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Source: http://feeds.feedburner.com/InTheseTimes

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<title>In These Times</title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/</link>
<description>Investigative reporting about corporate malfeasance and government wrongdoing.</description>
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<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 05:17:17 -0500</pubDate>
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<title><![CDATA[11 Lessons From 11 Years After the Rana Plaza Disaster]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/rana-plaza-bangladesh-collapse-worker-safety-accord-labor</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/rana-plaza-bangladesh-collapse-worker-safety-accord-labor</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Corporate exploitation has a playbook, so should we.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/ZYLWa62oWku6Ggt3HLjPDsEPS8Zaw0Ey6l23OSQw3Do/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9CQ1dTLVJhbmEtUGxhemEtRGVtb25zdHJhdGlvbi0yMDE4LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/ZYLWa62oWku6Ggt3HLjPDsEPS8Zaw0Ey6l23OSQw3Do/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9CQ1dTLVJhbmEtUGxhemEtRGVtb25zdHJhdGlvbi0yMDE4LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>An action by WSR Network member Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity on the 5th anniversary of the Rana Plaza collapse. / Bangladesh Center for Worker Solidarity</figcaption></figure> On April 24, 2013, the Rana Plaza building collapsed in Bangladesh killing 1,134 people and injuring approximately 2,500 more. Those deaths were preventable. In the aftermath of the deadliest incident in the history of the apparel manufacturing industry, worker organizations and activists around the globe rallied around the demand: “Rana Plaza Never Again.”
Since that horrific day, workers have won binding, enforceable protections to make that rallying cry a reality. The Bangladesh Accord, now known as <a href="https://wsr-network.org/success-stories/accord-on-fire-and-building-safety-in-bangladesh/">the International Accord,</a> has received recognition around the globe for transforming basic workplace conditions for three million garment workers. And the <a href="https://wsr-network.org/resource/worker-driven-social-responsibility-fact-sheet/">Worker-driven Social Responsibility model </a>has been adapted by tens of thousands more workers internationally to tackle the root causes of exploitation in their own workplaces.
On this anniversary, we remember those who died. Their deaths were both tragic and preventable. Workers saw the warning signs that the buildings were crumbling around them. Yet poverty wages, lack of strong unions, and widespread repression made it so that most workers went to work, knowing the risks but unable to walk away. Global fashion brands also knew all too well the crumbling infrastructure and coercive conditions that were a consequence of their purchasing practices, but they chose to look away. Government regulators and inspectors prioritized their own pocketbooks over enforcing legal protections that might have been on the books.
It’s a playbook that’s employed far too often in workplaces around the world. Here in the United States, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reports that <a href="https://www.osha.gov/data/commonstats#:~:text=Worker%20fatalities,Learn%20about%20key%20findings.">5,486 workers died on the job in 2022</a>. Those too are preventable deaths, and that number undercounts the many people who work on farms outside of OSHA’s regulatory reach (according to Civil Eats, this group includes some <a href="https://civileats.com/2022/11/14/injured-and-invisible-1-few-protections-animal-agriculture-workers-cafos-dairy-migrants-injuries/">96% of animal agriculture workers</a>, to name just one dangerous industry). <a href="https://aflcio.org/reports/death-job-toll-neglect-2022">Black</a> and <a href="https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2023/work-related-fatal-injuries-among-foreign-born-hispanic-or-latino-workers-rose-to-727-in-2021.htm">brown workers and immigrant workers</a> are more likely to work riskier jobs and to be killed on the job.
In our work at <a href="https://dignityandrights.org/">Partners for Dignity and Rights</a> where we collaborate with a wide range of worker organizations, we have seen that many of the root causes of these deadly and exploitative conditions are a consequence of the same corporate playbook. 
In the 11 years since the Rana Plaza collapse, we have learned some lessons broadly transferable from Bangladesh's garment factories to workplaces worldwide where workers seek to win binding, enforceable protections to keep them safe at work. 
<ol><li dir="ltr">Workers should be at the center of any program meant to protect them. Worker organizations need to be involved in the development of any program from the start, not just as “stakeholders” after the fact. Strong enforceable agreements require strong worker organizations and unions. Yet outside expertise plays a critical role as well—part of the success of the International Accord is how it has harnessed the expertise of structural engineers and specialists to ensure protections are fit for purpose. </li><li dir="ltr">Demands need to be enforceable in scope. There’s a tension between the human rights that every living person possesses and what rights a group of workers has the power to bring a brand to the table to negotiate, win, and enforce. And in large part, what’s enforceable depends on what you can win at the negotiating table. The Accord relies on brands leveraging their purchasing power to ensure suppliers follow worker-driven criteria for safe workplaces. <a href="https://cleanclothes.org/news/2024/member-states-chose-to-protect-corporate-profits-and-fail-workers-and-human-rights">Until legislation compels brands to take responsibility</a> for the consequences of their purchasing practices, we can only enforce what we can get brands to sign onto. </li><li dir="ltr">Transparency is a strategic first step—but not an endgame in itself. The Accord requires extensive reporting from participating brands and suppliers. Worker advocates have then used that information to connect non-participating brands that disclose their supplier lists to factories where repairs are needed, and then build and win campaigns to protect more workers.</li><li dir="ltr">Follow the money to make meaningful change possible. Global brands are quick to announce unfunded commitments to everything from living wages to climate change. Too often, those pledges disappear, leaving workers with little but a trail of greenwashing PR to point to. The Accord requires brands to contribute to suppliers' cost of compliance, and campaigners collaborate to <a href="https://action.eko.org/a/levi-s">call in companies who try to freeload </a>off participating brand’s factory upgrades. </li><li dir="ltr">Strong enforceable agreements require strong worker organizations and unions. Winning enforceable agreements at the scale of the Accord requires sustained relationships across organizations and the ability to adapt and negotiate a clear vision for the ever-evolving future.</li><li dir="ltr">Worker-driven means deep investment in leadership development. Strong organizations need seasoned leaders and new up-and-coming leaders. A strong, engaged base and dynamic leadership help ensure that yesterday’s wins are the foundation for tomorrow’s.</li><li dir="ltr">Anticipate opposition, and be prepared to meet it. Local power players and corporations alike are often deeply invested in the exploitative status quo. Be prepared for both overt opposition and co-optation of worker-driven efforts.</li><li dir="ltr">Be prepared to win. The agreements that became the Bangladesh Accord existed for two years before the Rana Plaza collapse, and garment worker unions had been ironing out the terms of binding agreements for years before. Yet only two brands had signed on. The massive public outrage at Rana Plaza created a moment in which campaigners were able to compel brands to sign the agreements.</li><li dir="ltr">Stay true to scale. Too often, programs that claim to cover workers in long value chains make sweeping claims about being “fair” and “ethical,” with claims to living wages that are not backed by either the standards or their impact reporting. From the Accord, we can see the strength of having a strong program that is focused on a few key issues and builds on those successes over time. “Is it scalable?” is a question we’re often asked about the Worker-driven Social Responsibility model, and the real question is usually, “who is trying to scale it and how?”</li><li dir="ltr">Bring the fight to the corporate decision-makers with a strong, broad base of allies. Corporations rely on keeping working conditions out of sight and out of mind. A key part of winning the Accord was building strong coalitions of unions from around the world, students, and other activists to bring Bangladeshi garment workers’ demands straight to corporate headquarters where they couldn’t be ignored. </li><li dir="ltr">Strong campaigns keep building victories over time. The movement infrastructure that we collectively built to win the Accord and its subsequent expansions started in the 1990s. And these aligned, worker-driven movements continue to be a strong force for corporate accountability and workers’ rights in the global garment industry. When the Covid pandemic hit, we had the relationships and tools to pivot and win back over <a href="https://www.payyourworkers.org/">$10 million dollars in stolen wages</a> from workers hit hard by factory closures around the world.</li></ol>
These lessons have been hard-learned over the past decades of organizing. And while the Accord is transformational, more is still needed. The demand for enforceable protections isn’t a flashy one. First and foremost, it’s about winning a world where workers can leave work, go home to their families, and go on to organize another day. There is immense pressure where life and death are on the line. It has taken a global coalition years to win workers the ability to enter workplaces without the fear that they’ll be crushed by crumbling buildings. Yet the fight goes on. Workers in Bangladesh are <a href="https://www.workersrights.org/commentary/bangladesh-minimum-wage-negotiations-put-brands-living-wage-commitments-to-the-test/">still fighting for decent wages </a>and <a href="https://cleanclothes.org/news/2024/bangladesh-crackdown">to protect their right to organize in the face of deadly repression</a>. The still-unsolved <a href="https://wsr-network.org/resource/solidarity-statement-on-the-murder-of-garment-worker-leader-in-bangladesh/">murder of union organizer Shahidul Islam </a>last year underscores the high stakes for those who speak up.
Even as we gather lessons from the last decades of organizing, we recognize that far too many brands, especially U.S. brands, still haven’t signed the Accord. As we build stronger movements for workers’ rights, for human rights, and for corporate accountability across borders, one small way we can support this global movement is to demand that the remaining holdouts sign the Accord so that a tragedy like Rana Plaza never happens again. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Anna Canning and Sarah Newell]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[This Earth Day, Common Ground Urges us to Rethink Our Relationship With Soil]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/earth-day-common-ground-rethink-relationship-soil-regenerative-industrial-agriculture</link>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2024 13:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/earth-day-common-ground-rethink-relationship-soil-regenerative-industrial-agriculture</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Regenerative agricultural practices can be transformative, but only if we let them.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/dRpImNAFzi9We9FZ5YtivEiOIiggo3cPSD71rTD51dg/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE4MzU0NzYyNzEuanBn.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/dRpImNAFzi9We9FZ5YtivEiOIiggo3cPSD71rTD51dg/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE4MzU0NzYyNzEuanBn.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Heathy soil from a regenerative agriculture field. </figcaption></figure> Comment on industrial agriculture mostly appears in the mainstream only when something has gone awry. The <a href="https://apnews.com/article/bird-avian-flu-chickens-eggs-03793b5b1cb7429ce293e8577aef0358" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">current avian flu epidemic</a> comes to mind, but it’s rare for the general public to step back from the alarm of novel threats to take a more comprehensive look at why our current system doesn't work for its supposed purpose of feeding people.
Common Ground, a new documentary now screening in AMC theaters across the country (and 2023 Tribeca Film Award winner), isn’t afraid to point its finger at Big Ag for the problems with industrial agriculture. It posits that regenerative agriculture is one powerful climate solution that could fix our broken food system. The film positions itself as a sort of an anti-Inconvenient Truth (the famous 2006 climate change documentary from Vice President Al Gore) in the sense that it’s a “good news” documentary about a very bad industry rather than a clarion call for climate action to a disengaged and uninformed public.
In one early scene, Gabe Brown—a regenerative rancher from Bismarck, N.D.—points to an expanse of seemingly barren land with dying soil. “It makes me sick to my stomach to see this,” Brown says of his neighbor's industrially farmed land. 
The camera then pans to the lush expanse of greenery that follows an invisible line separating their properties. The difference, Brown says, is regenerative agriculture.
“Regenerative agriculture” is an umbrella term encompassing the practice of growing food while restoring soil health. It includes a myriad of Indigenous and contemporary farming practices, and they all look different based on the place and culture that practices them, because (by definition) regenerative methods are those shaped by long-term engagement with a place and its ecosystem.
Industrial farming uses tillage to separate soil from root systems, including root systems that help transport nutrients. It encourages the heavy use of synthetic pesticides and herbicides, which can cause an array of illnesses and damage ecosystems. In contrast, regenerative agriculture uses various methods to promote healthy, living soil, which in turn promotes healthy crops, which are more pest resistant and require less or no chemical pesticides.
Soil is the most important difference between regenerative ways of farming and industrial ways of farming. Healthy soil is alive, full of root systems and fosters a thriving ecosystem of microbes and fungi that make nutrients available to plants and sequester carbon dioxide—a vital part of plants’ diet. Meanwhile, soil that has been extensively tilled, treated with pesticides and depleted is often deader, drier and more prone to turn to dust and blow away, contributing to the epidemic of topsoil loss that, <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1123462" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">according to the U.N.</a>, could see as much as 90% of Earth’s topsoil gone by 2050.
On Brown’s farm, for example, regenerative agriculture looks like using cover crops (and not tilling the soil). At Soul Fire Farm, run by racial and food justice activist Leah Penniman, regenerative agriculture uses <a href="https://grist.org/extreme-heat/livestock-dying-heat-solution-silvopasture/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">silvopasture</a>—a method in which animals graze in the shade of fruit trees—to help protect trees from wind and water, and enrich the land with manure. What these methods have in common is that they draw on systemic thinking about how to grow food. A fruit tree or root crop does not exist in isolation from nature, but with all of the natural systems around it.
Of course, putting these efforts into practice is not easy. The Department of Agriculture has only started to support regenerative efforts in the past few years—with immense support from the Biden administration— while some <a href="https://grist.org/agriculture/usda-spending-climate-smart-farming/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">researchers have cast doubt their effectiveness.</a> Lobbying efforts by the American Farm Bureau, the self-proclaimed "voice of agriculture,” has generally supported only <a href="https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24102018/farm-bureau-climate-change-denial-farmers-crop-insurance-subsidies-drought-future-at-risk/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">larger corporate agriculture interests</a> rather than farmers looking to change their ways.
The history of regenerative agriculture spans far further than Common Ground lets on—with certain Indigenous and Black farming methods dating back thousands of years—but the important thing the film does is highlight the importance of how Earth functions as a system which cultivates our land in accordance with local weather patterns and ecosystems. The root of a lot of modern agricultural problems is the <a href="https://cafod.org.uk/news/international-news/colonialism-and-food" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">destructive and colonial practices</a> that have become industrial-farming norms. Bringing agriculture more in line with existing natural systems, the film argues, can heal the land, remake our food systems to serve more people—and help solve climate change.
“Regeneration, to me, is not just about healing the soil,” says Lyla June Johnston, an Indigenous Diné and Cheyenne ecologist and environmentalist. “It’s about stewarding whole land bases. We were thinking about how to regenerate the land and give more than we take and to me that’s the most beautiful expression of our Indigenous nature.”
Johnston is one of the many advocates, activists, scientists, ranchers and farmers who sing the praises of regenerative agriculture over the course of the film, outlining specifically how it can do things that feel impossible—like bring rain to a desert and healthy food to under-resourced communities.
The possibilities feel endless and transformative. Meanwhile, planetary heating has only just begun. The urgency is as real as the filmmakers outline, but the premise of the film —which is essentially to let regenerative practices heal the planet and avoid the worst effects of climate change.
In the meantime, protecting people, their health and the health of various microbes, animals and other members of the ecosystem cannot be more important. Maybe one of the most poignant parts of the film comes after all of the footage has rolled, and stark white text on a black background tells viewers that Gabe Brown, the regenerative rancher who was seen in the beginning, has since been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, otherwise known as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease—<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3358481/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">which has been linked to exposure to pesticides.</a>
Saving the planet, plants and animals isn't the only thing regenerative agriculture is good for. It might just save our lives too. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Siri Chilukuri]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Volkswagen Workers in Chattanooga Vote “UAW, Yes!”—and Win Big]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/volkswagen-workers-chattanooga-vote-uaw-win</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 12:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/volkswagen-workers-chattanooga-vote-uaw-win</guid>
<description><![CDATA[“With UAW’s win at Volkswagen, another gateway to the South has been opened. No longer will the wage-and-benefit standards of the million-strong auto workforce in the U.S. be set by the non-union portion of the industry."]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/kUFsH_utbvv7gOx8kQtOx89L-S1BlEkuumo3l9kXyZk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTQ3OTM3NDQ5LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/kUFsH_utbvv7gOx8kQtOx89L-S1BlEkuumo3l9kXyZk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTQ3OTM3NDQ5LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Workers celebrating after the UAW won on Friday, April 19 2024. / Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images</figcaption></figure> In a watershed victory, workers at the Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted "UAW, yes!" on Friday.
The company's sole non-union plant will finally join the rest of the world.
“If Volkswagen workers at plants in Germany and Mexico have unions, why not us?” equipment operator Briam Calderon said in Spanish ahead of the vote. 
"Just like Martin Luther King had a dream, we have a dream at Volkswagen that we will be UAW one day," said Renee Berry, a logistics worker on the organizing committee who's worked at the plant for 14 years. 
The United Auto Workers is riding a <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/11/auto-workers-direct-momentum-toward-organizing-plants-across-us">wave of momentum</a> after winning landmark contracts at the Big Three automakers last year. Production workers at Volkswagen earn $23 per hour and top out above $32, compared to $43 for production workers at Ford’s Spring Hill assembly plant by the contract’s end in 2028.
“We could see what other auto workers were making compared to what we were making,” said Yolanda Peoples, <a href="https://prospect.org/labor/2024-02-15-southern-autoworkers-organize-vw-business-class-tries-to-wallop/">a member of the organizing committee</a> on the engine assembly line. 
To head off a union drive, Volkswagen boosted wages 11% to match the immediate raise UAW members received at Ford. Peoples saw her pay jump from $29 to $32 an hour.
“When they went on strike, we paid close attention just to see what happened. Once they won their contract, it changed a lot of people from anti-union to pro-union members,” said Peoples.
The vote was a key test of whether the union could springboard the strike gains to propel <a href="https://labornotes.org/2024/04/southern-auto-workers-are-rising">new organizing in longtime anti-union bastions in the South</a>, the anchors of big investments in the electric-vehicle transition.
The vote was 2,628 in favor of forming a union to 985 against. There were seven challenged ballots, and three voided; 4,326 workers were eligible to vote.
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/aIzXt21wNPmVgbMfmyGBCmEqt4S1nSFvxlOYqtru4xk/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIxNDc5Mzc1NDEuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Workers at the Chattanooga Vollkswagen plant won their vote on Friday, April 19.</figcaption> </figure>
Previous efforts at this plant in 2014 and 2019 had gone down to narrow defeats. Ahead of this week's vote, workers said their co-workers had learned from those losses.
They brushed off threats that a union would make the plant less competitive and lead it to close. After all, VW invested $800 million here in 2019 to produce the I.D. Electric SUV.
“We have seen the enemy’s playbook twice, and they don’t have any new moves,” said Zach Costello, a member of the organizing committee and a trainer on the assembly line. “It’s the greatest hits now.”
The organizing committee beat the predictable anti-union talking points with conversations across the plant.
“At the end of the day, we’ve been focusing all our time and attention on the people who matter,” said organizing committee member Isaac Meadows, “and it’s our co-workers who cast votes."
“Now Mercedes workers [in Alabama] are right behind us. We’ve set the stage for them to win and they will create the momentum for Hyundai and Toyota.”
Mercedes workers will vote from May 13-16, with a ballot count on the 17. 
Angel Gomez knows the benefits that come with a union card, having been a steward with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) and the Teamsters at two previous jobs. 
Gomez followed his family to Tennessee after working at Smithfield Foods and Molson Coors in Wisconsin, as well as at Ford in New Jersey, where his father put in 30 years. He was hired at VW last November. He works on the underbodies of gleaming Atlas SUVs as they travel down the line at a steady clip.
“At first I wasn’t involved in the union,” Gomez said, because the moment he opened his mouth, people knew he was from up North; he didn’t want them to write him off while he was still getting acclimated. “Down here I’m the Yankee. Perception is everything. I didn’t want people to see a slick-talking New Yorker from the Bronx.”
But despite his trepidations, soon people were approaching him to talk about problems at the plant: “People started telling me—white, Black, it didn’t matter—about all the favoritism.”
He started talking to a handful of Spanish-speaking workers from Venezuela, Chile, the Dominican Republic and Mexico—who saw in a Puerto Rican worker someone from their culture, who could shed light on the union drive because of his own union experiences.
“I took a special interest in looking out for people who do their thing, take care of their families, and they always get f—ed with at the job,” Gomez said. He said these people tended to be Spanish-speaking workers who kept their heads down and did as they were told.
He said he convinced the Latino workers in his department to vote for the union. But he doesn’t sugarcoat the challenges. Some people, he said, think: “If you don’t believe in what uncle daddy Trump is telling you, then you’re a bad person.”
“That’s been the biggest drawback—the whole political aspect coming from the right.” 
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/gctP3L1v4yXCCCnFtXy9xp9EEcd7bCNAv-7ECLnk6GU/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIxNDc5Mzg2MDEuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Volkswagen workers celebrate after winning their vote on Friday, April 19 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
Meadows said the worker-organizers had learned from past drives not to get too drawn into partisan politics, and that conducting house visits wasn’t worth the backlash. 
Instead, this time around, workers emphasized talking to their co-workers on the shop floor, covering 90% of the plant with leaders on every line.
They also kept the focus on workers improving their jobs and bettering the lives of their families, rather than getting drawn into a fight with GOP actors, an astroturf campaign, or a billboard war.
“Partisan politics has nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” said Meadows.
[Labor Notes is a critical publication doing amazing, powerful and impactful work. You can support articles like this by subscribing to Labor Notes <a href="https://labornotes.org/store/labor-notes-subscription" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">by clicking here.</a>]
A recent poll conducted for the conservative Beacon Center found that 44% of respondents statewide in Tennessee <a href="https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2024/apr/14/uaw-viewed-more-favorably-than-unfavorably-in/">viewed the UAW favorably</a>, while just 19% viewed it unfavorably.
Ahead of the vote, Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee warned workers they shouldn’t “risk their future” by voting for the UAW and urged them not to give up “the freedom to decide it themselves and hand that over to a negotiator on their behalf.”
“His message is wrong,” said Meadows. “Right now, the only choice we have at this place is: Do I stay or do I quit?” 
Lee was reprising his role from 2019, when he also opposed the drive, stumping alongside the plant’s chief executive officer. At the time, Meadows said, workers booed the governor, and the union drive lost support because of it. This time they’ve grown their committees by focusing on each other instead of the politicians.
“People for the most part are smartening up. And they’re not paying attention to the political crap,” said Gomez. “The politicians know nothing about blue-collar work. They are born with a silver spoon in their mouths.”
Take Gov. Lee, <a href="https://archive.ph/fPPKF#selection-983.24-983.188">heir to a wealthy construction family business</a> with annual revenues when he became governor of upwards of $220 million in 2019.
Like last time, there was a union-busting website, stillnouaw.com, this time with a social media post from former President Donald Trump attacking UAW President Shawn Fain and equating voting for the union with supporting President Biden.
But the anti-union Facebook page only had 15 “likes” as of this week. Previous opposition groups counted hundreds of open supporters. Tennesseans for Economic Freedom, a business group, ran Facebook ads emblazoned with the message: "UAW would spend our paychecks on politics."
“They still have not realized that we are making the decision for ourselves,” said Victor Vaughn, a member of the organizing committee. “We are the ones driving this ship.”
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/Z64DqaXhXwL3vzIZx4_Mv7D_D2468__ojo5zFznUoqU/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIxNDc5MzY5ODUuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>A Volkswagen worker celebrates on Friday, April 19 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
Congressperson Chuck Fleischmann (R-TN) got the message. Even though he opposed the last drive, this time Fleischmann bucked his Republican colleagues and refused to intervene. 
“This is something that I’m going to let the workers decide,” he <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tennessee-republican-volkswagen-union-vote_n_6616a5c6e4b0c01a9ee42acb">told HuffPost</a>.
Overall, the GOP campaign against the current UAW organizing wave hasn’t been as vicious or coordinated as in previous drives. Only after the union filed for elections in Alabama and Tennessee did the governors of Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas issue a joint statement opposing the union.
They <a href="https://governor.alabama.gov/newsroom/2024/04/governor-ivey-other-southern-governors-issue-joint-statement-in-opposition-to-united-auto-workers-uaws-unionization-campaign/">wrote</a> that they were seeing “the fallout of the Detroit Three strike with those automakers rethinking investments and cutting jobs. Putting businesses in our states in that position is the last thing we want to do.”
The threats are implied. But compare that to 2014, when then-Chattanooga Mayor and later U.S. Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) said the VW plant would get a new SUV production line if workers rejected the UAW, and state politicians threatened to withhold tax incentives should workers vote the UAW in. 
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/n3hjk8EgSDL1FRDcxnUKJOQ2B0fiUTHnH_uUqSIGABk/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIxNDc5Mzc2MDQuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>A Volkswagen worker celebrates on Friday, April 19 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
In the lead-up to this week’s election, supervisors would read verbatim from a company newsletter called “The Talking Paper,” written in such a way that it cast doubts about the union without crossing over into unfair labor practice territory. 
“Every time the ‘Talking Paper’ comes out,” Costello said, “even my supervisor is like ‘It’s gonna take a while,’ because they have to read every word as it is written. They cannot Cliff Notes it.” 
To beat past union drives, the company promised to boost wages and address safety. But workers said these turned out to be empty promises. In 2019, Volkswagen brought back the company president who had originally opened the plant.
“Everybody loved Frank Fisher,” said Peoples, who was hired in 2011. “So when he came and pleaded, and pretty much said, ‘Give Volkswagen one more chance here in Chattanooga, we aren’t finished yet, we're going to make some changes, and I'll be right here with you,’ that pretty much swayed a lot of people and turned their votes into no's.”
“People understand that they’re just trying to trick us one more time like they did the two times previously,” said Vaughn.
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/vZaTaTUCP4V-tL-Q3gmIsTdOwvEzTg5sldZ8eOKQbAE/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIwOTI0NDc2MDYuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>The Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee.</figcaption> </figure>
Costello said Volkswagen shipped Fisher back to Germany soon after the vote. "The conditions in the plant slammed back to the brutal meat grinder that it always was," he said. "And we have carried that with us into this campaign."
Renee sustained multiple surgeries in her long tenure at the plant. Going into the campaign, she said safety was her top concern. "I want to come out of work the same way I came in," she said. But conditions at the plant have deteriorated to the point where she says workers agonize over whether they'll come out of work alive or maimed.
 "You may lose a leg or a hand," she said.
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/jpl4T5BNk7uTChVQRu1s8RN7jUQcMntcMZCS7Pnqbkc/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTIxNDc5MzcwMDEuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>People check the voting tallies on Friday, April 19 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
"I got synthetic in my shoulder [from a rotator cuff tear.] I have a three-year-old granddaughter who I can't pick up. So my life has changed, but I'm still going to keep going because I've put too much blood, sweat and tears into this plant." 
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein compared tonight’s win to the Union Army’s victory in Chattanooga in 1863, during the U.S. Civil War, when President Abraham Lincoln declared it “the gateway to the South.” 
Taking Chattanooga, Lichtenstein said, “opened the door to the capture of Atlanta, the rest of Georgia, and the Carolinas.
“With UAW’s win at Volkswagen, another gateway to the South has been opened. No longer will the wage-and-benefit standards of the million-strong auto workforce in the U.S. be set by the non-union portion of the industry. A militant and increasingly powerful UAW will set the standard.”
Costello, too, sees new horizons opening up. “If workers can unite in this country, I think we can move a lot,” he said. "We could even effect change that goes beyond our workplace."
<a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/10/auto-workers-spare-big-3-win-landmark-just-transition-general-motors" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">This story originally appeared in</a> <a href="https://labornotes.org/2023/10/auto-workers-spare-big-3-win-landmark-just-transition-general-motors" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Labor Notes</a> and is being reprinted with permission. Learn more about Labor Notes by <a href="https://labornotes.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">clicking here.</a>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Luis Feliz Leon]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The Threats To U.S. Democracy Go Far Beyond Elections and the Courts]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/democracy-protest-dissent-gaza-israel-cop-city</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/democracy-protest-dissent-gaza-israel-cop-city</guid>
<description><![CDATA[We need to do more than protect our elections. Getting money out of politics, repealing anti-dissent laws and ensuring more accountability from elected officials are equally important to democracy.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/pAo03Td3IE6rld-ZCvG6P4u7OUnkoCFeNhd2fPbFDaQ/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTQ3ODQ1NzU2LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/pAo03Td3IE6rld-ZCvG6P4u7OUnkoCFeNhd2fPbFDaQ/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTQ3ODQ1NzU2LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Chicago police take pro-Palestinian demonstrators into custody during the protest against Israel's attacks on Gaza on April 15, 2024. / (Photo by Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> The idea that U.S. democracy is in danger is now widely accepted among the U.S. political class and increasingly by the American public as well. “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy been under assault here at home as they are today,” President Biden said during his March 7 State of the Union address.
Much of the media attention on the threat has focused on our electoral system and courts. These procedural elements of democracy are of course critical. But there isn’t enough public discussion of threats to substantive democracy—the degree of government accountability to the public, as well as the protection of free speech and the right to dissent. 
There is a steadily worsening erosion of substantive democracy in the United States, but it isn’t widely understood as a pattern, even when individual components of it are known. But it’s critical to understand that all of these attacks on our democratic system pose a hazard to our rights. 
Defying public opinion 
One of the most glaring examples of the Biden administration’s non-responsiveness to public opinion is the stubborn refusal to budge from its full-scale support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.<a href="https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/12/5/voters-want-the-us-to-call-for-a-permanent-ceasefire-in-gaza-and-to-prioritize-diplomacy"> Data</a> from<a href="https://pro.morningconsult.com/instant-intel/gaza-cease-fire-poll-december-2023"> multiple sources</a> shows that substantial majorities of the U.S. voting public, across political and<a href="https://www.ispu.org/ceasefire-poll/?utm_campaign=Data%20Digests&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=293532421&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8N17kKNJ20m-VgHV-AFATMFeluBITnHbY9NmsxukdZpf2zlXnXNzKKcmWKj-ZdLRx1eFHy6Mxb1fQu9fDn9PgXHFdwDQ&utm_content=293532421&utm_source=hs_email"> religious affiliations</a>, want the U.S. government to push for a permanent ceasefire and bring an end to the violence.
It’s not just the polling data—the public outpouring of solidarity with Palestinians across the United States in recent months has been historic. Large numbers of people have<a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/global-day-of-protests-draws-thousands-to-d-c-other-cities-in-pro-palestinian-marches"> marched</a>,<a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/rabbis-cease-fire-capitol"> prayed</a>, confronted public officials (including the<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/31/biden-pro-palestine-protest-israel"> president</a>),<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/pro-palestinian-protesters-block-new-york-city-bridges-tunnel-2024-01-08/"> blocked bridges</a>, and<a href="https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4429884-cities-gaza-ceasefire-hamas-israel/"> petitioned</a> their<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/1/chicago-becomes-latest-us-city-to-seek-ceasefire-in-israels-war-on-gaza"> local governments</a> to pass<a href="https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2024/02/duke-university-durham-city-council-ceasefire-cease-fire-resolution-north-carolina"> resolutions</a> demanding the federal government call for a ceasefire, among other creative protest tactics.
So far, their demands appear to be falling on deaf ears, with the leadership of our two establishment political parties united in unconditional support for Israel. The Biden administration continues to<a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-biden-administration-once-again-bypasses-congress-on-an-emergency-weapons-sale-to-israel"> bypass Congress to provide weapons to Israel</a>. House Republicans, for their part, tried to pass a bill to provide<a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us-house-rejects-republican-led-effort-pass-israel-only-aid-bill-2024-02-07/"> even more military aid to Israel</a> than what the Biden administration originally asked for.
The Israeli assault on Gaza has been found by the International Court of Justice to<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/01/gaza-icj-ruling-offers-hope-protection-civilians-enduring-apocalyptic"> plausibly constitute genocide</a>. Closer to home, it has also laid bare the deep democracy deficit in the United States.
The disappearing right to dissent
While protests against the horrific violence in Gaza have understandably received widespread attention, the movement to stop construction of a<a href="https://atlantapolicefoundation.org/programs/public-safety-training-center/"> militarized police training facility</a> on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia is not the national story it deserves to be. The government response to this movement offers some of the most chilling examples of the erosion of human rights in the U.S. today.
Some protesters against Cop City—as the facility is widely known—are being charged with “<a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/03/08/atlanta-cop-city-protesters/">domestic terrorism</a>” simply for having muddy shoes or having legal support numbers written on their arms. Three activists are being<a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/05/02/cop-city-activists-arrest-flyers/"> charged with a felony for distributing flyers</a>.
Most disturbingly, at least one activist in the movement against Cop City, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán (known in the movement as Tortuguita), was killed by police in what could be a targeted political assassination—or at best an intentional cover-up of a friendly fire incident between police officers, as indicated by the<a href="https://www.npr.org/2023/03/11/1162843992/cop-city-atlanta-activist-autopsy"> results of independent autopsies</a>.
Georgia’s Republican Attorney General Christopher Carr has led the legal witch hunt against activists using<a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/dozens-indicted-on-georgia-racketeering-charges-related-to-stop-cop-city-movement-appear-in-court"> Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) charges</a>, which<a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/rico-and-domestic-terrorism-charges-against-cop-city-activists-send-a-chilling-message#:~:text=On%20September%205%2C%20Carr%20obtained,to%2020%20years%20in%20prison."> effectively criminalize collective planning of civil disobedience actions</a> through overbroad allegations of conspiracy. His fellow Republican, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, has made<a href="https://twitter.com/GovKemp/status/1663943106859786240"> inflammatory statements</a> accusing members of the movement against Cop City of domestic terrorism.
Meanwhile, the administration of Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens has used<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/10/cop-city-atlanta-vote-referendum"> voter suppression tactics</a> to obstruct organizers from being able to put the city’s funding for Cop City on the ballot. The state of Georgia and the city of Atlanta are acting in concert to block the public from being able to influence policy through legal channels such as ballot initiatives, and simultaneously, to criminalize civil disobedience.
<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-south/the-new-fight-over-an-old-forest-in-atlanta">Large crowds have testified</a> during Atlanta City Council hearings on Cop City, with the<a href="https://apnews.com/article/cop-city-vote-atlanta-city-council-d782604c15874e441570654ea362e0ef"> overwhelming majority in opposition</a>. 
As with Israel’s attack on Gaza, there is similarly bipartisan consensus around an unpopular policy position, in this case accompanied by bipartisan support for anti-democratic measures to suppress the popular will and criminalize dissent.
Cop City is not merely a local Atlanta issue. Independent investigative journalist Renee Johnston has documented<a href="https://isyourlifebetter.net/cop-cities-usa/"> 69 militarized police training facilities</a>, in various stages of planning and construction across 47 states and the District of Columbia. The government response to opposition to Cop City in Atlanta—and particularly the<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/dec/06/cop-city-atlanta-georgia-environment-protesters-terrorism"> role of the federal Department of Homeland Security</a> in aiding the crackdown on the movement in Atlanta—indicate the high likelihood of potential community opposition to these other facilities attracting similar state repression.
The resulting threat to our democracy is hard to understate. 
There are<a href="https://communitymovementbuilders.org/stop-cop-city/"> valid concerns</a> that facilities such as Cop City will train law enforcement in militarized counterinsurgency tactics to use against people exercising their First Amendment rights. The facility will reportedly include tear gas and explosives testing areas, a Black Hawk helicopter landing pad, and a mock city which can be used to practice urban warfare. It was proposed shortly after major protests in Atlanta against the police killing of Rashad Brooks during the summer of 2020, when much of the country was in the midst of an uprising against police violence.
Meanwhile, law enforcement tactics against the Stop Cop City movement illustrate how the state is increasingly redefining routine acts of dissent as “terrorism.” The proliferation of militarized police training facilities points to a chilling future where law enforcement is trained and equipped to target dissent with extreme violence and intimidation after our political establishment labels all such dissent to be terrorist or subversive. 
Widening the war on protest 
In a recent <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/war-protest-standing-rock-cop-city-repression-criminalize-dissent-political-rights-first-amendment">article for In These Times</a>, Adam Federman lays out the barrage of anti-protest laws being pushed across the country which criminalize dissent and collective action, amounting to state-sponsored political repression. 
A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to <a href="https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/04/court-declines-to-intervene-in-lawsuit-against-black-lives-matter-organizer/">not review a Fifth Circuit decision</a> now opens up the possibility of protest organizers facing civil liability, in addition to being criminalized by the anti-protest laws Federman describes. 
The lawsuit in question was filed by a police officer who was injured in a protest, holding a key protest organizer liable for his injury. <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/24080080/supreme-court-mckesson-doe-first-amendment-protest-black-lives-matter">Everyone (including the plaintiff) agrees</a> that the organizer did not assault the officer, and did not directly incite others to do so either. The plaintiff argues that, by organizing the protest, the defendant created an environment that led to the assault. This line of argument can make any individual or organization who plans a mass protest vulnerable to financial liability for any act committed by any one of sometimes thousands of protest attendees, whose actions they have no control over.
Civil lawsuits can potentially lead to large financial liabilities that grassroots organizations and activists who plan protests can’t afford. Even if the protest organizers can defend themselves successfully from these lawsuits, the time, expense, and stress of having to fight legal battles can have a chilling effect on protests. 
This last point is especially critical. The lawsuit in question has not been decided yet. If, however, the court rules in favor of the plaintiff, a dangerous precedent will be set. 
Corporations and other private actors with an anti-democratic agenda already have <a href="https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/big-oil-greed-v-the-truth-greenpeace-on-trial-over-standing-rock/">tools at their disposal</a> to <a href="https://roanoke.com/news/local/government-politics/mountain-valley-pipeline-protesters-lawsuit-resistance/article_41163394-50f0-11ee-bd8f-33c5ea279fd2.html">misuse the legal system</a> to harass social movements. An adverse ruling in this case will give them yet another tool for legal harassment.
Democracy vs. oligarchy
Such brute force is only the most dramatic way our political and economic elites handle dissent. More often, simply plying our political system with cash is sufficient.
A<a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B/S1537592714001595a.pdf/testing_theories_of_american_politics_elites_interest_groups_and_average_citizens.pdf"> landmark 2014 academic study</a> found that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” while economic elites and powerful interest groups (particularly big business) have outsized influence on policy outcomes. This isn’t merely the conclusion of a decade-old study—in a recent article, I documented how<a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4355892-joe-manchin-and-the-legal-corruption-that-threatens-our-planet/"> corruption funded by corporate cash</a> is very much a feature of U.S. politics today, at both the federal and state levels, transcending party lines.
This brings us back to the difference between procedural and substantive democracy. It is essential to preserve procedural democracy. But for elections and other forms of public decision making to have any meaning, they must substantively reflect the views, interests and input of the ordinary people who are impacted by those decisions. 
This means two things for progressive movements. First, resisting elite capture of government and defending the right to dissent must be core components of any pro-democracy movement in the United States, on par with issues such as voting rights and the courts. 
In practice, this means that the core demands of a pro-democracy movement must include far-reaching measures to root out corporate lobbying and big money from our political system. They must also include the repeal of anti-protest laws, and enacting legislation to protect the right to protest instead, a case that my former colleague Gabrielle Colchete and I have made in a<a href="https://ips-dc.org/report-muzzling-dissent/"> 2020 report</a>. 
Second, we cannot rely on voting alone to preserve (let alone expand) our democratic rights. Elected officials from both mainstream political parties often show disdain for widely held public opinion, and may back repressive measures to protect elite interests. 
If we want to save our democracy, there is no substitute for an organized mass movement of people in the streets. 
Political and business elites are intolerant of dissent and use law enforcement to squash it. However, throughout history, in this country and elsewhere, social movements have challenged elite power—sometimes facing violence and repression—and won. If they hadn’t, Jim Crow segregation would still exist in the United States, the British Empire would still control South Asia, and South Africa would still be subject to apartheid. 
More recently,<a href="https://www.ipe-berlin.org/fileadmin/institut-ipe/Dokumente/Working_Papers/ipe_working_paper_166.pdf"> popular protests</a> brought about a<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/11/gabriel-boric-chile-president-new-era"> political transformation</a> in Chile, and<a href="https://acleddata.com/2021/12/17/an-unlikely-success-demonstrations-against-the-farm-laws-in-india/"> forced the authoritarian government of India</a> to withdraw laws that would subject farmers to corporate control. The movements to dismantle these oppressive systems had to endure<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/02/indian-authorities-lash-out-protests"> violence</a> and<a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/02/02/india-journalists-covering-farmer-protests-charged"> intimidation</a>, but they organized, they persisted, and they won.
To rescue our democracy, we have to follow their example. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Basav Sen]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Lawsuit: Alabama Is Denying Prisoners Parole to Lease Their Labor to Meatpackers, McDonalds]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/alabama-slavery-prison-labor-incarcerated-company-exploit-capitalism-lawsuit</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/alabama-slavery-prison-labor-incarcerated-company-exploit-capitalism-lawsuit</guid>
<description><![CDATA[No parole if you’re still profitable.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/Tu0WXKQdfx4OLvUUplPjPLD0_YYerBIXfltLoGzovsE/w:820/h:453/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYxLkluLVRoZS1UaW1lcy1MYWtpZXJhXzcuanBn.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/Tu0WXKQdfx4OLvUUplPjPLD0_YYerBIXfltLoGzovsE/w:820/h:453/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYxLkluLVRoZS1UaW1lcy1MYWtpZXJhXzcuanBn.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Lakeira Walker, one of 10 plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit against the Alabama Department of Corrections, was released from prison after fifteen years. During her sentence, her labor was exploited for profit by a number of big companies. / Photo by Nitashia Johnson</figcaption></figure> Working in the freezer at Southeastern Meats, a meatpacking facility based in Birmingham, Ala., “was the worst job I’ve ever had in my entire life,” Lakiera Walker tells In These Times. Her 12-hour shifts were spent inside a refrigerated building as cold as 30 or 40 degrees, and she had to beg or borrow warm clothes from her friends and family because the employer didn’t provide any.
She couldn’t even take solace in the idea that she was saving up money for her future, because the prison where she spent the rest of her waking hours was taking a 40% cut on top of various fees. As an incarcerated worker, Walker’s time was not her own—even when she was being forced to use it to make money for private employers and the state of Alabama.
Walker, 36, is one of 10 plaintiffs in Robert Earl Council aka Kinetik Justice v. Kay Ivey, a landmark class-action lawsuit challenging what they and their supporters describe as an unconstitutional forced labor scheme in Alabama’s state prisons. They allege the state’s disproportionately Black incarcerated population is being intentionally exploited for profit. The 126-page complaint was filed in the middle district court of Alabama on Dec. 12, 2023, by the 10 currently or formerly incarcerated workers, the Union of Southern Service Workers (USSW), the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) Mid-South Council, and the Woods Foundation. The suit describes how incarcerated Alabamians are forced to work for free in prison and paid extremely low wages to work for hundreds of private employers—including meatpacking plants and fast-food franchises like McDonald’s—as well as more than 100 city, county and state agencies. And it alleges that the state keeps the scheme going by systematically denying parole to those eligible to work outside jobs.
Prison labor is big business in the United States. According to a 2022 ACLU report, <a href="https://www.aclu.org/news/human-rights/captive-labor-exploitation-of-incarcerated-workers" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers</a>, incarcerated workers save prisons more than $9 billion a year in operational costs and earn them more than $2 billion in sales of goods and services, while the prisoners make pennies per hour. They have no say over what types of work they perform or how they’re compensated for that labor, and a survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 76% of the nation’s roughly 800,000 incarcerated workers are unable to refuse to work without punishment or retaliation.
None of this is unique to Alabama, but Alabama is one of only seven states that pays nothing to prisoners who work to keep its prisons running. The Yellowhammer State also has a particularly rotten reputation for how it treats its incarcerated population, with a notoriously overcrowded, dirty, dangerous and corrupt prison system. The prisoner mortality rate is<a href="https://aldailynews.com/inmates-families-share-gruesome-testimonies-of-alabama-prison-conditions/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> five times higher</a> than the national average.
For these reasons and more, the plaintiffs I spoke with told me that, once word spread that a class action was brewing, they jumped at the chance. There is a long list of defendants, including Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, Attorney General Steve Marshall, three members of the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles, Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm and Transportation Director John Cooper, as well as the cities of Montgomery and Troy, Jefferson County, and a number of private employers, including Gemstone Foods, Progressive Finishes and McDonald’s. The suit charges them with violating Alabama’s State Constitution—which, as of 2022, bans <a href="https://alison.legislature.state.al.us/constitution" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">slavery and involuntary servitude</a>—as well as the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
In the case of the government officials, they’re also accused of conspiring to increase the size of the Alabama prison population—which is predominantly Black—through the discriminatory denial of parole so the state can continue profiting from forced labor. “[Prisoners] have been entrapped in a system of ‘convict leasing’ in which incarcerated people are forced to work, often for little or no money, for the benefit of the numerous government entities and private businesses that ‘employ’ them,” the suit charges.
In Alabama, that charge comes with ugly historical baggage. Convict leasing—a practice of forced penal labor prevalent in the post-Emancipation South (in which incarcerated men were “leased” to private employers)—was a massive state revenue driver. Thanks to the Black Codes, a racist program to criminalize petty offenses both real and imagined, Black people were locked up at a massively disproportionate rate to their white neighbors. Many were then sent to work on plantations to fill the labor gap left by Emancipation.
“The plantation owners, as best they could, wanted Blacks to return to the same place as they had been as slaves,” historian David Oshinsky <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/slavery-and-the-modern-day-prison-plantation/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">writes</a> in Worse Than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. Other prisoners were “leased” out to work in coal mines, which was as good as a <a href="https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/banner-mine-explosion/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">death sentence</a>.
During the 1891 Coal Creek War in Tennessee, striking white miners freed more than <a href="https://eji.org/news/convict-leasing-alabama-coal-mines/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">100 Black convict laborers</a> who had been shipped in to act as strikebreakers. But such bright spots were few and far between. The more Black people who were imprisoned and forced to work, the more money they brought in for the state’s benefit. (Is this sounding familiar, dear reader? It should.) By 1898, convict leasing fees made up 73% of Alabama’s revenue.
Convict leasing was formally abolished in Alabama in 1928, but prison labor has remained a significant source of income for the state. Alabama has long been one of the poorest states in the country (in 2022, its poverty rate was 16.2%). It also collects <a href="https://parcalabama.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/How-Alabama-Taxes-Compare-2023.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">less in property taxes</a> per resident than any other state, with rates that are enshrined in the state constitution and thus extremely difficult to change. This arrangement encourages the state’s conservative leaders to look for money elsewhere.
According to the lawsuit, Alabama reaped a $450 million benefit from forced prison labor in 2023 alone. The state takes a 40% cut of the gross earnings of all incarcerated workers laboring for private employers. It also prof its from goods manufactured by incarcerated workers. The Alabama Correctional Industries website boasts a wide range of products “sold to governmental entities within the State,” including “executive chairs” and a judge’s bench, and even operates a showroom in Montgomery, Ala. A lovely white gazebo purchased for the governor’s mansion was made by incarcerated workers. Its current occupant, Kay Ivey, is named as a primary defendant.
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<figcaption>Guards supervise a group of convict-lease prisoners in Birmingham, Ala.</figcaption> </figure>
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<figcaption>Convict-lease prisoners at the Banner Mine in Alabama.</figcaption> </figure>
The symbolism is not lost on the plaintiffs: “In those same chairs prepared by [prisoners’] hands, the ones who benefited sit on the leather and deny them freedom,” plaintiff Alimireo English tells In These Times.
Some of that windfall also lands on Alabama’s state and county agencies, which have saved a fortune in wage costs by extracting labor from incarcerated workers instead of paying hired personnel. Since 2018, more than 100 public employers have benefited from cut-rate labor provided by the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC).
Lakiera Walker worked for Jefferson County doing roadwork for approximately two years and was paid a $2 daily wage to handle large trash removal (including a Jacuzzi). She found out that the non-incarcerated workers on her team were making $10 per hour for the same job. One day, the lawsuit alleges, Walker’s boss attempted to coerce her into unwanted sexual activity; when she refused, he wrote her up on a disciplinary offense for “refusing to work.” She was then sent to work unpaid in the prison’s kitchen, and when her family called the commissioner and the warden to demand something be done, no action was taken.
“It was basically just slipped under the rug,” Walker says. 
During Walker’s time working at Southeastern Meats, she technically started at $12 per hour, which she believes is the same as her non-incarcerated coworkers, but after the Alabama prison system got through with her check, she was only bringing home about $100 in her weekly paycheck, which works out to less than $2 per hour. ADOC deducts 40% of the check as a “fee” and then often adds other fees, such as a $5 “transportation fee” to take workers to and from work.
After Southeastern Meats, Walker was sent to Burger King, where she worked right up until her release date. Once Walker left state custody, she called to collect her final check, but found it had already been sent to ADOC. After that, according to her lawyer, no one knows what happened to it. “So I’m coming out of prison with $10 and not the check that I worked hard for,” Walker explains. “You don’t have to take 40% from me. I’m at home!”
During Walker’s 15-year incarceration, she held a litany of unpaid jobs throughout the prison itself, too, including in the kitchen, housekeeping and healthcare. She even provided hospice care to dying patients. “The nurses really weren’t interested in taking care of sickly or terminally ill people, so they would get the inmates to do it,” Walker says. She says she was regularly required to work seven days a week, and she often had to work two shifts a day.
None of these prison jobs were paid, and quitting or refusing work was not a viable option. “You can’t say, ‘Hey, I can’t go to work today,’” Walker explains. “You would go to segregation, which was solitary confinement. … People were so tired and just hopeless at that point, they would kind of welcome solitary confinement, just to have a break.”
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<figcaption>Lakiera Walker, a plaintiff in the class-action Kinetik Justice v. Kay Ivey against Alabama’s prison labor system, poses with her son. Other plaintiffs include (from left to right) Arthur Ptomey, Robert Earl Council (aka Kinetik Justice), Lanair Pritchett, Lee Edward Moore Jr., Jerame Cole, Michael Campbell, Alimireo English, Frederick McDole, and Toni Teare Cartwright.</figcaption> </figure>
Walker did finally make it home after all those years of forced labor, but many others are still trapped in the system. Another plaintiff, Lee Edward Moore Jr., a genial 51-year-old Black man, has been in ADOC custody since 1997. He is currently incarcerated at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., and was most recently denied parole in 2022. It was his fourth time being denied since 2009. He cannot for the life of him understand why.
His story spans decades and has seen him change prison “careers” many times. One of his first jobs at Holman was refitting the execution chamber; he remembers tearing out the old electric chair when the prison was switching over to lethal injections. As a highly skilled worker, he is constantly in demand, and the lawsuit describes how, over the years, he has been asked to do “plumbing, heating and air conditioning installation and maintenance, installation of phone lines, electrical work, and all manners of construction and yard work” projects for the prison. Like Lakiera Walker, Moore has been called down to the healthcare unit to help clean and provide care for fellow prisoners. For the past decade, Moore has also been asked to work on projects outside of the prison, during which he is typically left unsupervised; he’s even personally remodeled wardens’ own state-provided houses.
“They trust me; they know I’m not going to try to escape,” Moore explains.
His latest job has taken him back beyond the prison walls; now, Moore cuts the grass outside of death row.
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<figcaption>Members of the Tennessee Student Solidarity Network gather outside Alabama’s St. Clair Correctional Facility on March 2 for a solidarity protest with the Free Alabama Movement.</figcaption> </figure>
Moore has not been paid a single cent for any of it, the lawsuit alleges, or received any type of tangible benefit. The biggest perk he’s ever received was a bunk in a smaller, less violent dorm reserved for certain low-risk workers. That, at least, was something; throughout our conversation, he’s clear about his desire to avoid the violence that notoriously permeates ADOC. A <a href="https://theappeal.org/alabamas-prisons-are-the-most-crowded-if-you-look-at-the-right-data/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">2019 Department of Justice report</a> stated that conditions in Alabama’s prisons were so egregious that they violated prisoners’ constitutional right to be protected against cruel and unusual punishment.
When I ask Moore if he ever refused to work, he explains he did feel he had the option, but generally prefers keeping busy—and staying safe. “I just do it because it’s so violent on the inside here,” he says. “I try to keep away from the trouble. I’m trying to go home, but I never have the opportunity.”
That element is the strangest part of his story. Moore’s reputation among the prison’s officials is squeaky-clean—as his lawyer interjected during our call, “Lee has the cleanest file I’ve ever seen, and he’s been in some of the toughest prisons in Alabama”—and Moore is clearly a low-risk, highly motivated individual. As the lawsuit reads, “There is no reasonable argument that he poses a threat to public safety as he has been working long hours daily since he was first incarcerated, without pay, for ADOC, both inside and outside prison walls without incident.” Moore has paying construction jobs waiting for him once he does go home, and a wife and family desperate to see him. His step-daughter is a parole officer, and several of Moore’s family members are in law enforcement.
The wardens at Holman continually recommended Moore for parole.
And yet, Moore’s custody level has not budged. He has not been allowed to participate in a work-release program, which would at least provide a paycheck. And his latest request for a sentence reduction was denied.
Now, Moore won’t get his next chance to come home until 2027. That’s why he joined the class action. “We’re being treated like slaves in here,” he says. “We just sit here. It’s hopeless. Trying to go for parole, there’s no hope.”
In 2015, the state of Alabama reacted to reports of dangerous overcrowding within ADOC—prisons were at 195% capacity—by enacting measures intended to parole more people while hiring more parole and probation officers, plus an effort to reduce recidivism by investing in community-based substance use disorder and mental health treatment centers. The reforms initially were a success: They reduced the overcrowding and nearly equalized parole outcomes between Black and white prisoners.
But after far-right Gov. Kay Ivey came to power in 2017, progress stopped—and began rolling back. Ivey immediately took pains to curb parole grants. The lawsuit alleges that Ivey forced parole boards to disregard the “evidence-based objective standards” for parole decisions that had increased parole grants prior to 2018. The next year, the parole grant rate <a href="https://www.alabamasmartjustice.org/reports/report-parole-denied" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">fell from 53% to 31%</a>. It continued to plummet, and the gap between Black and white prisoners’ likelihood of being granted parole widened. Between 2020 and 2022, Black prisoners were denied parole at twice the rate of white ones.
By 2022, the parole rate was 11% overall and only 7% for Black prisoners—meaning that 93% of parole-requesting Black prisoners were denied.
That’s what happened to Alimireo English, a charismatic 48-year-old Black man who, according to a judge, should not be in prison right now. It’s a convoluted story, but he was taken into ADOC custody in October 2020 after his parole from a previous conviction was revoked over new misdemeanor charges. A jury acquitted him of those charges on Nov. 8, 2021, and a judge ordered his release.
But instead of being back home with his family, at church with his faith community, or visiting his eldest son in New York, English is at the Ventress Correctional Facility in Clayton, Ala. His case did not come before the parole board until November 28, 2023, more than two years after he’d already been acquitted, but he was denied anyway. His next parole date is November 2024.
“They gotta keep me for another year until they can find somebody else on the street that they can pull back in and take my place,” English tells me. “If they can’t replace you, they don’t let you go.”
His continuing incarceration has come as a heavy shock to English, who spent the time since his 2017 release staying out of trouble and building a better life for himself and his loved ones. “You don’t send a man back to prison when he’s got his whole life straight,” English says. “My parole officer said in my hearing, [they] never had a problem with me prior to this incident. That should have been a red flag right there.”
It is even more jarring given how he spends his time at his unwelcome new home. English works as a dorm representative for the facility’s Faith Dorm, where he is on call 24 hours a day, seven days per week. He is responsible for the safety and well-being of 190 incarcerated men, many of them elderly or medically vulnerable. He handles custodial duties and maintenance, screens dorm visitors and is also the first responder for drug and health emergencies. In his scant free time, he runs a therapy and counseling group for his fellow prisoners. He consistently works 12 to 15 hour days and, for most of the week, he is the sole individual in charge of the dorm; a retired prison chaplain comes in to assist him a few times weekly, but otherwise English is not supervised by any corrections personnel.
As the lawsuit highlights, “Since Mr. English has been in this position, the Faith Dorm has had no fights, deaths, or overdoses.”
The plaintiffs’ legal team estimates that ADOC saves roughly $200,000 a year by not having a corrections officer in that one dorm. Meanwhile, English is paid nothing. “The inmates basically run the prison, but the officers are getting compensated for it,” English says. “The wages the inmates are paid for their work hasn’t changed since 1927.”
Several of the plaintiffs I spoke to also mentioned “institutional need,” a specific designation that plaintiffs have reported is added to certain prisoners’ files to signify their utility to their current facility. According to Walker and her lawyer, institutional need is yet another trick used by the ADOC to keep especially useful incarcerated workers from leaving, so the state can continue benefiting from that person’s skills. It calls to mind Moore’s construction skills and English’s high level of responsibility.
“Most people, it stops them from going home or making parole because it says that we need you more in prison than the world needs you in society,” Walker explains. “This lady, her name is Lisa Smith, she’s been in prison about 30 years, and every time she comes up for parole, regardless of her crime, she’s an institutional need. She can fix anything in the prison—she can probably build a prison—but she’s not getting paid. Sometimes they won’t even call in a free world contractor because she knows what to do. It’s looking bleak that she will ever make it out of prison, because they need her there.”
Alimero English, Lee Moore and Lakiera Walker see this lawsuit as a chance to speak up for themselves and the thousands of other currently or formerly incarcerated workers in ADOC who have felt freedom slip through their fingers.
“The ADOC have institutionalized inmates to the point where they’ve been in captivity so long that their hope has been completely extinguished,” English says. “And their fight to be released from this has turned into just an uncomfortable routine of prison life until they die.”
With Robert Earl Council aka Kinetik Justice v. Kay Ivey, they have found a new spark of hope—and some new allies. The 10 plaintiffs have been joined by two heavyweight Southern labor unions, the USSW and the RWDSU Mid-South Council. It is uncommon to see major unions speaking out so explicitly about prison labor and the plight of incarcerated workers, but USSW and RWDSU have been unequivocal in their support.
“We’re proud to join this lawsuit because we are horrified and outraged by the system of forced labor in Alabama state prisons that has kept Black incarcerated people trapped in prison,” Eric Winston, a USSW member and a cook at the Brookdale Durham assisted living center in North Carolina, tells In These Times. “Across the South, we know that when racism exists anywhere, it hurts workers everywhere.”
RWDSU represents thousands of workers in Alabama, predominantly in the state’s poultry plants, and also represented the workers who spearheaded the first major attempt to organize an Amazon warehouse, in Bessemer, Ala., in 2021.
Beyond the myriad social, political and economic justice issues that underpin prison labor, the proliferation of forced labor also hurts unions’ ability to organize workers and depresses wages and working conditions for all workers.
The USSW represents fast food workers throughout the South, while RWDSU counts many meatpacking workers among its members. If employers like McDonald's, Southeastern Meats, KFC or Progressive Finishes (an automotive powder-coating company where plaintiffs Michael Campbell and Arthur Ptomey currently work) are able to hire incarcerated workers, pay them the bare minimum, and work them to the bone because those workers cannot call out or quit, there’s precious little incentive for them to hire outside workers.
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<figcaption>Lakiera Walker poses with her son.</figcaption> </figure>
Because of a 1977 Supreme Court decision, incarcerated workers in the United States—including those in ADOC’s work release program—are legally prohibited from unionizing.
The Supreme Court decision barring incarcerated workers from unionizing has not stopped organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World’s Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Jailhouse Lawyers Speak and the Free Alabama Movement (FAM) from organizing labor actions, strikes and protests against prison slavery, or individual prisoners from finding their own ways to dissent. The Abolish Slavery National Network is working to eliminate “involuntary servitude” exemptions for prison labor from state constitutions. It succeeded in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee and Vermont in 2022, and eight states are considering legislation in 2024.
One of the founders of FAM, Kinetik Justice, is a plaintiff in the Alabama lawsuit. He has helped organize and lead several high-profile nationwide prison strikes since 2016. He’s been in ADOC custody for the past 29 years, and he has been repeatedly punished, harassed and tortured for his work organizing against forced labor. According to The Appeal, he spent 54 months in solitary confinement between 2014 and 2018 and has been repeatedly sent back into the hole. As he told Democracy Now! in 2016, “We understood our incarceration was pretty much about our labor and the money that was being generated from the prison system, therefore we began organizing around our labor and used it as a means and a method to bring about reform in the Alabama prison system.” He is no stranger to filing lawsuits on his own and his fellow prisoners’ behalf against ADOC, so it is fitting that this landmark class action suit bears his name.
On Dec. 21, 2023, six of the plaintiffs filed a motion seeking a preliminary injunction demanding that Alabama return to its pre-2018, pre-Ivey parole process, and calling on state officials to end the current system of forced prison labor and release individuals qualified for parole. “The harms that plaintiffs are suffering from being unjustly denied parole are extensive and irreparable,” the motion reads. “There is no remedy for that lost time or liberty.”
Moore put it more plainly: “I want to go home. I don’t want to stay in here. We need to stand up for something.”
A happy ending remains out of reach for most of the plaintiffs, at least for a little while longer, but at least one has found some peace outside ADOC. When I spoke with Lakiera Walker, the bubbly 36-year-old had left Alabama and had just started a new job as a receptionist. She feels like she lucked out.
“It’s hard for us to come out here and get a job or to find somewhere to stay, because we weren’t able to save any money,” Walkers says. “They worked us for years and took all of our pay. ... [And then] people look at your background and say, ‘Oh, she was a criminal.’ But we’ve worked all these years in prison doing all this work. We have the drive, we have a great work ethic. … If we’re good enough to work at these free-world jobs, why are we not good enough to work in society?”
She tells me she manifested this lawsuit and this chance to finally speak out. “[A] lot of us were raised to work,” Walker says. “That’s not the issue. It’s the injustice in things that go on behind the walls that no one knows. [It’s about not] being held to do slave work. It’s about being appreciated and being valued. Because at the end of the day, we’re human.”
Note: Since the print publication of this story, Burger King was dropped as a defendant in the suit. The online version has been updated.
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kim Kelly]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The Nation’s Coal Miners Get a Rare Piece of Good News]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/msha-new-silica-rule-coal-miners-black-lung</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2024 10:30:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/msha-new-silica-rule-coal-miners-black-lung</guid>
<description><![CDATA[MSHA’s new silica rule—recommended 50 years ago—could save thousands from black lung, although advocates worry about enforcement.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/xM6hqoN-vbdHDk1tawG7XKftR54BBcZF9zwUWdHJqD0/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9TYXVuZGVyc19JblRoZXNlVGltZXMxMy5qcGc.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/xM6hqoN-vbdHDk1tawG7XKftR54BBcZF9zwUWdHJqD0/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9TYXVuZGVyc19JblRoZXNlVGltZXMxMy5qcGc.jpg" alt="A young girl points a pink Polaroid at the camera as a man in a baseball cap looks on, laughing. They're in a living room cluttered with toys and photos." /><figcaption>Miner John Moore (right), 42, smiles at his daughter in their home in Beckley, W.Va., on March 16, 2023. Moore is one of a growing number of young miners diagnosed with black lung, an incurable disease. / Photo by Laura Saunders</figcaption></figure> Today, the Department of Labor’s Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) officially published a <a href="https://www.federalregister.gov/public-inspection/2024-06920/lowering-miners-exposure-to-respirable-crystalline-silica-and-improving-respiratory-protection">new federal safety rule</a> aimed at reducing the amount of silica dust that coal miners breathe during their long shifts underground. As In These Times <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/manchin-senators-push-biden-silica-standard-coal-miners">reported</a> in a 2023 investigation, the prior standard allowed miners to be exposed to as much as 100 micrograms of silica dust per cubic meter, which was twice as high as the silica limit for workers in all other industries. The new rule slashes the limit to 50 micrograms—a level first recommended in 1974.
Silica is 20 times more toxic than coal dust and has been identified by experts as the leading cause of a growing epidemic of black lung cases among coal miners in Central Appalachia. The Department of Labor estimates that the new rule will result in about 1,067 lifetime avoided deaths and 3,746 lifetime avoided cases of silica-related illnesses. 
“It is unconscionable that our nation’s miners have worked without adequate protection from silica dust despite it being a known health hazard for decades,” <a href="https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/msha/msha20240416#:~:text=The%20final%20rule%20lowers%20the,-hour%20time-weighted%20average.">said</a> Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su in a statement. “Today, the Department of Labor has taken an important action to finally reduce miners’ exposure to toxic silica dust and protect them from suffering from preventable diseases.”
The new rule will require coal companies to monitor miners’ work environment for silica dust, report overexposures to MSHA and take immediate corrective action. Mines must also employ engineering controls to reduce dust exposure. 
The rule’s enforcement provisions aren’t everything that advocates had <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/11/07/1210051981/coal-miners-black-lung-silica-dust-rule">hoped for</a>. National Black Lung Association Vice President Vonda Robinson <a href="https://grist.org/health/a-new-federal-rule-aims-to-protect-miners-from-black-lung-disease/">tells Grist </a>that she is “pretty upset” that it relies heavily on self-monitoring by mining companies. Her husband is dying of black lung disease at age 57.
As the rule is rolled out, advocates are also calling on MSHA to add stronger criteria for issuing citations and create clear penalties for violation, as well as provisions to temporarily shut down mines that are in violation. 
Penalties are a particular sticking point; <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/west-virginia-coal-mining-silica-hearing-black-lung">at a public hearing</a> in Beckley, W. Va. last summer, attorney Sam Petsonk was adamant that the agency needed to beef up its enforcement plans. “A rule with no penalties is no rule at all,” Petsonk said. “The only thing that mining companies understand is money. They don’t understand or appreciate the blood and the lives of miners, because if they did, they would have protected miners willingly over the last several decades.”
According to data that the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) shared with In These Times in 2023, black lung cases have become much more prevalent in recent decades among younger miners and those who have spent less time underground. In coal-producing states like Kentucky and West Virginia, black lung afflicts more than 1 in 8 coal miners who have been working underground for 20–24 years, rising from about 1 in 30 a decade ago. For an 18-year-old who heads into the mines straight from high school, those numbers would put them at serious risk of the disease before they turn 40. Rates have also increased among even younger workers and those who’ve worked underground as little as 15–19 years —and heavy exposure <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/topics/silica/risks.html#:~:text=Silicosis%20results%20in%20permanent%20lung,more%20quickly%20after%20heavy%20exposures.">can speed up the timeline</a> even further.
This is not new information. <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-extra/2018/07/26/618848386/q-a-investigations-correspondent-howard-berkes-discusses-black-lung-disease-seri">Howard Berkes</a>, a member of the Public Health Watch board of directors and former NPR investigations correspondent, first documented the rise in black lung in <a href="https://www.npr.org/2018/12/18/675253856/an-epidemic-is-killing-thousands-of-coal-miners-regulators-could-have-stopped-it">a landmark 2018 expose</a>, and has closely followed its developments ever since. As he <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/16/1245011608/silica-dust-mine-safety-coal-black-lung-final-rule">told</a> NPR, the new rule has come about 50 years later than it should. NIOSH sounded the alarm on silica back in <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/coal-miners-black-lung-young-dying-old-mans-disease-kim-kelly">1974</a> and recommended lowering the standard to 50 micrograms to “prevent adverse effects of crystalline silica.” It took <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/manchin-senators-push-biden-silica-standard-coal-miners">five decades of organizing, lobbying, and pressure</a> from coal miners and their families, the UMWA and USW, advocacy groups like the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, the Black Lung Association and Appalachian Voices, and health experts to get to this point—and as many of them are quick to point out, it’s still just a start.
The Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center’s director of policy Rebecca Shelton tells Grist she is troubled that MSHA “[prioritized] the economics of the industry over the lives of miners” in rejecting a lower exposure limit because it would be too costly to mining companies. 
Petsonk believes the administration should have looked more closely into technology like dust monitors that can automatically shut off mining machines when dust levels are too high.
He also worries that the plan is subject to political winds. “Under this administration, we believe MSHA will effectively audit [companies’ self-reports],” Petsonk says. “This administration is more forcefully, creatively and successfully committed to empowering miners than any MSHA Administration throughout history. … But future administrations could neglect such oversight—leaving the foxes to guard the henhouses much of the time.”
“Congress … made clear in the Mine Act that miners’ health and safety must always be our first priority and concern," MSHA Assistant Secretary Williamson said in a <a href="https://www.msha.gov/news-media/news-releases/2024/04/16/department-labor-issues-final-rule-reducing-silica-dust-exposure-better-protecting-miners-health">statement</a>. “To further advance this directive, MSHA is committed to working together with everyone in the mining community to implement this rule successfully. No miner should ever have to sacrifice their health or lungs to provide for their family.”
Leaders of the UMWA and the Steelworkers <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/16/1245011608/silica-dust-mine-safety-coal-black-lung-final-rule">joined</a> workers, public health advocates and government officials in Uniontown, Pa., on Tuesday to celebrate the announcement of the new rule. “Obviously, we want it to be better,” UMWA spokesperson Erin Bates told Grist. “But no matter what, more health and safety is better for our miners.”
Any program, Petsonk says, will “only be as strong as the political mandate from the Department of Labor and the aggressiveness of rank-and-file miner participation. That matters more than anything. 
"Ultimately, no workers' rights regulation will be effective if workers are not adequately empowered to demand their rights on the job.”
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Kim Kelly]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[What Today’s Labor Activists Can Learn From the Legacy of Ron Carey]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/ron-carey-teamsters-ups-strike-ibt</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/ron-carey-teamsters-ups-strike-ibt</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The late Teamsters reform leader Ron Carey succeeded in turning around a corrupt and conservative union. Today’s labor reformers looking to revitalize their own unions can take lessons from his career.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/QKI35JarP4wi_DgWLZ2Md4h5LgW2NDUSmmCkQdT8ZEo/w:820/h:590/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy01MDQ2Nzk2Ny5qcGc.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/QKI35JarP4wi_DgWLZ2Md4h5LgW2NDUSmmCkQdT8ZEo/w:820/h:590/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy01MDQ2Nzk2Ny5qcGc.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>President of Intl. Brotherhood of Teamsters Ron Carey holding post-election press conference. / (Photo by Cynthia Johnson/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> Books about union presidents are usually penned by professional writers—either academic historians, labor journalists or paid flacks. Past accounts of the life and work of labor organization chiefs like John L. Lewis, Walter Reuther, Jimmy Hoffa or Cesar Chavez have run the gamut from hagiographic to constructively critical. Few have had a biographer whose view of their leadership role is rooted in firsthand experience as a blue-collar worker in the same industry and union.
Ken Reiman’s personal connection to the subject matter of <a href="https://monthlyreview.org/product/ron-carey-and-the-teamsters/">Ron Carey and the Teamsters: How a UPS Driver Became the Greatest Union Reformer of the 20th Century by Putting Members First</a> (Monthly Review) resulted from his long career as a UPS driver and activist in the local union that Carey led before becoming president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in the 1990s. Reiman’s insights into the workplace culture and organizational politics of IBT Local 804 in Queens, New York, before, during, and after Carey’s presidency provide a rank-and-file perspective on the challenges of institutional change in organized labor over the past 50 years.
Carey’s story, as told by Reiman, contains many important lessons for younger union activists, whether they are Teamsters or involved in other unions. Organized labor today is in a state of very positive ferment. A reform movement in the United Auto Workers (UAW), modeled after Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), has had similar success winning direct election of top officers and using that system to oust old-guard officials.
By late 2023, newly elected UAW leaders were conducting a major strike against U.S. automakers, after building a membership-based contract campaign of the sort never employed by the previous leadership during national bargaining. Earlier in the year, new leadership in the Teamsters, elected in 2022 with TDU backing, engaged many of the union’s 330,000 members at UPS in a national contract fight that drew on the experience of the UPS strike in 1997, led by Ron Carey.
In California, in 2023, workers in the state university system staged the largest higher education walkout ever and union members at Kaiser Permanente conducted the biggest health care industry strike in U.S. labor history. Actors and writers participated in an overlapping work stoppage in Hollywood that involved more than 170,000 workers. Meanwhile, thousands of Southern California hotel workers also struck for a new contract.
Workers at Starbucks have conducted what now appears to be a successful first contract campaign, after engaging in nationally coordinated protest activity and mini-strikes in particular workplaces. The landscape of labor organizing in Amazon warehouses and distribution centers is replete with similar shop-floor skirmishing between labor and management, including worker-led strikes over local issues in many locations with no formal bargaining rights or union recognition.
This dynamic mix of union democracy and reform struggles, at the local and national level, and heightened workplace militancy in many different sectors was, of course, the context for Ron Carey’s own late 20th century career as a union dissident. He became the first democratically elected president of what was, not long ago, the nation’s most corrupt and racketeer-dominated union. 
Each phase of Carey’s rise and fall, as recounted in Ron Carey and the Teamsters, is worthy of close study by those seeking to follow in his footsteps as a shop-floor militant, an opposition candidate for local union office, and a coalition builder with other reformers. Last, and most impressive, was Carey’s role as a national labor leader faced with the daunting challenge of transforming a dysfunctional organization in the face of employer hostility and the internal resistance of union officials protecting their own perks, political power and personal fiefdoms.
Below are some of the critical components of union revitalization, as recounted in this biography, that have continuing relevance to present-day reform struggles:
Ousting local union incumbents
Like many disgruntled members before and since, Carey first got involved in union politics because officials of Local 804 in the late 1950s were so unresponsive to worker complaints and concerns. He ran for shop steward, beating a fellow driver who “didn’t want to rock the boat.” Rocking the boat became Carey’s “MO” for the rest of his career.
But he understood the limitations of being a “lone ranger.” Reiman’s account of how Carey assembled a team of like-minded coworkers to take on the union establishment is a good primer for anyone trying to do so at the local union level today.
It took Carey a decade, and several election defeats running for lesser offices, before he became 804 president on a platform of cleaning up the local, enforcing the contract and improving pensions. As he did 24 years later in the “Marble Palace”—the Teamsters’ headquarters in Washington—Carey cut his own salary to show that he was serious about putting union resources to work for the membership.
Using direct action on the job
The year Ron Carey became a Teamster steward, Local 804 had 20 wildcat strikes; not long afterwards UPS drivers in New York City struck for six weeks, over the objections of local and national union officials. Throughout his three decades in the local, Carey tapped into, rather than trying to suppress, rank-and-file unrest that took the form of job actions, whether legal or not.
When Carey became president in 1968, after campaigning for a year as part of an opposition slate, his first challenge was striking UPS again. This time, 804 members walked out for more than two months to win a first-ever “twenty-five-and-out” pension provision (allowing workers to retire with a pension after 25 years on the job) with UPS, effectively using contract rejection votes at mass meetings to win a better final offer from management.
Challenging bureaucratic control of bargaining
As Reiman reports, Carey quickly developed a reputation for honesty, transparency, and independence from the corrupt regional and national power structure of the IBT. But, in the Teamsters then, and in many other unions today, islands of militancy have trouble surviving in a sea of business unionism.
Ron Carey and the Teamsters shows how dissident locals like Carey’s 804 must overcome attempts by the union hierarchy to undermine picket-line solidarity among workers bargaining with the same employer, but in different locals or national unions. Carey’s methods of thwarting management’s “divide-and-conquer” schemes, aided and abetted by top union officials, are worthy of emulation.
Networking with like-minded reformers
In the 1980s, the IBT began negotiating more issues with UPS at the company-wide level—via a tightly controlled national bargaining committee—which reduced the scope and impact of local or regional bargaining. To counter this threat, Carey and Local 804 began to ally with UPS dissidents around the country, including those long active in TDU and equally opposed to a then-provision of the IBT constitution that required a two-thirds vote, rather than a simple majority, to reject any tentative agreement with an employer.
Jousting with the international union over imposition of unpopular UPS contracts—voted down by a majority of those covered by them—helped build the movement for democratizing the Teamsters by linking bad bargaining outcomes to denial of membership rights.
Winning and using one member, one vote
Most U.S. union members have no direct say about their national union officers and executive board members. The latter are elected by smaller groups of local union delegates at national conventions that tend to be leadership controlled, particularly when incumbents are up for reelection. These delegate bodies are resistant to changing national union constitutions to allow the more democratic method used in the American Postal Workers Union, International Longshore and Warehouse Union, the NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America, and a few others.
The only major breakthroughs in direct voting on top officers have occurred after corruption scandals and resulting judicial intervention involving the IBT, UAW and the Laborers’ International Union of North America. Without a rank-and-file reform movement—of the type which backed Carey during his two Teamsters presidential campaigns, or which developed recently in the UAW—it remains hard for opposition candidates to win any union-wide election. The lesson of this book is to be ready for that political opening when and if it occurs, while fighting for “one member, one vote” in the meantime.
Tackling internal restructuring
When Carey and other members of his reform slate took over Teamsters headquarters in 1992, the Marble Palace was not just a monument to past Teamster extravagance. It was full of poorly performing departments, with overpaid (and sometimes incompetent) staffers hostile to the goals of the new administration. Foes of reform also controlled all the Teamster joint councils, area conferences, and the boards of the many health, welfare and pension benefit funds. These powerful officials wanted Carey and his team to fall on their faces.
Working with TDU activists around the country and a minority of reform-minded local officers, Carey put 75 troubled locals under trusteeship, cut waste, stepped up Teamster organizing, hired aggressive new staff and empowered members. As Reiman documents, the elimination of the “area conferences” was a major restructuring victory—and a blueprint worth following, as needed, in other unions saddled with unnecessary layers of bureaucracy and staff featherbedding.
Staying close to the members
To his credit, Carey never felt comfortable in his new inside-the-Beltway world (where a sycophantic culture of political hustling and overpaid “consulting” would, in the end, contribute to his undoing). He liked hanging out with working Teamsters in Queens, not politicians or other high-ranking union officials in Washington. He was a workhorse not a show horse, a hands-on handler of IBT members’ daily problems, large and small.
Carey’s organizational accomplishments, as Reiman shows, were always rooted in a strong personal connection with the membership that many elected and appointed officials seem to lose as they ascend through the ranks of their respective union bureaucracies.
Taking on employers, with new allies
Carey’s finest hour came in 1997 when the presence of someone at the top of the union who sincerely believed in the power of the rank and file made it possible for 185,000 UPS workers to win the biggest nationwide strike in the last 30 years. The UPS contract campaign employed membership education and mobilization, labor-community coalition building, and outreach to UPS customers and the general public via the media that the union had never utilized before.
Two years before, the Teamsters under Carey had cast 1.4 million votes in the AFL-CIO’s first contested election in 100 years, thereby helping to secure the victory of a new leadership more helpful in labor-management showdowns like the UPS strike. The IBT joined the labor-community coalition Jobs With Justice, embraced single-payer healthcare reform, and campaigned against free trade. The union ditched its traditional ties to conservative Republicans, while maintaining some—albeit not enough—distance from Democrats who disappointed or betrayed labor.
Anticipating a counterrevolution
When union reformers win, they still face pushback from entrenched internal foes. Carey’s crackdown on crooks and leadership perks alienated large sections of the Teamster officialdom. Still-powerful bureaucrats who had split their support between two “Old Guard” candidates in 1991 bankrolled a unified $4 million challenge, fronted by James Hoffa, five years later. The wealthy Detroit labor lawyer masqueraded successfully as a populist critic of a “New Teamster” establishment that was spendthrift, incompetent, and run by “outsiders.”
As Reiman recounts, the Carey campaign fundraising misconduct in 1996 was a self-inflicted blow to the moral authority and public reputation of his administration. It was the result of corner-cutting and top-down campaigning that was very different from the bottom-up approach that propelled Carey to victory five years before.
The moral of this story: if you’re going to take on union corruption and corporate America at the same time, don’t let opportunistic “outsiders” hitch their wagon to your team. Their greed, bad judgment, and lack of any connection to union reform will lead to grifting of a new sort. 
While the tragedy of Ron Carey’s criminal prosecution and eventual banning from the union makes for painful reading, Ken Reiman’s book reminds us that the Teamster reform movement survived “<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/what-went-wrong">Donorgate</a>” in the mid-1990s and upheld his legacy of opposition to Teamster old-guard politics and policies. The work of Carey and many like-minded supporters four decades ago raised the bar and set the stage for Teamster reformers to reclaim their national headquarters nearly 25 years later.
One result of that most recent national-level reform slate victory was the 2022–23 UPS contract campaign, which drew on the lessons, experiences, and, in many cases, the leadership of 1997 strike veterans. In much media coverage and analysis of last year’s grassroots contract campaign and its results, Carey’s name, memory, and past strike role were often invoked.
To TDU members and the many other Teamsters whose votes made him the first directly elected national union president, Carey remains a heroic, not just tragic, figure. In a union where to this day, many local officers are wary of TDU, the pugnacious ex-Marine and former UPS driver from Queens was a unique ally in a vibrant reform movement that has now spanned five decades.
During that period, we had the privilege of working with Ron in different capacities and seeing him in action, behind the scenes and in public, during several critical junctures in the union’s modern history.
Reiman has brought Ron’s story to a new generation of labor activists faced with the unfinished task of revitalizing and reforming the U.S. labor movement. The book will help ensure that Carey’s singular role will be remembered—and rightfully honored—long after his critics and detractors have been forgotten.
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Steve Early and Rand Wilson]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The War on Protest]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/war-protest-standing-rock-cop-city-repression-criminalize-dissent-political-rights-first-amendment</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 07:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/war-protest-standing-rock-cop-city-repression-criminalize-dissent-political-rights-first-amendment</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Political repression is on the rise as the state finds new ways to criminalize dissent and collective action.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/rwjx6yz9tkjtRRA1V8dbE_uN8mikZf43jb_1pYJIeH8/w:820/h:669/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLlRoZS13YXItb24tcHJvdGVzdC1JTlNJREVfQWRyaWEtRnJ1aXRvczIuanBn.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/rwjx6yz9tkjtRRA1V8dbE_uN8mikZf43jb_1pYJIeH8/w:820/h:669/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLlRoZS13YXItb24tcHJvdGVzdC1JTlNJREVfQWRyaWEtRnJ1aXRvczIuanBn.jpg" alt="THE WAR ON PROTEST" /><figcaption> ILLUSTRATION BY ADRIÀ FRUITÓS</figcaption></figure> Amin Chaoui had been in Atlanta less than 24 hours when things took an unexpected turn. Chaoui, then 31, drove down from Richmond, Va., to attend a March 2023 music festival organized by activists trying to stop the construction of the police training facility known as Cop City. The sprawling compound in one of Atlanta’s largest urban parks would require clearing at least 85 acres of partly forested land that abuts a predominantly Black neighborhood in DeKalb County. It faced growing opposition from racial and environmental justice advocates, including an occupation of the forest that began in November 2021.
Chaoui was loosely familiar with Cop City—he’d seen flyers around Richmond—but hadn’t been involved in the campaign. He’d also never been to Atlanta, and was especially drawn to the music. There was also an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting at the festival that appealed to Chaoui, who had started a recovery program five months prior. “I honestly just thought I was going to spend a few days in the forest and then go home,” Chaoui said. 
But before the hour-long AA meeting ended his first night there, Chaoui noticed heavily armed police officers encircling the venue. About a half-mile away, a group of protesters had staged an impromptu march through the development site, setting fire to some of the construction equipment. As the sun began to set, plumes of smoke rose above the forest, providing the only pretext law enforcement needed to round up anyone in attendance. As Chaoui tried to leave, he and about 50 other people were corralled and handcuffed in a parking lot. By the end of the night, 23 of them were thrown in the DeKalb County jail.
When Chaoui was released 18 days later, he faced a very different future: He’d been charged with domestic terrorism, which, in Georgia, is punishable by up to 35 years in prison. 
Several months later, in August, Chaoui and 60 others were also indicted under anti-racketeering laws designed to go after organized crime, known as the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Allegations against members of the group include being part of a<a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23940338-cop-city-rico-indictment" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> criminal conspiracy </a>among an “organized mob” to “occupy the DeKalb forest and cause property damage.” Chaoui has struggled to find work since then; he’s been relying on fundraising networks to pay his rent. Chaoui’s relationships with friends and family have also frayed. As a Muslim American, the domestic terrorism charge—one of the first results that appears if you search him online—is an especially heavy burden. “My personal life is in shambles now,” Chaoui told me.
The sweeping nature of the Cop City arrests and charges may be novel, but the targeting of protesters and social movements is not. Since 2017—the same year Georgia expanded its domestic terrorism law to include property destruction—21 states have passed legislation to enhance penalties and fines for common protest-related crimes, such as trespassing or blocking highways. 
“We’re in a really unique moment with the amount of legislation that we’re seeing, [with] this legal assault on protesters and the right to protest in the U.S.,” says Nick Robinson, a senior legal advisor at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, which tallied nearly 300 anti-protest bills introduced in state legislatures since 2017, 41 of which passed.
Many of those laws seemed like direct responses to specific protest campaigns, says Nora Benavidez, senior counsel for the nonprofit group Free Press and lead author of the 2020 PEN America report, <a href="https://pen.org/arresting-dissent/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Arresting Dissent: Legislative Restrictions on the Right to Protest</a>. “For every progressive movement—irrespective of its actual views—there’s so quickly a crackdown that occurs in language and narrative and law.”
Among recently passed state laws, 19 enhance penalties for or make it a felony to engage in protest on or near energy infrastructure— a clear reaction to the mass protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. After 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests, five states enacted laws—and nine others have pending legislation—that impose harsh penalties for individuals who block traffic or even sidewalks. Some states added laws granting immunity to drivers who strike protesters and extending liability for crimes committed during protests to any organizations that support them. This January, in response to growing opposition to the war in Gaza, Democrats in New York proposed a bill that would expand the definition of domestic terrorism to include blocking public roads or bridges.
But it’s not just state legislatures cracking down on protest. Republican senators have introduced federal legislation, also in response to protests over Gaza, to criminalize blocking public roads and highways. Another bill, introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and ostensibly responding to “pro-Hamas leftists,” would increase the prison sentence for participating in a “riot”—loosely defined as an act of violence committed by a group of three or more people—from five years to 10.
Accompanying these laws is increasingly harsh rhetoric from political figures to demonize protest movements, characterizing activists as rioters, mobs, violent extremists and terrorists. Protesters face other threats too: During the summer of racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, the Trump administration openly discussed deploying military force to clear demonstrations, and protesters in Portland, Ore., were snatched from the street by federal law enforcement officials in unmarked vehicles, a troubling episode still shrouded in mystery. More recently, pro-Palestinian activists say they’ve faced home visits from police and the FBI. This week, Cotton <a href="https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1780039918737121502">urged</a> people who end up stuck in traffic due to protest actions to “take matters into your own hands” and “put an end to this nonsense.”
Courts have also struck at the right to protest. Just this Monday, the Supreme Court <a href="https://www.vox.com/scotus/24080080/supreme-court-mckesson-doe-first-amendment-protest-black-lives-matter">announced</a> its refusal to hear a case involving DeRay Mckesson, a prominent leader in the Black Lives Matter movement. On two prior occasions, a lower court had ruled that protest organizers like Mckesson can be held liable for the actions of others, upending decades of legal precedent. The Supreme Court’s rejection of Mckesson’s appeal means that, at least for now, it is a huge risk to organize mass actions in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Taken together, says Charlie Hogle, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project, these shifts will inevitably “have a chilling effect on the sort of important political speech we think the First Amendment is intended to protect.”
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/oELyhZjCMDM8KwxpBIf_xr4_3gkaUPVhBV8xUWmDc_I/w:1000/h:588/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLjIzMzE4NTMxMTA3NjM4LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>A Georgia State Patrol officer threatens a journalist with arrest at the Block Cop City march in Atlanta on Nov. 13, 2023, as activists from across the country rallied at the construction site.</figcaption> </figure>
A decade ago, protesters in Georgia and other states who engaged in civil disobedience—knowingly breaking the law to advocate for their cause—likely would have faced misdemeanor charges and perhaps a night in jail. Today, they can spend months in pretrial detention—as several activists involved in the Stop Cop City campaign have—before facing lengthy and expensive legal battles to clear their names. The new laws, stiffer penalties, and more aggressive policing have, in addition to landing more activists in jail, had a corrosive effect on social movements across the country.
Jamie Marsicano, a third-year law student at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who was swept up in the same Cop City raid that nabbed Chaoui, had been arrested at protests before—including during street marches in 2020—and assumed they’d be processed quickly and released. But like Chaoui, Marsicano spent nearly three weeks in jail and had to post $50,000 in bonds to get out—money that may not be recouped for years. Upon their release, Marsicano had to wear an ankle monitor for three months and, after a decision by UNC’s chancellor, was barred from setting foot on campus or even attending classes online. Marsicano was able to finish their coursework at Duke and will graduate this spring—but they can’t take the bar exam in North Carolina or practice law until the case is settled, which could take years.
Even if the felony charges are ultimately dropped—as lawyers say they routinely are in protest-related arrests—the threat keeps activists off the streets and siphons resources away from political organizing.
“I don’t think the goal is conviction, which is really sinister,” says Xavier T. de Janon, director of mass defense with the National Lawyers Guild. 
The tactics have already changed the way movements organize. Activists in Georgia are now worried about the implications of participating in routine political activities, such as putting up flyers or circulating and signing Cop City-related petitions. The fears aren’t unfounded: Three activists swept up in the RICO indictment were initially arrested for posting flyers identifying the police officer who allegedly shot and killed Stop Cop City activist Manuel Esteban Paez Terán in January 2023.<a href="https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2023/09/30/activists-outraged-after-city-releases-largely-unredacted-cop-city-referendum-signatures/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> In September 2023</a>, the city of Atlanta made the unusual decision to publish the full names and addresses of the more than 100,000 people who signed a Stop Cop City petition, effectively doxxing them. Afterward, according to Marlon Kautz—cofounder of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, which has provided bail support and other resources to area activists since 2016—many locals said “they would never sign another controversial petition again.”
But many states, including Georgia, are now going even further, attempting to pass new laws that could fatally undermine the support networks that social movements depend on.
A couple months after the music festival, Kautz awoke to the sound of his front door being kicked in by law enforcement. The Atlanta Solidarity Fund’s home-based office, which Kautz shares with two of its board members, was ransacked, their files and computers seized. Kautz and his coworkers were <a href="https://apnews.com/article/police-training-center-arrests-cop-city-1468a138ed4b17ed394e4b1e4fe202fe">initially charged</a>, in May 2023, with money laundering and charity fraud—though they have not yet been indicted on those initial charges. But in August, they were included in the sweeping RICO indictment, which claims that the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, through its parent nonprofit the Network for Strong Communities, provided financial support to the forest defenders and published posts online claiming responsibility for acts of property destruction. According to Georgia’s attorney general, these were all acts that furthered the “conspiracy.” (Kautz says he is unable to talk about specific allegations while the case is ongoing but “suffice it to say the indictment contains claims which are objectively lies.”)
Like de Janon, Kautz doesn’t believe the RICO charges are intended “to secure convictions in the long term.” Rather, he tells me, “It’s to create as much disruption as possible to protesters and the nonprofit organizations which protect their rights. And in that sense, these charges are working exactly as intended.”
But Kautz and his colleagues also face another threat. Republicans in Georgia have introduced multiple anti-protest bills since Cop City protests began in order to, as one said, send “a signal to troublemakers … that they won’t get a slap on the wrist” if they “engage in rioting” in Georgia. In 2023, Georgia Republican state Sen. Randy Robertson introduced what was initially characterized as a bail reform bill, which would significantly expand the number of offenses requiring mandatory cash bail to include criminal trespass and unlawful assembly—charges frequently lobbed at protesters. That was bad enough, says Tiffany Williams Roberts, policy director at the Southern Center for Human Rights, which opposed the legislation. But this year, a new clause was added that makes it virtually impossible to operate a nonprofit bail fund in Georgia by limiting the number of people that charitable organizations, including churches, can assist in any given year—to only three people.
Kautz, who faces up to 20 years in prison and $25,000 in fines if convicted on the RICO charges, sees the bill as a direct response to the solidarity fund’s successful work in bailing out nearly 100 Cop City activists. “It was shocking how blatantly targeted it was at our work,” Kautz says.
The bill passed both houses of Georgia’s legislature. It takes effect in July.
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/kjs4jIonf69yH7TjM1Dc2ugFW7ZTcupOT787_O0Z_aU/w:1000/h:667/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLkdldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTY0NDQyMjkzNF8yMDI0LTA0LTExLTIwNTA1N19vZ2NtLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Dakota Access Pipeline water protectors face off with militarized police on Feb. 22, 2017, the day their camp was slated to be raided. At least six were arrested, including a journalist who sustained a broken hip.</figcaption> </figure>
The anti-pipeline campaigns of the 2010s ushered in a new era of environmental politics and protest. The Keystone XL campaign, targeting a pipeline that would have carried oil from the Canadian tar sands to the Gulf Coast, embraced direct action, including tree-sits, to disrupt the project’s construction. Though the movement was committed to nonviolent civil disobedience, it <a href="https://grist.org/protest/keystone-pipeline-fbi-government-documents/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">engendered heavy resistance</a> from industry and law enforcement at multiple levels. In early 2012, before Keystone XL became a household name, the FBI opened a counterterrorism assessment of South Dakota activists with a focus on Native groups and leaders. A second FBI assessment, targeting Texas activists protesting the pipeline’s southern leg, began less than a year later. In documents I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the FBI hypothesized both groups—whose members they called “extremists”—would move from lawful First Amendment-protected activity (including attending public hearings) to “violent opposition.”
The language of extremism—many of the FBI documents are part of larger “domestic terrorism” case files—came to permeate the federal government’s characterization of the anti-pipeline movement and has dogged subsequent social justice campaigns. The charging documents in many of the Cop City arrests cite a Department of Homeland Security classification that characterized Defend the Atlanta Forest, a group affiliated with the Stop Cop City movement, as “domestic violent extremists.” Similar labels have been used to describe Black Lives Matter and anti-fascist activists—labels with serious impact on movements’ ability to attract new members and how law enforcement responds to those groups.
Hundreds of individuals were arrested during the roughly five-year campaign to halt Keystone XL, which declared victory when Obama canceled the project in late 2015. But none of those activists were charged, or even threatened with felonies, recalls Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center.
Nonetheless, policing and prosecution tactics escalated sharply during the Dakota Access Pipeline blockade the following year. In 2016, thousands of activists, including many veterans of the Keystone XL fight, descended on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota, where tribal leaders had set up “spirit camps” in an attempt to block pipeline construction. The standoff lasted several months and was marked by violent clashes with heavily armed state and local law enforcement, National Guard troops and private security firms. The FBI, according to newly released court documents, deployed up to 10 informants to spy on the protesters.
The legislative response to Standing Rock was equally severe. In January 2017, just weeks after the camps were cleared, North Dakota introduced and later passed two laws expanding the definition of criminal trespass and dramatically heightening penalties for so-called riot offenses—an unmistakable response to what had unfolded at Standing Rock. As with similar bills that have deployed terms like rioting or domestic terrorism, the language in these was deliberately vague, giving law enforcement and state officials broad discretion to target groups whose viewpoints they disagree with. In 2019, a third law was passed, enhancing penalties for trespassing on or near critical infrastructure and making interference with pipeline construction a felony, carrying penalties of five years in prison and fines of up to $10,000.
What all of this adds up to is that a Standing Rock-style protest in North Dakota, or many other states, is virtually impossible today.
Nearly 20 states now have similar <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/greenpeace-anti-protest-laws" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">“critical infrastructure” laws</a>, which have been supported by the petrochemical and oil and gas industry and shepherded through statehouses with assistance from the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council.
At the same time, in the more than 20 years since 9/11, many states have passed or amended laws increasing the number of crimes defined as domestic terrorism, which can levy exceptionally harsh punishments and grant law enforcement far greater investigatory powers. Georgia, for example, updated its domestic terrorism law in 2017, ostensibly in response to the 2015 mass shooting of nine Black parishioners by white supremacist Dylann Roof in Charleston, S.C. But the law included provisions—like classifying as terrorism the disabling or destruction of critical infrastructure, government facilities or public transit systems—that had nothing to do with Roof’s crimes and which were condemned by civil liberties groups as potential threats to constitutionally protected speech.
Maine and now Oregon have similar statutes. Oregon’s law, passed in August 2023, is particularly worrisome, since its definition of “critical infrastructure” extends to public roads—meaning protest activity that “damages” a highway could be prosecuted as domestic terrorism. What constitutes “damage” Oregon’s statute doesn’t say, exemplifying how vaguely written laws open the door to potential abuse. 
“It places a lot of power in the hands of state and local law enforcement and gives a lot of prosecutorial discretion to people who may be driven by political incentives,” says the ACLU’s Charlie Hogle. “And that should be very troubling to everyone, no matter your politics.”
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/uutNItiOmzEdLUGOiZ7oU4yPWHtxVWvIJS8LezfXGAM/w:1000/h:667/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLkdldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE5MjA2OTc4ODdfMjAyNC0wNC0xMS0yMDUzNTlfaXpzeS5qcGc.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Protesters block the entrance of the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan on January 8, demanding a permanent cease-fire. Hundreds were arrested during simultaneous actions at the
Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge.</figcaption> </figure>
Donald Trump's rise to power overlapped with—and in many ways fueled—the surge in anti-protest legislation, as his 2016 election was met with unprecedented mass action. The Women’s March on Jan. 21, 2017, marked what is widely believed to be the largest single-day protest in U.S. history, with some four million people taking to the streets in more than 600 U.S. cities. The day before— Inauguration Day—more than 200 protesters were arrested in Washington, D.C., and indicted on felony rioting charges, all but one of which were later dropped. A week after taking office, Trump signed an executive order banning people from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States, prompting yet more demonstrations at airports across the country.
This period was also marked by a dark shift in rhetoric, as Trump and his allies vilified protesters as thugs and referred to constitutionally protected activity as crimes. During 2020’s demonstrations against police brutality, Trump reportedly instructed law enforcement and top military officials to “beat the fuck out of” protesters and “just shoot them.” That June, the National Guard used tear gas and rubber bullets to remove peaceful protesters from Washington’s Lafayette Square, before escorting Trump to a photo-op in front of a church.
The following month, federal officers dressed in camouflage and driving unmarked vans grabbed protesters off the street in Portland, Ore., and held them for questioning without pressing charges. An attorney with the Oregon Justice Resource Center <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland">told NPR</a> it was like “stop and frisk meets Guantanamo Bay.” Mark Pettibone, one of those detained, wrote that the officers covered his eyes and he feared for his life. (The ACLU is currently suing the federal government over what it alleges were unlawful detentions.)
Meanwhile, Republican congressmembers pushed the Department of Justice to prosecute antifascist and Black Lives Matter activists under federal anti-racketeering laws. “We have laws on the books that prohibit organized crime—the kind of organized crime that we’re seeing from BLM,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) told reporters at an event organized by the House Freedom Caucus in June 2020. The year prior, fellow Texan and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz urged Attorney General William Barr to open a similar investigation into “Antifa,” noting that RICO would enable prosecution of members of a group “even when the government cannot establish which particular individual … committed a given crime.”
State legislators heeded their call, enacting laws that empower local officials to charge not only individual activists but also the networks that support them as part of a broader “conspiracy.” Many of the critical infrastructure bills, for example, include stiff penalties for organizations that aid—through funding or direct-action trainings—in impeding pipeline construction. In Montana and North Dakota, an organization found to be a “conspirator” in protesting on or near critical infrastructure is liable for fines 10 times the amount authorized for trespassing.
Still, Georgia’s more recent RICO indictment against Stop Cop City activists marks a clear shift in government targeting of social movements. According to the Civil Liberties Defense Center’s Lauren Regan—who’s representing one Cop City defendant and has advised others—it’s the first time RICO has been weaponized this way. There have been lawsuits brought by corporations against environmental activists in the past, but those were civil, not criminal, cases. And while Indiana prosecutors tried to use RICO to criminally prosecute two Earth First! activists in 2009, the racketeering charges were eventually dismissed.
Ultimately, Regan says, the statute was never intended to be used to prosecute political activity: “Historically, we do not place political protests in the same bucket as gang drug dealers.”
But now, regardless of whether Georgia prevails in its case, other states could follow suit.
“The notoriety and the commitment of resources to these cases in Georgia have made a lot of states look at their RICO statutes,” says Regan, and think of them “as a potential tool.”
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/2wAEueS8wLEjvAuUjvQZ90gcM92chFGUTX0_1X3V3Dc/w:1000/h:716/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDR3LkYxLklNR18xMTY5XzIwMjQtMDQtMTEtMjA1ODM2X3V1dHEuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Cease-fire activists organized by Jewish Voice for Peace-Triangle NC block traffic on the Durham Freeway in North Carolina on Nov. 2, 2023. The rush hour frustration emphasizes the idea that “genocide is not business as usual.”</figcaption> </figure>
On Nov.2, 2023, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) and allied groups in Durham, N.C., staged a protest that brought rush hour traffic on Highway 147 to a standstill. About 50 protesters occupied two lanes of the highway, calling for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, for two and a half hours. 
“The political mainstream doesn’t like it when people awaken the conscience of the nation,” Tema Okun, a JVP member who participated in the protest (but did not block traffic), tells me, but “it’s deeply American to protest like this.”
Two months later, North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis and Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn, both Republicans, introduced the Safe and Open Streets Act, which would make it a federal crime to block a public road or highway or, crucially, to “attempt to conspire to do so”—a clause which implicates any individual or group that might help plan such an action. A press release for the bill, which describes groups protesting U.S. support for Israel as “Hamas sympathizers,” said the legislation was a “direct response to radical tactics of pro-Palestine protesters.”
The Tillis-Blackburn bill is part of a wider effort among state and federal lawmakers to subvert the growing opposition to U.S. support for Israel’s war in Gaza. Since the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, and Israel’s retaliatory assault (which has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians), mass civil disobedience has been one of the most visible ways for people to express discontent.
These campaigns, many led by progressive Jewish groups, have been met with reactionary rhetoric equating any support for Palestine with Hamas and a new round of legislation criminalizing dissent. Sen. Tom Cotton, who called for deploying the military against Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and giving “no quarter” to participants in protests that turn violent, also introduced a bill this March: the “Stop Pro-Terrorist Riots Now Act,” against “pro-Hamas mobs.” And Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.), Trump’s former interior secretary, proposed legislation that would “expel Palestinians” from the country.
When Sens. Tillis and Blackburn introduced their bill, Tillis declared that blocking roads or bridges—common protest tactics going back at least to the civil rights era—“needs to be a crime throughout the country.”
Soon, it may be. 
Alaska, Arizona, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Washington and West Virginia have all <a href="https://www.icnl.org/usprotestlawtracker/?location=&status=pending&issue=&date=6&type=legislative" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">introduced bills in recent months </a>to criminalize blocking roads or highways during protest, with some lawmakers explicitly referencing pro-Palestinian protests as justification. In Tennessee, which already criminalized highway protests, Republicans have proposed an enhancement measure that would make the offense a Class D felony, punishable by up to 12 years in prison and a $5,000 fine. (South Dakota, Oklahoma, Iowa, Florida and Arkansas have already passed similar bills, and Massachusetts may soon follow.) New York’s bill, introduced by Democratic lawmakers, is perhaps the most extreme, declaring that blocking public roads, bridges or transportation facilities—or even “act[ing] with the intent” to do so—is a form of domestic terrorism.
Even if these bills fail, they contribute to a climate of intimidation that chills speech and deters people from taking action. The crackdown has been more explicit on college campuses, amounting to what JVP executive director Stefanie Fox describes as a new form of McCarthyism, as student protesters have been doxxed, suspended and threatened with deportation. In early November 2023, Brandeis became the first private university to ban its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP); a week later, George Washington University followed suit. Around the same time, Columbia University temporarily suspended its SJP and JVP chapters. More recently, Columbia and American University have drafted policies severely limiting when and where students can protest.
Meanwhile, Florida’s public university system ordered the deactivation of all SJP chapters, claiming the group’s activism amounted to “material support” for terrorists, a felony under Florida law. (The order was challenged by the ACLU and has since been walked back by the chancellor, but the deactivation order remains on the university system’s website.) And a growing number of states have passed laws defining antisemitism in ways that limit criticism of Israel and stifle academic freedom
All of this is happening at a particularly volatile and perilous moment in U.S. history. The movement opposing U.S. policy toward Israel is attracting “hundreds of thousands” of new supporters, says Fox, but that’s also coming at “a time where the Right is really experimenting and trying to build new tactics and legislative tools of repression.”
In Democratically controlled Chicago, pro-Palestinian groups have already been denied permits to protest outside this summer’s Democratic National Convention—an echo of the violent clashes between protesters and police at the 1968 convention, which also concerned racial discrimination and an unjust war. Organizers have declared that, even if Chicago refuses to allow them near the convention center, the march will take place, “permit or not.” 
But the FBI has already been knocking on doors in Chicago, home to the largest Palestinian American diaspora community in the country, with roots dating back to the late 19th century. Muhammad Sankari, a Chicago-based organizer with the U.S. Palestinian Community Network, says at least two Yemeni families and one prominent Palestinian community leader have faced questioning in their homes by the FBI and Chicago police, in visits that followed Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s January call for the agency to investigate pro-Palestinian groups’ funding.
The FBI has conducted home visits to members of the Palestinian community in the past, Sankari says, especially during periods of social unrest. But the visits now seem particularly intent on intimidating a movement that’s growing nationwide. In Oklahoma, three FBI agents showed up at the home of Stillwater resident Rolla Abdeljawad after she posted comments to her Facebook page critical of the war in Gaza. The advocacy group Palestine Legal has reported numerous similar incidents. An attorney working with one of the Chicagoans who was questioned confirmed that a Chicago police officer who was present during the visits told them that the FBI again has its eye on the city’s Arab American community.
The Chicago Police Department did not respond to requests for comment. In a written statement, an FBI spokesperson declined to confirm whether the Chicago visits had even taken place or if any investigations had been opened. But, the spokesperson assured, “The FBI will never open an investigation based solely on protected First Amendment activity.”
Sankari is not convinced: “This sets the stage for the next phase of repression,” he says.
And what that phase brings will be shaped by what happens this November. Whatever the outcome of the election, mass protest is almost guaranteed. 
Should Trump win—as he well might—he has already vowed to pursue his enemies with a vengeance and serve as a dictator for at least “day one.” On the campaign trail, Trump has lamented not having sent troops to quell protests during the summer of 2020 and has said he’d consider suspending the Constitution to further his agenda. Meanwhile, his far-right allies have reportedly drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act, allowing Trump to use military force to crush opposition movements and civil unrest, making mass action like the Women’s March all but impossible.
The legal landscape has shifted considerably since Trump last occupied the White House: states have many more tools to go after protesters, and, as the Cop City arrests indicate, Republican officials are increasingly willing to deploy existing laws in new ways to conduct sweeping arrests of activists.
The day after I spoke to Tema Okun, who has been an activist with progressive Jewish organizations for 20 years, she emailed to say she felt she had understated the threat posed in this moment. She wanted to try again.
As more and more laws are proposed and passed to “criminaliz[e] dissent, and as we face a possible presidency by a man who admires Putin and expresses his penchant for dictatorship,” Okun writes, “we are skating closer and closer to authoritarianism.” Basic freedoms, once enshrined in the Constitution, are now at risk of being eliminated. “Congress shaves off more and more rights piecemeal until we find we are unable to speak aloud our criticisms of government policies and practices. We slowly become a police state.”
This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit newsroom <a href="https://www.typeinvestigations.org" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Type Investigations</a>, where Adam Federman is a reporting fellow. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Adam Federman]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The Political Coalition the Left Needs to Win]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/political-coalition-left-win-war-protest</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/political-coalition-left-win-war-protest</guid>
<description><![CDATA["The situation is, without question, daunting. But there are signs of possibility all around us—and the future is ours for the taking."]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/-aDQzvi3qH1c0ogaG2CEN6nTw45ybNLIGvWwicu6XfU/w:820/h:615/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMjQ2NDYwMzY1LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/-aDQzvi3qH1c0ogaG2CEN6nTw45ybNLIGvWwicu6XfU/w:820/h:615/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMjQ2NDYwMzY1LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Police arrest a "Stop cop city" protester in Atlanta, Georgia on January 21, 2023. / Photo by Benjamin Hendren/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images</figcaption></figure> The Left in the United States is arguably at a point of greater political power today than at almost any time in the past century. More than <a href="https://newrepublic.com/article/174658/socialist-come-gone-moment-dsa-bernie-aoc" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">100 open socialists</a> hold office across the country, from Tacoma, Wash., to St. Petersburg, Fla., from school boards to the halls of Congress.
But no advance comes without a counterattack, and the same context that has opened the space for a resurgent Left over the past decade also holds the conditions that could close that space for a generation.
We look back at the post-war era as the moment that created the modern world order, and the deep contradictions involved then are reasserting themselves as we travel into uncertain times—with new economies and politics buttressed by broken institutions on a crumbling foundation. 
As a new world struggles to be born, hope and danger exist in equal measure.
To usher in this new world and ensure its trajectory is pointed toward justice, we have two critical tasks. The first is to create a new common sense around our social movements, one in which our efforts for democracy in the workplace are interwoven with <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/biden-democrats-israel-gaza-palestine-michigan-uncommitted" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">freedom in Palestine</a> and an end to the <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/louisiana-prisons-oil-money-mass-incarceration-pretrocapitalism" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">carceral state</a>, to name just a few examples. We cannot win if these struggles are separate struggles.
Our second task is to engage in a clear-eyed assessment of the political coalition the Left needs to assemble—which must be formed around these interdependent movements. That includes strategizing about how to ensure any lines drawn around us are elastic, because it’s in those borders that we are fragmented and pitted against each other. Political repression of the Left has been taking on a sharper character than our memories of the past 50 years, with the intent to exploit those divisions between and among us.
We see that repression in its most condensed form in the attacks on cease-fire activists, but it’s happening in almost every space of progressive growth—and it’s all connected. In Georgia, for example, the forces repressing organizing work around <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/cop-city-atlanta-dissent-police-military-environment-climate" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Cop City</a>—whether Democrat or Republican, private or public—have deep parallels to the bipartisan support for <a href="https://www.ajc.com/politics/appeals-court-sides-with-georgia-law-targeting-boycotts-against-israel/5OQH5BWMKBGPFOAA4G43RPEZJY/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Georgia’s 2022 bill</a> targeting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Also in Georgia, new this year: Businesses that voluntarily recognize a union are <a href="https://www.wabe.org/the-georgia-house-passed-a-bill-that-will-make-it-harder-for-companies-seeking-state-incentives-to-organize-unions/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">prevented</a> from receiving state economic incentives.
President Joe Biden won Georgia in 2020 by just 12,000 votes. He is increasingly in danger of losing that slim margin <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/14/washington-georgia-primary-uncommitted-vote-protest-gaza-biden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">because</a> of his stance on Gaza.
We see in Georgia a bipartisan political coalition arrayed to defeat the Left. There is much to learn—not from its authoritarian and anti-democratic nature, but from its flexibility and constant construction and reconstruction. 
Of course, it doesn’t stop there. In our cover story for this issue, journalist Adam Federman explores these links and takes a deep dive into the repression in Georgia and across the country: Activists in Portland, Ore., snatched up by the FBI. Legislation drastically increasing the penalties for blocking traffic—and protecting drivers who hit protesters. Organizers working to stop pipeline construction classified as domestic terrorists. And so much else.
This war on protest is fundamentally a war against the political coalition we need to build. It seeks to criminalize our justice projects and our formations with such severity that we are immobilized. The outcome of this November’s election will decide the role that the loudest members of that political coalition will play in the repression of the Left—and our preparation and response are critical for the times to come.
The situation is, without question, daunting. But there are signs of possibility all around us—and the future is ours for the taking.
]]></item.content:encoded>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Alex Han]]></dc:creator>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Two Years In, These “Progressive” Companies Still Haven’t Negotiated First Union Contracts]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/starbucks-trader-joes-rei-union-labor-nlrb-first-contract</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2024 09:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/starbucks-trader-joes-rei-union-labor-nlrb-first-contract</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The union wave at big U.S. retailers hasn’t yet resulted in first contracts for workers at Trader Joe’s, Starbucks and REI. But unions are proving their value in other ways.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/WTTc63bJcKYcAxwZm55F_VphGV2p69N1MRzbSs4X49g/w:820/h:611/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9yZWkuanBn.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/WTTc63bJcKYcAxwZm55F_VphGV2p69N1MRzbSs4X49g/w:820/h:611/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9yZWkuanBn.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Union workers protest outside their REI store. / REI Union / Facebook</figcaption></figure> Claire Chang and Steve Buckley knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But the two retail workers-turned-union organizers had been heartened by progress made during the first year of contract negotiations with REI, the outdoor gear and apparel chain. By June 2023—more than a year after Chang and Buckley’s store in Manhattan became the first REI location in the country to unionize—the bargaining committee on which they serve had reached a number of tentative agreements with the company. “It seemed like we were building up a rhythm,” says Chang, who has worked at the REI store in SoHo for more than six years.
Then, negotiations quickly went south, Buckley says. REI began working with Morgan Lewis, a management-side law firm known in union circles for hardline, union-busting tactics. The company sent its lawyers to bargaining sessions alone, without any corporate managers, which Buckley saw as part of a new strategy to stretch out negotiations and sap the union’s strength. As of April, there’s been no progress toward a first contract for nearly a year. “Blatant disregard and openly hostile negotiations aren’t productive,” Buckley says. The company has “continued to get worse and worse because they’re embracing their worst impulses.”
Talk to union members at Trader Joe’s, which (like REI and Starbucks) also has unionized retail stores across the country pushing for a first contract, and you’ll hear similar things. Four Trader Joe’s stores have unionized since July 2022 (and another has filed for union election), 9 REI stores have unionized since March 2022 (with another store election coming later this month) and nearly 400 Starbucks stores have unionized since December 2021. The efforts at these companies, which have all tried to burnish progressive reputations, provide a window into the challenging process of negotiating a first contract more than two years after a wave of unionizing first hit the retail industry.
Trader Joe’s Union (TJU) Vice President Sarah Beth Ryther describes contract negotiations this way: “Every single bargaining session is excruciatingly long. Eight hours where almost nothing happens.” The company’s strategy, she says, is: “We will waste all of your resources as much as possible, we will dangle tiny little treats that won’t come to fruition.”
Ryther and Chang are <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/22/starbucks-union-talks-trader-joes-amazon-rei">heartened</a> by the <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/starbucks-union-labor-workers-united-sbwu-first-contract">recent news</a> that Starbucks and its union, Workers United, would resume in-person bargaining in late April after a lengthy break. For the first time, the company has signaled support for a potential national labor accord, agreeing to meet with workers from union stores across the country. But the apparent breakthrough at Starbucks has yet to alter the bargaining dynamic at Trader Joe’s and REI. Workers at all three retail companies learned a painful truth over the past two years: Just because a corporation cultivates a progressive veneer doesn’t mean it will welcome a union.
The recent Starbucks news is “promising,” Ryther says. “But we’ve seen these enormous corporations make many of the same promises before.”
John Logan, a professor of labor history at San Francisco State University, is not convinced Starbucks’ new union rhetoric will lead to a strong first contract anytime soon. The company has <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2024/message-from-sara-starbucks-and-workers-united-agree-on-path-forward/">said</a> it wants to complete bargaining and contract ratification this year.
“It’s hard to imagine the company agreeing to a contract that provides an incentive for workers in non-union stores to unionize,” Logan says. Still, workers and their union will continue pushing for better wages, benefits and working conditions when bargaining sessions finally restart. 
Waiting workers out
In lieu of progress at the bargaining table, the three unions that have kept organizing momentum going after initial historic victories—Trader Joe’s United, Workers United and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (which REI workers joined)—have spent a lot of time in court. 
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the agency charged with enforcing federal labor law, has ruled in the unions’ favor dozens of times on various matters, including illegal retaliatory firings and finding that Starbucks has failed to bargain in good faith. The NLRB has ruled similarly against Amazon, which still refuses to recognize the validity of Amazon Labor Union’s (ALU) sole warehouse union victory in April 2022.
In fact, the NLRB has filed more than 125 complaints against Starbucks. Late in 2023, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union <a href="https://www.rwdsu.org/news/rei-workers-take-nationwide-legal-action-against-employer">filed</a> 80 unfair labor practice charges against REI with the NLRB, alleging a “concerted, multi-pronged union-busting campaign” including retaliatory firings, schedule changes and disciplinary actions. TJU has filed similar charges against the grocery store chain. Starbucks, REI and Trader Joe’s have denied all wrongdoing, although they have <a href="https://www.modernretail.co/operations/maybe-there-can-be-changes-rei-settles-unfair-labor-practice-charge/">settled</a> specific charges. An REI spokesperson said in an email that the company “is committed to and engaged in good-faith bargaining.” Starbucks and Trader Joe’s did not respond to emailed questions.
It’s amazing how much—and yet how little—can happen in two years, when it comes to first contract negotiations. It has long been a slow process, and it appears to be lengthening. Economic Policy Institute <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/bp235/">research</a> found that between 1999 and 2003, 37% of newly unionized workplaces didn’t have a first contract after two years, while 30% didn’t have one after three years. A <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/irj.12399">study</a> of union elections in 2018 found that 63% didn’t reach a first contract in the first year after organizing and 43% still didn’t reach one after two years. That study also concluded that employer obstruction through unfair labor practices served as a major impediment to negotiating a first contract.
Such lengthy delays would likely increase if the courts side with anti-union forces’ latest tactics. In January, Morgan Lewis introduced a new innovation to the corporate anti-union playbook. The firm, which (along with REI) represents Trader’s Joe’s, Amazon and SpaceX, began <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/26/anti-union-lawsuit-conservative-courts-musk-starbucks-trader-joes">arguing</a> before the NLRB that the 89-year-old agency’s structure is unconstitutional. The argument, which challenges long-standing legal precedents, claims that the NLRB “violates constitutional separation of powers and due process protections by wielding different types of authority in the same case,” Bloomberg Law <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/spacexs-bid-to-upend-nlrb-follows-signals-from-supreme-court">reported</a>. Starbucks began making a <a href="https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/starbucks-is-latest-company-to-call-labor-board-unconstitutional">similar argument</a> in February in a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/15/business/economy/amazon-labor-nlrb.html">case</a> that will head to the Supreme Court for oral argument later this month. If the court rules in favor of Starbucks, the NLRB’s ability to reinstate workers fired during a union campaign could be curtailed.
These companies are “so frustrated that they’re working to basically take down the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the NLRB,” says Seth Goldstein, who represents both TJU and the Amazon Labor Union. “Because they can’t defeat us any other way. This is an attack on the American labor movement.” 
During a contract bargaining session in February, Goldstein says he asked Trader Joe’s Deputy General Counsel Nancy Inesta whether she recognized the validity of the NLRA and the NLRB’s jurisdiction over the company’s practices. “She refused to agree to that,” Goldstein says. “It’s not normal to talk to someone like it’s 1920.” The NLRA, passed during the height of the New Deal in 1935, enshrined the idea of workers’ collective bargaining rights into federal law and created the NLRB.
Two years into the retail unionization wave, and even with the most pro-union NLRB in decades calling companies out for their illegal tactics, corporate intransigence in the sector appears as strong as ever (with the exception of Starbucks). Through their efforts to delay bargaining, including retaliation and litigation, companies are trying to turn time and employee turnover into an ally, hoping that worker morale drops, solidarity erodes and union <a href="https://one.starbucks.com/negotiations/what-does-decertification-mean/">decertification</a> efforts multiply.
In the face of opposition, how are unions proving their value to members and staying strong as the contract fight drags on? 
Bringing embattled unions to life
Barista Parker Davis has one answer to that question: protect and defend the day-to-day and month-to-month needs of members whenever necessary. 
In November 2022, just a few months after Davis’ San Antonio Starbucks store unionized, the building’s drains backed up, forcing a three-day closure. While the drainage problem was being fixed, management reduced shift lengths and sent many workers home. The union then asked for workers to be paid for their scheduled shifts, citing a “catastrophic pay” policy in the company’s employee guide that stipulates employees will be paid if a store is closed due to a natural disaster.
“We knew that other stores had gotten catastrophic pay when their power had been cut temporarily,” says Davis, who played a lead role in unioning his store two years ago. Similarly, “our water services weren’t working, essentially.” 
But the company refused to pay the workers and, in response, the union demanded to bargain over the impacts of the store closure decision. Starbucks flew lawyers from union avoidance firm Littler Mendelson into San Antonio for a five-hour bargaining session. It was contentious, but the company ended up agreeing to compensate baristas for their scheduled shifts.
“It was such a small amount of money compared to the company's overall profits,” Davis says. “It seemed like an odd thing to fight over. But it definitely strengthened [the union at] my store.” 
That’s just one tangible win achieved without a contract at a unionized Starbucks store. Davis and his colleagues have banded together to defend their interests in other ways as well, such as pushing back against a manager’s plan to reorganize storage in the front and back-of-house. The union made clear such changes to working conditions would need to be negotiated with the bargaining unit, Davis says.
The ability to have a say in how supplies are stored is not the primary reason that around 400 Starbucks stores have unionized. But it’s an example of how the union is a tangible and valuable presence, even without a contract in hand. “At the end of the day, a union is workers coming together to care for each other,” Davis says. 
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/F1xmX4CcULL2CpsSQmbJU0TF9ElO-WZvezW06yqqWIA/w:1000/h:678/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE3ODYxMjM5NjEuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Steph Kronos, a pro-Union activist, joins Starbucks workers, former employees, and supporters in holding signs in support of a strike, outside of a Starbucks store in Arlington, Virginia, on November 16, 2023.</figcaption> </figure>
TJU’s Ryther says that after it became clear Trader Joe’s was slow-walking contract negotiations, her union began framing conversations with workers differently. “A contract is the ultimate goal, but we’re focusing more on small wins, empowering folks, unfair labor practices and training media ambassadors,” says Ryther, a Trader Joe’s crew member in Minneapolis.
Without a contract in place, TJU can’t collect dues from members to fund its operations. But that hasn’t stopped the union from building a “kind of advocacy network” for unionized grocery stores. Each store has a Discord channel on which workers can post about problems with managers and disciplinary actions, learn about their rights as a union member, or just chat about shift swaps, Ryther says. (One example of a right that TJU members have taken advantage of: under federal labor law, union members can request union representation whenever an employer’s investigatory interview could lead to discipline.)
“A bunch of people will say, ‘Here are your rights. This is legal or illegal. Here's what it says in the Trader Joe's handbook,’” Ryther says. 
This is how a culture of unionism is being built at Trader Joe’s—member to member, one Discord chat or in-person conversation at a time. Ryther doesn’t see high store turnover rates as a big impediment to sustaining the union’s strength. “Sometimes folks’ lack of knowledge of unions plays to our favor,” she says. “Some people don’t even know what a contract is. But they start working at a store and say, ‘This is great.’ People underestimate the power of an established store culture.”
Sustaining and growing the union in the face of steadfast corporate opposition starts with conversations that build relationships and trust. “You have to meet people where they’re at,” Ryther says. In-store organizing and member engagement is not transactional and it’s not about persuasion: “90% of the time, you should be talking about weather, sports, holiday plans, family traditions—it’s social skills 101.”
Buckley and Chang at REI echo the importance of whole-member organizing as contract fights continue. “We see our co-workers as whole people, not just who they are at work,” Buckley says. “We show up in each other’s lives. We’re building a community so that when the hard times come, we have each other’s backs.” 
Having each others’ back can mean covering a shift that a coworker can no longer work, or connecting someone with a union lawyer to file an unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB. But it’s also about helping a coworker get through a tough financial spot. Workers at the REI SoHo store created a REI Union Hardship Fund to support each other. In San Antonio, Starbucks union members have set up mutual aid systems, Parker says. 
“Sometimes, it's as simple as someone needing $20 for gas money,” he says. “Of course we're going to offer that to them. It’s about always being there for someone.” 
Marathon fights continue
Union workers at Starbucks, REI and Trader Joe’s know they’re running a marathon. Any initial optimism that contracts could be negotiated (relatively) quickly is now gone. In its place? A steely determination that comes from knowing exactly who they’re up against. And in workers who have now spent years pushing for change, an awareness of how leaning on each other can help prevent burnout.
“It’s a real issue,” Ryther says. “Most of us are working full-time jobs, right? This is an incredible amount of work. It gets easier in terms of knowledge over time, but it doesn't get easier in terms of having to build new relationships constantly.”
When you consider what the retail unions are up against—high employee turnover rates, an array of illegal union-busting tactics and now an apparent effort to dismantle the legal infrastructure that has governed businesses and labor in this country for generations—their willingness to go on offense becomes more improbable. Unionized workers have staged <a href="https://www.masslive.com/news/2023/07/trader-joes-staff-walkout-at-hadley-store-local-unions-join-in-protest.html">walkouts</a> and a string of short, targeted <a href="https://ccxmedia.org/news/maple-grove-rei-workers-stage-two-day-strike/">strikes</a>, including thousands of <a href="https://apnews.com/article/starbucks-strike-red-cup-day-7c07617260ea1c4760410e29b4509b6b">Starbucks</a> workers at more than 200 stores in November 2023.
In March, REI workers from across the country <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rei-union-campaign_n_65f4991ce4b0b4d0b89954c2">showed up</a> uninvited at the company’s corporate office in Issaquah, Washington. They protested outside carrying signs bearing messages such as “Ask me about my raise (REI took it away).” 
In the REI, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s campaigns, unions are calling attention to the gaps between the companies’ supposed progressive values and the way workers are being treated when they organize collectively. That’s particularly true of REI, which is structured as a member-owned cooperative, and whose leadership views climate change as an existential threat and has <a href="https://www.rei.com/newsroom/article/rei-antiracist-multicultural-fully-inclusive-commitment?cm_mmc=aff_AL-_-40661-_-55097-_-NA&avad=55097_a385e562d">committed</a> to becoming an “anti-racist” organization. There’s “tremendous opportunity for customers to be engaged and push for changes inside the co-op to be the kind of place they know it should be and they assume that it is,” Buckley says.
That kind of public pressure has yet to be seen. Still, Starbucks’ new stance may be partly an attempt to repair damage to its reputation, Logan says, as well as the result of unofficial boycotts over union-busting efforts and the appearance of a new, more pragmatic CEO. (Starbucks in February <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2024/message-from-sara-starbucks-and-workers-united-agree-on-path-forward/">said</a> it now wants to resolve outstanding litigation and come to agreement with Workers United on a “fair process for organizing.”)
“It's not entirely clear why Starbucks decided to reverse course—assuming this is what has happened,” Logan says. A realization that the union wasn’t going away may have also been a factor, he adds. 
It may not be a coincidence that, compared with REI and Trader Joe’s, Starbucks now has many more unionized stores. Store-based organizing may be the strongest argument to corporate executives that workers’ demands won’t dissipate any time soon. For these campaigns to succeed, they’ve “got to be based on empowering workers to organize their own stores,” Logan says. “That’s what young people want to do, and that’s the only way you can win against these companies.”
The fights continue. In <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/entry/starbucks-union-elections_n_65d24123e4b0ce1bdc39d7d5">February</a>, baristas at 21 Starbucks stores informed the company they intended to organize. In mid-March, REI workers in Santa Cruz, Calif. announced their intention to unionize; they’ll vote later this month. And on April 8, Trader Joe’s employees in Chicago followed suit.
“We’re responding to [the company’s] legal onslaught with our own, while also trying to organize new locations,” Buckley says. “Any time we’ve seen massive changes in union density in this county, it’s when workers lead the campaigns and lead the shop floor.” 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jeremy Gantz]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[“Crisis”: Half of Rural Hospitals Are Operating at a Loss, Hundreds Could Close]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/rural-hospitals-losing-money-closures-medicaid-expansion-health</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2024 11:15:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/rural-hospitals-losing-money-closures-medicaid-expansion-health</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A new report paints a grim picture for small-town health care—especially in states that have not expanded Medicaid.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/M1bmQU72V1YGgU8MupgRAQzB63zFsDb9RZ1cY7KEcag/w:820/h:535/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9Sb2RyaWd1ZXotS0ZGLXJ1cmFsLWhvc3BpdGFsLXJlcG9ydC5qcGc.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/M1bmQU72V1YGgU8MupgRAQzB63zFsDb9RZ1cY7KEcag/w:820/h:535/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9Sb2RyaWd1ZXotS0ZGLXJ1cmFsLWhvc3BpdGFsLXJlcG9ydC5qcGc.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption> Getty Images</figcaption></figure> Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by <a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/about-us">KFF Health News</a>, a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about <a href="https://www.kff.org/about-us">KFF</a>.
In a little more than two years as CEO of a small hospital in Wyoming, Dave Ryerse has witnessed firsthand the worsening financial problems eroding rural hospitals nationwide.
In 2022, Ryerse’s South Lincoln Medical Center was forced to shutter its operating room because it didn’t have the staff to run it 24 hours a day. Soon after, the obstetrics unit closed.
Ryerse said the publicly owned facility’s revenue from providing care has fallen short of operating expenses for at least the past eight years, driving tough decisions to cut services in hopes of keeping the facility open in Kemmerer, a town of about 2,400 in southwestern Wyoming.
South Lincoln’s financial woes aren’t unique, and the risk of hospital closures is an immediate threat to many small communities. “Those cities dry out,” Ryerse said. “There’s a huge sense of urgency to make sure that we can maintain and really eventually thrive in this area.”
<a href="https://www.chartis.com/sites/default/files/documents/chartis_rural_study_pressure_pushes_rural_safety_net_crisis_into_uncharted_territory_feb_15_2024_fnl.pdf">A recently released report</a> from the health analytics and consulting firm Chartis paints a clear picture of the grim reality Ryerse and other small-hospital managers face. In its financial analysis, the firm concluded that half of rural hospitals lost money in the past year, up from 43% the previous year. It also identified 418 rural hospitals across the United States that are “vulnerable to closure.”
Mark Holmes, director of the Cecil G. Sheps Center for Health Services Research at the University of North Carolina, said the report’s findings weren’t a surprise, since the financial nosedive it depicted has been a concern of researchers and rural health advocates for decades.
The report noted that small-town hospitals in states that expanded Medicaid eligibility have fared better financially than those in states that didn’t.
Leaders in Montana, whose population is nearly half rural, credit Medicaid expansion as the reason their hospitals have largely avoided the financial crisis depicted by the report despite escalating costs, workforce shortages and growing administrative burden.
“Montana’s expansion of Medicaid coverage to low-income adults nearly 10 years ago has cut in half the percentage of Montanans without insurance, increased access to care and preserved services in rural communities and reduced the burden of uncompensated care shouldered by hospitals by nearly 50%,” said Katy Mack, vice president of communications for the Montana Hospital Association.
Not one hospital has closed in the state since 2015, she added.
Hospitals elsewhere haven’t fared so well.
Michael Topchik, national leader for the Chartis Center for Rural Health and an author of the study, said he expects next year’s update on the report will show rural hospital finances continuing to deteriorate.
“In health care and in many industries, we say, ‘No margin, no mission,’” Topchik said, referring to the difference between income and expenses. Rural hospitals “are all mission-driven organizations that simply don’t have the margin to reinvest in themselves or their communities because of deteriorating margins. I’m very, very concerned for their future.”
People living in rural America are <a href="https://www.ruralhealthresearch.org/assets/2200-8536/rural-communities-age-income-health-status-recap.pdf">older, sicker and poorer</a> than their urban and suburban counterparts. Yet, they often live in places where many health care services aren’t available, <a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/primary-care-health-professional-shortage-areas/">including primary care</a>. The shorter life expectancies in these communities are connected to the lack of success of their health facilities, said Alan Morgan, CEO of the National Rural Health Association, a nonprofit advocacy group.
“We’re really talking about the future of rural here,” Morgan said.
Like South Lincoln, other hospitals still operating are likely cutting services. According to Chartis, nearly a quarter of rural hospitals have closed their obstetrics units and 382 have stopped providing chemotherapy.
Halting services has far-reaching effects on the health of the communities the hospitals and their providers serve.
While people in rural America are <a href="https://ascopubs.org/doi/full/10.1200/OP.20.00352">more likely to die of cancer</a> than people in urban areas, providing specialty cancer treatment also helps ensure that older adults can stay in their communities. Similarly, obstetrics care helps attract and keep young families.
Whittling services because of financial and staffing problems is causing “death by a thousand cuts,” said Topchik, adding that hospital leaders face choices between keeping the lights on, paying their staff, and serving their communities.
The Chartis report noted that the financial problems are driving hospitals to sell to or otherwise join larger health systems; it said nearly 60% of rural hospitals are now affiliated with large systems. South Lincoln in Wyoming, for example, has a clinical affiliation with Utah-based Intermountain Health, which lets the facility offer access to providers outside the state.
In recent years, rural hospitals have faced many added financial pressures, according to Chartis and other researchers. The rapid growth of <a href="https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/medicare-advantage-rural-hospitals-financial-pinch/">rural enrollment in Medicare Advantage plans</a>, which do not reimburse hospitals at the same rate as traditional Medicare, has had a particularly profound effect.
Topchik predicted sustainability for rural health facilities will ultimately require greater investment from Congress.
In 1997, Congress responded to a rural hospital crisis by creating the “Critical Access Hospital” designation, meant to alleviate financial burdens rural hospitals face and help keep health services available by giving facilities cost-based reimbursement rates from Medicare and in some states Medicaid.
But these critical access hospitals are still struggling, including South Lincoln.
In 2021, Congress established a new designation, “Rural Emergency Hospital,” which allows hospitals to cut most inpatient services but continue running outpatient care. The newer designation, with its accompanying financial incentives, has kept some smaller rural hospitals from closing, but Morgan said those conversions still mean a loss of services.
“It’s a good thing that now we keep the emergency room care, but I think it masks the fact that 28 communities lost inpatient care just last year alone,” he said. “I’m afraid that this hospital closure crisis is now going to run under the radar.”
“It ends up costing local and state governments more, ultimately, and costs the federal government more, in dollars for health care treatment,” Morgan said. “It’s just bad public policy. And bad policy for the local communities.”
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jazmin Orozco Rodriguez]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Congress Has Decided to Stay Far Too White]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/house-office-diversity-inclusion-dei-congress-government-shutdown</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/house-office-diversity-inclusion-dei-congress-government-shutdown</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The GOP-led House has eliminated the office on diversity and inclusion, maintaining a system of racial exclusion in the halls of power.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/LDrzwAWicK7up0nMJ9oHexZMdWnQU7aCh8Za9w09pLk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMTk4NzUxMzkwLmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/LDrzwAWicK7up0nMJ9oHexZMdWnQU7aCh8Za9w09pLk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMTk4NzUxMzkwLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>House Republicans cheer during President Donald Trumps State of the Union address in the House Chamber on Tuesday, February 4, 2020. / (Photo By Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> Last week, Congress disbanded the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion as part of an agreement to avert a government shutdown. This decision will have serious consequences for U.S. democracy.
The House diversity office was created in March 2020 in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd—a time when institutions across this country were challenged to reckon with their exclusionary and racist histories. I am a sociologist who has been studying Congress and its insular practices for more than a decade. My book,<a href="https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691223636/the-last-plantation"> The Last Plantation</a>, harkens to the nickname that Congress earned for its stubborn resistance to inclusion, a resistance that this decision continues.
The mandate of the House diversity office was accountability and transparency. The office was tasked with diversifying employment through strategic outreach to underrepresented groups at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and minority serving institutions (MSIs), and with researching and publishing data on the<a href="https://diversity.house.gov/research-and-data/house-studies/house-workforce-study/"> racial makeup of congressional employees</a> and<a href="https://diversity.house.gov/research-and-data/house-studies/house-witness-representation-study/"> testifying witnesses</a>.
It is work that is sorely needed. Even today, as we celebrate the most diverse Congress ever, Capitol Hill remains very, very white. Though whites only constitute 60% of the population, 75% of members of Congress are white. In the House, <a href="https://jointcenter.org/racial-diversity-among-top-staff-in-the-u-s-house-of-representatives/">82% of top staffers are white</a> and even more are in the Senate:<a href="https://jointcenter.org/2023-racial-diversity-among-top-staff-in-senate-personal-offices/"> 84%</a>. Even the pipeline into Congress, the Congressional Internship Program, is disproportionately white—a 2021 study I published found that <a href="https://payourinterns.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Pay-Our-Interns-Who-Congress-Pays.pdf">76% of paid interns were white</a>, even as white students make up only 52% of the national undergraduate population.
Congressional staff, whom the office tracked, are an invisible force in American lawmaking. They do the majority of work on Capitol Hill, from drafting legislation to providing lawmakers with critical advice. What’s more, after a few years on the Hill, staffers often go on to occupy even more influential positions within American politics, including in the executive and judicial branches, local and state politics, and in lobbying and non profit institutions. By eliminating the House diversity office, the GOP-led House is ensuring that consequential decisions for everyone in this country will continue to be made by a congressional staff that does not look like America.
The elimination of the House Office of Diversity and Inclusion is the latest victory for conservatives and their national campaign to rollback diversity efforts. <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/here-are-the-states-where-lawmakers-are-seeking-to-ban-colleges-dei-efforts">Anti-DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) legislation has passed in a dozen states, </a> often eliminating funding for diversity and inclusion programs in state agencies and targeting public colleges and universities, restricting these schools from considering race and ethnicity in hiring and admissions. For example, Texas passed SB17, which banned DEI offices in public universities. Last week, the University of Texas at Austin unceremoniously <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/us/university-texas-austin-cutting-dei-jobs-reaj/index.html">fired</a> 60 staff members employed in DEI roles. Florida Republicans attempted to go further, passing the Stop WOKE Act in 2022 which would, among other things, prevent diversity trainings by private employers. <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/court-rules-floridas-stop-woke-law-restricting-business-diversity-training-is-unconstitutional">This law was ruled unconstitutional last month. </a>
Conservatives are trying to undo the last 60 years of progress, erasing anti-discrimination protections and inclusivity mandates state by state. It is an attempt to keep classrooms, workplaces and Congress white. The conservative victory in the House will have far reaching implications. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio), for example, <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/race-politics/4564129-dei-advocates-sound-alarm-house-office-diversity/">said</a>, “ODI’s dissolution is a significant setback in the conservative war on D&I, endangering the creation of policies that will promote opportunity and uplift underserved communities throughout this country.”
Black staffers and others from underrepresented groups help write laws that better represent Americans. They also play important roles in championing underrepresented groups in constituent services and drawing attention to issues that matter to them in congressional hearings. In short, they help make sure that representative democracy is actually representative. 
For example, Shalanda Young made history in 2017 when she became the first Black staff director of the House Appropriations Committee in its 159 year history, and she currently serves as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/23/us/politics/shalanda-young-omb-deputy-director.html">In the House</a>, Young was responsible for overseeing the entire appropriations process, which included negotiating around a dozen spending bills each year as well as five pandemic relief packages, totalling $3 trillion dollars. It matters that a Black woman led this process as <a href="https://www.govexec.com/management/2022/03/shalanda-young-working-mom-first-woman-color-take-charge-americas-budget/363256/">she said in her confirmation hearing,</a> “a budget is your values.”
During Young’s Senate confirmation hearing to lead the OMB, <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/06/politics/shalanda-young-capitol-hill-black-staffers/index.html#">Democratic and Republican lawmakers lauded her intellect, work ethic and contributions to congressional lawmaking.</a> Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) praised Young as a “strategic thinker” who “has helped to shape many of the solutions to some of the most pressing problems.” Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer (ND), meanwhile, highlighted her specific efforts to advance major water infrastructure projects in North Dakota, his home state. However, Young is the exception: committee directors, who are crucial in congressional policymaking and often tapped for more senior roles in U.S. politics, are <a href="https://jointcenter.org/racial-diversity-among-senate-committee-top-staff/">overwhelmingly white</a>.
In recent years, I have spoken to hundreds of congressional staffers as part of my research. Black and Brown staffers have described how they’ve highlighted issues of racial inclusion that their white colleagues were either unaware of or unwillingly to bring up. This includes disparities in credit reporting, the importance of funding the U.S. Census Bureau for fair representation and the availability of government services in multiple languages. They also work to stop racist biases from becoming enshrined into the law.
This decision to close the House diversity office is sadly not surprising when placed in historical context. For most of its history, Congress was an exclusively white institution. Since its inception in 1789, approximately <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/interactive/2022/congress-slaveowners-names-list/">1,800 white slaveholders have been elected to the federal legislature</a>. This figure surpasses the combined number of Black members of Congress tenfold. Throughout this time, whites held a competitive advantage—shaping the rules, interests and outcomes of the nation’s chief lawmaking body. They still do.
It was not until 1995 that Hill offices finally adhered to federal workplace anti-discrimination laws. Ironically, Congress had mandated that all employers follow these regulations three decades earlier, though it was not enforced in the body that set the mandate. Even today, lawmakers and their staff have wide discretion in hiring decisions. They are accountable to almost no one. 
Because congressional recruitment is insular, without accountability or external pressure, it is easy to see how Congress remains overwhelmingly white. Typically, information about congressional job openings are shared among staff networks and vacancies are filled by individuals known to Hill insiders long before these roles are publicly advertised. Unlike many elite employers, Congress does not actively recruit for talent. Since white people are already overrepresented in staff positions, they disproportionately benefit from this arrangement.
Racial disparities persist prominently in our society. The racial <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/15/racial-wage-gap-starts-as-early-as-16-heres-why.html">wage gap endures</a> while racial wealth disparity <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/black-wealth-is-increasing-but-so-is-the-racial-wealth-gap/#:~:text=...in%202022%2C%20for,19%20pandemic%2C%20wealth%20increased%20unevenly.">continues to widen</a>. Black, Latino and Asian Americans still often reside in segregated, underserved neighborhoods, adversely impacting their access to education, employment, healthcare and political opportunities. The lack of political representation in Congress cements barriers to racial equality and reinforces these systemic and longstanding issues.
The strength of the United States is in its diversity. The killing of the House diversity office, and the attack on mechanisms to maintain diversity and inclusion across the country, hurt us all. But they will have a disproportionate impact on communities of color, whose voices will be muted in Congress, further harming our multiracial democracy. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[James Jones]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Can Grocery Workers Take Back Their Union?]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union</link>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Apr 2024 07:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/revolt-aisle-5-ufcw-grocery-workers-union</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Faye Guenther’s multiyear plan to revolutionize the grocery workers union.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/GOzGuIxXy18_ld0G1QE6iR59VNEBbr-1Erg0vb8tDAQ/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL2NvdmVycy9BaXNsZTUuanBlZw.jpeg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/GOzGuIxXy18_ld0G1QE6iR59VNEBbr-1Erg0vb8tDAQ/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL2NvdmVycy9BaXNsZTUuanBlZw.jpeg" alt="" /><figcaption>Faye Guenther, president of UFCW Local 3000, looks on from the PCC grocery store in Burien, Wash., on February 23. / Photo by Jovelle Tamayo</figcaption></figure> On a gray October evening, half a dozen insurgents huddle around a table in an upscale diner across the street from Sea-Tac airport, considering their battle plans.
“I don’t want to get shot in New Jersey or New York, and those guys will fucking murder us,” says the consigliere.
“Yeah,” the boss muses. “They will hella murder us.”
“I’m more afraid of some people who have threatened to shoot us out here than those people out there,” says one of the generals.
“The chances of us getting shot,” concludes the ringleader, “are fairly high.” She smiles her omnipresent smile as she says this, to indicate it’s all in good fun. Pretty much. It’s definitely, mostly, sort of a joke. More or less. Her office window did get shot out not long ago. But … nobody said changing the world would be easy.
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/KcnFczhUd-CK1rXfHsr-TatKwoUETVYi4RB0OwlxMVU/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYzLjI0MDIyM19JblRoZXNlVGltZXNfRmF5ZUd1ZW50aGVyX0pUYW1heW9fMDA2LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>UFCW Local 3000 member Sam Dancy, a worker at the Westwood Village QFC in Seattle, proudly wears a Black Lives Matter pin on February 23—and led a campaign for the right to do so.</figcaption> </figure>
On February 6, 1919, 25,000 Seattle workers from more than 100 different unions walked out in support of 35,000 striking shipyard workers. It was global news. The city was momentarily paralyzed by the most comprehensive display of labor power that post-WWI America had seen.
On the wall of an exhibit about the strike at the Seattle Museum of History and Industry, a small label channels the thinking of the strikers: “Where will this lead? To revolution? Power for workers? The truth is: Nobody knows where!”
A century later, the electrifying heart of Washington’s labor movement can be found in a three-story office building, next to a chiropractor and a Mexican restaurant, in the town of Des Moines, which lies along the bay about 15 miles south of downtown Seattle. There, in the lobby, “educate, agitate, organize” is spelled out in neon blue cursive on the wall. A novelty claw machine holds little plastic bubbles containing bright yellow union T-shirts and beanies. This is the headquarters of United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) 3000.
With more than 50,000 members in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho—mostly grocery and healthcare workers, along with several thousand more in retail, meatpacking and public service—UFCW 3000 is the largest local in the million-member UFCW International. It is the model of an energetic, pugnacious, organizing union, growing labor’s influence steadily in one of America’s most concentrated areas of corporate power. But it is also—and, really, this is why I’m here—the epicenter of a great plot to root out the rotten elements holding back the UFCW, overthrow them, and revolutionize one of the biggest private-sector unions in the country, along with the labor movement itself. If you like scrappy bands of righteous pirates setting out on a grand caper with uncertain chances of success, well, here is the union world’s version.
The driving force behind UFCW 3000’s grand plans is Faye Guenther, the local’s 47-year-old president. She is mounting a 2028 run for UFCW International president. That will, ideally, be the culmination of a multiyear strategy of rallying member support across the country to build a mighty internal caucus that wants to sweep away long-entrenched leadership and make the union more democratic, more committed to new organizing, and more willing to strike—to make one of America’s biggest unions as ambitious to win the class war as Faye Guenther herself.
Guenther, who has curly blonde hair and glasses and a perpetual elvish grin playing on the corners of her lips, is notable for her willingness to say yes to any idea that will help the working class, no matter how difficult it might seem. She comes by her activism honestly. She grew up poor, in Oregon. Her father, whom Guenther suspects had undiagnosed mental health problems, was abusive. Her mother, who later was diagnosed with PTSD, left him when Guenther was a baby and traveled to eastern Oregon, eventually settling in tiny Spray, Ore., where her mom picked up work on ranches and farms. In his late 40s, her father had a brain aneurysm and died in Gulfport, Miss., where he was living unhoused. Guenther, his only next of kin, had to fly down and take him off life support.
With the help of a friendly science teacher, Guenther got into Oregon State University in Corvallis, making her one of the first women from her high school to go to college. She became deeply involved in campus activism. By the time she graduated, she had started a full-time job at the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence coordinating volunteers and helping domestic violence survivors, sure that she would be doing that for the rest of her life.
Then an AFL-CIO Organizing Institute recruiter, who had known Guenther as a campus activist, came and asked Guenther to join the labor movement. Her knee-jerk reaction, fueled by her impression of unions as undemocratic bureaucracies, was a strong hell no: “The labor movement is fucked up; you guys are losers.” But the recruiter persisted. As Guenther thought more about the big picture, she reconsidered. 
“I was working with women who, maybe seven out of 10 were returning back to their abusers, and almost every single one of them was for economic reasons,” Guenther says. “Poor women, low-wage women don’t have a lot of options. I just felt like helping one person at a time wasn’t going to work. It wasn’t fast enough.”
Soon, she was hooked. She went to work organizing healthcare workers for Service Employees International Union in California and then for UFCW 1000 in Washington. After a few years, she made it back to Oregon, supervising organizers throughout a large part of the state. She left to go to law school at the University of Oregon before she was lured back to the union world at UFCW—with the promise that she could train to take over as the local’s attorney. Instead, she ended up running campaign after campaign, then became staff director, then secretary-treasurer, and then was elected president in 2019.
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/0DfrHTai4HSs-CzZkalXx23czrmWjaCcyQuwGE9d-_0/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYzLjI0MDIyM19JblRoZXNlVGltZXNfRmF5ZUd1ZW50aGVyX0pUYW1heW9fMDEyLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>UFCW Local 3000 President Faye Guenther greets Sam Dancy, who sits on the union’s member-led executive committee, at the Westwood Village QFC in Seattle on February 23.</figcaption> </figure>
For the entire time that Guenther has been working for unions—more than two decades—she has been conscious of the ways her union was failing. She and her fellow organizers would go out for beers and grumble about the UFCW’s failure to invest in organizing and its disconnected international leadership.
Her own relationship with the leadership—particularly with Marc Perrone, the UFCW International’s president since 2014—deteriorated. In 2020, when Covid-19 struck, UFCW found itself right in the middle of the crisis. Grocery workers were being pressured to continue working as the pandemic spread, and nurses who were UFCW 3000 members were forced to wear garbage bags and unsafe masks in the early days of the pandemic, because their hospital <a href="https://ufcw3000.org/news/2020/3/23/health-care-workers-need-safety-equipment-to-protect-ourselves-on-the-front-lines-of-the-covid19-outbreak-its-time-to-get-this-equipment-into-our-hands#!" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">lacked sufficient PPE</a>.
“I got onto a phone call with Marc Perrone—he had these regional meetings—and I said, ‘We need face masks, we need PPE, and we need it fast. Or 200,000 people could die by August.’ He said, ‘Faye, let’s not be overly dramatic,’ ” Guenther remembers. “I knew immediately that this person was completely out of touch.” By the end of August 2020, more than 183,000 Americans would die of Covid.
In 2022, Kroger and Albertsons <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/kroger-albertsons-merger-ufcw-union-labor-ftc-biden" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced their plan to merge</a>, which would form the largest grocery chain in America. Such megamergers are almost always bad for workers, leading to layoffs, store closures and more monopoly-type power for the corporation. The UFCW represented more than 300,000 workers at the two companies, but the union’s international leadership pointedly declined to announce its opposition to the merger, releasing only a mealy-mouthed <a href="https://www.ufcw.org/press-releases/ufcw-statement-on-proposed-kroger-albertsons-merger/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">statement of concern</a>, which indicated they thought there might be some opportunity for a deal with the companies.
Alarmed, Guenther and her team at UFCW 3000 pulled together a “<a href="https://www.nogrocerymerger.com/supporters" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Stop the Merger</a>” coalition of six other locals, along with dozens of community and labor groups, to agitate and lobby against the deal. The international did not decide to formally oppose the merger until May 2023, after a great deal of internal pressure.
It marked yet another public schism between the Marc Perrone and Faye Guenther wings of the union.
The internal politics of labor unions, though they often remain out of view, can be every bit as dramatic as any episode of Game of Thrones. By 2022, Guenther and her allies at UFCW 3000 had resolved to launch a reform effort inside UFCW, with an eye on pushing a slate of reforms at the union’s international convention in 2023.
The atmosphere was tense—Guenther describes it as “open war.” The international union ended the $24,000 monthly subsidy that it had been giving to support the local’s organizing efforts, which Guenther interpreted as direct retaliation against her for her years of being a thorn in their side. A UFCW International spokesperson said that the end of the subsidy was not retaliatory and that “the International Executive Board conducted an independent investigation by engaging an outside law firm to look into this very question and it concluded that no retaliation took place.” UFCW International did not respond to requests to interview Perrone for this story.
On Aug. 1, 2022, the local’s office in Seattle was broken into. The local later moved to its current office out in Des Moines, Wash., where Guenther arrived one day to find a bullet hole in her office window. It was still there when I visited: The bullet entered, ricocheted off the ceiling and made a hole in the wall, right over the couch where staffers sat during meetings. There is no evidence theseincidents were anything more than random crimes, but the combined effect was enough to make everyone’s hairs stand on end. As recently as 2018, a local UFCW officer in New York was indicted and charged with racketeering on behalf of the Genovese crime family.
Even if all of these things were coincidences, the atmosphere of tension that Local 3000’s leaders felt was very real. Faye Guenther is a driven person. She only got involved with the labor movement because she wants to change the world. Her fundamental frustration with the way UFCW as a whole was being run was that, despite having access to many resources, it seemed totally uninterested in that goal. Perrone boasted about the union’s financial strength, but its organizing budget had been cut under his leadership, and proposals at the 2023 convention to boost organizing spending were resoundingly voted down. Guenther was equally frustrated with other UFCW locals that seemed to exist as sinecures for their officers, rather than democratic, member-focused unions.
“It’s a political inside club,” Guenther says. “You get your regional directors and staff. You have no accountability to the membership.” At many locals, “their boards are filled with staff. They vote themselves their raises. They don’t have organizing departments. They don’t mobilize their members … [and at the international], they’re not leading either. They’re not pulling people together. They’re not speaking out. They’re not exposing the problems. Because they all want to stay in power.”
Sam Dancy, 65, has seen a lot of union locals in his 33 years as a grocery worker at the Westwood Village QFC in Seattle. He’s been represented by three different ones through UFCW, traveled the country doing get-out-the-vote work for the union, and now serves as a member representative on the Local 3000 board. He says Local 3000 stands out for its transparency, its investment in members and its willingness to fight. Soon after coming in, the local won paid sick leave and more control over scheduling. In 2021, it successfully defended Dancy’s right to wear a Black Lives Matter pin.
In contrast to bloated officer salaries at other UFCW locals, Dancy says, “We know where our money goes. … They make sure we have money for strike defense, money to help other people, money to organize.” That investment in new organizing, he says, is crucial to building “strength in numbers.” 
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/OjW0SLfiIDi1w9aXqQr0ZwjEh-z-w263KZ6XyD0f-H8/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYzLjI0MDIyM19JblRoZXNlVGltZXNfRmF5ZUd1ZW50aGVyX0pUYW1heW9fMDI0LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>At the union office in Des Moines, Wash., Guenther shows off the local’s
inspirational pin board.</figcaption> </figure>
“When I was growing up, there were unions—and there was a middle class. … Today, you just have the rich and the poor,” he says. “Every single entity should be unionized. Everyone should have a voice.” Local 3000 is trying to be the change it wants to see. Matt Loveday, who was the local’s organizing director from 2020 until earlier this year, says that, from 2020 through 2023, the union added 2,738 members through new organizing. Those came in 45 separate campaign wins, 30 of which were National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections. Those are not staggering numbers, though they do reflect continual work by his staff of 10 organizers through the depths of the pandemic. What is staggering is that, according to Loveday, Local 3000 accounts for about 5% of the UFCW’s total membership but for more than 25% of its new organizing.
“The average size of a UFCW [NLRB union election] filing is about 20, whereas the average size of one of our elections is in the mid-60s,” Loveday says. “The UFCW win rate is very low. It’s lower than the national average. Our win rate is about 10 points higher than the national average. They could give you some BS about, ‘Oh yeah, UFCW is one of the great organizing unions.’ But if you actually know what statistics to look at, it’s very, very poor.”
Todd Crosby, who preceded Guenther as Local 3000’s president and then served as the UFCW International’s organizing director until the end of 2022, saw the sharp difference between the organizing philosophies. Crosby says he brought Marc Perrone a plan for UFCW to build up to organizing 10,000 new workers per year, which Perrone rejected. Likewise, the goal of spending 20% of the international’s budget on organizing—$40 million a year—was never taken seriously.
“Perrone hasn’t gotten even a quarter of the way there in his 10 years,” Crosby says.
A UFCW International spokesperson disputed these figures, saying, “The numbers you cite are categorically false. While, like many unions, our organizing activity went down during the pandemic, we doubled our amount of organizing victories from 2021 to 2022, [and] have surpassed that in 2023.” The union also said it devotes “more than 20% of our budget to organizing” but refused to share any specific details. 
Crosby stood by his assertions about the flaws in the union’s organizing strategy and budget, and he expressed skepticism about the UFCW International’s denials: “What gets included in the 20%? That’s the devil in the details. Is it 20% of staff? Do those staff actually work on organizing full-time? Does it include comms and political? That has never been clarified.” Crosby adds: “It is true that the organizing department budget and actual expenditures went up in 2021 and 2022. That’s because both the pandemic and the shift of resources to the presidential election brought the budget/expenditures [in 2020] to almost zero.”
Guenther told me her own vision for a UFCW that hired hundreds of new organizers and won coordinated national contracts to transform the entire grocery industry. Local 3000’s secretary-treasurer Joe Mizrahi, Guenther’s closest ally and consigliere, can rattle off detailed plans to organize 30,000 cannabis workers and unionize Whole Foods as an entry point to Amazon. To make those ambitions a reality, though, means making the UFCW International act more like Local 3000.
Last year, Mizrahi and Guenther resolved to make reforming the UFCW a reality. They pulled together a reform slate, headed by Guenther, as well as a host of resolutions and constitutional amendments to propose at the convention. Most meaningful was one to institute a “one member, one vote” structure that would shift power at UFCW away from insider delegates and toward members—a reform that has been integral to overthrowing entrenched leadership teams at other unions like the Teamsters and United Auto Workers (UAW) in recent years.
They also proposed limiting the salary of any local officer in the union to $250,000 per year. This measure sounds modest, until you learn that 30 of the UFCW’s 74 local presidents in 2023 were paid more than that, including three who were paid more than half a million dollars. When Crosby served as the UFCW International’s organizing director, he made it a point to cut subsidies to locals who paid their officers more than $300,000 a year—to send the signal “that money existed in the local for organizing. It was just misallocated to the president’s salary.”
Eventually, Crosby says, those locals just started going around him and appealing directly to Perrone. (Guenther is paid less than $200,000, and Local 3000’s elected 48-person executive board consists of 45 members and three officers.)
The reformers made their voices heard—loudly—at the UFCW convention in April, but they were defeated on the floor, as they knew they would be. It was a first step.
Now, the same band of true believers are plotting to spend the years leading up to the next convention on a bootstrapped national campaign designed to refashion the entire million-member union in UFCW 3000’s image: democratic, aggressively organizing, and rooted in social justice.
First, Seattle. Next, everywhere.
Puget Sound's perpetual gloomy mist wafted through the air on an early Tuesday morning in October 2023, but inside UFCW 3000’s office, everything felt electric. Dozens of staffers from across the local’s sprawling territory crowded into a large conference room for the biannual all-staff meeting. This one was about more than just the normal campaign and budget updates; if there is going to be a revolution inside the UFCW, it will start with the people in this room, many of whom are veterans of the 2023 convention reform fight.
“We know that we are, in my humble opinion, in a fight over the soul of UFCW,” Guenther told them. “We’re in a fight for the soul of the labor movement.” Many of the staffers in the room had helped with the reform effort and attended the convention themselves, bearing witness to the jeers and cold shoulders that showed just how hard the road ahead would be.
Guenther noted the president of one of the other locals, who had been an ally, had just died; one of her deputies was attending his funeral that same day. Whether that local would remain an ally was an open question.
“We cannot rely on individual or fragile partnerships to reform UFCW,” Guenther said. “We must create a movement of members—not of elected leaders, of members—who want a different kind of union.” The UFCW’s membership had sunk below where it was when she joined the union world in 1999, and she wanted everyone who worked for her to feel the urgency of that crisis: “How do you build power for low-wage workers—for grocery store workers, for food packing and processing workers, for cannabis workers? How do you build power when you’re sinking like a stone? How do you do that? I don’t know. You can’t! So we have to do something different.”
<a href="https://ufcw3000.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">UFCW 3000</a>, with more than 50,000 members and a pugnacious attitude, always has plenty of fights on its plate. On top of that, they are committed to getting bigger. When I asked Katie Garrow—head of MLK Labor, the central labor council for the Seattle area—about where UFCW 3000 sat in the union landscape, she immediately replied: “Their investment in organizing is like a model for the whole labor movement. … UFCW 3000 stands as a shining example of the call to action right now, to invest in external organizing.”
During the week I spent with them, UFCW 3000 was also preparing for not one, but two, potential strikes. On Monday, Guenther, Mizrahi and several staffers crammed around a laminated table in the back corner of a teriyaki restaurant to talk through a looming strike at Macy’s, where members were fed up with low wages. On Thursday, staffers were camped out in a tiny break room at Providence Regional Medical Center in Everett, 30 miles north of Seattle, where a thousand nurses were taking a strike vote, which came in at 97% yes. (Providence workers ended up striking for five days; Macy’s workers for nine.)
Meanwhile, Guenther and Mizrahi spent Thursday and Friday at an airport motel in the midst of contract negotiations. Mizrahi was also working to arrange another meeting with Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan regarding the Kroger merger. (The meetings would pay off: In February, the FTC sued to block the deal.) Rite Aid, where Local 3000 had members, had just declared bankruptcy. On top of those things, and the staff meeting, the Israeli bombardment of Gaza had begun, and Guenther and her staff sat in on a Zoom call of labor activists discussing the issue, then added UFCW 3000’s name to the then very short list of unions demanding a cease-fire.
There was nothing about this river of work that would motivate any normal person to voluntarily undertake, in addition, a years-long project to reform a hostile and intransigent union. The motivation was ideology. The motivation was that Guenther and her allies believe the union must be better, and their work is not done until it is.
After contract negotiations concluded one night, they migrated to that upscale diner by the airport to sketch out their battle plans. Guenther whipped out a piece of paper, sectioned it off into years, and began filling in what needed to be done: 2024, 2025 and 2026 would be for building a national base of support among members of other locals, while 2027 and 2028 would be spent training reform delegates to flood the next UFCW convention. Each year, they planned on picking three or four cities to target—geographically dispersed places with UFCW locals that had members enthusiastic for reform and leaders who were not. Those cities would be the sweet spots, where the evangelistic message of democratic unionism could most easily take root.
This plan drew on the playbooks of two other internal union reform efforts: <a href="https://www.tdu.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Teamsters for a Democratic Union</a> (TDU) and <a href="https://uawd.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Unite All Workers for Democracy</a> (UAWD). Guenther and her members have attended TDU conventions to learn.
UAWD, whose fight for union democracy led to the election of crusading new UAW President Shawn Fain, accomplished its task in only four years, proof that revolutions can happen fast.
Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian and professor at University of California Santa Barbara, notes that both the Teamsters and the UAW only instituted “one member, one vote” reforms after they were forced to in the wake of corruption investigations. The Teamsters did it in 1989 in response to a racketeering case after 13 years of agitation by reformers. The UAW made the reform in 2021 after a settlement with the Justice Department, laying the groundwork for Fain’s rise. 
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/REexVBbGMlUPkwTL_dkfjW6G4yeeNuzLuVxQ-XhAnPw/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ4MDN3LkYzLjI0MDIyM19JblRoZXNlVGltZXNfRmF5ZUd1ZW50aGVyX0pUYW1heW9fMDQ0LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Faye Guenther discusses working conditions with Yasab Pfister in the break room at the PCC grocery in Burien, Wash., on February 23.</figcaption> </figure>
“The Teamsters union is actually a more decentralized union than [the UAW],” Lichtenstein notes, which accounts, in part, for TDU’s more arduous path to success. The UFCW, too, is decentralized—and there is no imminent corruption settlement to force the voting reform that seems key to defeating its incumbent leadership. But Lichtenstein points out that other unions, including the United Steelworkers, have implemented “one member, one vote” systems without a corruption scandal. There is no reason to imagine that UFCW cannot change itself without the government forcing the issue.
Guenther and her allies began kicking around targets for early 2024. Chicago? Phoenix? Boston? Perhaps Kansas, Ohio or New Jersey? And what about Canada? The scale was intimidating. Then there were the logistical concerns. Carrying out this plan would mean everyone involved spent the next several years using their spare time to fly around the country to meet with workers and recruit them. Guenther said anyone who wanted to be on the slate with her could have one week of vacation per year but would be expected to use the rest of their vacation days visiting workers. They needed fundraising. A comms team. These things were briskly ticked off—not as obstacles, but as to-dos. (By early 2024, they had lawyers forming a new organization to house the effort, and they were focused on recruiting dozens of UFCW members to meet up at the Labor Notes convention in April, where they would decide their list of target cities.)
They discussed some more exotic possible tactics as well. One idea was to rally support to call a “special convention,” where they could force a formal consideration of one member, one vote. Even if the international leadership blocked the measure from passing, it could be a good way to draw attention to the fact that those leaders were insulating themselves from the will of the membership.
Another idea, which Mizrahi referred to as the “nuclear option,” would be for Local 3000 to pursue a full disaffiliation from the UFCW—the union equivalent of California seceding from the United States. In this scenario, the local would declare UFCW to be irredeemably broken and ask members to allow them to become a standalone union dedicated to new organizing and union democracy. This is, to be clear, a far-fetched plan, because the UFCW’s constitution makes it difficult, but introducing it as a possibility could give the reformers leverage.
It is not hard to see its appeal. Among other things, Mizrahi said, Local 3000 could stop sending $800,000 per month to the UFCW International. “We could have another 80 staff,” he said. “Picture that we had the staff that you saw in that meeting, plus 80 organizers. What would that look like?”
It would look like the labor movement’s dream fully unleashed. What makes UFCW 3000 so remarkable is that it combines all of the real, existing, hard-won characteristics of a strong democratic union—a member-led board, national political influence, a willingness to tangle with multibillion-dollar corporations—with an additional, exceedingly rare determination to follow a purist ideology of labor solidarity wherever it leads.
Usually, it leads into new and bigger battles. 
Faye Guenther does not need to pledge the next four years of her life to a fight to reform her heartbreakingly ossified international union. It is a fight that will be wearying and expensive. It will make her unpopular in important places. Its odds of success are uncertain. But for all the time she has invested in planning how the fight should be carried out, she has never seemed to question whether it must be done.
“Being an island does not build power,” Guenther says. “You’re always on the defense. We need to go on the offense. We need to go.”
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hamilton Nolan]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Sunday’s Rally in New York Is Just About Israeli Hostages—that’s Not OK]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/hostages-new-york-israel-gaza-palestine-israeli-hammarskjöld-starvation</link>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/hostages-new-york-israel-gaza-palestine-israeli-hammarskjöld-starvation</guid>
<description><![CDATA["I cannot call for the release of the hostages without an explicit demand for an immediate cease-fire and an end to the Israeli assault on Gaza."]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/PopwSgE3DT7NuoLkfgwtbztNGBicP3yXeJRrEGclGz8/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMDM0NTc0Njg4LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/PopwSgE3DT7NuoLkfgwtbztNGBicP3yXeJRrEGclGz8/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMDM0NTc0Njg4LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Palestinian children in Gaza holding banners on February 27, 2024 to protest the lack of food and water as the Israeli assault on Gaza continues and starvation and dehydration is widespread. / Photo by Abed Zagout/Anadolu via Getty Images</figcaption></figure> A large swath of New York’s Jewish community is planning to <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-03/ty-article/.premium/rescued-hostage-to-address-major-n-y-rally-to-mark-six-month-anniversary-of-october-7/0000018e-a38c-dadc-a7af-fbafd4370000">gather</a> in Midtown Manhattan on Sunday to urge that the Israelis held hostage for six months in Gaza finally be brought home.
But as much as I want those hostages released, I will not be standing with those in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza. 
The hostages need to be brought home, to be reunited with loved ones, to get the care they need. But I cannot call for the release of the hostages without an explicit demand for an immediate cease-fire and an end to the Israeli assault on Gaza.
And I cannot call for the hostages to be brought home without underscoring that in retaliating for Hamas’ atrocities, the Israeli military has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, injured more than 75,000 others, displaced more than 80% of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, <a href="https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/palestinians-in-gaza-begin-ramadan-with-hundreds-of-thousands-on-the-brink-of-famine#:~:text=The%20war%20has%20driven%20around,and%20dehydration%20in%20northern%20Gaza." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">and starved hundreds of thousands</a>, including so many babies and children.
The “<a href="https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/03/un-experts-condemn-flour-massacre-urge-israel-end-campaign-starvation-gaza" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Flour Massacre</a>” in late February and <a href="https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-04-02/ty-article/.premium/idf-bombed-wck-aid-convoy-3-times-targeting-armed-hamas-member-who-wasnt-there/0000018e-9e75-d764-adff-9eff29360000" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">the killing earlier this week</a> of aid workers with World Central Kitchen have only added to the ongoing horrors of death and starvation.
The members of my Brooklyn congregation have found many ways to respond. Some protest in the streets. Others call elected officials, pleading for a change in policy; some joined the Uncommitted national movement and <a href="https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2024/04/leave-it-blank-campaign-gets-12-vote-ny-democratic-presidential-primary/395464/">took action at the ballot box</a> in New York's Democratic primary by leaving their vote for president blank. Some have given to Israeli peace organizations, others have sent donations to aid organizations trying to help starving Palestinians. And yes, some may be going to the April 7 rally.
For me, confronting starvation and the humanitarian disaster is paramount. I spent much of my career helping feed people, first as founder of the soup kitchen at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (the Reform Jewish seminary in New York) then as East Coast Director of MAZON: A Jewish Response to Hunger (which raises funds and then gives grants to service and advocacy organizations focused on hunger), and later as a volunteer with Interfaith Voices Against Hunger.
Every fiber of my being cries out against deliberate starvation as an act of war.
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/q6iaKg9wMTAj2w3bDaGhJmOSJReq-W6GPabW45ZeBak/w:1000/h:600/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE3Nzk2ODYxNTMuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Palestinians reaching out for flour in Gaza on November 13, 2023.</figcaption> </figure>
I got notice early last week of Sunday’s gathering to call for the release of the hostages. But the notice was only about that. 
There are many rabbis I admire whose shuls (synagogues) and organizations are signed onto the event. But what they have signed onto is woefully insufficient, and makes no mention of what would actually bring hostages home—a full and permanent cease-fire. And these shuls and organizations have placed their logos alongside organizations that offer every justification for Israel’s most violent actions. 
I can only stand with Jews who also see the pain of Palestinians, the mourning for so many dead, the horror of starvation, the killing of those offering or reaching for food.
And when I stand with Palestinians and other supporters of Gaza, I can only do so with those who also see the pain of Israelis while the hostages are still held captive, while the mourning for their dead continues, while released hostages go through the long slow process of healing. 
It is why I am so glad to be part of <a href="https://rabbis4ceasefire.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Rabbis4Ceasefire</a>, why I am a proud board member of <a href="https://www.jfrej.org/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ)</a>. Both groups have managed to walk this fine line in an excruciatingly painful time, refusing to condemn people for the actions of their leaders, refusing to see human beings as less than human.
 This diminishing of humanity may be the greatest danger of engaging in violent enmity beyond the loss of life itself. 
Humans are likened to insects, to vermin, to animals of all kinds, for only then can those who kill convince themselves that the killing is deserved or necessary. I refuse to allow myself to see any human being as less than human, so I insist that we must recognize the grief of all those in mourning.
Like many others, I now find myself standing outside “the Jewish community,” fearing that there are few Jews I can be shoulder-to-shoulder with in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza if they can call only for the release of hostages without a word for the many, many, many Palestinians killed by bombs and dying of starvation.
How can anyone imagine that hostages can be released without a full cease-fire in place? How dare they even suggest a brief cease-fire only to release the hostages, followed by resumption of bombing? A full cease-fire must begin as soon as it possibly can, so that not only will those hostages who are still alive come home, and the bombings end, but also so some wise and imaginative minds can begin to think about what follows.
Because the event will take place in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, I looked for some wisdom in Hammarskjöld’s own words (he was the former, second Secretary-General of the United Nations). In 1953, he <a href="https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1961/hammarskjold/biographical/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote</a>: 
On my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country—or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions. ... On my mother’s side, I inherited a belief that ... all men were equals as children of God. 
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<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/SZt-HzyEzG4JMtvdvQ7WYaoMi-fvfrgXI_LAlNpoXK4/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL0dldHR5SW1hZ2VzLTE5NjYwNDkyODUuanBn.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Palestinians waiting in long lines for bread in Gaza on January 30, 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
Service to humanity requires sacrifice and courage. All people are equal as children of God and should be treated so. Wisdom indeed. Yet where in Israel-Palestine, in Gaza, can we see this courage, this equality? Where in our New York Jewish community can we find the courage to speak truly about the needed return of the hostages and also the need for an immediate full cease-fire and freedom and equality for Palestinians and Jews? 
I have been a student of Israeli scholar and scientist, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, often shunned for his truth-telling about the dangers of the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. In 1994, Joel Greenberg <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1994/08/19/obituaries/yeshayahu-leibowitz-91-iconoclastic-israeli-thinker.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">wrote in his obituary of Leibowitz in the New York Times</a> that shortly after the 1967 war, “Leibowitz began warning that the occupation of the territories would turn Israel into an agent of repression” and that “Israel had to liberate itself from this curse of dominating another people.”
It is deeply saddening to see the ways Leibovwtz’s prediction has proven true. If Leibowitz, a Zionist and Orthodox Jew, could see so clearly what Israel had and might yet become, can New York’s Jewish community not be as clear-eyed?
I ask my colleagues who will gather on Sunday to hear the voice of Hammarskjöld as they come together, and to listen to Leibowitz, who was so often seen as outside the community. I ask them, too, to listen to the voices that urge them to see the violence and destruction taking place in our names, and to expand their call:
Yes, bring the hostages home. And yes, a full and immediate cease-fire. And yes, stop starvation as a tool of war; safe entry of aid organizations to Gaza and safe access to food and aid for Palestinians.
As we say in prayer, kein yehi ratzon—may it be God’s will. May it also be ours.
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ellen Lippmann]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The Baltimore Bridge Collapse is a Story About Deregulation]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/baltimore-working-people-east-palestine</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 05 Apr 2024 08:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/baltimore-working-people-east-palestine</guid>
<description><![CDATA[From Baltimore to East Palestine, deregulation is killing working people.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/TV9BmO7VeWjK0EzFhcnkW_wk68TkQBMq2shRvbqgRzk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTI1Njg1MDIzLmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/TV9BmO7VeWjK0EzFhcnkW_wk68TkQBMq2shRvbqgRzk/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTI1Njg1MDIzLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Wreckage from the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge rests on the Dali cargo ship as efforts begin to clear the debris and reopen the Port of Baltimore on March 30, 2024. / Scott Olson/Getty Images</figcaption></figure>
<iframe style="border-radius:12px" src="https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/6PTgZqVCq3ooq9qwaG9pNa?utm_source=generator" width="100%" height="152" frameBorder="0" allowfullscreen="" allow="autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" loading="lazy"></iframe>
24 hours after Max returned to Baltimore from East Palestine, Ohio, the shipping vessel Dali slammed into the Francis Scott Key Bridge, collapsing it into the Patapsco River. The catastrophic collision and collapse of the bridge claimed the lives of six immigrant, non-union construction workers who were working the night shift at the time, filling potholes on the bridge. In this interview on The Valley Labor Report, Alabama’s only weekly union talk show, hosts Jacob Morrison and Adam Keller speak with Max about The Real News Network’s coverage of the bridge collapse, the connections between Baltimore and East Palestine, and about the conspiracists and “anti-woke” grifters who are trying to capitalize on this tragedy for their own gain.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. 
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 coworkers, leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and become a paid monthly subscriber on Patreon for just five bucks a month to unlock all the great bonus episodes that we publish exclusively for our patrons. And please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to therealnews.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.
My name is Maximilian Alvarez and I just wanted to pop in really quick to let folks know that yes, I am alive. I appreciate the messages. I know folks were a little worried with me announcing in the last episode that I was finally going to East Palestine to be there in person, and then there was no episode from us the following week. But if you've been following my updates on social media last week, or if you happen to catch my face or voice on outlets like Democracy Now, Breaking Points, The Nation, and The New Republic, then you know that I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off covering this catastrophic shipping vessel crash that brought down the Francis Scott Key Bridge here in Baltimore.
And that literally happened 24 freaking hours after I got home to Baltimore from East Palestine. And I'm still trying to work with filmmaker Mike Balanick to get our documentary reports from East Palestine ready to go too. And Jules and I will be putting out a compilation episode later this week that will include some of the voices from that incredible gathering that we had in East Palestine about a week and a half ago now. It was just such an incredible experience, you guys, and I have so much more to say about it, but I'll save that for the next episode. For now, I'm just going to link to some of the interviews and pieces that I put out over the past week in the show notes of this episode. And instead of a new episode this week, we are going to share with y'all today, an interview that I did with our brothers, Adam and Jacob, at the Valley Labor Report this weekend.
And just a huge shout out to the Valley Labor Report. If you guys aren't listening to them yet, what are you doing? That's Alabama's only weekly union talk show right there. And we need them doing the good work that they're doing, so please go support them if you aren't already. But yeah, this was the first interview that I got to do after this insane two-week stretch from East Palestine to the Baltimore Bridge. And I got to just reflect a bit on the story, the dimensions of tragedy, and the layers of societal failure that are wrapped up in this bridge collapse, the connections between Baltimore and East Palestine. And I also have a special message for all of these jack off and right-wing grifters who are trying to make this tragic story fit their dumb DEI or anti-DEI narrative.
And in doing so, they are showing just how bankrupt their message is and how little they have to offer the working class when it comes to addressing the sources of the pain here, let alone addressing the larger issues that we need to deal with to stop stuff like the East Palestine train derailment and the Baltimore Bridge from happening in the first place. These guys are modern-day snake oil salesmen. And I have no time, these families of these workers who died on that bridge have no time, our city has no time, and working people have no time for their bullshit. Anyway, we've got lots more important coverage on Baltimore, East Palestine, Ohio, Palestine, the elections, and the fight against the corporate destruction of everything. We've got all of that coming your way here on Working People and across The Real News Network. So stay tuned. And for now, here's me speaking with Jacob Morrison and Adam Keller on the Valley Labor Report.
Jacob Morrison: Maximillian Alvarez is the editor in chief of The Real News Network, host of the Working People podcast, friend of the show, voice of the show. Thanks for taking the time to talk to us today.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thanks for having me, brothers. It's great to see you, as always.
Jacob Morrison: Great to see you. It's unfortunate that it is under these circumstances because the circumstances are not great. There has been just a genuinely catastrophic accident in Baltimore that has, by all accounts, taken at least six lives and six lives of immigrants. And I'm not sure if there are expectations that the death toll is going to be rising at this point. But on top of that, the obvious and the thing that should be at the center, and we want to put that at the center, there are, of course, huge other ramifications because this bridge was really kind of the connecting artery to the Baltimore port. That's one of the largest in the United States. The Longshoremen's Association there said that they are concerned that their 2,400 members are going to be out of a job soon. These cargo carriers are anchored outside of the port, unable to dock because they can't get their stuff, this is just a huge, huge situation with really serious ramifications for the entire city of Baltimore.
So just let's start there, and then we can dive into some of the specific aspects and maybe some of the reactions to it. Generally, from a 30,000 foot view, how is this feeling to people in Baltimore as a resident of Baltimore yourself?
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I'll walk through the timeline of this week. And just to kind of let folks know, it's been a very long week, and I just got more than five hours of sleep for the first night in a week and a half. So it's kind of all hitting me now. I was just, along with our team at The Real News, racing all over the city, doing everything we could to meet the moment and lift up the voices of the people who were going to be quickly forgotten in all of this. And the workers who perished, their families, their community, our community, as you said, the workers on the port, the workers on that ship who are probably going to be stuck there for weeks.
If we're talking about invisible workers, like these immigrant construction workers who were filling potholes on the key bridge when the ship, the dolly hit the load-bearing pylon and collapsed the bridge, the workers on that ship are also incredibly exploited, and we don't know a whole lot about them, but what we do know is that as Maritime Trades Union folks here in the States have told me, you have a lot of these ships that are effectively, and I quote, "Floating sweatshops" that workers from the global South are living on and working in and have no escape from months on end. So there's a whole lot of horror tied up in this story that we're going to need to unpack for the weeks and months to come.
But as you said, Jacob, the very fact of the bridge collapsing in the Port of Baltimore is going to have huge ramifications for working people in the Baltimore area, but beyond it too. It's going to have ramifications for our economy after workers have been battered for years by COVID, by inflation, and so on and so forth. So this is going to be a very devastating event for the city and for our people for a long time to come. I got back to Baltimore myself at 1:30 on Monday morning after driving six hours back from East Palestine, Ohio where I had been for the previous five days, running around, filming for The Real News, participating in an event that we helped put together along with just this incredible coalition of folks that have come together and came together, talking to East Palestine residents whose lives have been turned upside down by the catastrophic Norfolk Southern Train derailment on February 3rd of last year.
That too was a preventable catastrophe. And the workers there, the people there, these are current and former union members, like Chris Albright, one of the residents that I've been working most closely with and have gotten close to, and his family. He's an incredible guy, with a beautiful family. He was a gas pipeline worker, he was a foreman, he was a LiUNA member, is a LiUNA member. And then a month after the derailment, we can almost completely surmise, but because of all the legal deniability, doctors are even afraid to say for sure, but a month after this derailment, a healthy able-bodied pipeline worker was experiencing congestive heart failure that developed into severe heart failure, and he can no longer work. His medical bills are piling up. As of this year, he's lost his health insurance.
So these folks are in an incredibly dire situation, and we were there, along with residents, railroad workers, residents from other sacrifice zones like Piketon, Ohio, where they've been getting poisoned by a nuclear plant for 40 years, residents living near other rail lines saying, "We don't want this to happen to us, and we're coming here to stand in solidarity with you.” Striking journalists from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, environmental groups, people from West Virginia, California, Baltimore coming in to assemble there to answer the call in East Palestine and say, "We're not Trump voters. We're not anything but fellow workers, fellow human beings who are fighting for our families and our communities, and we are here to help you. And we want to stand with you, but we all need to stand together if we're going to stop this crap because it's happening all over the country." It doesn't matter if you're in a Democrat or Republican state, corporate America is poisoning, exploiting, and taking advantage of all of us right now.
And we are the forgotten victims of this 40 plus year reign of corporate oligarchy and neoliberal crap that has contributed to the decades long process of the Wall Street takeover of vital industries like the railroads, the profit obsession, leading to an obsession for juicing short-term profits, while stripping away long-term maintenance and safety provisions, stripping away staff, cutting costs, cutting corners every year. And the railroads are more profitable than they've ever been, and yet communities like East Palestine and workers like those on the railroads are the ones paying the price. I promise I'm getting to Baltimore, but the point is, that's what I was doing this weekend. And I drove back on Sunday night, got home late Monday morning thinking about all of this, thinking about those conversations, thinking about our brothers and sisters in East Palestine.
And then the first thing I did on Tuesday morning was I went on Flash Ferenc's show, America's Workforce. Shout out to Flash and the great folks there. I know you guys got a phenomenal regular spot there too. Chris Albright and I went back on Flash's show Tuesday morning at seven in the morning to talk about the East Palestine Conference. And as soon as that was done, I started learning about the bridge. And the first text that I started getting about the bridge were from East Palestine residents who felt really connected to Baltimore right now. And there's something really powerful in that, but we can return to that later. But they were seeing a lot of eerie resonances with what they had been through. I couldn't help but see them too. And I want to be clear, as I said in the piece I wrote for The Nation this week, Baltimore is not East Palestine. These situations are not exactly the same, but they do, I think, reveal common issues that working people around this country are feeling, and the sources of those issues we also have in common.
I'll get to that in a second. But as we know, around 1:30 on Tuesday morning, this ship, the freight ship that was leaving the Port of Baltimore, had left some 30, 40 minutes prior to experiencing a catastrophic propulsion failure. They issued a mayday call when they experienced that failure, letting the emergency dispatch know that there was a chance that the ship could hit the bridge. And then they had about 90 seconds to respond. And so police, you can listen to the police scanner, the folks responding to that call racing to the Key Bridge, blocking traffic. So more people didn't drive onto that bridge before it collapsed, and credit to them, they saved lives. But the workers, the construction workers who were filling potholes on that bridge in the middle of the night, were working for a contractor in the city named Brawner Builders. It's a non-union contractor. They did not get a warning. I mean, by all accounts, we have not found any evidence that they got any warning. And that's kind of where my reporting in this came in is after the America's Workforce interview, I went to The Real News Network.
I was talking to our colleagues, our team about what we knew and what we could do—two of my amazing colleagues, Kayla Rivara and Jocelyn Dombroski, our chief of editorial operations and our managing editor. We got in the car, I grabbed my podcast stuff and I said, "Let's go and try to get as close as we can." And so we ended up at this Royal Farms gas station. It's a really famous kind of Maryland chain. Justin Tucker, the kicker for the Baltimore Ravens, does the commercials for them. So I was standing there with my colleagues and seeing media run around at this Royal Farms that is right next to one of the entrances to the bridge. And we were racing there because we had seen on social media that a man named Jesus Campos was there. Jesus also works for Brawner Builders, is also an immigrant worker, a construction worker who was saying that he knew the men on that bridge.
So we were racing primarily to meet him, and we did. And I got to interview Jesus for between three and four minutes. But it was really troubling to me because the whole time we were racing there and I was trying to find out everything I could about the situation, I was looking at the posts and articles from other journalists who had spoken to Jesus. And when we got there, I asked him a question that I felt I hadn't heard anyone else ask up until that point. I'm not saying no one did, but I hadn't heard it, which was, “Did the workers get a warning before the bridge collapsed?” And he told me pretty point-blankly, “No.” That to me is an egregious injustice, and there's so many questions that are wrapped up in that.
So far, what I've heard from other construction folks in the city is that Brawner doesn't have the worst reputation. So I don't want to speak out of turn and blame the company for everything before I can do more investigating, but the facts are that it's a non-union contractor that the state of Maryland, like states around the country, uses these contractors, and those contractors subcontract workers out. And that very well could have been the situation on Tuesday where some of these workers were subcontracted, being paid under the table, possibly even undocumented. Again, these are the questions that we're trying to find out. But right now, first and foremost, we're trying to give the family space because they are grieving an incredible and impossible loss. Some of these men just welcomed new children into their family in the past year and now those families have a hole in it that'll never be filled.
So anyway, I'll wrap this up. The point being is that I interviewed Jesus Campos. I posted about the fact that according to one of the co-workers of these men who died on the bridge, they did not receive a warning. If they were city workers, if they were union workers, would they have had a direct line to emergency dispatch? If not, why the hell do we have a regulatory regime that allows workers to be marooned on a ship like that in a clearly potentially hazardous environment doing that vital work? And let's not forget, construction's already one of the deadliest jobs in America, and they had no direct line to emergency dispatch in case something like this happened. That in itself is an egregious injustice. And the only other thing I'll say, just tying it back to East Palestine is, again, these situations are not the same, but a lot of the common questions are coming up with Norfolk Southern and the train derailment.
When that derailment happened, immediately you had all of these well-to-do pundits in the United States saying things like, “Well, we can't rush to conclusions. All we know is that it appears to be a bearing failure that caused the derailment. So that's all we can say on it right now,” just like the same folks today are saying, “Well, all we know is that it was a propulsion failure, so we can't rush to conclusions.” And I'm not rushing to conclusions. We need to do the investigative work. That's what journalism is supposed to do. But, again, the point that I'm making here and the point that seems so obvious to not just me but folks in East Palestine and folks who've been paying attention to things like East Palestine, to things like Boeing, right, to things like BP, right, to the railroads, right?
I mean, what we are seeing is a fracturing of the basic social contract in this country, which was supposed to be between the citizens, labor, business and government to say like, “Look, all of this dangerous crap and machinery that is operating in our backyards, in our communities, these railroads that are running through our backyards in our towns.” These massive shipping vessels that are passing by our homes and over the water that we use in this city, the social contract is that we need to have layers of protection and maintenance in place that are not driven by profit but that are there and exist solely to ensure that things like this don't happen.
So the very fact of the bridge collapse, the very fact of the Norfolk Southern train derailment, the very fact of the two Boeing planes that went out of the sky and killed hundreds of people with them, the very fact of the BP oil spill, and I could go on and on and on, that is the problem. If we had a healthily functioning regulatory system, if we actually had a society that did not allow corporations to do whatever the hell that they want, those things would not happen in the first place. That is the problem.
Jacob Morrison: Right, right. I mean, some of the echoes, The Lever has been doing great reporting, and they were really great on the East Palestine stuff as well. They found that the company that chartered this cargo ship also was sanctioned by the Labor Department for retaliating against an employee who reported unsafe working conditions. In its order, the department found that Maersk had a policy that required employees to first report their concerns to Maersk prior to reporting it to the Coast Guard or other authorities. And it seemed like, I can't find it right now, but was that same ship involved in another accident?
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah. So I believe it was in 2016 in Antwerp. The ship didn't have a catastrophic accident, but it did... You can see pictures of it online where it ran into a concrete siding in the Port of Antwerp. And then the other detail that is worth looking at was, I believe it was last year, the ship was sited in a port in Chile for having propulsion issues, right? But what the company and what people of a certain disposition will point out is that the ship did also receive a passing grade here in the US. I believe the last one was in September, right? So again, there's a lot to unpack here because, again, one side is going to try to kind of do what they always do, what they did in East Palestine and everywhere else is they're going to try to say that this is a contained freak accident that couldn't have been avoided, or if it did, here are the unique circumstances that led to this contained and unique catastrophic incident.
But we know better, right, because if you actually spend your time interviewing the working people who live and work around these sites, right, whether they be railroad lines or whether they be ports or whether they be just folks living in the city, and know what goes on there and are affected by it, there's a larger question here about how we ended up in a situation where something that should have been caught, a ship that never should have been able to leave port, especially carrying as many hazardous materials as it was, some of which are reportedly, according to Business Insider, sitting in the water right now in the Patapsco River… That's what folks in East Palestine were also saying, is like, “How many of those containers fell into the water?” Again, they are going through something similar where they're being told by Norfolk Southern, by their own government and government agencies like the EPA, “Everything's fine. You guys are fine. Go back on to your regular lives and stop bothering us.”
Meanwhile, myself and Mike Balonick, this great working class director and videographer who I was shooting in East Palestine with, we were standing in the creeks behind people's houses in East Palestine with Christina Siceloff, a single mom who lives in the sticks in Pennsylvania who is also getting all these health ailments. She's been out there like a creek ranger with a few other folks documenting the fact that those waters still are not safe. Those chemicals that we saw on top of the water a year ago, they're still there. And so obviously, East Palestine folks are telling us, “You need to find out what was in those containers and you need to get them out of the water as soon as possible”. So that's another issue.
But again, the whole point is that this did not happen overnight. The chickens are coming home to roost after 40 plus years of corporate dominance, deregulation, disinvestment, the devaluation of labor and life itself. That stuff starts to add up. And all of it plays a role to the point where we don't care enough about the workers on that bridge to even ask, “Do they have a direct line to emergency dispatch?” We don't care enough about the workers in that port to ask, “Are you guys getting enough time to do your job properly?” We don't care enough about the workers on those ships to ask, “Are you guys getting enough time and are you getting paid enough? Are you getting what you need to ensure that you are navigating these vessels as safely as you need to be when they are passing in our own backyard?”
I mean, to say nothing of what's on the ships, the amount of regulation, the kind of security checks, there are so many resonances here with what I'm seeing in other industries. I'm not jumping to conclusions and saying I know exactly the source of this failure, but again, you can't do the work that we do and talk to people around this country who are experiencing similar things and not see the connections here. So that's kind of where we are right now. I mean, again, everyone's sort of racing to talk about what this is going to mean for the economy. There's just a rash of conspiracy theories floating around there. People are already kind of racing past the six men who died on that bridge. Eight fell into the water that we know of, two were recovered that morning, one of whom went to the hospital.
The other reportedly refused emergency services. And I immediately... Because if you know undocumented people in construction worke, your conclusion when you hear that is like, “Oh, they were uninsured or undocumented or both.” But I was watching white anchors and newscasters here in the city say, “Oh, I guess that person must've just been fine and walked away.” And that's the kind of situation we're in, where these workers who were already basically invisible to our society have only become momentarily visible in death.
And this is happening at a time when Donald Trump, one of the two leading presidential candidates in this country leading one of the two major parties, he's out there saying that immigrants are poisoning the blood of this country and people are believing it. I went on Democracy Now! and made a passionate plea to people to please see us as human beings, for God's sake. Because while you're out there saying that we're criminals and rapists and we're coming to destroy the country and we're sucking all the government money out, this is what we're actually doing. We're working at night filling your potholes so that you can have a good drive to work and we can put food on the table for our families.
I just had an incredible podcast conversation yesterday in a Mexican restaurant in town, El Taquito Mexicano in Fells Point, where I met with an incredible group of heads of different Latino and immigrant justice community orgs in the city. I mean, these are folks who the media and the city barely ever talks to or acknowledges at all. So they themselves are also operating in the shadows and they are doing their best to fight for a community that is basically invisible, not just here in Baltimore, but around the country. And they are also working people who have families, who have multiple jobs. Some have children with special needs.
And yet I was sitting at this table of superheroes talking in English and Spanish about how they have been mobilizing to support the families, what this says about the way that our community is treated, and what we were all feeling as people who are being vilified in this country, even though we're just trying to make a life for our families, and even though even in death we can't achieve the dignity that every human being deserves. That's kind of where it is right now. 
Jacob Morrison: Yeah. That is really indicting on those reporters that assumed and said on the air that, “Oh, that means they're okay.” I mean, that's wild to me that they would believe that and say that it's...
Maximillian Alvarez: Well, it's an even bigger indictment on our country, right? Because again, we want to learn more details about the family. But what I was told was he had no health insurance.
So in this fucking country, just sit with that... Sorry for swearing. In this country, imagine being a worker, a construction worker, filling potholes at night, a bridge collapses beneath your feet, you fall into the cold waters of the Patapsco River, your coworkers are dying around you. You don't know if you're going to make it out alive. And reportedly one, if not both of these workers could not swim. We know that one of them could not. You're rescued from the water. And you refuse the offer to go to the hospital because you live in America and you don't have health insurance. After going through what I have to imagine is one of the most traumatic experiences of your life, you are worried about the cost of that healthcare that you desperately need. That is an indictment of our country.
Jacob Morrison: Right. Absolutely.
Maximillian Alvarez: And East Palestinians right now don't have healthcare. That is an indictment of our country. That's why we're trying to get Biden to invoke the Stafford Act and guarantee these folks government funded healthcare, because their ailments and bills are piling up. What a horrendous state for our country to be in, and when are we going to band together as a class across political lines, union, non-union, whatever? When are we going to start banding together and say, “This is not good enough. We will be forgotten no more. We deserve healthcare. We deserve to be able to drink our water and for our children to breathe the air without getting nosebleeds or cancer.” I mean, this is how bad things have gotten.
So hopefully that kicks us in the ass enough to stop pitting ourselves against each other and seeing one another as the enemy, whether they're the Trump voters in East Palestine or immigrant workers like the folks on this bridge. If we can get past that crap, we can actually make change happen. We can be the change that we're waiting for. But I don't know what we're waiting for right now because look around you. Things are really dire, and people are suffering.
Jacob Morrison: Right. And it's absurd to not kind of look at the state of things for an answer as to why this happened in Baltimore, just like we did as things initially started breaking in East Palestine. Just because the boat passed an inspection, doesn't mean that everything was great. I mean, we've seen the state, through multiple examples, the state of our regulatory system and how it's kind of falling apart at the seams, and it is not catching the things that it's set up to catch. And so-
Maximillian Alvarez: That was the defense of Norfolk Southern, who were like, “We were within all regulations.” And then you have a decision to make there. You could either say, “Oh, okay. Well, then I guess it was fine.” Or you say, “How bad are our regulations if that was okay?” 
And not only that, but I mean, again, the hotbox detectors that picked up the ambient rise and heat of the bearing miles away from East Palestine. Those hotbox detectors are not regulated by the government, they're regulated by the companies. The company decides what the threshold is: “if it gets above this heat, then we'll relay it to the dispatch office and they'll relay it to the crew on the train.” That's another example of what deregulation looks like, where those layers of security are stripped away and the company's profit motive is driving the decisions that are made, and this is what happens.
So you're absolutely right, Jacob. One of the many problems with East Palestine and with this is not that this ship or that train we're up to code, it's that the code is not up to the right standard. I mean, because those codes have been watered down and government negligent, government officials have let companies do it for years on end. Democrats and Republicans have participated in this.
Jacob Morrison: And it's like the FAA paying Boeing employees to do the FAA's job in certain instances. I mean, it's all just a mess.
But that's a good segue to East Palestine and your conference or convention that y'all had last week to ask Joe Biden, to call on Joe Biden to invoke an act that would give people in East Palestine healthcare.
Tell us the act and the authority that Joe Biden has there and the event that y'all had last week and how it went and what are some of the next steps?
Maximillian Alvarez: Yeah, I appreciate that. And by way of bridging the two, I want to let folks know, again, I talked to these incredible organizers and pillars of the Latino community here in Baltimore last night. They were the ones who started the original GoFundMe, that was the Latino Racial Justice Circle. Which again, these are all volunteers, but they started that GoFundMe for the families of the six brothers that we lost this week.
But I think one silver lining, one ray of hope, is that they were quickly overwhelmed by the response. So even though part of the country is demonizing us, the response from people wanting to help, wanting to show solidarity, from East Palestine to around the country, the fact that the Latino Racial Justice Circle had to close the GoFundMe because they were getting so many donations that they were worried... They wanted to be fully transparent. They wanted to make sure that the families got every ounce of that money. So they made the decision to essentially work with the city to offload that fundraiser, and now that fundraiser is being run through the city.
So if folks want to donate to that fund for the families of the Key Bridge 6, it is there on the Baltimore City website. I've also posted it online. I can share it with you guys after this interview. But if you want to help, that is one way that you can.
Same goes for East Palestine. This coalition that's formed called Justice for East Palestine Residents and Workers, this has come out of a year's worth of folks like me. But not just me, there's the East Palestine Unity Council. There are residents across East Palestine who are not part of the Unity Council. There are railroad workers. There were union reps, mainly local and regional, including local presidents who came there and were not permitted to speak on behalf of their unions, but who were saying, "I'm here anyway because this is what's right."
And therein lies another issue. Labor needs to get off its ass and start helping East Palestine. These are your brothers and sisters. Again, Jami Wallace from the Unity Council, she's a former SEIU member. Chris Albright is a LIUNA member. Daren Gamble, who I've also interviewed, is a retired bricklayer. I mean, these are our brothers and sisters, and they are dying. Their families have been poisoned by this crap.
And again, they were exposed to chemicals in that unnecessary and catastrophic derailment and the decision to vent and burn five cars worth the vinyl chloride, which the manufacturer of that vinyl chloride said was not necessary, but what we all suspect is that Norfolk Southern pressured local officials to make the decision to vent and burn those contents. Not because the contents were going to explode and there was going to be shrapnel going for miles around, but because they wanted to clear the way and get those rail lines open again, because they're a massive moneymaker. I saw those trains going through every 20 minutes when I was standing in East Palestine.
So I mean, again, I say that that exposure to those chemicals, even if those chemicals have dissipated since then, a lot of it is still in the soil, a lot of it is still in the water. I could taste the metallic taste in my mouth when I was standing near Chris Albright's house. It got worse when I stood next to the derailment site. You get a sort of mouth numbness. People are still in their homes racking up bizarre ailments, really unique ailments. It has all the hallmarks of an industrial poisoning accident, like Three Mile Island or anything like that. And we're going to see the effects in the bodies of these people over the coming years.
And yet, again, the country's just moved on. Biden finally got there in February of this year and basically said, “You're welcome for delivering for you, bye.” Norfolk Southern is out there telling people, “You're not going to get another dime from us.” They're cutting people off from this aid. What they're doing there is so despicable, and I need people out there watching this to care about it. Because what I told people in East Palestine is, and what our coalition really represents is that it's—and again, I know this because I talk to workers around the country, as you guys do—I said, “It's not that working people have forgotten about you, it's that so many people feel just as forgotten as you do.”
I mean, I just interviewed Brett Cross, another fellow worker, another gas worker in Texas, who was also a father. And his son, Uzi, was one of the children murdered in the school shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde. His community feels just as forgotten as East Palestine does.
I interviewed one of the workers, Leo Linder, who was on the Deepwater Horizon when it blew over 10 years ago in the Gulf. That community feels forgotten. It feels like the devastation from that feels as forgotten by the country as anything else.
We need to band together as a coalition of the forgotten. The forgotten workers on strike, like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers or the Warrior Met Coal strikers, who we both tried to cover throughout their two-plus year strike.
I mean, like the Latino organizers told me yesterday, a lot of immigrant workers in this community are still and are going to keep being impacted by Covid. I mean, people are dealing with long Covid because they were working in conditions where they didn't have the kind of protections. And if they were undocumented, they did not have access to the stimulus checks and the unemployment benefits. So they had to go to work. They got sick. A lot died. A lot are still getting sick. They feel just as forgotten as East Palestine does, and as we're worried Baltimore will be. And Baltimore has been forgotten for so many years. I mean, this city's been losing population for decades. We've been disinvested from. The police have been brutalizing us. And again, we're all kind of feeling this stuff.
And yet the people who are ripping us off, the people in the 1% whose wealth has grown by astronomical amounts in the past 10 years alone from Donald Trump's tax cuts to the ways that we essentially handed the economy over to billionaires throughout the course of Covid, the bosses are winning, the oligarchs are winning. And they are busy pitting us against each other and telling folks like the working people in East Palestine that people like me and the men on that bridge are their enemy, instead of the people like me and the men on that bridge are their enemy instead of the people like Alan Shaw who are raking in profits from all of the cost-cutting and corner cutting that they're doing on the railroads, right? That's where the work that we do, that's where the work that all of us does has to come in. We have to fight back. We have to find each other on the basic human levels, not as socialist, Republican, union, non-union, Democrat, Republican, whatever, right? We need to find each other on that level of just basic humanity, right? Human beings, fellow workers, fellow neighbors, people who want to provide for our families, breathe clean air, drink clean water, be left alone so we can enjoy our one time around on this earth with our family, not have to work every day, every hour of our day just to put food on the table, right? I mean, things have gotten so bad that those are the most basic common foundations upon which we need to unite, but if we do, I promise you all, we can actually win and we can make real change happen.
Jacob Morrison: Right. And just to wrap it up—I was going to say that this may be a lighter note to end on because it's just so, so stupid, but also it's kind of a dark note because you alluded to some of the propaganda that's been going around around the situation, and that's the attempt to shoehorn the kind of anti-DEI stuff into this Baltimore Bridge collapse just like they have been around the stuff with Boeing. And every time now that you see a story about corporate malfeasance and the destruction of the regulatory state that results in totally preventable disasters and accidents and deaths and injuries, there's some crazy conservative commentator coming out and saying, well, that's what happens when you hire Black people. And it's astounding that they're able to just come out and say that. I mean the mayor of Baltimore, and I don't know how you feel about the mayor of Baltimore.
I have no idea anything about him because I know how you feel about politicians generally, I'm sure probably you're not a fan, I don't know, but he came out and did a press conference and there were people on Twitter talking about, “This is Baltimore's DEI mayor.” They're just saying the N word. That's just what DEI means now. And then Charlie Kirk has been doing this thing about, “Oh, well, I'm not saying it was DEI, but I'm just saying it's important that we get rid of DEI as I'm talking about this.” Dave Rubin did the same thing by saying that we need to “hire the best people to build our stuff,” and that once you allow wokeness in, bad things happen. And it's just astounding their willingness to shoehorn this stuff in where it clearly reveals their bigotry. And so I'm just interested in how you've been taking in the reactions like that as you've seen this unfold.
Maximillian Alvarez: You saved this one for the last question. I'm about to yell for another hour. I mean, I just want to say before I go on this rant to anyone out there listening, because I know we got a lot of union brothers and sisters listening to this great show, please support the Valley Labor Report. We need shows like this because you guys are not unconnected from what we're talking about here. It's because the contracting and subcontracting relationship and the way that profit-seeking businesses and sleazy contractors exploit that is the exact same reason we find brown children working in Hyundai parts distributors over there in Alabama or cleaning bone saws in meatpacking plants in the Midwest, or working in slave conditions and farms and picking the tomatoes for our Wendy's cheeseburgers in places like Florida, right? This connects all of us, and if you are in a union, you need to do what Laborers’ Local 79, a construction union in New York is doing. Not seeing their fellow workers, immigrant workers returning citizens from prison, undocumented people, the people that non-union contractors target and exploit the most.
They are not "taking your jobs." Again, they're like the men on these bridges. They're like people working around you so often, they're trying to make a life for themselves. They're living in the shadows and they're being exploited and abused because they do not have the full legal right to representation. They do not have a union contract. They need your help. They are not your enemy. That is what Laborers’ Local 79 has realized, and that's why they are working to organize those folks. They are reaching out to them. They helped start a COVID relief fund for undocumented people who couldn't get benefits from the state. Because if you organize them, you take the bosses' leverage out of their hand where they always have a cheaper form of labor. You guys were just rattling the bars here at The Real News Network talking about how corporations and government agencies are exploiting slave prison labor to undercut costs.
They're doing that to all of us. If you're a working person, these companies, these corporations, and even our own government, are the ones who are creating this multi-tiered system where you have prison slave labor at the bottom, undocumented under the table labor… I mean, they've created so many layers of labor that create resentment within our own ranks that make us see each other as the enemy. That's how they're winning, guys. Please don't take the bait. Please see this in the larger picture. And also if you are listening to this and you want to get involved in the coalition that is growing out of East Palestine and you want to join the campaign to pressure President Biden to invoke the Stafford Act, issue a federal disaster declaration for East Palestine, because that's the kind of thing that presidents do when there are hurricanes—Governor Westmore just declared an emergency here because of the bridge collapse, right? You unlock a lot of resources, federal and state, that people in East Palestine desperately need right now. And in fact, governor Mike DeWine has finally, last year, sent a request to President Biden to issue a disaster declaration and Biden won't do it. It's only going to happen if a rank-and-file movement of people, union, non-union, environmental groups, and everyone else, pressure him and join this call to say, “Invoke the Stafford Act, declare East Palestine a disaster. Get these people healthcare.”
I suspect one of the main reasons Biden won't do that is because if he does, then there are going to be a whole lot of communities around the country that are like, “Hey, we're in the same boat.” I mentioned Piketon, Ohio, where the nuclear plant is, they should get... I mean, they have a different situation, but there are communities like that that still need help.
People are still dying of cancers and weird ailments. That's what we're fighting for in East Palestine. Now, to quickly jump to the morons and cowards who are out here spinning their BS conspiracy theories amidst this tragedy here in Baltimore, I mean, I went on Breaking Points yesterday to make this point. I'd said it on Democracy Now. We're not going to reach those morons like Charlie Kirk. They are disinformation and division merchants. That is the whole point of what they do, right? I'm not hoping to reach them. I'm hoping to reach the fellow workers who are being poisoned by that crap and the people who are again, being led by their most cowardly impulses to fabricate these ridiculous explanations when the reality is much more horrifying and it's staring you right in the face. We can confront that together. We don't need to shy away from it.
We don't need to come up with these ridiculous boogeymen to try to explain what should be patently obvious, which is again, the regulatory capture, the corporate capture of our entire system, the speed-ups, the relentless thirst for profit, the stripping away of safety and maintenance, the devaluation of labor and life. All of this is creating the conditions where things like the Baltimore Bridge collapsing and the East Palestine derailment are going to be happening a lot more. That is the problem. But what I would just say as someone who grew up conservative, as someone who used to think people like Charlie Kirk think, I used to buy into that. If I had not gone the way that I have to end up being the lefty nut job I am today, I would probably be out there saying the same things right now. I have right wing Latinos yelling at me for “pushing a narrative” this week, and I'm like, “Bro, I used to think like you. Your mentality is nothing new to me. I hope you see the light someday.”
But a lot of people are too far gone into that thing. But what I would just say as someone who has made that journey from conservative, deep red conservative to deep red lefty over the course of my life is that when I see that, what I see is that they are playing you. Republicans, the Right, have been the ones since I was born, pushing for all this deregulation, all this disinvestment, all of this, “Oh, we’ve got to let corporations serve their shareholders and not the public because then the invisible hand of the market will bring us prosperity. We’ve got to keep cutting the taxes of the rich and the wealthy. We’ve got to keep stripping away these regulations. We’ve got to keep disciplining labor and breaking unions.” And now that same right is trying to turn around 40 years later and say, “Oh, diversity's the problem. DEI is the problem. Immigrants are the problem.”
Fuck you. I grew up listening to your lies. I grew up believing the crap that you were pushing, and now all of you on the right, especially people like Charlie Kirk and even people I work with, I mean, I'm not even going to call out more names. Again, I went on Breaking Points yesterday. I mentioned Saagar by name. I want to have a conversation. I'm not saying Saagar is Charlie Kirk, but there's a whole right-wing discourse machine here that is contributing to this crap, and it is not going to help working people. And I believe, and I think it's patently obvious having grown up in this world and this ideology, that the Right is just trying to cover its ass. The Right is trying to distract us from the fact that they have helped create, and in fact, they have been the driving force creating the conditions that are leading to our communities being in this dire state over 40 years.
They don't want you to know that. They want you to think that they're the populace on our side and that the problem is DEI. That's not the problem. DEI for corporations like this, it's just another money making scheme. That's why corporations lean into DEI so hard because it's a way to pretend like they're doing something to satiate calls for diversity. It's a low lift, low budget investment that can make companies seem more woke, more conscientious, but it really doesn't require them at all to change their business or their labor practices in the least, right? They can keep doing what they're doing while pretending that they're more conscientious employers. That's why so many companies just lean into the DEI stuff because they take very little risk in doing so. What you're actually mad at is not the diversity. You're mad, again, at the corporate oligarchs who are playing you and playing us and trying to cover their own ass for what they have done to our country for 40 plus, 100 plus, 200 plus years.
Eventually we’ve got to wise up to this, otherwise, they're going to destroy everything we hold dear. They are in the midst of destroying the very planet that we live on, and we don't have time to waste fighting about DEI right now. Get serious, get involved, or get out of our way.
Jacob Morrison: Hell yeah. You were talking about this has been going on for 10, 20, 30, 100, 200 years. You might even say something like, the history of all Hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Maximillian Alvarez: You might. You could say that.
Jacob Morrison: You might say that. Max Alvarez, really appreciate it. Always great. People should subscribe and read The Real News Network. Listen to the Working People podcast, watch The Art of Class War on Breaking Points. Max, thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.
Maximillian Alvarez: Thank you, brothers. Always a pleasure. Love and solidarity from Baltimore.
This story originally appeared in <a href="https://therealnews.com/missing-presumed-dead-workers-from-key-bridge-werent-informed-of-mayday-call">The Real News Network</a>. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Maximillian Alvarez]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[Books Are the Missing Piece of a Unionized American Culture Industry]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/barnes-and-noble-union-labor-rwdsu</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 12:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/barnes-and-noble-union-labor-rwdsu</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Organizing book stores like Barnes & Noble could lift up the entire creative underclass.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/uLd9_0wBp88r5W-6yx9j0esuFied5-Q4llbQ-I4j-OE/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMjUzNTc4NzU3LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/uLd9_0wBp88r5W-6yx9j0esuFied5-Q4llbQ-I4j-OE/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xMjUzNTc4NzU3LmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>A union store. / (Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> One interesting side effect of writing a <a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/hamilton-nolan/the-hammer/9780306830921/">book</a> about unions (as I recently did) is that it makes you more aware that the book industry is, for the most part, not unionized. On one hand: yeah, just like every other industry! On the other hand, there are some glaring reasons to think that the book business—the whole, sprawling chain, from writing to publishing to selling—is overdue for its own big wave of unionization. Book workers, unite! You have nothing to lose but the branded tote bags they give you instead of raises.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, any type of worker, in any type of workplace, in any area can be convinced to organize. The hard part is just helping people understand exactly what they are losing by not having a union, and what they can do about it. This process of education and empowerment that precedes union drives can be more or less difficult depending on how easily employees can be misled, intimidated, or bought off by management. For these reasons, the sweetest of sweet spots for union organizing is often “overeducated, underpaid workers.” Hmm… where do these sorts of workers work?
You know the answers. These workers, who my former colleagues and I at Gawker used to refer to as the “creative underclass,” can be found in great numbers in academia, in higher education, in journalism and media, and in the high prestige, low pay precincts of the cultural world at museums and other institutions. In other words: in many of the industries that have, in recent years, been feverishly unionizing. By and large, these workers went to school and got educated as they were told to do—often at fancy schools, which left them in great debt—and then emerged to find that, contrary to all that stuff they had heard about Hard Work and The American Dream, their education did not translate into a decent living.
This basic dynamic, from higher ed to media to the cultural world, has been like Miracle-Gro for union organizing—the one thing that these workers understand can rearrange the power imbalance that is screwing them over. 
The book world, though, has been something of an outlier. Writers themselves may very well have passed through unions when they were on campus or working in media, but the permanent workers of the book industry mostly have not. Of the “Big Five” publishers, only HarperCollins is unionized. (My own publisher, Hachette, is not.) Last year, workers at HarperCollins <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/23594358/harpercollins-union-contract-strike">went on strike</a> for more than two months in a fight over the modest demand of a $50,000 per year salary minimum, which gives you a good idea of the industry’s traditionally low wages.
Through all of the past century’s labor uprisings, publishing has largely managed to sustain its ability to leverage its own cultural cachet—a glamorous literary dream job, in dazzling New York City!—to pay peanuts to workers who want to be a part of it. To launch a union drive in a competitive, highly consolidated industry like that always runs the risk of being cast out of the place that you have dreamed to work your whole life. The unionized workers at HarperCollins have therefore been stuck with the heroic but unfair task of carrying the whole industry’s labor standards on their shoulders.
Major publishers are a glaring target for unions. They sit roughly adjacent to the media industry, where unions have been feasting for nearly a decade now, and to the entertainment industry, where unions are more energized than ever after a 2023 characterized by two national strikes. (On top of that, Simon & Schuster, one of the Big Five, was <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/08/08/publisher-simon-schuster-bought-kkr-16-billion-judge-blocked-sale-penguin-random-house-antitrust/">bought</a> by a private equity firm last year, which is always and everywhere a flashing red warning sign for employees to unionize before the financial vultures attack.)
Besides the natural benefit to workers, unionization of publishers is an important part of the long term project of organizing the entire supply chain of American culture. Movies, media, music, books—the things that are, besides bombs, America’s most potent global export—should all be union industries. Otherwise, as Hollywood proves, they will be fully digested by the power of capital. Helping publishing workers catch up with their unionized counterparts in this swath of the economy makes a great deal of sense for everyone.
The one part of the book industry that has joined the union wave in earnest is book stores. Some of the biggest independent book stores in the country, like The Strand and Powell’s, have long been unionized—and now, as The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/apr/01/barnes-noble-workers-union-drive?CMP=twt_b-gdnnews">reported</a> this week, workers at Barnes & Noble are accelerating plans to join them. In the past year, six of the company’s 600 locations have unionized, over the bleating objections of the CEO. Four of those stores, including three in New York City, have joined the Retail Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU)—a union inclined to lean into new organizing drives, as evidenced by the great resources it expended trying to win a union at the Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.
The union effort at Barnes & Noble is proceeding on a store by store basis, according to RWDSU communications director Chelsea Connor. The three New York City stores have been in bargaining for seven months, but the company has so far refused to allow them to negotiate a single master contract for all of the stores in the city. Connor says the union is in the midst of a “national organizing effort” at Barnes & Noble, though she wouldn’t disclose specific plans.
In any union drive at a national chain, it is easy to imagine that if the union can get enough stores organized, it can use a combination of strikes and negative PR to force the company to bargain a national contract, elevating the work lives of all of the employees at once. Indeed, this is the thing that the Starbucks union appears to have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/starbucks-union-seeks-national-template-us-bargaining-2024-03-01/">accomplished,</a> weathering a storm of union busting to wear the company down and force it to the table. Besides the ample efforts of the workers and organizers themselves, the victory at Starbucks was aided by a friendly Biden administration NLRB, which deluged Starbucks with charges for violating labor laws, and by friendly politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders, who dragged Starbucks founder Howard Schultz in front of Congress to berate him for being a hypocritical scumbag.
A company like Barnes & Noble, whose customers are probably more sensitive than average to the idea that they are supporting an exploitative monster, is vulnerable to a Starbucks-esque approach. The more stores that the RWDSU can organize, the more plausible such a strategy becomes.
Gaze at the book industry with optimistic eyes and you will be able to see the outlines of a union-fueled alternative to the shoddy and deflating commodification of culture that American businesses specialize in. We can unionize the schools that teach people to write, so they can think without debt suffocating them. We can unionize the media outlets where the writers hone their craft, so that they don’t have to give up their writing dreams before it starts. We can unionize the publishing houses so the people who do the actual work of producing the books can share in the prosperity of the successful authors (and the always successful corporate managers). We can unionize the book stores, so that no one who plays a part in the delivery of books to readers has to be condemned to a life of genteel poverty. And then we can sell the books to a unionized Hollywood, where unionized screenwriters can turn them into movies staffed by unionized actors and directors and crews. Sounds nice, right? We’re already on the path. It’s just a matter of helping our friends in the book industry fill in the gaps.
Or, we can just let AI read every book ever written and produce infinite versions of Twilight that can be turned directly into CGI movies overseen by a single paid employee whose job is to send the profits directly to the limited partners of the private equity firm. The choice is ours!
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Hamilton Nolan]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[It’s on All of Us to Dismantle Colorism]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/big-idea-colorism-skin-color-ethnicity-race-discrimination</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/big-idea-colorism-skin-color-ethnicity-race-discrimination</guid>
<description><![CDATA[People of color with darker skin tones make less money, face more health risks, and are more likely to be arrested than their lighter skinned counterparts. We have a collective responsibility to confront it.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/LPz-yHCR8NcnpElyhbe8sR5ZPBhiwZFsRzqoBUDIA-Y/w:820/h:891/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ3MDh3LkJpZ19JZGVhLmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/LPz-yHCR8NcnpElyhbe8sR5ZPBhiwZFsRzqoBUDIA-Y/w:820/h:891/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzLzQ3MDh3LkJpZ19JZGVhLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption> BY TERRY LABAN</figcaption></figure> col·or·ism
noun
<ol><li>Prejudicial discrimination that favors lighter shades of skin.</li></ol>
So it’s a fancy word for racism?
Colorism and racism are related, but different, ideas. Racism (or “racialism” or “race theory”) groups people into a handful of broad “biological” categories— Black, white, Asian, etc.—based entirely in pseudoscience. It’s one of the drivers behind Western colonialism, slavery, segregation, eugenics and a host of more horrors.
Colorism, more generally, is the social preference for lighter skin, often experienced among people from a similar ethnic group. Black people with lighter skin are often given more preferable treatment than Black people with darker skin, for example. In many parts of India and the Middle East, darker skin is considered less physically attractive. The phrase “blue bloods” originates with European royals whose skin was light enough to see their veins, unlike field workers.
How big of a problem is this?
Because of this social bias, Americans with darker skin tones statistically make less money, face more health risks and are more likely to be arrested, separate and apart from racial bias. <a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2329496514558628" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">One study</a>, for example, found that lighter-skinned Black and Latinx job applicants were considered more intelligent by prospective employers than their darker skinned counterparts.
The effects of colorism are also often internalized, and colorism can be especially hard on people’s self esteem. The beauty industry pushes skin-lightening products while failing to offer as many options for darker shades of foundation and concealer, for example, while the most-featured women of color in music, film, business and politics typically have lighter skin.
What can we do?
“Because of colorism, we are divided into groups,” <a href="https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2015/03/05/the-fight-against-colorism-in-the-black-community/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">says Michigan State professor Ronald Hall</a>. “We need to come together in order for a change to be made.” The first step toward that change—in our workplaces, schools and communities—is just to recognize that the social bias exists in the first place. Anti-discrimination lawsuits could target institutionalized colorism as well. At the same time, consumers can pressure fashion, media and makeup companies to celebrate more shades of skin. And teachers, parents and community leaders who work with youth can look for ways to combat negative self-esteem while affirming diversity.
This is part of “The Big Idea,” a monthly series offering brief introductions to progressive theories, policies, tools and strategies that can help us envision a world beyond capitalism. For recent In These Times coverage on these ideas, see "<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/big-idea-nationalization-public-good-twitter-amazon-spacex-tyson" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nationalization Is a Great American Tradition</a>" and "<a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/guerrilla-gardening-local-food-ecology-seedbombs" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The Guerrilla Gardeners Seedbombing the Suburbs</a>."
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dayton Martindale]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The UAW Is Standing Up with Mexican Autoworkers]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-mexico-solidarity-project-autoworkers-union-borders</link>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Apr 2024 10:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-mexico-solidarity-project-autoworkers-union-borders</guid>
<description><![CDATA[With its Mexico solidarity project, the UAW will fight alongside the country's growing militant independent labor movement, ensuring justice for autoworkers extends beyond borders.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/UoR8qc6zRKkRPLxJPaTw8CBEPMcH6cmgqt2WqXsXCFo/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL21leGljb19hdXRvLmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/UoR8qc6zRKkRPLxJPaTw8CBEPMcH6cmgqt2WqXsXCFo/w:820/h:545/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL21leGljb19hdXRvLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>An autoworker in Puebla, Mexico / Photo by PEDRO PARDO/AFP via Getty Images</figcaption></figure> This story was originally published by <a href="https://www.labornotes.org/2024/03/our-class-has-no-borders-why-uaw-standing-mexican-auto-workers">Labor Notes</a>.
The United Auto Workers <a href="https://uaw.org/uaw-establishes-solidarity-project-to-support-mexican-autoworkers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">announced</a> February 23 that it will provide material support to Mexican autoworkers organizing in the independent union movement. As a member of the UAW executive board, I’m proud that our union understands how the futures of autoworkers in the United States and Mexico are tied together.
Our Mexico solidarity project is about empowering our membership to win strong contracts and protecting our jobs in the United States—and it’s also about ensuring justice for workers across the border. 
The auto industry is not nationally bound, and neither should the labor movement be. For every record contract, there will come the threat of moving production to Mexico, where a partnership between the companies and the corrupt company unions keep wages low—a whipsaw that oppresses workers on both sides of the border.
The irony of free trade is that even with expanded production, Mexico still imports most of the vehicles sold to its own people. Meanwhile, around 75% of Mexican-made vehicles are shipped to the United States, and they do not cost any less because they’re produced with cheaper labor.
<h3>LOW-WAGE ZONES</h3>
The North American Free Trade Agreement completely changed the makeup of the continent’s auto industry, integrating cross-border supply chains in the United States, Canada and Mexico. That integration has facilitated growth and profitability for the bosses in the three countries while hurting auto workers regardless of nationality.
NAFTA cost the U.S. working class millions of good-paying manufacturing jobs. Before it was signed in 1994, the U.S. auto industry was by far the biggest on the continent. Afterward, the Mexican auto workforce of 112,000 workers grew eightfold, reaching nearly 900,000 by 2019, an increase that was especially concentrated in the parts sector. By 2016, the United States employed only about 51% of North American auto workers, and Mexico employed 42%.
Corporate profits from free trade do not trickle down. The real wages of auto workers in all three countries have stagnated—one of the reasons driving the militancy of the stand-up strike at the Big Three and the new organizing at nonunion plants.
When the U.S. media decries the decline of manufacturing here, they assume that the growth of Mexican industry meant that Mexican workers reaped some of the benefits. No such thing happened. In fact, Mexican autoworkers’ wages declined after the passage of NAFTA—from an average of $6.65 an hour for final assembly jobs in 1994 to $3.14 in 2016.
Mexico didn’t “take our jobs.” The Big Three automakers set up in Mexico to exploit cheap labor. Now Mexican autoworkers make one-tenth of U.S. workers' wages.
That allowed the bosses to discipline U.S. autoworkers, driving a concessionary bargain with UAW leaders who had no stomach for a fight. The company would threaten to offshore jobs to Mexico, and the union would buckle, assuming it had no leverage to resist.
<h3>COMPANY UNIONS</h3>
The auto companies also leaned on the support of corrupt charro unions, what Mexican unionists call company unions. They’re a legacy of Mexico’s former one-party rule, where official unions were incorporated into the state. Their contracts are known as “protection contracts” because they protect companies and anti-democratic union officials from rank-and-file challenges.
This arrangement allowed state-dependent unions to maintain political control over workers while also suppressing wages and militant worker organizing. The unions would welcome the arrival of more industry and investment in Mexico, and those at the top would get their share, disregarding the interests of their membership. This is company unionism in its most perverse form.
In Mexico, the Big Three could count on not just lower wages but also the power to enforce degrading working conditions. We can tell the same story about the U.S. South, where German, Korean and Japanese auto companies have decided to use homegrown right-to-work laws and low union density to suppress wages and keep the UAW out—until now. 
As the UAW continues to organize nonunion plants in the United States and looks to bargain even better contracts at the Big Three, we will continue to face the threat of offshoring work. And as long as the charro unions have control, Mexican auto workers will have limited power to bargain their own strong agreements.
The question is how auto workers on both sides of the border can regain our leverage in the industry. On the one hand, we’re organizing the nonunion plants in the U.S. South. But on the other hand, we have to get over our tendency to fret over VIN numbers (which show where a particular vehicle was assembled) and instead double down on our commitment to international solidarity. Simply “buying American” is not enough.
Rather than thinking of Mexican workers as our adversaries, we need to see each other as partners in the struggle for worker power. No worker benefits from the international race to the bottom that the companies like to call “global competition.” Just like we did during the Stand-Up Strike, it’s time to whipsaw the companies against each other—but this time across North America.
<figure>
<img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/E8YAQ3xydx189Oylja493tnvyTOWxsycGhc4-QBdA8A/w:1000/h:666/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTIuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pdHQtaW1hZ2VzL2F1ZGlfbWV4aWNvLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" />
<figcaption>Autoworkers for the German carmaker Audi protest over wages in San José Chiapa, Puebla state, Mexico, on January 24, 2024.</figcaption> </figure>
<h3>WHIPSAW THE COMPANIES</h3>
The UAW will join the fight alongside Mexico’s growing militant independent labor movement. For instance, we’re supporting the National Union of Auto Workers (SINTTIA), which is taking on General Motors in the central Mexican city of Silao and organizing parts suppliers at Fränkische and Draxton from the bottom up, not through backroom deals.
The most recent trade pact, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, created an enforcement tool with some teeth, known as the Rapid Response Mechanism, that has contributed to real victories for workers. The UAW has petitioned the U.S. government to request that Mexico investigate violations of the right to unionize at an auto parts plant owned by Stellantis.
Mexican autoworkers are also taking advantage of the 2019 labor law reform in their country to continue organizing through new unions, including the Mexican Workers’ League (La Liga) and the National Independent Union of Industry and Service Workers (SNITIS), which was formed in a huge strike where workers won a 20 percent raise and a 32,000 peso bonus.
Past UAW administrations expressed verbal support for Mexico’s independent labor movement, but their follow-through was limited. Our recent decision under UAW president Shawn Fain’s leadership is not just talk.
We will engage with the growing movement of Mexican independent unions committed to new organizing and democracy. We will not dictate to them; we will learn from each other in our common fight for survival.
The UAW will assign organizers to work alongside Mexican independent unions and coordinate our campaigns together. We will offer technical and bargaining support and research, where resource constraints inhibit the Mexican unions from developing their own campaign infrastructure.
This is not a question of one union being better or smarter than another. It’s about committing to share our resources with those who need it most, which in turn will improve our own bargaining position. When our Mexican union family goes on strike, we’ll provide assistance to help them hold out against the companies’ pressure to settle for less than they deserve.
<h3>A UNITED WORKING CLASS</h3>
Leaders and staff of the UAW can make these commitments, but we also need to facilitate connections among rank-and-file members. The working classes of the United States and Mexico have been pitted against each other for too long.
Right now the ruling class is using people’s anxieties over border security to stoke division. When we turn a blind eye to it, we enable the Donald Trumps of the world to continue deceiving workers. Capital can move freely across borders, but workers are criminalized.
The best resistance to Donald Trump is to unite our working-class struggles. 
For me, this international commitment is personal. My family left Guatemala during the 1980s and moved through Mexico to cross the border. My family was able to achieve a level of stability —largely through union jobs—in this country that so many Latino workers are not able to enjoy because they work under terrible conditions with little to no representation or recourse.
In the last few decades, I’ve seen how free trade agreements decimated families across North and Central America. So having the opportunity to make this motion and commit my union to solidarity across the supply chain has been one of my proudest moments on the union’s executive board so far.
The UAW, and the labor movement as a whole, faces an existential question: Are we going to consent to our decline, or do what it takes to end the international race to the bottom?
For our part, our answer is now definitive: The only way we’re going to be able to organize for power on both sides of the border is by embracing the Mexican working class as our ally, not our enemy. The UAW will stand up for all auto workers. And we’re proud to deepen our partnership with our union family in Mexico.
This story was originally published by <a href="https://www.labornotes.org/2024/03/our-class-has-no-borders-why-uaw-standing-mexican-auto-workers">Labor Notes</a>, a media and organizing project that has been the voice of union activists who want to put the movement back in the labor movement since 1979.
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Brandon Mancilla]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[“The People Won”: Kansas City Voters Reject Billionaire Stadium Tax]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/kansas-city-stadium-tax-royals-chiefs-democracy</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2024 14:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/kansas-city-stadium-tax-royals-chiefs-democracy</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In a blow against billionaire sports franchise owners, Kansas City voters rejected a 40-year stadium tax. It's a victory for community interests over corporate greed.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/gds5HtrZFXyWqPol8rqCUovRtxcskmtX52gziDdPEis/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTI2MTQyNzIzLmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/gds5HtrZFXyWqPol8rqCUovRtxcskmtX52gziDdPEis/w:820/h:546/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0yMTI2MTQyNzIzLmpwZw.jpg" alt="" /><figcaption>Mell Gray and Hartzell Gray of the KC Tenants Union canvas a neighborhood in Kansas City, Mo. to push for a no vote for a tax increase to support a new Kansas City Royals stadium on Saturday March 30, 2024. / (Photo by Christopher Smith for The Washington Post via Getty Images)</figcaption></figure> In a historic victory and demonstration of collective power, the citizens of Kansas City have rejected a proposal that threatened to exploit the everyday people of Kansas City in favor of billionaires and corporate greed.
The vote count revealed a resounding victory for the opposition to a proposed stadium tax, with 30,791 votes cast against the measure and 22,399 in favor within Kansas City itself. The broader Jackson County mirrored this sentiment, with 38,862 votes for ‘No’ against 28,282 for ‘Yes’, based on reports from 81% of precincts. In total, more than 58% of voters in Jackson County rejected the plan, which would have added a sales tax to fund stadium renovation and construction.
“The largest transfer of public funds to private enterprises in our region’s history, $2 billion over 40 years. The people took on the billionaires,” @KCTenants wrote in a victory tweet. “The people won. Nothing is inevitable if we organize.”
The aftermath of Kansas City’s resolute “no” to the billionaire-backed stadium tax proposal has prompted reactions from figures like Royals owner John Sherman and Mayor Quinton Lucas, who stand on the less celebrated side of this democratic victory.
John Sherman’s response—“We respect the voters of Jackson County and the Democratic process. We will take some time to reflect on and process the outcome and find a path forward”—reads as a forced nod to democracy after a failed attempt to exploit public funds for private gain.
Mayor Quinton Lucas’s reaction, also after losing the vote he endorsed, similarly straddles the line of political diplomacy and veiled disappointment, stating, “Over the months ahead, I look forward to working with the Chiefs and Royals to build a stronger, more open, and collaborative process that will ensure the teams, their events, and investments remain in Kansas City for generations to come.”
This statement, while forward-looking, can’t mask the underlying issue: the attempt to stronghold and threaten everyday people to provide our hard-earned dollars for a billionaire sports project. In the spirit of looking forward, however, this moment marks a significant victory for grassroots activism and is a promising sign of the emerging organizing power being birthed in the city. 
At the heart of this victory is everyday people of Kansas City and the tireless efforts of organizations like KC Tenants, Decarcerate KC, Operation Liberation, Standup KC, MORE2 and many more. Kansas City’s citizens have drawn a line in the sand, signaling a readiness to challenge and resist efforts that prioritize profit over community well-being.
The vote, and the reactions it has elicited, highlight not just a moment of failed policy but a broader dialogue about power, capitalism and how development impacts the everyday people of our city.<a href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fkansascitydefender.com%2Fpolitics%2Fkansas-city-rejects-billionaire-stadium-tax%2F" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> </a>
This story was first published at the <a href="https://kansascitydefender.com/politics/kansas-city-rejects-billionaire-stadium-tax/">Kansas City Defender</a>. 
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ryan S.]]></dc:creator>
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<title><![CDATA[The Right Has a New Playbook to Crush Unions and Enshrine Corporate Power]]></title>
<link>https://inthesetimes.com/article/alec-american-legislative-exchange-council-labor-unions-politics</link>
<pubDate>Wed, 03 Apr 2024 13:00:00 -0500</pubDate>
<guid>https://inthesetimes.com/article/alec-american-legislative-exchange-council-labor-unions-politics</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The American Legislative Exchange Council is pushing a spate of anti-worker bills in states across the country—the latest in the group's onslaught on collective bargaining rights.]]></description>
<media:thumbnail url="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/ZrTlLLWEa5Y7rajrUEaZ6KTS-DvnMbUpuY7I4ULcZKs/w:820/h:586/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xOTg4MTA1MzY1LmpwZw.jpg" /> <item.content:encoded><![CDATA[<figure><img src="https://imgproxy.gridwork.co/ZrTlLLWEa5Y7rajrUEaZ6KTS-DvnMbUpuY7I4ULcZKs/w:820/h:586/rt:fill/g:fp:0.5:0.5/q:82/el:1/aHR0cHM6Ly9zMy51cy1lYXN0LTEuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9pbi10aGVzZS10aW1lcy9HZXR0eUltYWdlcy0xOTg4MTA1MzY1LmpwZw.jpg" alt="Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference on February 05, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida." /><figcaption>Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks during a news conference on February 05, 2024 in Miami Beach, Florida. / Joe Raedle/Getty Images</figcaption></figure> State lawmakers seeking to dismantle unions and implement anti-worker laws have just been handed a new state-by-state roadmap by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the corporate-funded bill mill popular with Republican legislators.
Although <a href="https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/ALEC_Exposed" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">ALEC</a> claims that its proffered labor reforms are designed to protect “worker freedom and flexibility,” its <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23994955-alec-exposed-undermining-workers-rights" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">attacks on workers</a> over the past 50 years have made it harder for them to organize, harder for local governments to support decent-paying jobs, and easier on big business.
Those attacks, <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/05/05/bradley-foundation-bankrolls-attacks-unions/">bankrolled</a> by Koch Industries and right-wing donors such as the <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Bradley_Foundation" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation</a>, are motivated as much by the desire to protect corporate bottom lines as by the determination to eviscerate a key supporter of the Democratic Party: labor unions.
ALEC has paid particular attention to public sector unions by peddling model bills that prohibit paycheck deductions for dues, mandate high membership thresholds, and introduce automatic decertification, among other anti-labor measures. 
The <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/04/20/alecs-post-janus-wishlist-revealed-policy-document/">first edition</a> of ALEC’s labor policy handbook, which was published in 2019, came on the heels of the Supreme Court’s momentous 2018 Janus ruling, which radically upended the lives of American workers by maintaining that public sector employees do not have to pay union dues as a condition of employment. 
The <a href="https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24436346-alec-labor-reform-policy-2nd-edition-2024" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">second edition</a>, published this year, adds three model bills to expand the scope of ALEC’s key anti-labor policies. In addition to its evergreen model “right-to-work” and union-busting bills, the updated edition includes bills that target independent contractors and occupational licensing. Two of these address interstate occupation licenses, with one setting up a process for reviewing all current and proposed occupational licenses.
One of ALEC’s most recent anti-worker policies, which was <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2023/07/26/alec-ditches-free-market-and-limited-government-principles-at-its-50th-annual-meeting/">introduced</a> at last summer’s annual meeting, <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2023/07/24/alec-considers-blacklisting-companies-that-voluntarily-recognize-unions/">blacklists</a> any company that voluntarily recognizes a union to keep it from qualifying for state economic development incentives. However, this policy is not included in the newly released handbook.
Since 2019, ALEC’s anti-labor priorities — including its state-level right-to-work and anti-union bills — have had a significant impact on workers and workplaces. With the imprimatur of Governor Ron DeSantis (R), the Florida <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2023/03/24/florida-bills-deliver-on-desantis-and-alec-anti-union-wish-lists/">legislature passed</a> some of the most regressive labor legislation in recent history last year. The Florida bill — which is highlighted as “noteworthy legislation” in the new handbook — empowered the state to decertify public sector unions, prohibit automatic deductions for union dues, mandate universal language on union membership cards, and impose considerable annual reporting requirements, all key items on ALEC’s anti-worker wishlist. A <a href="https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1234412389/investigation-shows-the-scope-of-a-sweeping-anti-union-labor-law-passed-in-2023" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">recent investigation</a> found that since the law passed, more than 42,000 public sector workers in Florida have lost their union representation.
A Louisiana bill outright <a href="https://legis.la.gov/Legis/BillInfo.aspx?i=246330" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">banning collective bargaining</a> for that state’s public sector workers is currently making its way through the state legislature. It comes amidst a flurry of <a href="https://lailluminator.com/2024/03/14/public-unions/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">other anti-union bills</a> which feature some of the most regressive features of ALEC’s model bills: banning the automatic deduction of dues, requiring the regular recertification of existing bargaining units, and all but outlawing political lobbying.
Permanent precarity 
The new model bills included in the second edition focus on promulgating precarious employment through independent contracting laws and occupational licensing reforms.
These have been introduced in at least seven states this legislative session: Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Oklahoma. 
ALEC claims that its model bill addressing self-employment in the gig economy — known as the <a href="https://www.alecexposed.org/wiki/Uniform_Worker_Classification_Act" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Uniform Worker Classification Act</a> — “ensures that the 80% of workers who prefer their independent contractor status are able to keep it, rather than being forced into traditional employment models.”
Big business groups have long sought to maintain the status quo of workplace insecurity faced by the vast majority of gig workers. 
“It is in the best interests of this State, workers, and businesses for there to be certainty regarding the legal status of workers and their applicable rights and obligations,” the model bill states.
ALEC’s advocacy arm, ALEC Action, <a href="https://www.alecaction.org/tag/pro-act/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">worked to oppose</a> the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act of 2021. “Increasing barriers to independent contractor status would deprive millions the flexibility and entrepreneurial opportunity available through innovations such as the ‘gig’ economy,” an <a href="https://www.alecaction.org/advocacy/state-legislators-tell-congress-to-protect-worker-freedom-and-oppose-the-pro-act/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">open letter</a> organized by ALEC Action stated.
California’s Assembly Bill 5 (AB5), signed into law in 2019 by Governor Gavin Newsom (D), has required many employers to reclassify independent contractors as employees. Backed by Julie Su, then the state’s labor secretary, it drew widespread criticism from big business and conservative think tanks. A joint friend-of-the-court <a href="https://americansforprosperity.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/20220422144502498_21-1172-Amicus-Brief-American-Society-of-Journalists-and-Authors-v.-Bonta.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">brief</a> submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court by Charles Koch’s right-wing advocacy group <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Prosperity" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Americans for Prosperity</a> (AFP) along with the <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=National_Federation_of_Independent_Business" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">National Federation of Independent Business</a> (NFIB), New Jobs America, and the <a href="https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Independent_Institute" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Independent Institute</a> challenged AB5, but the court declined to hear their case.
Four years later, when President Biden nominated Su to join his cabinet as labor secretary, her earlier role in promoting gig worker protections in California <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/battle-over-biden-labor-nominee-julie-su-heats-up-2023-04-10/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">doomed her candidacy</a>. 
Despite the Right’s concerted and coordinated effort to fund anti-worker groups such as ALEC, the tides may be turning, with a national <a href="https://www.epi.org/publication/unionization-2022/?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20230227&utm_term=8035455&utm_campaign=money&utm_id=208962&orgid=92&utm_att1=#:~:text=Further%2C%20workers%20are%20increasingly%20winning,71.4%25%20(Glass%202022)." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">resurgence of interest</a> in unionizing and <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/28/unions-with-power-popularity-rising-are-still-losing-a-big-battle.html#:~:text=Even%20before%20the%20big%20wins,to%202022%20data%20from%20Gallup." target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">big wins</a> last year for auto workers at GM and Ford, along with writers in Hollywood. In 2023, Michigan <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2023/03/27/alec-loses-last-ditch-efforts-to-blunt-repeal-of-michigans-right-to-work-law/">overturned</a> its right-to-work law, which allowed free-riders in all private sector workplaces. And even outside of true-blue states, which regularly implement stronger labor laws, purple states like <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/article/workers-want-unions-how-states-have-strengthened-worker-power-in-2023/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Nevada</a> are making it easier for workers to have a voice at their workplaces.
This story was produced via the <a href="https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2024/03/19/alec-pushes-anti-union-playbook/">Center for Media and Democracy</a>.
]]></item.content:encoded>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Juliana Broad]]></dc:creator>
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