Can Workers Overseas Provide: Tips for U.S. Labor Organizers?
By Steve Early
The worldwide spread of Covid-19 created major challenges for workers and their unions throughout the globe. Very similar pandemic disruptions provided a timely reminder of the inter-connectedness of the global economy—and the need for cross-border links that enable workers to share information about their own struggles and learn from organized labor in other countries.
What are some of the “best practices” abroad that might be reproducible in the U.S. to help strengthen workplace protections here? Two labor-oriented academics, Kim Scipes and Robert Ovetz, have recently published collections of case studies that answer that question in great detail. Their new books will be useful to both union organizers and campus-based observers of comparative labor movements.
In Building Global Labor Solidarity (Lexington Books), Scipes brings together his own past writing on international labor struggles over the last four decades. A retired professor of sociology at Purdue, he is the author of several previous books, including KMU: Building Genuine Trade Unionism in the Philippines, 1980-1994 (New Day Publishers, 1996) and AFL-CIO’s Secret WarAgainst Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (Lexington Books, 2010). Earlier this month in Philadelphia, he was involved in efforts to inform national AFL-CIO delegates about what’s wrong with their federation’s continuing dependence on U.S. government funding of its international operations.
Shop Floor Internationalism
With a focus on “social movement unionism” that overlaps with Ovetz’s, Scipes describes workplace organizing by South African and Filipino workers—and how it was supported by left-leaning unions like the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). As Scipes explains, U.S. workers are far more likely to embrace what he calls “shop floor internationalism” if their own union has a tradition of militancy and democracy like the ILWU. But many labor organizations are not as rank-and-file oriented. And changing their leadership or structure is not easy, at home or abroad. “While building global labor solidarity is a necessary task,” according to Scipes, “it is not sufficient: we must revitalize our domestic labor organizations.”
In Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle (Pluto Press), Ovetz showcases the work of trade union researchers and organizers engaged in this project, in different ways, on four continents. They report on shop floor organizing and/or strike activity by truckers in Argentina, teachers in Mexico, tech workers in the U.K., auto makers in India, and other manufacturing workers in China and South Africa. Drawing on his own experience in the California Faculty Association (CFA) at San Jose State University, Ovetz critiques past contract campaigning in America’s largest public university system which, in his view, failed to produce a “credible statewide strike threat.” The result has been “modest wage gains cancelled out by concessions on productivity, two-tier medical coverage, and the growth of contingent lecturers.”
Other contributors to Workers Inquiry also try, in Ovetz’s words, to identify “new organizational forms, tactics, and strategies that can be deployed by workers to win, be it in their workplace, community, sector of the economy, or as a class.” In Mexico, public school teachers could not depend on their notoriously corrupt national union to defend them from neo-liberal “education reform.” So, in 1979, they created a grassroots network which expanded to 100,000 union activists around the country, particularly active in rural areas. This dissident caucus, known as CNTE, has maintained its political autonomy and continues to resist “privatization of a vital and highly lucrative public service,” even under the more labor friendly government of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Under conditions of far greater repression, Chinese factory workers, as described by Hong Kong labor researcher Jenny Chan, have found ways to fight for better conditions with or without the support of the country’s only legal labor organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). As reported by Marxist scholar Anna Curcio, highly exploited immigrant workers in Italy’s logistics sector—many of them female and non-white—have resisted harassment, discrimination, and sexual violence in warehouse jobs by using “their disruptive power” and forging alliances with “students and other precarious workers.” In post-apartheid South Africa, workers have used wild-cat strikes and sit-ins to confront former allies, like Cyril Ramaphosa. He led the South African miner’s union before becoming one of his country’s richest men and then a successful African National Congress candidate for president.
A Social Movement Union
In Building Global Labor Solidarity, Scipes returns to the subject of insurgent unionism in the Philippines. He recounts the history of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU), a radical labor federation that developed during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (whose kleptocratic family just returned to power via the election of his son, Ferdinand, Jr. as president of the country). KMU was the product of militant union organizing in manufacturing plants, copper mines, sugar plantations, and other forms of agriculture. When founded forty years ago, the new labor center had only 50,000 members. But, as an alternative to traditional unions that sold out their members and failed to organize against foreign domination of the economy, KMU quickly expanded to include nearly 750,000 workers by the late 1980s-early 1990s.
By 1989, KMU had played a catalytic role in several nationwide general strikes, while surviving the arrest, detention, and, in some cases, murder of key militants. Its organizing model, according to Scipes, emphasized “rank-and-file member, not just steward level, education, building new relationships with sectoral organizations across the social order; and uniting with workers and labor organizations around the world.” In addition to putting thousands of workers through a 3-day popular education course on “Genuine Trade Unionism,” the KMU was a key part of BAYAN. This broader community-labor coalition included several million people involved in women’s rights campaigns, organizations of the urban poor, and opposition to U.S. military bases.
In the Philippines during this period, KMU activists not only experienced state-sanctioned violence under the original Marcos regime. They also had to compete with the AFL-CIO-backed Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), which championed “Christian values” and fervent anti-communism. Created with government support during a period of martial law, the TUCP received millions of dollars from the U.S. labor federation’s Asian-American Free Labor Institute (AAFLI). This cold-war institution was far more concerned about reducing radical labor influence than challenging the exploitation of Filipino workers by multi-national companies.
As a leading U.S. backer of the KMU for four decades, Scipes has helped educate fellow trade unionists here about the negative role played by AFL-CIO operatives in the Philippines and other less developed countries, during the Cold War and today. As noted above, he’s part of a new pressure group, called the Labor Education Project on AFL-CIO International Operations (LEPAIO).
Its members are trade unionists opposed to US government funding of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center or the international work of any individual affiliate, via grants from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Instead, LEPAIO calls for “direct worker to worker links” with union members throughout the world and solidarity actions that target the multi-national companies that have become their common adversaries. That’s a common sense approach whose feasibility and effectiveness is well documented in both Building Global Labor Solidarity and Workers Inquiry and Global Class Struggle.
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Click on this link to order Building Global Labor Solidarity and use code: LXFANDF30 when pre-ordering/ordering the paperback.
“How many Mozarts are working in steel mills?”
By Trae James
The title of this post comes from Edward Sadlowski, steelworker. He was a labor activist and a past Director of United Steelworkers of America, District 31 in Chicago.
“Who among you is a musician, poet, rapper, or dancer?” This is one of my first questions on Day One of any organizing or bargaining training I teach for the Building Trades Academy. When worker musicians and artists self-identify we have a talent show at the end of the four-day class. Glenn Perusek, my training partner, and I believe that these talent shows are fundamental to building class camaraderie and solidarity. Organizing involves tapping the emotional soul of workers and music and art are a key component.
Trae James, a member of the Plasterers and Cement Masons union who attended our most recent training in Ft. Lauderdale, wrote the poem and notes below.
Peter Olney
.
Seasons Most Apparent
Many years have gone by us sweet friend of mine
Seasons most apparent
Our spring but a tick to the piece that tells time in our lives
As if our seeds just bloomed
Reasons almost apparent
Our days in the sun
Free willed and strong in our prime
We thought we were valiant
Our summer was vibrant
Now the velvet petals fly away in the wind
They tear free and fall to the dirt with a thunder that screams our worth
With winter incoherence
Seasons most apparent
Trae C. James, Plasterer, union leader, poet Milwaukee, Wisconsin
.
As I dug through my box of dribble and poems, I came across this newspaper photo. This was taken by a Milwaukee Journal (now the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) reporter, moments after I penned “Seasons Most Apparent” on the wall inside of the upper floor’s balcony doors. I was unaware of the photographer, but was given the article by a family member, some days later. That is me (circled in red) on the balcony, still sporting the long hair that I wore after the military and into my early 30’s.
The building was originally a Schlitz brewing company family home in Milwaukee. A religious sect bought it, lived there, and translated the Bible in the building for 25 years. Warren Buffet’s youngest son Peter bought it from them. The third floor was his recording studio. Upon his divorce in 1993, the building sold again. The new owner renovated and restored the property. I was fortunate to be apprenticing for the plastering company awarded the plaster restoration.
The balcony below me, is the shared bathroom for the presidential guest rooms. The lady of the house was a college and lifelong friend of Hilary Clinton. The rooms on either side of the lower balcony, went on to be used by Hilary and Chelsea when they would visit.
I went on to put poems in many other structures throughout the region. There are poems behind a niche wall in a Vaudeville era Theatre in Sheboygan, WI. Another of my poems is in the domed swimming pool ceiling at the Grand hotel in Milwaukee and one is behind the repaired ornamental cornice above the Plaza hotel’s dining room. Many other commercial and residential projects as well are plastered with my poems.
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The Stansbury Forum obit for Sadlowski.
For more on working class art and culture: Local 1199 Bread and Roses Cultural Project Files
Trench Warfare in California Hospitals
By Cal Winslow
Kaiser Clinicians Prepare to Strike: 91% in favor of walking out
Two thousand northern California Kaiser Permanente mental health practitioners, members of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW) have voted to strike the giant California health maintenance organization (HMO). The result of the late May balloting was 91% in favor of walking out – the date yet to be determined.
The vote follows a three-day strike in Hawaii. In May, Hawaiian psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors walked picket lines on Oahu, Maui, and the Big Island to protest Kaiser’s severe understaffing at clinics and medical facilities. Staffing, patient loads, working conditions, these issues are the same right throughout Kaiser’s vast system. The wealthy and powerful corporation that self-advertises as non-profit and patient centered cynically refuses to meet minimal government mandated staffing requirements while enforcing working conditions that demoralize clinicians and place mental health patients in danger – severe, sometimes fatal – all in the name of the bottom line.
These hospital strikes are the workers’ fightback; they represent a sort of trench warfare, front lines in a war of attrition, with Californians’ lives and livelihoods at stake.
There have been half a dozen such strikes at Kaiser in the past decade, as mental health care workers, unheralded, have fought to make it possible to meet patients’ needs with the attention and treatments they deserve and have paid for. They are part of a much wider movement seeking to raise mental health care to, if not a right, at least parity with medical care.
This country is experiencing a deep crisis: depression, addiction, suicide and COVID 19. Added to the mix, yet another group of massacres, a political malaise, and the specter of war. Stress is high and it undermines resilience and resistance causing more medical illness and more mental health issues.
Through all that California health care strikers then are truly heroes and still on the front lines of care through COVID, high stress, and cutbacks.
Kaiser CEOs are compensated handsomely. Salaries compared to workers: 231-1!
The California health care industry is massive, a corporate kingdom employing hundreds of thousands, cashing in with billions in profit – for profit and not for profit alike.
Kaiser Permanente, one of the largest not-for-profits in the country, is the pacesetter in California. Kaiser is based in the Bay Area and has 39 hospitals and some 700 medical facilities in Washington State, Oregon, Hawaii, Colorado, Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia. Since just before COVID its membership had grown by 600,000; it now employs some 300,000 workers, including 80,000 nurses and doctors. In 2020, its profits were $6.4 billion. In 2021, its net worth, according to the California Department of Managed Health Care, was $43.3 billion. CEOs are compensated handsomely. Salaries compared to workers: 231-1! Greg Adams, the chief executive in Oakland HQ received $17.3 million in total compensation in 2020. He and the 100 top executives have the benefit of eight separate retirement plans.
The NUHW represents 4000 Kaiser mental health technicians, clinicians (psychologists, social workers, psychiatric nurses and chemical dependency counselors), this including another 2000 in southern California who settled earlier in the year.
Ken Rogers works at Kaiser’s South Sacramento/Elk Grove clinic. He is a psychologist and NUHW shop steward and an elected member of the NUHW’s executive board. He’s been at Kaiser for nineteen years. “There are two overriding issues here,” he insists. “We have been pushing Kaiser to increase staffing and invest more in behavioral health care so that we can actually address the needs of our patients, but Kaiser keeps refusing.” In response to the union’s demands and threatened by the state, Kaiser has, at times, increased hiring. Even when Kaiser does hire therapists, however they “rarely last.” Therapy, Rogers explains requires “face to face time” but “we aren’t allowed that time, the time we need and the patients deserve. More time for face-to-face visits, more visits and more time for all the other things we have to do -–charting, answering emails and phone calls. COVID has made this all that much worse.” So patients “endure unconscionable delays, and we’re always behind, we just keep working, no breaks, always ‘above and beyond.’ This isn’t what we were hired to do,” he says, “this isn’t what the new hires expect.”
Shay Loftus is a psychologist at Fairfield Mental Health and Wellness Center in Sonoma County. She’s a steward, a member of NUHW ‘s executive board, and a member of the bargaining committee. She too says this is all about patient care and provider retention. “We’ve been in bargaining since July. These sessions,” she says,” move at a glacial pace. Most proposals come from the union. Management will listen (sometimes), go into caucus but come back out with nothing. Kaiser does not present proposals and does not respond to ours.”
“Kaiser just doesn’t get it,” says Rogers. “Kaiser is highly bureaucratic. Its reps think bargaining is just about wages and benefits, that’s all.” So, there’s been a long stall. “There are negotiations, but they get nowhere. Kaiser management,” Rogers agrees, “doesn’t seem interested in bringing this to a conclusion. We present our proposals, Kaiser presents nothing. We end up negotiating against ourselves.”
In the meantime, the staffing crisis continues, there’s burnout (turnover now is higher than ever, more people leave than are hired); “the new people cycle in and out, disappearing into greener pastures, while the patients wait… and wait.”
Loftus explains just how this works (or doesn’t work), “Someone phones in and spends ten minutes in virtual (phone or video) triage, then, within ten days, is assigned thirty minutes with an intake coordinator, who, as required by law, must schedule the patient with a secondary appointment. At that point, though this may take four to eight weeks, they see an assigned therapist. They have one session with the therapist, only then wait four to eight weeks for follow-up. I’m getting appointments now for August.” And when confronted with acute illness? “We find ways to squeeze them in,” says Loftus, “on our lunch time, during administrative time, or at the end of the day, but this just doesn’t work. It’s not sustainable.” Kaiser likes to say “it offers group sessions as a more-timely alternative, but these sessions can include at once seventy or eighty participants.”
Will the threat of an open-ended strike, move Kaiser? Possibly, And, if not, these clinicians will strike. They’ve done it before and Kaiser knows it.
Kaiser is bringing in thousands of new members
Astonishingly, we learn now that Kaiser is bringing thousands of new members into the system. Earlier in the year, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, struck a deal, outside the normal bidding process, to expand its Kaiser’s Medi-Cal enrollment, perhaps by as much as 200,000 new members, many of whom, of course, will require mental health treatment.
There are reasons, members suggest, that Kaiser has consistently played hard ball (and worse) with NUHW – clearly apparent in comparison with any of the other half dozen unions that represent Kaiser workers. First: NUHW is a union that is present on the “shop [hospital] floor,” that fights for its members, that doesn’t do concessions. Second: NUHW’s Kaiser workers have steadfastly refused to give up their watchdog role – their responsibility to their patients and to the community; it has consistently rejected Kaiser’s insistence on “gag rules” imposed in contracts and elsewhere. Why? The union and its members have from the beginning joined other mental health campaigners in advocating for patients and in exposing Kaiser’s negligence, while calling for parity with medical health care and supporting the rights of mental health care patients. Just this year, they joined with others in pressing for the passage of senate bill 221 (SB221), a bill that hopefully will but some teeth into existing California staffing laws and regulations – laws and regulations “that have resulted in failures to provide enrollees follow up appointments with nonphysician providers of mental health and substance use disorder services within the time frames consistent with generally accepted standards of care.” (SB221)
Now the California Department of Managed Health Care has informed Kaiser Permanente that it will be examining whether the company is providing adequate mental health care services to its twelve million members. “This non-routine survey is based on complaints received from enrollees, providers, and other stakeholders concerning the plan’s behavioral health operations,” said Amanda Levy, the department’s deputy director of health policy and stakeholder relations.
Levy says regulators “would evaluate Kaiser’s internal and external provider networks, timely access to care, processes for intake and follow-up appointments, appointment scheduling processes, levels of care and associated decision-making processes, medical record documentation and retention practices, and monitoring of urgent appointments.”
The California Department of Managed Health Care “Help Center “received a 20% increase in behavioral health complaints for Kaiser in 2021 compared to 2020,” writes Rachel Arrezola, a spokesperson for the department.
This is scandalous, more so in a corporation that began as union friendly and was supported by unions as it recruited tens of thousands of members from Bay Area unions in the years following World War II. It is, however, industrial healthcare in California, where any distinction between profit and not for profit is long gone and corporate corruption rules.
In the trenches NUHW carries on its own fight, today in its contract fight “pushing Kaiser to increase staffing and invest more in behavioral health care so that we can actually address the needs of our patients,” says Rogers. “Hopefully these investigations will finally force Kaiser to stop denying that is failing its mental and behavioral patients and start working with us to improve its services.”
NUHW will continue to call out the corporation when necessary, as it has done repeatedly, above all in the acclaimed report, “Care Delayed is Care Denied” and on the union’s website, a goldmine for advocates of mental healthcare reform.
NUHW president Sal Rosselli sees the hospitals and the health care industry as situated squarely in the corporate world. As others did, they were quick to adopt the strategy of the “lean” corporation, always alert to the bottom line, with “just in time” the mantra in regard to staffing, resources and facilities.
Predicably this was catastrophic in the face of the most severe public health crisis and economic collapse in recent memory. It also exposed the health system’s weaknesses that left the US unprepared for COVID-19. Rosselli says, “there were shortages of everything from doctors and nurses to beds and PPEs. They had no plan for a real emergency.”
In the US today, the health care system is highly unequal in its care especially for people of color but for virtually all working-class families, seen vividly in the debacle of testing and vaccine distribution. The primary care system is in crisis, it is disappearing in rural and impoverished urban settings. Life expectancy is in decline. The insurance system leaves millions uninsured, while millions more face exorbitant commercial insurance prices – prices that fuel growth in health spending exposing people to high premiums and deductibles. The elderly face bankruptcy; they lose their homes. Working people with plans tied to their employers are forced to make wage concessions to keep their benefits. Anxiety and depression have become near universal.
In the face of all this, Rosselli insists, Kaiser “is doing nothing,” even as health care workers abandon their careers in tens of thousands, leaving Kaiser and the industry just that much more unprepared for the next crisis. “This is why we fight,” says Rosselli.
The hope now is that the new movements of teachers, baristas and warehouse workers signal the beginning of a new labor movement and can join the fight. “It’s about time. I think the conditions are right. That’s our experience.” At the same time, Rosselli still has hopes that here in California Medicaid for All can be forced back on to the table. “I’m sure it’s coming, if not this year, then next,” he says. “We’ve never needed it more. We’re all for it, we have to get it.”
In the meantime, they will – when necessary – strike! They deserve our support.
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Myth and Reality
By Hardy Green
The violence of the Old West has been widely described—and magnified in countless Hollywood productions. But a look at the record of Wild West violence shows that it was nothing like as bloody and horrific as the current spate of AR-15 murders across the U.S.
A little background: In the immediate post-Civil War years, a number of “cattle towns” sprouted up across Kansas, encouraging great drives of the immense Texas longhorn herds to these railheads. Dodge City, Abilene, Wichita, Ellsworth, and Caldwell all came into being and flourished between 1867 and 1885. In 1867, a mere 35,000 head of Texas beef were driven to Abilene, with perhaps 20,000 being shipped to points east. Wichita and Dodge City, each with links to the Santa Fe railroad, rose as important shipping points in the 1870s. In 1882, 200,000 head of cattle were sold in Dodge City alone; by 1910, 27 million cattle had made the trek from Texas to the Kansas towns.
But famously, when cattle drives ended, they unleashed upon the towns dozens of rowdy cowboys—suddenly flush with end-of-drive pay and eager to cut loose. Catering to their wants were legions of prostitutes, gambling halls, and 24-hour saloons. Brawls of every sort resulted: During Abilene’s second cattle season, 1869, one cowboy rode his horse into a saloon, pulled a gun on the bartenders, and upon exiting, engaged in a shootout with numerous other “desperate characters.” The towns were thus compelled to effect a variety of peace-keeping mechanisms—one of the most common being hiring a crew of former gunfighters as a police force.
All the same, in the words of historian Robert R. Dykstra’s 1970 work, The Cattle Towns, there were relatively few fatalities. “Many legendary desperadoes and gunfighters sojourned in the cattle towns at one time or another, but few participated in slayings,” he writes. These notable badmen included Doc Holliday, Clay Allison, and the teen-aged gunman John Wesley Hardin. Nor did badge-wearing gunslingers contribute much to fatality stats: “Wild Bill” Hickok killed only two men during his one term as Abilene city marshal; Dodge City’s Wyatt Earp, only one; and “Bat” Masterson, also of Dodge, killed none at all.
According to Dykstra, between 1870 and 1885, total homicides in the five cattle towns amounted to 45.
Many of the wanton cowpokes were likely no older, and probably no less unhappy, than the Uvalde, Texas killer, Salvador Ramos. But a six-shooter bears no comparison to the AR-15 that in only a few minutes fired off over 100 rounds in Uvalde—or to the other AR-15s used in every recent U.S. mass killing from Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut to the Buffalo, N.Y. supermarket.
It’s no wonder the Uvalde police were afraid to face the shooter.
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This article appeared previously on Hardy Green’s blog
Winning (Time) Isn’t Everything
By Byron Laursen
Winning Time (the HBO series) is based on writer Jeff Pearlman’s 2014 book “Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s.” I didn’t write that book and remain dismissive of its reliance on gossip-y, horny-porny topics. But the emergence of the series has brought many questions my way, including some from Peter Olney, a long-term friend (and co-editor of the Stansbury Forum), an admirable worker for “la gente,” the common folk.
The book I did write, which was my first, is “Show Time: Inside the Lakers’ Breakthrough Season”, done with and for Pat Riley, the former player who became the Lakers’ coach and guided them through the 1980s, first as assistant coach then as head coach beginning in 1982.
If memory serves, Sports Illustrated called them the best team of the century – in any sport.
When the book behind the series came to my attention, I couldn’t help noticing they’d borrowed the title Pat and I had used in 1988, giving it a minor typography tweak. Since titles can’t be copyrighted, I didn’t begrudge the author for borrowing it. It had been conferred by our publisher anyway, not by us, because it was marketable. And the book became a strong best-seller, for which the publisher paid us a nice wad of bonus money. I’m still grateful to Pat for choosing me to write it.
Winning Time is enormously successful as entertainment, not as documentation, but entertainment fulfills important needs. The first season also covered a time span before I got lucky enough to be a fringe character around the Lakers organization. Still, I have some bones to pick.
Let’s start with the late Jerry Buss, owner of the Lakers. He was angry that we’d used “Show Time” because in his mind he believed he would one day write a book with that title. He didn’t leave behind any book, as it turned out. But he did leave some impressions. My exposure to Buss was limited. In fact, the friendly hour or so I spent interviewing him was more time than I needed or desired. The charisma in John C. Reilly’s performance as Buss exceeds that of the man he portrays by a huge multiple. In my experience, Buss exuded beyond-ripe body odors from the pits of his single-color silk shirts, and in scoring his numerous “dates” had the services of a couple of guys anyone would describe as pimps. They sorted and culled from the female talent hanging around after games in hopes of making it with one or more of the players, found the one(s) willing to settle instead for the rich guy who paid the players’ salaries, and guided them to Buss.
Jerry West I barely met. But I never saw or heard evidence that he was the tantrum-throwing hothead he’s portrayed to be in the series. Still, he was tightly wound. When I asked him a potentially ticklish question – about a trade Buss wanted to make, one that would have proved stupid – he refused to answer. I shelved the question and moved on. Within two minutes he circled back and answered the question at length, as if needing to unburden.
Kareem, Michael Cooper, Jamaal Wilkes, and many other insiders also disagree with how West was characterized. West has threatened the series producers with a suit. I imagine he could win.
Chick Hearn, the announcer, was his own greatest fan and in my experience a miserable s.o.b. I didn’t know about his alcohol habit until seeing the series, but it fits with his personal behavior. His shtick was so tedious that when I watched from home, I turned off the sound. He liked to believe that he was a power in the organization. But when word went around that Hearn said he disapproved of a certain trade and would make his feelings known, West reacted with laughter.
I should add that Riles never spoke ill of either Buss or Hearn, both of whom were instrumental in his career and deserving of his respect.
Pat may feel honored to have a great actor like Adrien Brody portraying him, I doubt he was ever as stylistically clueless as the Winning Time wardrobe department has made him – no doubt to build contrast for the closet full of bespoke suits he began assembling when his paychecks grew. Before the Armani connection was made, he liked his pants with a welted seam on the legs – a flashy choice, but subtle. In more recent years, Pat has acquired a lead-sled customized postwar Mercury from ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons, and some vintage electric guitars, so he remains a fan of the things that were cool when he was a kid.
Kareem has complained that the portrayal of Magic makes him seem like a simpleton easily led around by the sexual honey constantly being offered, and that his own portrayal makes him seem like “a pompous prick.” Kareem is in fact a complex guy, the “brother from another planet” to many of his teammates, and not comfortable with being the focus of all the personal attention that comes with being extremely tall, talented, intellectual, trail-blazing and fame-worthy. There were times when I saw him as a prick, but I’ve also seen the shy guy who would like to be left alone with his headphones and his music.
What else?
In Magic’s first game and first win as a Laker, he didn’t feed Kareem in the post for the game-winning hook shot. That was done by teammate Don Ford, with a long inbounds pass. I’m sure there are plenty of other halfway-true elements from on-court and off. But Winning Time is no documentary. It’s reductionist, slappy, heavy on the gossip, and it pushes limits in order to convey how much excitement Los Angeles felt for their Lakers through the 1980s. In that pursuit, the show needs to be hyperbolic because the reality was that Magic and Company, Riles and staff, gave L.A. fans an amazingly enormous and long-lasting lift through the decade. It was a generous gift. Magic – Earvin to his family and Buck to his teammates – really is a great presence in any room, magnetic and joyful, with a sense of appreciation for his fan support, even when he might wish to have some time off from the adulation.
Theresa Volpe Laursen, my wife, worked in costuming for the 1989 Eddie Murphy film Harlem Nights. At the cast and crew wrap party, Murphy and other celebrities (Arsenio, etc.) had their party in an exclusive room. We never saw them. But Magic spent much of the evening rubbing shoulders with the drivers, costumers, camera operators, and other down-to-earth folk. Asked to pose for photos, he always obliged, and his smile never faded. Just as he did while running the Lakers to greatness on the court, he made sure everybody had their moments of glory and belonging.
Maybe the second season of Winning Time will give him, and all the Show Time Lakers, a more grown-up and truer to life representation.
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They Built This City?
By Hardy Green
The current issue of MIT Technology Review is focused on so-called cybercurrencies and contains a jaw-dropper of its own: Crypto millionaires have plans to build their own private cities in Central America.
In an article entitled “Cities Built by Crypto,” tech writer Laurie Clarke describes how, in a plan endorsed by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, that country is selling $1 billion worth of debt in U.S. dollars to fund the construction of Bitcoin City and Bitcoin mining operations.
The Salvadorean project is not alone: Other crypto investors are leaning on governments from Puerto Rico to Honduras to create semi-autonomous enterprise zones that, they say, will stimulate growth and enrich the locals.
Sounds like more enterprise-zone flapdoodle, you say?
Yes, it seems the Ayn Rand-devotee crowd intends to keep plugging its dubious no-downside, rugged-individualist social vision until there’s a real meltdown.
There’s more to the Salvadorean plan: Bitcoin City’s economy will run on that cybercurrency, be powered by geothermal energy from Conchagua Volcano, and be largely free of taxes…if things go according to the plan.
There’s even a non-profit foundation dedicated to the proliferation of such crypto-cities around the planet, the Free Private Cities Foundation. In such cities, as envisioned by foundation President Titus Gebel and former World Bank economist Paul Romer, residents pay an annual fee for such services as policing—and if the services aren’t provided, these “contract citizens” can take the supposed provider before an independent arbitration tribunal.
To me, the author of a book about company towns, it all sounds a bit like a company town…as envisaged by a lawyer. But there’s a lot yet to be disclosed: Would the managing enterprise own all institutions—from the hospital to the newspaper to housing and the company store—as in such company towns as Kannapolis, N.C. or the original Lowell, Mass.? I mean, there’s already company “scrip,” a.k.a. Bitcoin…so why not?
And what happens when the next pandemic hits? I mean, if such towns’ citizens are all just independent free actors, just what entity will tell them there should be curfews or a lockdown? Who would tell people they must wear masks or get vaccinations?
Oh, I see—forget about public health. In this life, you’re on your own.
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For more reading:
The Conversation
Fortune
Rest of the World on Próspera
This article appeared previously on his blog
At the Border of the American dream: The Hidden World of New Mexico’s Colonias 
By Photos/Story by Don J. Usner - Searchlight New Mexico
Rural communities near the border lack amenities, but thousands call them home.
Fidel Pérez made his way from Durango, Mexico, to Juárez and then to Chaparral, New Mexico, in 1970. He was cleaning yards and working in the agricultural fields of nearby Anthony when border patrol officials arrested him. When they asked why he had come to the United States, he replied, “Because I’m hungry! And it’s easier here to make money for tortillas than it is back in Mexico.”
Later, after he’d married an American, he returned to Chaparral. It was one of many informal communities known as colonias, a word that, in the Southwest borderlands, connotes just the kind of place where he’d landed: a rural unincorporated settlement populated almost entirely by Mexican immigrants and lacking such amenities as paved roads, electricity, water systems, wastewater treatment and decent housing.
Right: Pérez, in his kitchen, shows his green card, which he keeps handy in his wallet. After 52 years in the United States, he owns three rental units in addition to his own home.
Pérez is one of the thousands of laborers who’ve traveled north of the border in search of work. Squeezed out of established housing markets by price — and by overt racism — these low-wage workers have sought new places to settle. Landowners and real estate developers in New Mexico, seeing an opportunity, have found ways to offer what the newcomers wanted: cheap land. And the lax laws outside of established municipalities allowed landowners to subdivide property without providing basic infrastructure.
The resulting small, poorly designed subdivisions started as little more than clusters of makeshift houses and mobile homes — often with only a few dozen residents. They grew rapidly, offering people like Pérez the possibility of land and homeownership. Hundreds of colonias soon sprang up along the Mexican border from Texas to California, and today there are more than 2,000 of them. In New Mexico alone, there are more than 140 colonias, home to some 135,000 people.
Lots were often sold using unscrupulous contract-for-deed arrangements and other predatory lending practices. Buyers — who often didn’t speak or read or write in English — had to navigate through loosely regulated real estate contracts in a legal system they may not have understood well. A purchase often left them without a legal title for their small, unimproved lots of land without electricity, gas, a sewage system or indoor plumbing. Some buyers wound up locked into a cycle of debt that exacerbated their poverty.
Appalling conditions in New Mexico colonias prompted local and regional governments to reckon with them in the 1990s. The state attorney general attempted a crackdown and subdivision laws were amended to close loopholes, but by then the colonias were well established.
Today, it’s easy to drive right by a colonia and not even see it. In New Mexico, they are typically situated between towns within a couple hours’ drive of the border — the majority within striking distance of the Interstate 10 and Interstate 25 corridors and smaller feeder roads. Amid the rush of semis bouncing between urban centers, commuter cars carry laborers from the colonias to their jobs in farm fields, factories and service industries in El Paso and around Las Cruces.
Immigrants chasing home ownership can still find relatively inexpensive land in the colonias. Infrastructure has improved for the most part, thanks to local activism and government and nonprofit programs. A few colonias have incorporated and grown to include a few thousand or more residents. Some have gained a measure of status as bona fide towns. But despite their ubiquity and the large numbers of people who live in them, they remain largely invisible to most New Mexicans. I traveled to southern New Mexico this year to bring them into view.
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Voices from the colonias
“I’ve lived here in Palmeras, maybe about two months. But I’ve been here in the States for a good long while. Like 25 years. I come from Mexico, from Delicias, Chihuahua.
“My woman, she is working now, in Anthony. She is from Coahuila. We are renting here. My landlord was very cool. He was Mexican. He owned all of this, and he just died. Now the one who is in charge is his son-in-law. He’s very good, too. He’s charging me cheap — $175 per month.”
— Cecilio Salinas
“Well, I lived in El Paso, but I am Mexican, from Juárez. And that man next door, he’s from Juárez, too. I am originally from Meoqui, in the state of Chihuahua, but I was actually born in Delicias, Chihuahua. I’ve been living here 10 years.
“A gentleman sold us this property, but it was a fraud. We paid $18,000, and that was because it was a friend of that man and he sold it to him, and now he doesn’t want to give us our money, and he wants to throw us out of here. But he doesn’t have the title. And now we’re not paying rent. We’re just here. We don’t give him any more money.”
— Marisela López
“I’ve lived here almost five months. I was working in El Paso at a tattoo shop and studying to become a professional tattoo artist. But the transportation into town was an issue. So I couldn’t add to my education. I’m from El Paso originally. My parents ended up moving here when I was like, 10. And now I’m 29. I live here in this place, part trailer and part house. And all the way in the back of this property is my neighbor. And then over there, all the way in the back over there, there’s another neighbor. This neighborhood is pretty crowded, but everybody gets along. It’s pretty chill here. There are a lot of Mexicans here. I was born here in the U.S. I guess you would call me, like, a Chicano.”
— Bryant Chacón
“I am from Jiménez, Chihuahua. I’ve lived here about 10 years. … There is not much crime here. It is very quiet. Very nice here. Very comfortable because nobody messes with us.
“We go to Mexico for vacations — when they give us vacations. Because I work, yes, I work, in a dairy. We work 12 hours, from three in the afternoon until three in the morning. Four days a week. That’s why I was asleep, because today I got out at three in the morning, milking the cows, with machines.”
— Celia Rey
“I’ve been here 20 years. In this trailer. I am from Guadalajara. And I came here to work. And I lasted 12 years working, and then I got sick with epilepsy. And then I broke my leg. I didn’t feel good anymore. I am disabled. I’m here in the chair, or just in bed. Due to epileptic seizures and high blood pressure.
“Once I was about to get married, but my woman cheated on me with a friend. There in Mexico. And I was traumatized. The trauma has gone away a bit. But I’m afraid of falling in love. Because they say that people here, the women just want papers. And I have papers.
“But I no longer go out. I get bored, I get sick, I go to bed, it’s my routine. Sometimes I feel depressed or something, I go out, I get distracted with my babies — that’s what I call my dogs, babies. If sometimes I feel like this, I put them inside here, and they see that I feel bad, and they see that I fall asleep, and they see that I don’t wake up, they start crying, they think of cheering me up, they get on my body here. And they let me know when people arrive.”
— Vicente Fuentes
“I came to the U.S. 15 years ago and we have lived here in Milagro for 12 years. I come from Guanajuato, Mexico. Far away, by car, almost 24 hours. My father arranged papers for us. He lives in Hatch. We have resident status. And I started to work the moment that I arrived. I worked in the fields, or in the dairy. There are a lot of dairies here. And there’s lots of work in the fields here. Onions, chili.
“This colonia was really small. Maybe just 12 houses here. Way back then the road was just rough dirt, there was no drainage, and now there’s a good road that drains, and there are more houses. We have potable water, but no natural gas. Just propane. And yes, we have electricity.
“It’s very quiet, peaceful. Relaxing. I come from work, get up on that chair, sleep really well on the trampoline. No problems, no nothing. When I married my wife, I wanted a house, a home in Hatch, but it’s very expensive there. So, I saw this house trailer, already here on this land, and a man told me, ‘Hey, do you want to buy my land?’ And in those years the price was good, it was a whole lot to buy here. ‘Give me this much,’ he said. ‘OK.’ And I paid every month, and now it’s paid off — thanks to God.”
— Miguel Diáz
“I was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, in a little town called Los Garcias, near Meoqui. My mother was born in the U.S., and that’s how we were able to arrange our resident status. She’s Mexican, but she was born in Pomona, Calif. She married my father and they moved to Mexico. They had all their children there, nine in all. And none of us are left in Mexico — we all moved here — my parents, too.
“When we first arrived here, in 1974, we came to La Union, near Anthony, and we worked on farms. Then I worked for nine years in Amarillo, Texas, in the slaughterhouses. And then I found this valley, and I liked it — the climate and the people. It’s really peaceful here.”
— Enrique Garcia
“I was born in El Paso and I grew up in Chihuahua, Mexico. I have citizenship, and so do my kids, who were born here, too, in Las Cruces. I came to the U.S. six years ago, for my kids and the schools. I have three kids, 14, 11 and 9. I drive every day to El Paso, 20 miles, to take them to school. … We have been living here in La Mesa for three years. And thank God everything’s OK, so far so good.
“My husband works. Somebody has to work! We’re a team: He works, and I’m in charge of the kids. He works with livestock, for a company in Del Rio, Texas. It’s seven hours from here. He works with cattle that come across the border. Around 300,000 head cross the border and they’re taken in trucks to feedlots. He comes home on weekends.
“We have a very good life here. We bought this trailer, and the land, and everything is paid off, thanks to my husband. I travel to Texas for the schools, because they’re better there. But we’re very lucky. We’re very happy here. We’re going to stay here.”
— Cecilia Moya
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The Stansbury Forum is grateful to @SearchlightNM (Twitter) @SearchlightNewMexico (Facebook) who produced and first published this piece. They are an absolutely great site for news of New Mexico and all issues that affect the country whether rural and non-rural. We strongly recommend you visit them on a regular basis.
Searchlight New Mexico is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization dedicated to investigative reporting in New Mexico.
Peter and the Peloton!
By Peter Olney
The 105th running of the Giro d’Italia begins on May 5, Friday. The Stansbury Forum is happy to present the cycling exploits of co-editor Peter Olney in Florence, Italy on March 20th of this year.
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One of the first tasks upon arriving in San Frediano, our neighborhood in Florence, is to rent a sturdy “bicicletta” for our two months in Italy. At the corner of our street, Via del’Orto and Via del Mago di Oro, is Cicleria Iandelli run by Riccardo Iandelli who was an up and coming junior cyclist in his youth. He found me a sturdy city bike, which means no clip ons for the pedals and wider tires for the cobblestones. He threw in a lock and a helmet for 200 Euros for two months.
Each day I would try to ride to explore a new place. I am hoping to mail home “proletarian postcards” from places off the tourist trails. As you can imagine they are places with working class communities, often near manufacturing locations like Sesto Fiorentino, Campi Bissenzi and Nuovo Pignone in the northwest, and hill towns like Bagno a Ripoli and Impruneta to the southeast. These are longer excursions, often 15 or 20 kilometers. But perhaps my most challenging ride is to Fiesole, the hill town just north of Firenze and just ten kilometers from my door. My usual route to Fiesole includes an ascent to Piazzale Michelangelo where the iconic postcard panorama of Florence is the first stop on any guided tour.
On Sunday March 20, I arrived on my “bici” at Piazzale to find cycling team support cars with roof racks full of replacement bikes, chase cars, ambulances, and a ton of motorcycle cops. I even saw a van emblazoned with the azure blue of the Italian national cycling team. They were parked, massing on the piazzale. It looked like a race was to begin shortly. I kept on riding from the Piazzale and descended to the Arno, crossed the river and after a short flat traverse started the ascent to Fiesole, a five-kilometer ride, but at 7% grade. I tooled along in the lowest gear and was passed several times by younger and lighter riders with state-of-the-art racing bikes. When I finished the final climb into the main piazza di Fiesole I rode towards the statue of Garibaldi and King Vittorio Emanuel II, both depicted on horseback. I saw Carabinieri directing traffic and diverting traffic. I saw a mass of spectators look up to see a lone cyclist: me, entering the piazza. A little ripple of chatter: “Oh the leader, there has been a breakaway….” Then the momentary murmur subsided as the expectant spectators realized the oversized rider wearing no colorful spandex and riding a pedestrian city bike was not part of the “gara per onorare Alfredo Martini” (a race in honor of Alfredo Martini, renowned Italian cyclist and coach of the Italian national team, deceased in 2014).
Soon after I dismounted, the real deal “peloton” came roaring around the corner and further up the hill from Fiesole.
The Gara is 172 kilometers and weaves up and down Florentine hills before finishing in Sesto Fiorentino, the birthplace of Martini. My brief moment as a “breakaway rider” reminded me of the wonderful masterpiece movie made by Charlie Chaplin in 1936, Modern Times. This depression era story features Chaplin as the Tramp, an unemployed worker who sees a red flag fall off a construction truck. He picks up the flag and yells to the driver to stop and take back the flag. Just at that moment a march of the unemployed turns the corner and falls in behind Chaplin carrying a red flag. Then the police attack to break up the march and descend on Chaplin assuming he is the leader of the march.
I suffered no arrests or beatings, but for one solitary Chaplinesque moment, I was the leader of the “peloton” in Fiesole.
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Readers are owed my “proletarian postcards” from those sites in the Metro Firenze area that are off the tourist trail of museums and cathedrals. They will be forthcoming on the pages of The Forum.
Seize the Time: Biden’s Labor Board and a New Workers’ Up-Rising
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
The labor world is abuzz with the April 1st certification victory by the independent Amazon Labor Union at Staten Island’s JFK8 Amazon fulfillment center. Despite the election setback for the second ALU vote at Staten Island’s LDJ5 sortation facility on May 2, the momentum for Amazon workers is still very strong.[1] Similarly, the unprecedented string of organizing victories at Starbuck’s cafes across the country is energizing the labor movement. To date there have been 240 plus NLRB election filings at Starbucks around the county. Twenty-eight of those filings have already resulted in victory for Workers United, an SEIU affiliate. The new level of organizing has overwhelmed the NLRB![2]
We are clearly having a wonderful “labor moment.” Observers and organizers have credited the victories and the momentum to the disrespect shown workers during the COVID pandemic, the radicalization of youth by Bernie Sanders and Black Lives matter, and workers turning to unions out of frustration with Washington gridlock.
However, there is a larger political context for this organizing upsurge. As a result of President Biden’s appointments to the NLRB, the Starbucks and Amazon victories along with many other organizing campaigns, have been aided and abetted by very positive rulings from a reinvigorated national board. NLRB General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a former union-side attorney also appointed by Biden, has adopted an aggressive enforcement stance towards employer unfair labor practices.[3] And as we have noted before[4], the Board’s legal rulings have been accompanied by the bully pulpit of pro-union pronouncements from “Union Joe.”
Starbucks sought to force its employees into regional elections arguing that the appropriate “community of interest” for the bargaining unit in Buffalo should not be the individual stores that workers petitioned for. The NLRB ruled that each individual store constituted a separate bargaining unit, enabling the union to roll up individual victories at the sites where the union was ready to go.
In another significant ruling, after finding significant Unfair Labor Practices at Amazon’s Staten Island Fulfillment Center, the Board ordered management to allow workers to campaign in non-work areas – break and lunch rooms – while they were off shift. This was a huge boost to Amazon Labor Union supporters that enabled round-the-clock meetings with workers.
In a recent shocker for corporate management, the General Counsel issued a memo deeming mandatory “captive audience” meetings to be an unfair labor practice because they constituted coercive behavior in violation of the NLRA. What a wonderful paradox that organizers are now debating whether this is a good thing in light of the fact that where workers have a strong organizing committee such meetings afford in plant organizers a forum to challenge management in front of their coworkers showing the power of on-the-job union leadership.[5]
In a rousing speech to the North American Building Trades Unions’ Legislative Conference, President Sean McGarvey gave effusive praise to the Biden administration for regulatory action and appointments on enforcement of Davis Bacon laws and support for apprenticeship training.[6] Both of which were under attack from the Trump administration. McGarvey’s speech was also extraordinary because he began it with strong support for the protests against the police murder of George Floyd and a condemnation of the January 6th insurrectionists. McGarvey hailed the appointment of former Boston mayor and Laborer’s union leader Marty Walsh as Labor Secretary. Leaders of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union have similarly heaped praise on the Biden administration and Secretary Walsh for their defense of worker interests in the supply chain.[7]
Just as history tells us that working class uprisings happen in spurts and often come from unexpected quarters, history also teaches us that such surges are prodded and sustained by good politics.[8] The National Industrial Recovery Act which passed in 1932, while later invalidated by the Supreme Court, set the tenor of the times and helped spur the 1934 west coast maritime strike that led to the formation of the ILWU. Similarly, the passage of the Wagner Act in 1935 helped spur workers’ struggles for union recognition and collective bargaining in the auto, steel and electrical industries.[9]
The political opportunity of this moment gives workers who are organizing an opportunity for some creative thinking. But it will require concrete analysis of current conditions and assessment of the balance of power. Based on what we have seen at Staten Island: the workers are ultimately in the best position to make the callThe JFK8 victory on Staten Island was not anticipated by most labor “experts” because the ALU filed for an election with only a 30% showing of support — the minimum qualifying threshold on authorization cards. The rank-and-file organizers defended their decision on two counts:
1: Churn and turnover at Amazon means that getting to 70% is nearly impossible
2: Getting to 30% is an amazing achievement and we built our strength from there to win the vote.
The victory at Staten Island’s JFK8 has rocked the labor relations world. The disappointing vote at LDJ5 doesn’t change that. For the foreseeable future, any walkout, work stoppage, or NLRB victory at Amazon is going to be big news. Imagine the reverberations if Amazon workers and their organizations were to file and win elections at multiple facilities around the country — especially in giant metro and logistics markets like NY/NJ, Chicago, or Southern California’s Inland Empire.
It’s not often there is a strategic opening created by the confluence of a favorable NLRB, a supportive presidency, a tight job market, and a roiling economy. This is not a time to cling to paradigms wedded to past conditions and stale practice. Now, at long last, we have an opportunity to “Think Big.”[10]
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[1] ALU is likely to file unfair labor practice charges challenging the outcome of the election. “Amazon Labor Union stumbles as workers vote down union at second NYC facility,” by Mitchell Clark, The Verge, May 2, 2022, https://www.theverge.com/2022/5/2/23053665/amazon-ldj5-union-vote-results. Also see our, “Viewpoint: Amazon Win Shows We Need an Eclectic and Class-Wide Approach,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, April 08, 2022, https://labornotes.org/blogs/2022/04/viewpoint-amazon-win-shows-we-need-eclectic-and-class-wide-approach
[2] “Starbucks Store Unionizing Surge Tests Cash-Strapped Labor Board,” by Ian Kullgren and Robert Lafolla, Bloomberg Daily Labor Report, April 27, 2022, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/starbucks-store-unionizing-surge-tests-cash-strapped-labor-board
[3] “The Memo Writer, Jennifer Abruzzo, general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, has outlined an agenda that would transform the American workplace,” by Harold Meyerson, American Prospect, March 30, 2022
https://prospect.org/labor/memo-writer-jennifer-abruzzo/
[4] “Wake Up, Everybody! Midterms are Almost Here,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, Convergence & The Stansbury Forum, February 25, 2022, and “The Message from the Amazon Union Defeat in Alabama Is Clear: Keep Organizing,” by Rand Wilson and Peter Olney, In These Times, April 9, 2021, https://inthesetimes.com/article/amazon-union-defeat-alabama-bessemer-rwdsu-pro-act
[5] The General Counsel’s decision on employer mandatory meetings still must gain the national board’s approval. Employers would still be allowed to hold “non mandatory” meetings and just “encourage” workers to attend which by itself would be coercive. which would have to be challenged w ULPs (happening in LDJ 5)
[6] 2022 U.S. Legislative Conference: Remarks by NABTU President Sean McGarvey, https://youtu.be/ENJ3fsRNsWk
[7] https://www.ilwu.org/labor-secretary-marty-walsh-meets-with-ilwu-members-in-seattle-and-tacoma/
[8] “Amazon Workers Are Organizing, and Elected Officials Are Supporting Them,” by Eric Blanc, Jacobin, 4/25/2022
[9] “Organizing, Politics, Mood: Reflections on the 1930s,” by Glenn Perušek, Convergence magazine, May 2, 2022
[10] “Think Big: Organizing a Successful Amazon Workers’ Movement in the United States by Combining the Strengths of the Left and Organized Labor,” by Peter Olney and Rand Wilson, in The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy, Edited by Jake Alimahomed-Wilson, Ellen Reese, 2019, https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341484/the-cost-of-free-shipping/ and “Think Bigger: New possibilities for building workers’ power at Amazon,” by Peter Olney & Rand Wilson, Stansbury Forum, October 1, 2021, https://stansburyforum.com/2021/10/01/think-bigger-new-possibilities-for-building-workers-power-at-amazon
How Border Deployment Led To Union Organizing in Texas
By Steve Early and Suzanne Gordon
When a group of Texas workers started discussing job problems and what to do about them a few months ago, their list of complaints would have been familiar to Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse staff, or restive young journalists at new and old media outlets.
With little notice, their employer changed work schedules and transferred employees to a new job location. Some of those adversely affected applied for hardship waivers, based on family life disruption, but many requests were denied. Meanwhile, access to a major job benefit—tuition assistance —was sharply curtailed. Even paychecks were no longer arriving promptly or at the right address. When a few brave souls called attention to these problems, management labelled them “union agitators” who were trying to “mislead” their co-workers.
Operating outside the national media spotlight on recent labor recruitment in the private sector, key activists were not deterred. In mid-April, members of the Texas State Guard, Army and Air Force National Guard declared themselves to be the “Military Caucus” of the Texas State Employees Union (TSEU), an affiliate of the Communications Workers of America. Taking direct aim at Republican Governor Greg Abbott, who has ordered thousands of them to police the U.S.-Mexico border, these TSEU supporters called for greater legislative oversight of such open-ended missions so that Guard members are called up only to “provide genuine service to the public good, not posturing for political gain.”
Union Demands
Their own mission statement announced that they will seek meetings with legislators, the governor’s office, and the state agency known as the Texas Military Department. Union goals include a guaranteed end date for all Guard members on state active duty, full restoration of tuition assistance slashed by Abbott, and immediate access to the same healthcare coverage as other state employees, along with state subsidized coverage “for our families while on Texas Military state mobilization.” To achieve these objectives, they pledged to “build a union which gets stronger with every new member we sign up” and coordinate with other state employees who have a “proud history of organizing” as part of the 8,500-member TSEU.
Hunter Schuler, a Texas Guard member and medic who helped initiate the effort, was one of those labelled an “agitator” for doing so. “None of us would be unionizing if our jobs didn’t suck and without all the negative aspects of the mission,” he says. “There’s not great mechanisms for getting problems to the attention of the top leadership any other way.”
Thanks to a U.S. Department of Justice court filing in January, Texas is not the only state where National Guard members are now organizing. District Council 4 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which is headed by Jody Barr, a veteran of the Connecticut Guard, is also opening its doors to Guard members called up for in-state duty. AFSCME was one of four public employee unions that sought to clarify that a 45-year-old federal prohibition against unionization by uniformed employees of the U.S. Department of Defense, does not apply to Guard members like Christopher Albani, when operating under state control.
As a member of the 103rd Civil Engineer squadron, Albani helped his home state respond to natural disasters, public health crises, and other emergencies. But, as Barr points out, when Connecticut Guard members were involved in setting up field hospitals and distributing medical supplies as part of the state’s pandemic response, they “were not able to bargain over COVID-19 safety precautions, even though state employees they worked directly alongside were able to have a voice in COVID-19 testing and other necessary precautions.”
Operation Lone Star
It’s often said in the field of labor relations that unions don’t organize workers: bad bosses do. While the validity of that old saw is questionable, it’s certainly been true of a bad boss named Greg Abbott. Last year, with an eye toward his 2022 re-election campaign, Governor Abbott launched Operation Lone Star. This $2 billion a year attempt to police the U.S.-Mexico border with Texas Guard members was necessary, he claimed, because the Biden Administration was failing to do so with the Border Patrol.
Viewed by many as a political stunt, Abbott’s sudden mobilization of 10,000 Guard members took them away, with little notice, from their regular jobs or shorter-term duty in pandemic relief efforts. Nearly 1,000 of the citizen soldiers affected applied for hardship waivers, citing family responsibilities or their civilian work as first responders. A quarter of these requests were denied because, as one Army National Guard veteran explained, “for this mission, if you had a warm pulse, they were sending you to the border. They didn’t care what your issues were.”
Adding insult to injury was the seemingly pointless nature of border duty itself. Its main initial risk was COVID outbreaks among troops packed together in trailers in groups of 30 each. As TSEU reports, “members reported being assigned to 12-hour shifts, which they spent sitting in a Humvee or walking around near an observation post, waiting for something to happen.”As one soldier assigned to a post near Brownsville explained, “If someone comes up, we ask them to stop and wait, we call the Border Patrol. If someone runs, we call the Border Patrol. We’re basically mall cops at the border.” On April 22, Abbott’s mission resulted in its first direct fatality. On a treacherous stretch of the Rio Grande river, Specialist Bishop Evans saw several migrants struggling in the water. The 22-year old African-American from Arlington, Texas, stripped off his body armor and dived in to save them. They survived but Evans was swept away while trying to do, without proper training or equipment, what a local mayor called a “good deed.” At least four other deaths—in the form of suicide—have been reported among soldiers whose mental health problems or financial pressures were exacerbated when they were sent to the border or faced deployment there.
Meanwhile, Abbott’s administration has sharply reduced one of the main incentives for young people like Evans to join the Guard. While the governor was boasting about Operation Lone Star on Fox News and fending off a Republican primary challenge from two other right-wing Republicans, he cut the budget for tuition assistance for Guard members in half, from $3 million to $1.4 million. Previously Guard members, working full-time toward a graduate or undergraduate degree, were eligible for tution reimbursement amounting to $4,500 per semester. That award was reduced to $1,000 for only about 714 Guard members. In addition, as TSEU Organizing Coordinator Missy Benavidez explains, the state’s involuntary, year-long call-up order was highly disruptive for soldiers trying to be part-time students. Some were forced to withdraw from classes in mid-semester; others had paid to pay out of pocket for courses they planned to take, or take out loans.
Second Coming of the ASU?
If the U.S. Army ever reneged on the education benefits–much touted by military recruiters as a reason for young men and women to enlist—any soldier agitating for a union in response would face criminal prosecution. That’s because workplace organizing among active duty GIs during the Vietnam era, became so potentially disruptive of “good order and discipline” that Congress outlawed membership in any “military labor organization,” with the penalty being five years in jail. Before that crackdown, one organizational expression of widespread discontent among draftees fifty-years ago was the American Servicemen’s Union. The ASU issued membership cards, formed local chapters on military bases and on naval vessels, and published a national newspaper. Among its organizational models were already existing soldier associations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, West Germany and the Netherlands (where a union of conscripts won higher pay and reforms of the military penal code). Among ASU’s own demands was the right to elect officers and reject what soldiers might deem to be illegal orders.
TSEU volunteer Hunter Schuler is definitely not in the mold of Army private Andy Stapp, founder of the ASU, who was court-martialed twice for his radical activism at Fort Still in Oklahoma during the late 1960s. Guard member organizing by TSEU and AFSCME follows more in the footsteps of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), which voted in 1976 to amend its constitution to permit the recruitment of active duty service members, helping to trigger the Congressional ban enacted the following year (with the bi-partisan support of Senators Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden). Schuler’s civilian job is deputy clerk for the Supreme Court of Texas. He has a master’s degree in statistics and plans to pursue a doctorate program in that subject at Southern Methodist University.
“I don’t really have any prior experience with unions,” he told me. “Ideologically, I think of myself as pretty conservative, leaning to the right.” In that respect, he has much in common with other “young, adult males who join the military” and “are pretty unfamiliar with unions in Texas.” As a recruiter for TSEU, Schuler has had to reassure some new dues-payers that the union was “not just a bunch of Democrats who want to get Beto O’Rourke elected” (although TSEU has endorsed O’Rourke’s general election challenge to Abbott in November).
Strike Breaker Protection
In Texas and other states, the Guard is typically called out, with much popular appreciation, to help with disaster relief efforts or public health emergencies. On other occasions, it gets drawn into policing. In 1986, for example, a Democratic-Farm Labor governor sent Guard members to protect strike-breakers at the Hormel meat-packing plant in Austin, Minnesota. Thirty-four years later, another DFL governor in the same state deployed Guard members in Minneapolis and St. Paul during Black Lives Matters protests over the killing of George Floyd. And a year ago, the Guard was again posted on Twin Cities street corners, along with local police, in anticipation of renewed civil unrest in the event that former police officer Derek Chauvin was acquitted of Floyd’s murder. When CWA Local 7250 President Kieran Knutson learned that one unit, with 50 soldiers and 15 armored vehicles, was operating out of the St. Paul labor center last April, he decided that “our union hall should have no place in those militarized efforts against the Black community, activists, and working-class people.”
A group of concerned trade unionists from CWA, the Minnesota Nurses Association, and United Brotherhood of Carpenters gathered at the labor center to demand that the Guard members leave. According to Knutson, they spoke one-on-one with the soldiers based there, who were mainly white and from rural areas of the state. The union activists urged them “to break ranks and join the anti-racist movement sparked by murders of Black people by the police.” Guard officers ended the fraternization quickly by ordering that the armored vehicles be loaded up and the labor center evacuated.
Knutson has friends, relatives and fellow CWA telephone workers who served in the Guard, the Reserves, or active duty military. His national union, headed by Air Force veteran and former New York telephone worker Chris Shelton, has promoted membership participation in a Veterans for Social Change program, which collaborates on political education and training with Common Defense, a progressive veterans’ group. As a Teamster member, working for UPS in Chicago twenty years ago, Knutson saw Vietnam veterans who belonged to IBT Local 705 strongly support a resolution against the war in Iraq, introduced by left-wing activists in the local. “I think we need to engage with people in the National Guard,” Knutson says. “Because who they are and the role they play is different than full-time police officers and prison guards even when they are called out to defend the status quo.” His hope is that unionization efforts like TSEU’s might lead to “more potential solidarity between the Guard and people on the street or on strike.”
In Texas, TSEU has long been a vehicle for solidarity among state workers of all types that is not limited to legally defined “bargaining units” of the sort found in states where public sector unionists can engage in formal contract negotiations. Formed 43 years ago, TSEU was a pioneering “non-majority union” in the open-shop environment of the South and Southwest. Its members learned to build workplace organization, based on voluntary payment of membership dues and rank-and-file activism, long before the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Janus decision five years ago, put all public sector unions to that new stress test.
Both white-collar and blue-collar state workers of any rank can join, in any state department, agency, or the Texas university system campus. (When longtime progressive activist and writer Jim Hightower was Texas Agriculture Commissioner, an elected position, he was a card carrying TSEU member). As former TSEU lead organizer Jim Branson explains, “We have a voice on the job because we are an active and growing movement that puts a lot of emphasis on organizing. We have agency caucuses, made up of union activists, who meet regularly to formulate goals and plan actions for winning those goals. From time to time, members of the caucus will meet with agency heads to discuss our goals, and when the legislature is in session, caucus members will speak directly to lawmakers…If a united group of workers act like a union, they can have a voice on the job. It’s not easy, but it can be done.”
One of the things that makes Guard member recruitment a particular challenge is the nature of military service and the degree of management control over this particular group of state employees. “The Texas Military Department is not like a 9-to-5 employer,” Schuler notes. “When soldiers are on state active duty, TMD controls every aspect of your life. Even if they don’t do something that’s obviously retaliatory, there’s a lot of things they can do to make your life miserable, without overtly breaking the law or demoting you.” So far, he notes, “we don’t have union stewards or representatives you can call.” Yet, by forming a statewide solidarity network and generating much favorable publicity, Schuler and others have already demonstrated that military-style teamwork and “esprit de corps” can be put to better use than the border guard duty that led them to organize. “The idea [of unionizing] started as joke,” he told Military.com. “But now we have a real opportunity to make the lives of soldiers better.”
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This article appeared first in Convergence, a site well worth a visit for articles of interest to thinking people.