Volvo Workers Back on Strike at Virginia Trucks Plant
By Ben Solidaridad
Some 2,900 auto workers at the Volvo trucks plant in Dublin, Virginia are once again on strike after walking off the job for nearly two weeks in April, returning to work, and then voting down by wide margins two contracts negotiated by their union, the United Auto Workers (UAW). The current struggle at Volvo has been ongoing since February, when contract negotiations between the company and union began. Throughout this entire period, workers have maintained their solidarity and steadfast determination to win a better deal from the bosses and beat back years of concessions from previous contracts, including a much-hated two-tier wage structure in place at the plant.
Compared to the 13-day strike in April, this time around management has adopted a harder line against the strike. The bosses have cut off workers’ healthcare and are actively encouraging workers to cross the picket line. In addition, the company has carried out a “survey” of property lines around the plant and marked these lines in front of the facility. The point of this is to push the striking workers closer to the road and undermine the workers’ ability to stage an effective picket line. In the process, this has also made the picket line more dangerous for strikers. Beyond that, Virginia State Police have pressured and threatened the union to stop workers from blocking scabs from entering the plant. A Tuesday post on the UAW Local 2069 Facebook page notes that, “The State Police has informed us to not block the entrances of the plant. We do not want to see anyone get in trouble and we want law enforcement to stay neutral in this process. Do not cross the picket line. Many places are hiring. Take care of your union brothers and sisters on the line and make sure they do not overheat.”
In response to this, it must be said that law enforcement is never neutral when workers enter into struggle. The police are on the side of the bosses, and their efforts to facilitate scabbing at the Volvo plant are just the latest example in a long history of strikebreaking and other attacks on workers.
As it is, Volvo workers are now once again in the middle of a high-stakes struggle with a multi-billion-dollar company. The entire labor movement and the socialist movement have an obligation to support these workers and shine a light on their vitally important fight, which has ramifications for the entire class struggle.
On Sunday, June 6, the workers voted for the second time in less than a month to reject a tentative agreement negotiated by the company and the International UAW by a margin of 91 percent for salary language and 90 percent for common language. This surpassed the previous rejection of a tentative agreement on May 16, when workers turned down that contract’s salary language by 83 percent.
Following the most recent contract rejection, UAW Secretary-Treasurer and director of the union’s Heavy Duty truck department, Ray Curry, sent a public letter to Volvo management on Monday declaring that the union would walk off the job later that day.
The strike targets a critical point in Volvo’s supply chain, with the April walkoff shutting down production at what is Volvo’s only truck production facility in all of North America at a time of booming demand for Volvo trucks and commercial vehicles more generally. The initial strike at Volvo ended on April 30 when UAW officials announced that the union had reached a new tentative agreement with the company and that workers would return to work the following week. As reported in last month’s edition of On the Picket Line, this arrangement was made despite the fact that striking workers had not been allowed to see or discuss, let alone vote upon, the tentative agreement negotiated on their behalf.
As it turned out, the initial tentative agreement that followed April’s strike was filled with what many workers felt were unacceptable concessions and failed to address the core grievances that led workers to strike in the first place. Notably, the problematic content of the contract was only brought to light as a result of the organized efforts of rank-and-file members. The proposed contract was not put online, but members obtained copies of the agreement from the union hall and circulated the proposal to their coworkers in the plant, according to a report from Labor Notes.
In terms of the content of the tentative agreement, workers were angered to learn that the deal failed to abolish the hated two-tier wage system in place at the plant. In addition, the contract included significant increases to out-of-pocket health care costs for workers. Language in the contract also enabled union officials to agree to a so-called Alternative Work Schedule, including “four 10-hour days, alternative shift operations, or other alternative schedules based on the needs of business.” This proposed scheme may abolish time-and-a-half pay for work after eight hours. Notably, such alternative schedules – which have already been implemented at many Big 3 auto plants across the country – are beneficial to management as they allow companies to boost productivity and cut wage costs by paying less in overtime.
According to a worker interviewed by Labor Notes, the successful “no” vote was largely organized through word of mouth and face-to-face discussions by workers. In addition, online discussions and campaigning in a private Facebook group with some 1,900 members also factored into the contract rejection.
Following the initial “no” vote, the next development in the contract struggle came just four days later when, on May 20, the UAW announced that it had arrived at a new tentative agreement with the company. In the press release published by the union international, Ray Curry heralded the new deal and declared that, “the agreement addresses [the] concerns” of rank-and-file members that voted down the previous contract. Many rank-and-file members, in contrast, argued that the new contract did not meaningfully improve on the previous deal. This point was made clear in a rank-and-file petition released the same day as the announcement of the new tentative agreement. The petition – which was circulated as a flyer, posted online, and subsequently reported on in a news segment by the local Fox affiliate, WFXR – denounced the proposed agreement as “almost identical to the previous agreement.” The petition also called for the recall and replacement of union officials.
The resounding contract rejection on June 6 made it clear that workers are not willing to give up their struggle and accept the company’s terms for a new contract. Thus, by their determination, members have pressured their union to continue the fight. This success was made possible by a vigorous rank-and-file movement within the union that, at times, has come to take on the character of a struggle for union democracy. This dynamic will undoubtedly persist as the union fights the company on the picket line.
Notably, workers’ eagerness to fight the company is connected to the fortuitous economic situation at Volvo right now. While Volvo, like all multinational auto companies, has been impacted by the global shortage of semiconductor chips used as component parts at assembly plants, production demand for new heavy duty trucks is currently skyrocketing. The trade publication FleetOwner has reported that, as of March, monthly North American orders for the Class 8 truck produced at the plant had exceeded the company’s productive capacity for the previous six months. Meanwhile, the head of the commercial transportation consulting firm ACT Research has declared that “Demand for commercial vehicles in North America is about as good as we’ve seen in 35 years of monitoring heavy-duty market conditions. Times are so good that demand is far outrunning the industry’s ability to supply right now, and that will likely remain the case into the autumn and perhaps even through the winter.”
Volvo is also making money hand over fist. On June 1, Volvo announced that it would be providing a $2.3 billion dividend payment to the company’s investors. As Volvo CEO Martin Lundstedt announced in a statement, “The board believes that the Volvo Group’s improved profitability, resilience in downturns and strong financial position enable a distribution of the proceeds. Even after the distribution, the group is financially strong with resources to invest in future technology.” Clearly, the bosses have the money to meet workers’ demands – and their claims of poverty during contract negotiations have been entirely fraudulent.
On top of these conditions, the Volvo plant in Virginia has been massively expanding in recent years. According to statements by the company, the Volvo trucks plant is in the middle of a $400 million expansion and upgrade. Since 2016, the plant has added some 1,100 additional jobs – and it plans to add some 600 more during the course of 2021. As already noted, the Virginia plant is Volvo’s only North American production facility, which means that a protracted strike at the plant could completely choke off the sale and delivery of new Volvo trucks for the entire continent.
Within this context, some workers have asked: If not now, then when? If we don’t fight to win back previous concessions and smash the two-tier wage system right now, then when in the future will be a better time?
Notably, what happens with the struggle at Volvo has implications not only for the thousands of workers employed at Volvo, but potentially for the broader workers’ movement, as well.
In the past several years, a movement for union democracy and a full-scale revival of the UAW’s proud tradition of militancy has developed within the ranks of the union. This movement has taken shape within the context of a protracted federal investigation into widespread corruption within the top ranks of the UAW bureaucracy. On top of this, UAW workers have grown weary of international union officials’ propensity for cozying up to the bosses and implementing company demands for concessions.
An internal caucus, Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) has been organized by rank-and-file members with the goal of rebuilding the type of militant, class-conscious movement of auto workers that is capable of taking on the auto bosses. The UAWD is campaigning for members to vote yes in a referendum, which will take place within the next six months, that would allow rank-and-file members to directly elect the union’s executive board and president. The upcoming vote is stipulated in a consent decree agreement between federal prosecutors and UAW officials stemming from the corruption probe. UAWD activists have portrayed the campaign to win a “One member, One vote” election system as a fight to “win a more democratic system of electing our International officers [that] would allow for every member’s voice to be equally heard.”
On a political level, the fight for trade union democracy is inseparable from the struggle to transform the unions into fighting organs of the working class. This is a point long upheld within the Marxist movement. In his incisive 1940 essay “Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay,” Leon Trotsky argues that “It is necessary to adapt ourselves to the concrete conditions existing in the trade unions of every given country in order to mobilize the masses not only against the bourgeoisie but also against the totalitarian regime within the trade unions themselves and against the leaders enforcing this regime.” He adds, “The primary slogan for this struggle is: complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This means a struggle to turn the trade unions into the organs of the broad exploited masses and not the organs of a labor aristocracy.”
…
Orginally published in: Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores
To win in 2022 and 2024 we must connect the rural and the urban – find out how
By Robert Gumpert and Peter Olney
Last Tuesday, the 8th of June, the co-editors of the Stansbury Forum “attended” the first of four webinars on bridging the urban-rural divide. The remaining three run on consecutive Tuesdays, starting on the 15th of June.
The 2022 elections are coming on fast, the time to start organizing is now. They will be overwhelmingly important to working folks – their jobs, income, health, freedoms – and to the democratic process of the country.
We must find a way to engage all in these coming fights, to connect people of common interests in both the urban and rural communities.
Anthony Flaccavento, a Virginia farmer, activist, and occasional writer for the Stansbury Forum, is hosting a series of four webinars on how we can best connect people in these two settings.
Below you will find a brief description of the series, a link for registration to the remaining three sessions and a video of the first section. Anthony has requested, recommended, that the video should be watched first if you did not attend the first seccsion.
Peter and I hope to “see” you there.
.
Future Generations University, LiKEN Knowledge, and Appalachian Voices invite you to join Anthony Flaccavento and some of the best thinkers and doers from across the nation in a deep discussion of the underlying causes of this divide and how it can be overcome. You’ll learn:
- Six underlying causes of the divide and how they reinforce each other
- How the neglect of rural development has enabled the divide and how effective, bottom-up rural development strategies can help reverse it
- Better, more accurate ways of understanding rural perspectives on regulations, the environment, and the role of government
- Much better ways to talk about and talk to rural communities
- Other tools and strategies for overcoming the divide
The rural-urban divide is deep, it’s widespread, and it’s getting worse. Liberal people from cities and suburbs think most rural folks are ignorant, racist, stuck in the past, their communities heading towards oblivion. Many in the countryside view urban people, academics, and the government as elitist, contemptuous of rural ways, and dismissive of the people living there. While race and racial resentment play major roles in this polarization, the divide between urban and rural is perhaps the most poorly understood component of our divisions. And it’s killing us, enabling the richest people and biggest corporations to dominate our democracy while the great majority of us fight amongst ourselves.How did we get here, and how do we begin to overcome the divide? More to the point, what role has those who espouse a fair and just world played in exacerbating the divide, and what must we do differently?
The Rural-Urban Divide:
How We Got into This Mess, How We’ll Get Out
Register – Here.
…
Labor Must ‘Block and Build’ to Defend Democracy
By Rand Wilson and Peter Olney
In “The White Republic and The Struggle for Racial Justice,” Bob Wing contended that the U.S. state is racist to the core, and this has specific implications for our movements’ work going forward, especially the need to replace this racist state with an anti-racist state. Organizing Upgrade is publishing a series of commentaries on this piece, and we invite readers to respond as well. In this response, Peter Olney and Rand Wilson look at the role that labor unions can play in building the cross-class front against what Wing calls “the re-entrenchment of the white republic.” From their long experience as union organizers, they draw the lesson “thatunity and awareness of our shared enemy is built among trade unionists and allies in the trenches of common struggle.”
Bob Wing argues in “The White Republic” that American capitalism is firmly rooted in the appropriation of the lands and labor of native peoples and African slaves. Throughout U.S. history this system has been one of white supremacy and racial oppression, not only of Native peoples and Blacks, but also of other exploited peoples like Asian Pacific Islanders and Latinos.
The 2020 Presidential election, the battle for the Senate in Georgia, and the January 6 Capitol insurrection illustrated the white supremacist forces at play, Democracy and majority rule are in the cross-hairs. Republicans are moving in lockstep to suppress and oppress the votes of people of color to preserve minority rule. The recent spate of state legislative initiatives to restrict voting is the closest thing to the “Jim Crow” era since before the Civil Rights Act of 1965.
We accept the veracity of Wing’s analysis, and the need for a “united front” to defeat and destroy the white supremacist forces in the long term. Our challenge in trying to bring the labor movement into that front is to operationalize a perspective that builds antiracist practice, tackles white supremacy and fights capitalism – and to do that among a membership that is not rooted in a shared identity or philosophy.
It’s no easy matter. Demographics are not destiny – at least not fast enough. The country remains 62 percent non-Hispanic white. And as we saw in the last election, Trump’s racist, proto-fascist appeals garnered 73 million votes, and his vote totals increased in both Latinx and Black communities.
As lifelong trade unionists, we embrace the challenge of building the broad united front between labor and communities of color to defeat white supremacy. But how best is that elusive unity built? Imagine going to a union meeting and denouncing the “white republic” when many cars and trucks in the parking lot sport “Blue Lives Matter” bumper stickers. It’s a recipe for a very heated exchange, or worse, a brawl! What’s really needed are ways to open discussions with members that don’t condescend or polarize, and do involve deep listening and identifying common values.
Many union leaders have begun this process by centering racial justice in membership education programs, organizing campaigns and bargaining. “Labor organizations are taking up the fight for racial justice in many ways,” wrote Stephanie Luce in a profile of contemporary efforts by union leaders. “They’re developing in-depth member education on racial capitalism. They are using bargaining to address structural racism and developing new leaders.” Luce also cites SEIU 1199 in New England which has used Bargaining for the Common Good to build relationships and common demands with racial justice organizations. This is one approach.
Bonding Through Common Work
Experience tells us that unity and awareness of our shared enemy is built among trade unionists and allies in the trenches of common struggle. We are inspired by the work of UNITE HERE and other unions in battleground states like Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and later the Senate race in Georgia in 2020-21. The bold decision by a few union leaders to recruit and support their members to canvass on the doors during the pandemic built lasting relationships and respect with the organizations of Blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans already deeply engaged in those battleground situations.
The union banners, T-shirts, and buttons (we do bling well!) were welcomed in action, as was the experience and courage of these able trade unionists of all colors. Nothing bonds people better than working together in 95-degree heat, with a mask, a visor, and the determination to knock on every door. That joint work is worth a thousand educational sessions.
The great Italian Marxist philosopher and organizer Antonio Gramsci points to the limits of education and intellectual argument in this passage on “Philosophy, Common Sense, Language and Folklore” from his famous Prison Notebooks:
“Imagine the intellectual position of the man of the people: he has formed his own opinions, convictions, criteria of discrimination, standards of conduct. Anyone with a superior intellectual formation with a point of view opposed to his can put forward arguments better than he and really tear him to pieces logically and so on. But should the man of the people change his opinions just because of this? Just because he cannot impose himself in a bout of argument? In that case he might find himself having to change every day, or every time he meets an ideological adversary who is his intellectual superior. On what elements, therefore, can his philosophy be founded? And in particular his philosophy in the form which has the greatest importance for his standards of conduct?”
The 2022 midterm elections offer an excellent opportunity for the “men [and women] of the people” to forge new convictions and standards of conduct.
2022: Next Battleground, Foundation for Change
Maintaining the momentum to win progressive legislation and beat back the far right and the “big lie” requires a broad commitment to win seats in the 2022 midterm elections on November 8 – and win big. It’s no easy task. The political system is rigged against Democrats who got five million more votes in their 2020 races for the U.S. House of Representatives yet lost 11 seats in Congress.
Can we defy history and increase Democratic margins in the House and Senate? Can we afford not to? The 1934 midterms during Roosevelt’s first term in the midst of the Great Depression are inspiring. Gains were made in both the House and Senate that enabled the passage of key legislation like the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged millions of workers to fight for and form new unions.
The 2022 midterms are perhaps more monumental. The Trump forces will be determined to recapture both houses of Congress and stymie any positive Biden initiatives in the second two years of his presidency. They will have all the advantages of their voter suppression laws and gerrymandered districts. But the ground forces on the front lines in the last election will not be deterred. They will be out again, and with even more gusto.
LUCHA in Arizona will fight to keep Democrat Mark Kelly in the Senate. The New Georgia Project and Stacey Abrams will be rolling up their sleeves to defend the Senate seat of Rev. Raphael Warnock. All the battleground locations will see healthy mobilizations of activists from all over the country eager to defeat the right. These are the battles that labor must join, and these are the flashpoints where multi-racial unity will be forged in the common struggle to preserve the forward march of the pro-labor Biden agenda and stem the racist right.
Time is Running Short
Prior to the midterms, there will be important primary challenges by progressive Democrats running to win against corporate Democrats. Nina Turner’s primary campaign for the recently vacated seat in Ohio’s 11th congressional district is a great example. These pro-labor/pro-racial justice candidates need support, especially where Democrats have safe seats. But once the 2022 primaries are over, labor must focus on competitive races where congressional seats need to be defended or where seats can be gained. In addition to the seats held by Senators Kelly and Warnock, there are six more Senate seats where Republicans are resigning or are vulnerable, in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Florida, and Missouri.
The labor movement can draw much inspiration from the experience and energy of 2020 combined with the surprisingly good performance of President Biden. The new administration’s taming of the pandemic and its robust stimulus and infrastructure bills should create the foundation to peel away many of the estimated forty percent of trade unionists who voted for Trump. Particularly in the more conservative building trades, funding for infrastructure is something to fight to preserve and extend. Biden’s shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline, a big issue that many building trades leaders railed against under Obama, is being overshadowed by the massive infrastructure proposals.
After detailing the billions of dollars of infrastructure spending that Biden is proposing in an editorial to the membership, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) President Lonnie R. Stephenson wrote, “This is enough work to last from apprenticeship to retirement not just for you, but for tens of thousands of new union members in our brotherhood alone…This bill means hundreds of thousands of jobs for construction members, but also for our members in utility, telecom, railroad and broadcasting.”
Stephenson knows “A Lifetime of Work” is what will motivate IBEW members to support the plan regardless of how they voted. And that is what will motivate the IBEW and other unions to recruit and send members to preserve the possibility of anti-austerity measures like the infrastructure bills that have a direct benefit to working people. Few IBEW members will ever embrace the notion of a “white republic” or “racial capitalism,” but when those members are in the trenches (or on the doors) with Blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans with a common purpose, they will come much closer to supporting Wing’s call for “a powerful antiracist movement of people of color and whites” to “defeat the white supremacist right, transform or replace the racist institutions that dominate the country, and to reconstruct society based on peace, sustainability, and justice.”
We can think of our strategy going forward as “Blocking and Building,” as laid out by Tarso Ramos of Political Research Associates. “We need to block the Right Wing…and build relationships, strategies, and campaigns of deep solidarity and shared power across the communities that together will build real multi-racial democracy,” Ramos said. For us in the labor movement, this looks like blocking white supremacy, preserving a pro-labor agenda, and building our power. Funding and supporting union members for the ballot brigades in the key 2022 election races will be the most concrete way to dovetail labor and race in the trenches.
In the run-up to the November 2020 election, Labor Action to Defend Democracy (LADD) was formed to protect the election from being stolen. It was an exciting and relatively broad formation supported by many union leaders. Combined with the energy and resources of other progressive labor initiatives, LADD could be reassembled in some form to support activist union members in the key battleground states to work alongside local organizations battling the Trumpista white supremacists.
Bob Wing’s work is theoretically sound. The Block and Build labor brigades are one example of how to put that vision into concrete strategic practice. It is time to get cracking, as we are only 17 months out from our day of reckoning: November 8, 2022.
…
A call to action….
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
Union leaders: no deals with Uber and Lyft!
Trade union members, and everyone else supportive of workers’ rights, should be very concerned about proposed legislation in New York, Massachusetts, and other states that would allow limited bargaining rights for independent contractors of Transportation Networked Companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft.[1]
The New York bill (and similar legislation proposed in Connecticut and Massachusetts) establishes a framework for TNC employers and drivers to jointly participate in an industry council.[2] It proposes a “work-around” to avoid violations of the Sherman anti-trust act that will allow the TNCs to engage in what would normally be prohibited price fixing. It establishes a procedure to give a qualifying organization limited collective bargaining and representation rights pertaining to the wages and working conditions of the TNC drivers.[3],[4]
However, these bills raise some serious concerns. While Uber and Lyft claim otherwise, gig drivers are clearly their employees under “A-B-C” tests that are generally used to determine if workers are misclassified as contractors. When subjected to the test, state attorney generals are finding the TNC’s are misclassifying their drivers in violation of their state’s employment law.[5]
Sadly, these “third way” or “contractor plus” bills are backed by some unions seeking to make backroom deals with the rideshare companies to increase their membership without actually organizing workers. Both the Transport Workers Union (TWU) and Machinists union (IAM) are on record backing the New York legislation.
Giving the TNC drivers “representation” as independent contractors makes a concession to the TNCs that labor unions are prepared to accept the current violation of existing state law – contradicting the position of the courts, state legislatures, advocacy groups like the National Employment Law Project (NELP) and the national AFL-CIO.
These unions have argued that as long as the rideshare drivers are contractors, “third way” representation is necessary in order to give them a much-needed voice. They say their proposed legislation wouldn’t prohibit a change in status if the state or federal governments upgrade drivers to statutory “employees.” However, their support for a middle ground will almost certainly be used to argue that state legislatures or the federal government recognize these gig workers as independent contractors. For example, in Massachusetts, the state Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a case regarding real estate agents that another unrelated statute recognizing that agents may be independent contractors was effectively a “carve-out” for that industry from the A-B-C test in Sec. 148B.[6]
Without a doubt, the movements by gig drivers for better wages and working conditions across the country — and around the world — is motivating the companies to seek a “compromise” with labor that would give them the appearance of taking steps to make improvements. In reality, if Uber, Lyft (and some unions) have their way with these bills, the drivers’ demands for respect and compassionate treatment could never be achieved.[7]
“We California drivers know what this kind of industry supported legislation means: the companies will do anything to maintain their ability to pay us far less than minimum wage, pay nothing toward the operation of our vehicles, while maintaining no responsibility to fund the safety net needed in this precarious and often unsafe job,” said Nicole Moore, a leader of Ride Share Drivers United (RDU) in Southern California. “Under their new Prop. 22 law in California, drivers are making even less money — as little as 32 cents a mile. Sadly, now it is totally legal. The ‘flexibility’ protections the gig companies bragged about have actually led to less flexibility and less freedom to earn.”
Making any public concession recognizing the drivers as contractors now, will seriously undermine labor opposition to allowing Uber and Lyft to water-down — or eliminate — state A-B-C tests. Support for this “third way” legislation plays right into the companies’ hands, allowing them to twist this proposed legislation to confuse our elected officials and the public by showing that some unions are willing to accept classifying gig workers as independent contractors.
It’s no coincidence that Uber, Lyft and other TNCs are looking to use opportunistic unions as “allies.” This year labor, and many economic and social justice groups have begun an epic battle to strengthen labor law through the national PRO Act.
The movement against misclassification is also gaining momentum. Last January, more than 70 unions, advocacy groups and other organizations — including the National Employment Law Project, AFL-CIO, AFSCME, Teamsters and NAACP, sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to reject legal frameworks such as California’s Proposition 22, which exempts employers from treating gig workers as employees.[8]
The letter stated, “Millions of workers hired and managed by companies via internet apps, such as Instacart and DoorDash delivery workers, Uber drivers, and Handy home service workers, are deprived of basic labor protections that many of us take for granted… Because their employers insist on unilaterally calling them ‘independent contractors,’ these workers don’t get a minimum wage, overtime pay, workers’ compensation, unemployment, state disability insurance, or access to federal protections from discrimination, including sex harassment.”
“A proposal to supposedly provide limited benefits to some ‘independent workers’ would threaten our most fundamental understanding of what work ought to provide,” the letter added. “A federal ‘Proposition 22’-like scheme would shunt more and more workers to piecework labor, performing jobs here-and-there with neither individual security nor the possibility of collective action.”
Another serious concern regarding these third way schemes is how the unions are proposing to fund workers’ representation. Instead of members paying dues, the legislation would enact a small surcharge on passenger fares to pay for expenses incurred for representation. The surcharge makes the qualifying union organization essentially employer funded, crossing an important prohibition in the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) against employer funding or support for a labor organization.
“A passenger tax is a great way to ensure a fire hose of funding into a union,” added RDU’s Moore. “But where’s the accountability to the workforce? Where’s the guarantee that we are building real power and leading our own fights? This law acts like the union is the Social Security Administration. It’s not – dues give us independent funds to build real power. We need to be classified correctly as employees and have the protections and benefit/wage floor of employees – not something that assigns us a permanent second class worker status. We are a majority immigrant and Black Indigenous People of Color workforce. Where is the equity and power in this compromise of our rights?”
Proposed low thresholds of driver support to trigger “voluntary recognition” from the TNCs is an invitation to sweetheart deals. Majority support for a union is the underlying foundation for worker empowerment. What sort of power will a qualifying organization have with only 10% support? True worker power is built through authentic organizing by workers, their union using its collective power to take advantage of their strategic position in the economy, and existing state and federal labor protections.
Since the passage of Prop. 22 in California, other employers in health care, retail, hospitality – even the Pentagon — are openly looking to shift to managing their workers through digital apps, or outsourcing them through temp and staffing firms, to escape their employer obligations.[9] Legislation enabling this new scheme could break open the dam, incentivizing entire industries to “gig out” more jobs that once provided living wage jobs and a measure of prosperity.
Passage of this legislation could set a very dangerous precedent for Teamster drivers and UFCW grocery delivery workers.
The gig economy, epitomized by employment at Uber and Lyft and similar companies, is a segment of the labor market literally carved out of pro-worker regulation. These companies want to be exempted from an obligation to respect workers’ rights. What’s at issue here is how large we will permit it to grow. Passage of this proposed legislation will further solidify these workers’ status as independent contractors and weaken labor’s efforts at the state and national level to have these workers classified as actual workers with full benefits and real collective bargaining rights.[10]
RDU’s Moore summed it up succinctly, “We’re fighting some of the biggest union busters and richest corporations in the world. We need a real union with real app-based worker leadership to be willing to fight. What if the union isn’t representing us well? They don’t even need us to pay dues – and there is no democracy in 10% of drivers signing a card!”
“Drivers in NYC have fought hard to ensure that they are paid more than minimum wage for all of their time on type job. This bill would ensure that drivers are paid for only the part of their time while picking up a passenger. It codifies the destruction of rights agreements drivers have already won in NY. It is a way to bust the union Lyft and Uber drivers have already built in New York City – with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance.”
Unions should not support legislation creating a compromised and weak voice for independent contractors. Labor must stay united to defeat any effort to undermine the A-B-C test and fight for more workers to have access to our federal and state employment protections.
…
[1] “Lawmakers Look to Spruce Up Gig Work Rather Than Replace It,” by Josh Eidelson, March 18, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-18/lawmakers-look-to-spruce-up-gig-work-rather-than-replace-it
[2] “A Bill Requiring Regulation of Network Workers, and Providing for Their Protection and Benefits,” https://aboutblaw.com/XEJ
[3] “Labor, Gig Companies Near Bargaining Deal in N.Y.,” by Josh Eidelson and Benjamin Penn,
May 17, 2021, Bloomberg, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-18/labor-gig-companies-are-said-to-be-near-bargaining-deal-in-n-y
[4] “BREAKING: Draft Legislation in New York Would Put Gig Workers into Toothless ‘Unions’,”
May 21, 2021, Joe DeManuelle-Hall, Labor Notes, https://labornotes.org/2021/05/breaking-draft-legislation-new-york-would-put-gig-workers-toothless-unions
[5] AG Healey: Uber and Lyft Drivers are Employees Under Massachusetts Wage and Hour Laws, https://www.mass.gov/news/ag-healey-uber-and-lyft-drivers-are-employees-under-massachusetts-wage-and-hour-laws
[6] Monell v. Boston Pads, LLC, 471 Mass. 566 (2015)
[7] Gig Workers Demand Occupational Death Benefits, Coworker.org, https://www.coworker.org/petitions/gig-workers-demand-occupational-death-benefits
[8] https://www.nelp.org/wp-content/uploads/Letter-to-Congress-Labor-Protections-App-Based-Workers-January-2021.pdf
[9] “The Military Is Creating a ‘Gig Eagle’ App to Uber-ize Its Workforce,” by Edward Ongweso Jr, May 20, 2021, Vice, https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7bzvw/the-military-is-creating-a-gig-eagle-app-to-uber-ize-its-workforce
[10] For more along these lines see, “Sectoral Bargaining: Principles for Reform,” a statement signed by dozens of scholars endorsing six principles as starting points from which to consider sectoral bargaining reforms similar to SD 473, https://concerned-sectoral-bargaining.medium.com/sectoral-bargaining-principles-for-reform-7b7f2c945624
Living with uncertainty
By Robert Gumpert
As is the case in all parts of the United States, indeed around the world, too many people are “unhoused”, living day to day with shelter uncertainty.
San Francisco, home to staggering amounts of wealth and innovation is also home to people who live in tents, boxes, cars, RVs. On a couch here, a couch there, or directly on the ground in sleeping bags, packing blankets, or the remnants of Amazon packing boxes.
In San Francisco tomorrow, on two parking lot between Merlin and Morris streets, about 40 people will be evicted from spaces they have “lived” at for between a few months and 5 years because … well there is always a reason. What is never answered fully is why these folks, why here, why now. The lots are owned by Caltrans and were operated by a parking contractor who went bankrupt.
Here are four of the “residents” and a few of their thoughts.
(I’ve been here) all together about 5 years. I have a place, like I said, I can’t afford a, I would have to win the Power Ball to be able to afford a house here. I’ve always had mobile homes before, a “camper”, you know. They’ve gotten towed, a couple of them, so I’m down to this (a box truck). But I’ve always had my own place where I rent or parked. I’ve rented here (a spot in a parking lot) for about 5 years until they declared bankruptcy and gave the place (the parking lot) up. I’m just looking for another place to rent space for my vehicles, a place I could but a small trailer.
That’s how I live. I’d rather live this way than in an SRO and not be as happy and secure. I like to have my own place. I can come in when I want, have my stuff, don’t have to look anybody in the eye when I come in and out, you know. And be me, just like you, you know what I’m saying.”
“Maintaining. It’s hard out here, like as far as showers and food and, security.
It (living on the street as a single woman) got to be self-sufficient and take care of myself, nobody else to do it for me.
We’re kind a like segregated down here. We got people at one end and then there’s people at the opposite end, we kind a stay to ourselves.
(I miss) being with my kids. Yeah, it sucks. Once I get my housing back my kids will be home but it’s hard. Stuff is like irritating. COVID hit and then everything just came to a halt. So now I got to wait.
They (the city) leave us here to fend for ourselves with no resources at all. The only time we do get resources is when we raise hell and cause problems for them.
“I was homeless from 2007 to 2012 and then I became housed through DAAH. I moved in there about 2012, or 2013, and when I moved in there from the very beginning it seemed as if I was targeted. The staff was very difficult to deal with, and just very unpleasant. But I stayed and I thought that maybe I needed to adjust myself. Or maybe I needed to take a step back and take a look at things further. Maybe I’m being treated fairly and I’m not giving people the benefit of the doubt. Well as a human being we’re born with certain things that tell us when something’s not right, or when something’s wrong. Bottom line is that I never felt like I was being treated right from the very beginning. The slowly but surely things started to happen with the tenants. Everybody comes with psychosis issues in those buildings, or disabilities of some sort, myself included. What happens is administration starts to personalize things, so they target you. Next thing you know you’re getting written more, you’re under a microscope. Then you’re being evicted for small reasons, things that only warrant a warning or disciplinary action. There is such a disconnection with the tenants and the staff that there’s no community. You know it’s supposed to be that kind of healthy community originated environment, (but) everybody is walking around in the SROs mad. Very angry and upset. While I’m there I’m not happy, I’ve been assaulted on multiple occasions, asked to be moved, but I was told they don’t do that. … The police downplay everything that happens in the SROs, it’s almost as if they don’t want to take the report, would rather settle it right there, but that doesn’t get anything done. Someone went in my building and killed my dog. Finally, I got fed up and I left. I just go and I pay my rent. Once COVID hit I just even didn’t go back to the building. I’ve just been living out here on the streets. I’m safer out here than I feel like I am in there. I go in my unit and I can feel like somebody’s been in my unit and when I discovered how they were getting in, they (managers) said they had remediated the problem, they didn’t. I’m in court with them Friday to determine some kind of settlement, if they’re going to put me out. If that’s what they are trying to do, what are they going to do for me for everything I’ve been through? You have rodent problems. You have staff issues. Discrimination issues going on in the building, I’ve had all those issues happen to me. I was sexually assaulted in the building, made a police report and they said they couldn’t do nothing about it. I filed reports with DPH asking to be moved. I went to City Hall, I went to the Department of Building and Inspection, I went the people who investigate if people are discriminating against you, and then I went to the rental board. All these places failed me. Nobody could help me. There was nobody to oversee what happened to me at that SRO.”
“(The hardest thing about the street), the harassment, social indifference. The way that people, you know the authorities, address you. They act like it’s my fault. I’m pretty sure, myself, and a lot of these people, if the resources were available, we would take them. Not no hotel room for a couple months and then kick us back out on the street to do this whole recycle thing again because it generates currency, it generates money. They’re getting paid off peoples’ misery.
“They moved us out of this aisle and told us to pack up, that they were sending out resources, that they were going to put us in hotel rooms. We packed on the corner and streets well into the night and no one came, and so I said let’s go in this parking lot. People still park their cars here; we don’t allow peoples’ cars to get broken into. People call the cops on us because they feel some type of social righteousness, that we’re doing something wrong because that’s how it’s portrayed through media. If social indifference continues to happen, they’re going to feel they can do whatever they want to us and not have to worry about any type of repercussions. I don’t understand how that’s right. If you’re moving us off the streets because we’re on the streets, then that means that San Francisco has an obligation to house its citizens. Not just place them in hotels, rundown hotels, that been condemned since ’89 (the earthquake) and cannot be reopened unless all the requirements of building inspections, safety codes, are met. This is not happening. Take for instance the Marathon Hotel, there’s holes in the roof and people are still living there. These are the homeless people that they take off the streets from a bad situation and put them into a worser one. It’s all designed so that you can be kicked out. San Francisco, there not addressing the homeless crisis that’s happening out here in the wealthiest city in the United States of America, and I don’t understand what’s going on. They’re moving (us) and they’re using fear of incarceration to intimidate because people on parole and that’s not right. You’re taking a hopeless person in a desperate situation; you’re provoking them to have some sort of negative episode. It’s going to drive people insane. What do they think going to happen? Now you provoke this situation and everybody’s watching. Not just Americans but other people in other countries are watching America, “home of the brave land of the free”. It don’t feel very free, don’t feel very free at all.”
…
All photos copyright Robert Gumpert 2021
A DEMOCRATIC FOOD SYSTEM MEANS UNIONS FOR FARMWORKERS
By David Bacon
The people who labor in U.S. fields produce immense wealth, yet poverty among farmworkers is widespread and endemic. It is the most undemocratic feature of the U.S. food system. Cesar Chavez called it an irony, that despite their labor at the system’s base, farmworkers “don’t have any money or any food left for themselves.”
Enforced poverty and the racist structure of the field labor workforce go hand in hand. U.S. industrial agriculture has its roots in slavery and the brutal kidnapping of Africans, whose labor developed the plantation economy, and the subsequent semi-slave sharecropping system in the South. For over a century, especially in the West and Southwest, industrial agriculture has depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Mexican, South Asian, Yemeni, Puerto Rican and more recently, Central American migrants.
The dislocation of communities produces this migrant workforce, as people are forced by poverty, war and political repression to leave home to seek work and survive. Any vision for a more democratic and sustainable system must acknowledge this historic reality of poverty, forced migration and inequality, and the efforts of workers themselves to change it.
California’s Tulare County, for instance, produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables in 2019, making it one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. Yet 123,000 of Tulare’s 453,000 residents live below the poverty line. Over 32,000 county residents are farmworkers; according to the US Department of Labor the average annual income of a farmworker is between $20,000 and $24,999, less than half the median U.S. household income.
Poverty has its price. It has forced farmworkers to continue working during the COVID-19 pandemic, although they are well aware of the danger of illness and death. As the gruesome year of 2020 came to an end, Tulare County, where the United Farm Workers was born in the 1965 grape strike, had 34,479 COVID-19 cases, and 406 people had died. That gave it infection and death rates more than twice that of urban San Francisco, or Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County. COVID rates follow income. Median family annual income in San Francisco is $112,249 and in Santa Clara it’s $124,055. Half of Tulare County families, almost all farmworkers, earn less than its median $49,687.
Democratizing the food system starts with acknowledging this disparity and seeking the means to end it. And in fact, the broader working class of California has concrete reasons for supporting farmworkers. COVID and future epidemics, for instance, do not stay neatly confined to poor rural barrios, but spread. Pesticides that poison farmworkers remain on fruit and vegetables that show up in supermarkets and dinner tables. Labor contractors and temporary jobs were features of farmworker life long before precarious employment spread to high tech and became the bane of UBER drivers.
The rural legacy of economic exploitation and racial inequality was challenged most successfully in 1965, when the grape strike began first in Coachella, and then spread to Delano. It was a product of decades of worker organizing and earlier farm worker strikes, and took place the year after civil rights and labor activists forced Congress to repeal Public Law 78 and end the bracero contract labor program.
The grape strike was a fundamental democratic movement, started by rank-and-file Filipino and Mexican workers. Although some couldn’t read or write, they were politically sophisticated, had a good understanding of their situation, and chose their action carefully. Growers had pitted Mexicans and Filipinos against each other for decades. When Filipinos acted first by going on strike, and then asked the Mexican workers, a much larger part of the workforce, to join them, they believed that workers’ common interest could overcome those divisions. Their multi-racial unity was a precondition for winning democracy in the fields.
Philip Veracruz, a Filipino grape picker who became a vice-president of the UFW, wrote during the strike’s fourth year: “The Filipino decision of the great Delano grape strike delivered the initial spark to explode the most brilliant incendiary bomb for social and political changes in U.S. rural life.”
The strike’s impact was enormous. Fifteen years after it started, farmworkers achieved the highest standard of living they’ve had in the years before or since. In the union contracts negotiated in the late 1970s the base wage was 2.5 to 3 times the minimum wage of the time, the equivalent in California of what would be $37-45 per hour today. The worst pesticides were banned, and for a decade union hiring halls kept labor contractors out of the fields.
By striking, farmworkers in 1965 were demanding the democratization of the food system. Winning the first and most basic step – a union contract – required overcoming the division between rural and urban people. Workers left the fields, traveled across the country, recruited allies, and stood in front of stores in the cities, appealing to consumers not to buy the struck grapes. Of all the achievements of the farmworkers’ movement, its most powerful and longest enduring was the boycott. It leveled the playing field in the fight with agricultural corporations over the right to form a union, and led to the most powerful and important alliance between unions and communities in modern labor history.
Farm worker strikes have traditionally been broken by strikebreakers, and all too often, drowned in blood and violence. No country has done more than the U.S. to enshrine the right of employers to break strikes. From their first picket lines in Delano, members of the new union, the United Farm Workers, watched in anger as growers brought in crews of strikebreakers to take their jobs. The boycott couldn’t end the violence, but after farm workers crossed the enormous gulf between the fields and the big cities, they didn’t have to fight by themselves.
The boycott was a participatory, democratizing strategy, and since then it has become a powerful tool for community-based union organizing. Today alliances between unions and communities are a bedrock of progressive activism. Farmworker strikes and boycotts helped develop this strategy, and gave the UFW its character as a social movement.
In 2013 farmworkers used that experience when they went on strike against the Sakuma Brothers blueberry farm in Burlington, Washington. For four years they combined strikes in the fields with a boycott of Sakuma’s main client, Driscoll’s, the world’s largest berry distributor. Their campaign succeeded in winning a union contract, and developed new ways to fight for rural democracy.
Since the mid-1980s a growing part of the migrant flow into U.S. fields has come from the states of southern Mexico, especially the indigenous Mixtec, Triqui and other communities of Oaxaca and the most remote parts of Mexico’s countryside. Migrants speaking the languages of these towns formed a new union in the heat of the Sakuma strike, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. Their fight for higher wages was closely bound to the right to speak Mixteco and Triqui, and to develop indigenous culture in rural Washington state towns two thousand miles from their home villages. Their struggle for cultural rights expanded the meaning of rural democracy.
The strike at Sakuma Farms started when the company made obvious its intention to replace its existing workers with a new set of migrants, recruited in Mexico and brought to the U.S. in the H2-A visa program. The union fought successfully for the rights and jobs of Sakuma’s existing employees, the Mixteco and Triqui farmworkers already living and working in the U.S. But in the years that followed their union also became the primary source of support for H2-A workers themselves, when they protested about abusive conditions.
Familias Unidas organizers came to the defense of workers at one company, who were fired and forced to leave the U.S. after protesting the death of an H2-A worker, Honesto Silva. They helped guestworkers on other farms protest exhausting production quotas. And when H2-A workers began to get sick and die after contracting the coronavirus in their crowded living quarters, Familias Unidas por la Justicia sued the state over grower-friendly regulations that allowed the virus to spread.
Sakuma Farms workers discovered in the course of their strike that the U.S. food system is a transborder system. In 2015 a similar strike movement began in Baja California, among the strawberry pickers at Driscoll’s and other growers in the San Quintin Valley. Workers there come from the same towns in Oaxaca, even the same families, as the strikers in Washington State. Both groups found that challenging the big growers, and winning the right to a voice over working and living conditions, ultimately means cooperation and solidarity across the U.S./Mexico border.
The largest agricultural employers have responded to demands by workers for economic and racial democracy by proposals to expand the H2-A contract labor system, criticized for being “close to slavery.” The largest recruiters of H-2A workers have enormous influence over immigration policy. With no limits on the number of visas issued annually, their recruitment of workers has mushroomed from 10,000 in 1992 to over 250,000 in 2020 – a tenth of the U.S. agricultural workforce.
Their principal proposal in Congress today is the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. It sets up the conditions for enormous growth in the H2-A program, and would likely lead to half the farm labor workforce in the U.S. laboring under H2-A visas within a few years. The bill will prohibit undocumented workers from working in agriculture, while implementing a restrictive and complex process in which some undocumented farmworkers could apply for legal status.
Instead of competing for domestic workers by raising wages, growers seek a supply of H2-A workers whose wages stay only slightly above the legal minimum. This system then places workers with H-2A visas into competition with a domestic labor force, depressing the wages of all farmworkers. As the program grows, domestic workers have to compete with growers for housing, and rents rise. When guest workers are pressured to speed up their work, an exhausting work pace spreads to the other farmworkers around them.
For farmworkers trying to organize and change conditions, the H2-A program creates enormous obstacles. When H-2A workers themselves try to change exploitative conditions, employers can terminate their employment and end their legal visa status, in effect deporting them. Workers are then legally blacklisted, preventing their recruitment to work in future seasons. Farmworkers living in the U.S., thinking about organizing or going on strike, have to consider the risk of being replaced.
Growers threaten that if wages rise, consumers will have to pay much higher prices for food. Yet a woman picking strawberries in a California field gets less than 20¢ for each plastic clamshell box, which sells in the supermarket for $3-4. Doubling her wage would hardly change the price in the store. Yet the food system is built on her poverty, and growers’ efforts to build a labor force of temporary workers cements that poverty into place.
Democracy in the fields is based on the idea that farmworkers belong to organic communities – that they are not just individuals without family or community, whose labor must be made available at a price growers want to pay. When Familias Unidas por la Justicia set up a coop to grow blueberries, Tierra y Libertad, it sought to create instead a new basis for community, a system in which workers could make the basic decisions as a community – about what to grow, how land should be used, and how to share the work without exploitation.
Rosalinda Guillen, the daughter of a farmworker family and founder of Communty2Community, the main support base for the strikers at Sakuma Farms, believes that a democratic system for food production can’t be achieved if farmworkers continue to be landless. “The value of what we bring to a community is blatantly waved aside,” she charges. “We’re invisible. Our contributions are invisible. That’s part of the capitalist culture in this country. We are like the dregs of slavery in this country. They’re holding onto that slave mentality to try to get value from the cheapest labor they can get. If they keep us landless, if we do not have the opportunity to root ourselves into the communities in the way we want, then it’s easy to get more value out of us with less investment in us. It’s as blunt as that.”
Organizing a union doesn’t give farmworkers land, and Guillen cautions that its goals are more immediate and limited. ” It’s not enough to say we’ve got X number of union contracts,” she say. “Those workers are still in a fight. They’re fighting everyday for their existence.”
But getting land and reorganizing production requires political power, just as raising wages does. And the food monopolies controlling land and production won’t give up their power without a fight. Unions for farmworkers, therefore, are the first, most basic step to power. Democratizing the food system without the organized power of the workers within it will remain just a dream.
All photographs and copyright: David Bacon
…
The Biggest Bust Ever: Direct Action Lessons From Three Days in May of 1971
By Steve Early
Fifty years ago this May, when the U.S. Capitol police were better at arresting large numbers of white trespassers, I watched 1,200 of my fellow anti-war demonstrators carted off to jail for just sitting on the back steps of the Capitol and listening to speeches from two House members.
That bust was the last gasp of three days of mass protest activity, in Washington, D.C. over the Vietnam War. It resulted in the largest number of civil disobedience-related detentions in U.S. history—12,000 in all, including a record-breaking single-day total of 7,000 people arrested on May 3, 1971.
To conduct this unprecedented round-up—later found to be unlawful—President Richard Nixon deployed far more law enforcement and military personnel than the Trump Administration used, in the same city, last year. Organizers of the May, 1971 anti-war actions had publicly announced their intention to shut-down the nation’s capital–by blocking its streets, bridges, and buildings. But that plan was thwarted by nearly 20,000 local, state, and federal police officers, National Guard members, U.S. Marines, paratroopers from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division, and the Sixth Armored Cavalry from Fort Meade in Maryland.
Last June, President Trump’s threatened response to Black Lives Matter protests in triggered a major debate about the appropriateness of deploying such active-duty military personnel against civilians, in DC or anywhere else. Push back from the military itself—and members of Congress– helped stay the hand of the Nixon fan then occupying the White House.
Meanwhile, intentional law-breaking— by police brutality protestors in some cities last summer and Trump supporters on January 6—was much condemned in the mainstream media. That problematic equivalency aside, the question of how and when to organize mass protests, that are militant and disruptive, while remaining as peaceful as possible, remains a challenge the left should not ignore—if only to avoid alienating potential supporters or community members adversely impacted.
Several excellent studies of the Mayday protests, including L.A. Kauffman’s Direct Action (Verso, 2017) and Lawrence Roberts’ MayDay, 1971 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), are worth consulting about these questions, on the fiftieth anniversary of the biggest bust ever. As Kauffman argues, Mayday “influenced grassroots activism for decades to come, laying the groundwork for a new kind of radicalism: decentralized, ideologically diverse, and propelled by direct action.” According to Roberts, the Nixon Administration’s response led to “consequential changes to American law and politics, including the rules governing protests in the nation’s capital, which remain in force today.”
A Grand Finale
In the Spring of 1971, Mayday was the grand finale of anti-war actions that included the bombing of a Capitol Building restroom by the Weather Underground; an occupation of the Capitol Mall by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and a mass rally in April organized by the National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC), which drew 500,000 people. This last event was similar to the huge peace demonstrations held in Washington, D.C. on weekends during the Spring of 1970 and the Fall of 1969. Each involved bussing in large crowds of people, doing a little marching around, listening to speeches and music, and then getting back on the busses to go home. For some in the anti-war movement, this familiar routine—what one critic called “dull ceremonies of dissent” — began to feel futile and too easily ignored by the Nixon Administration.
The late Rennie Davis, the mastermind and maestro of May Day, had a different idea. Tens of thousands of activists would come to Washington ready to camp out and disrupt business as usual, on a weekday when thousands of federal workers were trying to get to their jobs. As viewers of Aaron Sorkin’s flawed film about ‘The Chicago Seven” know well, Davis was no stranger to confrontational protest. A leader of Students for a Democratic Society at Oberlin College, he helped organize anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. This made him a defendant in the most famous political trial of the era, resulting in a 1970 conviction for incitement to riot (that was later overturned on appeal).
Davis was still facing a five-year jail term for his Chicago Seven role when he courageously hit the road to convince campus activists that if “the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government.” As one old SDS comrade told the New York Times when Davis died, at age 80 in February, Rennie’s style of organizing involved a lot of “smoke and mirrors.” He believed in “political salesmanship, creating a kind of myth that wasn’t quite a lie but created an image of possibility, even if it wasn’t yet true.”
The game plan developed by Davis wasn’t an easy sell among traditional practitioners of civil disobedience or NPAC. Pacifist foes of the Vietnam war tended to play by strict non-violent protest rules; if you broke the law by blocking a federal building or burning draft board records, you didn’t try to evade arrest afterwards, for either misdemeanors or felonies. You sat (or laid down) and waited to be hand-cuffed and hauled away. NPAC leaders, following the Socialist Worker Party line, didn’t favor getting busted at all. They believed that the broadest possible anti-war movement could only be built through continued reliance on massive protests, that remained peaceful and legal. “When people state they are purposely and illegally attempting to disrupt the government…they isolate themselves from the masses of American people,” argued The Militant, an SWP publication.
Affinity Groups
Ignoring such counsel, Davis and fellow members of the May Day Collective, envisioned widespread mobile civil disobedience. Protestors would come to Washington as part of small, home-grown “affinity groups” ready to disrupt and run, not damaging property or harming people but definitely trying to paralyze commuter traffic entering the District of Columbia on Monday, May 3, 1971. The staging area for this affront to public order was originally going to be Rock Creek Park. But, after negotiations with city officials, our short-lived official camping site became West Potomac Park, near the Lincoln Memorial. On May Day itself, Saturday, May 1, 50,000 people gathered there to hear a rock concert and last-minute pep talks. Among the bands playing that night were the Beach Boys, who insisted on being the opening act so, as co-founder Mike Love explained, they could leave “before any riots broke out.” Before we emerged groggy from our tents the next morning, several thousand DC police officers had surrounded the encampment and ordered its dispersal.
To avoid any premature confrontation, almost the entire crowd packed up, and left — seeking shelter in college dormitories, church basements, private homes or apartments throughout the city. By Monday, May 3, our numbers were greatly reduced but, by most estimates, still more than 25,000 strong. By mid-morning, few demonstrators had found their way to locations originally assigned to them in the “tactical manual” developed for the protest. But that didn’t matter because President Richard Nixon had stubbornly refused to give all federal employees the day off, to avoid rush hour traffic snarls. As protestors roamed downtown DC, dodging huge tear gas barrages, they created small barricades, left disabled cars in roadways, or temporarily blocked intersections with mobile sit-ins. As Roberts observes,
“The tactical advantage underpinning Mayday was now apparent, the asymmetrical warfare of a guerilla force against a standing army. It was nearly impossible to defend against small decentralized bands who could shift on a dime, tie up police or troops at one spot, and then get to another place before the authorities could adjust…”
One adjustment the authorities did make created a legal nightmare for them. DC Police Chief Jerry Wilson suspended the use of field arrest forms and accompanying Polaroid picture-taking that linked particular officers to individual arrestees. As a result, on May 3, nearly 7,000 people were detained, but with almost no information about who they were, what they had done, or who had arrested them. In addition to not being able to easily prosecute anyone nabbed in this fashion, the city quickly ran out of places to hold everyone. During my own 48-hours of detention, I never saw the inside of a jail cell, which was fortunate because they were dangerously overcrowded. Along with fellow detainees from Vermont, I was first transported, via paddy wagon, to the exercise yard of the DC city jail. Then several thousand of us were moved to the old DC Coliseum, an indoor sports arena, where members of the National Guard, bored but friendly, kept watch.
Conditions were not great but a lot better than protestors experienced, penned up over-night, in an outdoor practice field next to RFK Stadium. There, sympathetic members of the local African-American community showed up with much needed donations of food, water, and blankets that were passed over the chain link fence to detainees who were almost entirely white. One organizer of that relief caravan, civil rights activist Mary Treadwell, informed the press that she was there because anything that “can upset the oppressive machinery of government will help black people.”
Jamming the Jails
Even critics of our attempted disruption of the city—and there were many in politics and the press– soon expressed concern about the circumstances of our confinement and related militarization of the city. The use of mass preventive detention–which resulted in some non-protestors (including reporters) being swept off the street as well — paralyzed the local jail and court system. Creating that kind of crisis was very much in the tradition of free speech fights waged by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) a century ago or the civil rights protests which filled southern jails in the 1960s. In both situations, orchestrated mass arrests were used as a pressure tactic against local authorities interfering with the exercise of constitutional rights.
As word spread that our legal defense team was trying to persuade a federal judge to order an unconditional release, many detainees in the Coliseum spurned tempting offers to be finger-printed and released on $10 bonds. In the meantime, 5,000 fellow protestors, who had eluded the first day round up, descended on the Justice Department and Capitol Building on May 4 and 5, respectively. There, they sat down and got arrested in more traditional fashion. Among those hauled away was John Froines, one of two Chicago Seven defendants acquitted in that case, but now, along with Davis and Abbie Hoffman, indicted for conspiracy again, as a planner of Mayday.
In MayDay 1971, Lawrence Roberts, who became an award-winning journalist after being a detainee himself, provides a detailed account of the subsequent litigation, which continued for sixteen years. Only a handful of people were ever convicted of anything. The charges against everyone else were dropped, including the federal indictments of Davis, Froines, and Hoffman for conspiracy. “Over the years,” Roberts writes, “thanks to class action cases filed by the ACLU, as well as individual lawsuits, judges and juries awarded millions of dollars to thousands of detainees, for violations of their right to free speech, assembly, and due process…Congress acknowledged, in a backhand way, that the fault lay as much with the federal government as the police; it appropriated more than $3 million for the city to help defray the costs of settlements and damages.” In one jury trial, the plaintiffs initially won $12 million in damages, an amount later reduced on appeal.
As Roberts notes, key players in the suppression of Mayday ended up spending more time in jail, for more serious offenses, than anybody who blocked traffic to end the war in Vietnam. That’s because, 13 months later, Nixon administration operatives were caught burglarizing and bugging the Democratic National Committee, which had offices in a DC neighborhood where much Mayday skirmishing happened. The resulting Watergate scandal ended with Richard Nixon facing impeachment and forced to resign from the presidency in 1974. Among his various co-conspirators were Mayday crackdown architects like White House counsel John Dean, Nixon’s chief of staff H.R. Haldeman; his top domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman; Attorney General John Mitchell; Assistant AG Richard Kleindienst, and White House staffer Egil Krogh. A future Supreme Court chief justice, named William Rehnquist, provided a Justice Department memo assuring Nixon that he had “inherent constitutional authority to use federal troops to ensure that Mayday demonstrations do not prevent federal employees from…carrying out their assigned government functions.”
It was the kind of green light that Donald Trump sought, but never quite got last June, when deploying the military against protestors in Washington, D.C. became a White House strategy again.
…
Taking a stand in Massachusetts: Gig economy workers are employees, not independent contractors
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
On Saturday, May 1st at 10:45 AM (PT), Rand Wilson and Peter Olney took part in the panel “Organizing Workers in the Gig Economy”. Watch the recorded discussion HERE
Of course, after winning in California, we knew they wouldn’t stop there. Their big win on Proposition 22 last November has emboldened Uber, Lyft, and the whole constellation of gig economy companies to undermine employment standards and workers’ rights in other states.[1]
The hyper exploitation of ride share drivers by Uber and Lyft and other gig companies is premised on using a cell phone application (or “app”) to enlist workers as drivers or delivery workers. The companies claim that the drivers are not their employees but instead are independent contractors. With this reasoning, management is not obligated to comply with wage and hour laws, or pay into workers’ compensation, unemployment, and state disability insurance funds. And by classifying their employees as independent contractors, drivers do not have access to federal protections from discrimination or collective bargaining and other worker rights under the National Labor Relations Act.[2]
The gig economy companies mobilized after a 2018 California State Supreme Court decision, “Dynamex,” ruled that a simple “ABC test” should be applied to determine whether an individual is an employee or a contractor. California codified that decision when it enacted Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5) in September 2019 and tightened the criteria for worker classification.[3]
Under the ABC test, a worker is considered an employee and not an independent contractor, unless the hiring entity satisfies all three of the following conditions:
- The worker is free from the control and direction of the hiring entity in connection with the performance of the work, both under the contract for the performance of the work and in fact;
- The worker performs work that is outside the usual course of the hiring entity’s business; and
- The worker is customarily engaged in an independently established trade, occupation, or business of the same nature as that involved in the work performed.[4]
The Dynamex decision and California’s AB 5 law fundamentally threatened the rideshare companies’ business model. The companies responded with a ballot initiative, Proposition 22, to pass a law carving out rideshare drivers from AB 5’s regulations.
Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash claimed that if their ballot initiative passed drivers would receive guaranteed pay equal to 120% of the minimum wage plus 30 cents per mile to cover expenses, as well as access to health insurance. However, after considering multiple loopholes in the initiative, a research study estimated that the promised pay guarantee for Uber and Lyft drivers is actually equivalent to a wage of only $5.64 per hour.[5]
Rideshare Drivers United (RDU),[6] a grass roots organization of Uber and Lyft drivers based in Southern California, campaigned valiantly against Proposition 22. RDU was joined by the California Labor Federation and its affiliates in officially opposing Prop 22.[7] But they were outgunned, out messaged, and outspent $205 million to $14 million.[8] The unions decided not to canvass voters at their doors during the pandemic –surrendering their most powerful weapon: an organized ground game.
The pro Prop 22 forces developed a slick media campaign that showcased immigrants and people of color at the wheel of their cars talking about their desire for “flexibility” and the great benefits of driving for Uber or Lyft. The meager anti Prop 22 budget could not come close to matching the media campaign and the lack of a door-knocking program meant the corporations carried the day, winning 58.63% to 41.37%.[9]
While the gig companies are looking at campaigns in Colorado, Illinois, and New Jersey, Massachusetts appears to be where the next high profile battleground will take place.[10] Uber and Lyft have created a “grass-tops” coalition, the Massachusetts Coalition for Independent Work,[11] to push several bills in the state legislature that would undo the state’s ABC test.[12] Most observers believe their bills will die in committee on Beacon Hill. However, like California, Uber and Lyft will likely resort to placing a referendum question similar to Prop 22 on the state ballot in November 2022.
The definitive margin for Prop 22 in California shows just how hard it will be to win in Massachusetts. And we know in advance that the campaign to preserve the ABC classification test will be heavily outspent by the gig industry. However, a smaller media market, the 2022 governor’s race, other ballot initiatives, and the lessons of California may help equal the playing field. There are four keys to a different outcome in Massachusetts:
- Doors, doors, doors – Pandemic or no pandemic the campaign needs to mask up, stay socially distant, but knock on voters’ doors;
- California dreaming? – Immediately after the passage of Prop 22 the gig companies in California began slicing promises they made to drivers for health insurance and higher income. And in the wake of Prop 22, other companies like Albertsons and Vons began to take advantage of the law by firing their employees and hiring DoorDash to make deliveries. The campaign must be about all workers, not just drivers.
- Powerful pathos – The motives and consequences of gig employment must be exposed! Hundreds of gig drivers will need to be recruited and trained to tell their stories contradicting the paid media narrative.
- Unity and solidarity – the campaign must be about uniting working people against powerful corporations and the greed behind their initiative. We will need many heartrending stories of employees denied their FLSA protections and employee rights because of misclassification.
The simultaneous 2022 ballot to amend the state constitution allowing a special tax on millionaires and a hotly contested race for governor will also create a grassroots advantage. Combined these campaigns should yield a very large progressive turnout. However, it remains to be seen if suburban liberals and the intelligentsia that has historically been snowed by the “new economy” discourse will be open to a critique of the false promises of the gig economy.
On the one hand, we saw how liberal Democrats folded when the hospital industry spent $25 million to defeat the nurses’ union ballot for staffing ratios in 2018.[13] On the other hand, a proposal to expand charter schools backed by a $26 million campaign was soundly defeated in 2016.[14] Let’s be optimistic, if Robert Reich can go from being a pro NAFTA and new economy guru as Secretary of Labor to a staunch defender of worker rights, then there is hope that liberal opinion leaders and state elected leaders will be on our side.
Stopping Uber and Lyft cold in Massachusetts would be of enormous significance nationally. A defeat for the ride share driver companies could propel broad federal legislation making worker mis-classification much harder and undoing toxic state measures like Proposition 22 in California. Imagine a Bay State banner that reads, “Yes Uber and Lyft: Blame me, I’m from Massachusetts!”
…
Watch the recorded discussion here
[1] “2020 California Proposition 22,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22, “California Proposition 22, App-Based Drivers as Contractors and Labor Policies Initiative,” https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_22,_App-Based_Drivers_as_Contractors_and_Labor_Policies_Initiative_(2020)
[2] “Uber Was Designed to Exploit Drivers,” Ankita Rao, Vice, https://www.vice.com/en/article/3k3kdn/uber-was-designed-to-exploit-drivers
[3] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB5
[4] “Independent contractor versus employee,” State of California, Dept. of Industrial Relations, https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_independentcontractor.htm
[5] “The Uber/Lyft Ballot Initiative Guarantees only $5.64 an Hour,” Ken Jacobs and Michael Reich, October 31, 2019, https://laborcenter.berkeley.edu/the-uber-lyft-ballot-initiative-guarantees-only-5-64-an-hour-2/
[6] https://www.drivers-united.org/
[7] “NO ON PROP 22 FACT SHEET, California Labor Federation, “https://calaborfed.org/no-on-prop-22-faq/
[8] “Uber And Lyft Spent Hundreds Of Millions To Win Their Fight Over Workers’ Rights. It Worked.” Caroline O’Donovan, BuzzFeed, November 21, 2020, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolineodonovan/uber-lyft-proposition-22-workers-rights
[9] “2020 California Proposition 22,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_Proposition_22
[10] “The Gig Economy Is Coming for Millions of American Jobs,” by Josh Eidelson, Bloomberg, February 17, 2021, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-02-17/gig-economy-coming-for-millions-of-u-s-jobs-after-california-s-uber-lyft-vote
[11] In a January 28 email to community and religious groups, it stated, “The coalition’s goal is to help develop a modern legislative framework that can protect workers’ ability to choose their schedules and earn income on their terms, while also gaining benefits and protections. Overall, the coalition aims to expand opportunities for workers across all demographics, ethnicities, and backgrounds; strengthen transportation and delivery equity that helps all communities grow and thrive; help brick-and-mortar small businesses, restaurants, and retailers compete in an increasingly online economy; and protect those communities that rely on independent workers and app-based services for their essential needs.”
[12] House Docket 2901, “An Act relative to the definition of an independent contractor,” and House Docket 2904, “An Act relative to independent contractors.”
[13] “Hospitals spend record $25M to defeat nurse patient ratio ballot question,” By Jessica Bartlett – Reporter, Boston Business Journal, Feb 25, 2019, https://www.bizjournals.com/boston/news/2019/02/25/hospitals-spend-record-25m-to-defeat-nurse-patient.html
[14] “Massachusetts votes against expanding charter schools, saying no to Question 2,” by Shira Schoenberg, Jan 07, 2019, MassLive, https://www.masslive.com/politics/2016/11/massachusetts_votes_against_ex.html
“The Wandering Habit” — Two Cheers For Nomadland
By Hardy Green
She called them “the suitcase crowd.”
It was while working as a secretary in the Memphis public schools, beginning in the 1960s, that my mother became acquainted with a frequently moving slice of humanity.
One of her duties at the school was to register incoming students, particularly those who appeared not on the first day of school but later, in the middle of a term perhaps. Some of these late-arriving students might show up in mid-November and then one day disappear, only to reappear sometime in the spring. Generally, they resided for a period at a nearby public housing project. What caused them to come and go? Probably their parents’ uncertain employment, perhaps talk of opportunity elsewhere combined with what some historians of southern textile-mill villages have termed “the wandering habit”—a tendency of formerly rural people to pick up at a moment’s notice and move away.
When I first heard about the film Nomadland, I thought it must concern “the suitcase crowd.” And maybe that’s right: The availability or unavailability of work does induce Fern—the character played by actress Frances McDormand—and her chums to move about. But Fern’s group seems a little less down-and-out—and a little more Age of Aquarius-inspired—than I recall my mother’s “suitcase crowd” as being.
As the movie awards season approaches its climax with the late-April Academy Awards, we’ll be hearing more and more about Nomadland. And that gives me pause. There’s lots to like about the picturesque, often touching film—and certain things to question, particularly the very positive image of work at Amazon.
What first prompts Fern’s roaming is the 2011 closure of U.S. Gypsum’s mine and sheetrock factory at the company town of Empire, Nevada, where her husband had worked. Employees and their families were permitted to continue living in their company-owned homes for only five months after the closure. Then, Empire became a ghost town and even its zip code gotdiscontinued.
Thereafter, we see Fern taking on various stints of work and long drives in her camper van. She has gigs at an Amazon warehouse, at a national park, and at a beet processing plant. She wanders around Badlands National Park in South Dakota and, in deepest winter, hangs out with other migrant van dwellers at the real-life Rubber Tramp Rendezvous at Quartzsite, Arizona, which every year draws thousands of attendees.
The movie was inspired by a book of the same name by journalist Jessica Bruder. That account covered five years and interviews with some 50 aging post-recession refugees from the middle class and working class. They include a former long-haul truck driver and taxi drivers, McDonald’s and software company executives, an IRS phone representative, and a chain store cashier.
To call these people nomads is a misuse of the term. “The word nomad derives from the Greek nomos—a pasture,” travel writer Bruce Chatwin informs us in his essay “Nomad Invasions.” “A nomad proper is a mobile pastoralist, the owner and breeder of domesticated animals…. Nomads never roam aimlessly from place to place, as one dictionary would have it. A nomadic migration is a guided tour of animals around a predictable sequence of pastures.”
Chatwin also tells us that nomads, with their grazing animals, and farmers, with their crops, live in a symbiotic relationship, exchanging hides, meat, and dairy products for grains and vegetables. In like manner, the wanderers of Nomadland depend upon stable capitalist outposts including Amazon. But these “nomads” have no animal products to trade—only their labor power.
Perhaps coincidentally—and perhaps not—Amazon has been in other news lately due to a unionization vote at a warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. (That’s another former company town; you really can’t get away from them in working-class America.) The union drive featured reports of denied bathroom breaks and repetitive-stress injuries due to workers’ slogging around heavy boxes for hour after hour.
In the movie, we see Fern and her co-workers performing these tasks at a similar Amazon “fulfillment” center. But the work seems far from hellish: At one point, we see McDormand casually walking a package from one area of the warehouse to another. And later when questioned about how she’s getting along economically, she reports that Amazon’s good pay is key to her survival.
Perhaps there can be a sequel in which Fran develops back trouble and can no longer endure long drives in her van. Nomadland has been praised for its use of non-professional actors including true-life itinerants. But a more true-life picture would examine just why unionization became an issue at the Bessemer warehouse. Life for “the suitcase crowd” is a long way from that of the jet set.
…
From My Backyard in Hackney – It’s all about the money
By Neil Burgess
On Sunday the 20th of April we sat in the sunshine in our garden drinking tea with a very nice young couple who are buying the house next door. London is just coming out of Covid lockdown and we’re now allowed to meet people in the open air. She’s an architect and immediately bonded with my partner of the same profession. His response that he was a lawyer, didn’t immediately seem promising, but questioned closer, it turns out that he specialises in Sports Law and not only that but he supports Liverpool FC. Well, these are going to be nice neighbours! I remember commenting that it must be great being lawyers working for the top football teams: who is going to argue over £1000 an hour fees when the top players are earning north of £200,000 a week?
Towards the end of the afternoon as they were leaving the lawyer hinted that there was a big football news story about that I might be interested in, he couldn’t tell me what, but it was about to break. Immediately they were gone I looked up on Google and found a short report suggesting a group proposing a new European Super League. Interesting? Well, yes, but it’s been talked about before and there was little detail, so I didn’t think about it again until I heard the news the next morning by which time all hell had broken loose. It was top of the national radio and TV news and headlining the front of all the newspapers and websites.
The four top teams in England and a couple of others had joined with the top teams in Spain and Italy to form a new European Super League that would be best of the best, but everyone was against it, they were going mad. Not just the fans, but the managers and the players knew nothing about it, they hadn’t been consulted. Not just the Chairmen of the other teams who hadn’t been invited. Not only the leaders of the English Football Association and the European Football Association, but the bloody Prime Minister Boris Johnston was wading in. By eleven o’ clock Monday morning Prince William expressed his displeasure, and I was waiting for the announcement from the Vatican that the Pope wasn’t happy, then we’d have the full set.
The sight of this Prime Minister accusing these clubs of greed, was, to use a very English expression gob-smacking.
To say that the kick back against this idea was ferocious is an understatement. What was all the fuss? Apparently this new league would be fixed: win or lose the founding teams would remain in it. Apparently this offended the British sense of fair play, the egalitarian, the meritocracy, the very democratic tradition, that made the Empire great…, er okay, not the last bit. So, in theory, a small team from some backwater can join a local league and by topping that league win promotion the next level of football. If they do that about seven or eight times they might join the English Premiership; election to the Premiership is the biggest cash prize in world sport, it guarantees additional income of over £130 million pounds over the following season. But of course it’s not about the money, no. Naturally, the royals, the politicians, the Chairmen of the Associations and of the lesser clubs and the journalists and the fans and their spokes-people all agreed, it’s about the very nature of sportsmanship, sorry, sportspersonship.
Bollocks. It’s all about the money. The sight of this Prime Minister accusing these clubs of greed, was, to use a very English expression gob-smacking. The previous week he’d been reported claiming that it was greed that motivated the vaccine manufacturers that had saved us from the pandemic. So that greed was good, but football’s greed is bad. Confused? Well, I am for sure. Professional football (yes, I know you guys in America call it soccer, but everywhere else it’s football. I mean, in the American variety they don’t even use a ball, it’s some sort of egg thing, someone should tell them, it’s not a ball.) is worth many billions of pounds and even more dollars. It has attracted Russian Oligarchs, Saudi and other Arab Princes and American sports Mogols, plus other more disreputable types, but all genuine football fans, who now own the entire English league. What, because they love our sense of gamesmanship? Maybe, but also the game is a huge cash cow and so badly regulated that owners can cream off large amounts of money in all sorts of imaginative ways. And what about the people who run the competitions, the World Cup, the Champions League, Series A, the Premiership? Well they’ve all got their snouts in the trough and are gobbling up their share too. This new Super League was about break the status quo and threaten their livelihoods.
Now, the break-away teams have all with-drawn from the Super League and apologised. It was all over in a matter of days. But I remain suspicious about what was really happening. If the Super League was serious, where were the PR consultants and press secretaries briefed to sell the super league idea to the fans? The promise of seeing the world’s top players and teams playing each other on a regular basis and without having to buy a yearly subscription to SKY TV or their UK competitors BT, is an attractive proposition. Why didn’t the Super League group have their considerable media teams behind the idea from the start to counter all the negative stuff? Maybe they are just stupid and hadn’t thought it through? Or maybe there is something else going on and this was just an opening skirmish? Whatever the case I can feel confident that my new neighbour is going to be kept very busy in the coming months.
…