“I Don’t Want Your Millions (Billions), Mister,” – Art and the Working Class
By Jay Youngdahl
Production and enjoyment of art is one of the constants in the human condition. From cave paintings, to the art of ancient Greece, to the posters from the Black Panther Party, all humans participate in art.
Unfortunately, “respected” art today is closely tied to the vagaries of capitalism. Museums are locations for the production of tax breaks for billionaires. “Fine art” is an asset class for speculation for those whose wallets are swollen with the harvests of exploitation of the working class. Determination of what is worthy to be exhibited and what is not is enforced by a neoliberal ideology which performatively lauds “identity” while ignoring class, and punishes artists who attempt to speak on issues such as Gaza.
But outside of this ideological strait jacket much art making occurs in the working class. Often not recognized as such, training in art theory and history can reveal such art as important as any that is being exhibited in the galleries of New York City. Over the last few years, I have worked on bringing this to light.
On February 13, 2026, I was able to open an exhibition “I Don’t Want Your Millions (Billions), Mister,” (running until April 11th 2026) at the Workers Art and Heritage Centre (WAHC) in Hamilton, Ontario. The theme of the show is the innate creativity of workers, and the commonalities that exist within the working class.
Through documentation of worker-made objects from union training and apprenticeship centres in Alberta’s oil sands, the high rises of New York city, the American Deep South, and locations in between, this exhibition showcases the creative expression of workers, recognizing their labor as art. It does so not from a journalistic or historical perspective, but through the lens of conceptual art.
The name of the show comes from a song written by a Harlan County, Kentucky labor activist, Jim Garland, in 1941. This song was sung in my home in my youth, and verses from it are interspersed in this essay. The core of the show emanates from worker training centers, apprenticeship schools. Sponsored by unions, I visited many of these taking photos in each. An historical outgrowth of concepts of guilds which have existed throughout the world, these schools teach skills which society needs taught. They are sites of social reproduction. For those in them, they impart a sense of pride and a concrete response to the insecurity of wage labor.
In my day job, I am a union and civil rights lawyer in the South. While I have represented nearly every union over my career, much of my legal work today is for the Southern District of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners, I represent their Apprenticeship Fund which covers eleven southern US states.
The following is written in conjunction with this exhibition. All of life is nuanced, and this is especially important when considering art and considering the working class. Here I attempt to make a number of discrete points which were important to me in building this exhibition. None of these theses are fleshed out.
INTRODUCTION TO EXHIBITION
The pieces which comprise the show all began with the efforts of workers while in training and at work. I then applied my interpretation. To take one example, photographs entitled, “A Welder’s View, Numbers 1 and 2,” were taken from inside welding booths. To me, they represent what an apprentice welder sees of the outside world as they learn their craft.
A special piece in the show, “Workers’ Staircase,” is a large metal sculpture, constructed from materials used in contemporary building construction, The sculpture was built by three apprentices, working with their instructor, at the UBC Local 18 Training Center, in Hamilton. With the conclusion of the show it will move to the union hall. I provided a design that was influenced by a famous post-revolutionary conception of a Soviet Ukrainian artist, Vladimir Tatlin, known as “Tatlin’s Tower.” Though never constructed, Tatlin’s Tower was to be erected in today’s Saint Petersburg, and to serve as the headquarters of and a monument to working class political parties throughout the globe. While workers vary through historical time, location, and context, certain strands are permanent I believe.
THESIS ONE
The working class is eternal.
With precious few exceptions, this underclass has existed throughout humanity. It has subsisted in all locations, historical times, ethnicities, and genders. It has taken the form of human slavery in ancient Greece and the Americas as well as laboring over computer code in Asia and Africa.
Subject to oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, the fruits of their labor have gone first to the reproduction of itself as a class and second to those who have the power to exploit it.
Except for a few shining historical moments, this class is always in contradiction with their wealthy global citizens who have amassed assets and power.
This power to exploit is often physical. Also, the rules of governmental power uphold exploitation through the rules and regulations of the operative system. These rules, regarding the legality of collective action by workers, or the handling of debt, for example, ensure an exploitative web. This web is maintained by a professional managerial class, lawyers and financiers and judges, which serves those who benefit the most from this exploitation.
Dominant ideas and ideology taught in schools and the media are determined by the economic bases of society at the time. Ideologically, a systemic philosophy of “possessive individualism,” is lauded today, a phrase coined by the Canadian philosopher, C.B. MacPherson.
Those with the hard or soft power to exploit engage in a constant effort to split this class, an effort that is not always recognized by those who suffer from these efforts. In my youth in the southern US, employers encouraged activity of the Ku Klux Klan to split solidarity of white and Black workers in rural paper and wood products factories. Today, many of those plants are owned by Canadian companies who use similar tools to ensure their profits.
This same effort to split the working class is assisted by the denigration of many workers as being “deplorables” and by an ideology that seeks to weaken understanding of class by upholding certain gender and identities, even of the wealthy, over conceptions of class and of the struggles of workers.
I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
THESIS TWO
Each class produces its own morality. Due to their lack of individual economic power, workers’ morality must stress the common good. Regardless of location, gender, race, ethnicity, or historical time, most of the global population shares a commonality of work.
To improve the lot of their lives, workers must practice “solidarity forever,” whether we like it or not. One must work with others, so the actions that come out of it must benefit your fellow humans and yourself. Individualistic endeavors in which all is competition. and for you to win, others must lose, is embraced by some, but for this class such a philosophy can only be transitory.
It is from this that the title of the show emerged. The love and humility in the song has always been an inspiration to me. It is an antidote to the individualism of “look out of number one” that has been the mantra of the global elite in my lifetime, as well as the Silicon Valley religion of the “joys” of disruption, to “move fast and break things.”
Workers are forced into finding their distinctiveness from work. There is pride in production, a wholesomeness. The pride of a clean kitchen after the lunch rush; the pride of a completed building by those who constructed it; the pride of recovery by patients in a hospital ward; the pride of a well-maintained family home which allows a wholesome family to function.
I don’t want your Rolls-Royce, Mister,
I don’t want your pleasure yacht.
All I want’s just food for my babies,
Give to me my old job back.
THESIS THREE
Art and labor, and art and workers and their class, are multi-layered concepts. This show focuses on one of these layers, art made by workers while at work, as part of their work. A short exposition of several other layers is useful.
Generally, the concept of art by workers or labor art, is often connected to labor heritage. Much of it celebrates and helps us remember struggles of the past. Rob Kristofferson and Stephanie Ross in their book “The Art of Solidarity: Labour Arts and Heritage in Canada,” argue that “labour arts and labour heritage are especially key to sustaining and valuing working people, and their communities and movement, in difficult times.” (P1) These authors see this labour art and labor heritage as illuminating and sustaining “the oft-hidden realities of working people, and their contributions to and aspirations for social and economic justice, equity, and inclusion that capitalist structures of domination seek to block out.” (P2)
These authors, like many others, have recognized that art is generally mired in the economics of art in contemporary capitalist society. The gallery/museum system in North America has become a plaything for performative action by billionaires and their families. Art exists and is produced in and for the market, with its financial exchange value reified as a Wall Street commodity. Art made specifically for this system even has its own name today, “Zombie Formalism.”
In contemporary art practice, as in other sectors of society, workers are being squeezed out of the field. ”Class Ceiling A Review of Working-Class Participation in the Arts Across Greater Manchester,” released in January 2026, documented that workers losing the ability to participate in the arts. They are being pushed out of theatre, music, and literature, a trend that has accelerated over the last few decades.
Much of what is called worker art is made by workers using traditional techniques. These include painting and sculptures often known as “outsider art” in the academic art canon. Some recognized famous artists were laborers prior to becoming fulltime artists, such as Jean-François Millet. Prior to the middle of the nineteenth century in Europe, depictions only of the wealthy and powerful, or those favored by them, were allowed as subjects in figurative paintings hung on gallery walls. In the 1850’s, however, French painters like Jean-Francois Millet and Gustave Courbet heroically anchored a turn toward “common” people when they scandalized the Parisian art establishment with their paintings of ordinary French men and women. For example, Millet’s painting, The Gleaners (Les Glaneuses), portrayed widows in the countryside forced to gather leavings in the fields to survive, combining skilled artistry with a political position favoring ordinary French people.
Representations of workers was a favorite topic of artists during and after the Great Depression of the Twentieth Century. Further, many artists have used workplace locations as a theme, including some work by Canadian painters known as the Group of Seven.
The show at the WAHC, however, asks the viewer to consider another kind of labour art. While worker’s art is often thought of as art produced by workers who are consciously producing art and craft, my point is that there is a subconscious layer to this too, in which the creations by workers are art. This layer can be accessed by artist and viewer alike. One hundred years ago the Soviet artist, Boris Aratov, wrote “it is in the factory and the workshop where the erosion of the distinction between workers (as culturally excluded) and artists (culturally privileged), individual ideas and collective creativity will be tested and challenged in practice, and the real work of a new egalitarian culture created.” I hope to add in the revitalization of this concept.
Work and workers produce art. This art I am presenting as art is produced in worker training centers, often wholly unrecognized as art by the viewer or even by the producer. When I showed my first album of photographs to Paul Jones, the lanky director of carpenter union training centers in Texas, he replied, “It looks like work to me.”
To be sure, these pieces are my interpretation, influenced by art history and contemporary art practice. Yet they could not exist without the underlying work and efforts of these crafts people. Pieces in show are vignettes – only some of many. I mean for the pieces in the show to be conceptual entryways for the viewer to consider the working class, as a class with deep meaning and talent.
I am influenced by the work of Fred Lonidier, a union leader and photography teacher from California. Lonidier, along with his fellow students at the University of California, San Diego Martha Rosler and Alan Sekula, translated the movements of the 1960’s into conceptual art. Lonidier’s exhibition “The Health and Safety Game,” premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976, and considered the horrific yet mundane injuries incurred by workers through a lens of conceptual art.
THESIS FOUR
When I began photographing union training centers, I presented them as zines, with each zine focusing on a specific location. My zine, “1901 Susan Drive,” features a training center for carpenters and millwrights in Arlington, Texas. In it I included an essay entitled, “The Democratic Working-Class Possibilities of Art.” Ideas from that piece are included in this essay.
As discussed above one of my influences in producing this exhibition was the explosion of artistic methods in the revolutionary period in the early decades of the Twentieth Century. In the early years of the Soviet revolution, the issue of workers and art was on the front burner in a society which expressed its dedication to worker well-being and agency. An artistic socialist alternative, bringing art into factories and workplaces, was advocated by leaders in the artistic community. Arvatov, an avant-garde artistic activist, promoted the conscious implementation of art into factories in the young Soviet state. Artists would be part of the industrial process, working alongside production workers, as do those with other skills such as logistics, shipping, and accounting.
Recently published in English, Arvatov’s 1926 book “Art and Production” encouraged an artistic movement called “Productivist Art.” He wondered how artists, with their skills and attention, could contribute to the building of a new society by supporting collective processes of industrial work. Arvatov, his translators wrote, believed that “artists should subordinate their technical skills to the greater collective discipline of the labour process and the workshop. For it is in the factory and the workshop where the erosion of the distinction between workers (as culturally excluded) and artists (culturally privileged), individual ideas and collective creativity will be tested and challenged in practice, and the real work of a new egalitarian culture created.” (Art and Production, translated by John Roberts and Alexei Penzin.)
Arvatov and his contemporaries attempted to separate the division between art and life. They examined materials in a new way, arguing for a “culture of materials.” Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism.” Christina Kiaer (2005)
There are many ways to consider this conception of the relationship between art and working life, and mine is one which emanates from this tradition.
We worked to build this country, Mister,
While you enjoyed a life of ease.
You’ve stolen all that we built, Mister,
Now our children starve and freeze.
THESIS FIVE
A number of pieces in the show could be called “conceptual art.” Why use techniques of conceptual art for presentation in this exhibition?
The French painter Fernand Leger wanted access for workers to fine art. Leger observed that the problematic issues in art came from our economic system, not from the art itself. Because the poor and working classes must use their time and labor power to produce enough for the reproduction of their lives, working inside and outside of their living spaces, little time existed for this pursuit. Art’s main problem, Leger argued, is that regular people cannot fathom it; anyone without an academic art degree who has visited a conceptual exhibition in a big city art museum or gallery has experienced this feeling. “One of the most damaging charges that can be made against contemporary modern artists is that their work is accepted only by a few initiates. The masses cannot understand them.” The issue for working people, Leger argued, was not their inability to grasp the concepts and beauty in the art but that an economic structure of work allowed workers little time to gain access to the works or to contemplate them. “Everything is organized to keep them away” from galleries and museums, he wrote.
In addition to Leger’s argument, it is my intention to encourage an expanded way of seeing. Conceptual art can do this.
One way to show the philosophy of this exhibition is to show the relation of workers’ spaces and my manipulation of their work art to the artistic canon. The sum of writing about art history is not simply an endeavor to support art as a function of an exploitative system. Many interesting concepts and much beauty have arisen from it. So, one attempt of this show is to show relations between such high art and my presentation of art from working-class locations. I nod to the artist Michael Asher and his “institutional critique,” and New York’s “abstract impression,” and everyday working-class objects.
Workers are taught there is little beauty in what they make. Most know differently. They are proud of the beautiful buildings in which they hang the dry wall and wire the rooms. They recognize the beauty of a well-adjusted turbine in a power plant that serves their community. But thinking of additional ways to consider their tools and their labor, is a goal of this show.
THESIS SIX
In a somewhat controversial move, I did not include individual portraits of workers in this show. There were several reasons for this. To begin, there are extraordinary photographers and artists who have done important portraits of workers for centuries. While I have taken such portraits, I felt I had little to add.
Such portraits of workers generally focus on individual workers in sympathetic poses or highlights important struggles in which they feature. A number of struggles are part of this show, but showing the class as a class will limit the number of individual portraits. My goal was to show the commonality and collectivity of workers, as a group. This is not to understate the beauty and dignity of depictions of individuals workers.
Further, today too many emphasize difference within the working class, and try to elevate identity over class. This is a mistake. In this cultural period, with the social media mantra of “look at me, look at me,” individualism is the coin of the realm. It is antithetical to the solidarity of the working class. Working with groups of white, Black and Hispanic workers in the south, my personal experience is that once a struggle begins, these differences of identity fade away. The focus on the unity of the class and the contradictions of being with a boss who has an identity similar to yours become clear.
As a writer on labor issues for years, one of my most cited article (thought in a negative way), contains my view that shoehorning the struggles of workers into a narrative of individual rights eviscerates solidarity. Given the predominance of the “human rights” framing in our progressive struggles today, this view is not a popular one.
For this show my attempt is to lead our eye away from individual portraits which can lead our concentration into individualism. Here, I am influenced by the philosopher of photography, Alan Sekula. Coming out of an artist grouping at the University of California, San Diego with Martha Rosler and Fred Lonidier, Sekula works are under appreciated.
According to Sekula, the celebration of abstract humanity featured in individual portraits of workers becomes, in any given political situation, the liberation of the dignity of the passive victim. This is the final outcome of the appropriation of the photographic image for liberal political ends; the oppressed are granted a bogus subjecthood.
Real “subjecthood” comes from an understanding of class, not from a performative rendering of “The Family of Man.”
CONCLUSION
These are “high concepts” and “everyday” labor.
So, I don’t want your millions, Mister,
I don’t want your diamond ring.
All I want is the right to live, Mister,
Give me back my job again.
…
Onsen Again – A Growing Addiction
By Peter Olney and Christina Perez
On our second trip to Japan in 2025 we discovered the “onsen”, the baths. It quickly became an addiction and we frequented the baths at least five times in our second visit. Nelson even toured us to the base of Mt Fuji and a resort where we could bathe hot and cold in natural spring water and look at snow covered Fuji. Coming home we thought we could maybe find a comparable spot in Japan Town in San Francisco. Kabuki Spa is a fine venue on Geary in the heart of J Town, but the cost is prohibitive at $50 a visit vs. the 1200 Yen price tag in Tokyo. ($7.50)
This visit we started to get a little more sophisticated about the bathing culture. First of all “Onsen” are technically mineral spring fed natural waters . “Sento” are public baths in urban areas with heated and cooled tap water. Nelson introduced us to a wonderful Sento in Hachioji that has a shuttle bus that leaves from the Southside of JR Hachioji Station a 15-minute walk from our house in the neighborhood. We easily doubled our Onsen visits during our stay this March.
This time I was not surprised and “shocked” by “Denki Buro”, the electric baths. On our previous visit I had wandered into a denki buro pool and received a jolt that I feared might kick off my A Fib heart condition. This time I avoided these baths and learned the Kanji symbol that labels them. The baths run a current from 3 to 10 Volts and have been around since the 1920’s. Many Japanese folks consider them very therapeutic to treat muscle pain and improve circulation. See “Shocking baths of Japan” by Alice Gordenker The Japan Times May 19, 2014
I will limit myself to the challenge of the cold baths. The super cold bath is set at 8.5 Centigrade about 47 degrees Fahrenheit. That is my tolerance when I do my cold plunge at Ocean Beach here in San Francisco. Then from the cold there are many warm options some of them sitting outside and soaking on chaise lounges bathed in hot water, or dunking in large pools while gazing at the open sky which is especially beautiful with a full moon, starry constellations, and in winter falling snow.
The Kabuki Spa in SF chastised me for conversing with my wife. The Japanese Sento/Onsen is very social and crowds of young people whoop it up. Several men were in the baths carrying their newborn babies. My wife Christina reports that small groups of women and girls speak freely in the women’s section.
The locker room culture is somewhat of a throwback to (Peter’s) college athletic days, a very comfortable place. I (Peter) have to suppress the urge to snap a towel at someone!
In the women’s Onsen mothers and daughters, and little girls finish off their Onsen with 10-20 minutes of facial mask, plus full body massages. Then it’s back to the main lobby for additional R&R on giant tatami mats where friends and family are sprawled out reading, resting, and spending additional time together.
Year around the whole experience is pure comfort for the whole family.
…
Jazz in Japan – Our Cultural Atonement
By Peter Olney and Christina Perez
The month of March was chosen for our trip to Japan for our son Nelson’s graduation on March 12th. Nelson graduated from the Nihon Kogakuin College of Hachioji. The ceremony was massive with 1500 students graduating from vocational schools ranging from Manga to Masonry. Half of the graduates were women. Nelson graduated from the electrical program and has begun work at a Japanese electrical capital equipment manufacturer. We watched from the balcony with the other parents and when the ceremony was over and the students convened meetings by program we left to return to our home near Hachioji Station.
Our good friends Chizuro and Mizuyo had arranged for front row seats for us that evening at the Sometime jazz club 7 PM show The club is located in Musashino, Kichioji and we got there from our house on the Chuo train line. The Trio’s official name is Samurai-Be-Bop and the players include Tomoharu Hani on piano, Yoshihiko Natani on bass and Sonosuke Imaizumi on drums. We loved their music and interacted with them after the show.
We found the whole experience very emotional because the contrast between the artistry of these musicians, influenced of course by a cultural form exported from the USA, stood in stark contrast to the barbaric acts of the US Empire. The bombing and ongoing war with Iran had begun the day we left for Japan. And being in Tokyo you can never escape the fact that the US firebombing of the City on March 10 of 1945, immediately killed more Japanese than either of the horrific A-Bombs dropped in August on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is partly why the Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi was left speechless by Donald The Barbarian’s joke on March 19th about the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor.
At the Sometime session we were fortunate to meet and interacted with a young American named Adam Smith who has been living in Tokyo for 12 years and is a practitioner of “Gypsy Jazz”. “Gypsy Jazz” refers to an acoustic guitar, often called a Selmer-Maccaferri guitar, designed for increased volume and the punchy swing sound popularized by Django Reinhardt – himself a Romani gypsy native of Belgium. On March 15th we went to hear Adam and his cohort of Gypsy jazz musicians at The Den, a music club in Koenji.
What a night! A total of 8 musicians from various countries all stepped on stage to play the “gypsy” guitars. This was a multinational scene from France, Taiwan, Japan, China, Singapore and the USA that produced some of the most dynamic music we had ever heard.
Upon further investigation we have discovered that the first jazz to arrive in Japan was not imported by Americans but by Filipinos in the 1930’s. But obviously the American occupation from 1945-52, which shaped so much of post war Japan, influenced the music scene greatly. For those interested in the shaping of post war Japan culture and politics, Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower is a wonderful read. And jazz aficionados who visit Tokyo can take cool comfort in the fact that there are over 100 jazz venues in the metropolitan area. We have so far only visited three: Sometime and The Den on this visit, and the Blue Note Tokyo in 2025.
…
Uniting Beyond Parties
By Stewart Acuff
Hemingway advised writers, write the truest sentence you can.
Here’s mine.
The No Kings Movement’s three huge mobilizations this year, each surpassing the other, is:
Outside our two homeland wars, the largest, broadest, deepest, mass collective action against fascism, tyranny, dictatorship, and christian nationalism ever in our history!!!
The protests of millions each were folks swarming, overwhelmed in joy and found freedom. They are actions of love and anger and frustration and hope and faith.
As one of those at the grassroots in a red state who was articulating this strategy as soon as the votes were counted, these protests are very strategic.
They are the organizers fail safe: face to face communication, on the street, side by side, sign waving together. Month after month, week after week, day after day we showed our neighbors that we would resist, giving many the courage to step out themselves. In fact, our pressure has helped those with much more power to start using that power to stop Trump.
I live in West Virginia. The GOP boot on our throats. But in this last year we have had unbelievable success creating Movement activity as small as 12, and as big as 3000.
From a lifelong union organizer perspective, teaching people to act together in concert is the first, and hardest part of moving folks into action for change.
Early on, we rallied around the issues, targeting them strategically. One of our earliest was a rally at Harpers Ferry Park was to stop the park service from removing “unpleasant” reminders of slavery.
Immediately afterwards we raised the issue of the Musk Assault on Workers. We drew dozens of pissed off federal workers, raising worker and union rights.
When Stephen Miller got his way and ICE went ape shit everywhere, we mobilized to support our neighbors and immigrant families. Our protests were aimed at ICE, against cooperation, and part of the mass humanizing of immigrants and Brown people.
I grew up in West Tennessee around folks who are now MAGA. I know them. I know they hate gas prices and inflation. But they love machismo.
This pedophile problem of the president is sickening his supporters, so we call out pedophile protectors. We never stop reminding them that their cult leader is the lowest level of man in their own cult judgement.
Now we’re focusing on the Iran War because it could be the most horrific abuse of power in American history.
We have focused on the issues that people were ready to move on — “Voting with their feet”, as we once said at ACORN.
We have cast the widest net possible to bring everyone we could to the fight. Although elders like me may outnumber younger people, we are in large part led by the youngest amongst us.
We strategically decided not to build longterm structure and organization in favor of allowing for the most possibilities for the explosion of movement.
Together we, everyone part of any of this, have created Movement that will protect, save and cover all our dreams for a just and loving homeland.
We are educating millions on the fundamental inadequacies of our current government and system. We are teaching solidarity, opening minds and hearts for other people based on that foundation.
Our presence as neighbors and loved ones on the streets of three West Virginia small towns challenging weekly, even daily the president they once loved and followed, could be the most revolutionary action possible.
Uniting beyond parties as people of action, justice, peace and compassion, in praxis on the ground where every conflict is settled, maybe making the most of opportunity while protecting our possibility for a just future.
…
Together Against the Far Right March
By Robert Wallis
While “No Kings” rallies took place across the U.S. on March 28th, in the UK on the same day hundreds of thousands of people marched through London in opposition to war, racism and fascism.
Britain still has a real king but, as a constitutional monarch, he has far less power than the wannabe one in America. As Trump continues to commit war crimes, in tandem with Netanyahu, there have been only feeble attempts to stop him from inside the U.S. government.
The London march brought together different groups who are both opposed to the war in Iran as well as to the existing regime in Tehran. These groups highlighted the connection between the attack on Iran with the war in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, and now also Lebanon, as part of a Greater Israel project. Protesters in London included the Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the Holocaust Survivor Descendants against Gaza Genocide.
And with upcoming British local elections in May, an additional focus of the protest was Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s far-right Reform Party. Farage led the Brexit campaign. Reform is anti-Europe and strongly anti-immigrant, mirroring MAGA in the States. It currently leads in many opinion polls, putting them ahead of the Labour Party. Although national elections won’t be held for a few more years, local ones in May could be a harbinger of things to come, as with the Midterms in the U.S.. It remains to be seen whether Britain will make a sharp turn to the right just as the U.S. might be moving back in the opposite direction after two years of a Trump second term.
Can mass demonstrations make a difference this time, where they haven’t in the past?
…
“Do mo arigato gozaimasu” – No Kings in Tokyo!
By Peter Olney
My wife, Christina Perez and I spent the whole month of March in Tokyo visiting with our son, Nelson who graduated from an electrical program at the Tokyo University of Technology in Hachioji. Our visit was filled with amazing experiences and there is a lot to reflect on. I will do so in future “Tokyo Takes”. But fighting Trump fascism takes precedence so I will report on the No Kings event I attended in Tokyo on March 28th.
Photo: Susan Wolfe.
Being in a time zone 16 hours ahead of Pacific time I thought I would be in attendance at the first No Kings rally, but it turns out an old college friend, Jeremy Bluhm, organized a No Kings in Sydney, Australia which is 18 hours in advance of Pacific time.
The rally I attended was held at 2:30 PM in Shimokitazawa right outside the train station of the same name. The neighborhood has a reputation as being a “bohemian” spot featuring small music venues, trendy shops and theaters. Democrats Abroad, an official overseas wing of the national US Democratic Party, organized the rally. When I emerged from the train station there were about 250 participants singing and chanting. I had announced my intention to go to the rally to a forum at Zenroren on March 16th. Zenroren is the second largest trade union federation and traditionally aligned with the left. I was pleased to see that Zenroren Secretary General Kurosawa Koichi was present at the rally with a red T-shirt declaring No War in English and Japanese.
The Japanese are absolutely not supportive of Trump’s War on Iran that began February 28th, the day we left for Japan. The country was roiling as Prime Minster Takaichi prepared to visit Trump in Washington DC on March 19th. The Constitution mandates that the Japanese Defense Force be used as its name suggests rather that as an aggressive military ally to Donald Trump. Even though Japan depends on the Middle East for up to 95% of its oil – 70% coming through the Straits of Hormuz -the public was opposed to even the deployment of mine sweepers to the Straits of Hormuz. Trump did not help himself in his meeting with the PM when he jocularly suggested that the Japanese should not be dismayed by his surprise attack on Iran given the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. His remark left the right-wing Premier speechless.
Zenroren has been a leading force in the peace movement, and I received many questions about the US peace movement at my presentation. The Secretary General is a stalwart peace activist, and I had earlier seen him at a labor rally on March 5th holding a banner denouncing the war on Iran.
For me it was a no brainer that the No Kings rally would want to hear from this distinguished warrior for peace and justice. However when I asked the organizer from Democrats Abroad that I be allowed to intro him to the rally, she politely told me No that would endanger their tax status as part of the official Democratic Party. I respected her wishes.
However when it came to solicited audience participation where rally attendees were given the floor to describe their efforts to defeat Trump, I stepped forward and identified myself and explained ILWU efforts in the upcoming mid terms to flip the House of Representatives. My remarks were met with rousing applause.
Suddenly SG Kurosawa jumped forward and delivered a spirited agitational burst in Japanese that was received with great applause by the expats in the audience who spoke Japanese. Many approached him after the rally concluded to say, “Do mo arigato gozaimasu” Thank you very much.
…
Between the Rivers – Report From the Eastern Panhandle of West Virginia
By Stewart Acuff
Even on a soft spring sprinkling evening the back roads from my crib to Spring Mills, WV is country beauty at its finest. The small hills and rocky outcrops roll across the valley floor. Still like so many mountain areas, there are wild woods next to pastures, farm fields next to forests.
At least it still is right now. Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey wants to ruin these rural counties in our Eastern Panhandle.
Last Friday night, 500-600 people crowded into the Spring Mills High School auditorium for a town hall meeting held by two local Republican elected officials.
Each speaker added to the list of reasons data centers will ruin lives while we endure constant noise, higher electric bills, threats to our ground water, the loss of natural beauty, valuable farmland, and lowering home values.
Hey, Gov. Morrisey, what about it?
Speakers posed question after question.
Why would any governor jam something on his voters?
Why would local Republicans both blame the GOP Governor and try to protect their party as people across the Eastern Panhandle suffer?
Where will the vast water needs come from?
How far from each operation can you hear their noise?
Why would our GOP elected officials do this to our counties and our people?
Where would the electricity come from? Will it require new generation power plant/s, and how high will our electric bills go?
The longer the town hall went on, the more it dawned on folks that this data center crisis is coal colonialism repeated again. Politicians sell the state’s resources that go to out-of-state corporations profit leaving few jobs, poverty, pollution, ruined creation and dirty water. The land and people poisoned.
Tension had been building in Berkeley County over the news of the data center on its way.
Some folks blamed the governor because he made data centers development his number 1 priority.
Other folks tried to protect the Republican Governor even as they castigated the governor’s highest priority.
We’ll soon see as election season begins that confronting MAGA folks with their own contradictions makes them mad as an “ole wet hen”, as my Momma used to say.
At the town hall meeting, we heard over and over that the data centers near Spring Mills, and others across the state, are the goal and highest priority of MAGA GOP Gov Patrick Morrisey.
Brooke Gibson testified, “Governor Morrisey said this data center would be good for Berkeley County.” Loud murmuring and laughing ensued.
Annie Watson said her family has been on her land for generations. “Look at the coalfields. Thousands of people don’t have drinking water.” Will that be us? “How long before this data center is obsolete?”
Lucia Valentine spoke as a candidate for Delegate from District 97 and a clean water advocate at the legislature: “We need responsible development while we protect the water, the land and all our resources. It is crucial that elected officials work to protect our Eastern Panhandle.”
A well known small family farmer from Jefferson County also spoke. He said his water rights go back to 1732, almost four centuries. “Are the governor and his legislature trying to cancel my water rights?”
No Kings 3 In The Eastern Panhandle
There were at least five protests in the Eastern Panhandle on NO KINGS DAY 3 – Charles Town with 900 people, Martinsburg with 600, Morgan County with 450, Hampshire County and in Harpers Ferry.
March 28 was the largest, broadest, nonviolent deepest demonstration for justice and peace on one day in American history.
We in the Panhandle were amongst the very first Americans to begin the street side sign waving protests.
After more than a year of almost constant protesting we’ve seen support for us grow from passers-by.
We can feel even here in West Virginia the decline in MAGA strength.
…
NO KINGS
By Robert Gumpert
On 28 March, 2026 people all around the world marched and demonstrated in “NO KINGS”, protesting and registering their resistance to US and Israeli actions, and the and racist rule of Trump and Netanyahu and their fellow travelers.
In all 50 states 8 million people showed up to 3,300 NO KINGS events to say enough: Enough to ICE. Enough to reckless and purposeless wars. Enough to fraud and corruption. Enough to sexual exploitation of women and children by an elite that think themselves immune because of money, power and their corrupted beliefs.
And in capitals around the world, from Tokyo where several hundred Americans abroad marched, joined by labor representatives and rights organizations; to Paris where a similar number hit the streets, also joined by labor unions and human rights groups. In London the NO TYRANTS march saw 10s of thousands march in pushback to the British version of MAGA.
Here are a few images from the Ocean Beach event in San Francisco, California – All photos Robert Gumpert
…
Saying No To The Empire Is Not Enough
By Max Elbaum
We won’t stop US wars, effectively tackle climate change, stave off US-style fascism, or halt the march to a nakedly might-makes-right world order without a vision for a transformed role for the US in today’s interconnected world.
The joint US-Israeli war against Iran puts an exclamation point on the Gaza genocide. It sends a message to the world from the regimes in Washington and Tel Aviv that if you didn’t get it before, you better get it now: We will do absolutely anything that our military strength allows us to do. There are no rules or international laws we are bound to acknowledge, much less respect. You have two choices: capitulate or be destroyed.
Most European governments, all too many regimes elsewhere, and major sections of the Democratic Party leadership here offer at most a few “process objections” to this level of ruthlessness but go with the flow.
This is a road to global catastrophe. It will accelerate a process that was already underway where every government in the world decides that their overriding priority must be increasing their military strength. And, like the US and Israel, they will conclude it is only prudent to crack down on opposition movements within their own countries.
New Thinking for the 21stCentury
To halt and reverse this course, it is essential but not sufficient to build mass opposition to the war on Iran and all the other evils perpetrated by Washington, The US Left needs a foreign policy platform that projects a positive global role for the US and can gain enough popular support to catalyze a broader and deeper resistance to Trump 2.0 and then shape the policy of a post-MAGA government.
Developing that vision starts with facing the reality of an interconnected world where humanity’s very survival is in doubt. Without in the least softening our critique of the US-dominated world order that is passing away, it entails assessing the heightened dangers in the new order that Trump 2.0 is driving us toward. It requires learning lessons from the most positive experiences of longstanding antiwar, anti-racist, solidarity, and climate justice movements.
A valuable step in that direction would be taking a fresh look at a brief period 40 years ago when discussion of global cooperation and de-militarization – including massive cuts in military budgets and complete elimination of nuclear weapons – moved from the margins to the center of global politics. The high point was a 1986 US-USSR Summit during which President Ronald Reagan, an arch-hawk, was forced to seriously consider a pact with the Soviet Union to ban nuclear weapons. This unprecedented development stemmed from both grassroots pressure for peace and bold disarmament proposals and a stress on humanity’s common interest in survival coming from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s program of “New Thinking” about foreign policy and perestroika (restructuring Soviet society).
In adopting “New Thinking” the Soviet leadership was not breaking new intellectual ground. As Gorbachev put it:
“New Thinking did not come out of the blue. It had its origins in the thought of Albert Einstein [“everything has changed except our thinking”] and Bertrand Russell; in the anti-war movements of the 1950s and 1960s…The core of New Thinking is the proposition that humankind’s common interests and universal human values must be the overarching priority in an increasingly integrated, interdependent world.”
What distinguished the Soviet initiative was that it was the first time that such a perspective was adopted as the official policy of a powerful state. And in a groundbreaking speech to an unprecedented meeting of Communist and other Left Parties and Movements on the 70thanniversary of the October Revolution, Gorbachev specified the ways the new Soviet policy created more favorable conditions to struggle for democracy, national liberation and socialism:
“[there are] two especially dangerous manifestations of capitalism’s objective laws: militarization and non-equivalent exchange with the developing world. However, they are only possible if they are backed by an appropriate governmental policy. But that policy will continue to enjoy support only so long as fear of the “Soviet threat” remains… and so long as people continue to believe there are ‘subjects’ of world politics and there are ‘objects’ – that is, the sphere of neocolonialism.
“Our perestroika…is eliminating the fear of the ‘Soviet threat’ and militarism is losing its political justification… We will not in any way renounce the genuine values of socialism. On the contrary, we will enrich them, and at the same time get rid of everything that distorted the humanitarian idea of our system. We do not expect our class adversary to become ‘enamored’ by us. We do not need that at all…
“For socialism, this policy secures a merging of its class interests as a system and the interests of all humanity. And for capitalism too there is no other sensible way than coexistence and competition… Joint action alone can lessen and remove the global danger of an ecological ‘heart attack’.”
A positive pole of attraction
Coming off the heightened nuclear fears of Reagan’s “Second Cold War,” audacious disarmament initiatives from one of that era’s two superpowers moved the idea of a nuclear-free world from a utopian dream to a practical possibility. The first World Climate Conference in 1979 had been a major step in alerting the world to the threat from global warming. The notion of global cooperation in building a sustainable and nuclear-weapons-free planet resonated with millions. It linked a vision of a changed international order with the concerns of individuals, families, and peoples for their own safety. In tandem with the antiwar and disarmament proposals from Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, leading forces in the US resistance to Reaganism in the 1980s, these initiatives echoed the internationalist spirit that infused Dr. Martin Luther King, SNCC, and others in the radical wing of the Black-led 1950s-60s Civil Rights Movement.
The prospect of a post-Cold War “peace dividend” to boost economic development and a relaxation of tensions that would provide favorable terrain for popular movements gave the global Left a platform to offer “realistic hope.” Even socialism’s most ardent partisans realized in the 1980s that our North Star goal was not on any near-term horizon, and that goal appears even further away today. A Left that cannot offer any program for a safer and better world short of revolution will remain on the margins in this country.
A product of weakness as well as vision
The New Thinking vision captured the imagination of millions. But it was fleeting. This was because the radical shift in Soviet foreign policy, and the program of perestroika in general, grew out of the USSR’s deep economic and political weaknesses. Gorbachev was frank about this:
“Our country was sinking ever more deeply into stagnation. The economy was, for all intents and purposes, at a standstill. Ideological dogma kept intellectual and cultural activity in a straitjacket. The bureaucratic machine sought total control of society’s life while being unable to satisfy people’s basic needs….
“The militarization of the economy was a big burden for all countries, including the United States and its allies. Yet for our country, this cost was particularly high. In some years, total military spending amounted to 25-30 percent of gross domestic product, i.e., five to six times as much as in the United States and other NATO countries…. However, excessive armament did not make our security more reliable…. It was clear to me that continuing the arms race was not the path to lasting peace.”
While Gorbachev’s initiatives aimed at ending the Cold War made headway, his proposals for economic restructuring failed to yield positive results. The new openness in Soviet society (glasnost) succeeded in fostering a large-scale reckoning with the crimes of the Stalin era. But nationalist, chauvinist, and pro-capitalist movements rose and gained far more strength than working-class-based strivings to renew socialism. As the USSR hurtled toward collapse, Washington quickly returned to policies based on the worst of imperial ambition, using military force to show the world it was the global hegemony (via the first Gulf War) and vigorously pushing its recently initiated neoliberal economic model across the world.
The reasons for the Soviet collapse, which are of course connected to one’s assessment of the Soviet Union before 1985, remain a topic of sharp disagreement on the Left. But whatever one’s views in that debate, the so-far-unique experience of a powerful state taking Einstein’s “everything has changed” perspective as a starting point for a foreign policy stressing nuclear disarmament and environmental protection offers lessons for addressing today’s dangers.
Competing visions as the old order collapses
We’re in a moment when this quote from Gramsci is deservedly popular throughout the Left: “The old order is dying, and the new one is struggling to be born.” The different factions of the elite oligarchy are rushing into this “interregnum” to shape what comes next.
MAGA/Trump 2.0 argues that considering values like democracy or human rights when formulating policy are somewhere between naïve and treasonous, and that international agreements and multilateral institutions are simply shackles on US power. Staying number one in global “lethality” is the road to safety and prosperity for the “heritage Americans” who will dominate the country after solidifying white supremacy and removing or subordinating the various “others” who now live in the US.
The anti-MAGA wing of the US ruling class counters by arguing that the “rules-based” world order of the last 80 years was key to the wonderfulness of the American way of life. We just need to correct some of its “mistakes” (Vietnam, Iraq) to get back on the right track. Let’s preserve the “Western alliance of democracies,” keep China at bay, and use “soft power,” sanctions, multilateral institutions (where the US calls the shots), and “smart wars” to remain the world’s dominant power and bring safety and prosperity to the US people.
The Left has trenchant critiques of the racism and exploitation inherent in both variants of Washington’s imperial project. But we won’t win the majority of people to our side if we don’t go beyond critique to offer a positive vision of what the world can look like if we are in position to shape US policy.
Global cooperation as a powerful starting point
That vision has to address the hopes, fears, and pressing needs of the majority of US people. It has to be compelling enough to counter the American exceptionalist ideology that permeates US culture. Resting on the longstanding position of the US as the hegemonic global power and promoted unceasingly by the political class and mainstream media, the idea that the US is an inherently virtuous nation whose actions are those of the world’s “good guy” has long defined US “common sense.”
Antiwar and solidarity movements targeting Washington’s role in Vietnam, South Africa, Central America, Iraq, and most recently Palestine have spotlighted the destructive role the US has played in each case and at least temporarily won a portion of the population to an overall critique of US imperialism. At times, energetic social movements have convinced majorities of the importance of arms control agreements and aggressive steps to fight climate change. But we have yet to win a durable majority to a structural critique of imperial behavior and support for an alternative world order where all countries are on an equal footing, conflicts are resolved via diplomacy rather than violence, and a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is a worldwide priority. If we fail in that, a new incarnation of racist and authoritarian militarism may come roaring back even if we succeed in pushing MAGA out of power this time around.
The Left has always stressed the common interest of the global majority in fighting imperial exploitation. But in a period when the most dangerous threats to human life – climate change, nuclear war, global pandemics, obscene degrees of inequality – can only be addressed by joint action by all countries, the arguments against American exceptionalism and the way it makes US national sovereignty absolute become stronger and more urgent. This is why taking the concept of global cooperation based on common human interests from the “New Thinking” experience is the key starting point for formulating a radical foreign policy to put before the US people.
Building on that foundation, additional dimensions of international relations need to be addressed in formulating a comprehensive Left foreign policy: Among them are:
■ A framework for global rules for trade, debt, and other economic interactions among countries that tackles global inequality both between and within countries. There are a host of penetrating critiques of the neoliberal model of capitalist globalization to draw upon for this, as well as positive proposals for what Focus on the Global Southcalls “a healthy balance between national and international economies, diversity in economics and governance, and strengthening local and national economies.” (While Focus on the Global South uses the term “deglobalization” to describe such proposals, others offering thoughts in a similar vein use the terminology of “progressive globalization.”) There are also useful ideas to draw upon here from the 1970s proposals for aNew World Economic Order and a New World Information Order put forward by the Non-Aligned Movement at a time when that alignment of governments in the global South had considerable unity and political initiative.
■ A set of proposals for reforming and strengthening international organizations, conventions, and treaties. The damage being done byTrump’s withdrawing the US from a host of global institutions is considerable, but a Left program must go beyond advocating a return to those institutions as they were structured pre-Trump. The demands of ongoing campaigns to reform the United Nations in a way that ends the Security Council veto power now held by the US, Russia, China, the UK and France, and to put the US under the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice and others need to be considered and many adopted.
■ Renewal and enforcement of theInternational Convention on the Rights and Protection of All Migrant Workers and Their Families. Racist assaults on the rights of immigrants are a key part of the global Right’s drive for political power, and defense of migrants’ rights by figures, organizations and parties of the center and center left has been uneven at best. This is intimately linked to the need for cooperation to mitigate global inequality and the climate crisis, because those are among the strongest drivers of migration. But a positive vision of “new immigration order” also needs to be part of the foreign policy platform of the US Left.
As the last point on immigration indicates, in today’s world the boundary between “domestic” and “foreign” policies is very blurry. They are interconnected, and we will need to continue to make that intertwining visible and concrete for people—for example, contrasting the bloated military budget with gaping holes in programs that meet human needs; looking at the way the global spread of bird flu spiked the price of eggs, pointing out how climate change has intensified floods, blizzards, and fires that have ravaged communities; stressing the way militarism abroad comes back home in the form of militarized surveillance and valorizing a toxic version of masculinity. In that sense, a Left vision for a post-MAGA foreign policy is a necessary component of an overall program for aThird Reconstruction that moves the country toward a durable multiracial, gender-inclusive democracy on a peaceful, sustainable planet.
Amid a continuing genocide in Gaza and a killing-spree-of-choice war against Iran, the numbers of people saying “stop” to the guardians of empire is growing by the day. Fanning those flames of opposition and offering these millions a vision to fight for is the combination needed to accumulate the political power to transform the US role in the world.
…
“Saying No to The Empire Is Not Enough” originally ran in Convergence Magazine
Seafarers
By Robert Gumpert
A few headlines from the last few days concerning seafarers marooned in the Straits of Hormuz
“War with Iran strands about 20,000 seafarers in the Strait of Hormuz” NPR 18 March 2026
An estimated 40000 seafarers are stuck on board ships on either side of the Strait of Hormuz … Bloomberg 18 March 2026
Seafarers Trapped By Hormuz Crisis Face Growing Humanitarian Emergency gCaptain 20 March 2026
Trapped in the Gulf: Tens of thousands of seafarers wait with fear and boredom as the Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Foreign Affairs 23 March 2025
In October 2025 I began work on “From the Hiring Hall”, visiting the Master, Mates, and Pilots halls in Oakland, and Los Angeles.
Even though the following portrait and interview is not about being on a ship in a war zone, Peter Olney and I, co-editors the Stansbury Forum, felt it right to run a piece about the lives of seafarers.
MM&P Hiring Hall, Oakland, California – 22 November 2025
I’m Monique Watanabe. I’m chief mate on a heavy lift ship, the Ocean Giant. I’m permanent, and we go all over the world.
The Ocean Giant is actually Ice Class. We can go all the way up to Greenland, and we can go all the way down to Antarctica. We’ve had the contract, oh my god, since 2013, to go down to Antarctica every year. This is the first year that we’re not going.
But other than that, we go anywhere you can think of. They’re finishing up a run from India to Canada right now. That’s where I’m gonna pick up the ship, in (eastern) Canada.
Then from there, because we’re a true tramp ship, I have no idea where we’re going. I have no idea what is in store. It’s just whatever the next contract comes up.
It’s East Coast Canada so they went from India, and down around the Cape of Africa because they’re not allowed to go through the Suez Canal, and then up to Canada. We’re not allowed to go through the Suez because the company has said that we won’t be doing any Suez Canal transits for a very long time. The other reason is a lot of the cargo that we’re running, it’s a 1.1 D – which is ammo, or dynamite, or other explosives.
..
I’ve never been on a fixed route, always tramp. I did car carriers with the U.S. Oceans, C-Corp. I’ve been doing that for a while now. So, I’ve done the Green Bay, the Green Lake, the Green Cove, and the Ocean Giant. Then I did one tour with Liberty on the Liberty Promise – all car carriers.
I genuinely do like tramp trips. It’s very different. You definitely don’t know where you’re going to go next.
The nice thing about the car carriers is they, for C-Corp or U.S. Oceans, they predominantly do NYK charters. So we go to Japan, pick up cars, and then we can go East Coast or West Coast. Or wherever they decide. We do a lot of military equipment, so sometimes we can pick up military equipment coming out of Tacoma [Washington state], and then going down to Hawaii, and over to – the last time I went with them – Indonesia.
..
The typical sail time, it can vary. I’ve had one trip that was a hundred, and I want to say, a hundred and sixty days. Almost six months. Then I’ve had as short as 84. I knew I was getting on here in the United States, and then I had somebody come relieve me over in Japan. So, it’s definitely a difference.
But, I mean, the minimum contract for MMP is normally 120 days rotary. Rotary means? Oh my goodness. It’s the standard contract – so 120 days. If it’s a relief job, they typically put what the relief job would be – you know maybe 30 days, or 75, or 80, or 90, depending on what the relief is setup for. That’s usually when you’re relieving someone who’s permanent, or somebody who’s decided that they don’t want to sail for a continuous 120. They can take what we call a ‘trip off’, meaning that they get off in San Francisco, and then they get back on in San Francisco, if the ship does that.
..
Choosing a favorite port is so hard. My least favorite area, I’d have to say, is the Middle East. It’s quite a challenge to be working in the Middle East as a female. The longshoremen are definitely a little bit of a challenge to work with. It’s a little frustrating. There’s plenty of ports where I get off and they tell me that I have to have an escort, or I can be arrested. So, I always have to have somebody trotting behind me, usually it’s one of the cadets. If I have a male cadet there, they’re right behind. Or right next to me, so that they can “escort” me. That’s a little frustrating trying to get my job done.
So I never… I’m never alone. I always have somebody next to me. Never a female. Always a male. And you never put yourself in a one-on-one situation. Ever. So always stay out in the open, and make sure you watch your back.
Nowhere else is like that. Japan, amazingly enough, that’s the most respectful port that I’ve ever been to – or country that I’ve ever been to. Korea, no problems. When I was in Australia, absolutely none. The United States, I mean, usually just my stature, unfortunately, you know, I’ve kind of gotten this don’t mess with me stature. Usually I could get around pretty okay and get my job done in a timely manner, no problems whatsoever.
..
I have not been to China yet. So that’s one place that I definitely want to go to, just so that I can get time in and see the differences. I mean, I really do enjoy spending time seeing the waterfront; seeing the different types of people that you see, or get to interact with. On the waterfront it’s not your standard typical people. You get a little bit more genuine, you know, feeling of what the locals will probably be like. If they have any complaints, or have any problems with the Americans, you’ll see it – no problem.
..
I had a friend who said she had a program that she thought would be really fun for me. It was pretty much working on boats, sailboats and cutters, because I worked on an 82-foot ex-coast guard cutter for a while. One of our benefactors was – he loved boats – he had a heart for old military boats.
So he had the 82, and he actually had purchased a 120 foot ex-coast guard cutter, the Morris. He also purchased a 180 foot ex-coast guard buoy tender, and brought it up from Baltimore all the way to Stockton.
(Anyway), she said you might actually like this. I think you should come down and check it out. And I fell in love. Absolutely just went, I love it. We ended up taking a tour of a American ship, the Liberty Grace, in 2001 when she first was built. She did a round the world tour, and I looked up and went, my goodness, that’s cool, and fell in love with that.
Then Melanie, who is the (MMP) VP here, she went to California Maritime, and she brought me over to show me the campus. I was like I think I figured out what I want to do. (I) ended up going to school, getting through the program, and I was like, well I’ll just keep on going. So, a hobby into a career and I haven’t stopped since.
..
I have been sailing professionally since 2010. The Hall has definitely been very … it’s changed. It’s kind of more like my second home. As crazy as that sounds, it really is like my second home. Me and Sean [a friend, a captain, they went to Cal Poly Maritime Academy together], we’ve known each other for thousands of years. And Melanie and I, I mean, we pretty much grew up together, so it’s somewhere that I feel comfortable with, to communicate back and forth with others.
Obviously I feel safe enough to bring my child, and show her what the world, what my world, looks like even though she’s not going to be able to see what mommy does, ever. Maybe one day I can get her on a ship, but she’ll never really see what mommy does. But she gets to know the people that I work with.
So it’s definitely a different place, a different environment. It’s also one of the major reasons why I ended up going commercial. I’ve worked for California Maritime Academy, I did that right after [graduation]. I also worked for Marine Spill Response Corporation, working on their small vessels. If it wasn’t for the Hall, I probably would have never busted into the big ships; the Liberty Grace or the Ocean Giant, or any of the car carriers. So it’s been a big opportunity, and definitely means a lot.
..
Family is a loaded subject. My mother always sat here and hoped that me liking the water, and what I do, would just be a quick fantasy. A quick hobby. And then I would turn around and become a stay-at-home mom. Never in 1,000 years would she even think that I would be shipping out and doing what I can.
But family means everything to me, which is one of the major reasons why I like this job. I can take 90 days and tell the office don’t call me. Nothing’s that big of an emergency (that) y’all can’t figure it out, and I’m going to spend time with my daughter, my husband, my parents. And being able to take my parents, and my husband’s parents, on vacation with us to Hawaii is something that I never dreamed we’d be able to do. So, family is everything to me. I love this job because of that, so I can do this.
..
Monique Watanabe, Chief Mate
…
Photo: Robert Gumpert 29 December 2025
Transcription: Michele Colyer
For more from this project, visit https://robertgumpert.com/seafarers-from-the-hiring-halls