Olney Odyssey #20
By Peter Olney
Photo Ed Warshauer March 1983.
In Olney Odyssey number 19, I met the beautiful Christina L. Pérez in San Francisco on Labor Day Weekend in 1982. I returned home to Boston and potential normalcy.
Olney Odyssey #20 traces the story of how Christina came to temporarily relocate to Boston in the winter of 1982-83 and how I decided to permanently relocate to Santa Monica, California in the spring of 1983. Writing about exciting developments in the labor movement and the urgency of fighting MAGA fascism has meant a delay in this memoir. Fortunately my dear friend and accomplished writer, Byron Laursen has rescued me from my inertia and helped me to proceed with this tale. Byron has written before for the Stansbury Forum, and he has ably captured my voice and sentiments in OO#20.
This installment was rigorously fact checked by Christina L. Perez
.
Christina Hits Beantown
I met Christina on Friday, September 3rd, 1982, in a magical moment, which I described in Olney Odyssey number 19, but I had to return to Boston on Sunday, the fifth, and get back to work.
On the flight back I thought, “That was wonderful, but I’ve got to settle down and get to business here.”
Nonetheless, I told my roommate, Ed Warshauer, about this incredible woman I had met and what an amazing connection had happened.
But when I also told him that I thought the work I had in front of me took precedence over exploring a romance, he flipped. “What?” he said, “Are you kidding? Do you think something like that comes along so often that you can just let it go? You’ve got to think about pursuing this!”
He was right! Fortunately, while I thought things over, Christina lit a fire under me on Wednesday the 8th. when she called from out in California to ask, “Do you want to go to a Mexican wedding?”
“What?”
“My cousin is getting married on September 18th. Why don’t you come? I bet you’ve never been to a REAL Mexican wedding?”
I hesitated and hemmed and hawed and finally said, “I’ll think about it, I’ll think about it.” As I hemmed and hawed Christina sensed my hesitation and blurted out “ I’ll pay half your ticket!” Charmed and embarrassed, I repeated, “I’ll think about it.” Before hanging up, she said, “you won’t be disappointed.”
As soon as I got off the phone, Ed said “Are you nuts? Get your ass out there. This lady’s obviously very special!”
After a few back and forth calls I decided to catch a flight back to the Golden State, in time to be her date for her cousin’s wedding. It took place at Quiet Cannon, a beautiful venue east of Los Angeles in Monterey Park. It was a huge, extremely festive Mexican wedding – the whole extended family, hundreds of people, and mariachi musicians in their sombreros and regalia, and trumpets, guitars and guitarrones. To this day I don’t know the names of all the relatives who were there – cousins, aunts and uncles and so on – and how all their relationships intertwine.
Her parents were very pleasant to me, but I could also tell they were feeling skeptical and bemused. “Who is this Yanqui?” I imagined them thinking. “What’s he doing here? We’ve seen a lot of boyfriends. This is probably just another one.”
The whole weekend was a tremendously special time spent together, a quantum leap from the first visit, which itself had been fantastic. We went from Friday to Sunday evening, staying at her studio apartment in Santa Monica, 11th and Washington, in the Voss Conti Apartments, a Streamline Moderne building from 1937, with all the apartments overlooking a central courtyard. It’s now on the National Register of Historic Places.
By the time she saw me off at LAX I had invited her to Boston for a long weekend during Oktoberfest where she could enjoy one of her passions at the time, long-distance running, and run the Bonnie Bell 10K race. And, I could introduce her to MY family! Not to be outdone, I stepped up to the plate and offered to pay half her ticket and she didn’t hesitate one bit. Christina was coming to visit Boston. It was another era in terms of travel in 1982. Family and friends could meet each other at the airline gate and that is what I did. Unbeknownst to Christina, the actor and Boston native Ray Bolger – the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz – was on her flight so there was a bit of pandemonium when she was exiting the plane that added a touch more excitement to her arrival. If she was nervous there were no outward signs.
I filled her in on the plans for the weekend: hooking up with good friends, the Bonnie Bell, meeting my parents and siblings and a trip with good friends to Northampton where more family including my grandmother were hosting a late lunch. As planned, she ran the Bonnie Bell and literally ran into a rude welcome by a young boy standing at the sidelines who pointed at Christina and yelled in apparent disbelief “Look mommy, an Indian!” She was aware of Boston’s racist reputation, but this was a kid, wow! Of course, she had to chalk it up to ‘out of the mouth of babes’ and ignorant parenting. Her own large extended family had often proudly praised her indigenous features as being like those of her maternal grandmother from Mexico. This kid’s comment felt weird. “Where was she?” she asked.
I’ve always told Christina that she was an exotic sight in Boston because pale-faced people like me were most of what there was to see. Whereas her gene pool features, and dramatic cheekbones are pretty common in L.A. Still, she rolls her eyes.
All in all, it was a great weekend. As it was winding down it became obvious that our feelings for each other had escalated. We knew we wanted to make it as a couple. But one of us would have move so we could be together. We devised our plan the day before Christina was to return to Los Angeles.
It was as we drove back from Northampton with our friends Ilene Handler and Bruce Fleischer that we decided, with their help, that it made more sense for Christina to move to Boston. My heating and air conditioning training program was finishing the following April, and because Christina had interstate reciprocity with her nursing license there were many job opportunities open to her. We reasoned I could finish my training and be more marketable if I decided I wanted to try living in Los Angeles. There was always the possibility, she would remind me, “we’re crazy about each other now, but maybe our relationship won’t work out.”
Up to then we had only been with each other a total of eight days across three months. Now we were to move in together across the country, and across cultures. But she would hold onto her Santa Monica apartment. “Just in case.”
I flew out to L.A. approximately four weeks later on World Airways. It was the cheapest flight across country and a nightmare! I guessed that they only had one plane that flew back and forth from Boston to L.A. In any case, there were flight delays. I was scheduled to arrive in LA at six PM but didn’t arrive until just before midnight!
Unbeknownst to me Rita, Christina’s older sister and her husband, Bahman, had at least 25 friends and family members waiting to meet me. They hung around eating dinner as the night got late! Later, Rita told me, laughing, that she had to discourage one of Christina’s ex-boyfriends from waiting around for me to arrive from LAX. It seems he got more nervous about meeting me as the hours ticked by.
When she and I finally got to Rita’s house it was the Mexican wedding all over again. with lots of people who cheered as Christina ushered me in. I didn’t know what to expect but it was clear I was the main event! Welcome to the Perez Family!
Early the next morning it took no time to load Christina’s belongings into her two-door Toyota Celica. She had gotten the dark brown beauty tuned up recently and because it was only three years old, we didn’t expect any trouble crossing the US of A. We had one stop however before heading East on Route 66, and that was to have a quick breakfast with her mother and father, Ramona and David, in El Monte. We received the traditional “despedida,” the Mexican blessing, which I would learn to appreciate culturally as I grew to understand Christina and her family.
After a couple of hours, we were east bound on Interstate 10, heading for Boston through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and beyond. We had to get me back in time for me to go to work early Monday at Boston City Hospital, where I was a refrigeration mechanic. We crossed North America in three days, almost non-stop, only staying in a motel for five hours in New Mexico and another in Maryland for six hours. We took turns catnapping on long stretches. We kept each other awake by talking and listening to the radio waves of the southwest. Sports, news and music kept us focused.
I was exhausted but ready to clock in at “City.” We also arrived in time for Christina to experience the crisp November Boston weather and to see her first morning snowfall. She moved into my third-floor attic room in a friend’s house on Perkins Street in Jamaica Plain, right down the street from the beautiful Jamaica Pond and Way, part of the “Emerald Necklace”, a 7-mile-long network of parks and parkways that civic visionary Frederick Law Olmsted laid out for the Boston Parks Department between 1878 and 1896.
Christina expected to eventually find a similar job as a nurse practitioner in women’s’ health, the work she had in L.A. But when she went looking she got a surprise: there was an unofficial, unstated hiring freeze for nurses throughout all of Boston’s hospitals and clinics.
She also realized competition was stiff for nursing jobs. HR people at the places she applied told her the competition for the jobs had bachelors, masters and PhD’s in nursing! She had none of the above, just a state license and national certificate in Women’s Health. She saw the writing on the wall, after practicing for 17 years without a bachelor’s degree it was time to go back to school.
One day, walking back from a job interview, she happened to walk into the Boston Indian Council (B.I.C.) near our home. She casually asked the friendly woman sitting at the front desk “What is the Boston Indian Council?’ An hour or so later, after a friendly exchange of information, Christina was offered a job there as a nurse. The woman at the desk turned out to be the director, and their friendly conversation had turned into a job interview. She was to be Nurse Case Manager for the Native American patient population of the B.I.C.
It was a very satisfying job, though she had some interesting encounters along the way. At one point a very elderly woman tried sizing her up over morning coffee and donuts and she asked Christina,
“Where are you from?”
“Los Angeles, California.”
“No,” the woman repeated, WHERE ARE YOU FROM?”
Realizing the elder woman was wanting to know the name of her ‘tribe, ’ Christina said,
“Chichimeca, Aztec.”
Without skipping a beat, the women looked at Christina with her good eye and said,
“Never heard of them!” End of conversation.
Christina was really impressed by the cold weather of Boston. In fact, she still hates it to this day. Among Christina’s friends I met at Rita’s gathering was her close friend Theresa Laursen, a film costumer. Theresa had spent her first two college years at Endicott College, in Beverly, Massachusetts, so she knew about winters in the Boston area. As a gift she mailed Christina a pair of electrified socks, designed for hunters and fishermen. She had to stow its batteries in her jacket pocket and run the wires down her trouser legs, and she had to endure merciless teasing. But on days when even the native Beantowners were complaining about their feet being cold, Christina had her secret weapon. Before long, people started asking her where they could get a pair.
When Thanksgiving came around, we went out to Andover, to my old family home, where my parents were still living. Not only did Christina get to meet my extended family, she played in our annual touch football game. As New Englanders we aspired to be at least a little bit like the Kennedys. She caught a couple of passes and made a great impression. Though I did find out later that some of my relatives were concerned that she might be a gold digger.
Not only was this as far as possible from the truth, it also begged some follow-up questions, such as: “What gold?” “Where is it?”
As a Californian, she had never dealt with a real winter. When the winter of ‘82-83 arrived,
she not only made use of her electric socks, but also began cooking up a storm. It was a great way to keep warm, and her fame began spreading for doing great things in the kitchen.
One of the people who benefitted was a newly acquired friend named Ginny Zanger, whom Christina met through a mutual friend. Ginny was the wife of Mark Zanger, the model for Megaphone Mark in the Doonesbury comic strip. Mark had gone to Yale and had been a frequent, prominent protestor and campus radical.
At the time we met the Zangers, Mark was working as a food writer for the Hearst paper in Boston, The Boston Herald. The Herald is a tabloid format paper you can conveniently read on the subway. With Ginny’s encouragement, Christina cooked a Mexican meal for Ginny, Mark and me. The Herald ended up running a centerfold feature on Christina with a stunning photo of her and some recipes, which she attributed to cooking skills learned from her father.
As soon as the Herald ran the feature, Mark alerted Christina that he got a phone call from a guy who wanted to know who this woman was and how they could get in touch with her because he was interested in putting her face on his can of products! Needless to say, Mark thankfully batted those types of calls away.
I have a wonderful picture of her standing over a hot stove and wearing a sizable woolen knit hat and a wool scarf which was her ruse for staying warm.
She also put a myth she had heard about shots of whiskey to the test. She was surprised to see that neighbors helped shovel snow out of each other’s driveways before heading off to work. The first morning she jumped in to assist the bone-chilling cold froze her brain. She had to run back into the house. Then she remembered hearing that people sometimes took a shot of whiskey to feel warm, so she drank a shot of whiskey and returned to the cold. Of course that didn’t work!
It was a demanding experience, but she got through the adversities of a Boston winter. However, we agreed that more such winters would be overdoing it. So I told her, “Since you’ve shown you’re willing to undergo hardship, I can face the challenge of being in Santa Monica.”
In April of 1983 we again packed up her Celica, this time with my belongings included. I didn’t have many. In fact, if there was a gold digger in the relationship, it probably had to be me.
We again made near-record time because she was due to go back to one of her jobs at a women’s’ health clinic in Santa Monica.
When we got past the Arizona border and were officially in California, Christina was so happy that she stopped the car so she could kneel down and kiss the pavement.
The way things worked out for both of us in the years since, there were no more Boston winters. I moved in with her at her little studio apartment on 11th Street, and then began wondering what I was going to do for work. I had worked as a refrigeration mechanic for a couple of years, using the skill set I’d learned in a technical school. But, frankly, I was a total klutz and I knew I was not going to make a career out of that trade. For starters, I never really got proficient at one of the baseline skills any refrigeration mechanic needs to have: soldering copper pipes.
I understood the science behind refrigeration, the heat and the pressure, but the touch required for soldering a joint was something that I couldn’t ever master.
Even so, I tried for work in that line, and put in applications at places like La Boulangerie in Westwood, as well as other restaurants in Santa Monica and Venice. Luckily for everyone’s sake, I didn’t get any of those jobs.
Instead, I met up with an old friend whom I’d known in Boston. David had worked in a machine shop that was organized by the United Electrical Workers, the union that I had organized into at Mass Machine shop. He’d relocated to L.A. a few years earlier. He knew my history of working at factories in Cambridge and Boston that had closed down and moved to New Hampshire. He knew that I had experience fighting against these factory closures.
“Peter,” he said, “there’s a job as the organizer with the Los Angeles Coalition Against Plant Shut-Downs (LACAPS). They’re fighting the closure of the General Motors plant in South Gate, the General Electric plant in Ontario, and the UniRoyal Tires plant on the 5 Freeway, and they need an organizer.
The Coalition was involved in various communities to fight these closures, so I interviewed for the job, and they hired me. I’d done plenty of protesting before, but this was my invitation to be a professional. The Coalition set me on the career path that has remained my focus ever since.
The office I reported to was at the First Unitarian Church on 8th street at Vermont. I met several union leaders and all these community leaders all at once. I made some lifelong friends as a result, including our friends Gary Phillips and Gilda Hass. She was on the board of the LACAPS.
On top of being a kick-start into a labor movement career, this job took me all over the Los Angeles Basin. It was how I learned up close about a city that was the polar opposite of Boston.
I was fascinated by Los Angeles. In terms of size, scope and layout, I don’t think you could find a city anywhere in the USA that’s more different than where I had grown up. In Boston, an historical house might be from 1683. In Los Angeles it might be 50 years old or less, and designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, Richard Schindler or any of the other numerous architects who evolved the modernism of Southern California, which spread around the world.
Because the history of Los Angeles was more recent, in some ways it was more compelling, and more part of the national discourse because of Hollywood and all the other media that radiate from L.A.
I was fascinated. I read everything Carey McWilliams wrote about California politics and culture and the history of the state’s labor movement.
I was so happy to be plugged into all this energy. I don’t think I would’ve ever gotten so deeply into the labor movement if I’d stayed in Boston. So that’s one more reason that my old roommate Ed was right when he said “Are you nuts? Get your ass out there.”
This is the story I tell to illustrate how the two places, Beantown and Shaky Town, are so different. As an organizer with this Coalition Against Plant Shut-Downs, I got involved in fighting the closure of a community hospital in Long Beach. I think it was called Long Beach County Hospital. Residents of Long Beach were doing all they could to keep it open. I was invited to come to one of their meetings. I came with a proposal I’d sketched out on how to fight this closure. They gave me the floor and they let me present what I had in mind. The chair said, “What do some of you feel about what he said?”
People said, “Those are great ideas. I think we should do that.”
I almost fell out of my chair. In Boston the reaction would have been “Who are you, anyway” and “which parish were you baptized in?”
Two months later I was invited back to a meeting. The chair was a wonderful man who was a retired pharmacist from New York, a Jewish-American guy who had helped found one of the great unions of America, 1199, a very progressive health care union based in New York City. He announced, “My wife Emma and I are leaving to go on vacation in Europe for a month and we need an interim chair for this group. What are we going to do?”
A woman raised her hand and pointed at me. “He’s got a lot of good ideas. Let’s make him the chair!”
For a second time I came close to actually falling out of my seat. Because again, coming from a parochial, small, insulated place like Boston, I found the openness of L.A. very liberating. As for Christina, she got back to her prior working life with ease, and our relationship – even in a small apartment – kept growing too.
…
In W. Va. and Nebraska: Can Two Working Class Candidates Crash a Multi-Millionaire’s Club in Washington, DC?
By Steve Early
Both major parties on Capitol Hill like to boast about how much more “representative” their Congressional delegations have become in recent years. But that’s only in the most discussed categories of diversity—such as race, age, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Working class Americans rarely end up in the halls of Congress. Fewer than two percent of Congress members had working class jobs at the time they were elected.
Two working class candidates hope to improve those numbers next year, by winning U.S. Senate seats in Nebraska and West Virginia, states currently represented by anti-labor politicians, but which were once bastions of a more populist, pro-worker politics.
In Nebraska, Dan Osborn is challenging two-term Republican Deb Fischer. Osborn is a steamfitter from Omaha who helped lead a successful strike by 1,500 Kellogg’s workers. They shut down plants in four states for 11 weeks in 2021.
In West Virginia, Zach Shrewsbury is also running for Senate. He’s a military veteran (as is Osborn) and a community organizer, and the grandson of a coal miner. Shrewsbury hopes to replace multi-millionaire Joe Manchin and prevent governor Jim Justice, a billionaire coal baron, from claiming the seat that the corporate Democrat is vacating.
Populist Voices
In their respective campaign launches this fall, both candidates sounded themes once familiar to voters in their home states in the heyday of progressive populism, but not heard much lately.
While picketing with General Motors workers in Martinsburg in October, Shrewsbury explained that he’s “running to win and show that working class people can run for office, even high office. We can’t be ruled by the wealthy elite who don’t understand everyday American life.”
At a campaign kick-off event in late September, Osborn denounced “the monopolistic corporations… that actually run this country” and pledged to “bring together workers, farmers, ranchers and small business owners across Nebraska around bread-and-butter issues that appeal across party lines.”
Unlike Shrewsbury, who plans to compete next year’s Democratic primary, Osborn is currently collecting the 4,000 signatures necessary to get on the November 2024 ballot as an independent. He hopes to avoid unhelpful association with the national Democratic Party in a state which chose Donald Trump over Joe Biden by 19 points in 2020 (and Trump over Hillary Clinton by an even larger margin four years earlier).
Osborn admirers in Nebraska unions, and even the state Democratic Party, believe his non-partisan stance may be helpful. According to Jeff Cooley, a railroad union official who leads the Midwest Nebraska Central Labor Council, Osborn’s focus on issues like rail safety and the PRO Act, paid leave time, minimum wage increases and misclassification of workers as independent contractors “offers hope to all workers in Nebraska regardless of political party.” Osborn’s platform also highlights the need to curb corporate misbehavior ranging from routine consumer rip-offs to Big Pharma price gouging and monopolistic practices in the meat-packing industry which favor big agriculture over small family farmers and ranchers.
A Troubled Brand
Jane Kleeb, a past Bernie Sanders delegate who chairs the Nebraska Democratic Party and serves as an Our Revolution board member, told the local media “it would be very interesting for Democrats, Libertarians, and Independents to all come together with the one goal of breaking up the one-party rule at the top of the tickets in our state.” She acknowledged to Labor Notes that, at the moment, “the brand of the Democrats is not the best when it comes to working class and communities of color voters.” Meanwhile, in rural communities like her own, “people think Democrats are wimpy, just want to tax us, and take away our guns.”
Neither Osborn nor Shrewsbury look or sound very wimpy. Before going to work for Kellogg’s as an industrial mechanic and becoming president of Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers Local 50G, Osborn served in the Navy and two state national guard units. Shrewsbury was in the Marine Corps for five years. After his discharge, he joined Common Defense to rally fellow veterans against what that group calls “Trump’s corrupt agenda of hate” and “the entrenched power of greedy billionaires who have rigged our economy.”
Shrewsbury has been an organizer for Citizen Action and the New Jobs Coalition, where he met retired AFL-CIO organizing director Steward Acuff, now a resident of West Virginia. Acuff hopes to enlist national union backing for Shrewsbury’s campaign. The two of them bonded while canvassing to build grassroots support for federally-funded green jobs, environmental clean-ups, and infrastructure projects employing union labor. Acuff believes that Shrewsbury is uniquely equipped to challenge the “corporate colonialism that is still robbing a people and their state of much-needed resources.”
Shrewsbury wants to use his campaign “to help revitalize labor here and everywhere, like Bernie did.” Like Sanders, who won West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary in 2016, Shrewsbury isn’t afraid of being red-baited either. “If caring about working-class people, caring about people having bodily autonomy, water rights, workers’ rights, makes you a socialist, then call me whatever you want. Doesn’t bother me,” he told The Guardian recently.
Fundraising Disadvantage
Osborn has raised more than $100,000 in small donations so far. Next November, Nebraska voters will also consider a ballot measure backed the Nebraska State Education Association. It would repeal the Republican-dominated state legislature’s authorization of a tax scheme that threatens financing of public education and aids private schools instead.
Osborn favors repeal, further illustrating what Kleeb calls “a real contrast between Dan and Deb Fischer,” who has built a $2.7 million re-election campaign war-chest. According to Fischer’s website, her top donors include “fellow Senate Republicans, the American Israeli PAC, the construction industry and defense contractors.”
Osborn believes that his Senate race could be “the most viable independent campaign in America” next year, particularly if Nebraska’s Democratic primary produces no serious competition for Fischer’s seat. Meanwhile, he is spending 40 hours a week doing boiler maintenance and repair work at Boys Town in Omaha, as a member of Steamfitters and Plumbers Local 464.
Osborn hopes to take more time off, from his day job soon to campaign around the state, with backers like Nebraska Railroaders for Public Safety. This advocacy group just conducted a favorable poll and then endorsed him.
Their survey of 1,048 likely voters revealed considerable discontent with Fischer, who promised to serve only two terms but is now seeking a third. Despite Osborn’s lack of name recognition, he had a slight lead over Fischer, which grew larger when survey participants were informed about the biographies and positions of both candidates.
The Nebraska Railroaders are taking that as an encouraging sign that their state still has an independent streak that could help “elect a next-generation representative of the working class instead of continuing to send out-of-touch millionaires back to Washington to fail us.”
…
Editor’s note:
Shewbury has put out a statement regarding the war being waged in Gaza between Hamas and Israel – it is included below.
“Hear me out. This email will be a bit long, but I need to share this with you.
I did not grow up in an environment where conversations about Israel and Palestine were commonplace. We were a working-class family in a small community, and foreign policy issues were not frequently discussed. We were neither Jews nor Arabs. My family has been in West Virginia for centuries, and our world was insulated. I didn’t have access to the kind of liberal arts education where history is examined from different perspectives. In the Marines, my training did not include a deep dive into the events that led to Nakba in 1948, which, by the way, means “the catastrophe” in Arabic.
I am from the same cloth as most Americans; I am a working West Virginian.
As a future U.S. Senator, I’m dedicated to deepening my knowledge and understanding of current events’ historical and legal context because the responsibility to and the influence this country has over millions of people in faraway lands is enormous. I don’t take this power lightly.
Our media industry often sensationalizes terms like war, self-defense, and human shields to mold public opinion toward the monied interests of their advertisers and influential stakeholders and the system that allows them to rake in incredible profit at the expense of truth and balanced reporting. As I broaden my context, I’m learning what these terms mean under the International Human Rights Law that we as a country claim to support and yet so rarely honor.
· The term “war” is used intentionally to create the impression that what is going on between Israel and Palestinians is a conflict between two autonomous states. That cannot be further from the truth, as Israel is the occupier, and Hamas is the governing body of the occupied territory but not a sovereign government.
· Israel has obligations under international law to provide services and ensure the safety of its occupied population. On October 7th, when Hamas attacked, they had the right to use police powers to apprehend the criminals and prosecute them but not to use their massive military might against an essentially defenseless people. We cannot use the “right to defense” language describing Israel’s revenge that has so far killed approximately 18,000 Palestinians, two-thirds of whom are women and children.
· In the context of international law, using human shields means actually putting a civilian in front of a military vehicle or combatants while advancing on the enemy. It doesn’t mean having combatants living or even operating in the areas civilians occupy. Using human shields is a war crime. Israel uses the human shield argument to justify their illegal, immoral, massive-scale attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure. Israel wants to drive the Palestinians out of Gaza.”
…
Who Are These Nice People Who Want Me to Get a Raise?
By Tom Gallagher
One day, I received a very nice card in the mail. It had a picture of Uncle Sam pointing out at me over the words “Give yourself a raise,” and included a tear-off mailer addressed to “UESF Membership Specialist.” It read, “Effective immediately, I resign any membership I may have in all levels of United Educators of San Francisco (UESF).” All I needed to do to get my raise was sign it and send it back to that membership specialist, c/o Freedom Foundation in Orange, California.
Just who were these nice people, I wondered, who were looking out for my financial well-being—and even had a specialist devoted to my local union? The answer turned out to be quite the story.
Heading to the Freedom Foundation website, I found a prominently placed video telling how “Los Angeles high school teacher, Glenn Laird, reached his breaking point after his teacher (UTLA) demanded we defund the police.” Given that Glenn is a teacher himself, I gathered that the questionable grammar and the mistake of referring to United Teachers of Los Angeles as a “teacher” rather than a union were likely typos on the part of the freedom folks. Odd though, I thought, that such an obviously well-funded organization would not employ the services of a proofreader, but then the website quickly makes it quite clear that it’s not the education business that these folks are in.
The business they are in is union-busting. In their words: “The Freedom Foundation is more than a think tank. We’re more than an action tank. We’re a battle tank that’s battering the entrenched power of left-wing government union bosses who represent a permanent lobby for bigger government, higher taxes, and radical social agendas.”
“Why We Fight,” the organization’s statement of purpose, proclaims that “government unions are a root cause of every growing national dysfunction in America.” (Every one of them!) And the mailing I had received, I learned, was part of the organization’s Nationwide Opt Out Project, aimed at “taking on government union bosses and defunding their radical unconstitutional agenda” because “GOVERNMENT UNIONS ARE THE SINGLE GREATEST OBSTACLE TO A FREE AMERICA” (All caps on the website) that “REPRESENT NOTHING LESS THAN A LOBBY FOR NATIONAL DECLINE AND DESTRUCTION. WE MUST DEFEAT THEM FIRST BEFORE THEY DESTROY OUR COUNTRY.” The website’s interactive 50-state map will allow you to locate the specific local union that the foundation would like you to leave, and its “dues calculator” allows you to compute how much you will have saved in union dues—compounded at 6%—by the time of your retirement.
While government employee unions are the organization’s particular bugbear, they’re not really too keen on unions of any sort. While conceding that “organized labor began as a way for workers to improve their standing in our country,” the foundation believes that “slowly it transformed into a weapon to destroy it.” And then there’s those darned “Liberal state governments” that are “like cockroaches eking out survival amid the fallout of a nuclear war.”
The freedom folks find evidence of this “national decline” pervasive throughout American society, extending to the “fiscal crisis” that “has forced government to take increasingly perverse actions to keep the system afloat, including multi-trillion bailouts of state government in the form of ‘Covid Emergency’ funds that were airdropped across America in 2020 at the height of mass hysteria over the virus.” For their part, they look forward to “a day when opportunity, responsible self-governance, and free markets flourish in America because its citizens understand and defend the principles from which freedom is derived.” As far as the foundation itself goes, “We accept no government support.”
What never? Well, hardly ever. It would appear that even these hardcore free marketeers were not immune to the Covid “mass hysteria.” Noting that at the time “unions specifically weren’t eligible for the paycheck protection program, so they were left to fend for themselves,” the July 8, 2020, Seattle Times reported, “Not so the Freedom Foundation, though—it got between $350,000 to $1 million from the federal relief fund, records show.” ProPublica reports the exact figure was a $644,125 Paycheck Protection Program loan given to protect the jobs of 82 campaigners against excess government spending. (The amount subsequently forgiven the resolutely anti-government bailout organization was $651,157, the difference representing accrued interest.)
To be fair, though, this government “airdrop” by no means represents the core of the organization’s funding. The June 28, 2018, Los Angeles Times reported that although the group’s labor policy director “declined to identify any of the group’s donors, which he said include businesses, foundations, and individuals ‘from all different walks of life,’” the group’s “tax filings reveal a who’s-who of wealthy conservative groups. Among them are the Sarah Scaife Foundation, backed by the estate of right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife; Donors Trust, which has gotten millions of dollars from a charity backed by conservative billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch; from the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, backed by the family of U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos; and the State Policy Network, which has received funding from Donors Trust and is chaired by a vice president of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.”
Who are these individuals and organizations? According to SourceWatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, the Sarah Scaife Foundation gives “tens of millions of dollars annually to fund right-wing organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, and anti-immigrant and islamophobic organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.”
In her August 23, 2010, New Yorker article “Covert Operations,” Jane Mayer described the billionaire Koch brothers as “longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation.” DeVos, of course, we know from the Trump administration, as well by association with her brother Eric Prince, who founded the mercenary organization formerly known as Blackwater. SourceWatch says that “Harry Bradley was one of the original charter members of the far right-wing John Birch Society, along with another Birch Society board member, Fred Koch, the father of Koch Industries’ billionaire brothers and owners, Charles and David Koch.”
In other words, the Freedom Foundation is hardwired to hard-right money. In a 2016 fundraising letter, Tracy Sharp, president and CEO of the State Policy Network—which counts the Freedom Foundation as an affiliate—was quite clear as to the orientation and policy goals of these organizations: “The Big Government unions are the #1 obstacle to freedom in the states” because, among other things, they support “a universal $15 minimum wage” and “defend Obamacare at all costs,” and—here we cut to the prime motivation behind the expenditure of all this hard right money—“They want to redistribute wealth.” She concludes, “And yes, they are the funding arm of the Progressive Left.”
The letter also touts the network’s victories in defunding the left in a number of states including Wisconsin and Michigan. Close followers of the Electoral College map will remember that in 2016 Donald Trump won Wisconsin by 23,000 votes and Michigan by 11,000, as well as the fact that his failure to repeat those narrow wins caused his eviction from the White House four years later. (State Policy Network donors include Philip Morris, Kraft Foods, Facebook, Microsoft, AT&T, Time Warner Cable, Verizon, and Comcast. Its Indiana affiliate was once headed by former Vice President Mike Pence.)
Although the Freedom Foundation operates as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charitable organization, a status requiring abstention from partisan politics, it’s not shy about expressing its views in the political arena. The 2018 Supreme Court decision in the case of Janus v. AFSCME ended the ability of public sector unions to collect “agency fees” from non-members, a practice designed to reimburse a union for the costs accrued in their representation of non-members as part of the bargaining unit. This decision, long sought by right-wing organizations, would not have happened had Donald Trump not recently appointed Neil Gorsuch to the court, an appointment with a specific political history.
As the foundation recounts on its website, “the liberal Judge Merrick Garland—who would later serve as attorney general under President Biden—was handpicked by President Obama to succeed Scalia” (Antonin Scalia, the Justice whose sudden February 13, 2016, death opened a seat on the court) but “conservatives stood and fought—and it made all the difference. The U.S. Senate, under the leadership of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, refused to debate the Garland nomination until after the 2016 presidential election. As we all know, that fateful election ultimately put Donald Trump in the White House. And it ended any chance of Judge Garland moving to the high court. Shortly after President Trump’s inauguration, Judge Neil Gorsuch ultimately was confirmed as a conservative successor to Justice Scalia.”
But the foundation cannot be accused of Trump loyalism, in that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his opponent in the bitterly contested Republican presidential nomination race, also came in for high praise when he signed legislation further restricting the ability of his state’s public employee unions to collect dues. Rusty Brown, the foundation’s southern director, thanked him for “standing up for government employees who have been held hostage by their unions,” declaring that “The Freedom Foundation applauds… Gov. DeSantis for ending this government union charade against public employees.”
So, back to the question of who those nice people who want me to get a pay raise actually are. They are people who oppose a $15 an hour minimum wage, expanded publicly funded health insurance coverage, and the redistribution of wealth. They are people who admire Mitch McConnell, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis. They are people funded by right-wing, dark money networks. They are people whose job is specifically to reduce the resources available to support economic equity campaigns, and to reduce the resources available to oppose the careers of rich men’s friends in government.
Should you decide to help them on their way by opting out of your union, you’ll probably want to avail yourself of their “dues calculator,” because if they have their way, the gap between their major funders and the rest of us is going to just keep growing.
…
This piece originally ran in Common Dreams
Press power of the Long 1960s: Liberation through duplication
By Lincoln Cushing
Social justice printing history in the United States during the “long 1960s” – describing the period from the early 1960s through the later 1970s – is not one of skilled craft or precious publications. It’s a history of young, passionate amateurs learning new skills and new technologies as a means to an end.
Several factors converged to produce a massive outpouring of printed documents. First, there was the baby boom – by 1969, 19 percent of the U.S. population was between 14 and 25 years old – an increase of 44 percent over this age group in 1960.[i] Young people were finding their voice and had something to say. The civil rights movement here was being matched by vigorous national independence movements around the world. The period was intoxicating and full of optimism.
But how to get the word out? Most standard print shops were either too expensive for broke students or simply wouldn’t touch the radical materials that were brought in. Some of the content could draw the unwanted attention of authorities. So activists learned to print for themselves. Here’s how the mainstream media described it:
The information officers of the New American Left have rediscovered an ancient political ally: print power. All over the country, radical and “movement” organizations have spawned their own print shops run by their own pressmen to churn out an increasing number of posters, pamphlets, handbills, and flyers. Whether it’s to mobilize a march on Washington, explain the advantages of “Free Speech” for GIs, or advertise courses at an alternative university, the rebel presses are rolling. By the thousands, their folded-and-stapled brochures, decorated with crude graphics, are being given away at hastily set up campus tables or sold in the standard subculture outlets.[1]
The equipment included small offset presses (Multilith 1250s and AB Dick 360s were ubiquitous) that were simple to learn and operate. Silkscreen printing saw a renaissance, using hand-cut lacquer-based stencils and oil-based inks. And one new technology, the electric stencil-burning Gestefax, was transformative in supporting community-based communications.
The Gestefax, introduced in 1959, was the first device that allowed consumers to scan original art to run on a Gestetner. This was a mechanical duplicator on which a stencil master mounted on an ink-filled drum printed pages up to 8 ½ x 14”. Instead of needing a typewriter to pound out a stencil, any art – even a photo – could be scanned on the dual rotating drums of the Gestefax, one with an electric eye skimming the original and the second burning the stencil with an electric spark. It was so simple to use that ads noted “it can be operated by your office girl, without any training.”[ii]
This scanner, coupled with the fact that by swapping or cleaning the ink drums one could print multiple colors in subsequent passes, offered some of the earliest opportunities for grassroots artists and organizers to make colorful flyers and newsletters. It may be hard to believe in this day and age, when “color separation” isn’t even a conscious act and photographs can be effortlessly published on a Web page, but this clunky technology was a breakthrough aesthetic boon to democratic media.
One of the first to experiment with the artistic possibilities of these machines was the Communication Company (or “Comm Co”), founded in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district by Chester Anderson and Claude Hayward in January of 1967. This was the epicenter of the new counterculture, and every movement needs a medium. The Communication Company cranked out an endless stream of flyers and handbills for community groups such as the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers as well as scores of events. As their promotional flyer stated, they planned to “Provide quick & inexpensive printing services for the hip community.” They also aspired to “Produce occasional incredibilities out of an unnatural fondness for either outrage or profit, as the case may be” and to “Do what we damn well please.” Years later one Comm Co participant described the chutzpah of this printing adventure:
We took [samples of our] sheets to the Gestetner company. They had no idea that their machines were capable of doing what we did. Like we put a peacock feather on the Gestetner and put the top down and Xeroxed it in color. And they were amazed. They were very beautiful sheets. We asked the Gestetner company to let us keep their machine, which hadn’t been paid for in full, and they said, No. So we liberated it.[2]
With an unsustainable business model and run by at-the-edge artists, the Communication Company lasted less than a year, but its flyers set the bar for artistry in street propaganda. Ten years later, another Gestetner art movement blossomed in the Bay Area. In the late 1970s, a critical mass of neighborhood arts organizations and community-based artists were prolifically making murals, posters, theater, and other cultural forms. A report produced about the S.F. Neighborhood Arts Program noted: “Uncontestedly, NAP’s design and printing of colorful flyers for community arts activities is the program’s best-known service…An average day’s output includes design of two to four flyers and printing of eight editions, many designed by the requesting group, of from 500 to 1000 each. They run through about 120,000 pages monthly.”[iii] Once again, the lowly Gestetner and Gestefax came to the rescue in helping spread the word, and in some cases, be the word.
Screen printing was quickly adopted by activists as a simple and effective way to create large and colorful posters. When Paris art students wanted to support the workers’ general strike in 1968, they quickly abandoned the clunky lithography they were taught in school and began screenprinting after one participant shared the “American printing” process he’d learned at a gallery job.[3] Like Gestetner, screenprinting is a stencil process but is printed by hand using a squeegee to push the ink through a framed stretched fabric that supports the image. Stencils can be hand cut with no machinery required. The resultant huge body of simple and strong street posters inspired artists around the world.
After the antiwar student demonstrations and killings at Kent State, Ohio (May 4, 1970) and Jackson State, Mississippi (May 14, 1970) there was a massive upswelling of resistance culture in the United States. Political poster workshops blossomed all over the country to express public outrage. At the University of California, Berkeley, faculty at the College of Environmental Design encouraged the use of campus facilities for a short-lived workshop that created an estimated 50,000 copies of hundreds of works. Many of these were screenprinted on distinctive discarded tractor-feed computer paper from the computer labs.
Conventional offset printing was a key tool of political movements as well. Occasionally older radicals in the trade would share their skills and equipment, but more often than not activists simply learned on the job and did the best they could.
The first glimmer of the new generation of activist print shops started in 1964 in the heat of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM). Their newsletter was first printed on a 14” x 20” Multilith 2066 by in the basement of a home later demolished to make People’s Park. The press was owned by Dunbar Aitken, publisher of the occasional science journal Particle, but Dunbar was evicted by his landlord for printing “communist papers.” When FSM activist Barbara Garson got involved, the shop was being managed by an old Trotskyist printer. Barbara describes the scene:
Deward Hastings, a speed freak who was handy with equipment, got [the old press] running… We printed five or six issues of the FSM newsletter. The press did movement printing at cost. That was in the day of marches and demos with huge print runs of leaflets. We also took in commercial business at normal prices. But it was understood that in a political emergency the political jobs would come first.
The first generation of shops blossomed in 1967. In addition to Peace Press in Los Angeles, several other printers dedicated to social change began inking their cylinders.
Glad Day Press was founded in Ithaca, New York as a spin-off from the local peace center. The name was from William Blake’s 1795 painting, where Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” is liberated from his constraining circle and square, beaming with an inner energy – an apt metaphor for the transformative feeling of the mid-1960s. They bought used equipment, learned to print, and served as a model for an independent activist shop. Although their initial priority was opposing the war in Viet Nam, they weathered shifts within the movement, including the disintegration of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the end of the war in 1973, and continued to produce materials for a wide range of issues including Cuba solidarity, Native American occupations, and support for liberation movements in Southern Africa. They charged a sliding scale and produced many self-published projects, including posters and books. As they began to take on more commercial printing to sustain the shop, they relied less on volunteers and cross-trained a core group of skilled collective members, and proudly displayed the militant union label of the Industrial Workers of the World.
Also in 1967 Madison, Wisconsin, publisher Morris Edelson donated the profits from his production of Barbara Garson’s satirical play MacBird for the purchase of a used Multilith 1250 duplicator. This became the first movement press in the area.
Sometimes political organizations chose to handle their own printing. The Black Panther Party operated an offset press in San Francisco and Oakland from 1968 to 1978. Although primarily used for printing BPP flyers and posters (except for their newspaper), this shop did handle occasional work for other progressive causes. The first BPP printing operation was at the national distribution office in San Francisco, which was set up by young Panther Benny Harris. Benny had recently restored an industrial shoe stitcher and was invited to help out at the print shop, where the equipment needed mechanical attention. He described the scene:
After arriving at the SF distribution office, I saw two old and incomplete Chief 20 printing presses sitting side by side on the concrete floor. After examining them and discussing what was required to rebuild them, I decided to take on the challenge. I did not have any knowledge of the printing process but I did have the required mechanical skills to do a rebuild of the presses. A few months later with one machine used for spare parts, the rebuild was complete. One functional Chief 14×20” printing press was up and running. After receiving a few lessons on the basics of printing, I was left on my own to develop my printing skills. Emory Douglas [“Revolutionary Artist and Minister of Culture” for the BPP] also provided me with valuable artistic guidance and proper artistic layout etiquette. My printing skills gradually developed over time as the press was used to print flyers, posters, pamphlets, restaurant menus, and business cards.[4]
More movement shops sprang up in almost every major city. Madison’s second shop, RPM (Revolutions Per Minute) Print Co-op, got its start in 1970 with a grant from the Wisconsin Student Association to buy out an existing commercial printer. Salsedo Press incorporated in Chicago in 1973 (and lasted until 2021). The next year saw the triple birth of Red Sun in the Boston area, Resistance Press in Philadelphia, and Inkworks Press in Oakland (later Berkeley). Other shops of this vintage include New York City’s Come!Unity Press (a 24-hour open access print shop run by a gay anarchist collective), Fanshen in San Diego, People’s Press in San Francisco, and Northwest Working Press in Eugene, Oregon.
Most of these shops embraced a distinct set of qualities:
● An articulated political position;
● A sliding scale for fees and specific mechanisms for donated work;
● A commitment to hiring people not usually in the trade (women and people of color);
● Membership in a trade union;
● Organization in a non-hierarchical form, such as a collective or co-op.
Berkeley’s Inkworks Press was formed in 1974 by several members who had been learning offset printing at an alternative school and wanted to create a movement print shop. From the beginning, the shop planned to be self-sufficient, which would be accomplished with a blend of commercial and political work charged on a sliding scale. As a mechanism to institutionalize revolutionary politics, the shop became a non-profit (though not tax-exempt) corporation with a collective structure in which everyone owned it together – no one owned any individual share, as is the case with co-ops. As a way to assure reasonable working conditions and align with the labor movement, Inkworks became a union shop (International Printing and Graphic Communications Union, later Teamsters) in 1978. One of the long-lasting movement press giants, Inkworks closed down in 2015 – it had become hard to recruit new members willing to take on collective responsibilities and the rapidly-changing printing trade had become more competitive..
After the military draft ended and the Viet Nam War collapsed, much of the wind was taken out of the sails for movement printing. But American capitalism and imperialism lumbered on, and a whole new set of issues – among them, women’s liberation, gay rights, U.S. proxy wars in Latin America, South African apartheid – emerged that also required printing. Artists and activists continued to learn the various technologies for generating effective propaganda. Current social justice print shops include Community Printers in Santa Cruz (California) and Radix Media in Brooklyn.
The radical printing of the “long 1960s,” ragged and chaotic though it may have been, was a powerful testament to the importance of document duplication in support of liberation. Long live the power of the press!
Images:
“Karma repair kit” Gestetner flyer by Richard Brautigan, printed by the Communication Company, circa 1967
.
“My name is Assata Shakur and I am a Black revolutionary” Gestetner flyer by Miranda Bergman, 1977 (printed by Jane Norling).
.
“Amerika is devouring its children” screenprint by Jay Belloli, 1970, UC Berkeley poster workshop
.
“[Al] Ferrari making ink fountain adjustment on Glad Day’s biggest press, a Chief 126” in “Left profile: Glad Day Press” Liberation Support Movement Newsletter, Winter 1978
.
Bennie Harris at Black Panther Party print shop, San Francisco, circa 1969
.
First published in Printing History Number 33, Summer 2023, the journal of the American Printing History Association
…
[1] “Young Radicals Rediscover and Use the Power of the Press,” Associated Press, July 8, 1970
[2] “A University Of The Streets” Jay Babcock interview with Judy Goldhaft of the San Francisco Diggers, September 9, 2021, Digger Docs
[3] “Anti-Nazism and the Ateliers Populaires: The Memory of Nazi Collaboration in the Posters of Mai ’68”
Gene M. Tempest, thesis prepared for the B.A. in History, U.C. Berkeley, 2006. https://www.docspopuli.org/articles/Paris1968_Tempest/AfficheParis1968_Tempest.html
[4] e-mail from to Benny Harris, 2/2/2011
[i] “Characteristics of American Youth,” United States Census report P23-30, February 6, 1970.
[ii] “George Stuart Stocks Newest in Equipment,” Orlando Evening Star July 9, 1970, p. 11
[iii] “The San Francisco Neighborhood Arts Program,” Interviews Conducted by Suzanne B. Riess for The Bancroft Library in 1978, p. 212
Harry Bridges and the ILWU – Then and Now
By Peter Olney
A review of Robert Cherny’s “Harry Bridges Labor Radical, Labor Legend”, University of Illinois Press 2023
Soon after I finished writing my review for Social Policy magazine of the new Robert Cherny biography of Harry Bridges, I read in an October 1 memo to all International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members that the union had gone into court on September 30 and filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. A ten-day trial in Portland Oregon in 2019 determined that the ILWU had engaged in illegal tactics that operationally disrupted ICTSI and the Port of Portland. The jury awarded a Philippine owned stevedoring company, International Container Services Inc. (ICTSI), $93.6 million in damages. The union challenged that amount and in March of 2020, a judge determined the maximum amount owed by the union was just over $19 million. The ILWU was prepared to accept that amount but ICTSI rejected the ruling and a new trial was set in which the terminal operator was seeking between $48 million and $142 million in damages.
The dispute arose out of ICTSI’s refusal almost ten years earlier to bring two electrician jobs; plugging and unplugging refrigerated containers, under the ILWU master contract. For years the two jobs had been represented by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) with excellent wages and benefits.
As my review points out, there are thousands of non-union trucking, warehousing and information technology jobs in the maritime supply chain that need organization. Such organization will require the cooperation of multiple unions. Could financial bankruptcy lead to rethinking bankrupt strategy? As longshore workers like to ponder: “What would Harry Bridges say?”
—
In 2005, I accompanied the International Officers of the ILWU to Teamster HQ in Washington DC. We were to meet with Teamster President James Hoffa Jr. to discuss issues of jurisdiction and cooperation in organizing. We were admitted into the “Marble Palace” of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) and ushered into a stately board room that featured portraits of past IBT Presidents most of whom had been indicted and/or served time in jail for various and sundry corrupt activities. When Hoffa Jr. joined us, he immediately greeted our President Jim Spinosa and stated: “You know my father, James Hoffa Sr., and Harry Bridges were good friends. I remember as a young boy watching them on their hands and knees in our living room maneuvering Manhattan sized phone books around to indicate the links in the logistics supply chain between trucking, warehousing and dock work.” Not what I expected to hear from the son of the infamous Teamster leader. I thought at the time: Wow: A Red and a Racketeer, nevertheless they were both brilliant strategic thinkers pondering how to increase working class power!
Robert Cherny, a retired Professor from San Francisco State, has written a new detailed biography of the iconic ILWU leader. He starts with Bridges’ early formative years in Melbourne Australia, his time at sea, and then his arrival in San Francisco where he takes up working “Alongshore” and participates in leading the organizing over 10 years that leads up to the great West Coast maritime strike of 1934 and the San Francisco General Strike. All these were seminal events that led to the victory of West Coast dockworkers and the establishment of one of the most powerful and progressive unions in the United States and western Canada. Much of the book is taken up with the ceaseless efforts of the employers and their state agents in the FBI, Justice Department, and Immigration to deport Bridges, over his alleged membership in the Communist Party USA. Cherny, who had access in the nineties to Comintern records in Moscow, concludes that it was not clear that Bridges was a member of the Party, although his politics where often consonant with the CP.
The story of Bridges is the not uncommon tale in the annals of labor history of a labor leader of the left who remains beloved by the members regardless of his/her political leanings. The bottom line for the member is: “He may be a red, but he has steered my union in a good direction, and my living standards are proof of it.” The famous case of the United Electrical Workers (UE) District 8 leader William Sentner in Iowa is a similar story. Sentner was an open Communist who weathered vicious red baiting because of his leadership prowess and because he delivered for his members.[1]
Bridges is extolled in ILWU lore as a believer in the wisdom of the rank and file. “Bridges shared leadership with others, as well as sharing decision making with rank-and-file members through such institutions as the longshore caucus and frequent membership referenda.”[2] He is also credited with fighting to break down barriers to the entrance and equal standing of African Americans in the union. This was certainly true in the Bay Area and San Francisco based Local 10, his home local. Local 10 is a majority African American (A-A) local today and led by A-A officers. “He was most successful in his own local in San Francisco, less so with Local 8 – Portland and Local 13 – Los Angeles, where his commitment to racial justice ran up against his commitment to local autonomy.”[3] This history with respect to Los Angeles Local 13 is well documented in Jake A. Wilson’s powerful history, “Solidarity Forever? Race, Gender, and Unionism in the Ports of Southern California”[4]
But Bridges and his cohort who built the union were much more than principled ideological warriors who stood for racial unity and rank and file control. They were serious students of class forces, the industries they worked in and the concrete conditions that confronted them. In fact, this ability to make a concrete analysis of conditions and proceed to develop strategies to advance working class power is a key attribute of successful left labor actors. In other words, they needed to know the industry better than their class nemeses, their employers. And often times they were able to anticipate the class interests and needs of those employers better that the employers themselves! Being a practicing Marxist materialist means that you do the careful industry studies that Marx and particularly Engels engaged in. [5]
In an essay written in 1874, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche takes aim at “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” He criticizes those that would engage in monumental history: “Monumental history rejects the disappointments and pressures of the present by taking safe harbor in the imagined company of great figures of the past.”[6] Therefore, the important thing to search for in the Cherny biography is some clues as to how the ILWU can take on the challenges it faces today. What does Harry’s analysis and social practice have to guide us in dealing with the union’s mammoth challenge of automation and the integrated supply chain? Chapters 15 and 17 respectively of Cherny’s work sketch the approach of Bridges to the containerization of waterfront work and its impact on warehouse work off dock.
As Cherny points out by the late 1950’s the ILWU was facing the challenge of mechanization: “By then Bridges, other ILWU officers and many longshore workers were focused on a new, transformative, and potentially disruptive technology: containerization, the most important development in ocean shipping since the steam engine”[7] Previously cargo was loaded onto ships and stowed in pieces. Often loading a ship could take two weeks. Now the product was being stowed in containers for loading, the process of loading (or unloading) a ship was made much simpler and less labor intensive. Often a ship could be unloaded and loaded in a 24-hour period. Employment numbers changed dramatically up and down the West Coast. In 1960 at the advent of containers there were about 26,000 dockworkers in California, Oregon and Washington. In 1980, when containerization had been established as the dominant mode of ocean shipping, the employment number was about 11,000. By 2020 that number rose by 47% to about 15,000, but cargo volumes had increased by almost 700%! [8]
A longshore caucus, purposefully assembled to deal with looming mechanization, met for three days in October of 1957. It issued a special report that stated: “It is not a good public position, whether before an arbitrator or in a strike, to be fighting to retain what the employer will label ‘unnecessary men” and “featherbedding.” Further the report stated: “Do we want to stick with our present policy of guerrilla warfare resistance or do we want to adopt a more flexible policy in order to buy specific benefits in return?” Cherny states that, “The report advocated for more flexibility.” [9]
Today’s technology challenge is the introduction of robots. In the 2008 negotiations with the Pacific Maritime Association (PMA), the ILWU agreed to the introduction of robots on the terminals. And several terminals in Los Angeles Long Beach – COSCO and TraPac – have mechanized. When Maersk, the largest ocean carrier in the world announced in 2019 its intentions to robotize Pier 400 in Los Angeles, Local 13 ILWU mobilized thousands of its members to engage in militant street demonstrations targeting the LA Harbor Commission and the LA City Council in an attempt to block the regulatory approvals for the project. While ultimately unsuccessful, the protest did place the matter of automation front and center again in the recently concluded coastwise negotiations with the PMA for a new labor agreement. One outcome of the agreement is stiffer penalties for employers who do not assign maintenance and repair work to ILWU mechanics, and an agreement to build automation training centers in the three principal port zones: LA, Bay Area, and Seattle Puget Sound.
In a convention that preceded the aforementioned longshore caucus in 1957, Martin Callaghan from Local 10 commented, “I’d like to see them install all of this machinery and equipment to do the work, to make it easier for us guys around here. But let’s bear in mind this: let’s make these machines work for us guys, not for the employers.” Robert Rohatch also from Local 10 added, “Pensions and shorter working hours are the only answer to mechanization.”[10]Enhancing the pension means that more senior workers retire and clear the field for younger workers. Reducing the workday, but maintaining the same compensation, helps to deal with job attrition that inevitably follows the substitution of machines for human labor. But there is a larger question of the changing structure and character of the employers that requires the leadership and vision of union officers schooled in a materialist analysis of the industry.
Cherny’s Chapter 17 touches on the issue of Container Freight Stations and the supplement negotiated by the union to deal with the impact of containerization of cargo handling hours for ILWU members. The stuffing and stripping of containers was most efficiently done either at the point of production of the goods, or at the point of delivery. In the early days of containerization many containers had less than full loads (“shippers load”) and therefore multiple consignees. The work of loading (stuffing) and unloading (stripping) containers was considered by the union to be work traditionally done on or near dock. In 1969 the union negotiated a Container Freight Station Supplement (CFSS) in an attempt to capture this work, often in conflict with the Teamsters. [11] This CFSS language had a provision that specified that work within a 50-mile radius had to be done under the supplement’s conditions by ILWU labor. This was similar to language won by the International Longshore Association (ILA) on the East Coast. This attempt on both coasts to deal with the impact of technology on freight handling of maritime cargo ran afoul of both the National Labor Relations Act and the Federal Maritime Commission. Both bodies ruled that the language was unenforceable.
But there is a bigger problem. Cherny describes the problem by citing an engineer that he talked to: “one engineer described to me such an ideal situation: a container is filled with athletic shoes at a factory in Pakistan and unloaded in a big-box store in the Midwest. Such long-haul containers constituted more that 80 percent of all container shipping and were not at issue” In other words such “shippers load” were exempted from coverage under the CFSS. This is a critical issue for the future of the union and points to its mission as a maritime logistics chain union not an isolated dockworkers club. Today it is clearer than ever that 95% of goods flowing into the ports, bound for giant retailers like Wal-Mart, Amazon, Target etc., are full-load containers being unstuffed by employees of those retailers, in their warehouses or in third party logistics providers, that they employ.[12]
The most stunning fact is that the giant ocean going carriers are all adapting their business models to the changing retail landscape and building or acquiring inland logistics capacity: In a fascinating 2019 Wall Street Journal article, Maersk reveals its plans to achieve a company makeover from 80% of their earnings coming from container shipping to “Hopefully a couple of years from now will be much closer to a 50-50 scenario between ocean and non-ocean services,” Chief Executive Soren Skou said.[13] Maersk already runs twenty warehousing and distribution centers in California, New Jersey, Texas, and Georgia. Five of them operate in the Southern California basin.
Maersk and other giant ocean carriers are all integrating their operations inland to respond to the specter of Amazon, the giant e-commerce retailer that is becoming a logistics powerhouse. Amazon employs 850,000 warehouse employees in the US alone. It has air hubs and owns a fleet of air cargo planes. Every major port on the West Coast has a dedicated container yard for Amazon imports. There is speculation that the company will soon buy a fleet of ships. It is already a Non-Vessel Operating Common Carrier (NVOCC), chartering and brokering space on container ships.
Cherny’s Bridges bio pays homage to another great ILWU leader, long time Secretary Treasurer Louis Goldblatt who was part of the March Inland, organizing warehousing on the mainland and one of the architects of the union’s dramatic growth in Hawaii. While Bridges and Goldblatt often had a contentious relationship, Cherny cites Goldblatt’s genius in analyzing the Hawaii situation: “After studying the economic situation in Hawai’i, he (Goldblatt) realized that virtually all economic activity was directly or indirectly controlled by the Big Five (Sugar and Pineapple co.’s). Goldblatt concluded that the ILWU could not win in longshore” until the heart of economic power in those islands, namely the sugar industry had been organized.” [14]The ILWU proceeded to launch huge organizing drives on the sugar and pineapple plantations that made the union the largest and most powerful union on the islands. Consequently, for today’s ILWU, part of securing its future lies in working with other unions like the Teamsters to make sure that Amazon is organized, a mammoth task that requires the best hearts and minds of the whole labor movement.
No union is an island and there is no long-term solution in fortress unionism. The ILWU cannot continue to ensure the wages and benefits of its members without securing unionization for the growth areas in the logistics supply chain. The employment numbers on the West Coast tell this tale in stark relief. In the period between 1980 and 2019 here is the breakdown:
On Dock Employment:
Total employment for (a) registered ILWU members (including Class A/B longshore, clerks and foremen) was 10,245 in 1980. In 2019 the same group of registered employees numbered 15,044. [15] Combined, this is a 47% increase in registered ILWU members, and a 46% increase in working registered ILWU members.
Trends in Off Dock Transport Logistics Employment[16]:
The most dramatic increases in transport logistics have occurred in three off-dock sectors: Logistics Information Services/Freight Transport Arrangements (FTA), Warehousing and Trucking:
FTA – 1980: 12,816 to 2019: 58,276. This is 355% growth
Warehousing – 1980: 12,738 to 2019: 160,610. This is 1161% growth
Trucking[17] – 1980: 156,808 to 2019: 340,729. This is 117% growth [18]
The future for the ILWU does not lie in building a sand castle on the docks that is being eroded by the shift of cargo handling to work inland. The future lies in marching inland following the containers and using the power and leverage the union still has to organize a whole new group of workers, largely immigrants and people of color. These workers are the future of a new and reimagined ILWU, just as the super exploited workers “alongshore” who shaped up on the docks of San Francisco and the West Coast became the soldiers in the battle to transform labor relations on the docks and beyond. Ensuring a solid future requires working with other unions to secure the supply chain. The recently settled coastwise longshore agreement’s principal triumph was ensuring that maintenance and repair mechanic’s work is ILWU and not the jurisdiction of the International Association of Machinists (IAM). This will result in a few hundred jobs on the waterfront, but the vast unorganized workforce of warehouse workers, truckers and information technology workers remain unorganized, and no one union can organize this maritime logistics workforce alone. During the Cold War attacks on left-led labor unions, the ILWU convention of 1953 ratified “ten cardinal rules” that became the Ten Guiding Principles” of the ILWU.[19] Three of those principles stand in stark contrast with recent practice:
Labor unity is the key to successful economic advancement
Organize the Unorganized
Jurisdictional warfare and raiding must be outlawed by labor itself[20]
Would Harry have been up to the task? Hard to know, but longshore leaders could truly honor his name and memory by making new history and not doting on past glories. I hearken back to my visit to the Marble Palace in 2005. Wouldn’t it be in keeping with Harry’s legacy to have the President of the ILWU and the President of Teamsters and the President of the IAM get down on the boardroom floor and discuss the strategic linkages in the supply chain and plan a multi-union collaborative process in organizing Amazon and the vast logistics industry?
Time to follow the containers and march inland and organize! Time to build a multi-union organizing project. Read Cherny, Strategize and Organize!
…
Footnotes:
[1] Celebrating Labor Day with the Sentner Papers
[2] Cherny Page 340
[3] Cherny Page 341
[4] Jake A. Wilson 2016 Lexington Books
[5] A neglected aspect of Friedrich Engels’s life: his work at his family’s textile firm, Ermen & Engels, in Manchester, the hub of the cotton industry in the mid-nineteenth century. Engels was a merchant and an intelligencer with a detailed, comprehensive understanding of products and the movements of goods, orders, and prices in the global cotton trade. The statistical insights Engels gleaned on matters such as machinery depreciation and reinvestment, his contextualization of capitalism within a unified world market, and his recognition of the tendencies toward overproduction that threatened economic crisis, all contributed to shaping key ideas and themes of Karl Marx’s Capital Volumes I and II, leaving a lasting imprint on Marxist political economy.
[6] Nietzsche’s Quarrel with History, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen The Hedgehog Review 24.2 (Summer 2002)
[7] Cherny Page 279
[8] . In 1980, 2.1 million loaded TEU’s were handled in the ports of the West Coast. In 2019, 16.5 million loaded units were handled. This is a 695% increase. Peter V. Hall Simon Fraser University 2023
[9] Cherny Page 281
[10] Cherny Page 280
[11] Cherny Page 316
[12] On the Waterfront and Beyond: Technology and the Changing Nature of Cargo-Related Employment on the West Coast University of California Institute for Labor and Employment Final Report to the ILWU Longshore Caucus 2004
[13] https://www.wsj.com/articles/maersk-ceo-wants-half-its-earnings-to-come-from-inland-logistics-11561580963
[14] Cherny Page 217
[15] Some registered longshore workers do not work in a given year. In 2019, there were 14,012 “registered and working” longshore workers. “Registered and working” numbers are reported in Graph 3.
[16] Off dock (and non-ILWU Other Marine Cargo) employment numbers are from the County Business Patterns data series from the Census Bureau for the three West Coast States. Analysis of the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages data series from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the same trends.
[17] In order to create comparable data over 39 years, trucking includes local and long haul trucking, messenger/courier and waste collection.
[18] PV Hall Research 2023
[19] Cherny Page 261
[20] ibid.
Ceasefire: The First Step on the Journey to Justice
By Kurt Stand
“I am grieving for every Palestinian, Israeli, and American life lost to this violence, and my heart breaks for all those who will be forever traumatized because of it. War and retaliatory violence doesn’t achieve accountability or justice; it only leads to more death and human suffering,” said Congresswoman Cori Bush. “Today [October 25] I am introducing the Ceasefire Now Resolution, vital legislation that calls for de-escalation and an immediate ceasefire in Israel and Occupied Palestine, and for humanitarian assistance to urgently be delivered to the 2.2 million people under siege and trapped in Gaza. The United States bears a unique responsibility to exhaust every diplomatic tool at our disposal to prevent mass atrocities and save lives. We can’t bomb our way to peace, equality, and freedom. With thousands of lives lost and millions more at stake, we need a ceasefire now.”
“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” Rep. Rasheda Tlaib wrote in a statement, a co-sponsor of the Ceasefire Now Resolution, adding “The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer. We cannot ignore the humanity in each other. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”
In addition to Bush and Tlaib, the bill was co-sponsored by Representatives André Carson, Summer Lee, and Delia C. Ramirez and joined by eight other members of Congress: Jamaal Bowman, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Jesús “Chuy” García, Jonathan Jackson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Nydia Velázquez (a list now grown larger).
If we wish to understand the sentiment that lies behind this resolution, we may want to listen to the lines of Palestinian poet Samih Al-Qasim who himself saw the inside of Israeli prisons on more than one occasion.
And destruction’s tide
rises higher still than the tide,
and the angel’s wing grows distant,
and the winds of devastation draw near,
and you sit atop the earth:
no moaning interferes,
no ark comes to save you,
no olive branch is here in the orbit,
and over death you wither
folding your shirt on the heart’s ordeal.
You fold and all,
Strange and sad –
sadder than water.
Like the struggle for peace everywhere, like the struggle for justice anywhere, the resolution seems fragile, a whisper against the rising tide of war. Yet a whisper can turn into a cry, a small step can be the path that leads out of the abyss. It is striking the fierce opposition this simple plea arouses. The line is drawn – war or peace, oppression or freedom, human empathy or destruction. It is up to us to choose.
Blaming the Victim
Despite law-and-order demagogues who proclaim violence as originating in “bad” individuals or cultures, violence does not spring from nowhere — it has root causes and those causes need to be understood, if the violence is to be overcome and resolved.
We should not forget that there is a violence that has defined the conditions of life in Gaza which the phrase “open air prison” begins to suggest. There is violence in the conditions of life in the West Bank in which apartheid-like barriers keep apart Israelis and occupied Palestinians, freedom of movement for the former based on denial of freedom of movement for the latter. And there is violence in treating some groups of citizens in society as having fewer rights than other groups of citizens as happens to Palestinians within the borders of Israel itself. Until Palestinians are able to live as free men and women, violence in all its forms will persist.
Noting this does not take away from responsibility of any who acts in wanton disregard for human life. When a child is killed, the reason behind it matters not at all – there is a lifeless body, there is grief. To talk about causes and reasons at that point seems itself to be a crime. But what does it mean when one child’s death matters and another child’s death doesn’t. For we need to recognize that Palestinian deaths – the killing of Palestinian children by Israeli soldiers – in the past year barely made a dent in the news, the names, the hopes of a life cut short, the anger and hurt of grieving parents, barely entered into the consciousness of our media, of our society. Acknowledging that does not relativize the pain experienced by those who lost loved ones in the Hamas attack on Israel, rather the reverse is true; it is an argument to organize for equality for hope in life, rather than the equality of grieving.
By failing to confront the use of force by those with power to suppress those without, we make inevitable the seemingly endless cycles of violence and counter violence. Many who are unable to see that connection are blinded by the racism which we know all too well from our own society. After all, the rhetoric of “super predators” used by politicians to justify enactment of the draconian laws that have led to the extraordinary rates of mass incarceration in the United States was designed to characterize some people as less than human, to deny social causes to individual behaviors. Militarized policing and tossing out the concept of “innocent before proven guilty” in turn normalized mass incarceration was the chosen means of addressing crime, rather than enact social policies to establish the equality promised in words into equality in life as experienced. Unfortunately, and tellingly, it has led to the practice of arresting and charging children as adults, giving decades long sentences even to children in their early teens. A racial blind spot allows that to happen; replaced by a field of vision that sees whole categories of people as irredeemable.
Moreover, that blind spot goes one step further – it enables the “neutral” observer from afar to blame the community for being responsible for its own oppression. Too many African Americans in prison, living in poverty, lacking education? – well it is “their” fault; we (one can insert whatever “we” one wants here) had to overcome challenges too. It is a logic that lies just below the surface of society – open racists and right-wingers make it explicit, yet far too many who otherwise perceive themselves as liberal minded, fall into the same mindset. Were it not so, the continued structural discrimination afflicting African Americans (or of Native Americans, or of Spanish-speaking immigrant heritage) would be viewed as intolerable – meaning it would not be tolerated and social policy and budgetary priorities would be so reordered to address those inequities. But, of course, it is tolerated, at an enormous cost to us as a society, at an enormous cost to all working people. Tolerated through a rationalization that blames the victims: i.e. blaming personal or familial or community disfunction, blaming bad leadership or bad decisions as the reason for lack of progress by those who have been and still are being held back.
Familiar refrains all and returns us to Palestine-Israel—and our failure to hold those who have power responsible, a refusal to look at the structure of society that creates such conflicts, an unwillingness to look at the systemic basis for oppression, an unwillingness to look for systemic solutions. Instead, we have violence, counter-violence, and the continuation of the unacceptable – alongside the easy answer of seeing conflict as reflecting ancient hatreds, irrational peoples, divisions rooted in history and blood, and other stereotypes that deny the humanity of those involved. It is that denial which links Islamaphobia and anti-Semitism, seeing people as identities that denies humanity, as if solutions can be found apart from social justice, apart from peace.
Roots of War
Therein lies the determined opposition to the call for a cease fire. A cease fire, in and of itself, simply means stopping the killing, killing which those with the greater fire power are quite unready to stop. Yet without a cease fire, war continues, without a cease fire there is no basis for the release of the hostages Hamas is holding in Gaza (or the reciprocal release of Palestinian political prisoners, many detained for years without charges).
But for those interested in maintaining the status quo – in the Middle East and in our own country – the demand for a cease fire is threatening, because it means negotiation, and negotiations might call the existing status quo into question. For Palestinians and Israelis solutions that end the reality of oppression experienced by millions and allow all to live a life of peace with justice, will require such negotiations, as happened in Ireland and South Africa. Ultimately, allowing equal political rights to all will enable divides over issues to be resolved through political means, through democratic struggle. How this will be achieved is for the people who live or are from the region to determine as a genuine democratic rights and equality is not what those in power in Israel want, however much it is needed.
While those of us abroad can have our opinions about one solution or another, no solution imposed from abroad will be lasting. What those of us who stand in solidarity with the Palestinians can do, however, is to end the interference by our government which has long supported Israeli violations of international law and of its denial of Palestinian human rights.
Far from being an honest broker, our government’s policy for years has been determined by the perceived need of our “power elite” – those corporate, military and political circles that conduct foreign policy as a means to maintain U.S. primacy in world affairs. The same sets of circles that call for “democracy,” after all, support Saudi Arabia, the same sets of circles that denounce wars of aggression, invaded Iraq and Afghanistan (to name but the most recent examples). And the same sets of circles that talk of economic growth are those that have imposed structural adjustment policies around the world, devastating for local populations, while being quite a boon for global capital and profits. The military, far from being a vehicle for national defense, has become an instrument of domination, and a never ending cash cow for the parasitical arms industry. These same sets of policies have their domestic equivalent, in anti-unionism, in the outflow of jobs, in privatization, in mass incarceration, in police violence, and in the racism that is intensified by the insecurity of life these bring. For all those, today’s call for a ceasefire is a threat, for all others it ought to be a call to action.
Reminders from the past
Profits for some – hardship for many. It is no accident that Bush, Tlaib and the other DSA members and progressives on the House who initiated this call for a ceasefire are the same who support social justice and redistributive measures domestically. The demand for a ceasefire is a demand for justice for Palestinians, it is a demand for peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike, it is a part for a campaign to cut the U.S. military budget and to begin to spend funds for humanitarian needs abroad and for social programs at home. Peace and justice are intertwined here, abroad and everywhere. And in that spirit, these words from a novel by Fred Wander, written as a recollection of his childhood in the Buchenwald concentration camp, provide a fitting call to action:
“But when I return, Feinberg says that night in block sixteen, if I should live so long, and I return to the ground-floor apartment in Rue des Rosiers, I’ll stand and listen, the walls will talk: You lived here, the walls will say, you brought up your children here, where are they now, how have you watched over them? And I will answer: I believed, I trusted God. I was happy, I’ll say. Every day I was happy. Had worries, I argued with my loved ones, with my wife, with the kids, I cursed, committed sins of every kind, lied a thousand little lies, that was life, that was my life. And, still I was happy, they were my most beautiful years, with my children, with my wife, all together … But the walls will demand an accounting, they will ask: You sat here and wasted your time. You dreamed. You knew nothing. And what happened, where are they now? – I don’t know, I’ll say. And then I will cry. But the walls will be quite cold: Now you are crying because misfortune has descended upon you. Back then you didn’t cry? And yet the world was full of misery. You didn’t see it?”
.
This piece originally ran on the blog, Washington Socialist
…
Three requests for you, Bernie Sanders
By Tom Gallagher
First – Join the call for a Gaza ceasefire.
This one actually should be easy; you’ve got the wording down already. On May 16, 2021, in response to an earlier outbreak of the conflict between Israel and Hamas, you posted this on what was then called Twitter:
“The devastation in Gaza is unconscionable. We must urge an immediate ceasefire. The killing of Palestinians and Israelis must end. We must also take a hard look at nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations.”
I’m not the first one asking and I’m not asking for the first time. I’ve already signed a petition of your past convention delegates asking you to do so, and I see that 400 of your former campaign staffers have drawn up one of their own. Speaking for myself, I’m puzzled. In your November 1, 2023 Guardian opinion piece, “Gaza needs a humanitarian pause. Then we need a vision of where we go from here,” you wrote that “A stop to the bombing is critical to save innocent lives and secure the safe return of the hostages.” This seemed an important statement on the war at that time, so it was a bit surprising to some of us when you distinguished your position from those calling for a ceasefire today. Further, four days later you told CNN that while Israel has the right to defend itself, “What Israel does not, in my view, have a right to do is to kill thousands of thousands of innocent men, women and children who had nothing to do with that attack.”
So it’s not clear to me what the hang-up is. The atrocities involved in Hamas’s attacks on civilians that precipitated Israel’s current devastating bombing campaign have understandably hardened attitudes of many Israelis as well as those who support Israel in various ways and to varying degrees. Yet your recent statements show that they haven’t blinded you to the need to find a long term solution that ends the ongoing conflict, nor caused you to lose hope that one will be found.
You’ve said that “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, a permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the State of Israel.” At the same time, you surely know as well as anyone that even if Israel should actually succeed in extirpating Hamas, each day of continued bombing of Gaza increases the numbers of Palestinians who will join whatever organization inevitably succeeds Hamas in taking up the fight against Israel. In fact, you also told CNN that in regard to a proposed aid package to Israel, “It’s terribly important that, as we debate that, to say to Israel, ‘You want this money, you got to change your military strategy.”
Nothing lasts forever, including ceasefires. Perhaps one will stick, perhaps it won’t. You have been a supporter of an independent Palestine for some time. It seems to me that you’re getting hung on wording at the expense of conveying the continuity and importance of your position. I’m suggesting that you need to find a way past this because we very much need your voice at this time.
Second – Speak out for seeking an alternative to endless war in Ukraine.
One of the major roadblocks to mustering a Ukraine peace effort in Congress is the argument that it’s not “our war.” So while the U.S. is the major funder and supplier of Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s attack, it is up to Ukraine, and Ukraine only, to suggest any possibility of negotiations. And this argument is not necessarily just a dodge. In the end, there will be negotiations only if and when Ukraine (and Russia) agrees to them. But it is indeed a fact that the Ukrainian war effort is significantly and expensively dependent on American assistance, hence is ultimately dependent upon the support of the American people.
For better or worse, it has been obvious for some time now that both sides’ maximal goals are probably out of reach: Russia will not likely overrun Ukraine, and Ukraine will not likely regain Crimea by military means. And when Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, Commander-in Chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, states that “Just like in the First World War we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate,” and that there “will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough,” the American public will eventually ask whether and why we are simply funding World War I trench-style warfare with no end in sight.
There is also history here that needs to be considered but, in no small part due to Russia’s unprovoked invasion, is largely ignored. The November 1 New York Times touched upon it in an article entitled, “Some Ukrainians Helped the Russians. Their Neighbors Sought Revenge.” “In 2014,” the article read, “Russia was able to seize Crimea and back an insurgency in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine in part because many Ukrainians in those places helped it do so. There is mounting evidence that something comparable took place last year in Kherson: Russian troops overran most of the region in just a few weeks.”
Many Russian and Ukrainians living today remember when they were part of one country. And within living memory, Crimea was even part of Soviet Russia, before it was part of Soviet Ukraine. So what may be treason to a Ukrainian loyalist may simply be a return to the good old days for a Russian loyalist.
I’m not suggesting you advocate simply pulling the plug on Ukraine, Bernie, but someone in Congress has got to raise the question of whether they might be something to talk about here as an alternative to endless grinding warfare.
Third – Run, Bernie, Run!
As we all know, the polls are lately treating our most recent ex-president very kindly and while we might consider the prospect of a second Trump administration even more absurd – and more dangerous than the first, we now know better than to dismiss it as impossible. As someone who has maintained his independent status, you know better than most that both of our major parties are quite capable of waxing anti-war – when they can hang the blame for the war on the other party – particularly if it isn’t going all that well.
Our concern should go deeper than garden variety opportunism, though, in that we need to stop and take a hard look at where we are. Do we really want to go into an election supporting two major foreign wars and asking American taxpayers to pay for them – indefinitely? A lot of people who were with you three and seven years ago are not going to stick around for a ride like that. A lot of people who were with Biden last time won’t either.
The world is burning up and we’re going to keep pouring money down the gullets of the armaments industries, without even suggesting an alternative? This is the hand we’re going to play in the 2024 election? I don’t like the reality, the message, or the odds. I know that you decided not to run again if Biden sought a second term. I know that it is ridiculously late in the game. But maybe not impossibly late. And, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure Joe Biden isn’t going to change between now and Election Day.
Bernie, if not you, who?
(Tom Gallagher was a 2016 Sanders delegate.)
This piece originally appeared on OpEdNews.com
…
BETWEEN THE RIVERS
By Stewart Acuff
A U.S. Senate candidate for working-class West Virginians
While we walked knocking on doors in Ranson in a political campaign, Zach Shrewsbury and I talked about how politics can make life better for everyday people in West Virginia.
The conversation deepened as we worked together and with others to push Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) to support President Biden’s visionary Build Back Better with child tax credits, union jobs in new energy, environmental cleanup, infrastructure and new economic boosts to foster high wagesfrom the bottom up.
We couldn’t believe that Manchin, a Democratic senator from a poor and suffering state, would, or could, stop something his own voters needed so much.
Shrewsbury, 32, a Fayetteville resident, announced on October 15th that he is running against Manchin for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. On the 10th of November Senator Manchin announced he would not be seeking another, sparking speculation that he will mount a third party run for the presidency.
Shrewsbury announced his campaign in front of the old Jefferson County Courthouse in Charles Town surrounded by a modest crowd of supporters. Those supporters include Danielle Walker, a Democrat who represented Morgantown in the House of Delegates, and Pam Garrison, who is Fayette County Democrat of the Year. Those in the crowd included union organizers and leaders, religious and spiritual leaders, low-wage workers and everyday people.
Shrewsbury’s campaign announcement speech reflected the diversity and makeup of the people who came to support him. He accurately and plainly laid the blame for so many West Virginia problems at unchallenged corporate power and the corruption that always accompanies unchecked corporate power. He called for unity amongst working families strong enough to put everyday people above corporate greed.
The following morning Shrewsbury and his team walked a UAW picket line at the General Motors plant in Martinsburg. Afterwards on a bench in downtown Shepherdstown this is what Shrewsbury told me:
“I’m running to win and to show that working-class people can and need to run for office, even high office. We can’t be ruled by the wealthy elite who don’t understand everyday American life.”
“I think Joe Manchin [and his kind] has forgotten how everyday people live, especially in working-class poverty.”
When asked how his background prepared him for such a huge challenge, Shrewsbury answered, “I’m from small town America. I grew up on a farm.”
“I served America in the Marine Corps which allowed me to see much of the world.”
The grandson of a coal miner, Shrewsbury was born in Ripley, West Virginia, and graduated from James Monroe High School in Monroe County. After serving five years in the Marine Corps, he began working on political campaigns from Seattle to West Virginia. He has organized rallies and town halls to engage local communities that are often “forgotten” within both political parties.
Since 2020 he has worked as a community organizer for the needs of everyday West Virginians, promoting legislation to address climate change and veterans issues.
“My work in communities across West Virginia and Appalachia has shown me the multitude of issues and problems of people whose voices are never heard. I intend to remedy that and amplify those voices.”
“Nobody can represent the American people when you can’t hear their cries.”
Asked about his legislative priorities, Shrewsbury didn’t hesitate:
“I want to serve on the Senate Labor Committee to strengthen and energize the labor movement and workers rights, to organize unions and begin again to lift wages and working conditions.”
“I also want to serve on the Senate Committee for Veterans Affairs and the Armed Services Committee to get the defense contractors off the neck of the military and move funding for enlisted men. The enlisted military people are from working-class families. They must be respected, honored and prioritized.”
Shrewsbury’s overall legislative priority is “taking on corporate America and making sure working-class people have a voice. As senator, I will echo and amplify that voice. I will work for the people, not the bought bureaucrats of the oligarchy.”
As a proud, patriotic West Virginia veteran, Shrewsbury said the needs and priorities of veterans are close to his heart. He will work to address homelessness and mental health issues of veterans.
Shrewsbury supports transitioning the Affordable Care Act into universal health care because he said he believes health care is a right, not a privilege.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade Shrewsbury has spoken out and supported women’s rights to choose. Indeed, what does freedom mean if a person can’t control their own bodies?
In my view, Shrewsbury is a Democrat standing for democracy and freedom.
Here are Zachary’s links:
Facebook Instagram Twitter/x Tik-Tok ActBlue
…
Palestine Solidarity and the Fight against MAGA
By Max Elbaum
Leaning into the urgent demand for a ceasefire and Palestine solidarity overall is the best route to stopping genocide in Gaza and beating back authoritarianism in the US.
It is not easy to function in an emergency and prepare for a long-haul fight at the same time. But right now, all of us committed to peace and justice in Israel-Palestine need to meet that challenge.
What’s more, all those concerned about the threat of racist authoritarianism in the US need to do the same. Staving off white Christian Nationalist rule in 2024 depends on expanding the ground pro-Palestinian forces have gained in electoral politics and shifting sentiment in the Democratic Party our way.
Yes, the Gaza crisis has centered the most fraught division within the coalition arrayed against MAGA at the ballot box. Pro-Palestinian organizing is under fierce assault, and beating MAGA is now more difficult. But all tendencies to retreat to strongholds on the margins of mainstream politics must be rejected. Instead, we need a bold program to defend all the electeds who support a ceasefire, expand their ranks, and press Biden to immediately reverse course or get out of the way.
Top priority: ceasefire and humanitarian aid
Civilians in Gaza are being killed every hour. Water, food, and fuel needed by two million Palestinians could run out any day. The demand that the US government insist on a ceasefire and massive humanitarian aid to Gaza is urgent. Domestic protest and global pressure (“The West Is Losing the Global South over Gaza”) have forced the Biden administration to express concern for Palestinian civilians and put forward the idea of “humanitarian pauses” in Israel’s onslaught. But failure to combine words with any action—specifically saying aid to Israel will be cut off unless Israel changes course —doesn’t change anything on the ground.
The pressure must be upped—more demonstrations and direct action/civil disobedience, more calls and emails flooding congressional offices, more congressional staffers and other “insiders” dissenting in public, and more individuals who have “inside” connections calling in every marker they have.
The ceasefire demand also sets the context for extensive political education work. The action front demanding a ceasefire and humanitarian aid is (and must be) much broader than its anti-Zionist component. But both can be expanded and strengthened at a time when large numbers are open to hearing analyses of the Israel-Palestine conflict—and the US role—that they would have ignored or dismissed just a few weeks ago.
Opening for a truly mass strategy
Support for Palestinian rights and acknowledgement that Israel is an apartheid state has long been a “third rail” in US politics. But under the surface, substantial shifts in sentiment have taken place among younger generations—including younger Jews—and within the base of the Democratic Party.
In the wake of the Hamas assault and Israeli response, the expanded sympathy for Palestine has exploded into mass politics with the ceasefire demand. The huge turnout at the Nov. 4 demonstrations, polling results showing majority support for a ceasefire, and the rebellion among a substantial percentage of the Democratic National Committee staff are unprecedented manifestations of the changed landscape.
A dramatic escalation of McCarthyite attacks on students, professors, elected officials, trade unions, community groups, writers, artists, funders, and others who express pro-Palestine sentiments has been the inevitable result. Such attacks call up the worn canard that opposition to Zionism and Israel’s practice of apartheid is and can only be an expression of hatred of Jews, that is, anti-Semitism. Defense of all those targeted and smeared in this manner is an essential task going forward.
This defense takes place in a new context, however. While there are individuals who retreat or are intimidated by these assaults, they are outnumbered by the people who are finding their voice. And growing numbers say that even though they disagree with the pro-Palestine viewpoint or aspects of it, supporters of Palestine have the right to put their arguments forward. Courage can be contagious and taking the offensive can be effective—witness the outpouring of public protest by writers and 92NY staff after this prestigious cultural institution cancelled a program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
The bottom line is this: though we are still well behind our opponents in political clout, we are part of a movement that is growing—in fact growing rapidly—not retreating.
The Democratic Party is a key site of battle
A particularly important aspect of the current landscape is the beachhead progressives —and figures who are willing to speak up for Palestine in particular—have established in Congress. Twenty-two House members and one Senator are now on record supporting a ceasefire. In the immediate days ahead, increasing this number is a top priority. Longer term, it is essential to support every one of these (and others who join them) in beating back the primary challenges they will face in 2024 (which will be lavishly funded by AIPAC, foreign policy hawks, and the bloated “defense” industry). Especially if pro-Palestine champions like Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush are re-elected, momentum to continue the shift among Democrats not only regarding Israel-Palestine but US foreign policy in general can be accelerated.
Deepening this shift is essential because of the current nature of the other major party. Captured by MAGA, the Republican Party is an open, no-apology-whatsoever advocate of Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians. As the political home of both the most die-hard Jewish Zionists and the millions of Christian Zionists who see Israeli domination as a prelude to their soul-saving “rapture,” there is not the slightest sympathy for Palestine in the GOP ranks. To the contrary, the plans of Trump supporters to weaponize the Justice Department under a second Trump presidency would translate into an all-out assault on any and every group advocating Palestinian rights as well as stepped-up repression against Arab American and Muslim communities within the US. Ron DeSantis’ current move to ban Students for Justice in Palestine from Florida institutions is just a glimpse of the McCarthyism-COINTELPRO combination that would anchor the policy of a MAGA-fied Justice Department.
Frustration with—indeed, anger directed toward—the Democratic “establishment” is more than justified. But breaking the bipartisan consensus on support for Israel—which means changing the Democratic Party—is simply a must if US policy toward Israel-Palestine is going to be radically changed.
Push Biden out of the way
Which brings us to Joe Biden. Already he was a weak candidate to top the anti-MAGA ticket in 2024, and his response to the Gaza crisis has been a political blunder as well as a moral catastrophe. With his over-the-top pro-Israel rhetoric and symbolic hug of Benjamin Netanyahu, Biden has made himself the symbol of US backing for the massacre of Palestinian civilians. His current pleas to the Israelis to conduct their slaughter with “humanitarian pauses” (while at the same time sending them weapons) cannot erase that. If he is the Democratic nominee for President in 2024, he will be asking crucial constituencies to make a choice that is agonizing at best: vote for an individual who supported mass murder in order to beat MAGA, or sit out the electoral fight against Trump or some other Republican who advocates genocide but didn’t yet get the opportunity to join in the killing spree.
There is at least the potential for an alternative. We can learn something from a long-shot effort that took place in 1967, when opposition to the Vietnam War was rising but Lyndon Johnson was seemingly secure in his presidency after winning a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964 and playing an important role in delivering some of the most progressive legislation in US history (the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act). A little-known congressperson from New York, Allard Lowenstein, took up a one-man crusade to find another Democrat to challenge Johnson in the 1968 primaries. After being turned down by Robert Kennedy and numerous others, he finally convinced Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota to throw his hat into the ring.
McCarthy’s effort tapped into the energy of thousands of young people who opposed the war, and his campaign proceeded in tandem with the growth of grassroots non-electoral protests. At the end of January 1968 came the Tet offensive in Vietnam, and though Johnson retained the support of virtually the entire Democratic establishment, McCarthy came close to beating the sitting president in the first Democratic primary (New Hampshire). With McCarthy having pushed open the door, RFK finally got the nerve to enter the race as an opponent of the war. Then, on March 31, 1968—an evening I remember as clearly as I remember last night—Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the 1968 Presidential race.
The conditions today are ripe for an attempt along those lines—for a candidate who gives Biden credit for beating Trump in 2020 and moving the Democratic Party’s domestic program to the left, but calls for a different approach to Israel-Palestine and foreign policy in general, and explains that this is the route to beating MAGA and starting a new progressive cycle in US politics. That candidate could energize those vital constituencies Biden has alienated—Arab and Muslim voters, young voters and especially young Black and Latinx voters, and peace advocates.
If enough momentum is gained, this kind of effort can widen the small but important cracks that are already visible in the foreign policy establishment regarding US blank-check backing for Israel. That some top officials are beginning to believe this stance harms US global interests is evident in the recent columns of the consummate ruling class mouthpiece Thomas Friedman. In parallel with that, a traction-gaining challenge to Biden could encourage Democratic high-ups to start saying forcefully in public what many of them already think—that Biden is a weak candidate and should consider stepping aside. David Axelrod, Obama’s shrewdest political adviser, just hinted as much in public.
Given the current balance of strength between the Democratic Party’s progressive and centrist wings, it is not likely that a progressive challenger who critiques Biden’s stance on Israel can become the Democratic nominee. But a robust progressive campaign could open the door for a centrist who is not as wedded to blank-check support for Israel and who would have a better chance of getting votes from every corner of the anti-MAGA coalition—including the grassroots communities who powered his 2020 win. And an insurgent candidacy that does decently in Democratic primaries gives progressives more leverage than we currently have.
There’s lot of time between now and the 2024 Democratic Convention in Chicago. And even more time between now and the 2024 election. Turmoil seethes and crises surround us. It would be foolish to try to predict exactly how things may go. But there are patterns in politics that reflect the way different class and social forces organize themselves and struggle to get hold of a piece of governing power.
There is a tide flowing for Palestinian rights. There is also a deep (but at this moment unenthusiastic) well of opposition to Trump and MAGA. The task of the Left is to find ways to mesh those two strands together in both the immediate days ahead and in the year remaining before the 2024 election. An insurgent primary challenge to Biden could be a way to do just that.
On the urgent front: Ceasefire and humanitarian aid to Gaza now!
On keeping today’s momentum for the year ahead: Take Palestine solidarity and anti-MAGA into the mainstream.
…
This piece first ran on Convergence, a great blog and source for progressives
“Get Up, Stand Up – Stand up for your right”*
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
“Stand Up” Strike Gives Autoworkers a Big Win
The “Hot Labor Summer” grew into an even “hotter” labor Autumn for the U.S. working class. The newly reformed United Auto Workers won historic contractual gains by selectively striking the “Big Three” domestic automakers: Ford, General Motors and Stellantis (a merger of Fiat, Chrysler, and Renault). On October 30, the union concluded tentative agreements with all three companies, pending membership ratification votes.
After decades of concessionary bargaining and “labor-management cooperation” that eventually led to financial corruption of top union leaders, the Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAW-D) reform movement won union leadership through the direct election by the members. The one-member, one-vote process for choosing leaders the result of a court settlement on corruption charges against the union and a referendum vote by the membership. UAW leaders were previously chosen at a convention where delegates were often controlled by paid staff from the union’s Detroit headquarters.
The new leadership took charge last March. Upon assuming office, they immediately faced the challenge of bargaining new contracts with the big three auto companies. These negotiations united 150,000 members — mostly employed in Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
With significant membership input, the new UAW leadership put forward dramatic demands for the new contracts:
- A 40% wage increase
- Four-day work week, with 40 hours pay
- Restore the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA)
- Abolition of tiers
- The right to strike over plant closures
- Union jobs in future electric-vehicle (EV) plants where over $100 billion is expected to be invested in EV production creating as many as one million new jobs.
The reform slate’s dynamic new president is Shawn Fain — an electrician from Stellantis’ Kokomo, Indiana factory. During the strike, Fain framed the UAW’s contract battle in class terms, pitting autoworkers against wealthy corporate executives who have seen their compensation grow by 40% since the last agreement.
Fain relentlessly posed the question, what is the worth of workers vs. their employers? After the New York Times mocked his strong class stance, the next day he appeared wearing an iconic T-shirt that said, “Eat the Rich”!
The union called its strategy a “Stand Up Strike” in homage to the iconic 1937 “sit down” strike that birthed the union at General Motors. Back then, autoworkers at the Fisher Body Plant in Flint, Michigan sat down and occupied their plant, cutting off the supply of car bodies and paralyzing the General Motors production process.
On September 15, the union struck all three companies, but only at one of their key assembly plants – GM in Wentzville, Missouri; Ford in Wayne, Michigan; and Stellantis in Toledo, Ohio. Each factory was a “high profit center” for the respective company. These limited strikes allowed the union to conserve its $825 million strike fund which would only have lasted about 90 days if all members at the auto facilities were on strike. While at the same time leaving room for escalation or de-escalation based on the response of the individual companies at the bargaining table -the union conserved resources while keeping management off guard.
On September 22, the union escalated by striking 38 parts distribution centers in 20 states serving auto dealers for GM and Stellantis. The union’s strategy spared Ford because it had already conceded to demands that electrical vehicles be included under future national contracts and to the right to strike over factory closures. Expanding the strike to the parts warehouses broadened the exposure of the strike geographically, so that solidarity actions and media exposure could take place in far more states while also slowing the flow of parts to auto dealers.
On October 25, the UAW reached a tentative agreement with Ford. Three days later, it reached a tentative agreement with Stellantis, the parent company of the Chrysler, Jeep and Dodge Ram brands. The two deals contain the same or similar terms, including a 25 percent general wage increase for UAW members as well as cost-of-living wage adjustments if inflation flares.
“We have won a record-breaking contract,” the UAW’s Fain, said. “We truly believe we got every penny possible out of this company.”
Shortly after announcing the tentative agreement with Stellantis, the union expanded its strike against General Motors, calling on workers to walk off the job at the company’s plant in Spring Hill, Tenn. The plant makes highly profitable sport utility vehicles for G.M.’s Cadillac and GMC divisions.
The result at General Motors was predictable! The UAW boxed GM into a corner where, if it did not settle, its competitors would gain market share with their employees back on the job. Given that reality, GM settled on October 30 to terms substantially the same as Ford and Stellantis. The settlement includes the elimination of wage tiers at all three companies, so that some workers will see their wages double overnight. All joint venture battery plants will come under the master agreement. In a final brilliant touch, the UAW negotiated a May 1, 2028 expiration date. Announcing the agreement, Fain said, “We invite unions around the country to align your contract expirations with our own,” — a not too subtle call for a 2028 general strike!
With its major sectoral contracts concluded, UAW must now meet an even bigger challenge: Over one million auto workers, largely working for foreign-owned companies, are still not united in a union. Workers at major auto assembly plants owned by BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Kia, Mercedes, Nissan, Toyota, and Volkswagen — and their part suppliers — are working for less pay and far fewer benefits than their union siblings. Most of these companies are located in Southeastern United States where union density and power is below 10 percent. (Read more in the Nation)
The UAW clearly has the not-yet-union companies in their sites: “One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain said. “When we return to the bargaining table in 2028, it won’t just be with a Big Three, but with a Big Five or Big Six.”
Already, workers at Tesla’s manufacturing facility in Freemont California are forming a union organizing committee.
The UAW’s “stand up strike” demonstrated the strategic power of organized workers in key nodes of the economy. This revitalized autoworkers movement, along with this historic contract victory, gives us optimism that the difficult, but essential task of organizing more autoworkers is finally within reach.
*By Bob Marley and Peter Tosh
…