We are encouraged to think like capitalists
By Maximillian Alvarez
“There are also less obvious reasons, which all of us—everyone who is invested in the mission of using independent media to change the world for the better—should reflect on.”
I’m not going to sugarcoat things: Progressive, independent media outlets like ours have made tremendous strides over the years, but in the aggregate, we are still getting our butts kicked by corporate and rightwing media. There are obvious reasons for this: one side is incredibly well funded by a host of powerful actors with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, the other is not; one side has its coverage artificially boosted by black-boxed social media and search engine algorithms while the other is regularly downgraded or shadow-banned; etc. There are also less obvious reasons, which all of us – everyone who is invested in the mission of using independent media to change the world for the better – should reflect on.
Whether we’re talking about individual voices on social media or independent podcasts, YouTube shows, magazines, and multimedia outlets like TRNN, the digital media ecology’s built-in incentive structures train us to see ourselves as competitors in a zero-sum battle royale to secure our share of viewers, listeners, donors, clout, and so on. In short, we are encouraged to think like capitalists, to see others’ successes as our failures, and to greedily lord over our own personal fiefdoms of followers while the world continues to burn. This is the oldest trick in the book: divide and conquer. It is this every mindset that has pushed so many of us to fight with and clamber over one another in our daily lives to secure whatever scarps of wealth, status, and security we can for ourselves, all while the vast majority of wealth and power is concentrated in the hands of a few. In the world of media, the situation is no different: the more we are fighting and competing with one another, the more the powers that be are able to shore up their dominance. If we – all of us – are going to pose a serious threat to the power-serving propaganda machines that have been stoking imperialist desires to invade Cuba, fomenting manufactured outrage over “voter fraud” and Critical Race Theory, providing cover for police brutality, etc., we need to get serious about pooling our resources, bringing our respective audiences together, and working collaboratively. And that is precisely what we are doing here at TRNN.
In the first installment of our six-part video series of special reports on under covered political struggles in the state of Wisconsin, we premiered our documentary on rural Wisconsinites’’ fights to protect their communities against Big Agriculture and the factory farming industry. This video series is a testament to what we in the media (and all of you who support us) can achieve if we collaborate: By teaming up with In These Times magazine for their investigative series “The Wisconsin Idea,” we have been able to create something special together that neither of us could do on our own.
We at TRNN are making a concerted effort to get our amazing, committed, and talented team out there in the media bloodstream to engage in important discussions happening beyond the confines of our website, to share our work and critical perspectives with new audiences, and to send a message that TRNN is a collaborative hub for people around the world who are serious about building a better world. For instance, TRNN Managing, and Baltimore Editor Lisa Snowden-McCray published a stirring piece on Audubon magazine about the beautiful, necessary struggle for green spaces in Baltimore’s underserved neighborhoods. Jaisal Noor has been giving powerful and incisive interviews about worker cooperatives in the age of COVID-19 on a number of radio, podcast, and YouTube shows, including FAIR’s Counterspin and Means Morning News. I spoke with the great Jacqueline Luqman and Sean Blackmon about striking Frito-Lay workers in Topeka, Kanas (the interview begins around the one-hour mark). Eddie Conway dispensed more of his legendary wisdom on the This Is Revolutionpodcast, and Police Accountability Report hosts Taya Graham and Stephen Janis have been drawing much needed attention to the injustices of the US policing system and getting much deserved acclaim for their documentary, The Friendliest Town. We are out there, and we’re only getting started.
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This piece is from the email newsletter of The Real News Network
Bob Moses: 1935 – 2021.
By Mike Miller
“This is Mississippi, the middle of the iceberg…There is a tremor in the middle of the iceberg–from a stone that the builders rejected.”
Bob Moses, Letter from Magnolia, MS jail, 1962
An Unlikely Hero
In an age of plastic heroes, Bob Moses is the real thing—in large part because he did not want the role. In Mississippi, where his approach to organizing was born of a deep respect for “local people,” the work he initiated unleashed the talent, energy and power that is there waiting when small “d” democracy has the space to operate.
That space is called democratic organization: small “d” so that it is not confused with the American democratic myth that says when you choose between competing brands called political parties, and the products called candidates that they offer, you have a democratic society. “Organization” so it is not confused with the occasional uprisings of mass mobilization that take place when oppressed people rise in anger only to return to internalized anger when power structures fail to respond; or when voters massively turn out for the lesser evil (however real and necessary that might be) in the hope that it will be more. In SNCC, we thought “organization” is what we did while “mobilization” is what Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference did.
“… what Black Mississippians needed was the right to vote.”
Ella Baker, another genuine hero of The Movement, introduced Bob to a network of Mississippi African-Americans who in 1961 were leaders in local branches of the NAACP or independent local citizenship organizations seeking voting rights. To dare to attempt registering to vote was to put one’s life on the line, and to risk firing, eviction, foreclosure or other economic consequences.
Amzie Moore, one of those leaders in Cleveland, MS, admired the courage of young people sitting-in and engaging in freedom rides but he told Bob that what Black Mississippians needed was the right to vote. His view was repeated by others.
Wesley Hogan describes Bob’s local Mississippi introduction in Many Mind, One Heart (my additional observations are italicized):
…In July, 1961, when [Bob] Moses first arrived in McComb, Webb Owens, a retired railroad employee and treasurer of the local NAACP, picked up Moses and began making the rounds to every single black person of any kind of substance in the community. For two weeks, during each visit, Moses conversed with these leaders about his proposal to undertake a month-long voter registration project. Other SNCC staff would come to help, he promised, if the community raised money to support them.
At that point, Owens moved in as a closer. A smart, slim, cigar-smoking, cane-carrying, sharp-dressing gregarious man known in the community as “Super Cool Daddy”, liked and trusted by all, Owens solicited contributions of five to ten dollars [equal to $45 – $90 in 2021 dollars] per person. Before the rest of the SNCC staff arrived, the black community not only supported the project, it financed it as well.
Surfacing here is one of the central causal dynamics of the civil rights revolution in the South of the 1960s…Moses would approach a local leader—in this case, Webb Owens. He then listened to Owen’s ideas…
…Owens led Moses to all of the potential leaders in the community, in the process exposing himself to great risks as a local NAACP leader. When he extended himself on behalf of Moses and asked citizens to financially support a voter registration drive, things began to happen. The quality of the local person that you go to work with is everything in terms of whether the project can get off the ground, Moses later explained. The McComb voter registration drive would not have taken off without someone like Owens.
Too many discussions of “grassroots organizing” and “top-down versus bottom up organizing” ignore the lessons that are taught by Moses’ experience. Respected local leaders introduced him into the local communities in which voter registration projects started and asked the local community to financially support the work that Moses and other SNCC field secretaries were going to do. To the question, “Who sent you?” that might be asked of a SNCC worker, the answer was Webb Owens or Amzie Moore or CC Bryant or any of a number of respected local people who legitimized SNCC’s presence in their community.
Where that beginning legitimacy was lacking, the SNCC worker had to “earn the right to meddle” by gaining the trust of locally respected people. Field secretary Charles McLauren wrote a SNCC staff working paper on invited and uninvited organizers, and what the latter had to do to earn the trust that was the precondition for engaging local people in “Movement” activity.
An Organization of Organizers
Moses also recruited young people to become organizers and developed in them an understanding of the role that was controversial within SNCC. For Jim Forman, SNCC’s executive director, SNCC was an organization of organizers and itself a leadership organization, a “vanguard”. To use a spatial image, SNCC would be internally democratic as would groups it created, but it would be in front of a growing body of affiliates from across the south.
For Bob and his Mississippi full-time organizer recruits, SNCC was alongside. It was this understanding of the organizer’s role that created the space for people like sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer to emerge as major Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party leaders. For the alongside organizer there is a continuing tension between, on the one hand, the greater vision an initial organizing effort offers and the belief in it that develops in its rank-and-file and secondary leaders, and, on the other, the egos and selfish interests that might emerge at various levels of leadership, and the realities of power relationships that necessarily force compromise upon the vision if it is to move forward.
The projection of local people led Bob to support the revival of the Council of Federated Organization (COFO), an umbrella organization in which the major civil rights organizations could develop a common strategy and implementation plan to break Mississippi’s iron wall of segregation. Under COFO’s auspices, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) was created. These were necessary steps to advance the cause, though a deep sacrifice organizationally for SNCC which was providing 90% of the full-time staff in the state and would no longer be able to raise funds in the name of its Mississippi Project. The sacrifice was necessary. That’s how Bob thought.
The Mississippi Summer Project
The idea of bringing the country to Mississippi was circulating in the state as early as mid-1963. Let America see Mississippi for what it is and surely it will reject it and demand change was the underlying premise. Moses was quiet during the increasingly intense discussion that followed. Local people generally liked the idea. Many of SNCC’s young Black staff feared what the presence of an overwhelmingly White, elite-college educated, group would do both to local leadership and to their own roles. The fears were legitimate, and Moses didn’t want to lend his weight to one or another point of view.
Then yet another murder of a Black local activist took place. Louis Allen, witness to the murder by a state legislator of local Black leader Herbert Lee, initially told a lie that made the murder appear to be self-defense. Allen changed his mind and told the FBI that he would testify. Explaining why, he said, “I did not want to tell no story about the dead, because you can’t ask the dead for forgiveness.” Allen was gunned down on his farm.
The Allen murder ended Moses’ silence. He threw his considerable weight behind the Summer Project.
Just before completion of training for the second group of summer volunteers, three more Movement people were murdered: a Black Mississippian and two northern White volunteers. Moses addressed the volunteers, inviting them to go home if the news of these murders created any doubts for them. The accounts vary as to how many left, and there may have been none, but it was fewer than the fingers on one hand.
Later, Moses said of them, “[I]t turned out they had within them, individually and collectively, some kind of moral toughness that they were able to call upon. And God knows they needed it, because it was not just the Mississippi government, it was also the issue that the space in the Black community was really not a completely welcome space. There were some elements there which were welcoming them and bringing them in as family…, but then there was this resentment also, so they had to figure out how to walk through that. It is to their everlasting credit that they did.”
The Algebra Project (TAP)
How The Algebra Project teaches algebra to its students who had been tracked out of studying math in most of the schools they attended remains a mystery to me. To say the least, algebra is not one of my strengths. Bob once said to me, “anyone can learn algebra.” When I challenged him to teach me, we gave up because our time for humoring me had run out—a meeting beckoned. The evidence is that those who thought they couldn’t learn it can!
What I do understand is some of its core concepts, and they are really organizing concepts: begin with people’s experience; tap into their curiosity; engage them and their families in the process; go step-by-step, establishing self-confidence and building from one experience to the next. TAP makes demands on those who would participate in it: you have to do extra studying, including a summer. And you have to make demands upon the education system. The element of demand is central. Change comes from below.
TAP is also more complicated than voting. School districts, superintendents and “downtown” math divisions, principals, math department heads, classroom teachers and others have to buy in. Bob’s organizing talent put together a national organization of school people, including university math departments, school superintendents and districts, school reformers and others to pursue its goals.
Across the country, in Black inner-city schools and in Appalachian hollers, TAP is working. It contributed an appreciation of social class to Bob’s thinking that I don’t think was previously there. In relation to their education, he told me he didn’t see much to differentiate poor White students in TAP classes in southeast Ohio and those in Black inner-city schools.
His Meaning To Me
Bob was closest to me in age of the three people who most influenced my life as a community organizer. (The others were political theorist/longshoremen’s union leader Herb Mills, my best friend for 60 years who died in 2018, and Saul Alinsky, who died in 1972, for whom I directed a Black community organizing project in Kansas City, MO 1966/1967.) Bob was born in 1935, two years before me. Like me, he grew up in a public housing project—he in Manhattan, I in San Francisco.
We first met when he came to the San Francisco Bay Area on a fundraising tour I organized as SNCC’s field secretary in the area. We got to know one another better when I worked out of the Greenwood, MS SNCC freedom house during the summer of 1963. Dick Frey and I were the first Whites to be assigned to the Mississippi Delta. I got to watch him work up close.
Our friendship renewed when Bob started traveling with The Algebra Project. He came to the Bay Area where I connected him with local community organizations that were interested in getting TAP introduced in their school districts. He invited me to come to Broward County, FL where the school district was adopting TAP as part of its curriculum. We developed a plan for an organizing project that would organize parents and their communities; unfortunately it never got off the ground.
In 2012, I organized a trip to the Bay Area by Bob to raise funds for the defense of Ron Bridgeforth, a former SNCC field secretary who’d gotten himself in trouble with the law when he used a gun to steal materials for a Black children’s tutorial program and got in an exchange of shots with a cop who was attempting to arrest him. (Bridgeforth escaped and went underground for 40+ years. We’d been friends before that incident when he was still a SNCC worker.)
Bob often stayed at my place when he came to the Bay Area. We got to have serious discussions about the things we cared most deeply about. I got to know him as a person.
What stands out about Bob is the quiet that surrounded him—a quality of serenity that made him a rock of steadfastness no matter what turmoil surrounded him.
We think of charisma as associated with dramatic speeches made to tens or hundreds of thousands: Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., John L. Lewis and other great orators. Bob’s charisma was different. He spoke softly, often using questions to get others talking with each other in small groups and listened carefully. But there was no question: when he was in a room, he was usually the center of attention.
For Bob, there were no nobodies. That created a deep bond between him and sharecroppers, day laborers, domestics and other otherwise nobodies in the dominant culture. The other side of this coin was that nobody intimidated him: not a Mississippi sheriff with a gun pointed at him or U. S. Senator Hubert Humphrey trying to persuade him of the honorary at-large two-seats “compromise” at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention.
Bob imagined a national constitutional amendment making education a right like voting and promoted the idea across the country when possibilities for ideas like that still seemed real. And he could return to a Mississippi classroom to teach his new algebra to make sure that it worked. The global and local were always interconnected in his theory and practice.
Bob, rest in peace. The country is a better place because of your presence. I miss you.
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Power Despite Precarity: How Contingent Faculty Organizing Can Succeed in Higher Education
By Steve Early
“Adjuncts need to develop the “capacity to speak as an independent collective voice within whatever over-arching organization” they choose to affiliate with.”
Despite recent organizing gains among some contingent faculty members, the adjunctification of higher education has left hundreds of thousands of college and university teachers with low pay, spotty benefit coverage, and little job security. As former adjuncts Joe Berry and Helena Worthen report in their new book, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Movement in Higher Education (Pluto Press, 2021), an estimated 70 to 80 percent of all contingent faculty in the U.S. still lack union representation.
The rapid, pandemic related expansion of on-line education threatens to further erode employment conditions for the two-thirds to three-fourths of all faculty members who are contingent. (For an analysis of OLE and its impact, see Robert Ovetz’s “Conscious Linkage: The Proletarianization of Academic Labor in the Algorithmic University,” New Politics, Summer, 2021.) In the next few years, Berry and Worthen predict, “the institutions of higher education will be more globalized, more on-line” and “and most will try to eliminate tenure and universalize contingency.”
To help the contingent faculty movement prepare for its next big battles, the authors have produced a timely history of union activity among “second tier faculty excluded from the tenure system.” It updates Berry’s previous survey of the field in Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (Monthly Review Press, 2005) and draws heavily on their own experience in California and other states. Their detailed case study of membership mobilization, contract bargaining, and political action by the California Faculty Association (CFA) illustrates many of the continuing challenges facing contingent faculty trying to form their own bargaining units or influence the direction of unions that include tenure line teaching staff with sometimes divergent interests.
As described in Power Despite Precarity, four decades of union building, within the CFA, have produced “the best contingent faculty contract in the U.S,” which now covers seventy percent of a faculty of 28,000 on 23 campuses. Adjuncts – or “lecturers” as they’re called in the California State University (CSU) system – “have taken leading roles throughout the union, which has maintained a high level of internal organization and membership despite the loss of agency fee funding,” due to the Supreme Court’s Janus decision. An internal union body known as the Lecturer’s Council of the CFA continues to be an important locus of struggle “both vis-à-vis the employer and within the union.”
In the 1970s, non-tenure track faculty, hired on a per class, per semester basis, had little voice in CSU workplaces. Many felt constrained from speaking their minds in front of tenure-line faculty, particularly if the department heads supervising them were union members themselves. In 1979, the California legislature authorized collective bargaining for CSU faculty, including lecturers. Three years later, two organizations battled each other for bargaining rights—the United Professors of California, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers, and the more conservative Congress of Faculty Associations, which “made no secret of looking down on Lecturers and hoping to split them off into a separate bargaining unit.”
In a run-off vote, the more welcoming UPC was narrowly defeated, in part because it failed to prioritize campaigning among lecturers. Ultimately, the CFA was forced to bargain for both tenure-line faculty and lecturers in the same unit. The CFA also avoided any further election competition from the UPC, when it became part of the Service Employees, via the latter’s larger affiliation with the California State Employees Association.
Circle The Wagons?
For adjuncts, the challenge was the same regardless of their union affiliation. As the authors note, the anti-union climate of the 1980s encouraged many higher education unions “to assume a defensive circle-the-wagons approach” rather than the “aggressive organizing posture they had taken in the 1960s and 1970s that had led to high-density faculty representation” in states with strong public sector bargaining laws. At the same time, “people working in what felt like the lower depths of college and university systems” were experiencing “bad working conditions, lack of job security, low pay, and lack of opportunities for professional advancement.” In the CFA, this forced them to organize and assert themselves in elections for union office, statewide bargaining committees and contract campaigns, and local contract enforcement.
“In 1999, Meisenhelder and other reform candidates mounted a re-election challenge to the CFA’s incumbent president, other statewide officials, and members of its board of directors.”
Berry and Worthen profile Lecturers Council leaders who found creative ways to enforce new contract protections against unfair lay-offs and denial of step increases. In 1994, the CFA helped adjuncts, with sufficient course loads, gain access to employer-paid health care coverage. This new benefit, achieved through legislation rather than bargaining, became a valuable tool for membership recruitment. But members of the CFA “old guard”—the mostly white, older male tenure-line leaders of the union—still downplayed lecturer problems and concerns. In response to an unpopular contract settlement in 1995, that weakened what little job security lecturers had, some started building an opposition caucus within the CFA.
By the union’s next bargaining round, in 1998-99, rank-and-file activists, like Susan Meisenhelder, a former lecturer who had gained tenure, were able to rally members against another bad agreement reached without any workplace agitation or activity. In 1999, Meisenhelder and other reform candidates mounted a re-election challenge to the CFA’s incumbent president, other statewide officials, and members of its board of directors. All the old guard officers were defeated, Meisenhelder became president, and her union vice-president was, for the first time, a lecturer, rather than a tenure track faculty member.
In various ways, the new leadership struggled to replace the “the service-oriented bureaucratic culture of the CFA” with a more activist approach, which included mounting credible strike threats and taking the union’s case to the public. Outside consultants and new staff were hired who could help the union bargain from a position of greater strength, through membership recruitment, education, and collective action. Local rank-and-file leaders were invited to participate in a strategic planning process that included a series of conferences on “The Future of the University.” At these campus gatherings, members critiqued the “corporatization” of higher education and brainstormed about alternatives to the predominant “business model” of CSU administrators. To win a more favorable statewide contract, the new leadership prepared for a system-wide rolling strike, a threat which only became credible after strengthening the role of lecturers in the union and highlighting, rather than ignoring, their bargaining priorities.
A Stronger Union and Better Contract
According to Berry and Worthen, the long-term results of this effort are reflected in both the CFA contract and structural changes within the union. The latter insured that lecturers are now better represented at all levels of the organization and “an important constituency in CFA.”
Contingent faculty members have become particularly active in “an anti-racist and social justice initiative which includes representatives on each campus, a vice-presidential seat on the board, and a robust effort to incorporate these concerns into all aspects of the union’s work.”
The CFA’s current collective bargaining agreement—its tenth since union certification—enables “someone working as a contingent in the CSU system to make enough money to lead a decent life – if they are assigned enough classes and if the live in a part of California where there is affordable housing.” Lecturers who teach 40 percent of a full-time load get job-based benefits identical to the medical, dental, vision, life-and-disability insurance coverage of tenure-line faculty. Other rights and benefits for adjuncts also provide “a level of contractual equality that is extremely rare,” according to the authors, who also praise CFA bargaining demands “that go beyond traditional job issues and address the quality of education, especially access to it by members of traditional minority populations.”
As the authors note, new adjunct organizing has benefited from an influx of veterans from graduate student employee organizations, affiliated either with the AFT or amalgamated unions like the UAW, CWA, and UE. These grad student unions – representing teaching and research assistants at both public and private universities – have grown steadily over the past thirty years. Some of their activists became so involved in organizing and bargaining that they abandoned academia for trade union careers. As opportunities to obtain tenure track positions continue to shrink for newly minted PhDs, many have joined the ranks of contingent faculty. According to the authors, “new leaders have emerged who are younger, often women or people of color, reflecting the actual workforce more accurately than leaders in the past.”
Faculty Forward
In recent campaigns at private-sector institutions, tens of thousands of adjuncts have become part of SEIU’s “Faculty Forward” campaign, rather than join traditional education unions. One strength of the SEIU approach is what the authors call a “metro strategy,” which means organizing contingent faculty as a regional workforce rather than targeting a single campus. One downside is SEIU’s long-standing propensity for currying favor with potential industry partners before affected workers have much say in the matter. In California, where the union’s membership includes few adjuncts other than those in its statewide CFA unit, the SEIU State Council backed a bill, signed by Governor Newsom last Fall, that will limit lawsuits, under the state’s wage and hour laws, against wealthy private institutions like Stanford University. The legislation does set a new minimum hourly rate for classroom hours worked, which may provide a floor for future wage negotiations by adjuncts able to win bargaining rights with help from SEIU or other unions.
But, in California and Washington state, class action litigation has already netted millions of dollars for underpaid and still mostly unorganized contingent faculty. In Washington, a lawsuit against state community colleges resulted in an out of court settlement benefiting thousands of adjuncts and making benefit eligibility easier, which leads one longtime advocate for adjuncts to question the value of SEIU’s lobbying. “Why on earth would a union representing adjuncts side with private colleges being sued for wage theft for not paying adjuncts for all of the hours worked outside of class?” asks Keith Hoeller, a Part-Time Faculty Association organizer in Washington state and editor of Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System. “It’s still not clear to me that AB 736 actually raises pay for current adjuncts at private colleges or will do so in the future. But it does seem like SEIU wanted to get into the good graces of private college administrators and supporting this bill would certainly do that.”
What other lessons can be learned from the experience of adjuncts who have already unionized? The authors argue that contingent faculty – as a majority of the academic workforce and, often, its union ranks as well – should prioritize “democratizing their unions and generating maximum feasible participation in them.” Adjuncts need to develop the “capacity to speak as an independent collective voice within whatever over-arching organization” they choose to affiliate with. They also need to align their own quest for a better deal, within higher education, with the struggles of millions of other precarious workers who lack secure jobs, paid maternity, family or sick leave, adequate unemployment benefits, and affordable healthcare. In that same spirit, Power Despite Precarity is not just a solid guide to best practices in day-to-day trade union work within higher education. It’s also a rousing call for the contingent faculty movement to embrace grassroots, rather than top-down, organizing and break out of the narrow confines of collective bargaining, as traditionally defined.
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Wildlife
By Kate Elliott
Dateline: Greater Vancouver – BC’s Lower Mainland, Canada
I begin by offering a story — a story I heard in 2019 while standing with a group of precariously housed folks in a dimly lit empty parking lot late one winter night.
We were gazing up at the sky. Someone had mentioned something about the stars — or maybe about a satellite or the space station. We’d all tilted our heads to look. A chill wind lapped at our faces, and we shuffled our boots against the asphalt to trick our feet into warmth. Unmittened fingertips held beer cans and lit cigarettes. And then a voice from among us asked if I knew about the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio.
“We used to come here at night to watch the owls,” he said. “They would perch at the edge of the roof over there, hunting rats. Beautiful birds. They’d watch the parking lot, waiting for the rats to come out. Then they’d swoop down and grab one. Plenty of rats. Good hunting for owls. But not everybody likes rats… When they renovated that building on the other side of the lot, things changed.” He pointed to a low-rise building, kitty-corner from the roof where the owls used to roost. “They put in a yoga studio, and people would drive here for classes. I suppose they didn’t like that sometimes a rat scurried by when they walked from their car to the studio. Someone must’ve complained to the building manager. Next thing you know, they’ve put down poison. Killed the rats. … No rats, no owls. They never came back.”
Several people nodded at the end of the story, and one man gestured to his dog, “Had to be careful this one didn’t get hold of any poison.” A couple murmured softly about the loss of something rare. “They wouldn’t have known about the owls,” the storyteller explained. “No way to know the poison would affect more than the rats.”
“No way to know …” The generosity of that statement has stayed with me. It forgives a lack of imagination that seems embedded in other urban solutions, such as those offered as a cure for homelessness. The same lack of imagination that killed the rats and ignored the owls is also present in one-size-fits-all municipal decisions about what “home” means to people who appear not to have one. — It is present also in decisions regarding what makes housing “adequate” for folks who have survived sleeping rough. Such decisions often ignore greater ecologies and tend to oversimplify the targeted problem.
To examine what makes a “good” solution, and who benefits, I invite you to take a closer look at the tale of the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio. What existed before a problem was identified? An urban ecosystem of sorts: a healthy colony of rats living underground — some of the houseless folks estimated the subterranean community spanned four blocks or more — and owls attracted by an abundance of prey. What played out in that space, from the perspective of the humans who gathered to watch the nocturnal hunting grounds come alive, might have been considered the stuff of nature documentaries. So, what, then, caused the problem? The arrival of a business that attracted folks who were not so local, clients who might not associate rats with owls — nor, for that matter, associate owls with parking lots in a neighbourhood of strip malls, police presence, and various social services. The assumption of the storyteller that someone connected to the yoga studio had complained about the rats, although not proven, seems plausible. The cause-and-effect timeline observed by the nature-watchers is clear: visible natural ecology playing out nightly, followed by arrival of yoga studio and its clients, followed by extermination of rats, and disappearance of owls. But through the limited gaze of the building manager and the yoga studio clients, the timeline is clipped: first there were rodents, which was deemed inappropriate, so action was requested and taken; now the rodents have disappeared. From this latter vantage point, the solution has been “good”; but from the vantage point of the locals who understood the ecology of the space, the solution has caused multiple harms. That there was no way to know the harms caused by poisoning the rats is true, but in a very limited sense: no one sought to ask, “Was there more they should know before taking action”.
And as with rats, in this case, so with humans.
A few weeks ago, a former classmate messaged me enthusiastically about renewed plans to “end homelessness” in the city. My instant emotional response was, “Whatever.” It’s not that I don’t believe in the importance of ending homelessness, I just haven’t seen it work in a way that permanently increases quality of life for the folks who become the target of these initiatives. In many cases, what I have seen and heard makes me wonder who “solving homelessness” is for: so often, it seems to merely invisibilise those without normative houses by tucking them out of sight into over-surveiled spaces that don’t ever feel like “home” — places people don’t necessarily want to be.
In the past six years, I’ve spent time in places where stories of people’s journeys into and out of homelessness — and back into homelessness — are the norm. The single common element of all the narratives I hear is that these experiences are individual; they vary depending on personality, ability and mobility, social connection, and the amount of trauma an individual has experienced. Just like housed folks, those who are houseless are not one definable demographic. But solving homelessness would be so much easier if that were not the case: if only unhoused people were a single entity with uniform needs. The stories I’ve heard bear the scars of easy solutions: housing conditions that are far from what the already-housed population would accept, and that few homeless folks would describe as “home.”
“Tenting is a desirable adventure for the already-housed.”
A few years ago, as a “tent city” was about to be taken down, I watched on my television screen while a reporter asked a woman in the camp if she didn’t want housing. All the viewers would have understood the dominant message that a tent is not appropriate housing. We also all understood the framing of this problem: those staying in the camp were refusing some sort of normative shelter being offered. This seemed to baffle and frustrate officials making the offer of housing. The woman answered the journalist without hesitation, “Of course I want housing.” And she told the reporter that she wanted her (the reporter’s) housing, explaining that if she couldn’t live in conditions similar to those that already-housed folks had, she’d rather live in her tent, where she had at least some control over her environment. That response is what I had already heard from others, and what I continue to hear from folks who feel that what they are being offered is sub-standard. But this lack of willingness to accept a living space with gyprock or concrete walls instead of the fabric walls of a tent flummoxes municipalities and those who have always had normative housing. Why would anyone turn down an opportunity to come in from the outdoors, to get out of a tent? — After all, although one outdoor adventure advertisement for my province boasts “50 free campsites” and pictures a tent pitched in a beautiful clearing, camping is reserved for leisure, for those who can afford to fit nature-time into the vacations doled out by their employer. Tenting is a desirable adventure for the already-housed. Folks who pitch a tent for free in urban spaces are an eyesore and an uncomfortable reminder that the rights to the city are inequitably distributed. So, when more normative housing is offered and then rejected, this can be confusing to those extending such offers. It might even seem like ingratitude. In an effort to understand refusals of housing, some people have decided that the lack of comprehension lies with those who are houseless. I’ve heard stories of houseless folks being advised to come put their name on the list for temporary modular housing (TMH) when they “come to their senses.” There is a strong fibre of paternalism running through these stories: that if unhoused folks simply understood what was good for them, they would accept what was on offer.
“When you don’t have a lot of money, there’s a fine line between housing and prison”
Theo, who made his living through scavenging and informal recycling, slept rough and pushed his belongings in a grocery cart. He had resisted different forms of housing on offer after discovering restrictions that he just didn’t want to live with. If he was going to move indoors, he told me, he wanted to know he would be comfortable; if not, it just wasn’t worth it. In 2019, during weeks of sleet, he reconsidered and went to see what the proposed TMH development in his neighbourhood might be like. He spoke with me the day after he’d gone to put his name on the list. He was angry. Apparently, before he’d had much of a chance to ask about regulations and restrictions, the woman in charge had nodded toward his grocery cart. “She told me to come back when I’d downsized my belongings! I was sure steamed. Told her to go back to her home and downsize her own belongings. How did that feel?” Johnny, with whom I’d been on many scavenging trips, lost his housing through renoviction in 2019. Although looking for housing, he wanted a place he’d be comfortable, and didn’t want to have to sign in and out when leaving a place where he lived. “That’s not home,” he grumbled to me one day. He lived rough for a year before a place he could live in became available.
Kyle, too, had been homeless for long stretches of time. “When you don’t have a lot of money, there’s a fine line between housing and prison,” he told me. He was especially wary of the TMH units that Theo had investigated. “They’re not all the same,” he said, admitting that some TMH projects are better than others, both in design and level of surveillance. “Run by different folks. But it’s like their name: they’re “temporary.” If you give in the first time and say, ‘Okay, I’ll sign in when I want to go home, and I’ll sign out when I want to leave my home, and I’ll accept that maybe I have to have room inspections, and that maybe I don’t have a kitchen in my home and I can’t have guests spend the night — or maybe I can but only a couple of nights a month and they have to be the right kind of people, well, okay then. — If I accept those rules for my ‘home,’ okay. But then the modulars get shut down. — They’re only temporary, right? — And they’re going to move you to new housing. But maybe this new housing comes with even more rules. What are you going to do? It’s a slippery slope. Say yes now and one day find yourself living in a prison.” He described some residents as “sleepwalkers.” “You have to be,” he told me, “to accept those conditions.”
But not everyone feels that way. TMH can become home space for some who need it, and some TMH is designed with fully-contained units that do have kitchen spaces and private bathrooms. But it is temporary. Other housing, like SROs and temporary shelter living requires a sharing that can be difficult for people coming out of abuse. Several women I’ve spoken with have likened the mere experience of being homeless to an assault. “I thought to myself, ‘This is not my life. This is not my life.’ I woke up every morning and wondered how I got here. I grew up in a nice neighbourhood,” one woman told me. When she arrived at the shelter with her small child, she found it difficult to parent in public, to find alone time. “I just needed a space to myself. But there’s no privacy in these places. — I’m not ungrateful, but you just need a space to yourself. And there isn’t one.” When she had taken a few minutes to sit quietly, another woman had made an official complaint that she was neglecting her child. “I mean, how can you be a good mother if you don’t have time to take care of your own needs?” I was surprised to hear there was little support.
Ryder, an informal recycler I worked alongside during my thesis research, told me women always have a hard time. “You can’t win if you’re a mom without a home. People always look at you as if you’re a bad parent. If you give up your children to the system, you’re a bad mom, but if you try to keep them and you don’t have good housing, you’re a worse mom.” Women told me how hard it was to find housing that is deemed appropriate, especially if they have children over the age of five: according to the Canadian National Occupancy Standard (CNOS) male and female children are not to share a room. It’s possible that many families don’t know this: those of us who have always been housed are able to configure our home spaces however we like. But I’ve heard from women who are deeply concerned that breaking CNOS guidelines may put at risk their housing funding or ability to live with their children. That means finding affordable apartments with multiple rooms, a financial impossibility in British Columbia’s lower mainland. And fathers suffer, too: one of Ryder’s friends had been separated from his children and their mother because most shelter housing is not intended for families. Gender-segregated shelter space means that children stay with mothers, and fathers live apart, meeting up when they can. For families already juggling the stressors associated with precarious living (precarious employment, food insecurity, moving children to different schools, surveillance from social services, the endless bureaucracy of paperwork required to access essential services), segregated shelters place extra burdens on relationships.
In order to save their relationships, even childless couples will sometimes reject sheltered housing in order to remain together. “We’re the only thing we have,” one woman told me. “Each other. That’s it. If it’s the street or separation, I choose him.” She and her partner had lived rough for almost ten years by the time they found space in a shelter that allowed couples. I heard a similar story from a woman in her 60s who felt her husband needed a level of care that simply wasn’t offered in a shelter. She chose to live with him in a tent, packing up daily and looking for “safe spots” to spend the night along the urban periphery. “It’s important to be invisible,” she told me. “That’s the only way to stay safe.”
I couldn’t agree more: just ask the yoga studio rats.
And I say this as a person who has a deep respect for rats — for their sense of community, their ingenious ways of getting along with the humans who wish to eradicate them. And like owls, rats are intelligent. One of my former professors might observe that rats simply lack a good marketing team. Without re-branding, residents have a hard time seeing them as anything but undesirable. Rats are a sign of filth; they offend the human penchant for “clean.” In the same way that rats make us uncomfortable, so does visible homelessness. We might explain this feeling by saying we wish for others to be comfortable, to be taken care of. But if that’s really true, then why is the housing we offer so unlike that of already-housed folks? Is it that we feel our housing must be earned? That houseless folks are less deserving? I suspect this is an obvious truth. And it must feel quite comforting and virtuous of us when we see fewer homeless people on the streets. This means we — our City, our Region — are solving homelessness. But I challenge that for someone to move out of being “homeless” they have to actually find “home” — something we don’t provide with temporary, over-regulated, segregated, rights-limited housing.
A few nights after I heard the story of the owls, the rats, and the yoga studio, Kyle and I were chatting a few blocks from the parking lot. He was still unhoused by choice, waiting for something that wouldn’t break his bankbook or his soul. “I wonder about them,” he told me, as we gazed across at the new condo towers only a kilometer away. I wondered about them, too, thinking that some of the yoga studio clients likely lived there. “I wonder what they’re thinking — and if they wonder about us,” Kyle mused. “They’re so high up, they don’t close their curtains. They must think they’re invisible up there.” He chuckled and then pointed, “Did you see that? The light just changed in that window there. You can tell they’re channel surfing.” Finally, the light remained a faint green glow. Kyle wondered aloud what they were watching. I was feeling gloomy. “Probably a National Geographic program about owls,” I said. Our shoulders shook with dark laughter, and he nodded beside me. “Yup. Wildlife.”
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Longshore Labor’s Real SF Worker-Intellectual
By Steve Early
“A new book about a Bay Area ILWU leader, whose own life as a working-class intellectual, over-lapped with Hoffer’s, presents a different view of Sixties activism and its impact on labor and society.”
In the 1950s and 60s, the best-known member of the left-led International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU) was, oddly enough, a conservative writer named Eric Hoffer, whose fans included Ronald Reagan. Hailed in the mainstream media as the work of a “labor philosopher,” Hoffer’s first book, The True Believer, became a national best-seller and widely-assigned reading in colleges and high schools. In his writing, Hoffer argued that mass movements of the left and right were essentially interchangeable, and equally prone to dogmatism and extremism.
A Bay Area resident, Hoffer worked on the docks until 1967, by which time UC Berkeley had become an epicenter of student protest. He was a fierce critic of campus radicalism, warning that “for the first time in America, there is a chance that alienated intellectuals, who see our way of life as an instrument of debasement and dehumanization, might shape a new generation in their own image.” This was music to the ears of Berkeley administrators who made Hoffer an adjunct professor. In 1982, President Reagan invited his fellow cold-warrior to the White House to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
A new book about a Bay Area ILWU leader, whose own life as a working-class intellectual, over-lapped with Hoffer’s, presents a different view of Sixties activism and its impact on labor and society. Herb Mills: A Tribute (Euclid Avenue Press, 2021) is an edited collection about the unusual career of a dock worker and elected officer of ILWU Local 10, who helped shape the Berkeley student movement sixty years ago and, later, received his PhD in sociology from UC-Irvine. As recounted in this edited collection of interviews with (and articles by and about) Mills, his original migration from the world of blue-collar work to higher education began in Michigan. Born in 1930, he graduated from Dearborn High School and then went to work, at age 18, in Ford Motor’s huge River Rouge assembly plant. As Mills recounted later, “this plant was my education. River Rouge and its union changed my life.” United Auto Workers Local 600 was, at the time, under left-wing leadership, and encouraged its 40,000 members to take classes in US politics, labor economics and history at a local junior college. A professor there encouraged Mills to leave the factory and get a four-year degree at the University of Michigan, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.
A Foe of HUAC
After a stint in the Army, Mills moved to California, where he started graduate studies at Berkeley. He also joined SLATE, a campus political party which became nationally known for its multi-issue campaigning against racial discrimination in housing, the death penalty in California, military training on campus, and the investigative activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As the ILWU Dispatcher noted when Mills died three years ago, at age 88, he “spoke to student and community groups across the country, explaining how citizens of San Francisco took action to successfully shut down HUAC, marking a shift from the anti-Communist hysteria that was used against unions, like the ILWU, during the Cold War.” According to fellow SLATE member Mike Miller, Mills was a “master strategist” for SLATE and “central to steering it through the thicket of left politics and maintaining its ability to win broad support.”
In 1963, Mills put his doctoral work on hold and became, like Eric Hoffer, a working member of ILWU Local 10. As a longshoreman, Mills was equally active on bread-and-butter issues, internal struggles to maintain the democratic character of the union, and ILWU refusals to unload military cargo destined for military dictatorships in Chile and El Salvador. He started out as a union steward, then stewards’ council chair, Local 10 business agent, and finally secretary-treasurer of the local, which remains in the forefront of Bay Area labor solidarity today. (On Juneteenth last year, the local was part of a West Coast port shutdown protesting the death of George Floyd and hosted a huge rally in Oakland featuring Professor Angela Davis, the former political prisoner who was just made an honorary ILWU member.)
For admirers of the ILWU and its legendary founder Harry Bridges, a San Francisco general strike leader in 1934, the most interesting part of Mills career will be his conflict with Bridges over implementation of the first Mechanization and Modernization (M&M) Agreement negotiated with longshore employers in 1960. As part of a “grand bargain” designed to raise wages and benefits while allowing the industry to reduce its labor-force through “containerization,” the M&M deal paved the way for a weakening of traditional union hiring hall protections. In 1971, management’s insistence on hiring some “steady workers” of their own choosing, rather than having all dispatched from an ILWU hall, triggered a 134-day walk-out. Strike action was opposed by Bridges but backed by a big membership majority.
Rebellion Against Bridges
As the Dispatcher reported fifty years later, this Mills-assisted rebellion against Bridges “tapped into a feeling among younger workers that Bridges had lost touch and was becoming too close to the industry.” In Mills’ view, “the social roots and bonds of the [longshore] community…were destined to be ripped asunder once the individual employer secured the contractual right to remove men from the functioning of the hiring hall.” Bridges, in turn, believed that strike advocates, like Mills, were “reckless and unwilling to face new realities.” In the end, the employers prevailed on the issue, a set-back which led Mills to call for Bridges’ retirement. The union founder finally stepped down in 1977, after trying to lead ILWU members back into the AFL-CIO, the Teamsters union, or the more conservative east-coast International Longshoremen’s Association, which the ILWU broke away from in 1937. A staunch defender of ILWU independence and autonomy, Mills campaigned successfully against any such affiliation or merger.
“all people should have the right and power to effectively participate in the decisions that affect their lives.”
During Mills’ own later career in Local 10, he tackled critical issues like the need for greater dock worker protection against workplace asbestos exposure. As noted above, he also helped mobilize ILWU members against shipments of military cargo to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile and the armed forces of El Salvador, during their 1980s civil war massacres. Mills led Bay Area protests over the death of two ILWU local officials, whose opposition to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos led to their own assassination. He was also credited with helping to save the life of South Korean dissident Kim Dae Jung, who faced execution in 1980 for his political activities. Seventeen years later, after imprisonment and exile, Kim was inaugurated president of South Korea, with Mills and ILWU President Brian McWilliams as honored guests at the ceremony.
A Permanent Tribute
Contributors to Herb Mills: A Tribute include a number of retired ILWU members or headquarter’s staffers, along with longshore historians, sociologists, and labor archivists. Among them are ILWU Secretary-Treasurer Ed Ferris; Harvey Schwartz, curator of the ILWU’s Oral History collection at its SF headquarters on Franklin Street; Professor Peter Cole, author of Dockworker Power; former ILWU organizing director Peter Olney; Steve Stallone, the union’s ex-communications director; Sadie Williams, a member of the ILWU Local 10 pensioners Club; Ashley Lindsey, a researcher for the Waterfront Workers History Project; and Paula Johnson, who collaborated with Mills on a permanent exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution on the transformation of waterfront work.
The moving force behind this collection is Mills’ best friend for 60 years, longtime community organizer and labor educator Mike Miller, whose ORGANIZE Training Center, at 442 Vicksburg Street, San Francisco, 94114 is filling orders for the book. To order send a check for $30 to the OTC at that address or through PayPal, using the email address: theorganizermailing2@yahoo.com. In Miller’s own salute to Mills, he describes him as “a small ‘d’ democrat” who “could engage in the most esoteric political theory debates” Yet, from the Berkeley campus to local labor fights and cross-border solidarity campaigns, Mills’ core belief remained the same: “all people should have the right and power to effectively participate in the decisions that affect their lives.”
That Sixties-inspired creed and Mills’ personal example are both good guides for younger radicals making a similar post-graduate transition today– from campus or community activism to workplace organizing in unionized or non-union workplaces.
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Biden’s PATCO Moment?
By Rand Wilson and Mark Dudzic
July 7th Update:
Today, The Labor Campaign joins MNA nurses from the St. Vincent Hospital Picket line, CWA-AFA President Sara Nelson, and a national coalition of activists to demand accountability from Tenet and support nurses’ strike for safer patient care during a 1pm ET LIVE STREAM in front of Tent Corporate Headquarters in Dallas, TX.
The demonstration in front of Tenet HQ marks the 122nd day on strike for St. Vincent nurses, making it the second longest nurses strike in Massachusetts history and the longest nurses strike nationally in more than a decade. As of that date, Tenet had spent an estimated $75 million to prolong the strike — all to avoid being held accountable for providing safer patient care.
This strike matters for all workers. Tenet has begun to permanently replace the striking nurses. This action, by a notorious healthcare profiteer has transformed a hard fought strike battle into a red line issue for the entire labor movement. It evokes the rampage of union busting that followed the Reagan Administration’s mass firing of striking air traffic controllers in the notorious PATCO strike of 1981.
WAYS TO SUPPORT
Sign and Share. Join the Labor Campaign, MNA, NUHW, and many others in calling for an investigation into Tenet and other large hospital systems. Sending a letter to your congressional delegation asking them to support an investigation is easy! Simply follow this link and add your name.
Tenet has made it very clear that they prioritize profits of patients and staff. There is ample evidence to suggest that Tenet Healthcare used COVID-relief funds to improperly expand its business, enrich its executives and shareholders, and prioritize the company’s bottom line over patients and caregivers.
Join us in calling for an investigation, today!
Join today’s demonstration– virtually. Nurses are bringing a giant, 16-foot-long petition signed by more than 700 striking nurses and will attempt to deliver the petition to Tenet’s CEO Ron Rittenmeyer. They will also call out Tenet for its blatant misuse of more than $2.6 billion in taxpayer-supported pandemic funding from the CARES Act stimulus package – funding that was supposed to be used by hospitals to provide PPE, staffing and other resources to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet in Tenet’s hands was used to fund corporate expansion, pay down debt, and buy back stock for executives. Join via live stream at 1:00pm ET, today!
Donate to Strike Fund. Your donations go to helping support St. Vincent’s nurses.
- Contribute with: PayPal| Venmo
- Checks can be made payable to MNA St Vincent Nurses Strike Fund and mailed to:
MNA Nurses Strike Fund
Massachusetts Nurses Association
340 Turnpike St
Canton, MA 02021
.
Speaking on the recent National Solidarity Call in support of striking nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, Our Revolution leader Joseph Geevarghese characterized the situation as “Biden’s PATCO Moment.” The call was convened by the Labor Campaign for Single Payer to help mobilize national support for the 800 nurses at the Tenet Healthcare-owned hospital who are now engaged in the longest nurses strike nationally in over a decade. Tenet has spent more than $75 million to date to prolong the strike. A fraction of those funds could have easily met the nurses demands for the staffing improvements that are the sole issue driving the strike.
Now Tenet is threatening to permanently replace the striking nurses who are represented by the Massachusetts Nurses Association (MNA). This action, by a notorious healthcare profiteer (Tenet leveraged federal bailout funds intended to provide urgent relief to employees and patients to triple its profits at the height of the pandemic last summer), has transformed a hard fought strike battle into a red line issue for the entire labor movement.
For those of us old enough to remember, it evokes the rampage of union busting that followed the Reagan Administration’s mass firing of striking air traffic controllers in the notorious PATCO strike of 1981.
Busting the air traffic controllers’ union sent a signal to employers everywhere that it was acceptable for management to break strikes and bust unions. In quick order, striking workers from copper miners in Arizona to newspaper workers in Detroit found themselves permanently replaced. Even more significantly, it changed the balance of power in labor/management relations as labor’s most powerful weapon was neutralized. This ushered in a devastating period of concessionary bargaining whose consequences are still being felt today.
Reagan’s decision to fire the striking PATCO members was not some isolated act of pique by an outraged president. In fact, his administration jumped at the opportunity to give teeth to its explicit policy to weaken and undermine the considerable power of the U.S. labor movement. And it was very successful.
The U.S. labor movement was slow to respond to this provocation. Both of us can remember standing on the National Mall on Solidarity Day in 1981 with half a million other union workers. It had taken the AFL-CIO more than six weeks after the initial firings to call the rally and they chose to hold it on a Saturday when Washington was shut down tight for the weekend. As we dozed in the sun listening to endless speeches, we could see the planes taking off and landing unimpeded just across the Potomac at National Airport. What should have been a forceful exhibition of labor power had been turned into a demonstration of our impotence. Like many others who were there that day, we vowed to never let another PATCO moment go unchallenged.
Tenet is a key player in a major strategic sector of the economy. If it is able to make the threat of permanent replacement an acceptable management tool in healthcare bargaining, it will weaken the entire labor movement for decades to come.
That’s why the Labor Campaign for Single Payer and other labor groups are stepping up to support the nurses and their union. They will be joining the MNA at a rally on July 7 in front of Tenet Headquarters in Dallas. They are also circulating a petition urging members of Congress to join Reps. Katie Porter (D., CA) and Rosa DeLaura (D., CT) in requesting an investigation into the use of taxpayer-financed COVID relief funds by Tenet and other large hospital systems.
This strike could be a watershed moment for the Medicare for All movement by exposing the corrupt and anti-worker underpinnings of our for-profit healthcare system. “The simple fact is that, if we had Medicare for All, we wouldn’t even be in this fight,” said LCSP National Coordinator Rhiannon Duryea. “Nurse-to-patient ratios would be set by law, ensuring safe and effective staffing ratios across the country that protect nurses, patients, and the community. Hospitals would not be able to exploit nurses and patients to line shareholder pockets.”
This strike could also be a watershed moment for the Biden administration. Ronald Reagan reversed a 40-year policy to promote the right of workers to organize and to bargain collectively. Before Reagan, corporations feared using the permanent replacement option because the federal government had made it clear that it would not tolerate such brutal behavior in the course of labor relations. After Reagan, it was open season on workers and their unions. Inequality skyrocketed as wealth was massively redistributed upward.
President Biden, to his credit, has vowed to reverse these trends. He has made a number of statements explicitly supporting worker rights and has appointed a number of pro-union advocates to key policy positions.
This is his chance to send a message to Tenet and corporate America that there’s a new sheriff in town. We need to challenge the Biden administration to put its money where its mouth is and to intervene forcefully in this conflict. The president must make it clear that permanently replacing lawful strikers is contrary to the policy of the U.S. government.
Tenet is not alone in trying to pull the rug out from under an upsurge in labor militancy. There are a number of current and pending labor battles where management is engaging in overt union busting, including months-long strikes by coal miners in Alabama and steelworkers employed by Allegheny Industries as well as a nasty lockout of refinery workers at a giant Exxon/Mobil facility in Beaumont, Texas.
You can be sure that employers everywhere are watching how the Biden Administration reacts to these crises. As Our Revolution’s Geevarghese told the participants on the Solidarity Call, “This strike creates the opportunity for President Biden to undo what President Reagan did.” It’s an opportunity that should not be squandered.
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2022, 2024 and Beyond, We best be talking to each other. And Organizing
By Robert Gumpert
This past week the Supreme Court ruled that suppressing voters by who they are is constitutional, as long as you don’t openly say that is what you are doing.
In 2022 and beyond it is more important than ever we find ways to bridge the gaps that seem to separate us by where we live and who we are.
For the last 4 weeks Anthony Flaccavento, Future Generations University, Liken Knowledge and Appalachian Voices have held the weekly webinar “Bridging the Rural Uban Divide”. While the series is now complete you can still watch and learn how to take part in further developments on the Forum.
You can get the guidebook to the series, “The Urban-Rural Divide: A Guidebook To Understanding The Problem And Forging Solutions”with links to resources, ideas and organizations here.
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My Job as an Ecart Shopper
By Patrick Cummings
Editor’s Note: From time to time the Stansbury Forum invites students to write about their experiences. The following piece is about one recent graduate’s experience of “service work”.
During the winter of the Covid pandemic, after graduating with a degree in Math, I got a job at a “Chain Store” as an Ecart shopper within one day of searching. At the time, I was just glad that I had gotten a job so expediently, but perhaps I should’ve been more careful. The experience doing the job was completely different from what I had expected.
To be a “Chain Store” Ecart shopper meant that it was my job to “do other people’s shopping” for them. Orders were assembled from the previous day’s requests, including a complete and thorough listing of the desired items sorted by aisle or department, and grouped chronologically according to the customer’s desired pick-up time. I was to work my way through the store searching for items on the customer’s list, using a laser scanner to verify and mark off items as I found them, and then compile them all together into a cart. Once the items were collected, I had to bag them into categories of food type, such as all the frozen items had to be kept together, the merely cold ones were separated from that, while select meats get their own plastic bag, and wine bottles either get a nifty handbag or cardboard container, and so on. All refrigerated items were stored in a cooler or freezer to match their storage requirements, and all the remaining bagged items were left in the cart.
Every day, starting early in the morning and working into overtime hours at night (very commonly, we were asked to stay late; there was always more work than we could do in a day), me and my coworkers shopped.
Despite being labeled as a “low-skilled” job, I did not find anything low-skill about my task. Shopping very different orders in an entire grocery store, with thousands and thousands of different products seemingly scattered at random throughout the store, requires memorizing tons of minutiae. I never got a clear answer why the flat tortilla shells were only located on one particular aisle cap, or why the frozen pasta was next to fruit drinks. The Deli & Meat department was a mess, with food items not only in glass cabinets but frozen bins as well. And possessing a profound knowledge of different food products and their substitutes was crucial. Whenever an item was out-of-stock, it was my responsibility to find a close substitute for it to offer to the customer instead. But not only does that require having detailed knowledge of the former food item and substitute products out on the market, but it also requires knowing where the substitutes are in the store, if they were there at all. I remember clearly the day when a boss of mine, as a demonstration, helped me find a substitute cheese… by marching me to the opposite side of the store. I couldn’t help but think to myself: How could I ever find this substitute on my own? How am I supposed to memorize not only where items were, but the entire store catalog, and which items were not currently available? Most of my coworkers knew these things from years of practice, but I was asked to perform at their level now.
Another challenge of the job was the time-management aspect. Every order was supposed to be shopped in a half hour or less, and it didn’t matter how large or small a particular order was. Now technically, most people didn’t meet this ridiculous standard, and the pros took around 45-60 minutes for an order, but I almost always was running late. For me, this meant that I was constantly stressed out about finding an item, verifying it was the right one by bar code, and taking as many copies of the item asked for as fast as I could, but commonly it would take me at least 5-10 minutes to find a certain item (or just to affirm that it, in fact, was sold out), and then either move on or spend another 10-15 min frantically looking for a substitute for an item I had little understanding of. I soon had to resort to just not looking for substitutes at all, because it was simply too time-expensive to do so, but when my bosses started noticing my trend they started giving me smaller orders. Now, to be completely honest, this was an incredibly generous and kind move on their part. They had every reason and right to be mad, for I wasn’t living up to expectations, but instead they tried to work with me, and they said I would be tested here and there till my skills improve. Sadly, though, this warning served more to discourage me, because it meant more and more of my fellow employees would start to realize I wasn’t doing as well as them, and also, I didn’t want to get “special treatment” just because I wasn’t as skilled. I didn’t think I deserved it, for one thing, but I also anticipated people might start babying me, or grow resentful at my seemingly unfair treatment, or might start to expect me to make mistakes, and jump to assuming I did something wrong if some other mishap happened. People started double-checking my orders when I arrived, interrogating me about any missing items, double-checking that what I reported was true, and so on.
Least of all did I expect the customers to be an adverse aspect of my experience. While trying to maneuver my way through the store, I had to circumvent and give courtesy to shoppers along the way, and not all of them were graceful. Everyone always expected me to know where every item was. There was one male shopper, for example, who asked me where he could find some obscure item, and once I admitted sadly that I didn’t know where it was, he scoffed at me and walked away. I soon learned to wait for customers to greet me rather than me greet them, as well, because early on I gave customers a warm welcome as they entered the store, saying “Hello! Welcome to “Chain Store”!”, but sometimes they coldly avoided contact and rushed off. Worst yet were the times when we had a mad customer outside waiting for their Ecart order. We delivered the orders, usually having been shopped by ourselves personally, to the very recipient customers in the parking lot. Every once in a while, my coworkers and I would run late on a delivery, and the customers would get pissed off, yelling at any of us they came in contact with until their order arrived. It was soon very difficult for me to feel like I had any respect or dignity as a “Chain Store” employee and couldn’t feel like my work was appreciated or even worthwhile.
Finally, the day arrived when my boss yelled at me in the middle of the store completely unexpectedly. I had to piece this together after the fact, but supposedly, a coworker of mine reported that she had asked me to stay late to help with some final orders the night prior, but I left at the end of my shift. I sure didn’t remember anyone asking me to stay, so when my boss asked me about it, I started to stutter that I didn’t recall her ever asking me, but my boss wasn’t in the mood for excuses and flatly shouted, “If we ask you to stay late, you stay, alright?!” That made it pretty clear how they felt about overtime: it wasn’t requested, it was mandatory. Once this happened, I had had the last straw. So many aspects of the job were not going well, and now I’m getting yelled at because I’m an easy target to blame. I finished out the week and quit.
I can keep going with many other aspects of the job that were difficult, such as a previous elbow injury acting up and causing me severe pain while trying to work, but I’ll try to wrap up with this last important point. One of the things I quickly learned with this job is the monotony and repetitiveness of its task. It’s a job that’s fast paced and very object oriented, and thus there’s not much space of time or memory to let your mind wander. In short, I soon realized that I couldn’t think about math questions or philosophy—topics dear to my heart—in the quiet of my mind while doing this job. The lack of focus slowed my pace and caused me to forget important details of the grocery item I was shopping for. For the first time ever I experienced what it’s like to be an automaton, a thoughtless and mindless cow, whose sole focus and capacity for attention was the very task in front of them, one moment to the next. There was no room for reflection, for active inquiry or questioning, or even remembering. This was especially difficult for me given my natural proclivity to thought. I could tell that as weeks became months, it started to feel more difficult to think like a philosopher or a mathematician, as I did only a few months earlier, even after my shift was over. Those parts of my mind and brain were atrophying very quickly from a lack of use, and that made it harder to even consider them outside of work. This helped me see how hard it could be to study math or philosophy on the side while holding a job like that, for it’s like asking a person to be a robot for 8 hours of the day and a thinking human during the off hours. You just can’t be both simultaneously.
Several months since quitting, I look back on the job as a valuable insight into the lives many people are forced to lead in the US. I have heard it said that most people spend their lives reliving the same year over and over again, my job made me see that as it was even more repetitive than that; it was the same day repeated over and over. Nothing changed about this job – no beautiful glimpses of creativity or novelty could be found. When I look back on my experience I ask myself, what sort of worker I would have needed to have been to be especially good at it. It would have been very helpful if I had been more mindless and thoughtless, less prone to the distractions of reflection and self-conscious contemplation, as these meta-level thoughts slowed down my dizzying manual labor. It also would have been good if I didn’t have any pride or dignity, as then I wouldn’t have recognized the indignation of this job or the way my customers treated me. Furthermore, we might as well rule out all emotional connection with my work, including the ideas of loving your job or yearning to feel like my efforts were making a genuine difference toward the good of society, all of these aspirations would’ve been thwarted.
But is this really the kind of people society wants to cultivate or needs? Thoughtless, servile, nihilistic, and self-erasing? No wonder the turnover is so high in this area of employment. No human being wants to be like that.
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Overcoming the Divide – Part 3
By Robert Gumpert
Adam Serwer wrote today in his NYT opinion piece, “The Cruel Logic of the G.O.P.” there are “no Democratic proposals to disenfranchise Republicans”, not because Democrats are nicer but because “parties reliant on diverse coalitions to wield power will seek to win votes rather than suppress them.”
Mr Serwer points out that the Republican brand of White identity politics is not new. Starting in the 30’s those same politics were the stock and trade of the Democratic Party, the party was remade by “a coalition of labor unions, Northern Black voters and urban liberals.”
To have such a coalition now we must bridge the urban – rural divide. To that end Future Generations University, Liken Knowledge and Appalachian Voices has sponsored a webinar series “The Rural-Urban Divide: How We Got into This Mess, How We’ll Get out”, hosted by Anthony Flaccavento, Virginia famer, activist, and occasional writer for the Stansbury Forum, with a series of guest speakers.
You can listen/watch the first 3 sessions on the Forum (1, 2, 3rd is below) and register here for the fourth and final session on strategies for overcoming the divide.
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The 3rd session begins the discussion on solutions for bridging the gap between rural and urban communities. Special guest speaker: Ericka Etelson, author of “BEYOND CONTEMPT – HOW LIBERALS CAN COMMUNICATE ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE”.
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Can rural and urban communities be united? A Beginning
By Robert Gumpert
“Most of the mines, most of the coal and mineral rights, in Harlan Kentucky and all of East Kentucky, is owned by outside interests, big oil and utility companies. I’ve been to several foreign lands, but this is, I believe, the first colony in North America that I’ve ever visited. They come in here, they take everything out, they don’t put anything back in. They don’t pay their fair share of taxes. The roads they haul the coal over are in real bad shape because of the overloaded coal trucks. They own the company houses. They own the stores that people trade in. They own the towns they live in. Their water supply is furnished by the company. Their electrical supply is furnished by the company. These people are completely dominated and dependent on the whims of the coal operators.” Huston Elmore, UMWA head of the organizing drive at the Brookside and Highsplint coal mines during the 1973-1974 strike.
In 2021 can rural and urban communities say things are that different? The corporate names have changed, but the business is the same, extraction, of minerals, goods, and workers’ wealth and health.
The Stansbury Forum is posting the latest sessions of the Rural-Urban Divide Webinar Series, last Tuesday’s 2nd talk is below.
After watching find out how to ask questions stemming from the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd sessions here
The 3rd session will begin the discussion on solutions for bridging the gap between rural and urban communities. Special guest speaker: Ericka Etelson, author of “BEYOND CONTEMPT – HOW LIBERALS CAN COMMUNICATE ACROSS THE GREAT DIVIDE”.
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