitability that the bourgeois class would take on their own efforts to undermine the organizational endeavors of the working class by any means. From the Pullman Strike of 1894 to the PATCO Strike of 1981 to the union-busting efforts of Starbucks in the 2020s, the forces of capital have tirelessly fought to keep the worker in conditions of subordination.
New York State’s Mohawk Valley is generally an untapped area when it comes to the historical struggle of labor. Textile workers, trolley and bus drivers, teachers, all sects of the working class that have engaged in some sort of organized struggle within the region since at least the 19th century, if not even earlier. In the mid-1930s, workers in Ilion, New York, in addition to two other NY cites as well as towns in Ohio and Connecticut were engaged in a strike that would ultimately spark the invention of the blueprint for modern strikebreaking and union busting.
From 1936-1937, workers at various plants of the Remington Rand Company initiated a strike, demanding a 20% wage increase, the rehiring of 17 unjustly fired workers, as well as protesting the potential of closing the plant in Syracuse, NY in favor of moving production to a newly acquired plant in Elmira, about two hours away from the prior. Upwards of 6000 Remington Rand employees put their boots on the ground for this fight. The response from the capitalists in some ways was typical of the rich classes, they weren’t happy seeing workers organizing in solidarity. Industrialist and owner of the company, James Rand Jr., let his disdain for unions be put on full display as he sought to crush the efforts of the six striking plants. After the workers were able to unionize in 1934, Rand made it his mission to harass and attack the union with the goal of dissolving anything even resembling a union.
Rand’s anti-union character reached a peak during the 1936-1937 strike. The Remington Rand company was able to file an injunction that temporarily limited the strikers’ ability to engage in pickets, and likewise filed an additional injunction that briefly blocked the National Labor Relations Board from holding hearings on the dispute between Rand and the workers in July of 1936. The pinnacle of Rand’s anti-labor rhetoric and actions came in the midst of the strike, with Rand and other higher ups in the company composing what became known as the Mohawk Valley Formula.
The Mohawk Valley Formula gets its name because it was initially introduced at the Ilion, NY plant, a village in the region. Sources vary on exactly how many points there are to this formula, but the number typically sits between 8-10 different tenets of this anti-worker, anti-union formulation. Rand’s formula would go on to become the blueprint used for strikebreaking and union-busting up to the modern day. Though in some form it does encompass the use of violence, the MV Formula is described more so as a strategy built on a framework of propaganda as described by Noam Chomsky. Others have written about the structure of this formula, such as Robert G. Rodden of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers in his work The Fighting Machinists: A Century of Struggle as well as CIO organizer John Steuben in his work Strike Strategy, but for our purposes, a detailed and concise outline of the tenets of this capitalist formula published in The Nation in 1937 will be used for reference.
Described in the article as “big business vigilantism” as well as the “scab ten commandments,” journalist Benjamin Stolberg lays out what each piece of this formula is designed to in supporting the narratives and endeavors of the capitalist ruling class.
The first step in this anti-strike program is to refer to union leaders and other strikers as “agitators,” often times being called “outside agitators” to prey on the xenophobia entrenched within much of the US populace. In tandem, the capitalists and their allies will spread propaganda against the union designed to trivialize their grievances and infantilize them, painting them as having arbitrary demands or claiming that those who decided to strike were only a minority that was upsetting the livelihoods of the rest of the workers.
Step two is to place economic/financial pressure on the striking masses. This includes moving or at least threatening to move plants, continued refusal of a raise, and other similar actions. An additional effort of this step is to create an astroturfed group design to oppose the strike in a smaller-scale example of enforcing capitalist hegemony. This is typically through the creation of “citizens committees,” made up of bankers, landlords, business men, and others benefiting from privately owned means of production and living.
The third step is a precursor to a political tactic that gained prominence in the late 1960s. Before Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan espoused it as a significant aspect of their presidencies, the MV Formula called for an adherence to “law and order” based on false narratives of violence being carried out by strikers. As with the future use of it, this instance of “law and order” is used to attack the civil liberties of the striking workers through legal attacks and further arming the police.
Step four connects to step two in that the “citizens committee” will begin to try to rally the general community in being against the strike in a mass propaganda campaign. Historically this has been done through using leaflets and utilizing the local press to publish pieces condemning the struggling masses.
The fifth step, acting in conjunction with step three, is where the most potential for violence lays. At this point the capitalists will increase their cooperation with police to build up a police vanguard against the union. Local police, sometimes even state police, will lead the charge, with both institutions utilizing privately hired deputies and security to create a loosely trained militia designed to intimidate the workers and crack skulls if they feel inclined to do so. This is especially prevalent in the Little Falls Textile Strike of 1912-1913, a precursor to the official establishing of the formula, when police violently broke up the picket line and wantonly raided the strikers’ headquarters, resulting in a mass of arrests on unfounded charges.
Once again seen in the example of the strike in Little Falls, as well as several others similar struggles, the sixth step in the Mohawk Valley Formula is to orchestrate a phony “back-to-work” movement. Such a movement is designed to deteriorate the morale of those actually on strike, attempting to guilt the strikers into ending their fight early and creating more propagandistic ammunition for the various media outlets to demonize them. The Stolberg article cites the use of a “puppet association” of people acting on the whim of the company owner. In the case of Little Falls, this was done by the mill owners working with the American Federation of Labor. The AFL was claiming to be the true representative of the workers and negotiated a settlement to “end” the strike, all while the actual strikers working with the Industrial Workers of the World remained on the picket line.
Step number seven is perhaps the biggest application of capitalist propaganda. In conjunction with the citizens’ committee and the supposed supporters of the “back-to-work” movement, the company owners set a date for officially “reopening” the plant, and in preparation they ensure that the plant and its surrounding areas are well equipped with police and security in the event that the “agitators” tried anything.
Step eight is simply an extension of the previous step, to put as many theatrics into the reopening as possible. News stories, flyers, TV or internet ads in the modern day, and using whatever other media to promote the reopening.
The ninth step is likewise a simple extension of previous steps. Keep putting pressure on the strikers through the police force and the illegitimate citizens’ committee, and using the same methods to ensure that those who have may actually chosen to leave the picket line stay off the picket line.
The final piece of this barbaric formula is to say that the plant, or really whatever institution is being picketed, is back up and running at full operation. Returning to the first step, the trivializing and dismissing of the demands of the strikers as a minority are reinforced by the capitalists, furthering the accusations of being “agitators” by claiming that they were interfering with people’s “right to work.”
With so many adopting elements of this formula without even knowing it, such as when reactionaries decry unions as “useless,” or when they speak ill of service workers fighting for some genuine representation and say in their workplace, the propaganda campaign of James Rand Jr. is shown to be extremely effective. Rand celebrated the effectiveness of his campaign, still feuding with the Remington Rand workers well after the NLRB required him to recognize their union. The Mohawk Valley Formula became revered by his fellow capitalists, and became the standard for strikebreaking and union busting.
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The United Auto Workers on Tuesday condemned the manufacturing company John Deere over recent mass layoffs at factories in Iowa and Illinois, arguing the company’s strong profits, lavish handouts to investors, and exorbitant CEO pay give the lie to claims that the job cuts and outsourcing were necessary. “John Deere’s reckless layoffs and job cuts are an insult to the working-class people of…
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Two months ago, from April 17-21, workers and labor organizers of all stripes convened in Chicago for the bi-annual Labor Notes conference, which overlapped with the Railroad Workers United convention. As the registration website rightly noted, “Labor Notes Conferences are the biggest gatherings of grassroots labor activists, union reformers, and all-around troublemakers out there.” This is not a buttoned up convention of union officials; this is a real grassroots gathering of people on the frontlines of struggle, talking openly, honestly, and strategically about their struggles, victories, and defeats, about what we can all learn from one another as fellow workers and fighters, and about how we can all contribute to growing the labor movement as fellow members of that movement. In this on-the-ground episode, cohosted by Max and Mel Buer, we speak with attendees at the RWU convention, Labor Notes, and participants in the Labor for Palestine protest that took place outside of Labor Notes on April 19.
Speakers include: Johnny Walker, a railroad worker and member of the Sheet Metal, Air, Rail, and Transportation Workers—Transportation Division (SMART-TD) Local 610 in Baltimore; Matt Weaver, who has worked on the railroad since 1994, is a member of the Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employees (BMWED-IBT) Local 2624, where he also serves as legislative director for his state; Marcie Pedraza, an electrician at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant and member of United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 551; Jacob Morrison, a member of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), president of the North Alabama Labor Council, and cohost of The Valley Labor Report; Leticia Zavala, legendary farm labor organizer working with farm workers in Mexico and the United States, and a member of El Futuro Es Nuestro (It’s Our Future), a farmworker caucus within the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, AFL-CIO); Colin Smalley, president of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers (IFPTE) Local 777 in Chicago; Berenice Navarrete-Perez, vice president of the Association of Legislative Employees (ALE); Annie Shields, former journalist and union organizer with the NewsGuild of New York; and Axel Persson, a locomotive engineer in France and general secretary of the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) Railway Workers Union in Trappes.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez Post-Production: Alina Nehlich
Transcript
The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome everyone to 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 all the other great shows in our network. And please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we cannot keep going without you.
Share our episodes with your coworkers, your friends, and family members. Share them on social media. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. And reach out to us if you have recommendations for stories that you want us to cover or working folks that you’d like us to talk to. And please support the work that 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 around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximillian Alvarez and we’ve got a great episode for y’all today. Two months ago in Chicago, workers and labor organizers of all stripes convened for the biannual Labor Notes Conference, which actually overlapped with the Railroad Workers United convention. So we had quite a lot of workers and organizers and labor advocates all in Chicago at one time, and it was really an incredible moment. As the registration website rightly noted, “Labor Notes conferences are the biggest gatherings of grassroots labor activists, union reformers, and all around troublemakers out there.”
And you know what? They’re not wrong. This was actually my second time attending Labor Notes. And for the second time, I was running around like a headless chicken presenting on panels, attending other panels, hosting events, doing interviews. I mean, it’s such a jam packed couple of days, but man, it really is an incredible experience getting to share space with and talk to and learn from so many working folks from so many industries and unions and labor groups around the US and around the world. This is not a buttoned up convention of union officials. This is a real grassroots gathering of people on the front lines of struggle, talking openly, honestly, and strategically about their struggles, victories, and defeats, about what we can all learn from one another as fellow workers and fighters, and about how we can all contribute to growing the labor movement as fellow members of that movement.
As I overheard a number of attendees saying during the conference, it’s impossible to feel hopeless at Labor Notes. And you know what? I have to agree. And I want to explicitly shout out all the Labor Notes staff and volunteers who worked their asses off to make this experience possible for the rest of us. And I want to also ask everyone out there to please support the work that Labor Notes does, support Railroad Workers United. The work that they do is so important and we desperately need it. And I know many of you feel the same way yourselves about Labor Notes because Labor Notes is one of the very rare places where I actually get to meet a lot of listeners to this show and a lot of folks that I’ve interviewed on the show who I’ve never gotten to meet in person.
And if I’m being 100% honest, that’s actually one of the many reasons I love Labor Notes so much. I mean, it really is a gift, a privilege, and an honor to get to meet you guys in person. And it genuinely means the world to me to have folks come up to me and tell me about how they found the show, what their favorite episodes are, what the podcast has meant to them, but also to hear more about you and about the work that you are doing. That is the magic of Labor Notes.
As someone who’s been hosting this show for many years, never knowing how many people out there were listening and how much of an impact the show is actually having, it’s just truly an incredible experience to get to hear firsthand from you guys in a place like Labor Notes that the show does matter and these conversations do matter, and it is having an impact. And so to all of you who have ever shared those stories with me, reached out to me to share them, like seriously, thank you. We’re all fighting so hard for better lives, better workplaces, better communities, and ultimately, a better world. But that work is punishing, to say the least. It’s exhausting. And it can be really isolating. And in our day-to-day lives, it can feel like it just doesn’t matter, like we’re failing or we’re not doing enough. Like we’re the only ones doing anything and the only ones who care.
But being at Labor Notes is a vital reminder that we are not alone, that we are all in this together. And when you can see so many kindred spirits and fellow fighters together and you can feel the potential that we all have as a movement, it is indeed impossible to feel hopeless. So while it’s impossible to totally communicate that feeling and that experience of Labor Notes in a podcast, we’re going to do our best to take you there today. For this special on-the-ground compilation episode, I spoke to a number of incredible folks at both the Railroad Workers United convention, so you’ll hear updates on the railroad workers struggle, but I also talked to folks throughout the Labor Notes Conference in Chicago. And this was all between the span of Wednesday, April 17th, and Sunday, April 21st of this year.
Also, I was there in Chicago with my Real News colleague, Mel Buer. And while I was talking to folks inside the conference, Mel was hustling around doing important coverage and interviewing folks outside the conference at a Palestine Solidarity protest held right outside the hotel by the group Labor for Palestine. As Martha Gravatt wrote at the time for The Militant, “Support for Palestine was strong among the thousands of union activists who attended the Labor Notes Conference in the Chicago area from April 18th to the 21st. Although not an official conference event, a rally organized by the Labor for Palestine National Network on April 19th drew hundreds of people. The crowd blocked traffic for over an hour surrounding a cop car and refusing to leave the street after two people were arrested, chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free and let them go. The demonstrators eventually de-arrested the two activists who were released without charges.”
So in this episode, you guys are going to hear interviews from me and Mel with folks inside Labor Notes, the Railroad Workers United convention, and outside at the Labor for Palestine protest. Take a listen.
Johnny Walker:
I am Johnny Walker, SMART Transportation Division, Local 610, Baltimore, Maryland.
Matt Weaver:
Matt Weaver, Brotherhood of Maintenance of Way Employee. Hired in 1994, so I got almost 30 years out here. Currently, I am a carpenter at the railroad. I won’t name the railroad because whistleblower retaliation is alive and well in the industry. I am the legislative director for BMWE members in Ohio. And it’s been very exciting to see how the ties of legislation, everything we do in the rail labor industry is tied with the politics of it. So we have to be very involved in that. And it’s exciting to be here on the stage with you where we really dig you, appreciate the opportunity to speak with you again.
Johnny Walker:
I think it was just an introduction, not a…
Matt Weaver:
I always go a million miles an hour, man. Yeah, you know me.
Johnny Walker:
[Inaudible 00:09:36] hop on that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
No, that was awesome, you guys. And it’s like, yeah, that’s what I want folks to hear on this recording, is the voices that they’ve been hearing on the show or the other coverage that we’ve been doing. I mean, folks have seen Johnny out there with his flag, like at Capitol Hill. Matt, I mean, we’ve had you on the show a number of times. You were the first guy I interviewed after the East Palestine derailment. So I think it’s just really exciting that we’re all here. And folks, if you’re listening to this now, just in the background, I mean, we’re at the Railroad Workers United conference here in Chicago overlapping with the Labor Notes Conference. And yeah, I’m sitting 10 feet away from a bunch of the railroad workers that y’all have heard from, including Matt and Johnny over the past few years. And that in and of itself is just really, really cool and exciting. And I wanted to just give listeners a little taste of that.
But also, we were here two years ago. And a lot has happened in those two years. I mean, we were in the midst of the contract fight. This was before Biden and Congress forced the contract down railroad workers’ throats, preempting the strike. And then two months after that, East Palestine happened, yada, yada, yada. But since then, we’ve had developments on two man crews, right? I mean, there was a class action settlement in East Palestine. Not nearly enough, but there’s something. So I just wanted to check in with you guys, and for our listeners, who have gotten invested in what’s going on in the railroads because of you guys, because of the conversations we’ve had.
I just wanted to check in and just, yeah, if you could talk to our listeners about how are things going after the last two years? Where are we on the railroads? Where should listeners have their focus as we head into the next contract fight? Or anything that you feel is kind of flying under the radar from your side of the rails?
Johnny Walker:
Oh, thanks, Max. First off, it’s not just us, it’s our organizations. It’s our membership. It’s the public community and stuff like that that’s really taken the time to come out and really see what’s going on. They supported us 100% when we got the contract. Forced or not, they still supported us. It was more than we’ve ever gotten. And I’ve been out here for going on 21 years in October. We did pass a two-person crew with the help of our coalition unions and SMART, with Jared Cassidy and Greg Hines, our legislative directors and alternate legislative directors. But it’s kind of like we’re storming the beaches in Normandy. Everyone’s happy the day is over. We’re going to be in Berlin in Christmas. Well, there’s still a long fight. There’s only a regulation. It’s not a law. So there’s still more to be there. And currently, my understanding is, the carriers are already trying to fight it.
So I mean, it’s a win. And it was a hard win, but still, it’s just like we landed the beaches of Normandy. It’s still not 1945 and we still got a long fight. And then even if we do win the two-person crew eventually in the future, what’s going to be our next fight? So I mean, that’s the positive side on my side. So I mean, there’s other things. One of the companies that we work for has a better CEO that seems to be a little bit more kind and understanding, but still they’re fighting with Wall Street to try to big profits and other things like that. There is kind of a change, but still, it is the same railroad, just different ownership, so to speak.
So I, in a lot of ways, try to lie to myself saying I’m out here because I love the job and I can protect the public, but ultimately, this is my trade, this is my profession and stuff like that, and I really want to do this. This is what I love. And the way that I justify all the stuff that happens to me and other people where I could deal with it is like I’m kind of a wall that I could service the customer and protect the community. But even that gets harder every day.
Matt Weaver:
It drives me to think that it’s very frustrating to think that we need things like the disaster in East Palestine to happen to get change made. That was the lead in to two-man crew. We’re looking at crossing safety bills. We’ve got many of the crafts have… I think we might be 90% of rail labor has sick days now. That didn’t come from the contract. And so vocal advocacy and cross craft solidarity is the key to making this stuff work. And it concerns me greatly that we are facing a scenario of more cuts. Norfolk Southern is looking to have a hedge fund, buy them out again and have more cuts, PSR 3.0.
And when’s the next disaster going to drive us to get better treatment for rail labor? When are we going to see better inspections for our brothers and sisters in the car shops? When are we going to see… The two-man crew bill is a positive step in the right direction. But there’s still a lot of loopholes in there. And that’s very concerning when you think of the group of rail labor, who are my brothers and sisters, and you have to be involved in politics, and we shouldn’t have to need a disaster to help drive things forward for the men and women in rail labor.
Johnny Walker:
I’d also like to say with Matt, it’s great that I got to meet Matt through the R struggle, with the contract negotiations and stuff like that. The same thing with my friend Devin out west. We were both interviewed by the BBC. We would’ve never been brought together without this strife. So I mean, we’ve been really looking at other things. We’re not looking at our seat at the table, we’re looking at our table for negotiations. So I mean, we wouldn’t have had that without this strife and it’s really starting to pay off in a lot of ways.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, let’s talk about that. This will be the wrap up question, right? Because I think folks out there really want to know, after they got really… They got more up to speed listening to you guys over the past couple of years on what railroad workers are really going through, what it’s like to work in this industry under these conditions, under precision scheduled railroading, staff cuts, corner cuts year after year after year, while executive and shareholder payouts are larger than they’ve ever been? So folks are now paying attention.
And they were worried about what they were hearing from the folks in this room about all that loss of talent and knowledge that comes with people being driven out of the industry, and all the problems that could potentially come when the railroads are trying to fill those losses with hiring people off the street who aren’t going to have those relationships with the old timers as much as they did before. So these are the kinds of questions folks are asking me. And so I guess I just wanted to ask, looking back on the contract fight, the last one, what are, you think, takeaway lessons we can all learn and that we can apply to the next contract fight which opens in 2025?
Like, from the railroad side and the public side, what can we learn from that strife to be better prepared this time? And also just have the conditions that we were talking about all these years, like change for your fellow workers. How are folks doing working in the different crafts?
Matt Weaver:
Excellent question. So the best thing that rail labor can do at this point in time is have coordinated bargaining, a rail labor bargaining coalition. We’re all on the same team, just like we ended the last round of bargaining under the AFL-CIO-TTD. Our strength is in numbers, our strength is in solidarity. And we all have to realize, I am my brother’s keeper. So if we can’t come together to start bargaining out at the same position we ended last time, then we might be setting ourselves up for concessions. I’ve got great hopes for us to do something like the Southwest Airlines pilots who got, what, 47.9% pay increases over five years. Teamsters did well with UPS, UAW did pretty well. Let’s build on those wins. And it’s time for rail labor to step up, come together and bargain as a group, one team, good solidarity, and we can do better.
Johnny Walker:
I could agree with what Matt says, but I want to go back to, you were talking about with basically hiring people off the street to replace our veteran railroad workers. Unfortunately, that hasn’t really changed. I mean, we’re getting more people coming into the craft, but because they found out how miserable it was and there’s other options, we’re not getting as high quality people. And the people that come here, they’re not going to put up with it, especially the first few years. I mean, that’s got to change. But I feel that the way that change is, like with all of our apprenticeship programs for the building trades or anything like that, they need to be federally recognized.
Let some of these unions and these other crafts come up with these programs that are standard for the industry. Because even though the company says that we’re looking out for our employees, they’re not always looking out for the employees, we’re looking out for our members. They’re not employees to us, they’re members, they’re our family. So if we get federally recognized apprenticeship programs in the building trades as well as the transportation trades, because right now, we have standardized signals and rules and other things like that, but we don’t have a standardized training program for conductors or engineers. We just have guidelines. And each railroad does it a little bit differently. And it doesn’t matter if you’re working down south or you’re working up north. It depends on who you’re working for, where you get certain standards and they’re met, but they’re not exceeded all the time.
And if we don’t start exceeding some of these standards, 20 years down the way, if some of these people fell through the cracks, we’re going to have even worse issues if we save all these safety concerns. So I mean, coordinated bargaining can help do that, but also federal regulation where we can have apprenticeship programs that are nationally and federally recognized as the end all be all. And we can even do that working with the companies, but they’re not willing to come to the table with us all the time. We’re willing to put out the olive branch, but everyone needs to be able to accept the olive branch on both sides.
Matt Weaver:
Because they answer to the shareholders. So it is driven by shareholder needs. More is never enough when you’re talking about hedge funds. And these stock buybacks and that kind of stuff is decimating the railroads. It’s absurd how what we’re facing as rail labor.
Johnny Walker:
Absolutely. And it’s one of those things where railroads used to be a standard stock that had good returns. Now it’s massive returns. Eventually the top’s going to fall off and everything’s going to go ahead and sink.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Then again, you end up with East Palestine. Right behind you is Chris Albright who lives there. And I was there three weeks ago. And so I guess, I just wanted to ask that as a final quick question, is like, what’s your message to the public about, again, why they should care about this kind of thing? Why they should care that there are two man crews on those trains, that those trains are not as long as they are, that we’re putting more investment in track maintenance? This can all feel in the weeds. But as like Chris is living proof of, as you guys are living proof of, this is not a theoretical thing. We’re talking real shit that directly impacts working people. So I guess, what’s your message to folks out there listening about why they should care about all of this?
Johnny Walker:
Well, quickly, Union Carbide went overseas because there’s less regulation. Union Carbide wiped out Bhopal, the Indian town, where everyone went to sleep and they didn’t wake up. So think about what you’re doing here. You can’t go ahead and send railroads overseas. If you keep deregulating, if you keep just squeaking by, that’s going to happen in your community. So I mean, this is something that directly you could affect and affects you if you’re not paying attention.
Matt Weaver:
And let’s not forget, and we’ve talked about this before, Max, railroads don’t go through rich people’s backyards. So think about how close you live. The train in East Palestine, what, two miles from my home. So the people need to realize, the public needs to realize that there’s dangerous materials going through their backyards. We don’t want them on the highways. We want better regulation. We want our public servants to serve the people and control the safety of shipping on rail so that we know that even though there’s a train in our backyard, we know there will not be a problem like there was in Ohio. That’s very troublesome.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah. So my name is Jacob Morrison. I am co-host of The Valley Labor Report, Alabama’s only union talk radio program and the largest union talk radio program in the South. I’ve started saying that now. Since we’re on four stations in three states, I think we could say that. If anybody else is bigger than us, then somebody should connect us, right?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. It’ll be news to me. Well, fuck you, brother. I mean, as y’all listening, you recognize that sweet southern twang. My man, Jacob Morrison is here. We just bumped into Jacob’s amazing cohost Adam Keller. If you guys listen to this show, you know all about The Valley Labor Report. If for some reason you don’t, you need to go listen to it. As Jacob said, not only is it the only, but is the largest union talk radio program in the South. And they’re doing incredibly good work. And I saw my man Jacob walking over here as I’m posting up in Labor Notes, talking to folks on the street. And just wanted to, yeah, check in and see how you guys over there in Alabama are doing. I feel like we’re talking a day after the incredible UAW victory at Volkswagen. Like, shit is going down in the South.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the panels that I facilitated was the Organizing the South panel. And we had on Keyshell Liggins, a Hyundai worker, organizing with the UAW obviously, down in Montgomery. And so that was my first question to her. First question to the panel was, how are people feeling down there? Presumably, you’ve got your finger on the pulse for what’s going on in the Hyundai factory. And she said that her phone has been blowing up. People are really getting a lot of energy from this. I think anybody that’s on Twitter has seen a lot of the videos and pictures of grown men in Chattanooga crying. And you could really feel a lot of that excitement in solidarity in the room, in the Organizing the South panel.
Because down in the South, we know that folks in the labor movement and folks who want to build the labor movement, who want to build the fighting wing of the labor movement, we know that Organizing the South is really a key. It is the key, as Michael Goldfield said, to changing this country. And so that’s, Organize the South, it’s been a slogan on the left and in the labor movement for decades, but nobody has done anything about it. Even Operation Dixie, if you actually take a look at how many organizers they had, how much money they spent, Operation Dixie, which was supposedly a cross sector, cross industry, multi-state thing by the Federation of Unions, they didn’t even have as many people, as many resources, as the Steelworkers drive, decades before in the South.
So I mean, Operation Dixie, I’ve really been reading a lot of Goldfield. And he says that it was just a coda and basically the final attempt to even pretend to do anything to Organize the South. And now, the UAW is really putting some real resources in. And not only real resources because you can throw money at shit and money can’t solve everything, resources can’t solve anything. But they’re throwing resources after importantly winning huge at the big three automakers and actually showing what workers can do when we come together. So proving the case to these folks down south and then putting the resources again, putting your money where your mouth is and giving them the opportunity to organize themselves, it’s an exciting time to be a Southern Union organizer, a Southern Union member. And you could really feel it in that room.
And I’m really looking forward to seeing folks at Mercedes win their election next month, and then folks at Hyundai after that, and folks at Toyota after that. And it’s just going to keep on going. So I’m excited.
Maximillian Alvarez:
We’re about to do the Howard Dean, and then we’re going to Hyundai.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah.
Jacob Morrison:
That’s right. That’s right.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And what a difference compared to when we were here two years ago.
Jacob Morrison:
Yep. Yep. Yep.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Because then, it was like people were talking about Bessemer.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So there was still hope that what we’re seeing happen would happen. But this is a very different moment of a different phase in that movement down there.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I could hear it. I mean, I was unfortunate enough to be moderating the panel in the room right next to Jacob’s, and I kept hearing people just going nuts in the room next door. They’re like, “Yeah.” and I’m like, “What the hell? Where’s my audience? Why aren’t you guys that pumped up?” But people are fired up. We got the Union of Southern Service Workers walking around here.
Jacob Morrison:
Yes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Like we said, we are here the day after the Volkswagen news. I mean, there’s really, do not sleep on the South. And if you want to know what’s going on down there, of course we’re going to keep trying to cover it at The Real News Network and at Working People. But if you want to put your finger on that pulse, you got to go to The Valley Labor Report and check out the weekly report on Southern Labor, the interviews they do with workers down there, the analysis they provide. It’s really invaluable. And I just wanted to ask you, Jacob, by way of rounding out and letting you go, what has it been for you? What has it been like for you being at Labor Notes this time in 2024?
Jacob Morrison:
Oh man, it’s great. This is my second Labor Notes, and just like the first time two years ago. As somebody in the fighting wing of the labor movement, even in union halls, it can get lonely sometimes. It can get lonely, it can get frustrating because you feel like everybody’s vision has been beaten out of them. And even folks who want to build and who want to do good stuff, just so many people in our unions don’t have hope anymore and don’t know what they can do differently. And a lot of people are resigned to hiding behind the fortress and protecting what we have.
And Labor Notes is one of the only places in the country, one of the only times every couple of years where you have thousands of people who believe that shit can be better, who are making shit better, and who are going to continue to make shit better. I mean, it’s just, there’s no other place or event like it. If you’ve never been, you should go in 2026. And especially-
Maximillian Alvarez:
Register earlier than we did, by the way.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s just been so great. There’s so many plans that are hatching. I was on a labor council panel, and we’re passing resolutions to encourage our affiliates to align contracts with May 1st, 2028, right? Shawn Fain has called for the unions to do that. That’s a very important thing, especially with the inability to strike in a contract. If we align our contracts, it makes it easier to do some mass action like that. So Shawn Fain has put that out.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and if folks want to see what… That’s not even a hypothetical. The panel that I was moderating today, one of the people on that panel was the Union Federation leader up in Quebec.
Jacob Morrison:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And they had… Effectively, it was called the common front strike, back in November. But it was essentially a general strike in that mode because it was over 500,000 public sector workers across the province of Quebec who were all on strike at the same time because their contracts were expiring at the same time. So that’s the kind of shit that Jacob’s talking about. If you want a general strike, you got to lay the groundwork. You can’t just snap your fingers and it comes out of nowhere. But if you lay that groundwork and sync up those contract expirations, you then have the ability to do what the homies up in Quebec did last year.
Jacob Morrison:
Exactly. And so some labor councils have got together and we’re passing these resolutions to endorse that call by Shawn Fain. And we’re encouraging our affiliates where possible to set their contract expirations for May 1st. North Alabama was the first central labor council to pass that resolution, I’m proud to say. Also, I think Alabama is the only state with two labor councils that have passed the resolutions. Bargaintogether.org is where you can find your materials if you’re on your central labor council and you want to get the draft resolution. So yeah, it’s just exciting. Plans are coming together, plans are being made, folks are executing on them. And I mean, no place like Labor Notes. So it’s great to be here.
Marcie Pedraza:
Hi, I am Marcie Pedraza. I’m an electrician at Ford Chicago Assembly Plant and proud member of UAW Local 551. Also a member of UAW-D.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. So this is exciting, gang. You guys recognize that name. You guys have heard me talk to Marcie through the UAW big three strike. And yeah, you were one of the first people I interviewed after Nick Livick. And…
Marcie Pedraza:
He’s here too.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, I want to meet Nick. But it’s so cool. This is what Labor Notes is about, is we connected virtually. Yours was one of the sites called to stand up and strike. You were such a powerful voice throughout all of that. And now, I get to meet you in person and hear at Labor Notes. So yeah, I just wanted to ask if you could refresh our listeners’ memories a bit about your involvement with the UAW strike, and what it’s like being here at Labor Notes now after that, especially a day after the big UAW victory down in Volkswagen?
Marcie Pedraza:
Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s been so inspiring. And I never would’ve thought that our strike would have this much of an impact, not just with people stopping me seeing my UAW gear, like, “All right, awesome.” One time, I was in the airport, I had a eat the rich hoodie on, and I had a worker in the restroom, was like, “Good job.” She was a CWA worker and followed the whole strike campaign and the strategy as in many people. And just being here at Labor Notes, running into folks like you or other people that I’ve known online or in meetings, virtual meetings for the past couple of years, I’m like, “Oh, that’s you in real life.” It’s been really great.
And then just hearing other folk stories. Like yesterday, I heard a panel. And this was before the announcement of Volkswagen winning their union. A worker was on a panel talking about how. Because UAW tried to organize there before. It was not victorious for production side anyway. But still trades, they were. So he was talking about watching our strike and the gains we got and how that was so inspiring and lit a fire in all of them. And I was like, hell yes. That was inspiring me. And I was like, “We did that?” I don’t know. It’s just so humbling and awesome.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. It is awesome. Because it shows… It’s like, the fight matters. Right? Standing up for what’s right matters. Yeah. You and your fellow members were showing us what it looks like to fight for what’s right. And that’s inspiring, not only because it motivates us and gets us ready to fight, but you’re reminding us that we are the change we’ve been waiting for. And if we’re organized, if we have solidarity, if we are working together strategically, we can move mountains. And UAW, your local, and everyone fighting that fight showed us that last year. And now, just like Starbucks workers have showed us that, just like Amazon workers, Home Depot workers. Everyone here who’s fighting that fight is contributing to that.
But yeah. I mean, is it wild to you, just like Ford electrician, mom, community activist? But now, you’re here and everyone’s like, “Oh, shit. You’re the guy. You are out there.”
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah. And people have recognized me just from my name or maybe seeing me on some interview. And I’m just like, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.” But it’s definitely been a great experience, humbling, like I said. But yesterday, the first day, I was sitting a few rows behind a couple workers who had their future UAW shirts on. I was like, “Oh yeah, I got to go talk to them.” They’re walking around like a couple of rockstars. I thought they were Volkswagen, but they’re Mercedes. But they’re next. Their vote, I believe, is in May 13th. So we’re going to be on the lookout for that one too. And I was like, “I want one of those shirts.” But I can’t wear it because a current UAW worker.
But anyway, it’s just… Yeah, it’s been really, really inspiring just to hear everybody’s stories. And today, I was on a panel about steering green transition. So we know the fight isn’t over. We have still a lot of work to do, and hopefully more people to join us in the fight.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well say a little more about that and then I promise I’ll let you go, because that was aside when we were talking about UAW and the Stand Up Strike. I know we touched on it a bit, but this is something that is as much a part of you and what your struggle as the UAW and that fight. So yeah, could you just tell us a little more about how you are bringing those two things together here at Labor Notes?
Marcie Pedraza:
Right. I mean, it’s like, all my dreams come true. I’m an environmental activist in my community. So I work on fighting toxic polluters. But I also work in a factory. And these things are all related and intersectional. And as we’re fighting for climate justice, we have to realize that it also means workers’ justice. So this panel, and there was one yesterday too that I was unfortunately unable to attend, but just bringing all these issues together like, when people hear about this green transition, what does that mean? And I don’t really know about that or they might not care about it, but it does matter to workers because workers are worried about losing their jobs.
And as these companies try to make these new products and not necessarily have them be union labor, that’s where they’re trying to cut corners and make more profits. So that’s when I try to tell my co-workers like, “This is our livelihood. If we want to be in the auto industry or just making anything and being union and having these great benefits, we have to make sure we are in these decisions that are being made with our tax dollars that the companies are getting to make these brand new facilities for all electric vehicles and battery plants.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, Yeah.
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, sister, again, it is so great to finally meet you in person.
Marcie Pedraza:
Likewise.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I guess I just wanted to ask, again, less than 24 hours after the huge victory down south with Volkswagen, and like you said, now this train is moving, any final messages out there to folks who got invested in the UAW and this struggle through the Stand Up Strike and are seeing what we’re seeing? Any kind of final messages you got for folks out there listening?
Marcie Pedraza:
Yeah. Anyone that feels like they don’t like their conditions at work, it’s time to organize and form a union and just look out because UAW is coming and it’s not just going to be the big three anymore. I don’t know what we’re going to call it. Maybe big three in the dirty south, or big four, big five, big six. So it’s just truly inspiring.
Colin Smalley:
So I’m Colin Smalley. I am from Chicago. I am president of the IFPTE, which is the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, Local 777. And so I represent, here in Chicago, workers at the United States Army Corps of Engineers. This is a mixed unit of everything from tugboat crew, to crane operators, lock and dam operators, but we’ve also got engineers and scientists and accountants and economists, the admin workers that keep us all straight. I mean, we’ve got a little bit of everybody in our union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah, man. What is it like to represent a unit that’s that diverse and doing that many essential jobs across your unit?
Colin Smalley:
So you might think that it would be tenser than it is. We work together really well. We actually, through bureaucracy, we were split into two separate unions when I took over, and we combined them. Because it’s like, why are we letting ourselves be split up like that? And the law uses these gross terms of professional and non-professional. Which basically is just like, does the job require a college degree or not? It’s totally demeaning and weird. So we just did away with it. And we’re all one union.
And so right out of the gate, we negotiated new agreements about the schedules of our lock and dam operators. They are 24/7 facilities, and they work 12-hour shifts, swing shifts. So they’re rotating through. We nailed down everything that was important to those guys. We really got it hammered out. So right out of the gate, our blue collar guys could see the power of the union. And then when it came time to bargain about telework, for example, they had the back of the white color workers in the office, even though they’re not teleworking. So the office guys aren’t working swing shift and the operators aren’t teleworking.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh man, that’s so cool.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to have you back on so we can really stretch our legs and get a sense of all the different kind of members you’re representing, the jobs you guys are doing, the job specific struggles that your members are facing and all that good stuff.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So I don’t want to put you on the spot and make you give that rundown here while we’re standing-
Colin Smalley:
No worries.
Maximillian Alvarez:
… in the Hyatt lobby.
Colin Smalley:
Yeah.
Maximillian Alvarez:
But yeah. I’m curious just how it’s been for you coming to Labor Notes as a Chicagoan doing this, and is this your first time here? Have you been into one before?
Colin Smalley:
It is my first time here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Okay.
Colin Smalley:
And so, one of the things that I’ve been really thinking about is, I’ve been sitting in these classes and panels and conversations. As federal workers, I think we’ve been indoctrinated that we can’t have a political opinion at work and we can’t have any kind of activism as part of our job, that we have to be this neutral arbiter. But in our union capacity, in our collective capacity, we all are passionate about the things that we do. And whether that’s addressing how changing climate is affecting our people and our neighbors, and especially the most vulnerable neighbors. Because of course, every climate disaster hits the most vulnerable people first. And it’s just the way it always is.
In California, the Army Corps had a failed levee a year or two ago. That, of course, was in a poor neighborhood, because they fixed the levy on the rich side. And we can talk about all that kind of stuff. But yeah. I think that our members are really interested in how can we embrace our expertise and our experience as Army Corps workers and bring that to bear on some of these big issues that affect us. Because we also live in these communities. We also pay taxes. We also are involved in every one of these struggles. And so we’re not this neutral robot.
And another thing, somebody was talking about AI this morning at the keynote. And our headquarters wants to replace our lock and dam operators with automated systems that are controlled from a control center somewhere. And so we’re constantly defending against this corporatist mindset, even in the government, where they’re trying to take over everything. And so we’re trying to… It is just another front in how we’re proving to people that we’re not autonomous robots. And so we’re here at Labor Notes and we’re learning about how is it that we exercise our voice? How do we work out those muscles of bringing everything we can to these struggles?
Maximillian Alvarez:
That was great, man. Anything else you wanted to throw on at the end? Like, where people can find you? What they can do to get involved?
Colin Smalley:
Yeah. So I mean, we’ve got a website at IFPTE777.org. So the other thing is that, I’ll just say that I am running for office for our national executive board with IFPTE. So this is outside of my local capacity, but I’m really pushing for democracy, for a rank and file strategy, a bottom up strategy where we’re going to bring what the workers are interested in and what they want to fight for. And we’re going to bring that to everywhere it needs to be. And so we’re not going to be as worried about, are we stepping on somebody’s toes? But let’s talk to people. Right? Let’s fight the fights that we need to fight.
We’re in this perilous place as federal employees where we’ve got the project 2025 that’s out there. The Heritage Foundation is gunning for our jobs, for our livelihoods. And we’ve got to be ready to fight. And so that’s what me and my colleague, Chris, we’re starting a campaign to really push for that. And I’ll be happy to get you a link for that too, for your show notes.
Leticia Zavala:
My name is Leticia Zavala. I’m an organizer with It’s Our Future. It’s a farm worker caucus of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. And basically, I work for farm workers. They are organizing to improve their working and living conditions in the fields.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Leti, it’s so great to be standing with you here at Labor Notes. It’s such an honor to meet you because you’re… She’s being modest folks. I mean, this woman’s been in the fight for a long time. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your history fighting for farm workers?
Leticia Zavala:
Oh, well, I started working in the fields when I was six years old. I migrated between Florida, Ohio, and Michigan following the different crops. And I saw my first collective action when I was 13 years old. My dad threw himself in front of a tractor in order to stop a supervisor who was harassing and molesting young girls on the farm. And that action really impacted me. We were fired because he took that action. But that’s the reality of a fight, right? From there, I started organizing. I came back to the fields after college, and I’ve been organizing farm workers since.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. And I guess, just for folks listening, because as you know better than anyone else, like sadly, when we talk about the labor movement, we often don’t talk about farm workers, domestic workers. I mean, there’s so many folks who are let out, which is why it’s so amazing that you all have been fighting to organize workers and to help workers who are the most exploited, most vulnerable. But now, you’re here in Labor Notes, part of the union discussions that we’re having. I think that’s so important. But I guess I just wanted to ask for folks listening who maybe don’t know a lot about FLOC, who don’t know about the organizing going on in the farm fields. Could you just say a little bit about what’s going on there? What you’re fighting for? Who you’re working with? And what you see on a week-to-week basis?
Leticia Zavala:
Yes. Well, we’re definitely living a fight. A lot of the workers that we work with are either undocumented or H-2A workers. They’re here on H-2A visas, which means they’re dependent on their employer for housing, transportation, immigration status, and a job. So you can imagine the type of working environment that is there. We haven’t had a harvest without a death since 2020. We are having to work in the fields eight hour, 10 hour, 12 hour days when news are being announced that people should put their pets inside for safety because of the heat. These are the types of the conditions that we’re living day by day.
There’s workers still making $4, $5 an hour on a daily basis. There’s workers that are consistently fired. There’s workers that are afraid to speak up and afraid to go to the doctor because they might not get called back next year. And those are the kinds of things that we’re fighting against. We’re organizing though. We’re educating workers. Workers are taking action. They’re walking out of the fields. They’re signing petitions. They’re creating minor changes at a time with hopes of creating a bigger change that will impact the state and maybe the country.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And I mean, it’s so incredible, so important. And what can folks listening to this do to help, to be part of that?
Leticia Zavala:
We are always in need of support. The hardest time is the summer, right? And people can help translating documents, translating petitions that workers write so that they can turn it into their grower. They can help with transportation. We drive a lot trying to visit workers, and we depend on a lot of people to go pick up workers, to bring them to union meetings when we have meetings and when we have part of the democratic process that seeks us to call actions and to do things. So we need gas cards. We need people to show up and drive. We need people to help translate. We need people to send donations and to sometimes call growers and say, “Yo, what’s up? Why did you retaliate against that worker?” Because that’s the type of union that we need. Everybody eats. Everybody has to support our costs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Yeah. Well, and again, while one dipshit presidential candidate is out there saying that we are poisoning the blood of this country, what are we actually doing? We’re filling potholes at night on bridges like our brothers who died in Baltimore. We’re picking the tomatoes that go on your cheeseburgers or in your fridge. Our children are working, cleaning in The Bone Sauce and meatpacking plants. And obviously this is very personal for me and for you all. And I’m just like… I think it’s, again, a real testament to Labor Notes that you guys are here along with the other unions that we hear about. But I wanted to ask, how has your experience been here at Labor Notes? Good and bad. I’m just curious.
Leticia Zavala:
I think it’s been mainly positive. It’s always important. There’s some tough conversations that have to happen. We are a caucus of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee is a member of the AFL-CIO. Right? And unfortunately, sometimes we get too comfortable in a space where we tend to protect the leaders and the institutions rather than the movement, which is why the institution was created. And so we’ve had some tough conversations with some folks, but we’ve also had some very productive educational conversations. We’re learning from unions in Mexico. We’re forming alliances on how they can help us organize our members while they’re in Mexico, and how we can help them educate their members when they’re trying to get across the border or promise visas that sometimes don’t get met.
And so, we are talking to service workers whose parents worked in the fields and want to know the history and want to connect to that part of their heritage. And they want to learn that cause and they want to support our cause. So I think, overall, it’s been positive. It’s been a great experience. It’s always good to learn in exchange. And we’re very thankful for that.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Just any final messages you have for folks? Anything about where they can find y’all, or any messages about why they should care as much about what y’all are doing as they do about Starbucks or something?
Leticia Zavala:
Definitely. We are on Facebook. We’re on TikTok. It’s Our Future. El Futuro Es Nuestro. There’s always actions for people to take. There’s always a lot of fun stuff that members post about how specific crops are harvested. So please learn more. Support when you can. There’s always calls to action. So if you’re connected, you’re going to… And you can. We hope you can come out and support.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
So, hi everyone. My name is Berenice Navarrete-Perez. I am a currently budget director for council member Christopher Marte. I’ve been a budget director for two years, but I’ve been with City Council since I’ve been 21. I am currently 28. Oh. And I’m also the Vice President of ALE, which is the Association of Legislative Employees.
Matthew Malloy:
Hey everybody. My name is Matthew Malloy. I also work at the New York City Council. I work for council member Shahana Hanif. And we are with the Association of Legislative Employees who have just secured our first contract agreement for New York City Council staff. And we’re really excited to be here today at Labor Notes.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Oh, yeah. Well, it’s so great to connect with you guys and to learn about this struggle, which I myself hadn’t heard about. But I’m so grateful to learn about it now. Tell me more about the Association of Legislative Employees and how this struggle got started. I feel like a lot of folks don’t know. They’re like, “Oh, wow.” People representing city council members are unionizing or working with city council members. That’s wild. A, what is that job like? And how did this union effort get going?
Matthew Malloy:
So, at the New York City Council, there has been a long history of organizing efforts, really probably going back to 2019. But I think what really sparked the wave that got it over the finish line was when New York City Council member, Andy King, who had sexually harassed, sexually abused some council staffers, was essentially given a slap on the wrist. And I think that dynamic of staff feeling that they needed more leverage really was what kicked off the organizing effort, which was a card campaign. And then Covid hit. So then we had to do a second card campaign during Covid. And then we achieved voluntary recognition. That was in ’21.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah.
Matthew Malloy:
And then for the last two years, we’ve been bargaining our contract, which, in mid-April, we ratified. And there are so many great things with this contract. But I think what you would think about it, it sets standard minimum wages at the council. Our lowest paid full-time person used to be at $30,000 a year. Now they’re at 55,000 a year. Paid over time, grievance rights. And most of our council staffers… When you think of a political staffer, you might think of a slick executive type person in a suit.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Lanyard wearing motherfucker.
Matthew Malloy:
Yeah, lanyard. And most of these people are working class people, working in district offices, getting people connected with essential benefits like food stamps or helping them with immigration paperwork. So that’s a little bit of the broad background of why we organized, what we won, and the kind of work people are performing at the city council.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
I would definitely say that the side of the job people don’t see is the hours we put into our work. Our day could really start from 9:00 or 10:00 and end at 9:00 at night or 11:00, depending on the meeting that you’re attending. A community board, they run pretty long. They could run from 6:00 until literally 10:00. So there’s something you don’t see or hear about that is happening at city council. There are folks who are working on weekends. I used to work to a point where I had to request a weekend off because that’s how excessively we were working weekends.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Wow.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
That’s put on the counter. Unfortunately, I can’t work this Saturday or Sunday because I have other things to do.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And you guys are an independent union, correct?
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Yes, we are an independent union.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. And so being here at Labor Notes, meeting other folks who are going the independent route, ALU, Home Depot workers, I guess, could you say a little more about why y’all went the independent route and how that’s worked for folks on the outside who are listening to this and maybe are thinking about getting something started like that?
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Well, because no one thought it was possible. And we’ve been able to accomplish something that a lot of folks thought it was impossible, including some of the unions that are here that originally weren’t supportive of our union.
Matthew Malloy:
Yeah. It was not our dream to create a brand new union from scratch. It was a necessity. Just essentially, we went to various big New York City unions. They didn’t see a blueprint. They didn’t see a path forward. They weren’t quite sure if it was legal. And so that’s really why we built our union. And we’re the Association of Legislative Employees. And another effort we took was we started collecting dues pre-contract because we didn’t have that war chest developed from an international to support us. So we asked our members to commit to paying 1% dues in the period during the contract campaign. And I think that was really essential.
And I think, more than anything, I think what we want people to know, people listening to this who are trying to form their own independent union, is just that it is possible. People will tell you that it isn’t, but it’s a grind. But it’s possible. And there are some benefits to it too. Because I think if we had paymasters above us with maybe connections to certain New York City Council members, they may have steered us away from taking some of the more direct actions we took to get this contract. We were picketing the sessions of the city council every two weeks, essentially, which is that’s how often they meet, for three or four months, being very aggressive, really, and trying to point out some of the hypocrisies of a New York City Council member getting on the picket line for Writers Guild and Actors Guild and UAW, and then when it comes time to their own staff union, just essentially being a little removed from that process.
So I think those are some of the benefits of being an independent union and a little bit of history on why we had to go that route.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, I want to have you guys back on for a longer discussion because there’s a story here that I want to hear more about. But I want to be respectful of your time. I want to let you go. You got a lot of other panels to see, people to meet. I just wanted to ask what your experience here at Labor Notes has been like.
Berenice Navarrete-Perez:
Definitely my experience here at Labor Notes has been fantastic. It’s been good to understand and learn from other unions here who are attending. And our struggle is a struggle amongst other workers. It’s not only in city council, it’s in every sector, the private sector and the public sector. But it’s been wonderful. It’s exciting. And I can’t wait to come back in two years with some new staff members at every level from city council.
Matthew Malloy:
And one thing we’re really excited about is we just had a great conversation with someone who’s very involved in organizing the Congressional Workers Union. We are tonight going to be meeting up with some staff from the Illinois state legislature who are unionizing. We have met folks here at these sessions who are unionizing, the Chicago City Council, the Boston City Council. This is a movement that is really in most states if you look for it, but it’s not a story that’s being told. And I think it’s really primarily about confronting power in the United States, and how labor, and new labor too, not always existing unions, can organize to really deliver for working people, even when they’re up against a really powerful entity like local politicians or Congress members and things like that.
So I think that’s one of the best parts about being here at Labor Notes, is just getting to connect with other people who are trying to organize their state legislature or city legislature or Congress.
Annie Shields:
My first name is Annie, A-N-N-I-E. Last name’s Shields, S-H-I-E-L-D-S. I am a union organizer and I work for the NewsGuild of New York. And I work with The New York Times tech workers on their first contract campaign. So I’ve been there for about two years. Previously, I was a member of the NewsGuild for 10 years and I got into the union through running for office. So I ran on a slate with our current president and on a reform ticket, trying to bring in more militancy and make our union more member led. And she won in a landslide. And then I just got so deep into our local. I had the opportunity for the first time to really see what other shops were doing and what the new organizing looked like. And so it made me want to become an organizer.
So I joined our member organizer program, which is… Member organizer program is a really cool way that we have at the NewsGuild to help members develop organizing skills and actually help the staff out with campaigns. So I was able to take some trainings and then started working side by side with the staffer on some underground organizing campaigns. And then that experience helped me to get the job I have now.
Mel Buer:
That’s great. So we are here outside of Labor Notes. There’s quite a few people outside because we were on a break between workshops. Last night, there was a pretty sizable demonstration outside of Labor Notes where the Labor for Palestine coalition held a rally and some demonstrators were arrested, put into cop cars. And as a result, individuals stopped cars and had a bit of a standoff for an hour until they were like… Now, you had tweeted this morning about what it was like to be a part of and to witness that last night. And I believe you said it was very instructive, almost like its own Labor Notes workshop.
Annie Shields:
Yeah.
Mel Buer:
Can you tell me more about that?
Annie Shields:
Yeah, definitely. So I went into it. I had gone to a panel discussion in the morning with some folks talking about Know Your Rights, free speech for all workers, but especially media workers in Palestine. So there’s lots of stories of journalists or other media workers being censored for speaking out about the war on Gaza. And there’s been a lot of concerns about our members’ rights being infringed upon. So we’ve got a lot of really great stuff going on in the NewsGuild to try to push back on that and set a new standard for journalists that really respects their freedom of speech.
So during that panel, somebody told us that there was going to be a rally at 6:30 in solidarity with Palestinian workers and struggle for a free Palestine. And I was definitely interested in going. I thought, okay, great. This is something that’s really important to me. It’s something that I feel very upset about on a daily basis. I know that so many of us do. And often feels like there’s not much we can do about it. And I don’t know what difference the rally will make in terms of the war, but it feels very important to make this a centerpiece of the Labor Notes Conference this year because we’re at a time that feels like a turning point in terms of what Americans are aware of. And I think that’s really important and it’s long overdue.
So I was excited to come to this rally. And I showed up and met a couple of friends. And really it was quite calm. And people were in the street, but this is a dead-end street. There’s really not traffic that comes. Anyone who’s back towards the end of the street would be here to park in a parking garage for this premises. So it wasn’t a big interruption until major traffic. And I was there for probably a half hour. The speakers had been speaking. And I thought, “Okay, I’m going to actually go and grab my suitcase from my car and then come back and bring that up to the room.” And so on my way back, I happened to just walk into this arrest as it was happening. And I saw one person who was being held by the police and then another person get thrown to the ground and really roughed up. It was very disturbing.
Not the first time I’ve seen cops behave that way, but it’s never a good thing to see. So my instinct was to just start recording. So I stayed very close and I recorded the whole thing. And I was in the middle though, and I had this big rolling suitcase, so I thought I better go back inside and get rid of this. So I came back out. And when I came back out, I realized that the crowd had actually gotten bigger and the police car where the… I wouldn’t even call them a protester necessarily, just a rally goer, an attendee was being held. And it became clear to me that we had an opportunity to make it very difficult for the police to leave.
And so it was very spontaneous. I didn’t have really any friends or people that I knew in the crowd. And I think there was a lot of people just coming together, seeing what was happening and deciding, okay, we’re just going to stay here until something… See if we can just make it impossible for them to leave. And so I think there were a lot of other things. But from what I saw, there were some people that were going inside. And I wasn’t involved in that and I can’t speak to it. But outside, it was quite intense. There were people negotiating with one cop. And he was very clear that he didn’t have the power to let them go and it wasn’t going to happen.
But people just kept chanting for an hour. Maybe a half hour. And it was not clear to me what was going to happen. We saw that there were more police coming and then there were some cars that were blocked that wanted to leave. And I think, honestly, there was moments where we in the crowd weren’t necessarily on the same page about what we should do. There weren’t any marshals around. This was not something that was… I’m sure it was planned, but I wasn’t involved in the planning and I hadn’t received any instruction about how are we going to operate. So it’s kind of just like a spontaneous ad hoc self-organization with people in cars who are getting angry and they want to go.
And we’ve seen that people have been emboldened to drive into protesters and things. So there was definitely tension. And it came to the point where there was a car that was trying to go, and we were like… It seemed that if we let the car go, we would lose the leverage to have the person in the police car released. And so it was this interesting… There was a lot of parallels to how you win a contract campaign. Like we’re making it more painful for them to not do what we want than to do what we want. It’s going to be a lot harder for them to get out of here with that person in that car than it is if they let them go. And we really had them surrounded.
And that’s not something that happens every day, and it’s not something that was just naturally going to happen. It was probably the quick thinking and collective action of a handful of people in that crowd to just say, actually no, we’re not going to just let this person be taken away. And actually there were two people, but one of them, I think, was taken inside of a building or something.
Mel Buer:
She was released. Yeah.
Annie Shields:
Yeah, that’s great.
Mel Buer:
Yeah.
Annie Shields:
But yeah, it was sort of like the manifestation of the thing that we try to do all the time in our labor organizing, which is, the more of us that come out here and stand together, the sooner they’re going to let this person go, the more certain that outcome becomes because they can’t mow down hundreds of people in the streets, or probably aren’t going to in this situation anyway.
Mel Buer:
Especially with the mayor speaking.
Annie Shields:
With the mayor inside.
Mel Buer:
Yeah.
Annie Shields:
Exactly. Yeah. So yeah, it was kind of like one of those impromptu activities where sometimes you’ll get a scenario in a Labor Notes training and you have to jump into it and imagine, “Okay, you’ve got this thing happening and these things are happening too. How do you proceed as an organizer?” And I love those trainings. I’ve learned a lot from them. And this was a real life version of that, a situation that we hadn’t all necessarily planned for. And I’m not entirely sure how to evaluate the success or relative success of the action because it wasn’t really… Mistakes became much higher once they made the arrest.
And I think that’s a good example of, when you try to repress people, it just makes them more upset. I’ve seen that with the workers I work with when I ask them what was the thing in their union campaign that made them decide that they were actually supportive of the union, they were going to vote yes. And so many people tell me, “It was the way that management responded to our campaign. I was actually on the fence. I didn’t even think we needed a union. But then I saw these emails from management and I was like, they’re lying. Why are they lying? And that’s what helped me see things in a different way.” So yeah, we see that act.
I’m not really inclined to be… I’m not a major direct action person. I don’t really go out in the streets that often. But after I saw these people being violently thrown on the ground, it makes anybody want to stay near, especially when you have this community of Labor Notes people where you walk around Labor Notes and it’s like there’s no strangers here. Even if I’ve never met these people, if I’m in line for a coffee, everyone around is making connections and talking about their campaigns and congratulating each other on things they’ve heard about. And it’s a really beautiful space.
And so even though it was a tense and uncomfortable experience and one of pretty serious conflict with what I hear are notoriously rough police in Rosemont, it was also very beautiful. It was a jubilation at the end once they let the person out of the cop car. We opened up the lane and the traffic started flowing and people were running around. And I heard someone say, that’s the first time that’s ever worked, in a really funny moment. And yeah, it was kind of like, holy shit, it worked. Yeah. And it was really cool. It was a really cool experience.
Mel Buer:
How does it feel watching the police car door open and took the handcuffs off [inaudible 01:12:46]? What did that feel like as you were standing there?
Annie Shields:
Yeah. On the one hand, it felt exciting, empowering like, “Of course, you couldn’t get away with this, of course we stopped you. This is what union power looks like.” And at the same time, it occurred to me that, okay, now we’ve come back to a baseline of this person is not arrested, which they weren’t arrested when this started. So the action actually became about something else. And so of course it’s important that these people were not forced to go down to a police station and be processed. That would’ve been completely unnecessary. But at the same time…
Mel Buer:
[inaudible 01:13:31].
Annie Shields:
But it is. There’s still this deep pain, to be honest, that I feel knowing that a really successful and amazing action like this is possible and also would need to be replicated on such a large scale to really make a dent in most of the things we try to change about the world. And so on the one hand, I’m always really pleased by it. On the other hand, I was just reminded we’ve got a lot of work to do to help more people in the working class develop the kind of instincts and assessment of power and analysis and desire to participate in these things and confidence to do so in a collective way. And that’s part of what we try to do all the time in our labor organizing.
So yeah, it was a really cool experience. It was also sad that it had to happen, but also thrilling. And still we have so much work to do to bring justice, some kind of justice, the beginnings of some kind of justice for people in Palestine.
Mel Buer:
Yeah. Is there anything else you would like to say that I haven’t touched on or asked about that you think is important for our listeners to know about the organizing happening here with Labor for Palestine or last night’s action?
Annie Shields:
I guess I would say that I really had a radicalization in 2014 when the war on Gaza happened and I was in a position working at The Nation magazine to work with people who were actually covering it on the ground. And I was truly blown away when I came to understand how little I understood. And I feel like that experience was something that I could never go back after I had that awakening. And I see people in my life having that same experience now. And I’m encouraged by that. And I think we’re in a real big turning point in so many ways. And it’s a little scary, but I’m hopeful that we start changing the tide on this issue in particular.
Axel Persson:
My name is Axel Persson. I’m a locomotive engineer, they say in the US. And I work for the French national state railway, the SNCF. And I’m also, of course, a proud member of the CGT Trade Union. And I’m also honored to have been elected as a general secretary of the CGT Railway Workers Union in the city of Trappes, which is a big railway city located at the southwestern suburbs of Paris.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, Axel, it is so great to have you on the show, brother, and to be sitting across the way from you because, as listeners know, we got nothing but love for the CGT. We’ve had our brother Matthew [inaudible 01:16:36] on the show a number of times. You guys know and love Matthew. And it was so cool to hear that Axel was going to be here too. Even if Matthew can’t, we love you, Matthew. Don’t worry, we’ll catch you next time. But yeah. I mean, because of those interviews we were doing with Matthew and other French strikers, the pension strikes last year, the general strike in 2020, 2019, our listeners have really gotten invested in what’s going on over there and they’re learning a lot from what you guys are doing.
So I guess I just wanted to start by asking that. Since the pension strikes last year, or maybe refresh our memory real quick about what you guys were doing last year with the strikes and where things stand now with the CGT with rail workers in France.
Axel Persson:
So last year, during early 2023, we went out on unlimited strike, but not only railway workers, it was workers from both the private and the public sector in order to try to defeat the government and the employers plan to try to raise the retirement age from 62 to 64, knowing that the government had tried previously already in 2019 to smash our pension system but had been defeated during a strike there where they had been forced to scrap their pension reform due to a strike that lasted for almost one and a half months. And that was eventually succeeded by Covid and the government decided just to scrap everything and now try to basically have its revenge.
And so what we did was to organize a massive strike, not only in the public sector, but in the private sector. And by the means of strikes because we do think that in these matters, there is no other option but a strike that is as massive as possible for two reasons. Well, the first reason, the most obvious one, of course, is because of the economical impact it has in order basically to force the employers and the government that served that interest to force them to back down because basically the price, the stakes get too high for them. But there’s also another aspect to it is that when you go on strike paradoxically enough, as you manage to halt the wheels of society, as you manage to put society to your standstill, paradoxically enough, society starts to move forwards politically very, very fast.
Sometimes, you can see it in strikes, the consciousness, the political awareness evolves very rapidly. Sometimes, things that would’ve taken decades literally happen in a week. And you see people who change because the entire society is focused as a standstill on what the workers on strike have put on their agenda. Everybody is debating in whether they agree with it or not, but everybody’s debating in the media, everybody’s talking about it in society. And it also is an opportunity there for us to put forth not only our defensive demands, but also to set the groundwork for a future in which we can hope.
Because that is also something we need. We need to be able to take the counteroffensive, to launch a counteroffensive in order to not only reclaim the ground we have lost the past years, but also to set forth a future which we can all envision and have hope in. Because if you don’t manage to do that, those who will reap the benefits of the anger that is rising today will be the far right. It will be politicians with solutions like explaining that it’s the fault of immigrants, it’s the fault of minorities, ethnic minorities, who will use these categories as scapegoats, and they will lay the groundwork for a future in which there is nothing to hope in. So it’s also responsibility not only for economical reasons, it’s also a political duty for us to organize these fight-backs.
Maximillian Alvarez:
This is why I love our French brothers and sisters, man. I mean, I think that’s so beautifully and powerfully put. And I’m curious, having gone through that. Because I mean, unlike 2019, Macron and his cronies weren’t backing down this time. But still, we in the states were watching what you guys were doing with envy and with a kind of like… I don’t know. In some ways, we felt so close to you and your fellow workers on this general strike taken to the streets, the images we were seeing, guys like you and Matthew with the-
Axel Persson:
The flares.
Maximillian Alvarez:
The flares. Just looking badass. But yeah, the joy, the rage, the hope, all of that on the streets. But it felt like we were watching it from the Moon. It did feel like something that just isn’t possible here. And now, you and I are sitting in this room full of railroad workers in the US who, as you saw, as we all saw, were gearing up to go on strike. And then the government said, “Fuck you. Get back to work.” So I guess, what is it like for you, being here talking to US railroad workers? But also what are your thoughts? What would you say to American workers now who feel that way?
Axel Persson:
I would say the feelings of love you have expressed are reciprocated. And I can assure you that every time we see American workers, whatever their industry, taking action, be it strike or other type of action, we feel that because our hearts are attuned to one another and then they beat at the same rate. And this is not only nice words, because we have concrete examples of what internationalist solidarity mean, and that is what we are here to build in a concrete manner, in a very down-to-earth manner. For example, during our strike in 2023, one of the factors, not the only one of course, but one of the factors that led that we could hold out for so long was the internationalist solidarity. Not only statements, of course, which is important, because every time, every day when we hold a general assembly of strikers where we decide whether we pursue the strike or not, of course we start by reading out the international statements of support we receive from all over the world.
But even further than that, for example, we have a network now that we have built through the World Federation of Trade Unions, of which my union is a member. And we have managed, for example, to build an international campaign all across Europe, but also in some other countries where we had, for example, Swedish railway workers, British railway workers who campaigned in their rail yards and gathered money for our local strike funds. And it wasn’t symbolic sums. It was like several tens of thousand of euros. So it means literally to several tens of thousand of dollars.
Maximillian Alvarez:
While the RMT was going on strike itself.
Axel Persson:
Exactly. And the Swedish Railway Union was the same. And that money was sent to us and was immediately distributed to striking workers who therefore could pay the rent and put food on the table for the dependents and so forth. And it also showed in a very concrete manner that internationalism is not only an abstract slogan. It showed that workers who are sometimes separated by thousands of miles of each other, they know instinctively that their interests are the same, their hearts are attuned to another, they beat at the same rate. And we can feel that even though we are separated by thousands of miles, at the same time, we are also no further separated than the five fingers of a clenched fist fighting.
And that is also what we are here to do, is to embody that solidarity and build those links with the American railway workers. And that is the sense of my presence here.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hell yeah. Well, let’s round out on that. Because I don’t want to keep you too long, and I know we got other folks who want to talk to you and all. And we got to build. You got to go around and build that solidarity by talking to folks. So I don’t want to keep you too long. But I guess I just wanted to ask… Yeah. Let’s talk about what concrete international solidarity can look like and why it is such an essential ingredient for all of our struggles.
Axel Persson:
Well, it is essential for many reasons. The first one, of course, the most obvious one is that our enemies, they are organized internationally. Be it economically, they have these international institutions like the International Monetary Fund. In Europe, they have what they call the European Commission where they coordinate their attacks. But they also organize military in order to maintain their power and their dominance over the world. They have military alliances. They have political alliances, and for a good reason. That’s how they maintain the control over the world. And that’s why we need to be at least as good as them, even if it’s a difficult task to ahead, because we don’t necessarily have the same material means. But that is why we need to build the front at the same level as they are fighting their war, which is an international war. So that’s the most obvious reason.
But the other reason also is that, because the struggles of one another, we can learn from them. Even as French workers, we learn from what happens in the US sometimes. I’ve noticed that when I say that to some US worker, they’re surprised because they think that, for some reason, we would be like some kind of elite, which we’re not. We’re really not. We’re just like workers in a country with a specific history. But we learn also from the struggles across the world. And for example, over issues like, in the US, for example, when the murder of George Floyd happened a few years ago, the methods that were used by the movement. For example, Black Lives Matter. But not only them because that was much, much broader than that, inspired activists in France who organized along the same lines using the same methods, and it worked.
So we practically learn from each other. And as we can manage to learn and grow from each other, we will be able to beat our common foes because we realize very often, and especially railway workers, given how capitalism globalize, we actually work for the same companies. I’ve met people here who work for a subsidiary of my company here in France, back in France. So we literally work for the same enemies.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Any final messages for American workers or workers anywhere who are listening to this?
Axel Persson:
I would say the most obvious is that, even though we might not always speak the same languages, we of course have our… Each working class has its own history, its own peculiarities, its own culture, which is fine, which is actually part of what makes it a very interesting word despite the violence of this word and the fact that it’s very harsh. At the end of the day, we share the same interests. And it may sound something obvious, but united we stand, divided we fall. And in order to make that a reality, it only depends upon us. And we cannot expect anybody else to do it for us. It’s up to us. Because the emancipation of the workers will be the work of the workers themselves, as a famous German philosopher said. Karl Marx.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank all of our amazing guests for taking time out of their crazy conference schedules to talk with us for this episode. And I want to thank the great Mel Buer for co-reporting with me. And of course, I want to give another special shout out and a thank you to the great folks at Labor Notes and Railroad Workers United for the vital work that they do. And I want to encourage everyone out there to follow the links in the show notes, learn more about Labor Notes and RWU, and support them however you can.
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 awesome bonus episodes we’ve got there for our patrons. We’ve got more coming this summer. So please stay tuned for more there. And go explore all the great work that we’re doing at The Real News Network where we do grassroots to journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle.
Sign up for The Real News newsletter so you never miss a story. And help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
As labor unions, advocacy groups, and progressive lawmakers rallied around Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday, Sen. Bernie Sanders held off on formally endorsing her for the 2024 Democratic nomination, saying he wants to ensure she will pursue an ambitious agenda that prioritizes the needs of the country’s working class. In an appearance on CBS News, Sanders (I-Vt.
On Monday, July 15, on Day 1 of the Republican National Convention, Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, became the first Teamsters president ever to address the RNC. Invited by former president Trump, who is now officially the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, O’Brien’s speech was no ordinary RNC filler. And to anyone watching, or anyone paying attention to the political reality in this country, this was no ordinary RNC either. O’brien’s very presence on the RNC stage, and the contents of his speech, which lasted for 17 minutes, have sparked a firestorm of intense reactions and furious debates within the labor movement and the Republican and Democratic parties alike. Everyone is talking about this speech and what it all means for workers, but workers themselves need to be driving that conversation. In this special episode, cohosted by Max and Mel Buer, we bring together a diverse panel of Teamster members from across the country to have a spirited, fair, and productive discussion about O’Brien’s speech, the 2024 elections, and the future of the labor movement.
Speakers include: Amber Mathwig, a UPS warehouse worker and member of Teamsters Local 638 in Minnesota; Tony, a UPS worker, member of Teamsters Local 174 in Seattle, and a member of Teamsters Mobilize; Chantelle, a part-time UPS worker and member of Teamsters Local 177 in New Jersey; Rick Smith, a 35-year Teamster working in the freight industry and host of The Rick Smith Show; Zoey Moretti Niebuhr, a UPS worker, third-generation Teamster, member of Teamsters Local 391 in North Carolina, and president of Pride at Work—North Carolina; Jess Leigh, a UPS worker, shop steward for Teamsters Local 728 in Atlanta, and a member of the Teamsters LBGTQ Caucus and Teamsters Mobilize; Kat, a part-time UPS worker and shop steward for Teamsters Local 70 in Oakland; and Robert Conklin, a third-generation Teamster and member of Teamsters Local 665 in San Francisco.
Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez 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.
Amber Mathwig:
My name is Amber Mathweg out of Minnesota with local 638, and I am working preload at UPS.
Tony:
Hey, everyone, my name’s Tony. I’m a UPS teamster out of Local 174 in Seattle, Washington. I’m a member of Teamsters Mobilize. We’re a reform organization in the Teamsters.
Chantelle:
Hi, everyone. My name is Chantal. I’m a UPS part-timer in local 177 North Jersey, and I’m very glad to be here.
Rick Smith:
Hi, I’m Rick Smith, host of the Rick Smith Show, and a 35-year teamster in the freight industry.
Zoey Moretti Niebuhr:
Hey, all, I’m Zoe. I’m a UPS Teamster at a local 391 in North Carolina. Third-generation teamster, also Prez of North Carolina Pride at work.
Jess Leigh:
Hey, guys, my name is Jess. I am a preload steward at UPS out of local 728 in Atlanta, and I am a member of the LGBTQ Caucus, a member of Teamsters Mobilize, and a recently banned member of TDU, but still hoping to bring good change. Nice to be here.
Kat:
Hey y’all, Kat out of Oakland Teamsters local 70, where I work as a part-timer at UPS, also as a shop steward.
Robert Conklin:
Robert Conklin, Teamsters local 665 San Francisco North Bay, third generation Teamster. Became a member in 2000. My claim to fame as had been hired and fired from every barn in the local. Casual UPS driver during the holidays. And right currently I’m in sales at a Teamster organized frozen food company.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right. Welcome, everyone, to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor, and made possible by the support of listeners like you.
Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. 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 that we’re doing here at Working People, because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your co-workers, your 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, support the work that 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 around the US and across the world. My name is Maximilian Alvarez.
Mel Buer:
And I’m Mel Buer.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And we’ve got a doozy of an episode for y’all today. As you guys can guess from this incredible panel of Teamsters Union members that we have assembled here, we put out the bat signal and the Batmen and women and siblings came a-coming. We are diving right into the story that has set the labor world on fire this week. And make no mistake, this is not just a labor story. What we’re talking about today will impact all of us.
Mel Buer:
On Monday, July 15th, on day one of the Republican National Convention, Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, became the first Teamsters president ever to address the RNC. Invited by former President Trump, who is now officially the Republican nominee for the 2024 presidential election, O’Brien’s speech was no ordinary RNC filler. And to anyone watching, or anyone paying attention to the political reality in this country, this was no ordinary RNC either. O’Brien’s very presence on the RNC stage and the contents of his speech, which lasted for about 17 minutes, has sparked a firestorm of intense reactions and furious debates within the labor movement and the Republican and Democratic parties alike. We’ve linked to the full speech in the show notes of this episode, and we encourage listeners to watch it in its entirety, but we’re going to play about three minutes worth of clips here at the top of the episode to give you a clear sense of what we’re going to be talking about today, and why it’s important. Take a listen.
Sean O’Brien:
Today, today the teachers are here to say, “We are not beholden to anyone or any party.” We’ll create an agenda and work with a bipartisan coalition ready to accomplish something real for the American worker. And I don’t care about getting criticized. It’s an honor to be the first teamster in our 121-year history to address the Republican National Convention. To be frank, when President Trump invited me to speak at this convention, there was political unrest on the left and on the right. Hard to believe. Anti-union groups demanded the President rescind his invitation. The left called me a traitor. And this is precisely why it’s so important for me to be here today.
Think about this. Think about this. The [inaudible 00:06:22] are doing something correct, if the extremes in both parties think I shouldn’t be on this stage. Now, you can have whatever opinion you want, but one thing is clear: President Trump is a candidate who was not afraid of hearing from new, loud, and often critical voices. And I think we all can agree, whether people like him, or they don’t like him, in light of what happened to him on Saturday, he has proven to be one tough SOB.
Corporatists hate when working people join together to form unions. But for a century, major employers have waged a war against labor by forming corporate unions of their own. We need to call the Chamber of Commerce and the business around tables what they are. They are unions for big business. And here’s another fact against gigantic multinational corporation. An individual worker has zero power. It’s only when Americans band together in democratic unions that we win real improvements on wages, benefits, and working conditions. Companies like Amazon are bigger than most national economies. Amazon is valued over $2 trillion. That makes it the 14th largest economy in the world. What is sickening is that Amazon has abandoned any national allegiance. Amazon’s sole focus is on lining its own pockets. Remember, elites have no party, elites have no nation. Their loyalty is to the balance sheet and the stock price at the expense of the American worker.
We need trade policies that put American workers first. It needs to be easier for companies to remain in America. We need legal protections that make it safer for workers to get a contract. We must stop corporations from abandoning local communities to inflate their bottom line. Labor law must be reformed. Americans vote for a union, but can never get a union contract. Companies fire workers who try to join unions, and hide behind toothless laws that are meant to protect working people, but are manipulated to benefit corporations. This is economic terrorism at its best, and individual cannot withstand such an assault. A fired worker cannot afford corporate delays, and these greedy employers know it. There are no consequences for the company, only the worker.
Mel Buer:
Reactions to the speech have been polarized to say the least, while certain lines from O’Brien’s speech garnered cheers and applause from the conservative, traditionally anti-union crowd at the RNC, many lines from that speech emphatically did not. And while many Republican voting and conservative leaning union members have expressed excitement about O’Brien’s speech, O’Brien has faced an avalanche of criticism from within his own union and across the labor movement, even one member of the Teamsters digital team went rogue and posted a now-deleted tweet from the Teamsters main social account on X, criticizing O’Brien’s fawning praise for Republican Senator Josh Hawley. “Unions gain nothing from endorsing the racist, misogynistic, and anti-trans politics of the far right,” the post said. “No matter how much people like Senator Hawley attempt to tether such bigotry to a cynical, pro-labor message.”
Maximillian Alvarez:
Everyone is talking about this speech, and what it all means for workers. But workers themselves need to be driving that conversation. And that’s exactly what we’re going to do here today. We’re putting working people in the driver’s seat where they belong. And we are so grateful to have so many hardworking folks here with a range of critical perspectives that need to be heard. And as we toss things to our incredible panel of teamsters, a quick note on the ground rules here, because we want to make the best use of this time that we all have together. So Mel and I will primarily be here to ask questions and moderate, so that we’re making sure that everyone gets a chance to say their piece, and everyone gets equal time to speak, because we’ve got a lot of great folks here. And we’ve designated a batting order of speakers, and we’re going to go in that order with each round of questions.
So it’s not going to be a full back and forth sort of discussion given all the voices that we have on today. We want to prioritize giving everyone a chance to say their piece. And we’ll try to go around the table as many times as we can in the time that we’ve got. Lastly, I know we’ve all got lots and lots of thoughts and feelings about this speech. And we absolutely want this to be a lively, fair, forward moving discussion where everyone can speak freely and frankly, but we also want to model for our audience and our fellow workers and union members what respectful and productive conversation looks like.
And we want to encourage folks out there to get involved in these kinds of discussions in their own union halls, in their living rooms and so on. And so swearing is totally okay. In fact, it is encouraged here on Working People. But no personal attacks, no slurs, no anything like that. None of that will be tolerated. And we encourage folks out there who are going to have these kinds of conversations to just check in, set some ground rules, and then dig in with your fellow workers, your family members, and your community members, and talk about the things that are really important to you. And so with all that up top, I say let’s get to it. Mel, do you want to toss the first question to our incredible panel?
Mel Buer:
Yeah. So, it’s a good place to start just to get folks general thoughts. What are the impressions of the speech itself? Did you watch it in its entirety? Did you see pieces of it online that you found to be particularly interesting and/or odious? What were the conversations that you’ve been having with other members about it? Other fellow rank and file in your own local, or online? Yeah, let’s just get your general thoughts to start off the conversation.
Amber Mathwig:
Yeah, this is Amber. I knew it was happening. I didn’t know if I’d be awake for it. For preload, we’re starting at 4:00 AM right now, and so I’m usually asleep shortly around this time that we’re talking tonight. But I had fallen asleep really early, and I woke up at like 9:05. And I thought I had missed it, I was like, “Oh, I’ll find it online.” And then I realized, “No, they’re probably behind. They’re always going to be behind.” And so I just laid there on the couch, and I watched the whole thing. And I think if my brother was up here, he would say that I was screaming at the television so loud in real time. It was like, “This is so surreal.” I’m just hearing this crazy spew out of his mouth. Just unquestionably giving love to Donald Trump, and J.D. Vance, and Josh Hawley.
And my primary thought was, “There is no historical support for closing up to fascism.” You think you’re going to get somewhere with this? You think you’re going to get workers somewhere? You are going to end up leaving behind so many people that it’s in favor of a white nationalist state. That’s who they’re seeking profits or labor for. I was also thinking through how much, or how little applause he got for the most part. There was just not a lot of enthusiasm when he was attacking corporations and a couple of other thoughts, but largely it just felt like everyone was embarrassed and everyone was disappointed. And then to wake up the next morning and see him 100% everything Josh Hawley says, and then almost the very first thing is, “We need to get away from the queers and the people of color in the workplace.” It’s like, oh, 100%. 100%.
And I think that there’s historical support for that, that he did use racial slurs on the campaign or on the contract trail last year. There was the recent lawsuit settled for racism. It’s unsurprising, and also, it is very surprising at the same time how he looked like a schoolboy who just got away with stealing a chocolate, or something. Just so giddy and excited about being there, and then just being so dismissive of the 1.2 million teamsters that he is supposed to be accountable to. And that’s where I’m going to wrap up right now.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And just to a clarifying point for folks listening, what Amber was referring to there, the day after the RNC was, an article that Senator Josh Hawley wrote for Compact Magazine entitled The Promise of Pro-Labor Conservatism, which then Sean O’Brien tweeted from his ex account, his personal ex account saying Josh Hawley is 100% right. And we will link to that tweet in the show notes as well.
Tony:
What I find so amazing is Sean O’Brien’s ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth. In this speech, he talked about taking on big corporations. He said that the Teamsters Union will not be beholden to this or that political party. But talk is cheap, and workers need action. So what will be seen from Sean O’Brien in reality? Very different from his rhetoric. He says that the Teamsters Union is not going to be beholden to this or that political party, but he worked hand in glove with the Biden administration to crush the rail struggle. He worked hand in glove with the Biden administration in backroom deals with Carol Tomé, UPS CEO, to put together a last minute sell out agreement in 2023 to a verdict strike. So I don’t buy this rhetoric from O’Brien.
Chantelle:
Yeah, this is Chantelle. I’ll just say a little bit more about who I am. But yeah, I’m a UPS part-timer. I’m on Dasort in Northern New Jersey, and I’m a member of Teamsters Mobilize. I’m here with a number of my fellow TM members, who we all organized in the Vote No 2023 UPS contract campaign. And I’m also a member of Maoist Communist Union.
My thoughts watching it was, I guess overall not too surprised based on everything that we’ve seen from O’Brien from the very beginning of his presidency. For years, I think it was early last year in some senate hearing, he was talking about how unions are really good for business, how he has great working relationships with the CEOs of all these various companies. And when companies do well, the unions do well, the workers do well. So I mean, I think up until relatively recently in this election season, most or a lot of that was directed towards the Biden administration, and like Tony mentioned, the collaboration that they had on the rail contract and the UPS contract to sell out the workers.
But yeah, there’s a lot of disturbing things that he said in his speech, where he is really trying to put forward that actually workers and our bosses, and the capitalists, do have shared interests. And he said it in a few different ways, which maybe we can talk about later. But with regards to bringing back jobs to the US and stuff like that, really whipping up a lot of, obviously, nationalists kind of US patriotism, chauvinism, which is quite dangerous.
But yeah, I think for me, in terms of what we’ve seen from him, in terms of all of his rhetoric, is all bluster about caring about the workers. And he said, “Oh, I go around every week and I talk to my members.” It’s like, we actually know what you’re like to talk to, because so many of us have met him during the UPS contract negotiations. He came to my building, completely avoided, deflected my question of, “Will we strike if there’s a TA that the workers haven’t agreed on?” Because up to that point, that’s what he’d been saying. And then he was like, “Oh, well, no one really wants to strike. Strikes are hard.”
And then at LaborNotes he spoke on a panel and I asked him a few questions afterwards about the UPS contract, about why there was a new tier for part-time workers, about the fact that there was close collaboration with the Biden administration to avert a strike, all these things. And he completely brushed me off. He almost running away saying he had to catch a plane.
So yeah, I think a lot of us who are pretty involved in I think the Teamsters, organizing, and have met Sean O’Brien at various conferences and conventions, or at our barns, this is pretty much like a continuation of his whole tenure as the Teamsters president up to this point.
Rick Smith:
Hi, I’m Rick Smith, host of the Rick Smith Show. And if you want to find out everything I’ve said about Sean O’Brien, you can check out our podcast. I have spoken extensively about this, since January, since the Mar-a-Lago trip and the whole thumbs up thing. My problem is this isn’t about Sean O’Brien. This is about the fact that I lived through four years of Donald Trump’s tenure. I lived through a labor department that was hostile to workers. I lived through a department, a labor secretary who, well, the one they wanted was a fast food restaurant, CEO, who wanted to eliminate workers. The other one, well, just a corporate Walmart lawyer. And the NLRB under him was horrible. His general counsel was the guy who was instrumental in firing the PATCO workers. So the backdrop of this speech is me remembering what Donald Trump was like in the White House, how bad things were for workers, how many bad decisions came out of his NLRB, the Supreme Court justices that he put on the court that have decimated workers’ rights.
And are going to make it worse. We’re going to head back to the days of the Lockdown era, where if you’re hungry enough and desperate enough to work for poverty wages, it’s going to be your freedom. This is the path that we’re on. It’s the path that Donald Trump set us on. So understanding that is the backdrop. I look at Sean O’Brien as basically Donald Trump’s dancing show pony, who Donald Trump is going to ride right till the election, because what O’Brien accomplished was to legitimize the Trump record, and to softly attack Joe Biden’s strong point, of the fact that Joe Biden is the most pro-labor president of my lifetime, at least, and some say since FDR. So by doing that, you have given a tacit endorsement of maybe not the teamsters, but Sean O’Brien, to someone who I think one of the guys I work with said it best. How is it our general president can call a rapist a tough SOB?
And I got to be honest, I was shocked to hear that from our members, because I work in a place where this is Trump country, and central Pennsylvania is very much Trump country, and our local is very much Trump country. So to hear that was surprising. Now, the reality is he went to that convention for a reason, and that was to get attention. He got to say words in about two-thirds of the speech. I’ll be honest with you. I don’t have a problem with, I’m in favor of attacking the Chamber of Commerce, and the business round table, and all of the people who have decimated wages, hours and conditions, especially in my lifetime. The problem is these conventions, they’re big pep rallies to do one thing, and that’s to coronate their dear leader, and then get them elected. So he walked into that environment knowing that the whole purpose of that convention was to get Donald Trump and J.D. Vance elected.
Now, someone would say maybe someone sold him on the idea that he’s going to be the George Meany of this generation. He’s going to be able to whisper in Trump’s ear. The sad reality is, we’ve seen what Donald Trump does to the very best people. And I’ve been asking the question of, when Sean O’Brien is thrown under the proverbial truck, what’s his nickname going to be? This speech did nothing to help organize labor. It actually did, I think harm, by showing that there’s division in the House of Labor. I think he is opened up the secret that the teamsters are split, and that there are working people who do support Donald Trump. So instead of him going out and educating members, being a true leader and saying, “Hey, members, this guy was bad for us. Here’s all the ways he was bad for us. He chose to pander to the person who made our lives worse, and is promising, well, to eliminate us altogether.”
The sad reality is he allowed himself to be used, and history will remember that. Now, nobody’s going to remember what he said in a month, but they are going to remember that he was there. And whether the teamsters endorse or not, and I said a year ago the teamsters were going to endorse no one, which would be an endorsement for Trump. Sean O’Brien’s already endorsed Trump with that glowing review of him being a tough SOB, and being courageous to have him in there. No, he wasn’t courageous. He knows how to use people. And President O’Brien got used.
Zoey Moretti Niebuhr:
I feel like my knee-jerk reaction to watching Sean O’Brien’s speech was, man, this guy doesn’t want to be our general president no more. He wants to get a job in whatever administration wins this election. And I would agree, I think most of us would agree that we need to, as workers, we really need to be advocating for our issues. We’re only ones that are going to do it. Rich people aren’t going to come and look out for the workers. So we got to do it ourselves, and that’s why we have unions, and that’s why we need to have independent politics as unions. And so when Sean O’Brien says something like, “The teamsters aren’t beholden to any one party,” I agree with that, but what you’re doing is you’re beholden by going to both the RNC and the DNC. You’re beholden to all these sets of politicians.
I think part of why Republicans are able to do this and get Sean O’Brien, as you said, Rick, as their show pony, is because Democrats have just not been bold enough and have not been able to deliver on a number of issues. And Republicans like Trump, like Josh Hawley, are able to grab at that low-hanging fruit. And ultimately, it’s not going to be Sean O’Brien that suffers, it’s going to be the members of our union that suffer. If a Trump administration comes in, we are going to have to face a lot of questions about what parts of Project 2025 are going to be implemented. They want to get rid of unions, they want to get rid of the NLRB, they want to get rid of OSHA. And Trump’s Supreme Court picks have already begun to chip away at that.
Jess Leigh:
Yeah, I agree with a lot of what Rick was saying. Sean O’Brien is definitely being used. He’s being used to sway the vote of the teamsters. 1.3 million people is a lot of people. Either way you look at it, this election’s going to be very close, and trying to win the vote of the Teamsters could make the difference of who’s the president. And Sean O’Brien knows that. Like Rick said, this is a pep rally, this is a big hoo-rah to get these votes. Sean O’Brien ran and campaigned on being a true reformer, on bringing transparency and democracy to our union. He is still creating that illusion by all the messages that he’s sending to the Teamsters, and there are many Teamsters that have not yet seen through that. They’re looking and hearing his words and not his actions of what he’s actually done. So he is, by being there and by speaking and by throwing out these names, praising these different Republicans, putting down the left, purposely leaving these pauses for the audience to boo at the left.
He was clear. He said he did not care about the criticism that he was going to receive. He said that it was his honor to be the first IBT president to speak at the RNC. That’s harmful. That is harmful to workers. It is harmful to unions. It is harmful for the future of unions, which is already in a decline. He made the statement that the last 40 years, Republicans had really been fighting for pro-labor. That is a complete lie. Republicans have been fighting to destroy unions. Look at all the right-to-work states. Look at how those laws were put into place. They were put into place by Republicans.
This is… Like Rick said, some of what he said about big business and taking advantage of workers, all that is true. But Sean O’Brien is working with those companies and enabling them to do that. He is trying to convince members that contracts are good when contracts aren’t good. That is for the benefit of the company. That is not for the benefit of the members. There are still people a year later after our UPS contract that are still saying good things about the contract.
Don’t get me wrong, this last year, more and more people’s eyes have become open. But there’s still a lot of people that aren’t as involved, that don’t have their ear to the ground, that aren’t looking into things, that still believe this rhetoric that Sean O’Brien and the TDU are putting out in regards to the UPS contract, all these other contracts that have been settled, and what Sean O’Brien is doing for labor. He’s not doing good things for labor. It’s all an illusion, it’s all smoke and mirrors. He has his own personal interest in mind. Whatever his outcome, whatever his hopes are for going and speaking at the RNC, it’s to benefit Sean O’Brien. It is not to benefit the workers.
Robert Conklin:
So listening to everybody’s viewpoint so far, I am going to be the devil’s advocate on this one, because I saw things a little differently. Now, when I first heard Sean O’Brien was going to go to the Republican National Convention, I went, “What the fuck? How is that working out?” And the more that I thought about it, I go… And it might be a difference in opinion in this room, but I said, “Sean’s not a stupid dude. He’s doing this for a reason.” Now, we had a straw poll, I don’t know, a couple months ago, or about a month ago, who you wanted for president. And I’m pretty sure Sean got those numbers, and shockingly was probably a lot closer than I would like to believe. And he had to make a decision, because the thing is, I do have a lot of fellow Teamsters that are very, very conservative, who go, “Oh, they’re just going to go with the Democrats,” or this and that, “And our voice isn’t heard,” and I’ve heard it.
They bring the pipeline up and they bring the rail strike up. And it’s kind of like I hear everybody talking about it, but they… On the surface, yeah, it looks pretty bad, but there is more to this story, because we weren’t in the room. Pretty sure none of us were in the room. Of how that handled because it was… I don’t want to sit here and defend Sean’s honor. He can do it himself. The way I look at it is, as I’m watching this speech, my jaw’s hitting the floor and I go, “What in the fuck are you doing,” sitting there tickling balls or whatever you want to call it. And then he called him a tough… Trump a tough SOB, and I kind just went, “What the fuck?”
And then all of a sudden you see his demeanor change and he pivots to a fiery pro-worker, pro-labor speech, which was, if you actually listen to it, was very, very good, and I think every working person in America should hear. I get everybody’s viewpoint of he shouldn’t have been there. And was him not being invited to the DNC, was that a ruse? Because the way I look at it, he kind of Trojan horsed in there and dropped a labor speech on primetime TV in front of millions of viewers, which I think is… He didn’t have to knock the door down, they invited him with open arms. And I understand the optics of it, absolutely. It’s a bad look. I can’t disagree with that. But what he accomplished, he did say nobody has ever been invited… No labor leader has ever been invited to the Republican Convention. This is true. And he got invited. And now I get everybody’s hang up with that.
He did call out some Republican senator. But you’ve got to think about it. If you’re scraping the barrel and all you can come up with is Josh Hawley at his AFL-CIO score of 11%. I mean, he had to find something to praise somebody about. Because if they knew he was going to go in and drop that speech, I don’t think they would have let in at the door. So the way I look at it is, when he was there, he had to play the game, but when… For the last two thirds of the speech, he dropped some shit, he dropped some stuff people needed to hear. And if the Democratic Party was smart, they would have him go in, do that speech, and say, “Kick it up a few notches.” Because that’s what the American people need to hear. Will that happen? I don’t know. But the first time I watched it, I was a little kind of… I’ve watched it a couple times, and the more and more I look at it and when you start listening to what he’s saying, I’m like, “God damn, how did he get away with that?”
Because if I was a fly on the wall in that convention, people were elbowing each other going, “Who let this motherfucker in the room? And are we being punked?” Because nowhere would you ever expect to see that. So it was a surprise. I get it. We shouldn’t fraternize with those Republicans. I get it. But the thing is is he saw an opportunity that’s probably never going to happen again, because they ain’t going to let any labor leader through those doors ever again. So he went in there, dropped the bomb, it is what it is.
My opinion is 99.9% of America has already decided who they’re voting on from president. Yes, it can sway either way, but it’s going to be too close for comfort and he had to make a calculated decision. So I support what he did. That’s about the best I can explain it. Because the speech he made, if you actually listen to it and get past the hatred for the Republicans or Donald Trump, that speech was pretty fire, as the young kids say. So anyways, I’m going to leave it at that. And I will go into my union negotiations and hopefully be back, and you guys can all talk shit about me behind my back. So talk to you later.
Kat:
Yeah. Before I start, I’ll just give a little bit of an introduction as to who I am and where I’m coming from. As I mentioned, shop steward at UPS in Oakland under Local 70. Also, a proud member of Teamsters Mobilize, a small group of rank-and-file workers who are trying to organize and take action to advocate for pro-worker organization and policies within our union. And I am additionally a member of Maoist Communist Union, USA. I watched the whole video of Sean O’Brien’s speech, and as I watched, I had in my mind the conversations that I frequently take part in with coworkers on my shop floor who are all UPS part-timers, all part of this lower tier of workers within the UPS workforce who are paid far less, receive far less in wages and benefits than the rest of the UPS drivers, and are generally treated as sort of second class citizens within the UPS worker world.
And the vast majority of people, when I talk to them about the upcoming presidential elections, they tell me, “I don’t think either of those men is going to serve my interests. I don’t think much will change depending on who is president, whether it’s Donald Trump or Joe Biden.” And I think that that’s reflective of an objective truth that, for the majority of working people in this country, their overall quality of life is not so much dependent on which party is in power, but in the chaotic boom and bust economic cycle of the capitalist system in the inevitable cycle of war and relative peace that breaks out as different sections of the ruling class across the world duke it out for control over various territories and natural resources.
And so when I watched Sean O’Brien’s speech, I was not really watching it from a particular standpoint of thinking, “Oh, he’s crossed over to the dark side.” I think the Republicans and the Democrats, when you look at the grand scheme of history, have not done much, actually, at all to serve the interests of the working class people in this country. And I think there’s an interesting contrast between Rob’s view that Sean O’Brien kind of busted a Trojan horse into this convention versus Rick’s view that he was used as a pawn, and I’m excited to debate those two views together in this podcast. I don’t really agree with either of them. I think that Sean O’Brien made a calculated strategic move in seeing that the Republican Party is making some shifts towards trying to court the unions in this country based on broader developments that are happening in the economy, internationally as well as within the United States, and I think that there’s some specific parts of the speech that point towards that. So in the future questions, we can talk more about it.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Let’s dig into that, right? Because this has been really great so far, and I just appreciate everyone sharing their thoughts and perspectives. And I hope that folks listening, this is as incredible for you as it is for us and I really hope you’re taking what everyone is saying to heart. Because as we know, if you listen to the show, the one thing that I hope you take away from it is that the working class is not one thing. We are the most diverse class, and it’s important that we have fora like this where we can talk amongst ourselves about what we, as a class, need to do and how we proceed in a way that benefits all of us. And that’s what we’re trying to model here.
And I think what I’m hearing from all of you is that, yeah, I mean, there was calculation that went into this. I mean, I am trying to think as a former conservative who grew up in a non-union family thinking many things about unions, this was not so long ago. But I can imagine to someone like me, to someone like the folks in my family who feel that way, seeing Sean O’Brien on that stage, just like seeing Chris Smalls on Tucker Carlson Tonight, it would put someone in front of me that did not exist in my orbit until then, and maybe even leave me with a more favorable impression of them and the union itself. I mean, I’ve been on Megyn Kelly’s show and got her to say she supported the Amazon Labor Union at the time. And as a former conservative, that excited me.
But then as I think y’all are really forcing us to ask is like, but what is that going to really mean beyond the rhetoric? What is it going to mean beyond just the sort of surface level understanding of a political discussion where we’ve got to kind of address the fact that, yeah, union members vote Republican, union members vote Democrat, union members don’t vote at all, right? So you’ve got to kind of work within that realm. But from the conversation in the first round, what I’m gleaning is that we’re really talking about, beyond the rhetoric, what is this going to mean for us on the shop floor? What is this going to mean for the economy and the plight of working people writ large? And what exactly does this portend if indeed Donald Trump becomes the next president and what Sean O’Brien was expressing hope for in that speech on Monday is really put to the test? We’re going to all find out what that means in our daily lives. And that’s where I want to hit on with this second question, right?
I want to bring this down to eye level, to the shop floor level, and ask, what implications does this have for you all as union members and workers in your day-to-day lives, the folks that you work with and care about? And yeah, I mean, what does this kind of approach that O’Brien is taking… Which we should mention is not representative of the labor movement writ large. Mel and I were just listening to Shawn Fain of the UAW speak last week at Netroots here in Baltimore. His speech was markedly different from Sean O’Brien’s speech to the RNC, and we’ll try to link to that as well so you guys can compare.
But yeah, let’s go back at around the table again and talk about what the implications here are for you all and your fellow workers on the shop floor level at the basic level of living your lives and achieving a comfortable life with dignity. Where do you think that this approach that O’Brien is trying to take, not endorsing either party, trying to kind of thread a bipartisan, more independent labor needle here, what do you think that means for our movement? Amber, let’s toss it back to you.
Amber Mathwig:
Big loaded questions tonight, Max, very important. For the folks at home, we did not get them pre-written, so really going off the cuff here. Yeah, that’s a really great setup to continue this conversation there, Max, because you just have my brain all over the place thinking about… I have all these big picture what’s going to happen as you’re talking, and the first thing I’m thinking about is, again, going back to what I said earlier, I believe, is that the labor movement that Josh Hawley wants, that J. D. Vance wants, that Donald Trump just wants to control the profits of, they want that movement for white Christian men.
And so to, again, see Sean O’Brien kind of cozying up to that with this nationalist idea in place, we can all… Yeah, you can carry that out together, and it’s a really good plan if it was for everybody. But when you contrast it against Project 2025, what we know from Trump’s last administration, that he has not calmed down his rhetoric, that he can probably do whatever he wants now and people are just going to support it unequivocally. And we already know that we’re losing Democratic progressive seats coming this fall. And so to even think about what’s going to happen to some of the most disaffected workers, our immigrant brothers and sisters and comrades in those areas, it’s going to completely shift how our entire labor movement is going. It’s going to bring back… I don’t think they’re going to bring back labor. Why would they do that? That’s going to mess with all these other plans that they have.
But let me bring it back down to my level. One of the great benefits that I have just really enjoyed having for the last two years as a union member is that they can’t fire me for my personality. I’m very outspoken. And when I know that I can advocate for myself at work because I’m protected from being fired for doing that, and then to think that, “Oh, the head of the Teamsters union basically doesn’t think that I should be here at all through inclusion, diversity, equity, making sure that LGBTQ are safe.” And then I immediately shift to our joint council, Joint Council 32, shout out, hosted a pride booth. Not just a booth, it was a double booth. So for two days, it was two weeks ago, and we’re one of the few unions to actually have a booth set up. And I just heard so many positive responses from people of all ages just to see us there.
I did have some people asking if Teamsters are going to endorse Trump. And into my head I’m like, “I don’t know,” because we just did this stupid straw poll that apparently has no precedent, so I think he really is trying to get support to endorse Trump. And so in thinking about… We’re putting all this effort into making sure that queer people and people who support our community know that they are also welcome in the union, to read the history and to know how many… I’m sorry. Now my dog is dying next to me. I just realized how loud she was. You can leave that in, Jules, just don’t make me sound like a bad mother. Bebe, [inaudible 00:48:56]. I’ll finish my rant later.
Tony:
To Rick’s point, I might use it in a different way. I think our union leaders have for too long been the show ponies of the Democratic Party who have tried to court the unions for votes and for public support for a very long time, while working actually against their interests, the interests of the workers in those unions. Something I think that needs to be highlighted here is that we need working class political independents. We need our unions to take the lead on breaking from these alliances with the Democrats and the Republicans where our union leaders are used as pawns in games for election season and working people are left behind. What I heard from O’Brien’s speech is that, whether it’s the Democratic Party or the Republican Party in power, that Sean O’Brien is ready to play ball with whoever.
So what does this mean for workers on the ground and on the shop floor, as you asked? I’m one of the UPS Teamster part-timers who got included in this new part-timer tier of lower paid part-time workers at UPS that had Carol Tome singing the praises of this contract and this negotiations for the shareholder. So I think we’re going to see more of the same. I think we’re going to see more backroom deals veiled behind the illusion of union reform. Let’s remember that Sean O’Brien ran on a reform ticket where he promised that we would have open bargaining and transparent bargaining. But during the 2023 UPS negotiations, everything was behind closed doors. The whole bargaining committee was made to sign non-disclosure agreements in direct violation of the campaign promise. So I think we’re going to see more sellout contracts as O’Brien struts around as a union fighter and a champion of the working class. I think we’re going to see him be a show pony for either party now.
Chantelle:
Yeah. I would agree with that. I think… I didn’t mention this on the last question, which was about what have conversation’s been like on the shop floor? And what Kat said about her coworkers is very similar to my coworkers, which is that I asked people… So when there was the debate, which was kind of an incredible thing to watch for many reasons. Also, just because it was like, after that point, all these people in the media and the Democratic Party who had been saying, “Biden’s totally fine. There’s nothing wrong,” after that were forced to say, “Okay, there’s something wrong.” But setting that debate aside, I asked my coworkers, did they watch it? “No.” I mean, like a few, but they’re a very, very small minority.
And yeah, likewise with Sean O’Brien speaking at the RNC. People knew there was an assassination attempt on Trump, but in general, people really… They’ve said what Kat said her coworkers have said, which is just, it doesn’t really matter. They don’t care. They have all this talk. Both parties will choose certain issues where they say, “Oh, look, the Democrats don’t care about you in X, Y, Z way, but the Republican Party will be there for you.” Look how bad the economy has been under Biden, which is objectively true. And so actually that’s the main reason why I have a few coworkers… I was talking to a coworker the other day and she is an immigrant from Central America, and she was like, “I think Trump is probably the way to go because look how horrible the situation is under Biden.”
So I also think, as somewhat of a sidebar, it’s pretty important that people aren’t… Not saying people here in this virtual room, but just broadly, aren’t painting all Trump voters with the same brush. Because I think there are so many people who have become totally disillusioned with the Democratic Party and how it’s really betrayed the working class people, how it’s betrayed Black people, immigrants. And because it’s so drilled into us that any kind of political party, any kind of political action, has to be either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. So when people have just been betrayed by the Democratic Party, then they think, “Okay, maybe the Republican Party.” And then we’ll see that again. And that’s kind of like what we see, I feel, every election season.
But to go back to my original point, I think, yeah, the vast majority of my coworkers feel like they’re just struggling. That, especially, just to say right now, it’s over 90 degrees in the warehouse and it’s hard work. We’re, in general, getting fewer hours. People can see also when we do talk about what’s going on internationally, how much money and weapons the US is sending to Ukraine, to Israel to bomb Gaza. All these things people feel, I think, rightly, very upset about and do see the overall unity of the Democratic and Republican parties on these main topics. So that’s all to say, of course there’s going to be different things that, if Trump wins, which I think, based on what’s happening in the society, it seems quite likely that he’ll win. Of course, there’s going to be attacks on the working class, which we’ll have to oppose, which we’ll have to fight against. But that would happen under a Biden presidency as well, or they end up going with another nominee. But I’ll stop there.
Rick Smith:
I would love to live in a perfect world where we all had the same ideas and we were all moving in the same direction. I look at O’Brien and I think he’s reading the tea leaves of the union. That we’re a legacy union with a lot of people… I look at myself, I work in a place where there’s a lot of old straight white guys who they would be okay with a anti woke union, because all they care about is putting food on their table and a roof over their heads. They want to go to work and have the job that we had back when I started. I started back in the late ’80s. The freight job was a gold standard job. Now, it’s reasonable. And they’ve seen that loss of power over the years, and this idea, I used it say it all the time, a drowning man will grab an anchor if you throw it to him. And we’re in that kind of situation. The Democrats have been less bad. There’s no question about it. Every bit of bipartisanship that Sean says he wants has gone against working people. I talked about the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which was true bipartisanship. Thirteen members in the house voted against it, 70 Senators voted for it. A Democratic Senator signed it into law because it was going to help consumers. It was supposed to help our fuel problems. It was supposed to help all of this stuff, but it fucked over the entire freight industry in this country.
And what we ended up with is what was a solidly middle-class job, in most cases, being a sweatshop on wheels. So I understand the anger and everyone has their issue. I keep saying the labor movement should be the place where we reunite this country, where we come together and we fight for these ideas and attempt to go after and be a more perfect union.
But for me, the political system that we have is the one you have to play in. Would I love to have a different one? Sure. But that’s going to take us. If you’ve got a broken government, if you’ve got broken legislative branches, you’ve got broken society and broken people because we can’t seem to agree on what we want. So I asked the question, how did Sean O’Brien go from marching in the street with Bernie Sanders to sucking up to a wannabe dictator?
Had we gone into the streets more and pulled people into this movement and instead of having 6% private sector union density, have the 22% union density that when I started, or the 35% union density that we had when my grandparents were around. Had we that then you have political power. We’re holding on to little bits and pieces of it because most voters, and this is the sad reality, most voters, the union endorsement doesn’t seem to matter.
I remember when I first started, a business agent would walk into the lunchroom and he’d throw it out a leaflet and say, “This is who we’re supporting,” and everyone would pick one up because they knew that that union had their best interest in mind. You walk into my lunchroom right now and you say, “We’re supporting Joe Biden or the Democrats,” you better know where the exit is because you’re probably not going to get out of there. And this has been decades in the making. But for me, I look at this second, Joe Biden has done some really good things, especially for the Teamsters. The fact that he bailed out, which was the number one legislative priority of the Teamsters, was to shore up the Multi-Employer Pension Fund, passed the Butch Lewis Act, and ensure that retirees are able to retire.
Biden did that. Trump didn’t do it. Obama didn’t do it. Biden did it.
And the loyalty and the thank you that he got was what we saw. O’Brien went and everyone here just said, “Both sides suck. The system sucks.” Well, it’s the only one we’ve got right now. I don’t see anything changing. So for me, it’s about encouraging our co-workers and encouraging our friends and neighbors, yeah, pick a side, but maybe pick better people to run. Maybe to run yourself. This is what the Republicans have done and you have to give them credit.
I go back to a guy named Ralph Reed. He was the head of the Moral Majority or whatever the hell their name was. He was asked how they built their ecosystem and he pulled out the SWOC handbook, the Steelworkers Organizing Committee handbook, and said, this is how we did it. We talked to people, we got into the churches, we got into their spaces, and we organized. This is what we should be doing. You got issues? We need to be organizing. And that’s where I would’ve preferred Sean O’Brien to spend his time.
I mean, in three minutes, I can’t go through everything there, but at the end of the day, the Republicans and the people in that convention hall have been the ones who have done an awful lot of damage. Democrats haven’t been a lot of help, but the Republicans are the ones holding the noose around our neck. So that’s where I’m going to leave it.
Zoey Moretti Niebuhr:
Yeah, I think coming back to how it is on the shop floor is I had a conversation this morning about the election, and most people that I talked to about this election really are either apathetic or… They’re not diehard one way or another. And there definitely are diehards, and I think the people watching the Republican National Convention are diehard Republicans. And so if Sean O’Brien really wants to give a speech to diehard Republicans, that seems like the kind of speech he was trying to give in terms of appealing to America first and trying to tie in the union politics to America first.
But I think that as a union, we really should be focusing on the majority of Americans who don’t vote or don’t really prefer one candidate or the other. Even among people who support either Trump or Biden, probably are not enthusiastic supporters one way or another.
And so going to the RNC and him taking this middle-of-the-road approach, to me, I feel like it does more damage to associate ourselves as a union with these political parties that Americans already are angry at. And I’ve been involved in a number of organizing campaigns, and one thing I hear a lot is, especially in North Carolina where a lot of people have no experience with unions, really don’t know much about them, I hear, “Oh, this is a political thing.” It’s like, “Well, no, not quite.”
They see it as we’re involved in some sort of government election, and I have to explain, “No, a union is about you and your coworkers coming together to demand change and demand better in the workplace and demand better as workers, period.” And I really would like for us as a union to get back to those independent politics. I think it’s disingenuous for Sean O’Brien to say that we’re taking this middle-road, bipartisan approach. Instead, we’re dipping our hands into both political parties.
I’m not a fan of Biden, definitely not a fan of Trump. I think that’s true for a lot of people. But going back to what Rick said, it’s Republicans that are strangling us. North Carolina still has a Jim Crow law on the books that prevents public sector bargaining for Republican employees. And Republicans have a super-majority in the legislature here, and not one Republican supports getting rid of that Jim Crow law.
And so for me, it makes it harder for me to talk to folks and talk about the issues surrounding local issues. If we have somebody at the top of our union leadership that is essentially giving a check mark to those Republicans instead of talking with them, I’ve got no problem talking with Republican co-workers or co-workers that are more conservative. And I think we should be doing that and figuring out how we can have those common issues and how we can have those conversations where we can talk through these things. Because generally, I feel like people are receptive to that kind of thing.
But when we’re talking to a room full of politicians that are cheerleading Donald Trump, that’s a whole other Republican, then somebody that supports Republicans.
Jess Leigh:
Yeah, so being a shop floor leader means standing up against the company, fighting back against contract violations. The one good thing about having a contract is that it is in black and white. It says what they can and they cannot do. If you don’t have a contract, you don’t even have that. Essentially, a company can do whatever they want. If it’s not a direct violation of a law, they can do as they please. They can pull stuff out of the air, do one thing one day, another day, something else a different day. Just make up the rules as they go. Having a contract, having it on paper in black and white, that is an advantage.
Does the company follow it? A lot of times they don’t, but at least you have that. You have that to refer to. You have that to stand behind and you can push back against the company. Outside of that, having the support of your members, having the support of a fellow steward, having the support of your business agent, your local president, and then even beyond that, like we talked about, the NLRB, the National Labor and Relations Board. You can go to them. You can file charges against the company through them.
If your union was to not support you, you can bring charges against your union. We know that Trump wants to disband the NLRB. He wants to put in people that are not going to protect the rights of workers, like Joe Biden added people that were more pro-union. We have a better NLRB than we had under Trump. And that gives people more confidence to take on those issues on the shop floor, to know that they have law in place behind them and not empty law. Laws that will ultimately be upheld and carried out. We probably won’t get those things under Trump. That’s going to change the conditions on your shop floor. If people know that there’s nobody to back them up, how are they going to feel confident enough to stand up to the bosses?
How are they going to feel confident enough to stand up for their fellow co-worker when they see these wrongdoings happening? That can have huge implications for being able to change your workplace conditions for it to be a safe workplace. Our companies put us in unsafe situations all the time, every single day. We already have to fight that now. Imagine having less protections than we already do. That’s regression. We’ve been regressing for many years. We’ve been losing little more, little more, little more, little more. We’re not trying to straddle the road and play both sides. We’re trying to actually regain so much of what we lost. You can’t do that by playing footsie with the Democrats and the Republicans.
Neither one of them are here to truly serve the interest of the people. And I understand people who want to vote either way. Everybody’s struggling to survive.
People see that it’s bad under Biden. A lot of people have the mindset of can’t really be any worse under Trump. It actually can be worse under Trump, but so many things are so bad that people don’t see the harm and like, “Well, let’s somebody else.” And we only have these two options, right? So like, “Well, this guy’s been awful, so let’s try this guy.”
O’Brien has an opportunity. He has a platform to stand on and really influence the Teamster members and not just the Teamster members, other union members, other non-union members, other workers. He needs to take that opportunity to educate the members, teach the members how exactly neither the Democrats nor the Republicans or serving the interests of the people. Start growing that idea that we have to form another party. We need a Labor Party. Is that going to happen overnight? No, but start getting that message, that narrative out.
Somebody mentioned, “Get in the streets, get in the churches, get in the community, talk to people.” The majority of Americans are low-income and middle-income people. Those people are not being engaged with. They’re not being educated. They’re not being taught. Take them under your wing, and help open their eyes and help them see that there is a path forward. Put hope into people’s hearts, not just having to choose the lesser of two evils that we’ve been doing for so long.
Create hope. May not happen tomorrow. Maybe it’s hope that we leave for our children, but we leave for the next generation to leave it better than we have found because all it’s done is gone downhill while most of us have been involved. And all these two parties that we have in place, they’re propping up capitalism, the elite. They’re propping up the people and the system who exist to exploit and tear down the working class to extract as much value as possible by any means necessary. Everybody’s dealing with that. Anybody in the working class can see. No matter what industry you’re in, most places are they have too much work, the amount of people to do it.
And it’s frustrating day in, day out, and people are sick of that, but neither party is going to help change that. Too many people are influenced by money and power and their own personal opportunity, but that’s not what’s good for people. That’s not what’s good for our country. That’s not what’s going to help change the path that we’re on. And as long as we keep choosing the lesser of two evils, we’re going to continue down the same road that we’ve been going on, whether that’s a Republican or a Democrat. We have to change the whole system to make real progress. And O’Brien has the opportunity to begin those changes and lay that foundation so that we have hope for a better future.
Kat:
Really well said, Jess. It’s a side comment that’s not really responding to this question so much, but I was talking to a coworker the other day about the debate that had happened, and he was like, “Man, my dad used to tell me we have to choose the lesser of the two evils, but I look at these two guys and I don’t even think one of them is less evil than the other.” So I think that’s where a lot of my people at UPS are at.
But to get back to this question at hand, Max, you had asked about the implications of Sean O’Brien’s rhetoric at this speech for people at the shop floor level. And I’d like to focus on this one particular quote that really stood out for me in the speech. He was listing a bunch of demands, so to speak, to the Republican Party, and one of them was we need trade policies that put American workers first. It needs to be easier to keep businesses in America. Trade policies that put American workers first. It needs to be easier to keep businesses in America.
So what the hell is he actually talking about? Well, he’s talking about some major strategic shifts that the ruling class in this country is making right now in their attempts to decrease their economic dependence on the country of China in the face of increasing competition, both economically and politically between the ruling classes of America and China.
And to be clear, I don’t think that the working people of our country are enemies with the working people of China. I think that we actually are part of one international proletarian class, and we need to stand in solidarity with the general masses of China. But it is a fact that the ruling classes between the US and China are increasingly competitive to the point of possibly ultimately turning into a third world war. But we’re not quite there yet. Nevertheless, the capitalists in this country are going to have to make some changes in order to not be so dependent on China anymore.
In order to do that, they’re going to have to make a number of changes to how they’re operating currently. But two changes that are going to especially have an impact on people at the shop floor level is one, they’re going to have to impose a lot higher tariffs on things being imported from China.
And two, they’re going to have to build a lot more industrial production facilities in this country as well as maybe in other countries that aren’t China. But there will be some re-industrialization happening in this country in the next few decades because of these shifts that they have to make. And on the one hand, this will lead to a larger number of jobs being created in this country, and as trade unionists, as leftists, et cetera, we’re not opposed to job creation. But what we are opposed to is that happening entirely on the terms of the ruling class. And if given their way, of course, they will always carry these plans out in a way that serves their interest entirely. And I think that one of the things that they see from their perspective is, okay, we’re going to have to actually corral a lot of people, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of workers into these new sites of industrial production, and we’re going to have to figure out a way to keep them under control.
And one way that they will be able to do that is by courting the unions, by trying to establish very cozy relationships with some of the highest-level leadership of those unions. And by cutting slimy deals like the ones that Tony described between the leadership of the Teamsters and the UPS executives in last summer’s UPS contract. So in addition to the need to increase industrial production, there’s also this factor of needing to establish new and different relationships with the unions. And I think that that’s a big part of what we’re seeing with Sean O’Brien speaking at this Republican National Convention.
And I kind of disagree with some of the panelists who said, oh, this was just a one-off thing. We’re never going to see it again. Sean O’Brien blew it out of the water, and there’s going to be no more chances. I do think that we’re going to see this pattern continuing throughout time.
On the flip side of increasing production, increasing tariffs and restricting trade from other countries is going to lead to further inflation. And I think to be realistic, Trump is pushing for these things to happen at a faster rate than Biden or the Democrats. And so that is a concrete distinction in the way that he’s approaching things and he’s putting forward a clearer strategy for it that he sees as being most advantageous for the ruling class.
But to loop this back around to the original Sean O’Brien quote, we need to be clear that these trade policies are not putting American workers first. These trade policies are being crafted and executed in the interests of the ruling class, and they will try to throw us a few crumbs. They will try to use fancy phrases like this to convince us that it’s in our interest to go along with whatever their plan is.
But in reality, it’s going to be the same as it always has been, which is that we need to fight for every inch of better wages and working conditions, every inch of not being controlled by people in our unions who are in bed with the capitalists and the politicians, and that’s never going to come without a struggle. So these are some examples of ways that I see the speech that Sean O’Brien gave relating directly to the lives of working class people in this country in the near and midterm future.
Mel Buer:
Great. Thank you so much everyone for such a cool range of conversation here. We’re going to kind of bring it back around to just final reflections. So I’ll just ask this question. What are your final thoughts on what this means for the election and labor’s relation to electoral politics?
And I know some of you have already sort of touched on this in past responses, but yeah, what are your final thoughts for rounding out this incredible panel?
Amber Mathwig:
I don’t want to miss an opportunity to remind everybody that it is the 90th anniversary of the beautiful strike-filled summer of 1934, and I’m here in Minneapolis as part of that. We don’t like adding any words to the end because we can’t agree on them.
Part of the people making sure that the past is remembered, and literally one of the associated art exhibits is called 1934 & Now. How do the labor struggles of 1934 relate to what we’re dealing with now? And in 1934, the truckers, drivers, and helpers union did not have approval of Teamster leadership to go on strike. They did not have approval kind of to do a lot of things.
And one of the things that always sticks with me, and I was trying to find it while I was waiting, was one of the initial things that Teamsters were not interested in were organizing part-timers, and a lot of us here are part-timers. And I think that says something about why we are so strong on what we’re saying. And another reason why it didn’t surprise me that Sean O’Brien was willing to throw everybody under the bus is because once again, leadership has decided that the power comes from the top down when it doesn’t.
And that no matter what happens with Sean O’Brien, I think we should honor his request to go back to driving as soon as possible. No matter what happens in the election, if we still have a semi-functioning country and company shortly after that, we need to take back that power. And we need to get people interested in not just filing grievances, but asserting the fact that we make this company run every single day.
They’re coming up on, well, at my facility anyways, we’re going on to phase two of automation. First thing they want to do is take away our music. You can’t hear the beep, beep, beep. That’s what I used to call the wrist thing if you have headphones in. But really it’s because they want to control us. They want to make us miserable. They want to have fuck ups that they can blame on people, and that’s why they need machines. And that’s a whole nother episode for us, Max, if we want to talk about AI implementation and preload. But that this is what he’s cozying up to is people trying to do away, people trying to constantly force workers to be reset, so you’re at the lowest wage, so you have to work more so that you’re more stressed and that you don’t have time to organize.
I’m fortunate that I can make ends meet as a slightly above part-timer with some few odds and end jobs and sharing cost of living with some other people, but even that time that I have doesn’t feel enough sometimes because we don’t have time on the shop floor. We don’t. We are so exhausted and run wild right now and for the past several weeks that most of these conversations are happening in the parking lot or over text message, and therefore they’re not reaching enough people. It’s the people that have already gravitated towards or that have gravitated towards me, that we’re having these conversations about how to make our union stronger, about how to deal with all of these changes that are coming up.
And that again, feel like Sean O’Brien’s ready to sell us all out for his own ego. And that may be a reason that we need to question the way that the hierarchy of the Teamsters is set up because we can’t seem to get away from this corrupt Teamster boss thing. At some point, we got to figure out that concentrating all of the power in one person is not going to lead us to stability and gains in the labor workforce. And I think that was good. So I’m just going to stop right there. Lovely to be here with you all again.
Tony:
Yeah, thanks for those thoughts, Amber. As Rick brought up, union density in the US has been shrinking for decades, and in the midst of the economic and political shift that Tamra was talking about. The only way that the working class is going to defend itself and expand its power economically and politically is if we call a spade a spade and see behind the rhetoric of a union leader like Sean O’Brien, who talks big talk about taking on corporate elites while shaking their hands in closed-door meetings and leaving Teamster workers and the whole working class in the dust.
So I think a key task for the Working Class Movement is to expose this betrayal, because this is not working class political independence that we’re seeing in this speech. This is class collaborationism of a different form than what we’ve seen in the last couple decades with the previous loyalty to the Democratic Party.
This is why this struggle for against class collaboration in our unions is so vital. For all those Teamsters listening to this podcast, I encourage you to come attend our next Teamsters Mobilize meeting. We’re going to be talking about the presidential election campaign. Go to our website at teamstersmobilize.com and sign up to come talk about how we can build working class political independence and struggle against these fraud union leaders.
Chantelle:
Yeah, I think in terms of final reflections, well, I think it’s been a great conversation tonight, and it’s just really important that we do take the time to have these types of conversations, of course, in the election year, but also more broadly, because I think, I know, we’re all quite busy on the shop floor and in our locals and organizing with our coworkers. There’s a lot to deal with on the day-to-day, a lot of harassment, a lot of just trying to get our coworkers to be engaged and to fight back and to not let a supervisor just beat you down.
But it is so important that we do step back, also, to think more broadly, like how do we actually address the issues that we’re facing, that the working class is facing, well, in this country, but in every country. I think what Sean O’Brien was really, one of the things he was saying in his speech… I mean, Tom said is true. What Sean O’Brien is doing is class collaborationism, but O’Brien doesn’t even talk about classes in that speech. What he talks about… First of all, he says the workers. He never says there’s actually a working class, but he talks about the corporates and the elites and the big banks and big tech, and the way he describes them is as if there’s some bad capitalists, like those people he’s just described, but then also good capitalists, who know to actually work with the workers hand-in-hand and to advance the same single interest, whatever it may be.
In this case, this is really obviously pushing U.S. nationalism and saying that there’s the shared interest of getting more jobs back to the U.S. and we’ll work together to do that. But I think it’s just really important that we do take a step back. We do see the fact that we, as a class, have certain interests that we have to fight for that we in no way can actually advance that fight by just working with and collaborating with and having trust in and belief in the capitalists, whether or not they’re the ones that are running the companies that we work at or that are running these various political parties or the big banks and the media, et cetera.
We really have to find an independent way forward. I know different people have talked about that today, that we do need political independence, that eventually we need to build the formation of a Labor Party. I think earlier it was Rick, maybe, talking about… He said this is a broken system. It’s a bad system. We need a new system. I’d love to live in a new system, but this is what we’ve got right now, and we can’t be idealistic and say that we’re going to be able to build a totally new society tomorrow, but I do think our fight and our discussion within the Working Class Movement today really should be aimed at thinking about how can we get to the point where we do build enough unity in the working class, where we do build enough clarity and strength where we can have a revolution, have a totally new society where actually the working class is in power.
We’re told all the time that that’s so impossible. I think, obviously, it’s in the capitalist class’s interest for us to feel like that’s impossible, for us to feel… Like my coworker said that, I think, yesterday. She said, “I’d love to have a revolution, but that’s never going to work. That’s never worked. People are too selfish. People don’t want to fight. I try to fight here at UPS and people won’t.”
I know a lot of people do have a lot of experience where you try something and it doesn’t work, and it can be hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, in a sense, but I think, like Amber was saying, to really draw from the history from 90 years ago and draw from the history of the entire Working Class Movement in this country and around the world, I do have a lot of hope. We’re kind of going back to the beginning. Max, you were saying you’re feeling a little mixed up about the overall situation. Yeah, of course there’s a lot of bad things going on in this society. There’s a lot of darkness, but I do feel a lot of hope. I do feel like working people want to find the way forward. It’s kind of a tortuous road, but I’m confident that we’ll find it. We’ll walk upon it, and we’ll be able to live in a new kind of society.
Jess Leigh:
Yeah, so I would say my final reflections is that we need to work towards teaching people. A lot of people have the mindset that, “Oh, politics isn’t something that I need to worry about. It doesn’t really apply to me,” because they see politics as just something on Capitol Hill. While that is true, these the people that are creating the laws and the policies that affect our everyday lives.
Everybody has things that they want to see changed. That’s politics. Anything that you want to see changed is inherently political, because there are forces that don’t want to see those things changed, and those people are using resources and policies and their influence to make sure that they don’t.
Most people are controlled by fear. On the shop floor, people are scared to fight back for fear that they will be retaliated against or even fired. It keeps people in line, and to go even further, people are scared that they’ll lose more rights if they really stand up and push back, that things could get even worse, but they are. Little by little, we are losing more and more rights, more and more control, more and more freedoms. We have to push past that fear, and the way forward is to not let that fear keep you from doing what you need to do to have your part in making sure that those changes come to fruition.
Don’t be fearful. Be bold. Be assertive. By doing that and letting other people see you do that, it sparks. It encourages other people. I can stand up like that, too, and anybody can do it. Even if you’ve never done it before, anybody can have a part in bringing about that change. Maybe that’s what you need. Maybe that’s what your coworker needs is to see you standing up and to be bold and saying, “I can do that, too. That person’s doing good things. I can do good things.”
Nobody is too small. Everybody can have a part, and it’s going to take everybody. We’re all going to have to come together to fight for the common interest and really move this country forward, and it’s not going to be through the Republicans or the Democrats.
Like I said, Sean O’Brien, he had the opportunity to do that, and he has failed. He has failed to do that, and he is riding the line. That is not going to push labor forward.
Kat:
Amber, I’m so glad that you brought up the fact that it’s the 90th anniversary of the General Strike Wave of 1934 in this country. For listeners who aren’t familiar with the history, I highly encourage, go find your favorite labor history book and read about it.
In short, during the middle months of the year 1934, at the bottom of the Great Depression, at a time when there was no unemployment insurance, there was no Social Security, there was no real well-established legal rights to unionize, millions of workers in this country, the lowest paid, least skilled workers, who all of the union leaders had said can’t be organized, shouldn’t be organized, we shouldn’t even try to organize these people in the unions, rose up, went on strikes that spanned across many different workplaces, across entire industries, and ultimately won a lot of concessions from the ruling class that are not to be taken for granted, that we still can leverage today to our advantage. I think I see this, these historical facts as evidence and proof that the people will rise up when the time comes. The people will be ready to fight when the time comes.
The question is, for those of us who see a longer trajectory for the Labor Movement, beyond winning a few concessions, what is our plan? Of course, we’re not at that point right now, where millions of workers in this country are spontaneously rising up and going on strike. We all know that. We’ve all experienced frustrations and feelings like our coworkers are apathetic, but if we ourselves see a basis to be able to provide leadership when that time comes in the midst of a period of crisis, I think that what we need to do now is really find others who see things in the same way, get together, and study history; study theory; make a plan; try to consolidate ourselves ideologically; try to, of course, get involved in our unions, if there is one; learn about the landscape; learn about the contradictions amongst the people; and acquire lots of practical knowledge, as well.
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves into thinking that we can just build a fire as one or two or five or ten people. The fire is going to spark off at some point, and what we need to do is prepare ourselves, strengthen ourselves as leaders, whether that’s on the shop floor or at a national scale, and instill in ourselves confidence in the people themselves. For those who are feeling angry, perturbed, confused, upset, don’t even know how you feel about Sean O’Brien speaking at the Republican National Convention, I hope that at least these more general and broader reaching thoughts can maybe make you sit down and think a little bit, because ultimately everything that seems unusual or confusing or unprecedented in our society, we can figure out ways to understand it. We can figure out ways to fight against it. We have to get organized. We have to educated ourselves, and we have to stand in solidarity with those that will fight alongside us one day. Over and out.
Rick Smith:
Ultimately, no one’s going to remember what Sean O’Brien said. They’re going to remember that he was there. That’s my problem with the platform in which he chose to give this speech. I thought the speech, in most other venues, two thirds of it was great. The fact that he went to that event, knowing that ultimately it’s about getting Donald Trump elected, means that you knew what you were getting into.
We can argue whether it was the right thing, wrong thing. If you were talking to the larger audience and the TV audience and will they remember that union speech, that you have to find out. Ultimately, it’s my view that Trump knew what he wanted, and he got a major union to come in and say nice things about him. That is what is going to be used from now to the election time. Everything else, I don’t have any personal attacks against anybody. I just think strategically it was a bad move, and I think strategically it’s going to be something that is going to end up hurting Biden or whomever the Democrats put forth, but ultimately hurting the members and hurting the union, because if Trump gets elected, they’ve already told us what they’ve done, they want to do.
It’s written down in Project 2025, and they have a whole labor section about how they want to do away with prevailing wage and screw up the NLRA. There’s so much that can happen, and maybe we need it. Maybe we need bad things to happen to get us to come back together. I don’t know. But I do know if Trump is reelected, it’s going to be a dark four years. Thank you so much.
Zoey Moretti Niebuhr:
One thing that really stuck with me the most isn’t the speech itself. It was Sean O’Brien doubling down the next day, reposting the Hawley article, and reposting that trans-phobic text of that article and praising Hawley as the one in good conservative, pro-labor conservative, while throwing trans teamsters like myself under the bus. It’s just really disappointing to see.
I’m not necessarily surprised, unfortunately, just for Sean O’Brien’s own political calculus on when he runs again. He probably cares more about republican Teamsters than he does about trans Teamsters. That’s just unfortunate reality of it. I think, ultimately, I agree a lot with what Rick says is that folks are just going to remember that he was there, and it’s just going to hurt the Teamsters more than anything else. It’s going to hurt the members of the Teamsters. It’s going to hurt if Trump is elected. It’s going to hurt organizing campaigns that are ongoing. I think we have seen that some staffers within the IBT are upset. One had posted that rogue post on social media, because they have to deal a lot, like these in the organizing campaigns, with the laws in various states, and in republican-run states, labor laws are way worse. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I think it’s an important thing to talk about, especially between Teamsters and how we can move forward, because we want to build a stronger union, and we need to hold our leadership accountable to do that.
Robert Conklin:
Yeah, I’ve never been more disenchanted about a national election as this one, because the two choices we were given are not ideal by any means. In a perfect world, we’d have a Labor Party, right? Made up of working people that actually could express what the working people in the United States need.
A hot, weird take on this one, but Sean O’Brien did walk into the Republican Convention and do a fiery labor speech. What if this is setting up the groundwork for a Labor Party. This is what people aren’t understanding is my conservative friends, my working class people that I’m friends with and talk to, all said they loved Sean O’Brien’s speech. A lot of those people aren’t really hip to the politics. They don’t care, but they’ve heard the speech, and they go, “You know what? That dude spoke to me.”
I know it’s not under ideal circumstances. I get it. But touching on some of the stuff that people said, bringing up the 1934 Minneapolis strike, the last really labor friendly president we had was Franklin Roosevelt, did wonders for working people. We haven’t had the power to shut down the country, if we were talking about the rail strike or whatever just recently.
Coming out of the pandemic and everything, I understand why the negotiations were postponed and there was compromises made, because as we were healing as a nation, coming out of the pandemic, a rail strike wasn’t a great time, and I mean to tell you, if it did happen, the view on labor would not be so hot with the average, ordinary American person. Yeah, sure, I would’ve thought it was great, but most people would be like, “After we just went through all of this, you guys are going to shut down the country?” I think the timing was bad.
1970 Wildcat Strike, a lot of you were probably familiar with that. Well, my grandfather was actually a part of that and shut the shit down. It was pretty hot, but we haven’t had a strong labor leader that’s been able to rally three million Teamsters, or how many we were members at the time. I hear a lot of people commenting, “It sounds like they’re unhappy with the UPS contract.” The contract before that one was a lot worse. I know that had a two-tiered system, the 22.4’s. That guy, I mean, 350,000 Teamsters under a UPS contract, you’re not going to make everybody happy. I get it. But the thing we’re missing is 70% of the fucking membership voted for it, so squeaky wheel, I get it, but this is democracy. This is the compromise and people were okay with it. They signed off of it. Don’t blame it on other people. You know, 70% is not a… It wasn’t close.
With the election, like I said, I’m looking at both choices, going, “God help us.” I think it’s like these are the two best people we have in the United States? Pretty much, a lot of us would agree, if we can get rid of them both and just start fresh and draw two names out of the hat, I think a lot of people would go for that.
To say the Democrats have been historically labor friendly, but what I tell my friends is there’s one party that says they’re for organized labor and there’s one party that’s vehemently against organized labor, but the thing is, what actually are they doing for labor? We’re in a kind of, as working people, in a shitty position. I would love to see a third party. That would balance the scales, but this is the shit hand we’re dealt with in the United States right now.
I’ll tell you right now, Sean O’Brien himself could have me a headlock, telling me, “You have two choices. Vote for Donald Trump or Satan,” and I’d be voting for the morning star, if you get what I mean. But the thing is, look at the other choice. I’m like, yes, he might be the most pro-labor president. He has his flaws. I get it.
Like I said, I’m disenchanted, but the thing is, bashing Sean O’Brien for going in there, into the lion’s den and shitting all over the white rug and smearing his feet, putting his muddy cowboy boots on the couch, if you know what I mean, people don’t see it, because they’re either blinded by their hatred for the Republicans, blinded by their hatred for Sean O’Brien, blinded from their hatred for Trump. But the thing is, something unprecedented happened a few days ago that I’m… Sure, I’m not a big Sean O’Brien fanboy, but I do give credit where credit is due, because if you put the first one third of the speech aside and listen to the second two thirds, that’s what everybody wants to hear. The thing is, it was just in a very strange, unsuspecting venue. But if I was a big corporation and throwing a pizza party for my employees and telling them how unions are no good, that’s a captive audience.
What did Sean O’Brien just do? He held a captive audience at the Republican fucking Convention. Well, love it or hate it, it is what it is. Now it’s time for the Democrats to tell him to get in there. Do that again, but do it even better. If that doesn’t happen, I don’t know what to tell you. Anyways, it’s been fun, guys. It’s been a great time. Well, I have knots in my stomach for what’s coming in November, because God help us all. Thank you very much.
Maximillian Alvarez:
All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. I want to thank all of our amazing Teamster guests calling in from across the country, for taking time out of their busy schedules to be on this panel and share their vital thoughts and perspectives. I really, really appreciate you guys.
I want to thank the great Mel Buer for co-hosting with me. Like we said in the episode, Mel and I want to and are planning to do more of these kinds of panels through the election season and beyond. We want to keep talking to more folks, union and nonunion, and getting more perspectives. We want you guys to reach out to us. Let us know what you thought of this panel and send us your suggestions for folks you want us to talk to in future panels and topics that you want us to address.
As always, I want to thank you guys for listening, and I want to thank you all for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. If you can’t wait that long, then go subscribe to our Patreon and check out the awesome bonus episodes that we’ve got there for our patrons. Of course, go explore all the 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 front lines of struggle.
Sign up for the Real News Newsletter, so you never miss a story, and help us do more work like this by going to therealnews.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you, it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.
This story originally appeared in In These Times on July 21, 2024. It is shared here with permission.
President Joe Biden, who has often touted himself as the most pro-union president in U.S. history, dropped out of the race for a second term in office on Sunday, less than a month before the Democratic National Convention in Chicago and less than four months before November’s general election.
Biden also endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to run against former President Donald Trump, and within hours several major unions echoed that endorsement.
They include, among others, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the nation’s largest private sector union; United Farm Workers, the nation’s largest and most enduring farm workers’ union (chiefly organizing in California); the American Federation of Teachers, the country’s second largest teachers’ union.
“SEIU is proud to endorse VP @KamalaHarris as our nominee for President. As a woman of color & the child of immigrant parents, VP Harris is not only a historic choice to lead the ticket – she is prepared,” read a Tweet from SEIU President April Verrett. “She brings decades of public service fighting for workers across industries.”
Sunday’s news came after Biden’s performance during last month’s debate raised doubts about his fitness for office and ability to beat Trump. But it also comes on the heels of an Uncommitted movement that galvanized a meaningful portion of the electorate and sustained protests criticizing the ways Biden has helped fund, fuel and enable the genocide in Gaza.
“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term,” Biden wrote in a letter posted on social media, urging Democrats to come together and back Harris as the nominee.
“I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as president for the remainder of my term.”—President Joe Biden
The National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW), representing 19,000 workers in California and Hawai’i, was also one of the first voices out of the gate with an endorsement for Harris, highlighting her strong advocacy for reproductive justice.
“Kamala Harris’ strong advocacy for reproductive freedom and other vital health care services, for workers’ rights to join a union and have a voice on the job, and for economic and social justice for all U.S. residents have earned our endorsement,” said NUHW President Sophia Mendoza.
Some of the first cracks in Biden’s coalition emerged in the fall in response to his administration’s support for Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians, not only with the Uncommitted movement but also with an unprecedented surge in demands from the U.S. labor movement to call for a cease-fire that started soon after the Israeli assault on Gaza began, and which intensified over time.
In the past week, labor’s loyalty to Biden has frayed and reports started trickling out of labor leaders sounding the alarm of whether the incumbent president is the best person to take on Trump in November.
“There’s not a person in the labor movement who isn’t worried,” one labor leader said. “Unions,” they said, “are looking at the same thing that everybody else is looking at.”
Three labor leaders with members in the Midwest spoke to ABC News on condition of anonymity July 20 to share widespread concerns among the ranks of the labor movement.
“There’s not a person in the labor movement who isn’t worried,” one labor leader said, pointing to Biden’s losing his train of thought during his debate performance and his prospects to defeat Trump.
“Unions,” they said, “are looking at the same thing that everybody else is looking at.”
Meanwhile, some labor leaders and political supporters remained staunch supporters, at least publicly, including progressive stalwarts Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). In an email seeking donations Sunday night, Ocasio-Cortez also endorsed Harris.
Last week, on Thursday, July 18, United Food and Commercial Workers Local 3000, representing 50,000 workers in retail, grocery and other sectors in the Pacific Northwest, urged Washington state’s congressional delegation to call on Biden to bow out of the race.
“If President Biden continues to demonstrate that he is unable to effectively campaign, and subsequently loses in November, the advances workers have made will be at immediate risk in a second Trump administration,” Local 3000 President Faye Guenther and Secretary-Treasurer Joe Mizrahi wrote in that letter to the congressional delegation.
Shortly after Israel’s assault on Gaza began and intensified, Local 3000 was also one of the lead signatories on what came to be a different, critical letter in support of a cease-fire that over the months garnered support from more than 200 unions. On Sunday night, Local 3000 also endorsed Harris.
“We feel Vice President Harris has the ability and the support to win the White House,” said J’nee DeLancey, a UFCW Local 3000 elected executive board member who is a grocery store worker at Town & Country Market. “As a union that is majority women, that has a diverse membership of many people of color, and of immigrants, we are very excited to have such a community-rooted and worker-driven candidate to support.”
US President Joe Biden speaks during a visit to a United Auto Workers (UAW) phone bank in the metropolitan Detroit area, Michigan on February 1, 2024. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images
Last week, in what appeared to be a sign underscoring conflicts between Local 3000, the reform upstart within the retail and grocery union, and its existing leadership, UFCW’s international president, Marc Perrone, said in a statement to the New York Times: “President Biden is the nominee of the Democratic Party and the only pro-labor candidate in this race, and we strongly support his candidacy over former President Trump.”
Harris must still win the nomination. For that to happen, she’ll need to win over a wide swath of the 4,600 delegates to the Democratic National Convention, which is made up of party officials, lawmakers, local activists and volunteers. She’s a favorite to win in part because she lined up the support of several big donors within hours of Biden’s withdrawal, and also because in addition to several major labor unions, Harris immediately earned other key endorsements from the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and others. Before the Chicago convention August 19, party officials will hold a virtual vote to choose a nominee — deadlines to qualify for a ballot in California and Washington state fall in late August, according to the New York Times.
Since late June, Biden has come under intensified pressure from a roster of prominent Democratic politicians, donors and progressive organizing coalitions. These calls for him to step down from the likes of Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, among others, strengthened the case for him to bow out of the presidential race.
Despite Biden’s claim of being the most pro-union President in U.S. history, his actions surrounding a major labor dispute involving railroad workers two years into his first term drew ire from many workers around the country.
In 2022, Biden and Congress intervened to block a national railroad strike. Many workers felt betrayed by a president who had cast himself as such a close friend of labor. Ultimately, rail workers won sick days in 2023 after pressure from the Biden administration, and many labor leaders still hold Biden up as one of the most pro-union presidents of their lifetime.
In 2022, Biden and Congress intervened to block a national railroad strike. Many workers felt betrayed by a president who had cast himself as such a close friend of labor.
“President @JoeBiden will go down in history as the most pro-union president in American history,” the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers posted on social media Sunday. The International Association of Fire Fighters also heaped high praise on Biden, likely fueled in part because the president came out in support of them after Boeing locked members out in Washington state in May.
United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain and Association of Flight Attendants-CWA President Sara Nelson had also signed the cease-fire letter. It was major news when the UAW came out in support of a cease-fire, and their announcement also appeared to clear the path for other major unions and labor leaders to follow suit.
TOPSHOT – Former US President and 2024 presidential hopeful Donald Trump gestures while speaking at Drake Enterprises, an automotive parts manufacturer and supplier, in Clinton, Michigan, on September 27, 2023. Photo by MATTHEW HATCHER/AFP via Getty Images
Both Fain and Nelson shared concerns over Biden’s candidacy but came short of calling him to withdraw from the race.
Following Biden’s announcement on July 21, Fain and Nelson thanked the president for his leadership and highlighted his support for their union members. Fain was a featured guest at Biden’s most recent State of the Union.
“In his first days in office after just one phone call he stopped airline furloughs and secured our jobs, while banning airline stock buybacks and capping executive compensation,” Nelson wrote in a statement. “Just this past month, two major airlines agreed to significantly more at the bargaining table because President Biden stood strong for our bargaining rights and our right to strike.”
Alaska Airlines flight attendants clinched a tentative deal, boosting wages by more than 18%. American Airlines has put a deal on the table. AFA-CWA had previously rejected an offer that would have increased pay by 18% followed by 2% yearly increases. The union demanded 33% upfront, with yearly bumps of 6%. Flight attendants have been without a raise since 2019. Meanwhile, United Airlines flight attendants have called for a strike vote.
In a statement shared on social media, Fain wrote: “Joe Biden made history by joining us on our picket line last September and has stood shoulder to shoulder with the working class throughout his term in office.”
“In his first days in office after just one phone call he stopped airline furloughs and secured our jobs, while banning airline stock buybacks and capping executive compensation,” Nelson wrote in a statement. “Just this past month, two major airlines agreed to significantly more at the bargaining table because President Biden stood strong for our bargaining rights and our right to strike.”
“Vice President Kamala Harris walked the picket line with us in 2019,” the statement also read, “and along with President Biden has brought work and jobs back to communities like Lordstown, Ohio, and Belvidere, Illinois.”
The UAW went on to cut a strong contrast with Donald Trump who crossed a picket line of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) in 2004. More recently, during the UAW’s Stand-Up Strike in the fall, Trump spoke with nonunion auto-parts workers at the invitation of the company’s boss and coordinated by nonunion manufacturers who oppose the transition to electric vehicles.
At a July 20 rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Trump fulminated against electric vehicles, repeating debunked lies that they’re too expensive, consumers don’t want them and they don’t go far enough to be worthwhile for many people to own.
Trump also targeted and tore into Fain, while using Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to burnish his pro-worker credentials in spite of a well-documented history of anti-worker and union policies, including his lack of support for autoworkers in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019 as the plant shuttered while he was in office. As workers struggled after the plant closed, Trump fired off a Tweet to David Green, president of UAW Local 1112, telling him to “get his act together and produce.”
“While Donald Trump lies about rebuilding the auto industry, the fact is that while he was in office, autoworkers in Lordstown were left for dead by GM in 2019 while he said and did nothing,” Fain said in the statement.
While Nelson and Fain appeared to be careful on Sunday to avoid weighing in on who should ultimately be the Democratic nominee, Fain did have a message for working people and labor.
“The path forward is clear,” Fain said, “we will defeat Donald Trump and his billionaire agenda and elect a champion for the working class to the highest office in this country. We will speak truth to power about the issues that matter to the working class: a living wage, decent healthcare, a dignified retirement, and taking our lives and our time back.”
Myanmar’s junta-ordered military draft has exacerbated a shortage of workers caused by the country’s civil war, and the gap is being filled by minors who are vulnerable to labor rights violations, experts and rights groups said Friday.
The growth in child labor is an underreported impact of the junta’s People’s Military Service Law, enacted in February as part of a bid to shore up its forces amid heavy losses to various ethnic armies and rebel militias since its 2021 coup d’etat.
Under the law, men between the ages of 18 and 35 and women between 18 and 27 can be drafted to serve in the armed forces for two years.
Eight-year-old Maung Kyaw, center, carries a basket of gravel, weighing about 19 kilograms (42 pounds) in Yangon, Myanmar, June 10, 2014. (Gemunu Amarasinghe/AP)
Thousands of young men have been recruited in the first three rounds of the draft, while thousands more draft-dodgers have fled into rebel-controlled territory and abroad to avoid service.
Last month, the International Labor Organization, or ILO, published a report that documented “an increase in child labor levels partly driven, amongst other factors, by parents preferring their children to work as means to avoid conscription.”
While the ILO was unable to provide exact figures for the increase, it said its findings squared with an earlier report which found that “child labor rates in conflict-affected countries are 77% higher than global averages.”
RFA Burmese spoke with labor rights groups who acknowledged the difficulty in obtaining precise data, but confirmed that child labor is on the rise in Myanmar in 2024 compared to previous years – in part due to the absence of workers who have been drafted or fled to avoid service.
They said that child labor is prevalent across various sectors, including garment production, agriculture, food services, domestic work, hazardous construction, street vending, and begging.
At greater risk of exploitation
Ma Ei, the co-secretary of the Federation of General Workers Myanmar, said that in a country where workers have limited rights protections, children are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
“We have documented numerous cases where child laborers face issues such as unpaid overtime, termination after completing critical orders, or dismissal for refusing overtime,” he said.
Despite widespread violations, many child laborers are afraid to report abuses, fearing retaliation such as job loss.
A child carries a basket of stones while unloading a quarry boat with adult workers at a port in Yangon, Myanmar, Sept. 2, 2012. (Alexander F. Yuan/AP)
Labor union leader Myo Myo Aye told RFA that labor violations are often disregarded in smaller factories, where minors often look for work using identity cards that belong to older relatives or friends.
“Eligible workers would avoid such factories due to low wages, lengthy working hours, and lack of benefits that workers rightfully deserve,” she said. “Child laborers not only lose their rights but also endure exploitation and are denied the same rights as other workers.”
But families facing poverty, exacerbated by the junta’s mismanagement of the economy and foreign investors fleeing political instability, often have little choice but to send their children to work.
A June 24 report by the United Nations Development Program found that 75% of Myanmar’s population – or 42 million people – live in poverty.
Trading education for work
RFA spoke with a young woman from western Rakhine state who said that after the Arakan Army ended a ceasefire agreement with the military in November, she relocated to Myanmar’s largest city Yangon to escape the conflict and continue her studies.
“However, upon arriving, I lacked the funds to pursue my education,” said the young woman, who gave the pseudonym Thandar due to security concerns. “Consequently, I began working in factories instead of going to school. Often, I had to work late into the night, doing overtime without receiving any additional pay.”
Thandar said she dropped out of school at the age of 14 to support her family and has been working in Yangon’s garment factories using someone else’s identification card.
A child, right, carries a basket of stones while unloading a quarry boat with adult workers at a port in Yangon, Myanmar, Sept. 2, 2012. (Alexander F. Yuan/AP)
Experts RFA spoke with said that while child labor existed in Myanmar during civilian rule, it had “significantly increased” under current conditions.
Attempts by RFA to contact the permanent secretariat of the junta’s Ministry of Labor to inquire about efforts to combat child labor went unanswered Friday.
On June 8, 2020, Myanmar ratified the International Labor Organization’s minimum working age provision, prohibiting those under the age of 14 from employment or work in any occupation, except for light work and artistic performances, and banning hazardous types of activities for young persons under 18.
It ratified a foundational agreement concerning the participation of children in armed conflict on Sept. 27, 2019.
Translated by Kalyar Lwin. Edited by Joshua Lipes and Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Thazin Hlaing for RFA Burmese.
Sean O’Brien is in hot water as rank-and-file Teamsters speak out against his appearance at the Republican National Convention this week. The International Brotherhood of the Teamsters President was the sole union president to make an appearance at the RNC, and the audience’s tepid reception to his anti-corporate message might help explain why he was the only union man around. Rank-and-file members have attacked O’Brien’s appearance as undemocratic, harmful to union members of color and LGBTQ Teamsters, and politically unproductive. Longtime Teamsters organizer John Palmer sits down with TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez to discuss the speech, and why the union deserves better.
Studio/Post-Production: 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.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Welcome everyone to The Real News Network. My name is Maximillian Alvarez. I’m the editor in chief here at The Real News, and it’s so great to have you all with us. On Monday, July 15th, on day one of the Republican National Convention, Sean O’Brien, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters became the first Teamsters president ever to address the RNC. Invited by former President Trump, O’Brien’s speech was no ordinary RNC filler. And to anyone watching or anyone paying attention to the political reality in this country, this was no ordinary RNC, either? As my colleagues Stephen Janis and Taya Graham have shown with their on the ground coverage from Milwaukee, this year’s RNC has felt and looked like a religious reckoning more than a political convention. Following the failed assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania last Saturday, supporters on and off stage repeatedly spoke of Trump as a kind of Messiah, anointed and protected by God to carry the MAGA movement back to power, not just for another presidential term, mind you, but for decades to come.
And inside the RNC, where many delegates sported fake ear bandages in solidarity with Trump, and attendees wave signs with slogans like Make America Strong Again, and Mass Deportation Now, Republicans did their best to present their party as the true party of the working class. And Sean O’Brien’s very presence on the RNC stage and the contents of his speech, which lasted 17 minutes, was a central pillar of that message. But while certain lines from O’Brien’s speech garnered cheers and applause from the conservative, traditionally anti-union crowd at the RNC, many lines from that speech emphatically did not. And while many Republican voting and conservative leaning union members have expressed excitement about O’Brien’s speech, O’Brien has faced an avalanche of criticism from within his own union and across the labor movement. Even before O’Brien took the stage on Monday, however, John Palmer, a vice president at large of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, wrote a fiery op-ed entitled Teamsters President Sean O’Brien Should Not Speak at the RNC. And I’m honored to be joined on The Real News today by John Palmer himself to talk about all of this.
Now, John became a teamster in 1987, when he started working as a driver for ABF after serving in the US Army as a medic. He became an active member of Local 657 in San Antonio, Texas before becoming a full-time organizer for the union. Prior to becoming international vice president at large, John served as international vice president for the southern region of the Teamsters.
Now, lastly, before we get rolling here, I want to remind you all out there watching that The Real News is an independent, viewer and listener supported, grassroots media network. We lift up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle around the world and we can’t keep doing that work without you. So subscribe to our channel, become a donor today by heading to therealnews.com/donate. I promise you it really makes a difference. All right, brother John, I am going to bring you in here and I want us to dive straight in.
Now, in this op-ed that you wrote for New Politics, you said, and I quote, “A speaking engagement at the Republican National Convention by Teamster President Sean O’Brien, regardless of the message, only normalizes and makes the most anti-union party and president I’ve seen in my lifetime seem palatable. Teamster members and leaders have the right to demand an answer to the questions, ‘What does the general president intend to say? What does he hope to achieve from such an appearance?’” So here we are, days after O’Brien actually delivered his speech at the RNC. What are your thoughts on what he did actually say? What do you think he hoped to achieve with this appearance? And what do you think he actually achieved?
John Palmer:
Well, Max, first of all, thanks for having me, and also thank you for the work that you’ve done trying to help the folks in East Palestine in that tragedy. It’s very, very worthwhile. And I hope that no one forgets the tragedy that’s occurred there, and the families, and how they’re affected. To carry on to your point about Mr. O’Brien’s thinking, first of all, I never attempt to think for other people or think what’s going on in their minds. There’s an argument to be made that you have to talk to both sides in order to achieve an end. I think that day and time in our current politics left us a long time ago, a very, very long time ago, probably when I first started driving a truck some 30 years ago. And it’s only degraded itself. It’s even gotten worse over the years.
To the actual appearance, I think we live in a society where perception is reality. And there’s more than one instance, here. I refused to meet with Donald Trump at the round table. There’s no reason for me to sit down with Donald Trump. I know what he is. Everyone knows what he is. His actions speak louder than words, or his words as well. We know that he’s crossed picket lines. We know that he weakened the Labor Board. We know that during his term they did nothing for labor and we know that the party that calls itself the Republican Party now is completely hitched his wagon to him. He’s the leader. His family runs the convention. So by standing in front of those folks and delivering a speech like he did, which was a two part speech, one part was basically really, really praising Trump and his courage, if you want to call it that, to invite him to the convention, which was, in my estimation, not needed or necessary, and actually made us look like we’re pandering to the Republican Party.
The second part was the talking points. I mean, we all say these things. We all know these union issues that need to be addressed. And I think the interesting part about this whole conversation or speech was when that came out, it got awfully quiet. When you start talking about corporations, he was talking to corporations. That’s who these people are in the room. These people have no desire to hear that commentary. The very people they want to export from this country, they profit from that. They profit from cheap labor. They profit from workers not having rights. They profit from unsafe working conditions at the cost of workers, at the cost of people’s environment. Again, back to the East Palestine issue. I’m going to say it in polite terms, the railroad craps in your backyard, they set it on fire, and they leave.
Unfortunately, I’m not as polished as many would like me to be, but I think I’m tired. That’s what’s wrong with politics right now. It’s polished crap. It’s just people really aren’t delving into the issues. And I believe he knocked a lot of folks that were wondering whether they should support a Republican, I’m talking about union folks, probably got pushed into doing this and it was very clever on their part. Elections are one on margins and they know that they’re digging into the Democratic base, here. So I think it was a large mistake. And I think honestly he was a tool for the Republican Party.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, and you mentioned East Palestine, which I think is a very apt and horrifying example, here, because as we’ve covered endlessly here at The Real News Network, both Trump and Biden have a lot to answer for in terms of siding with the railroads, not regulating them the way that they should, allowing these massively profitable and powerful companies to essentially regulate themselves at the expense of communities like East Palestine. And yeah, Donald Trump is just as guilty of that, if not more guilty than other presidents. And yet, the very fact that he symbolically went to East Palestine before Biden did, a year before Biden did. That’s enough for a lot of people. That symbolism is all that they hope for or expect from the powers that be. But when it comes to actual policy that will help them and help our communities, that’s when you really get to the meat of the issue and you see who really does stand with working people and who doesn’t.
Now, O’Brien’s speech, to go back to that, it set off a firestorm of intense reactions within the labor movement and within the Teamsters Union itself. I mean, we’ve been getting flooded with folks reaching out to us to share their views. And Mel Buer and I actually just recorded a massive panel podcast with a lot of other rank and filers to get their thoughts on this. But people have been asking us all week how much the teamster’s leadership and the membership support O’Brien speaking at the RNC? Now, I really don’t want to ask you to try to speak for everyone, here. You guys are a big union with a lot of members, but what can you tell us about how the union is reacting right now?
John Palmer:
Well, in large part, the bubble of people that I speak to are very upset about this. People that are dialed in, you don’t have to be an official, either. If you’re a job steward, working, and you understand what happened during the Trump administration, some of your rights as a job steward were stripped away by the board. You see the effects of this. Anybody that’s had to deal with the Labor Board knows how difficult it is. What we need in this country, and you alluded to it, we’ve got two parties, and there’s issues with both of them. And I understand, we’re stuck with a two party system, which I frankly think is problematic, because they’re owned by corporate America. There is a stark difference in the two parties, but change is going to come. I mean unions are agents for change, and that’s the very reason that we shouldn’t be doing this.
My position has been as a veteran, as my dad is a retired first [inaudible 00:12:00], and every male member in my family served in the military. Everybody has the right to vote. People died that we might have that right. But as a labor leader, both on the international and local levels, I think it’s our responsibility to garner the facts and relate that to our members. Now, people are going to do what they’re going to do, but if we fail to educate and inform people as to why it’s harmful to support Donald Trump and the Republicans as they are currently made up, that’s our fault, and we’re failing ourselves and our members, and I think that’s where we’ve really failed.
We’re not, we’re career politicians. Many of my peers on that executive board draw multiple salaries. They live a very good life. Most of them are frankly removed from the life of, let’s say, someone at a meat packing plant in Colorado who’s exposed to all kinds of hazards, both physical and contaminants, all, you can only imagine, I’ve seen that work. Now, those folks aren’t making $300,000 a year. Those folks are probably making 50, $60,000 a year. They need our help. And they don’t need a party coming to power that’s made it clear in their 2025 project, 2025 writings that the plan is to weaken labor unions and create faux unions in the workplace. We’re just now making gains in getting on top of wages outstripping inflation. And that’s because the last few years, labor unions, including my own, have done a nice job of winning wages. But we’ve got a long ways to go. And if they destroy the unions, and without unions, there’s nobody to pull the safety standards and the wage standards, and we all want to live that middle class lifestyle.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Well, I want to pick up on that point you made about educating your members about what this is all really about beyond the surface level stuff, right? Because that’s all I’m seeing on mainstream media, and I’ve been watching it obsessively. It’s my job, which sucks, but every time I turn on the TV, so many mainstream media pundits and politicians out there, they keep talking about this election, and electoral politics in general, but this election specifically as if it’s all just a matter of people with differing opinions, campaigning passionately for different visions for the country’s future. But they never really talk about what the real world consequences will be if and when these opinions become policy. So let’s bring this down to the shop floor level, here. What would a second Trump presidency mean for your members and for working people in general on a real, tangible day-to-day level?
John Palmer:
Well, for one thing, I know that Sean was impressed with the election denier, JD Vance and the insurrectionist, Josh Hawley, and their commitment to not supporting Right to Work legislation. First of all, I don’t know of any time that I’ve watched Donald Trump tell the truth, literally, and I don’t know of any time in my working career as a Teamster that the Republican Party did anything that would benefit labor. That goes all the way back to Reagan, union busting, firing the air traffic controllers. So those are really emblematic of who we’re dealing with. You learn people after a while. I’m 65 years old, and I know who to trust and who not to trust. And there’s no reason to trust these folks. Based on their past behaviors, I would expect that first of all, Right to Work, unless something odd happens, I think it takes 60 votes in the Senate to get it. So that’s not our biggest issue.
Our biggest issue is getting rid of career people that do good work in the places like the EPA, the DOL, the DOT, the National Labor Relations Board, all these places that are backstops for working men and women, safe, clean drinking water, and then replacing them with lackeys political lackeys, and people without any … What was the guy from Bush’s administration, a horse judge or something that did the Hurricane Katrina relief thing?
Maximillian Alvarez:
Hm.
John Palmer:
We might’ve learned something from that, I hope, but it’s really important that most of these people, like the people in our building at the International Union, these are career people that are there because they want to do a good job and they really don’t want to get caught in the politics. But these are dangerous precedents and they’ve made it clear what they want to do.
It’s 900 pages, Project 2025, but if you just step back, and there’s plenty of places to summarize it and quoting much of the language, if you’ll read this, it will tell you what they intend to do. And card check, we should be getting card check neutrality, where in many countries, if you get enough cards to sign workers up, they’re in the union. They don’t have to go. You sign a card, that’s part of your election process. And now they get beat up from us by a union buster. This union busting’s not going to stop. It’s only going to get more intense.
And our rights are going to be more difficult to maintain in the auspices of the National Labor Relations Act and the Railway Labor Act, which by the way, you mentioned the rail strike, and that’s a very different venue, the National Mediation Board. The processes are very different. It’s very hard to get the right to strike. And that’s not fair to these workers. If people understood what they were really fighting for, they would sympathize with them. And there we go. We should be educating the public about all the things that go on. And so I don’t see anything historically that would give me any confidence in these people as truth tellers and as advocates for labor. I mean, that’s just not the party.
Maximillian Alvarez:
Man, I could talk to you about this for hours, but I know I got to let you go. And I’ve got one more question I want to toss your way. But we’re going to have to have you back on to keep digging into this. But real news viewers and listeners have been following Teamsters struggle specifically very closely and supporting y’all throughout these past few years. We helped get folks engaged by, as you mentioned, covering the railroad contract struggle a couple years ago. And there are a lot of union railroaders who are Teamster members. We also covered Teamsters unionizing at Amazon and in the cannabis industry. We covered the reform movement that elected Sean O’Brien to the presidency. And of course, we intensely covered the UPS contract fight last year. I know for a fact that a lot of our audience, because they keep telling me, they’re feeling betrayed after supporting O’Brien and the Teamsters, and then watching O’Brien go up on the RNC stage on Monday and bash the left.
And many viewers have expressed that they see the Teamsters just following the old, sad playbook here that gave a lot of folks a bad opinion of unions for many, many years. It’s just kind of playing into the stereotypes that a union will throw vulnerable workers and vulnerable communities under the bus. They’ll throw concerns about climate change, and immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights out the window if it means that members can benefit from some trade policies and job creation programs. That’s basically what a lot of folks are seeing right now.
And many have expressed to me that Shawn Fain, president of the United Auto Workers, is the labor leader that they hoped Sean O’Brien would be. And Fain’s statements on Trump and the Republicans are vastly different from O’Brien’s. They’re much more closely aligned with what you’ve been saying, here. So I just wanted to close this out by asking if you could talk directly to folks out there who are feeling this way, what would you say to them? Do you think that they’re right to have these concerns about labor? And what can the labor movement do to actually, really address these concerns so we don’t just go back to where we were 20 years ago?
John Palmer:
Well, number one, the good portion of my career was that of an organizer. And the one thing you learn in organizing is we don’t do that for any other reason than to help people. And you can’t help people if you don’t listen to them. And you can’t help people if you’re selling an agenda that’s not relative to their problems. You mentioned the Reform Group, Teamsters for a Democratic Union. I was on that steering committee for many, many years. And we aligned with Sean O’Brien on the promise that this was going to be different. This was going to be open to the membership. There was going to be no behind the door dealings, which turns out that’s exactly what happened during the UPS negotiations, that this was going to be member driven. That their leadership was going to be more accountable.
And so people are tired of politics. People are sick of people saying, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that.” Once they get your vote, they’re going to do whatever they have to do to stay in office. So what I’ve got to say is we were sold a bill of goods, Teamsters for Democratic Union has decided just to … They’re totally silent on everything that’s gone down, determination of organizers of color, the whole direction that we’ve gone. The UPS contract, I submitted a proposal that we study automation, use our education department, political, legislative department, and go educate our members. In that UPS agreement, we failed to really mitigate what’s a threat to not just Teamsters. This is going to be a problem for every one of us. Technology’s going to get good enough to reproduce what you and I are doing here right now.
So we need to be ahead of this. And we’re losing jobs to automation. UPS threw some money at our drivers. I’m happy for the drivers and the money, but the real issues, the air conditioning was sold in a very deceptive manner. Those air conditioners have to be in vehicles purchased after the beginning of this year. They purchased a huge fleet the last two years. The majority of guys are probably not going to see air conditioning for another 10, or 15, 20 years. These vehicles have very long life. You pull a motor out, you stick another one in. They’re relatively simple vehicles. They’re rugged, they’re tough, but that-
Maximillian Alvarez:
And that’s-
John Palmer:
… combined with- [inaudible 00:24:38]
Maximillian Alvarez:
That’s affecting people right now. We are in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave. It’s been 100 degrees here in Baltimore for like a week straight, and I’m seeing these UPS drivers without air conditioning still.
John Palmer:
Right. I saw it in the freight industry. They won it in a contract. And the ironic thing about it was they sold the contract. It was when the manufacturers actually said, “We’re not building trucks without air conditioners in them anymore.” So I found that to be … But at least we knew. We knew that if you had an old truck, until the new one came in and you were driving a truck with, what is it, 260 air conditioning, two windows down, 60 miles an hour. So we knew that. But I’m going to finish on my, to summarize the whole conversation, we need to quit depending on agencies, and governments, and entities to do what we know needs to be done. We need to breed an attitude of activism in this country that holds, people run for office, who holds them accountable?
Certainly the Supreme Court’s not going to hold anybody accountable. How in the world can the president be immune from trying to overthrow the United States government? I’m at a total loss. I don’t understand. But we the people have to stand together, and our unions need people with a fighting mentality, not just people who speak the words and then go hire a PR firm. We spent well over a million dollars last year with a PR firm to help sell contracts, help actually paint Sean O’Brien as Mr. Wonderful. Our members, that money could be used a lot. You want to be Mr. Wonderful, do the right thing.
Maximillian Alvarez:
So that is John Palmer, vice president at large for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. John, thank you so much for joining us today on The Real News Network, man, I really appreciate it.
John Palmer:
Thanks, Max.
Maximillian Alvarez:
And I want to thank all of you out there for watching, and thank you for caring. And please one more time before you go, we are in the middle of our summer fundraiser right now, and if you want to see more important coverage and conversations just like this, please head on over to therealnews.com/donate and become a supporter today. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.
