9/11 + 20 Years – Worker Safety and Health Today
By Earl Dotter and Scott Schneider
One year after the attack on the Twin Towers, I was invited by Phil Landrigan, M.D. and Steven M. Levin, M.D. to photograph the new Mount Sinai 9/11 Emergency Responder Medical Monitoring Program. By 2002, the Program had begun evaluating the health of the Responders. They included construction workers who had been lifted by baskets into the still smoking pile and rebuilt the damaged infrastructure there, fire fighters who had recovered human remains, truck divers who hauled away the mountain of debris, city employees who had cleared the dust laden wreckage from the streets, and police officers who secured the site. All needed medical attention for toxic dust exposures and related respiratory issues, cancers, and post-traumatic stress disorders.
Years of political pressure resulted in the enactment of the Federal World Trade Center Health Program in 2011. The Act expired in 2015, and only after the well-known TV personality Jon Stewart advocated in a sustained campaign, was the coverage reauthorized by Congress for 75 years. That program now provides treatment for certified WTC-related health conditions that responders not only sustained in NYC, but also at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, PA.
Earl Dotter, Occupational and Enviromental Health Photojournalist
.
Twenty years ago, close to 3,000 people died from the terrorist attacks on 9/11. There are memorials in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and many commemorations will occur of this tragic event. What has been and will likely continue to be ignored are the thousands of others who didn’t die in the attack but died or suffered as an aftermath of the attack. According to NIOSH there are over 105,000 people enrolled in the 9/11 health surveillance system, 79,000 of who were rescue workers, who are being treated for respiratory illnesses, reflux, asthma, cancer, PTSD and other illnesses.
In sum, 35 times as many people are suffering from the incident as were killed on that day. Yet their stories will likely be ignored because worker safety is often relegated to the back burner in this country. Many people assume that the government guarantees a safe place of work (at least since the OSHA Act was passed 50 years ago) and that workers who get hurt on the job were careless or at fault. Even though the OSHA Act makes it the employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace, each year about 5,300 workers are killed on the job. Things have improved over the past 50 years, but it’s not enough. Sadly, those 5,300 deaths are just the tip of the iceberg.
“We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites.”
An estimated 10 times as many workers die each year as those who perished on 9-11 from occupational diseases which are often not counted (in part because the long latency often makes it hard to associate the disease with a particular workplace and in part because the workers compensation system was never designed to count and compensate such illnesses). The system set up by the OSHA Act 50 years ago is largely intact and hasn’t changed much. We still have a disturbingly insufficient number of inspectors — less than 2,000 — to cover over 10 million workplaces. The AFL-CIO estimates that it would take 162 years to just inspect every workplace once.
New hazards such as COVID-19 have emerged for which OSHA has promulgated no enforceable standards (except in 3-4 states that have issued emergency rules this year). The federal OSHA standard that has been issued only applies to health-care workers. New OSHA standards take 7-20 years to issue because of all the regulatory hurdles Congress and the White House impose. The Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL) that OSHA set for toxic chemicals mostly haven’t changed in 50 years and have been disavowed by the agency. States are now struggling to issue new standards to protect workers from heat on the job as the climate crisis has caused the hottest summer on record.
The system is antiquated and broken. We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites. Other places, like the UK, require full time worker health and safety representatives on each jobsite, paid for by the company. Ontario workers have a much stronger right to refuse unsafe work and require joint health and safety committees.
Now, 50 years after the founding of OSHA and 20 years after 9/11, we need a much more robust approach to protecting workers from both injuries and illnesses at work.
Scott Schneider
Former Director for Occupational Safety and Health for the
Laborers Health & Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA)
…
UNITE HERE, THE 2020 ELECTIONS AND BEYOND
By Marty Bennett
Many weeks after Democrats swept the Georgia Senate runoff elections, the right-wing extremists’ January 6th assault on Congress saturated the news cycle. The Capitol insurrection and the debate about an independent and nonpartisan investigation overshadowed the compelling story of how Democrats prevailed in both the November 2020 election and the Georgia runoffs. The lessons of the elections are most relevant for the 2022 mid-terms-–notably, the impact of UNITE HERE’s “safe and contactless” door-to-door canvassing to turn out Democratic voters.
UNITE HERE is a union representing 300,000 North American hotel, gaming, food service, airport, and sports arena workers. UNITE HERE members are predominantly immigrants, youth, women, and people of color. The union played an outsized role in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania–critical swing states for the Biden-Harris Electoral College victory.Building the union’s electoral capacity has taken many years. It is a model other unions, progressive organizations, and the Democratic Party can replicate in 2022 and beyond.
The UNITE HERE Electoral Strategy: Lost Timers and the Ground Game
Four pillars anchor UNITE HERE’s electoral achievements:
- Aggressive organizing in the private sector, which exceeded all other unions by adding more than 63,000 new members between 2014-2019;
- Encouraging new union members to register and turn out to vote during each election cycle;
- Negotiating with employers to permit members to leave the workplace during the election cycle, and work as paid precinct walkers (aka “lost timers”). After an election, lost timers can return to work and retain their same job and seniority.
- Recruiting and mobilizing workers to take union leaves-of-absence. To recruit sufficient lost-timers the union taps into many workers’ commitments to urge voters at the door to make change for a better world by participating in the electoral process.
The union is strongly committed to precinct organizing and door-to-door canvassing. D. Taylor, President of UNITE HERE international claims: “I don’t think there is any replacement for it.”
Over the last two decades, field experiments by researchers at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politicshave demonstrated that face-to-face contact at the door is the best way to turn out voters. Their research shows that voters identified and mobilized by canvassers can often provide the needed margin of victory in close elections.
The union provides lost timers extensive training to become effective canvassers and to develop their leadership skills. When they return to the workplace, many serve as shop stewards, on contract bargaining teams, and in other leadership positions.
Max Bell Alper, former Organizing Director with UNITE HERE International Union and current Executive Director with North Bay Jobs with Justice, is an experienced canvasser who served as a trainer in Reno for the November elections. Alper stated, “Our goal for the campaign was not only to deliver Nevada for the Biden-Harris ticket but also to ensure that rank and file canvassers become stronger leaders and organizers after the elections.”
The union’s ground game has become more sophisticated over time, using massive databases, tablets and smartphones to identify, track, and turn out voters. In addition, lost timers and union volunteers supplement walkers by phoning and texting most voters who receive a knock at the door.
Nevada as Laboratory for the Ground Game
By the late 1990s, after two decades of bottom-up organizing, most of the large Las Vegas casinos and hotels were organized by the union. The 60,000 UNITE HERE members of Culinary 226 in Las Vegas and Reno are the union’s political backbone in the Silver State. Nevada has been a laboratory for the union’s ground game: the state has flipped from red to blue since Barack Obama carried Nevada in 2008 and 2012; Hillary Clinton won Nevada in 2016, followed by Joe Biden in 2020. Presently the Governor, both Senators, and three of the four Congressional Representatives are Democrats, and Democrats control both chambers of the Nevada legislature.
Preparations for the 2020 Presidential Elections
According to a report by the union, How UNITE HERE Delivered for Biden, the union began to prepare for the 2020 elections in 2016 by building coalitions and electoral infrastructure in such crucial swing states as Arizona. In response to Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070, passed in 2010, UNITE HERE Local 11, based in Los Angeles and Phoenix, was one of the founders of One Arizona, a coalition of twenty-eight labor, faith-based, environmental justice, civil, and immigrant rights organizations. One Arizona focused on voter registration and engagement of youth, Latinx, African-American, Native American, and immigrant voters, particularly in Maricopa County that includes Phoenix and surrounding suburbs home to 60 percent of the state’s population. In 2016 the coalition registered more than 100,000 new voters.
That fall, UNITE HERE Local 11 and its sister economic justice organization, CASE Action (Central Arizonians for A Sustainable Economy), joined with a broad coalition of labor, environmental justice, immigrant and civil rights organizations to launch the most extensive canvassing effort in the state’s history to defeat racist sheriff Joe Arpaio, who for decades had terrorized and violated the legal and human rights of Maricopa County immigrants and black and brown residents. The coalition also supported a successful statewide ballot initiative that lifted Arizona’s minimum wage to $12 an hour and provided five paid sick days for all residents.
These victories marked the coming of age of a progressive electoral coalition that in 2018 became “Mi AZ” and helped elect Democrat Krysten Sinema to a Senate seat long held by Republicans by a slender 2.3 percent margin. According to a report by the Latino Voter Project, 75 percent of Arizona Latinos voted Democratic in 2018, up 22 percent from 2014.
In 2019, UNITE HERE Local 11 also worked to elect former housekeeper and UNITE HERE Organizing Director Betty Guardado to the Phoenix City Council. Progressive Democrats now comprise a majority on the Phoenix City Council.
In June 2019, hundreds of delegates to the UNITE HERE convention in Las Vegas pledged to walk precincts for Democrats in 2020. Even though 98 percent of members were laid off or furloughed after COVID-19 began in March 2020, ultimately 1700 rank and file members, many still unemployed, would participate in the ground game. Daily socially distanced canvassing began in Phoenix in July, Reno and Las Vegas in August, Miami and Orlando in September. In Philadelphia, the fifty who began canvassing on October 1st grew to 500 by Election Day.
The Democratic Party and other unions had abandoned door-to-door campaigning when the COVID-19 public health emergency began, relying instead on the phone and digital outreach to voters. UNITE HERE was the first union to organize a canvas in these swing states for the November general election and UNITE HERE had the biggest union canvassing operation in these four states.
COVID-19 and Safe, ‘Contactless’ Canvassing
All UNITE HERE precinct walkers participated in a one-day training, and lead canvassers—who had completed a comprehensive one-week training—supervised both paid and volunteer canvassers. Precinct walkers were required to strictly adhere to epidemiologists’ safety protocols at all times—both at the door and off-hours, when they could not go to bars, restaurants, health clubs, malls, or restaurants. Lost timers and canvassers far away from home were housed at extended-stay motels and prepared meals in their rooms.
Having a conversation at the door required that voters were willing to wear masks (that canvassers provided), handing them to the voter using tongs. Canvassers took daily temperature checks, wore masks (or masks and visors), remained six feet from voters at all times, and participated in meetings held outdoors or on Zoom. No canvassers contracted Covid-19 as a result of their participation in the ground game.
The field operation focused on Democratic, independent, black and brown, low-income, and infrequent voters. Canvassers were expected to hit 70-80 doors each eight-hour shift and have extended conversations with at least 15-20 voters, asking them at the door to publicly commit to voting for Biden-Harris and also making a voting plan with each voter. The union estimates that one in four door knocks yielded a conversation with a voter.
Most voters at the door were receptive to the union’s message. However, some were not. In open carry states like Nevada and Arizona, residents could answer a knock on the door with a gun holstered on their hip. Canvassers also experienced racist and sexist taunts, aggressive dogs let loose and some physical assaults. Despite fears about contracting the disease and confrontations with hostile residents, canvassers did not give up.
At the end of each shift, rank and file members checked in with their supervisors to discuss their tallies, challenges in the field, and how they could improve the next shift.
Phone Banks and Social Media to Targeted Voters
Simultaneously, UNITE HERE mobilized members and community allies to phone voters in those swing states. The union claims that one in five calls led to a brief conversation with a voter. Bilingual callers spoke to voters in their native languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Amharic (Ethiopia), and Hausa (Nigeria).
Callers used the “ThruTalk” phone bank system that automatically dials landline and cell phone numbers (via a computer or another device) and can ‘call through’ disconnected numbers and answering machines until a live body answers the phone.
The phone banks grew to 1000 participants a day by late October. Callers identified Biden voters, made a voting plan with each, and encouraged voters to vote by mail or vote early. Callers also provided voters information about hours and locations for early voting, Election Day voting, and mail-in drop boxes. The information obtained on the phone was then transmitted to tablets that canvassers carried in the field and was invaluable during the pre-election GOTV days. UNITE HERE GOTV phone bankers conducted targeted calls in all of the above languages as well.
Beyond voter outreach by canvassing and phone banks the union designed and implemented a paid digital media program directed at unlikely or infrequent voters in these swing states that included 15 second video ads in English and Spanish viewed more than 38 million times.
UNITE HERE and the November 2020 Presidential Victory
In the November 2020 Nevada election, 41 percent of voters cast their vote early, and 48 percent voted by mail, electing Biden-Harris by just under 33,596 votes (2.4%). The UNITE HERE ground campaign had canvassed the doors of 745,000 voters and turned out more than 61,000 Biden voters through face-to-face conversations. Nevada retained a blue and female majority in the state legislature.
In Arizona, the ground game also delivered: Biden-Harris won Maricopa County by more than forty-five thousand votes, and bested Trump statewide by just under 10,457 votes (0.3%). The union delivered not only for Biden-Harris but also campaigned for Democrat Mark Kelly who won a Senate seat. Canvassers also helped to flip one Arizona House seat and another State Senate seat to bring Democrats within one seat of a majority in both chambers. Predominantly Latino and African-American precincts in Maricopa County supported Democrats by a three-to-one margin.
In July UNITE HERE Local 11 and CASE Action formed the federal Worker Power super-PAC that coordinated the Maricopa ground game. By election day the union’s canvassers knocked on 800,000 doors and made 2.5 million phone calls, boosting overall turnout in the primary and general election record levels. Their ranks of 500 canvassers included more than 100 volunteers from the national organization Seed the Vote, as well as other small groups of volunteers from across the United States who wanted to make history as part of Local 11’s electoral effort. The union estimates that its canvassers turned out 48,364 Arizona residents at the door who did not vote in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, 200 canvassers hit the streets on October 1st, joined by 300 more for the GOTV during the final week of the election. The union’s precinct walkers knocked on 575,000 doors in Philadelphia, and 67,000 voters pledged to support Biden and Harris—including 34,863 who did not vote in 2016. According to UNITE HERE, it was the largest union-based GOTV operation in the state’s history. Turnout from Philadelphia voters ultimately pushed Biden over the top by an 80,555 margin (1.1%).
“We believe we made a critical difference in Pennsylvania by focusing our efforts in the disenfranchised Black and Brown communities where most of our members live,” said UNITE HERE Local 274 President Rosslyn Wuchinich. “And despite a pandemic that has devastated our industries and our communities we did just that. That is a testament to how our union brings together those from all walks of life to harness our collective power and win for working people.”
All together during the November 2020 Presidential election UNITE HERE precinct walkers in the key swing states of Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida knocked on 3 million doors while hundreds of phone bankers made 10 million phone calls to voters. The union contacted 440,000 infrequent voters in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, of whom 125,000 had not voted in 2016 but pledged to vote for Biden and Harris in 2020—two-thirds were voters of color.
UNITE HERE and the Georgia Run-Offs
Just after the Thanksgiving holidays five hundred UNITE HERE canvassers started to walk precincts in three counties in metro Atlanta just to support Democratic Senate candidates Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
Canvassers included three-dozen African-born union members and community allies from such nations as Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon, Liberia, and Nigeria. These workers, part of the union’s ‘Get Out the African Vote Initiative,’ knocked on doors in suburban Atlanta’s DeKalb County—home to most of Georgia’s 40,000 African immigrants who are naturalized citizens and are eligible to vote.
In Georgia, the union collaborated with Stacey Abrams, who had lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin. Abrams founded both the nonpartisan New Georgia Majority, focused on voter registration and engagement, targeting youth, immigrant voters, and voters of color, and Fair Fight, which monitors election practices and organizes to thwart voter suppression.
The Georgia runoff partnership, coordinated by the national America Votes coalition, also included Black Voters Matter, Black PAC, the Poor People’s Campaign, Peoples Action, Georgia Stand-Up, Georgia AFL-CIO, Mijente, and SEIU. Many of these organizations had already established a robust socially-distanced ground game in Georgia, which was essential to flipping the state for Democrats by 12,670 votes (0.25%) in the November Presidential election.
By Election Day on January 5th, UNITE HERE locals had deployed more than a thousand union housekeepers, cooks, and airport concession workers to canvass low-income and black and brown precincts in the Atlanta metro region and the City of Columbus (GA). UNITE HERE canvassers knocked on 1.6 million doors, and two-thirds were black and brown voters. Altogether, the America Votes coalition knocked on the doors of over 10 million Georgia voters.
Historically voter turnout in Georgia runoffs had been 40-60 percent of previous November general elections. But in the January 2021 runoff, turnout soared to 90 percent of the total November election turnout, fueled by opposition to the racist Trump’s administration policies, popular demands for massive federal assistance to address the Covid-19 and economic crisis, and the largest ground operation in Georgia history, to give the Democrats a narrow victory.
Tony Evans, a member of UNITE HERE 2850 in Oakland who canvassed African-American voters in both Reno and Atlanta said, “We made this happen ‘on the doors’, we’re the people in the background who did the heavy lifting.”
Black voters, energized by black women like Felicia Davis, convener of the Clayton County (GA) Black Woman’s Roundtable, comprised one-third of the Georgia electorate and were decisive in the Georgia run-off; 93 percent of Black voters cast their ballots for Warnock and Ossoff.
Davis told the New York Times, “I am unapologetically Black, my agenda is Black, my community is Black, my county is Black. So, what I do is Black. And for 20 years we’ve been trying to tell people what was possible.”
Towards the 2022 Mid-terms and a New Democratic Majority
UNITE HERE’s experience in the 2020 election cycle points to several critical takeaways if Democrats are to increase their majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House in 2022.
First, the ground game is essential to prevailing in close elections, even during a public health crisis like COVID-19. Democrats and labor unions must make year-round investments to build training and organizational infrastructures as UNITE HERE and allied community based-organizations have done. Ongoing digital organizing is vital as well but should not be substituted for the knock on the door and phone calls by volunteers.
Democrats must begin immediately to prepare for the 2022 ground game to win Senate seats in swing states, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Ohio where incumbent Republican Senators are retiring. In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson is up for re-election, but Democrats could flip that seat. Georgia US Senator Raphael Warnock and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly will run for full terms in 2022, and the Democrats must retain these two seats.
Second, by large margins, voters of color, women, youth, labor, LGBTQ, poor, low-income, and infrequent voters in major metro regions supported Biden-Harris and Warnock-Ossoff. It is also essential to continue making inroads into the ever more diverse suburbs where Democrats prevailed, such as in the Phoenix and Philadelphia metro regions—with an emphasis on voter registration, engagement, and turnout of these core Democratic constituencies in both the inner city and suburbs. To forge an enduring Democratic new majority, the electorate must be continuously expanded and lower propensity voters within these constituencies must become likely voters.
A progressive electoral organizational infrastructure must become permanent in every state but independent of the Democratic Party and anchored in the constituencies comprising the new Democratic majority.
Moreover, it is crucial to combat voter suppression at the state level by passing the “For the People Act”, HR 1, in the House and S1 in the Senate to consolidate the new Democratic majority. Blocking voter suppression in Texas and North Carolina could enable Democrats to flip those states.
Third, the labor movement must hold Democrats accountable for implementing the party’s most progressive platform for any Presidential candidate—which is in large part a byproduct of Bernie Sander’s 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns and the progressive resistance to the Trump regime after 2016. The recently enacted $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package is a historic step forward, as the two pending infrastructure bills totaling $4.5 trillion could also be—but much more must be done.
To win the loyalty of core constituencies and to build an enduring new majority, Democrats must implement a progressive agenda that includes: a $15 minimum wage; canceling student debt; creating good green jobs and a just transition to a clean energy economy; approving the Protect the Right to Organize Act; winning comprehensive immigration reform (including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented); legislating paid sick and family leave; expanding access to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, and curbing police violence and transforming the racist criminal justice system.
Such a progressive agenda is now moving from the margins to the mainstream within the Democratic Party. The approval of Proposition 208 in Arizona in November 2020 that raised taxes on the wealthy to fund public education and Florida voters’ approval of $15 minimum wage by 60 percent of the vote indicates the popularity, in red and blue states alike, of a multi-racial economic populist agenda.
Moreover, this progressive agenda will enable Democrats to make further inroads with non-college educated white voters who decisively supported Trump. Many of these voters deserted the Democratic Party due to NAFTA, job loss, and deindustrialization, the stagnation of their wages and household incomes, the shredding of the social safety net, and never-ending wars in the Middle East.
According to UNITE HERE Secretary-Treasurer Gwen Mills, “The key takeaway from the election is that workers saved our democracy—workers did the essential door-to-door canvassing and everyday working voters turned out. With their votes comes a mandate for change to help working and low-wealth people.”
There is no guarantee that the current Democratic coalition is stable. The path to victory in 2022 runs through the ground game as demonstrated by UNITE HERE, broadening the electorate, and achieving concrete policy victories that directly address the needs of the emerging Democratic majority.
UNITE HERE is now meeting with other unions and community-based organizations to develop an even more robust ground game for the critical 2022 mid-term elections. As union President D.Taylor told the American Prospect, “I need to urge all labor unions to get on the doors.”
…
For UNITE HERE 2020 elections data references, please go here
This piece originally ran in Beyond Chron
Two Poems
By Stewart Acuff
Freedom
Freedom ain’t fruit pie to slice in slender pieces stretched for too many mouths
Or biscuits split in half covered with thin gravy to fill hungry bellies needing eggs, going without
Freedom refuses to be a scarcity available only to the most powerful
Fake freedom, freedom for the few dries on its vines shrinking in hot sun withering to husks
Full freedom must be watered and guarded so it flourishes stretching to cover everyone
Real freedom is as big and bright as the West Texas sky even at night shining in star light
Those who spend lives fighting freedom for others lose the little liberty of their tiny lives
Fighting freedom begins the end of humanity and its promise of harmony
Fighting freedom is the start of all atrocities
Freedom squeezed by the white men of Texas dries to seeds ready to rise.
.
Hunger
What is hunger?
Is it three days of peanut butter?
And saltine crackers?
A steady diet of ramen noodles?
No money for fresh vegetables
Or is it only children of war and famine?
Stomachs stuck out from malnutrition’s sickness
What about the kids of only one parent?
Working two part time jobs no benefits
A caregiver, cashier, hotel maid
Starvation and poverty pay
Never paid a living wage
Kids at home subsisting on cereal
Hunger now as American as corporate power
And greed great enough to destroy us and earth.
…
96.7% of Ballpark Concessions Workers Vote to Strike for COVID Safety, Health Care, and Hazard Pay“ Don’t be a Giant Idiot” Workers Demand Better COVID Safety at Ballpark
By Marc Norton
Update #2: Local 2’s strike vote press release
96.7% of Ballpark Concessions Workers Vote to Strike for COVID Safety, Health Care, and Hazard Pay
YES Vote Means Oracle Park Food Service Workers Could Walk Out at Any Time
San Francisco, Calif.—An overwhelming 96.7% of food service workers at the SF Giants’ Oracle Park voted to strike as negotiations over COVID safety, health care, and hazard pay stalled between hospitality workers union’ UNITE HERE Local 2 and the Giants’ food service contractor, Bon Appetit. Turnout was approximately 86% of active stadium workers. At least 20 concessions workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the stadium reopened. Concessions workers’ overwhelming “yes” vote means a strike could be called at any time.
Photos and video of voting and ballot-counting are available for download here: https://unitehere.box.com/s/dgf87rs04cfg7cjkq60z73aetv1d6ah6
“Oracle Park workers are like a big family, and we’re ready to go on strike to keep ourselves safe from COVID and for our health care and wages,” said Aurora Rodriguez, a cook at Oracle Park for 20 years. “I’m a single mom, and one of my children has a chronic medical condition that puts him at high risk if he’s infected with COVID. That’s why we need better protection at work. I’m ready to do what it takes to protect his health and make sure my family has the health insurance we need.”
At least 20 concessions workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the stadium reopened. The Giants have failed to mandate and/or enforce masks and social distancing at concourse concessions stands, private suites, and more, and food service workers often have to deal with unmasked guests who are under the influence of alcohol.
Ballpark workers have struggled during the lockdown without secure health care and with little support from Bon Appetit or the Giants. Eligibility for health insurance is currently set at ten events per month, but some of the coming months have only nine events scheduled. Workers are asking to lower the eligibility threshold to nine events per month.
In negotiations on reopening, Bon Appetit promised workers that hazard pay wasn’t warranted because working conditions would be safe. Workers are demanding hazard pay of $3 per hour.
“I voted yes to strike for our health and welfare. Some month’s there’s only nine events, and then we don’t get health insurance,” said Deborah Torrano, a suite attendant at Oracle Park. “Last night I must’ve told 200 people to put a mask on, and it’s stressful because a lot of them just make fun of you and give you attitude. I’ve worked at Oracle Park for 22 years and at Candlestick for 10 before that. We deserve better after all these years.”
“Bon Appetit and the Giants’ approach to workers and fans’ safety during this latest surge of COVID-19 is completely inadequate and dangerously irresponsible,” said Anand Singh, President of UNITE HERE Local 2. “Our members have carried on through this pandemic without fair compensation and security in our health insurance, while the Giants have continued to reap profits. We are ready to fight for our health, our safety, and for justice at the ballpark.”
UNITE HERE Local 2 Marriott workers won a two-month strike in 2018. Ballpark workers won their last contract after a one-day strike in 2013.
.
UNITE HERE Local 2 is the hospitality workers’ union in San Francisco and San Mateo representing 14,000 workers in hotels, restaurants, food services, and at SFO.
.
Update #1:
Local 2 has scheduled a vote on Saturday, Sept. 4,
to authorize a STRIKE at the ballpark
if our demands are not met
While the rock band Green Day was blasting out their hit number “American Idiot” at the San Francisco Giantsballpark on Friday, August 27 to a huge crowd, UNITE HERE Local 2 workers and staff inside and outside the park were handing out “Don’t be a Giant Idiot!” flyers. Local 2 represents hundreds of food service workers at the ballpark.
Thousands of Green Day fans — some masked, many not — were gathered for the concert, in the midst of the surging COVID-19 pandemic propelled by the Delta mutation. The Giants were doing little, if anything, to protect workers in the park from the ravages of the coronavirus. That is the way it is at the ballpark these days.
The Giants website boasts that there are “NO COVID-19 ENTRY REQUIREMENTS,” but warns fans that they can’t bring backpacks or alcohol into the park. A little COVID, however, well, apparently that is okay.
According to the Local 2 leaflet “Over 20 occurrences of COVID have been reported since the start of the baseball season among Ballpark Food Service staff.”
Linger, for a few moments, over that word “reported.” There is a state law, AB685, that requires employers to provide “written notice” to workers of any “potential exposure to COVID-19… within one business day.” Yet, it was not until August 11 that food service workers were given any kind of written notice about COVID-19 in the ballpark — for a season that began in April — and that notice reported only one potential exposure.
A few days later food service workers got a written confession that there had been many more “positive tests” — one in April, 11 in July, and seven in August (through August 12).
Of course, much of this was really not news to ballpark workers, who have been hearing about infections and workers getting sick since the beginning of the season. Reportedly there were workers in the warehouse who have been infected, and warehouse workers travel all over the ballpark delivering supplies. There is also a story about an area supervisor getting infected. Supervisors also are in and out of many concession stands during their work day.
Yeah, “over 20 occurrences of COVID have been reported…” Sure, boss.
As of Tuesday, August 31: Three Giants ballplayers are now on the COVID-19 injury list: starting pitchersJohnny Cueto and Alex Wood, and infielder Donovan Solano. Wood and Solano tested positive for the coronavirus. Cueto is “not well.”
I emailed the Giants on Saturday, August 28, and asked if they could provide me, a journalist writing about COVID-19 at the ballpark, with a full list of COVID-19 incidents in which workers at the ballpark have tested positive or have been diagnosed with COVID-19 during the current baseball season, and what they have done about it. I haven’t heard a thing.
I made a public records request to the authorities in San Francisco last April, asking for written documents between the City and the Giants regarding COVID-19 safety protocols at the ballpark. I haven’t gotten a single document yet, over four months later. Apparently the city’s safety protocols at the ballpark are a state secret.
Meanwhile food service workers are now attending to thousands of fans every game, basically playing a game of Russian roulette with our lives, the lives of our families, and the lives of our communities.
Back in April, some readers may recall, the Giants food service subcontractor, Bon Appetit, demanded that workers sign a release of liability for COVID-19 infection at the ballpark. Fortunately, Local 2 officials put a stop to that. But the fact that such a release was even created speaks volumes about the contempt with which the Giants treat ballpark workers.
Not that the Giants are unique employers. For example, hotel workers in San Francisco, and indeed around the country and the world, are facing severe cutbacks that threaten our safety and our livelihood. The same with other hospitality workers in restaurants, airline caterers, clubs and other sports stadiums — both union and non-union. Bosses rarely miss a trick to jack up the bottom line, even if it means taking advantage of a worldwide crisis.
According to Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta, “The work we’re doing right now in every one of our brands is about making them higher margin businesses and creating more labor efficiencies, particularly in the areas of housekeeping, food and beverage and other areas.”
Kick those workers while their down, Mr. Nassetta?
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot,” sings Green Day. Workers everywhere are facing a health crisis which seems to have no end in sight, not even that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
The number in the US of workers and other groups who have died from COVID is fast approaching the number of those who died in the Civil War — 655,000 — and looks to blow right past that number and keep going.
This is a country that doesn’t know how to get people vaccinated. A country that can’t do serious mass testing, contact tracing and isolation. More than 1,200 people are dying every day in the US from COVID-19. More than 100 are dying every day in California. There are more than a thousand people with COVID-19 in Bay Area hospitals, besting the numbers at the height of every previous surge, excepting only last winter’s mega-surge.
Nor can the American idiots running our country deal in any real way with the economic devastation — including the impending eviction crisis — that the pandemic and our greedy corporate masters have wreaked on us poor working-class folks.
The Local 2 “Don’t be a GIANT IDIOT” flyer noted that the last wage increase food service workers got was in “April… of 2018.” The Giants never lifted a finger to help provide health care to laid-off ballpark food service workers during 2020, although the pandemic was raging.
Local 2 has demanded a $3 per hour retroactive hazard-type pay increase, and even that demand is incredibly modest compared to what we have suffered. Especially considering that the fortune of Charles Johnson, the controversial chief owner of the Giants, increased by $815 million from March 2020 to January 2021, commanding a fortune of something north of $5 billion.
While I was passing out the Local 2 flyer at the Green Day concert, I was approached by a security guard who told me that I was on Giants property and had to move. I was actually at the Lefty O’Doul Gate on the walkway behind the stadium next to McCovey Cove. Hundreds of people were streaming past me going into the concert or strolling along the cove, but somehow I was picked out as an intruder.
When I told the security guard that the law permitted me to do exactly what I was doing, he went off in a huff. I was soon confronted with one of San Francisco’s finest, who informed me that the Giants had called and complained about me. I must have been doing something right, I guess. I effected a tactical retreat, moved back a few feet, and passed out flyers for another couple of hours.
Anand Singh, the President of Local 2, told me he sums up the situation at the ballpark this way:
“Although Bon Appetit/Compass [the Giants food service subcontractor] have taken some steps to address our members’ health and safety concerns, the overall approach adopted by the Giants to keep both workers and fans safe during this latest surge is completely inadequate, and dangerously irresponsible. Our members have carried on through this pandemic without fair compensation and security in our health insurance, while the powers that be have continued to reap profits. We are ready to fight for our health, our safety, and for justice at the ballpark.”
…
Straight Off Willow Street
By Robert Gumpert
Next month, the 14th of September to be exact, California’s Governor Newsom faces a recall election. A loss will mean a Republican governor with consequences for the state, the nation, and the Democratic Party, including but not limited to: a Senate appointment if Senator Feinstein takes early retirement, or dies, in turn affecting any possible Supreme Court opening.
As always, the outcome will depend on turnout.
But today’s post presents three voices from the unhoused because those living on the streets of our cities, towns and roadways have been made a an issue Republicans hope to ride to victory, bringing their form of limited government for the rich to the country’s most populated state.
So instead of talking about those living on the street as the enemy in a domestic war, today take a moment to read what they have to say about their situations dealing with forms of the problems anyone without unlimited resources faces.
And remember, if you are a registered voter in California Vote No on the recall, for the your future you, the future of your kids and the type of community you want to live in.
All three folks were living on Willow Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district on the 25th of August when the city conducted a homeless “resolution” operation – meaning people would be offered “places”. If they refused what was offered, they would have to move on. No surprise to anyone involved with housing issues there were only five spaces, all shelter beds for women. There were more than 20 men and women living on the two blocks being worked and the operation was changed to a “cleaning”, people move all their belonging out of the way and public works come through and sweep and wash the street and sidewalks before people move back.
.
“Any type of services I’ve had to debate whether or not I’d take it or not. The people who are coming to see us, they’re asking us to leave. They’re coming with the police. They’re coming with garbage trucks telling us we got to go, tents aren’t going to be allowed up, and then they say but we’ll send you to tent city. Ok, so I can’t sleep on the streets in a tent but you’re going to put me somewhere where I can be in the street, in a tent. Then I find one of the places where they do this tent city and it’s gated in. It’s covered so no one can see in, nor out. It’s locked doors, and I have to sign in and sign out. All that reminds me of jail! And it also takes me to a point where it was the Chinese, they did that to, concentration camp. Why would I want to put myself back in a situation where I feel like I’m back in jail but I’m on the street? Why would the city want me to stay off the street in a tent but pitch me in a place where there are tents but no one can see me? Are they helping me? Or are they helping themselves? They’re helping themselves. They don’t have to see us, then they don’t have to think about us. But for some people you get out here it’s just much easier not to have to pay rent. Not to have to have the nut. Not to have to do these things.”
“I’m out here and I don’t particularly like it but my addiction say if you want to beat me you have to be about me, but know what you want to be. I’m not trying to stay in too long. I have friends out here 13, 14, 15 years, finally got a place to stay. I’m happy for them. I would like to get my own place, haven’t achieved it though I’m trying.”
“If I give in to my addiction but not give up on life, that’s the difference.”
“I can give up just living life on life’s terms and go into my addiction, and let my addiction do it’s run because it’s only a run. They always talk about “this was my bottom”, but even bottoms have bottoms. So you might stop for a moment, get it right, then find out there’s another floor to my bottom. I got to go through it because in order to understand it I got to get there. If I don’t then I keep lying to myself and putting myself in situations where everything is destroyed. If I give in to my addiction but not give up on life, that’s the difference. A lot of people are giving up on life. You talk to some people, and they say they’re dead. They’re spiritually dead. I’m not giving up because I do have things I want to live for, and I want to live. I want a better situation for myself. I know I can have a better situation for myself, but I need to go through what I need to go through. I just have to get through this the best way that I can.”
“Some things I just need around me and that keeps me human”
“Accepting help is alright when the help comes that’s really helping and not just trying to shove me out of the way. You (the city) send somebody in here to talk to us about going someplace. You ask, “them where can you go?”, and they tell you. You ask them where it is and they say, “Oh I need to call my boss to find out.”
What kind of information are you bringing me? If you ain’t got it right, what makes you think I’m going to go someplace you’re telling me to go? I’d rather stay where I’m at. At least I know what’s ahead of me. I don’t know what’s ahead of me, going where you telling me to go, cause you don’t have the information telling me how to even get there. I’m not going to something that’s half told to me. When you’re in this life you don’t want to wait. I ain’t got time to sign no paper. I need to go get mine, my drug of choice. I need to start my day even before I can even think about what you’re telling me.”
“I’ve left and came back and they’ve thrown away everything I own including my ID, Social Security card, Medicare card. Everything that you need to collect services, which takes time to get back.”
“You get thrown in this pet camp. You got people on the door telling you what you can and cannot do. They give you a place to sleep, eat, but you can only take certain items. You telling me get rid of all that and sleep on a palette, in my tent, and everything I own must be in my tent, or I can’t have it. But somethings you get attached to. Some things I just need around me and that keeps me human. Now you want me to be inhuman. I got to live in this tent, most of them are 6×9, same size as a jail cell. You can’t move around. Once you’re in, you got to stay in and stay still. That’s all jail to me. It brings it all back.”
“I’m going to get better. My run’s just about over because I’m tired. They say you got to be tired of being sick and tired, but it’s just something that they say. But if you’re tired, once you rested up you have the energy to go do it differently. That’s what happens when you relapse. It’s got to be more than being tired of being sick and tired. You got to be through with going through the door you been going through. It takes time. Everybody can’t do it the first time, you might have to do it multiple, multiple times. I’ve been called a recovery junkie because I relapse. I don’t relapse right away, I’ll be a year here, six years there, it’s all a constant fight.”
“The people that you’re (the city) sending out here, they’re not offering services, they’re just offering us to be out of the way. It’s not fair to those that really want some help, you have to wait for so many things.”
“My belongings are all I have. They’re how I survive. My clothing and you know, my knife, pepper sprays, and things like that. I use them for everything including protecting myself from weirdos. Without my cloths I couldn’t protect myself from weirdos either, and I’d be walking around naked.”
“At this point I’m desperate just to be safe and have somewhere I can go and be safe and warm, and not have my things be stolen from me everyday.”
“My belongings is like my wife. You know it’s what I have to live for, what I work for. I put a lot of effort into doing things that I need to do to keep myself going and that’s what my things are. My things aren’t just like materialistic things, they’re something that actually means something and gets me going throughout the days.”
[When they come through and take it all] “I wouldn’t say (I’m) angry, I’d probably say hurtful because people don’t know how it is for people that stay on the streets without nothin’. People don’t see or realize how much hard work we have to do to get what we need. It’s like a waste of time, that’s why it’s so hurtful because we work for what we get.”
“My dog. He’s a puppy. It’s the first time I’ve actually raised a dog with like my bare hands. You know what I mean? He’s well trained. He’s well listened and he’s someone I love. He’s not just an ordinary dog, he’s like a human. He means a lot.”
…
The political right is growing in Italy because there is no Workers Party for Socialism in the 21st century
By Maurizio Brotini and Lepoldo Tartaglia
The Stansbury Forum is proud to publish an analysis of the rise of the right in Italy by two leaders of the CGIL, the largest national Italian labor federation. This article is translated from the Italian original.
I.
From the international point of view we have been witnessing for years a crisis of US hegemony. We have gone from the inability to form a coherent Western coalition to address the so-called war on terror imposed by the Bush Administration, to the financial crash of 2008, to the election of Trump as President: all unequivocal signs of a triple crisis, of international hegemony, of the financial system’s fragility, of the legitimacy of the traditional ruling classes. China, on the other hand, presents itself as a credible international competitor, despite continuing to suffer from a deficit in the attractiveness of its model of societal organization; a deficit that the effective management of the pandemic could – the conditional is a must – at least partially satisfy.
What remains unclear is the outcome of the transition, in particular a) the willingness of the current hegemonic power (USA) to “undergo” the transition without resorting to all the weapons, even the most destructive, at its disposal and b) the capacity of the emerging power (China) to escape in turn from the temptation of unilateralism and to remain, as it has in truth done up to now, on the terrain of multilateralism. This will be the subject of the political battle by all governments and all peoples in the immediate future.
II.
From a continental point of view, the process of European construction has never really recovered from the crisis of 2008 – 2012. In recent years we have entered a phase of relative stabilization, which, however, has not been able to stop Brexit (for the first time since the 60s integration loses pieces instead of adding them) and the widening of the cracks in the mercantilist and the basically hegemonic model imposed by Germany on other European nations. Even before the outbreak of the epidemic in Germany there was an alarming slump in investment, which threatened to drag down the weaker national economies, which were subordinate to the German-driven continental value chain. Also on this front, the pandemic had an acceleration effect on an already creaking mechanism.
If in 2008 – 2012 what held the EU together was the fear of the leap into the void and the loss of security, it is possible that in the 2020s, once the epidemic is over, there will be nothing left to lose, and not even the fear card can be played to hold together what remains of the dream of continental integration.
III.
Italy has never substantially emerged from the 2012 recession. Of the top 10 Italian companies measured in annual sales, 7 are publicly run. Big industry has outsourced to pursue favorable profits and taxation. Small and medium-sized enterprises, developed since the end of the 1970s as a response to the centrality assumed by labor conflict in the large factories and to the pressure exerted by the State on profits to finance the welfare system, has been exposed to the currents of a uncontrolled global market. Luxury and tourism industries are saved, while there is a low rate of value added in production. While the phenomenon of uneven territorial (“island”) development of the country is accentuated on a national basis, the question of underdevelopment in southern Italy is re-exploding in an even more pronounced and dramatic fashion. The pandemic has played the role of accelerator of dynamics already underway.
IV.
For more than a decade now we have been in a further phase of capitalist crisis. A crisis that concentrates wealth and centralizes command, which has redistributed the productive forces on a world basis and destroyed an important slice of the industrial framework in the West (and in particular in Italy), which has led to a substantial reorganization of work: diffusion of precarious forms of work and impoverishment of subordinate work and large segments of self-employment. The institutions have unloaded the 2007-2008 crisis onto society: they had managed – at the cost of draconian measures – to save themselves, a certain unity of the European political space, discharging tensions into the depths of society. By widening the income gaps in the working class, forming areas of underemployment as a safety valve for chunks of national capitalism that needed to reduce wages in order to stay afloat. This has happened a little everywhere, in Italy even more, for many reasons. Today this crisis rises from society to institutions, puts state apparatuses in crisis, reveals the real national interests behind the rhetoric of Europeanism as a salvation from nationalisms and opportunities for growth and solidarity, especially of those countries that basically have always used Europe for what they needed: a value chain functional to their own economy. In the crisis, the materiality of the power relations literally blows up the rhetoric that has concealed their disruptive scope.
V.
“Redemption” and “work” are two central concepts in a workers’ hymn written by Italian socialist Filippo Turati in 1886. Yet they are extremely current elements, perhaps because in many ways the present situation of work, its exploitation, its problems of inadequate representation, especially the lack of political representation are similar to the nineteenth century. For too long there has been no party in Italy that adequately represents Labor – in its concrete and contemporary articulations – starting from its material needs and interests.
VI.
Up to now, the work has been divided into two major segments: 1. the people of the Abyss, the Hell of precarious, poor, black market work and the gig economy and 2. “stable and guaranteed” work, incorporated and subsumed in the regressive company-territory block, that of hierarchical participation, of workers’ self- activation, of the factory-community (where conflict and autonomous representation of work is excluded), where the principle of collaboration, loyalty, sharing the values of the company and the market is in force.
How to reunite the people of the Abyss with the workers employed within the first circle of companies, that of permanent employment contracts, company benefits and welfare? How to reunite socially, as a union and politically those who live immersed in digital neo-Taylorism and those who live entangled in the pervasive Toyotism? This is the greatest political, anthropological and values challenge that a Left of radical transformation faces. An already complex and diversified reality that will have to deal now with scenarios further opened by the impact of the pandemic.
VII.
It is widely believed that the coronavirus pandemic will have significant repercussions on global economic scenarios. It will accelerate trends already underway such as the shortening of world production chains, will deeply question the cultural-tourist consumption sector as a driving force for capitalist accumulation, and will put at the center the role of the State as a lender and employer of last resort. The virus will impact the ways of organizing work. Among the many and sometimes unprecedented issues that the Covi19 emergency is posing for workers is the problem of remote work. Smart working would allow a more harmonious combination of work and private life, and, consequently, an increase in productivity. If a more or less imminent horizon of “governance” of the workforce focuses on the evaluation of results beyond the working time, very disturbing scenarios open up, which question both the “measure” of work and the keeping of the traditional division between working time and life time (already compromised or in fact made more fluid in many professions). Smart working, instead of agile and intelligent work, could in fact result in endless work. We are probably close to a paradigm shift, which must be dealt with, from a trade union and political point of view, by updating slogans – such as reducing working hours with equal wages – and tools.
VIII.
The discussion and confrontation with the Italian government on containment measures with respect to the spread of the coronavirus have revealed the fundamental importance of manual factory work in the production of wealth. The veil of propaganda on the “disappearance of the working class” deriving from the robotization and digitization of the economy collapses in the face of the same declarations by Confindustria (the main Italian Association of entrepreneurs), which claims the loss of 100 billion euros because manufacturing activities have been restricted to solely strictly necessary services. All this is the product of remote work and the productive decentralization of value chains and logistics itself, understood as an essential segment of the production cycle. In reality we already knew that worker labor (and non-factory manual labor) had not at all disappeared quantitatively even in post-Fordist economies, but now we have proof of how central and irreplaceable it is in the creation of value. There is always living labor at the bottom of the capitalist model of social production and reproduction It is necessary to start over from a new neo-laboristic representation of Work, its needs and interests, from its factory and artisan dimension, passing from manual non-factory labor, widening the perimeter to forms of juridically autonomous but economically dependent work: a social block that is in the field not only as trade union organization but also politically, as a guarantee of the founding value that the Italian Constitution recognizes as Work.
IX.
It is necessary to develop a point of view that contrasts the ideology of the end of history, reaffirming the historicity and therefore transformability of socio-economic formations; a point of view that reaffirms the usefulness also for the social and political initiative of an idea of different and better society, as it is in the tradition of the Italian workers’ movement, communism, socialism, environmentalism, feminism and the emancipatory policies implemented by the movements in recent years. As the tradition of socialism teaches, it is necessary to reactivate millennial aspirations for redemption at the level of organization, struggles, demonstrations, widespread acculturation, emancipation from degradation and physical and moral brutalization. Because, if the perimeter that you allow yourself is only that of the varieties of possible capitalism, only the purest capitalism in its brutality will always appear on your watch.
X.
There is a lack of a political project that puts work at the center of any reconstruction’s hypothesis, and that counts on workers, young women and men, the precarious and widespread intellectuality as new recruits for the creation of new leadership groups that are up to the challenge. The Italian Left, in all its versions, has revealed itself in the course of the crisis not ready for the challenge. Both from the point of view of analysis and tools.
XI.
The moderate Left has failed because the framework within which its project was built, that of neoliberal governance, has failed. The constitutionalisation of the idea that within finally pacified societies there are no conflicts, but “problems” to which to give “technical” answers. The era is over of thinking that “real globalization” was – and would continue to be – a factor of progress for the society as a whole, and above all for a middle class that was seen as the expression of the creative sectors of finance and culture, which were regarded as the pivot of national life and as structurally capable of profiting from the opportunities of an increasingly open world market. The PD (Italian Democratic Party), therefore, presented itself to the citizens as a post-ideological, post-national and post-class party, which would have effectively guided the inclusion of Italy in the global village, while at the same time ensuring the maintenance of acceptable welfare levels for the working classes to resist the growing insecurity of their jobs.
XII.
The political and social forces defined in various ways as the radical Left, despite having immediately criticized the regressive traits of globalization, have failed to represent at the mass and popular level either a credible alternative or a useful accumulation of forces in a phase of long resistance. The mantra of autonomy (from the moderate Left) has been elevated to dogma, while every hegemonic tension and every push for social and institutional change has disappeared.
XIII.
Basic processes such as those above described are the basis of the strength and popular roots of xenophobic forces with traits directly dating back to fascism such as those of the Lega (Matteo Salvini) and Fratelli d’Italia (Giorgia Meloni). The latest opinion polls, for the first time give a plurality to a political force (Fratelli d’Italia) that has claimed roots in the experience of Italian fascism. The immediate cause of this right wing surge can be attributed to the crisis of the second Giuseppe Conte government which united together PD, Movimento 5 Stelle (5 Stars Movement), part of the left and Italia Viva, personal party of the former Prime Minister and former Secretary of the Democratic Party Matteo Renzi.
The crisis caused by Renzi for that government (Conte 2), the most advanced possible, given the political and institutional situation, has led to a government of broad agreements chaired by the former President of the European Union Bank, Mario Draghi, with only the opposition of the right-wing party of Giorgia Meloni and left fringe groups. The wear and tear of the 5 Star Movement and the PD have produced three forces that, according to the voting polls, each amount to 20%, two of these are right-wingers (Fratelli d’Italia and Lega), who with the current electoral law could alone have the majority of seats in the Lower Chamber and in the Senate.
Despite Matteo Renzi’s split, with the secretariat of Zingaretti of the PD, coming from the experience of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), much less with that of Enrico Letta, coming from the DC (Christian Democratic Party) and former Prime Minister, the PD failed to reconnect itself with the world of work and with the popular classes, assuming the trait of a substantially liberal/neoliberal force on the economic-social level defining itself positively, albeit with many contradictions, on the level of civil rights. A polarity that does not affect the consensus of the Right on the world of work and that gives it, albeit in words, the identity claim of the defense of the national interest.
This is the opposite of what appears to be Biden’s orientation. Biden is aggressive in foreign policy, shows greater attention on the domestic level to give concrete answers to the world of work, especially with respect to the demand for social protection that has grown with the pandemic.
In Italy, the lack of a significant experience on a mass level such as that represented by Bernie Sanders, capable of putting back into circulation the word socialism and the classic themes of social democratic experiences in northern Europe, consigns the political life of the country to an alternative/alternation between xenophobic and fascist Right and liberal center that completely cuts out the material needs of millions of male and female workers, handing them over to electoral abstention or voting on the Right.
…
Living With Climate Change in Farmworker Communities
By David Bacon
According to Dr. Jessica Hernandez, a Zapotec scholar and board member of Sustainable Seattle, “indigenous peoples are the first impacted by climate change.” She points to the fate of the small municipality of San Pablo Tijaltepec, high in the Sierra Mixteca of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico: “Accelerated changes to our climate due to urbanization, fossil fuel industry, etc. continues to result in devastating impacts. The heavy rains that have recently taken place in Oaxaca, Mexico, have destroyed many of the harvests Indigenous peoples depend on. For the pueblo San Pablo Tijaltepec, their milpas [corn fields] were completely destroyed. This leaves 800 Mixtec families without the communal harvest they all depend on.”
Losing the milpas and harvest is a blow that falls on people already having a hard time surviving. The Mexican government says family income in the municipality averages about $500/month, leaving half its residents in extreme poverty. In 2020 only an eighth of San Pablo Tijaltepec had access to a sewage system, and over a tenth had no electricity. The region’s Mixteco-speaking people have been leaving and searching for work for decades as a result, joining the 400,000 who leave Oaxaca for northern Mexico and the U.S. every year.
In California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the world, people from San Pablo Tijaltepec have created a new home, an extension of their Oaxacan community, in the small town of Taft. For over two decades they’ve worked as farmworkers in the surrounding fields. Here, instead of torrential rains, they face another environmental danger – the summer’s heat, which can rise to over 110 degrees in July and August.
The connection between climate change and increasing summer temperatures has been dramatized by the “heat dome” that covered the Pacific Northwest in July, leading to similar temperatures in a region accustomed to lesser heat. Portland had a high of 116 degrees. In the nearby Willamette Valley one farmworker, Sebastian Francisco Perez, died as he continued to work in the heat, moving irrigation pipes, in order to pay a debt to a “coyote” who’d smuggled him across the border. Scientists, and even President Biden, attributed the heat dome to climate change and its associated drought.
In the southern San Joaquin Valley town of Poplar, extreme heat in the summer is the normal condition in which people live and work. It is one of the poorest communities in the state. Air conditioning in trailer homes or crowded houses normally consists of old swamp coolers, which hardly lower temperatures. At work people bundle up, using layers of clothing to insulate against heat and dust.
Poplar’s families are almost all immigrants or their children, who have traveled here from other parts of Mexico, or have crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines. Many now are older people, long accustomed to the heat. Yet for them the danger is greater as they get older. Some already have health conditions springing from poverty and the hard conditions in the fields. “In extreme heat, the body must work extra hard to maintain a healthy temperature,” cautions health journalist Liz Seegert. “Older adults are at higher risk for heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and other serious health issues due to poorer circulation and less effective sweating that comes with aging.”
This rural poverty of the southern San Joaquin stands in stark contrast to the enormous wealth the labor of its people produce. Poplar’s Tulare County produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables last year. Yet the average income of a county resident is $17,888 per year, compared to a U.S. average of $28,555, and 123,000 of Tulare’s 453,000 residents live below the poverty line. Poverty forced farmworkers to continue working during the pandemic. Tulare County’s COVID-19 infection rate was much greater, per capita, than large cities. A year ago Tulare had 7,603 confirmed cases, and 168 deaths. Heavily urban Alameda County had 9,411 confirmed cases and 167 deaths. But Alameda County’s population is 1.67 million, over three times that of Tulare County.
Photo Home and communities #6-10
These farmworker communities have fewer resources, but they are creative and resilient. Poplar’s Larry Itliong Resource Center holds vaccination clinics and campaigns for a park where people can find shade in the heat. Legal aid workers in Taft provide counseling about labor and tenant rights in indigenous languages like Mixteco. A history of farm labor activism in the San Joaquin Valley stretches back to the great grape strike of 1965, led by Larry Itliong, for whom the Poplar center is named, as well as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others.
Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington State, condemns the system of corporate agriculture for treating farm workers as disposable. “The nation’s farmworkers,” she says, “should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices. Most are indigenous immigrants and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America.”
…
Amazon? There Has to be a Better Way
By Wade Rathke
Amazon, we have a problem! Jeff Bezos may be going to the moon soon, but down here on terra firma unions are trying to organize and protect Amazon workers, and we seem to be the ones lost in space.
“… unions have not successfully organized a single mass employer with more than 100,000 workers in the US in the last fifty years.”
This is an old problem, not a new one, but somehow, we continue to try the same things over and over again, no matter how poorly they are working. This new problem may be Amazon since they have now grown to more than one million workers and rising globally. In the USA, Amazon is the second largest private sector employer behind Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart is a prime example of the old problem. The old problem, simply put, is that unions have not successfully organized a single mass employer with more than 100,000 workers in the US in the last fifty years. Or, 50,000 workers. Or, 30,000 workers. Think about any of the tech conglomerates. Think about any of the massive fast-food chains from McDonalds or Starbucks on down. Think about the fact that all of the business successes of our generation have not been labor successes.
I’m not saying that our generation of labor organizers have been nothing but losers. We have won some individual campaigns with some huge employers, but not many, and certainly not enough, as the union density in the private sector continues to plummet towards 5%.
We have also had some significant successes. The homecare industry, for example, where density is estimated at more than 25% of the workforce and constitutes more than a half-million members in the giant Service Employees International Union alone. In many areas we have also done well in the home daycare industry.
“We have also continued to practice organizing models that are not designed to organize the emerging monopolies and mass employment enterprises of these times.”
There are a host of reasons for our failures. Labor law has steadily become more regressive, favoring employers in a quasi-legalistic environment that what is left of our political leverage seems unable to impact. State legislators have continued to advance so-called right-to-work provisions for both public and private sector workers. Courts at every level have eroded our strength. Those are the facts, but not to make excuses, we have also stepped on our own feet, crippling our progress and opportunity with curious positions on jurisdiction, insufficient solidarity, inadequate democracy, strange political alliances, and uneven attention and resources devoted to new organizing, membership maintenance, and rank-and-file actions.
We have also continued to practice organizing models that are not designed to organize the emerging monopolies and mass employment enterprises of these times. NLRA-based organizing models have fallen – or been pushed, depending on your perspective – to almost record lows in terms of number of elections filed. When filed, for decades success has been in units with less than 50 workers, hardly a mass organization strategy. Substituting leverage-based organizing models held promise but depended on targets where a confluence of factors was present: some level of unionization in key places in the industry; favorable local market conditions; and a reservoir of public and political strength to create additional pressure. Where all the stars did not align in this universe, success was still rare and, when it occurred, often unsustainable.
What can we learn from our successes in industries like homecare?
We do well as union organizers when we can offset the workplace advantages of an employer by organizing a mobile workforce without a fixed workspace. We do well when we can combine community organizing and labor organizing methodology that privileges home visits, leadership development, direct actions, political flexibility, campaign and research skills, as well as strong alliances. Sadly, that’s a tendency, not a model, because it cannot be applied by rote, but must be adapted in every arena, with every industry, and for every individual company. Nonetheless, this convergence strategy has much to recommend to unions and organizers when we look at mass employers.
With 1.6 million workers, organizers know that a straight-up NLRB-based election strategy is a loser with Wal-Mart. To have any bargaining power on that model, unions would have to believe that they could win certification at a significant number of the 5000 locations the company operates in the US. Organizing 2000 of them at a pace of 20 victories per year, when we have won none in decades, would still take 100 years, and remember, that’s to represent 40% of their workers, not a majority. In the meantime, as generations of organizers and leaders lived, worked, and died, while moving up the ladder to 40% there would be decades where our bargaining power was limited, assuming the company bargained at all and didn’t close the locations as fast as we succeeded.
Amazon is a different beast
With 960,000 workers – and rising – and 110 fulfillment locations in the USA, Amazon is a different beast. Amazon claims the average workforce in these warehouses is around 1500, so roughly 165,000 workers. There are a lot of other folks working in their tech centers, on the road as drivers and delivery people, in their data farms, and more, but the centers have been the heart of the targeting discussion along with the drivers. As we saw in Bessemer, Alabama, an NLRB-based strategy is challenged here as well. The individual bargaining units would be larger than Wal-Mart’s store-based units, but that doesn’t make them easier. Organizing 40% there might mean collective units that totaled 60,000 workers. Theoretically not impossible, but definitely improbable. The number of NLRB elections over 1000 workers is now miniscule. Bargaining strength, even if successful, would be strained, especially without their drivers being organized, which would be an even higher degree of difficulty since they are not place-based in the way a physical location is. The additional Amazon lines of business are also challenging when organizers think about pressure points and leverage.
There might be other ways, as organizers found when confronting the challenges of homecare workers over the last fifty years and organizing Wal-Mart workers fifteen years ago by combining community and labor methodologies. Unfortunately, these models take time, patience, and persistence, which are often in short supply in these times of crises in the labor movement, but to organize mass industries or mass employers, we may have to go long.
“… being able to be a rock in the road to the company’s expansion could be key in building leverage”
The Teamsters, according to their Amazon project organizer, are eschewing an election strategy, which is a good move. They are proposing a mixed bag of tactics, including strikes and boycotts. A boycott seems a stretch with a lot of work for little gain that would be almost impossible to measure and easy for the company to deny. Strikes would have to be something other than what we have seen in the fast-food “narrative campaign” with few workers, but we are talking about the Teamsters, and they do know how to organize a strike. They think community support will be essential to win. They also think being able to be a rock in the road to the company’s expansion could be key in building leverage. On those two counts, I heartily agree and our experience with Wal-Mart fifteen years ago gives credence to that theory.
In 2005, I left the SEIU International board to run an organizing project directed at establishing whether we could successfully organize Wal-Mart workers on a number of fronts. This was a joint project involving ACORN, SEIU, AFL-CIO, and UFCW. SEIU was developing the Wal-Mart Watch effort based in Washington, DC, and our effort was the direct organizing component, while the Watch was the web and media side of the air war. The UFCW also began a parallel effort called Wake Up Wal-Mart centered on a bus tour that organized meetings and small rallies around the country, largely around UFCW locals.
Geographically, we focused on the Interstate-4 corridor in Florida running from roughly Orlando to Tampa – St. Petersburg, encompassing about twenty-one counties. At that time, 4% of the total revenue for Wal-Mart was coming out of that area.
“We were able to maximize action on individual and collective issues using their “open door” policy and “grievance” procedures and through direct action at the stores.”
Strategically, there were three legs to the stool: workers, store-siting in the footprint, and blocking international expansion.
First, would Wal-Mart workers join a union? We organized the Wal-Mart Workers Association to directly engage workers in the corridor, enroll them in the union, collect dues, and take direct collective action on the job. We had a team of about twenty organizers, split between labor and community work. We triggered the drive by accessing the Florida voter list and pulling all phone numbers for families making less than $50,000 per year. We used a robodialer (this was 2005!) with a two-pronged message, leading with the question of whether they, or anyone in their family, had worked for Wal-Mart, and did they know that there were rights and benefits they might not have realized. If yes, then what was their address, and we would follow-up. We would winnow out the bad calls, and the organizers would be on the doors the next day to do the visits.
We were clear that we were building a union, but that we would not file for an election, and we would win through action and campaigns, and not collective bargaining. Members joined on that basis. We signed up almost 65% of all completed visits, which was the best recruiting percentage I had ever tallied in any other union organizing drive. Wal-Mart workers wanted to organize and were ready to join the WWA on the basis presented. We surfaced the organizing committee publicly in a press conference at the point that we had committees in more than 30 stores with support ranging from 5 to 40%. We had close to 1000 members in about six months.
After we first went public, there were reportedly 100 Wal-Mart operatives from Bentonville sent into the Florida stores to counter our efforts. They had individual and captive audience meetings for six to eight weeks. One of our leaders literally had a one-on-one meeting with a Wal-Mart labor relations guy every shift for over 50 days. After they could not find a card signing effort or any sense of a pending filing, Bentonville pulled them away. We were able to maximize action on individual and collective issues using their “open door” policy and “grievance” procedures and through direct action at the stores. We won some wage increases, reinstatements, and a slew of schedule changes, because the company was forced to empower local managers to counter our claims that scheduling was done by Bentonville, Arkansas computers. They fired no one, and we never filed an 8(a)(3) charge (National Labor Relations Act charge alleging discriminatory discharge). We pushed, and they bent.
The second leg of the stool was building a community-based organization in order to block Wal-Mart from building new supercenters. To engage that fight, we built WARN, Wal-Mart Alliance for Reform Now, as a broad coalition of unions, community and civil rights organizations (including ACORN chapters obviously), environmental groups, and civic associations in instances where they would be impacted by traffic and property values from new stores. In addition to the community organizing team, we supported this work with research reports that debunked the wages claimed by Wal-Mart in Florida (we were able to identify Wal-Mart workers from the way state unemployment data was sorted) and advance site location work. We found several experts at the University of Florida in Gainesville who specialized in developing algorithms to help stores determine future locations. They agreed to train our researchers, so once skilled adequately, we were able to determine in our target area where Wal-Mart – or generally any big box operation – would be likely to site a store for expansion. Another one of our team would reach out to every planning and zoning department in the footprint on a weekly basis to determine if there was any activity around these sites from purchases to applications.
We were able to nip some efforts in the bud. Others we had to fight from proposal to council hearings and in one case, in Sarasota Springs, through a direct ballot local initiative. We were able to bring police into the alliance because of traffic and safety concerns. We were able to bring property owner associations into the alliance in some cases on value issues. We blocked some permits on company efforts to build in wetlands and environmentally prohibited areas. During the life of the project within our footprint we blocked 32 straight Wal-Mart superstore expansion efforts. Using a community base and alliances, we were able to develop leverage we hoped would aid the organizing efforts.
Lastly, Wal-Mart had widely publicized that its huge growth in the future would be achieved by expanding in India, as it had done in China. Enlisting the support of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center and to a lesser degree UNI Global Union, the international global federation, we quickly determined that any expansion in India would require amending the rules on foreign direct investment, which despite neoliberal revision in the country would still require modification because multi-brand retail was still restricted. We then organized the India FDI (Foreign Direct Investment) Watch Campaign, a coalition effort of unions, traders, hawkers, and others to oppose any changes in FDI for retail. It’s a long story in itself, but we were successful in blocking any changes for a decade, as ACORN continued to support the effort even after the unions had withdrawn support from the rest of the campaign. We had made promises, and they were meant to be kept. Even now, Wal-Mart has not been able to expand significantly in India and for them, or their competitors to do so, is very difficult since we were able to win significant concessions in the Parliament that the company still sees has prohibitive.
In this hybrid community-labor model applied to Wal-Mart, we established several things. Workers wanted a union and would join and pay dues, without any promise or prospect of an election or a collective bargaining agreement. We could stop expansion of Wal-Mart locally and internationally to build leverage on the company to support the workers organizing.
Nonetheless in the real politic of American labor organizing by 2008, SEIU and UFCW were involved in political and jurisdictional disagreements and part of the price of their trying to keep their alternative federation alive in Change to Win was their withdrawal from the project, forcing us to lay off most of the organizing staff. We were already at a juncture where we needed more lists to keep building and a deeper commitment, so this was crippling. We were able to keep some of the work alive for almost a year after that based on outside funding raised for the campaign. The work in India was taken over by ACORN International and absorbed as part of our Delhi office of ACORN India and continues to this day.
What does this say about other efforts to organize mass employers, like Amazon? Maybe nothing, maybe a lot.
When I met with Joe Hansen, then the president of UFCW, to give him a report on the work, I told him the good news was that we had succeeded on all of our main objectives, but the bad news is that for this model to work it would require a significant and long-term multi-year investment to get to 200,000 or more members, where the union would have enough power within the company to force de facto recognition and detente. It could take ten or twenty years, but it would work. He appreciated the point but wasn’t ready to go there.
A similar challenge faces any effort to organize Wal-Mart, or Amazon, or any mass employer. Organizers can fashion the strategies and tactics for almost any target. Workers will respond, if and when asked to act on their issues. Companies always have vulnerabilities that can be exploited.
Nonetheless without deep commitment – and pockets – to stay in it to win it, and the chance to adapt the organizing to what works and is most effective in the action and reaction of organization and workers to company response and so and so on, no plan will work no matter how good or well executed. Without that kind of commitment, it’s just dare to struggle without daring to win. Workers from time to time in different formations will be able to push Amazon and the others back in some battles, but won’t be able to win the war without putting all the pieces together and having the time and resources to engage the companies for as long as it takes.
…
Richard L. Trumka Sr. JULY 24, 1949 – AUGUST 5, 2021
By Robert Gumpert
Editor’s Note: This obituary for Richard comes by way of a group of friends and co-workers who worked in and around coal mining, the UMWA and labor starting as far back as the Miner’s for Democracy.
Richard Louis Trumka, 72, died on Thursday, August 5th, 2021. Rich, born on July 24, 1949 in Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, was a beloved son, father, grandfather, husband, friend, colleague, and leader. As the president of the AFL-CIO, Rich approached each day with a fierce passion to fight for others. When taking respite, he could be found in the great outdoors hunting, fishing, or camping with his family or with fellow members of the Union Sportsman Alliance. Rich helped usher a new generation of leaders through his service on the boards of the National Labor College, The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center, and The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, and many other groups. He also sat on the boards of the Economic Policy Institute and the Housing Investment Trust, and served as President Emeritus of the United Mine Workers.
Rich was preceded in death by his parents Frank and Eola (Bertugli) Trumka, his nephew Bryan Szallar, great nephew Bronson Szallar, his in-laws John and Katherine Vidovich, and brothers-in-laws John Vidovich and David Vidovich. Rich is survived by his wife Barbara, son and daughter-in-law, Rich Trumka Jr. (Jessica) of Olney, MD, sister and brother-in-law Francis Szallar (Alex) of McKees Rocks, his brother-in-law, Daniel Vidovich of Gates, his sisters-in-law Nella and Nancy, his three grandchildren Trey and Taylor Trumka and Ki Vidovich, and left to treasure his memory are his nieces and nephews, and his many other cousins. Friends and family will be received on Tuesday, August 10th from 6 to 8 pm, and on Wednesday, August 11th from 2 to 8 pm in the Behm Funeral Home, 1477 Jefferson Road, Jefferson, PA 15344, Gregory P. Rohanna, supervisor. On Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 11:00 am in the Jefferson-Morgan Middle/High School, 1351 Jefferson Road, Jefferson, PA 15344, there will be a public screening of the private memorial mass. Also a livestream of the mass can be viewed at: www.behm-funeralhomes.com or the AFL-CIO website: www.aflcio.org. In addition Mr. Trumka will lie in repose on Saturday, August 14, 2021 from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM at the AFL-CIO Headquarters in Washington, DC, 815 16th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006. In the following weeks, a larger memorial service (details to be announced) will be held in the Washington, DC area. Masks will be required, and social distancing will be observed at all events. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Penn State’s Scholarship Fund, which was started in Richard’s memory. The memo should reference: ‘Trumka Family Trustee Scholarship/ SCBTK’. The donation can be mailed to: Penn State Donor and Member Services, 2583 Gateway Drive, Suite 130, Bristol Place One, State College, PA 16801
DONATIONS
Penn State Scholarship Fund
Trumka Family Trustee Scholarship/SCBTK
2583 Gateway Dr., Suite 130, Bristol Place One
State College, PA 16801
Services
10 AUGUST
Visitation
6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
BEHM FUNERAL HOMES
1477 Jefferson Rd
Jefferson, Pennsylvania 15344
11 AUGUST
Visitation
2:00 pm – 8:00 pm
BEHM FUNERAL HOMES
1477 Jefferson Rd
Jefferson, Pennsylvania 15344
12 AUGUST
Live Stream of Private Mass
JEFFERSON-MORGAN HIGH SCHOOL
Auditorium
1351 Jefferson Rd.
Jefferson, PA 15344
14 AUGUST
Richard Trumka to Lie in Repose at AFL-CIO Headquarters
10 a.m. – 3 p.m.
815 Black Lives Matter Plaza (16th St. NW)
Washington, D.C.
Memories of Richard L. Trumka Sr.
Debbie O’Dell-Seneca
August 9, 2021
To the Trumka family,
My deepest sympathies to all of you on the loss of Rich. Such an inspiration! A man from the corner of Southwestern PA grew into a national leader who cared about people. I’ve known him since I became an attorney in the late 70s and he was always helpful, supportive, & kind to me and my family. One of my fondest memories was attending the 1984 convention with him, Lynn Williams, & Congressman Dr. Thomas E. Morgan. Thank you for sharing Rich with our nation and beyond. God bless.
Gwendolyn & Rev. Louis E. Ridgley
August 9, 2021
Extending heartfelt condolences to all that mourn the loss of this faithful, tireless “warrior”. Much that has been accomplished for members of America’s working class have been realized because of his many selfless efforts.
Gwendolyn O. Ridgley
Rev. Louis E. Ridgley, Jr.
Past Presidents
Fayette County (PA) NAACP
Ruth Stilwell
August 9, 2021
Like so many young labor leaders, Rich took me under his wing. He actively sought out women leaders in our movement to make sure we had a seat at the table. Our union was only 19,000 members, but he treated us the same as if we had a million. He did not make a show of it, he simply cared about our issues, our battle with the administration, the attacks on our profession and members were his battles. He made sure we knew that we were not alone in the fight, that the entire American labor movement had our backs.
My tribute on social media was simply this:
As I drove back to the office, I heard the news that Rich Trumka had died. I wasn’t ready for that. When I received my master’s degree, it was Rich Trumka that handed it to me. When I served on the AFL-CIO secretary treasurer’s committee, it was Rich Trumka that selected me. When I argued at the AFL Convention for seats for small unions on the executive committee, it was Rich Trumka that opposed me. When we were fighting to preserve our profession and our union against an administration that wanted to decertify us, It was Rich Trumka who counseled me. And when he was telling a story about his work at the Robena Mine, I asked my father if Uncle Frank knew him then. He told my dad, “I know Rich Trumka better than I know you, Rich Trumka saved my pension.”
Whether you knew him or not, whether you met him or not, if you are a working man or woman in America, Rich Trumka touched your life. His lifelong fight for fair wages and safe working conditions doesn’t end today, it is up to us to keep moving forward.
Rest my brother, you have earned it.
RONALD BROWN
August 9, 2021
Rich and I met at Penn State in the fall of 1968 when we both resided in North Halls. We were apartment roommates in 1970 & 1971. Rich traveled with me several times to my parents’ home in Shartlesville, Berks County, PA. I have attached 2 photos of Rich & I when he visited in 1970 or 1971 and also a photo of when he was an usher in my August 1973 wedding. We last got together in 1991 when he was still President of the United Mine Workers Union. Over the years after I often thought of contacting Rich but did not want to interrupt what I am certain was a very busy schedule with people of higher stature. As I approached retirement this year I thought about trying to reconnect with Rich when he retired, unfortunately that opportunity is now lost. We have lost a good common sense man who never forgot his roots. I truly regret not having tried sooner to reconnect.
My Condolences
Ron Brown
PSU Class of 72
Sosthenes Behn
August 9, 2021
I worked with Rich at the Nemacolin (Buckeye) mine. He was a dedicated hard worker. I met him briefly after he had assumed the leadership of the UMWA.
God Bless you Rich!
Jim Lavelle
August 9, 2021
REST IN PEACE, BROTHER!
Gregory and JanIs Kott
August 8, 2021
To the Trump Family,
We went to high school with Rick.
He was a home town young man that did so much helping others.
Our deepest sympathy for your loss.
Springfield, Va.
Bea Harris
August 8, 2021
I will always remember Rich as a visionary…. he saw how things could be and worked to see many of his visions come to life.
A great speaker and dedicated leader, Rich greeted everyone he met with a warm smile and a handshake..
I was privileged to work with the Baltimore AFL-CIO for many years, and always thought highly of Rich and his goals…..
Mary Kiger
August 8, 2021
Rich Trumka was the “local boy” that many grew up aspiring to be like . He came from a loving family and a loving town . Condolences to his family.
…
In 114 Degree Heat Farmworkers Are Still Working
By David Bacon
A sampling of headlines from June and July 2021
“Heat wave builds across West after hottest June on record in US” Washington Post
“Records torched as western US sizzles amid major heat wave” Washington Post
“Astounding heat obliterates all-time records across the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in June 2021” Climate Gov
“The Record Temperatures Enveloping The West Are Not Your Average Heat Wave” NPR
In a field near Arvin, at the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, dozens of workers arrive at 5:30 in the morning. It’s already over 80 degrees, and by midafternoon the temperature will top 114 degrees, according to my iPhone.
Is this heat normal? The southern San Joaquin is a desert like pan between the high Sierras and the Pacific Coast ranges, whose rivers have been diverted into giant irrigation projects. High temperatures are the norm. In 1933 the thermometer reached 116 degrees on July 27. The high this past July was 112.
In the summer, cars line the valley’s rural roads and highways, next to field after field. Even before daybreak, people stream from their vehicles into the rows and vines. By starting early, farmworkers can get seven or eight hours in before the heat reaches its peak. Most head home then, but some continue on, despite the temperature.
Farmworkers in the San Joaquin Valley have no choice but to treat the heat in a matter-of-fact way – laboring through the summer means survival in the rest of the year. Summer is the season with the most demand for field labor, so people get in whatever hours they can, hopefully saving enough money to weather the months when work is scarce.
It’s easy to pick up a bag of delicate small bell peppers in the supermarket, or lift a heavy watermelon out of the bin, without thinking about what it must have been like to get them from field to city in this summer’s heat. But in California, workers used to die from it.
In 2005, after four workers died from heat exposure, California began requiring growers to provide adequate water, shade, and rest breaks. But in 2008, 17-year-old Maria Isabel Vasquez Jimenez died from working in the grape harvest in 95-degree heat. That led to stricter standards and more enforcement. Nevertheless, at least 14 California farmworkers died of heat-related illness between 2005 and 2015.
A recent report by Vermont Law School’s Center for Agriculture and Food Systems, “Essentially Unprotected,” points out that only California, Minnesota, Washington and, most recently, Oregon have any requirements mandating heat protection for farmworkers. There is no federal heat standard, although unions have fought for one.
An article this year in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine warned, “Immigrant farmworkers will often suffer through [heat-related illness] rather than report it as they do not want to be fired for being perceived as a bad worker, lose income, or let down coworkers, especially if they are being paid by piece rate rather than by time.”
Yet, despite the heat, the immigrant workers in these photographs were out in the fields, laboring to provide the food for Los Angeles, San Francisco and the rest of this country’s cities, with their sweat earning the money their own families need to live.
…
This article and these photos first ran in Capital & Main.