Biding time with Biden and the possibilities of change
By Bob Master
In the autumn of 1932, as the most desperate winter of the Depression approached, Franklin Delano Roosevelt campaigned for the presidency on a program of slashing federal spending by 25 percent. “I regard reduction in Federal spending as one of the most important issues of this campaign,” he declared in a speech in Pittsburgh that October. “In my opinion, it is the most direct and effective contribution that Government can make to business.” It would have taken uncanny foresight to predict that in just a few short years, FDR and his New Deal would become virtually synonymous with Keynesian deficit-spending and the creation of the nation’s first social safety net.
Roosevelt’s attachment to fiscal austerity was not mere campaign rhetoric. Six days after his inauguration, he sent the Economy Act to Capitol Hill, mandating $400 million in cuts to veterans’ pension benefits (the equivalent of $10.3 billion today) and another $100 million in reductions to federal employee pay. By March 15th, it was law. “Under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt,” the historian William Leuchtenburg has written, “the budget balancers won a victory for orthodox finance that had not been possible under Hoover.”
At the time of his election, Roosevelt was not an ideologically consistent politician. Determined to try anything to jump-start the moribund economy, he surrounded himself with a diverse group of advisers holding often contradictory views. In the First Hundred Days, the fiscal austerity of The Economy Act was incongruously coupled with expensive state-sponsored initiatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the National Industrial Recovery Act.
Senator Huey Long spawned a network of 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs that would loom as an electoral threat to FDR in 1936.
In popular imagination, the New Deal has come to be identified with far-reaching reforms that empowered workers and created the infrastructure for an enduring social safety net. But these achievements were only possible because vibrant mass movements reshaped the political landscape and pushed Roosevelt to the left. The Wagner Act, which required corporations to engage in collective bargaining with workers for the first time in U.S. history, offers a case in point. Its passage made possible the birth of the modern industrial labor movement, and “when passed,” one legal scholar has written, it “was perhaps the most radical piece of legislation ever enacted by the United States Congress.” But Roosevelt had little to do with its enactment. The president “never lifted a finger” for the bill, his Labor Secretary Frances Perkins would recall later. She continued: “Certainly, I never lifted a finger…. I, myself, had very little sympathy with the bill.” In 1934, the year before the bill passed, hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike and took to the streets of cities across the country. This action generated irresistible momentum for the new collective bargaining law. At the same time, unemployed workers rallied for relief; seniors demanded a measure of economic security in retirement; and populist Louisiana Senator Huey Long spawned a network of 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs that would loom as an electoral threat to FDR in 1936. These powerful social movements transformed the 1932 apostle of austerity into the President who declared at a 1936 campaign rally that the forces of “organized money . . . are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”
With Election Day less than two weeks away, it is worth recalling this New Deal dynamic of mass movements and social reform. For many of us, the 2020 Democratic primaries left a bitter taste of disappointment and resentment. The rapid consolidation of the Democratic establishment—and of the primary electorate—in support of Joe Biden in the days before Super Tuesday thwarted the left’s hopes of nominating a transformational standard bearer. And Biden, of course, has many shortcomings: a centrist legislative record, sometimes head-scratching rhetorical ineptitude, and an outdated penchant for bipartisan compromise. Yet history suggests that what you see on the campaign trail, or even in a candidate’s past legislative record, is not necessarily what you get from a president once in power.
Transformational leadership is determined not only by the character, or even by the ideology of a particular leader, but by a complex interplay of social forces and historical circumstance. Perhaps most importantly, it is mass popular mobilization that can shift the frame of debate and push leaders beyond where anyone expected them to go. History demonstrates that this dynamic can produce surprising breakthroughs, even when activists may least expect them.
The radicals of 1860 were appalled. The Republican Party, declared William Lloyd Garrison, “may not be in all respects as bad as another party, but is so bad that I cannot touch it
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln was the compromise candidate of a political party whose stance on slavery leading abolitionists dismissed as an unacceptable compromise. The Republican Party, founded in 1854, accepted the prevailing constitutional interpretation that the federal government lacked the authority to outlaw slavery in the states where it existed; instead Republicans advocated “free soil,” preventing slavery’s spread into the new western territories, and for disassociating the federal government from direct support of slavery. This political expedience outraged abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, who fumed in 1855: “Free soilism is lame, halt and blind, while it battles against the spread of slavery, and admits its right to exist anywhere.”
The campaign dynamics of 1860 drew Lincoln in an even more cautious direction. In 1856, the anti-immigrant, “Know-Nothing” candidacy of former president Millard Fillmore had drained votes from Republican nominee John Frémont, leading to a decisive victory for the Democratic “slaveocracy.” Lincoln tried to avoid the same fate by courting nativist voters in Indiana, Illinois, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, that era’s battleground states. His campaign toned down Republican positions on denationalization of slavery, and highlighted other issues, like the tariff, to attract swing voters.
The radicals of 1860 were appalled. The Republican Party, declared William Lloyd Garrison, “may not be in all respects as bad as another party, but is so bad that I cannot touch it, and will not give it any countenance whatsoever.” Edmund Quincy, anticipating the arguments of subsequent generations of radicals, claimed there was no meaningful difference between the two major parties. The election was destined to produce, he wrote, “a new administration pledged to the support of slavery in our Southern States, and this equally, whether success be to the Democrats or the Republicans.”
After Lincoln’s victory, abolitionist disillusionment with the new president continued to mount. Throughout much of 1861 and 1862, the President continued to insist that preservation of the union was the sole objective of the war, refused to recruit Black troops into the Union Army, and sought to placate slave-holding Border States with proposals for compensated emancipation and the overseas colonization of freed slaves. In June 1862, Wendell Phillips, perhaps the foremost white abolitionist orator and one of the most radical, erupted in anger in a letter to his friend, Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican senator from Massachusetts. “Lincoln is doing twice as much today to break this Union as Davis is. We are paying thousands of lives and millions of dollars as penalty for having a timid and ignorant President, all the more injurious because honest.” At a meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Society in late May, Stephen Foster took his critique of the fledgling two-party system to the furthest extreme: “Abraham Lincoln is as truly a slaveholder as Jefferson Davis,” he said. “He cannot even contemplate emancipation without colonization.”
But Lincoln was not the same as Jefferson Davis. He hated slavery, even if he was acutely attuned to northern political opinion and often calibrated his positions to sustain majority support for the war. And just like in the 1930s, grassroots agitation, legislative radicalization, and historical circumstance combined to bring Lincoln to a turning point in the struggle against slavery. Frederick Douglass traveled thousands of miles and gave hundreds of speeches demanding “abolition war” and the recruitment of Black troops into the Union war effort. A mass movement of runaway slaves—the “contrabands of war”—presented themselves to advancing Union armies, seeking refuge from bondage and offering to join the war effort. Finally, after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln announced plans for the Emancipation Proclamation, at last making abolition the primary objective of war. Black troops would be recruited to the cause, albeit at discriminatory rates of pay. As Karl Marx observed in an article in the New York Tribune, “Up until now, we have witnessed only the first act of the Civil War—the constitutional waging of war. The second act, the revolutionary waging of war, is at hand.”
By the mid-1950s, the rise of the CIO, which was committed to cross-racial industrial organization, coupled with the emergence of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, had shifted the racial politics …
Mass movements would shape presidential leadership a third time in the modern civil rights era. Lyndon Johnson was a dyed-in-the-wool New Deal Democrat who grew up dirt poor in the Hill Country of North Texas in the first decades of the twentieth century. His biographer, Robert Caro, writes that Johnson’s own poverty and humiliation left him deeply empathetic towards impoverished people of color, in particular the Mexican-American children he taught during a brief stint as a schoolteacher on the eve of the Great Depression. But Southern populist enthusiasm for New Deal programs like rural electrification, agricultural price supports, and public power was always limited by the imperative of preserving the region’s racial and economic status quo. One-party rule in the South helped to ensure segregationist dominance of Congressional chairmanships awarded according to strict rules of seniority; this “southern cage,” as Ira Katznelson has called it, guaranteed that much of the New Deal disproportionately excluded Black workers.
Institutional racism was complemented by unconcealed racist prejudice. Robert Parker, Johnson’s occasional chauffeur and, during the 1960s, the maître d’ of the Senate dining room, recalled in his autobiography that Johnson never called him by his given name. “He especially liked to call me nigger in front of southerners and racists like [Georgia Senator] Richard Russell,” wrote Parker. “It was . . . LBJ’s way of being one of the boys.” First elected to Congress in 1937, Johnson believed for two decades that his path to power lay in an alliance with the Southern segregationist bloc. He voted against legislation establishing a Fair Employment Practices Commission and a bill that would have outlawed poll taxes. He repeatedly helped Southern Senators filibuster civil rights legislation proposed by Northern Democrats.
But social movements would force Johnson to revise his political calculus. Johnson rose to Senate Majority Leader in 1955, and soon began plotting a run for the presidency. Doing so meant navigating a far different political landscape than the one-party Southern oligarchy which had dictated his formative political decisions. By the mid-1950s, the rise of the CIO, which was committed to cross-racial industrial organization, coupled with the emergence of the civil rights movement of the 1940s, exemplified by A. Philip Randolph’s wartime campaign for fair employment within federal agencies and war-related production, had shifted the racial politics of the northern Democratic Party. The second wave of the Great Migration created significant Black voting blocs in many northern cities. And in 1955, the Montgomery bus boycott inaugurated the modern civil rights movement, in which Black-led, non-violent mass movements challenged nearly 100 years of Southern Jim Crow. Johnson recognized that a Southern Democrat with an unbroken record of hostility to civil rights could not be a credible national candidate for president. And so in 1957, drawing on all of his legendary skills as a legislative tactician, the “Master of the Senate” orchestrated the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, a bill with limited practical impact, but great symbolic significance as the first piece of civil rights legislation passed since Reconstruction.
This dynamic only intensified after Johnson’s ascension to the presidency following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. An escalating series of sit-ins, boycotts, and demonstrations across the South had forced the “American dilemma” to the forefront of national consciousness. Jim Crow had become an unsustainable Cold War embarrassment. With his eye firmly set on the 1964 election, Johnson moved quickly after Kennedy’s death to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination in education, employment, and public accommodations, defeating a sixty-day filibuster. And once Johnson was re-elected, the pace of reform accelerated. The ongoing Black Freedom struggle, coupled with an outbreak of student protests like the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, California, created a movement moment.
The climactic confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965 prompted Johnson’s remarkable speech to a joint session of Congress eight days later, endorsing passage of sweeping voting rights legislation. When the president, for twenty years one of the nation’s staunchest segregationists, concluded his speech by drawling “We Shall Overcome,” Martin Luther King, watching on TV in Selma, cried. And voting rights was just the beginning. The movements had set the stage for one of the most remarkable flurries of progressive legislative activity in the nation’s history: Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, Food Stamps, Model Cities, the Community Action Program, expansion of minimum wage and Social Security coverage, the Fair Housing Act, and numerous environmental protection laws were all established or consolidated. In an historical instant, Johnson’s Vietnam debacle would send millions of Americans into the streets to oppose his policies and vilify him personally. But for that brief period in the mid-1960s when presidential leadership rode the wave of mass progressive movements, enormous accomplishments were made.
“This is no personal contest. I shall not work for Abraham Lincoln; I shall work for the salvation of my country’s life . . . for the defeat of this disloyal peace party, that will bring ruin and death if it comes into power.”
Despite the unpredictability of the future and the historical specificity of past eras of progressive advance, the experiences of the 1860s, 1930s, and the 1960s offer several lessons for radical activists as November 3 approaches. First, the frustrating limitations of the U.S. two-party system are nothing new. We tend to think of “lesser-evilism” as a Hobson’s choice forced on progressives and labor activists after Democrats steadily abandoned New Deal politics and moved to the pro-corporate center in the years after Ronald Reagan’s ascendance. But the problem of choosing between the lesser of two evils is as old as the two-party system. Even after Lincoln’s emancipationist turn in 1863, many abolitionists remained deeply frustrated by his failure to accord Black soldiers equal treatment with their white counterparts and his reluctance to support voting rights for the freed slaves. Wendell Phillips, for example, declared he would “cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln’s election.” But most abolitionists ultimately came to believe that a victory for Democrat George McClellan would jeopardize the sacrifices and gains of the previous four years, and possibly result in a peace agreement which would leave the slave system intact. Anna Dickinson, a rising young star of the abolitionist lecture circuit, articulated this view in September 1864: “This is no personal contest. I shall not work for Abraham Lincoln; I shall work for the salvation of my country’s life . . . for the defeat of this disloyal peace party, that will bring ruin and death if it comes into power.” These words echo across the centuries, at a moment when our “country’s life,” and democracy itself, appear to hang in the balance.
The second lesson that we can draw from these historical precedents is that the rhetoric, the platforms, and even the past records of candidates are far less important than we often think. Radicals initially had scant reason to believe that Roosevelt, Lincoln, or Johnson might eventually produce some of American history’s most progressive accomplishments. But a combination of crisis and mass movements transformed these presidents, pushing them to enact far-reaching policies that were unimaginable at the beginning of their tenures. This is not to argue that Joe Biden is an FDR, LBJ, or Lincoln in waiting. But obsessing over his limitations misses the point. We can afford no illusions about the ground rules of the U.S. two-party system. Electing Biden is the precondition for progressive advance; Trump’s re-election would be a foreclosure of hope. We must therefore stay focused on two critical tasks: ending the regime of Donald Trump and building the mass movements that can make a Joe Biden presidency a transformational moment.
Finally, we should recognize that across U.S. history, moments of progressive advance have been infrequent and relatively short-lived—1862 to 1875, 1933 to 1938, 1964 to 1968. We may be on the eve of another such moment, when possibilities of radical change open up in ways that were only recently inconceivable. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders fell short in the primaries, but their ideas captured the imagination of voters, particularly among youth, and shifted the terms of debate. For or against, all the Democratic candidates had to respond to the substantive challenges posed by Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, a new wealth tax, universal childcare, eliminating student debt, and a $15 an hour minimum wage. Just as “the labor question” shaped both elite and popular debate over how workers should be treated and production organized in the decades prior to the New Deal, the last decade has seen a steadily growing awareness of the need to address pressing issues of racial injustice and economic inequity.
Then the pandemic hit, casting an unsparing light on the catastrophic inability of our society to meet the nation’s needs—and the profound racial and class inequities which determined who suffered the greatest impact of the crisis. It is a poignant historical irony that at the very moment when the candidacy of the candidate who did more to advance a social democratic program in U.S. politics than perhaps any politician in U.S. history was collapsing, an unprecedented social crisis erupted that made plain the need for an invigorated American social democracy, deeply informed by a commitment to racial justice—truly universal health care, a robust public health system, strengthened workers’ rights, massive investments in reversing climate change, universal child care, expanded paid family leave, and a stronger safety net for the unemployed. But Bernie’s ideas have outlived his campaign; coupled with the deeply disruptive impact of the pandemic, they have pushed Biden further to the left than any of us might have thought possible, on issues of climate, racial justice, and an expanded social safety net. And the magnificent impact of the Black Lives Matter upsurge over the last several months demonstrates the remarkable power of social movements to reshape public opinion and policy discourse in what seems like an instant. These conditions have set the table for an historic era of reform if we do our work over the next few months.
Let Frederick Douglass provide the last word. Despite his contempt for “free soilism,” Douglass understood that the Republican Party nevertheless represented a breakthrough in American politics—a major national party which, although not abolitionist, was contesting for power on anti-slavery principles. As the 1856 election approached, Douglass determined to cast his vote for what was clearly the “lesser of two evils.” His explanation of that decision resonates with the choices we face today. “Anti-slavery consistency itself requires of the anti-slavery voter that disposition of his vote . . . which, in all the circumstances . . . tend[s] most to the triumph of Free Principles,” Douglass argued. “Right anti-slavery action is that which deals the severest deadliest blow upon slavery that can be given at that particular time.”
Our first imperative in 2020 is a massive repudiation of Donald Trump. There is only one way to do that. A vote for Joe Biden will deal the deadliest blow against Trumpism, authoritarianism, racism, and reaction. Our second obligation is to organize social movements that will force President Biden and a Democratic Congress to take long overdue steps towards fundamental social and economic reform. We must be sharply focused on both tasks over the coming weeks and months.
This piece originally ran in Dissent Magazine 14 October 2020
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The Hundreds of Thousands of Stranded Maritime Workers Are the Invisible Victims of the Pandemic
By Christiaan De Beukelaer
Hundreds of thousands of maritime workers remain stranded at sea because many countries refuse to classify them as “essential workers” and because shipowners are prioritizing profits over worker safety. Seafarers have suffered enough — it’s time to bring them home.
The Avontuur ship, a two-masted schooner built in 1920. (Timbercoast)
I was at sea when the COVID-19 lockdowns hit in March. The restrictions on land initially meant little to us: we were already locked into a confined space, with no possibility of leaving. The realization of what was happening only kicked in later, when we arrived in Pointe-à-Pitre, the port of Guadeloupe in the French Antilles, on March 24.
We were meant to sail to Marie-Galante, one of Guadeloupe’s islands, to pick up a cargo of rum. But on March 19, we received a satellite message from our shipowner that we would not be allowed to make land anywhere in the Antilles. All ports in the area were closed. And pretty much every European country had gone into lockdown.
The world had certainly changed since we’d left the Canary Islands a few weeks earlier. The annual carnival of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, the second-largest celebration of its kind in the world, had gone off without any restrictions in late February. No face masks. No social distancing. No fear of community transmission.
Now we were in a completely different world. Would we be able to load the cargo as planned? Would we be able to provision for the remainder of the trip? Would we be allowed any shore leave after more than three weeks — and the entire Atlantic Ocean — on the water? And, most importantly, would we be allowed to change crews?
None of these questions were easy to answer. But as our captain and the shipowner explored options, one thing became clear: crew change would be very difficult. Even if any of the crew were allowed to step off in the French Antilles, new workers would have to replace them. Because regardless of our personal plans, the ship would have to sail on, or else the shipping company would go bankrupt.
We weren’t unique in our predicament. At the time, some 1.6 million seafarers were working aboard commercial cargo ships, roughly the population of Philadelphia. Hardly any one of us would be allowed shore leave or crew change anytime soon. The result: a global “crew change crisis” for maritime workers that still hasn’t abated. Roughly four hundred thousand seafarers remain stranded.
Contract Extensions for the Common Good
In August, the secretary-general of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), Kitack Lim, insisted that the estimated three hundred thousand seafarers then stranded must be repatriated. “A humanitarian crisis is taking place at sea, and urgent action is needed to protect seafarers’ health and ensure the safety of shipping,” Lim said in a statement. “Overly fatigued and mentally exhausted seafarers are being asked to continue operating vessels, increasing the risk of shipping casualties.”
As early as April 1, the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) had been sounding the alarm bell. As the Philippines and Ukraine — two countries with large maritime labor forces — closed their borders in March, crew change became practically impossible. At the same time, flag states like Panama — countries with “open” shipping registries and large commercial fleets — allowed contracts to extend beyond the eleven-month statutory maximum under the Maritime Labour Convention (MLC).
The MLC sets out basic requirements regarding maximum working hours, minimum rest hours, and maximum contract length. Though well below those of many rich countries, they provide enforceable standards for the many seafarers who work on ships that fly flags of convenience — issued by “flag states” that often lack strict labor, safety, and environmental regulations.
Initially, seafarers and the ITF accepted contract extensions without much complaining. They recognize that people ashore rely on the goods they supply. But few countries have deemed them “essential” or “key” workers — something the IMO has called for since April 1 — which would allow them to travel to and from work despite COVID-19 restrictions. So many seafarers, who often have to catch international flights to get back home, remain stranded.
Sailing With a Mission
I have been comparatively lucky. On July 23, I was able to disembark with my fellow crew members of the Avontuur in Hamburg, Germany and travel home to Australia without much fuss within days.
Fifteen of us had been stuck aboard — most of us for more than six months, the first officer and me for five months. But three key things set us apart from almost every other cargo vessel.
First, we were on a sailing vessel. A two-masted schooner built in 1920, to be precise. This made us exceptional in both age and propulsion technology: most cargo vessels have a lifespan of no more than twenty-five years, and virtually all of them run on massive fossil-fuel guzzling engines. As we were sailing, only two other cargo vessels were carrying cargo across the Atlantic under sail.
Second, the Avontuur, alongside a handful of other “sail cargo” vessels, sails with a mission: reducing carbon emissions from maritime cargo transport. Shipping goods by sea is less carbon-intensive than by rail, road, or air. But because we ship 90 percent of everything we consume, the total emissions from maritime transport amount to about as much as those from civil aviation. The Avontuur, along with other “sail cargo” vessels, aims to decarbonize shipping by using wind propulsion.
Third, our crew was a mix of professional seafarers and “shipmates,” who had paid Timbercoast, the shipping company that operates the vessel, to work on the ship. Such an arrangement, where professional and volunteer crew jointly operate traditional vessels is common on “sail training” and “sail cargo” ships. I was aboard as one of eight trainees, alongside seven professional crew, which consisted of a captain, two officers, a bosun, two deckhands, and a cook. I joined the voyage as a researcher exploring the revival of such sailing cargo vessels.
Overall, I did not feel the same uncertainty that many fellow seafarers do. Once it became clear that crew change in the Americas wasn’t going to happen, I knew all along that my journey would end in Hamburg. That was certain. The only uncertainty was when we’d arrive. And that was solely due to the fact that we relied on fickle winds to propel us there. Arriving we would — and we did.
Crew Change Remains in Crisis
On May 1, International Workers’ Day, we were docked in the port of Veracruz, Mexico. That day, all ships sounded their horns, rendering the invisible fate of stranded seafarers audible. Our protest call came in response to an invitation of the harbormaster, Gabriel Ángel Carreón Pérez. But the clarion call was global. The day before, he circulated a message to all vessels in port, asking everyone to sound their horns at 12 PM local time. As far as we could tell, all ships complied.
BIMCO, the Baltic and International Maritime Council, an international shipping association that represents shipowners, reports that as of October 7, forty countries and three Dutch islands in the Antilles remain closed for seafarers. Many more countries continue to enforce restrictions based on travel history, require quarantine, or demand crew travel to the airport immediately.
So many seafarers remain stranded. Some have not left their ship for well over a year, causing significant physical and psychological hardship. The main challenge for seafarers who are trapped aboard their ships is the sheer uncertainty they face. When and where will they be able to step off? Will they be able to get home? Will they be able to get back to work afterward? And what will “home” be like?
What Is the New Normal in Shipping?
Despite restrictions easing, the “crew change crisis” is escalating. The nearly four hundred thousand maritime workers stuck at sea is up one hundred thousand from August, when IMO secretary-general Kitack Lim called for urgent action.
With the crisis persisting and more options for crew change becoming available, tensions are emerging between workers and their bosses. Labor unions and their peak body, the ITF, vocally prioritize crew welfare and urge repatriation and crew change as per contract terms. Shipowners, on the other hand, tend to think solely of their bottom line. Their priority is to deliver cargo at the port of destination, with no delays — lest they risk having to pay hefty penalties to cargo owners for tardiness.
But shipping companies are doing well. Thanks to market consolidation, mostly through inter-corporate alliances, shipping rates have continued to be high through 2020. It is high time that the shipping industry accepts that the real challenges it faced due to border closures in early 2020 no longer exist. Crew change is now possible and should be facilitated in line with seafarers’ contracts and the Maritime Labour Convention, even if this leads to minor delays.
The continuing reliance on seafarers working beyond their contracts poses a safety risk and infringes on workers’ rights. It creates a situation that Jan de Boer, an IMO representative who has worked to repatriate many stranded seafarers this year, says borders on forced labor.
Virtually every country in the world relies on maritime shipping for its imports and exports, and despite trade wars and incentives to “re-shore” manufacturing, that will remain so for the time being. Right now, we need to ensure that the Maritime Labour Convention isn’t permanently undermined due to the initial “force majeure” of the COVID-19 pandemic and that crew change, no matter the cost, is possible.
And crucially, that extra cost is something shipping companies, not workers, should bear. Seafarers have struggled enough this year.
Originally ran in Jacobin 10.11.2020
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I’m writing to ask for your financial help to publish Herb Mills
By Mike Miller
Herb Mills: Family Man, Longshoreman, Student Movement Leader, Labor Leader, Strategist, Actor, Scholar, A Tribute
A Collection of his writing, stories about him, interviews with him, articles about him including analyses of his intellectual and public life, and tributes to him, with accompanying documents and photography.
A Collection of his writing, stories about him, interviews with him, articles about him including analyses of his intellectual and public life, and tributes to him, with accompanying documents and photography.
Mike Miller, editor
Joe Blum & Patricia Goudvis, photography
As many of you will remember, Herb was an important contributor to the Berkeley student movement. He played a major role in SLATE, the campus political party, and the 1960 student-led anti-HUAC demonstrations. He traveled throughout the country discrediting the right-wing film that claimed to document the HUAC events.
In 1963, he left a promising academic career to become a San Francisco Bay Area longshoreman, and a leader in the International Longshoremen’s & Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU)–one of the most progressive unions in the country.
During those years, and in his retirement, Herb wrote numerous articles, papers and monographs on the student movement, the ILWU, the pre- and post-containerization nature of longshore work, and related matters. Some of these have been published–usually in specialized labor history or labor economics journals.
During his leadership in Local 10, he was the chief organizer of the union’s actions against dictatorships in Chile, El Salvador, Philippines and South Korea. He was invited to the inauguration of Kim Dae Jung as President of South Korea—as a “thank you” for saving Kim’s life.
These stories and more are part of this book, as well as wonderful photographs by Joe Blum and Patricia Goudvis.
In addition, in 1999 Herb did an oral history with ILWU oral historian Harvey Schwartz. Excerpts from the oral history are part of the book as well.
The book is nearing completion. We are now raising funds for its publication and distribution (it will be self-published).
We’re writing to ask for your financial support for this project. Checks should be made to “OTC” and mailed to:
Herb Mills Legacy Project
442 Vicksburg Street, San Francisco, CA 94114
Please write “HMLP” on the memo line
Or:
You can use PayPal, HERE
If you do not want your donation acknowledged in the book, please let us know.
Many thanks in advance for your support, and for past support to those who have already given.
.
Note: Mike Miller is a contributer to the Stansbury Forum and Peter Olney, who has contributed an essay for the book, is the Stansbury Forum’s co-editor.
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RIDING WITH CASSANDRA
By Mariana Mcdonald
THIS MOMENT
Truth is trouble…It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public.
Toni Morrison, The Source of Self Regard, vii-viii.
We are in a time of profound change. We are in a transformative moment when the Covid19 pandemic, uprisings against racial injustice and white supremacy, the unrelenting climate crisis, and rising forces of fascism and repression, all come together to force a shift that will either propel the world forward or drive it into a tailspin.
This moment pivots on how much and how well the United States deals with its past. As Joanne Freeman noted in her August 2020 essay in The Atlantic:
“…before the United States can move ahead, it has to reckon with its past… America’s national identity is grounded in a shared understanding of American history—the country’s failures, successes, traditions, and ideals. Shape that narrative and you can shape a nation.” (emphasis added).
How do we understand this moment? How do we address its urgency? How do we shape the US narrative? And what does this moment mean for artists, art, and the arts movement?
WHAT ARE ARTISTS TO DO?
Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht
This is a time to reexamine and reflect on the role of art and artists, to ponder what artists should do. We need to be discussing this, debating it, and writing about it, not only among artists, but the whole community.
As a member of the community of artists, I offer my thoughts on what artists need to do.
First and foremost, we need to tell the truth. Artists tell the truth. We do not lie, cover up, obfuscate, gaslight, or avoid. Telling the truth in the United States, a nation rooted and rotting in lies, means we must directly and relentlessly fight the lies.
We also need to bring people together emotionally, spiritually, politically, geographically, and organizationally. We can play a role in uniting people, on racial justice (pro-Black Lives Matter and against racist violence), gender justice (women’s rights and rights of trans persons), and internationalism (pro-Palestinian, pro-Puerto-Rican independence, and against the Cuba blockade, for starters). We must also unite people to fight the climate crisis.
We can strengthen our communities through art. Art expresses the people’s anguish, sorrow, determination, pride, and joy, and helps us heal from trauma. We also need to get people to think. We need art that encourages questioning, art that promotes critical thinking in the tradition of Paulo Freire, whose theory and practice help people discover solutions to their problems. We need to reflect on our real history, rather than the white-washed one we’ve been fed. We need to unearth our peoples’ past contributions and realities.
Last but not least, we need to fight the fascist trends that are growing every day. These include, but are not limited to: voter suppression; racist anti-Black and anti-people of color violence; anti-intellectual and anti-science stances; anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-foreign language attitudes and policies; anti-women legislation and practices; actions that jeopardize the constitution-based courts system; and the wholesale obliteration of environmental protections. We must fight all fascist actions that curb our right to protest, and those that limit or simply refuse accountability for those in power.
A key step is deconstructing the lies.
DECONSTRUCT AND REFUTE THE LIES
I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.
James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro
To fight fascism and move toward the society we want and need, artists must confront, deconstruct, and refute what I call the Ten Big Lies That Blind US, 2020:
Lie Number 1: The United States was established based on freedom and equality; rather than forged in genocide and slavery. The Declaration of Independence was a document that belied the realities of its time. Certainly there were noble intentions among its drafters, who hoped the dreamlike vision they wrote about might one day be achieved. But as written, it is a kind of national creative non-fiction, a passage in a dreamed-of memoir about what might have been and what might be.
Even the country’s chosen name, made official on September 9, 1776, was equivocal. Long referred to as “the United Colonies,” the nation was on that day named the United States of America, in an action that decisively made official the erasure of both indigenous North America and indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.
Lie Number 2: White Supremacy. The fundamental, foundational lie of the United States was and is white supremacy, the ideology and system that allowed all subsequent lies to gain traction. White supremacy asserted, legalized, and operationalized itself based on the lie that Europeans persons were legally, morally, mentally, physically, and spiritually superior to all persons of color, be they indigenous peoples or kidnapped African people.
A lie based on a lie, white supremacy invented whiteness and considered persons who were “non-white” to be less than human, thus excluding them from standards of human treatment, rationalizing their captivity, and legitimizing genocide.
White supremacy can be likened to permafrost, frozen earth firmly held in place for centuries which now, due to earth’s increased temperatures, is disintegrating and destroying the stability of the land and everything rooted in it, while in the process releasing toxic gases that further poison the earth.
White supremacy is our nation’s permafrost. And it is melting.
Lie Number 3: The colonial settlers were helpful, kind friends of acquiescing natives; rather than murderers and thieves who oversaw the genocide of indigenous peoples that continues to this day.
Lie Number 4: Slavery was not so bad, and it’s over; rather than being the systematic, centuries-long oppression, torture, violence, murder, and genocide of Black people.
Lie Number 5: The United States colonized Puerto Rico to help the “savages” who could not govern themselves, rather than invading the island in 1898 to plunder its vast resources and use the island as a military outpost for intervention throughout the Americas.
What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism
Lie Number 6: “Manifest destiny” was a legitimate rationale for US expansion, rather than an excuse for outright theft of lands from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Lie Number 7: US worldwide interventions have been well-intentioned attempts to extend a helping hand to poor or disadvantaged nations; rather than a way to exploit populations and resources, establish and defend US hegemony, and control the planet’s wealth.
Lie Number 8: The United States is a unique, different, special, unparalleled, exceptional nation/geopolitical power; rather than using this essentially narcissistic lie as a veil to hide atrocities and excuse them, avoiding accountability for all crimes.
Lie Number 9: The climate crisis is a hoax to be exposed, rather than the global existential crisis that will determine the planet’s future.
Lie Number 10: Covid19 is a hoax, a little flu, and is under control; rather than a raging global pandemic that has sickened millions and killed hundreds of thousands.
We are rapidly approaching the figure of 200,000 US lives lost due to the lies of the current government, and by its incompetence and negligence responding to the pandemic.
What is happening now in the United States, with the high and disproportionate number of deaths among Black people and other people of color, is a painful echo of the past, when the genocidal system of slavery prevailed, when blankets infected with smallpox were given to indigenous peoples, and when one-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were sterilized by force.
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There are many other lies the country is based on, and they too should be addressed. These ten lies are essential to the nation’s DNA. These are lies that need to be pointed out, refuted, and replaced with the real history of how this country came about, and at what cost to what peoples.
What happens when we get rid of the lies?
We will need to arrive at a new narrative, one that acknowledges the grievous harm done, while affirming the positive characteristics of US history. It will not be a simple or brief or easy process. And it is bound to be fraught with contradictions and pain.
Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one identity, the end of safety.
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name
As Baldwin suggests, the disruption of the lies, the disintegration of the long-accepted narrative, is disorienting. It is at once breathtaking and breath-giving for those long oppressed by the lies. The exhilaration of truth is both shocking and empowering. It leaves one yearning to know the real history, the real story, the truth. That search is one in which artists can play a key role.
For those who have long benefitted from white supremacy and its quotidian goody-bag, white privilege, “the end of safety” is a source of extreme reaction, hatred and violence, which shakes the rustling robes of those deposed by the truth, and galvanizes their stubborn refusal to heed norms and laws, stoked by 45’s unrelenting calls for chaos.
This is the dangerous moment we are in. We are facing “anti-maskers” toting guns into state buildings rather than heed public health guidelines, and “pro-blue” armed gangs driving vehicles into throngs of peaceful protesters or gunning them down with rifles, both scenarios starkly absent appropriate responses from so-called “law enforcement.”
The “end of safety” is the source of cries to “go back to where you came from” directed at people whose ancestors were the first to till the land here hundreds of years ago, cries coming from people utterly terrified of 21st century US demographics, which are constantly and irrevocably changing.
The fundamental fear and outrage that MAGA supporters express with brute force—and unprecedented impunity—is that they will no longer be able to keep others down, to enjoy “birthright” advantages in housing, education, employment, and all arenas of social and economic life. Fears that they will no longer be able to convince anyone, including themselves, that they are “superior.”
If white supremacy were the underpinning of “only” extreme right-wing forces, this moment would be difficult, though not as daunting. But white supremacy is our nation’s foundation, its permafrost, and it’s not just the red-capped brutes who can feel the earth beginning to shift. The police—indeed, armed forces of all stripes—are working hard to keep their footing, and their allies in domed towers and halls of state are stepping up to throw them a lifeline, as whole chunks of disintegrating soil break apart and fall into the depths.
This is the fascism we have to fight.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS & CREATORS
History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us.
We are our history.
James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro
As we tackle the big lies, we quickly encounter the role of erasure in white supremacy. For just as white supremacy invents, privileges, and sings the praises of whiteness, it launches the systematic erasure of Blackness. That erasure has served as an essential tool for genocide. White supremacy disappears Black people (and indigenous peoples, and colonized peoples), their history and voices, their actions and contributions, and even their names.
For example, in “The Problem is White Supremacy,” Barbara Smith speaks of Ann Petry’s novella “In Darkness and Confusion” (about the 1943 Harlem Race Riot) in a way similar to how Toni Morrison discusses, in “The Foreigner’s Home,” Camara Laye’s “The Radiance of the King”—as works of literature that shed light on, and are examples of, the rich writing tradition of Black peoples in the USA and Africa, which has been for the most part buried and ignored.
What this means for US history is that it must be excavated.
We must become archaeologists, digging to unearth the real history of our country from the mass graves it was tossed in, from the incomplete parchment documenting who lived and who died, from the systematically promulgated canons that obliterate Blackness, and have made whatever little is permitted to be written in invisible ink. (How many important primary sources, such as the selected works of Puerto Rican leader Pedro Albizu Campos, quickly fall into out-of-print status, becoming unavailable to the next generations of readers?) Enter, into deep trenches with dusty clouds abounding, the artists. And art. And artistic movements.
Support Black Artists and other People of Color Artists
As we dig, we need to combat erasure intentionally and consistently.
We must defend and support Black artists and other people of color artists by supporting and sharing the art they create, but also by identifying and breaking down the barriers that exist to Black art being embraced as central to US culture. These are publishing industry barriers, music industry barriers, art industry barriers, film industry barriers, media and social media barriers, and others, as well as the fundamental economic barriers that impede the work and success of virtually all artists. We should give special attention to the philanthropic and nonprofit worlds and their contradictions, as they are a source both of opportunity and of perpetuation of white supremacy.
Art by and for the people
Fortunately, there is a long and multi-faceted tradition of arts serving and advancing social change around the world. We can learn from cultural movements of the world’s past, from Lang Son to Santiago and from San Juan to Cape Town, as well as in the United States.
For example, when the AIDS epidemic raged in the 1980s, activists envisioned how friends and family could create a quilt to honor their loved ones who died from the disease. The AIDS Quilt project grew rapidly into a national phenomenon, with thousands upon thousands of quilts being made and displayed, offering a healing and unifying activity to remember those lost to the disease, while helping shatter the stigma surrounding it.
In the seventies throughout the Americas, protest music became a loud and ever-present part of movements against dictators and foreign intervention. Victor Jara, the beloved Chilean poet-songwriter who radiated courage as he fought to his death in the 1973 US-supported Pinochet coup, was a leading figure in what would become known (in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Nicaragua, and elsewhere) as the Nueva Trova, or new song movement. In the United States the songs of Nueva Trova were sung and played in movements across the country, deepening bonds of solidarity and friendship while educating activists about neighbors’ struggles.
We can also learn from socialist countries, such as Cuba and Vietnam, that have for decades utilized the arts and culture to transform their societies. There are lessons to learn from their experiences achieving society-wide goals by utilizing culturally effective campaigns, such as Vietnam’s recent campaign against the coronavirus. As a result of their decisive efforts, cultural and educational offerings, and diligent handling of infections, Vietnam has defeated the coronavirus, with only 34 deaths to date.
A New Nuremberg
We also need artists and artistic movements to demand accountability. Artists can point to individuals and regimes that have committed crimes against the planet and peoples of the world, such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Jair Bolsonaro, and Rodrigo Duterte. Artists can help create and advance the demand that these individuals and regimes be held accountable.
We need a global forum for accountability, justice, and consequences for those who have carried out genocidal crimes against people and terracide against the planet. We call on mechanisms and vehicles from the past century that were used to seek justice for crimes against humanity. Artists can and must declare that now, in the 21st century, we need a new Nuremberg.
ONWARD/¡PA’LANTE!
Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated.
If one refuses abdication, one begins again.
“Thinking with Jimmy.” Eddie Glaude, Begin Again, xxix.
History is not in the rear-view mirror. It is straight ahead, every day, if we can only see it. It may sometimes be in our peripheral vision—fleeting, uncertain, intuitive, even hallucinatory. Artists must strive for, and nurture in one another, characteristics that foster vision: boldness, courage, creativity, and innovation. We must defend and support artists with vision, and unleash it in ourselves. As artists, we are called upon to ask ourselves, “Can we have Cassandra-like vision? Can we imagine this world we want to see?”
At what point do fortune tellers become fortune-creators? That dream-into-reality process can happen when artists combine vision, clarity, determination, and skills with the galloping will of the people.
It will not be easy. It will be a bumpy ride. The potholes have been growing, and sinkholes show up where they’re least expected. Then there’s that ominous Hummer hogging the road.
But there is a path that can be taken now, and artists must take it. For even in the darkest moments, we can call upon our ancestors to guide us, so that when we stumble, we can begin again.
I’m holding Jimmy Baldwin’s words close to my heart.
And I’m riding with Cassandra
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Originally appeared in
In Motion Magazine 28 September 2020
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References
Baldwin, James. I Am Not Your Negro. Documentary film based on Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House. Directed by Raoul Peck. Velvet Film, 2016.
Baldwin, James. The Cross of Redemption. Uncollected Writings. Randall, Kenan, ed. New York: Vintage International, 2011.
Baldwin, James. “Faulkner and Desegregation.” Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Vintage, 1992.
Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.
Freeman, Joanne. “I’m a Historian. I See Reason to Fear—And to Hope.” The Atlantic. August 17, 2020. Accessed September 2, 2020.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Glaude, Eddie S., Jr. Begin Again. James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own. New York: Crown, 2020.
Morrison, Toni. The Source of Self-Regard. Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2019.
Smith, Barbara. “The Problem is White Supremacy.” Opinion. Boston Globe. June 30, 2020. Accessed September 2, 2020.
Vietnam Coronavirus Video. You Tube. Accessed September 2, 2020.
Worldometer Coronavirus Tracking. Vietnam
Accessed September 2, 2020.
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Letter to NFL players, active and retired: Choice means Dignity – Dignity means Choice
By David Meggyesy
In the fall of 1970 I was playing Harvard college football in the midst of continuing turmoil over US involvement in Vietnam and the denial of civil rights to people of color. I read a book called “Out of Their League” by Dave Meggyesy. It was an eye opener and an inspiration to me. Dave was a star defensive player at Syracuse University and then went on to a career with the St. Louis football Cardinals in the 60’s. He was the Colin Kaepernick of his era, refusing to “properly” salute the flag during the anthem to protest racism and militarism. He was benched and blackballed, but went on to become a leader of the NFL Players Association and its West Coast Director. The Stansbury Forum is proud to run Dave’s letter to NFL players on the eve of this important election.
Peter Olney, Co-Editor of the Stansbury Forum
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The late Gene Upshaw, is a 16year Oakland Raider, NFL Hall of Fame member and 25 years Executive Director of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA). I was the Western Regional Director of the NFLPA.
Gene used to say, “it is about our Dignity as players and men”. For us NFL players the issue was and still is, the Dignity of Choice as men, to play NFL football on any team. The NFLPA, the NFL player’s labor union, the players won the 11-year war against the 32 NFL owners in 1993. For the first time Free Agency, meant the players had a choice to play professional football and work for any NFL team.
Before 1993 NFL players were neo-slaves, because there was no Choice. College players were selected, drafted by NFL owners and told where they could to be employed for life and play football as one of the 32 NFL teams.
The Dignity of Choice is a state of mind that all adult individual human beings possess. It is basically saying YES or NO. I believe dignity is the destiny of choice for all people. The transition toward a better world in the future is every individual’s choice and is making a choice itself. And It is the most essential issue in our current lives.
Why we vote and can vote, because we have a choice, because we have and possess the dignity of choice, of choosing. So, teammates and friends, it is your choice.
VOTE!
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The War On Drugs
By Mike Miller
A review of Chasing the Scream: The Search for the Truth About Addiction. Johann Hari. Bloomsberry paperback, 2019.
Once upon a time, about 100 years ago, there was no war on drugs. They were legal. Most people who used them weren’t addicts. You could buy some of them “over the counter;” others were routinely prescribed by doctors. Then Harry Anslinger arrived on the scene and began working at the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Beginning in the 1930s, he “did more than any individual to create the drug world we now live in.” Amongst other things, he’s responsible for the death of Billie Holiday. He is a despicable character. But Hari wants us to understand that Anslinger could only pursue his dark agenda because of a widespread darkness in human beings, a susceptibility to fear, a willingness to find explanations in devils when there are no facts to support them.
This book is personal. Hari’s partner was an addict, as were good friends and members of his family. He takes us on a journey of discovery to find out why “war” replaced acceptance and treatment. He documents the tremendous cost of this war—to those upon whom it’s waged, those who fight it who are themselves dehumanized in the process, and to the larger society that tacitly or explicitly supports it. His travels take him to slum neighborhoods in major cities across the globe, the Mexican border with the U.S., Uruguay, Portugal, Britain, Australia and elsewhere. He is on a determined search to get to the root of the matter—the original meaning of “radical.” Thus this is a radical book though not in the way the word is now typically used.
Hari’s sources are addicts and those who love them, politicians on both sides of the battle, scientists who justify and criticize prohibition, social workers, dealers, cops and anyone else who might shed light on his quest. Along the way, he travels extensively, digs deeply, and reflects carefully. I think the book is a model for anyone who wants to explain complicated things to a general readership.
The war on booze was waged in the U.S. during Prohibition. Its result was the creation of a whole underworld of gangsters, killing, corruption of politicians and more. It didn’t work. People who wanted to drink found a way to do so. Only now, because it was illegal, they decided if they were going to take the risk they might as well go for more potent stuff. Beer suffered; high alcohol content gained. Prohibition didn’t work. It didn’t diminish drinking. Yet despite the fact that prohibition of drugs was so similar a scenario, no one had the combined wisdom and clout to stop Anslinger and his Joe McCarthy-like crusade. It turns out he was a friend of McCarthy’s, and that McCarthy had a dirty little secret: he was a user!
This is what Hari concludes: people use drugs recreationally because they like it. They don’t become addicted. A much smaller number, who were damaged emotionally in some way—usually in childhood, use drugs to escape their pain. It is the pain that is the source of their addiction, not the heroin, cocaine, crack, marijuana or whatever is their preferred escape hatch. Some fraction who use the chemically most potent of the drugs may become physically addicted, but it’s not hard in the right circumstances for them to quit.
Hari also introduces us to the politicians and public interest groups that are fighting to make drugs legal. Portugal was the first nation to do it. Cities across the world have done it. Now several states in the U.S. have taken the first step by legalizing marijuana.
You will meet some incredible people in this book; you will enjoy meeting them. They are the ones who are fighting for peace. They range from former addicts to major political leaders.
There are tragic stories as well. Billie Holiday’s most of all, though the fate of young people who get sucked up into drug gangs is a close runner-up.
The cure to addiction, Hari argues, is connection. That’s right. Not medication but meaningful relationships that provide support, community and purpose in people’s lives. Here I think he misses an important distinction. Most of his examples are programs in which health professionals, social workers or former users become support people for addicts. This is the normal provider-client relationship at its best. Its practitioners are fantastic human beings.
But connection has another dimension. In the coal mining counties of West Virginia where Hari goes to look at the widespread abuse of opioids, there were meaningful, well paying, jobs. Men who did the work were part of a powerful union that asserted, defended and extended their rights and benefits. Workers were part of an occupational community, the creation of both their isolation from others and their interdependence on the job. They were deeply connected. That’s what good organizing creates and good popular organizations provide. I wish Hari had given more attention to this.
Read this book! You will learn from, enjoy, and be inspired by it.
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Dear Friends
By Molly Martin
Fall equinox 2020
I’m writing this after having learned that my hero RBG has died. What a way to top off a most distressing season! I’ve been telling my friends and repeating to myself that our primary job is to protect our own mental (and physical) health. My best antidote to depression is the outdoors and clean air, not an easy fix with pollution from fires that threaten to continue till the rainy season starts.
We work to influence the coming presidential election, calling and writing postcards reminding voters in swing states to vote. Of course, what we do in California is of little consequence nationally but I worry about the consequences on a state level. Polls show that proposition 16, the measure that would resurrect affirmative action, is headed for failure. The discussion has revolved around race preferences in state colleges, but no one thinks about women in the construction trades. Here’s the letter I just sent to local newspapers supporting Prop 16.
I am a woman who made a great career as a construction and maintenance electrician. I would never have gotten a job in the previously all-male all-white industry without affirmative action. I’ve devoted my life to helping other women achieve success in the construction trades. Why? Because these union jobs pay wages substantially above what women can make in traditional female careers, decreasing the number of women (and children) in poverty.
Women got a foot in the door but we are still being denied entry to these jobs because of entrenched sexism and racism, especially after affirmative action was made illegal in California by the passage of Proposition 209 in 1996.
Proposition 16 on the November 3 ballot will overturn the 1996 law. Right now only about three percent of construction workers are women. That’s not enough. Women still experience isolation and harassment on the job. Working conditions in construction will not truly improve until discrimination ends and the numbers of women increase.
So …
A YES vote on Proposition 16 will make programs like targeted recruitment for women and minorities possible again, restoring a level playing field for all.
Then there are a couple of other propositions on the state ballot I fear will fail, so I’m already getting prepared for election letdown, a familiar feeling for those of us who support peace, justice and human rights.
Please vote yes on Prop 15 to restore property taxes on large commercial property, and yes on Prop 21 to allow local communities to decide whether to enact rent control (which is now prohibited statewide). And vote no on Prop 22. Don’t let Uber & Lyft turn this into a gig world where all workers are “independent contractors” and get no benefits.
Please take care of yourselves.
Sending virtual hugs to all.
Love, Molly
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Trade Raiding: A zero sum game
By Noah Carmichael
An organizer’s perspective:
It is no secret that building trades unions in the United States have been hemorrhaging members for over 40 years. Neoliberal economic reforms, abandonment of class-based politics, job outsourcing, legislative and cultural attacks on organized labor: All have challenged the trades. Our membership (and power) have been decimated as a result.
U.S. construction unions have long been divided on craft lines. There are 14 affiliates in North America’s Building Trades Unions (NABTU). These affiliates enjoy complete autonomy over their jurisdiction.
There are good and bad features to this specialization. Training, for instance, is specific to the individual trade. This makes union apprenticeships far more comprehensive and meaningful than whatever training non-union workers receive. Labor agreements are bargained by people performing the actual trade. An ironworker contract is not littered with provisions geared for electricians. Autonomy is given to these trades to conduct their affairs as they see fit.
One downside is organizational individualism. It is relatively easy to divide the building trades politically, and to pit them against each other fighting over pieces of “turf.”
Raiding as organizing
Spending time and limited resources by “organizing” workers who already operate in other craft unions—believing you are organizing when in fact you are raiding—is an old practice.
From an organizer’s perspective, I always found it to be an incredible waste of time for the labor movement overall.
Diagnosis; self-preservation
Before getting too far along, lets provide a bit of context. It is not being suggested that you do not defend your trade, or if you have work in your contract that is clear and another trade is doing it, to ignore that. That is not the case. I am also not referring to the occasional overlap of certain practices that are minor in detail that can be solved with a few phone calls between union business representatives. I am also not talking about organizing brand new non-union members who are not being approached or organized by other trades. The folks that need and are looking for representation are fair game.
What I am referring to is an all-out mass encroachment into already organized work, which just happens to be work that your organization isn’t performing. So, lets unpack exactly what that means, where it stems from, and how to stop it.
To coagulate and stave off declining membership numbers, some of our brothers and sister organizers and International Unions have turned to organizing work already being performed by other union members of another trade. To put it bluntly, this does not help organized labor. First, it adds not one single union member to the ranks. The person who was performing the work before, either bumps someone else’s job somewhere else, joins the raiding union, or often, is unemployed. The raiding union, then sends their already organized members to take over the work.
If it were an equation, it would look like this:
- Raiding trade 1 + raided trade -1= Labor movement 0.
If the larger scheme for unions is to gain political power through developing class consciousness (which it should be), this doesn’t help. Further, the amount of money that is spent litigating these encroachments can be staggering. I would be willing to bet if all legal expenses were added up by all the trades, it would be in the millions. Imagine if your organization invested that money instead into organizing training and programs, or internal political organizing. Trade raiding also creates further division between the locals and internationals culturally, making it impossible for combined political clout and cohesiveness- just the way our enemies like it.
Corporate mimicry
So where does this backwards approach to solidarity come from? To harken back to the previous point, it is a bit of desperate self-preservation for some organizers. They attempt to bolster their ranks to impress bosses, keep their job, and increase the coffers of their union. We could call the last reason “check-off grabbing”. Simply stated, one union is getting those checkoffs, and they want those check off dues. Not exactly solidarity forever, is it? Strategically, it has no place in the long-term game.
Financially, most international unions are in good health and in a position to do more with their wealth than at any time before. But these short-sided power grabs are more akin to the corporate world that all too often gets mimicked. Slogans like “value on display”, and that type of mentality has led far too many of our labor leaders into the confusing dogma of business unionism – a world were labor leaders look to be more like CEO’s and lieutenants of capital than working class unifiers. This is not a vision that sparks inspiration in the membership, nor fear in the anti-union corporate and political world. Our enemies bask in the warmth of that capitulation and are glad to see us try and join their club. They will invite labor leaders to golf so that they can ease their business tensions quickly, and once the relationships are close enough, undermine your workers. Its just a fact. I decided long ago – be cordial, do what makes sense, but know in the back of your mind that when you are dealing with the business leaders and their lieutenants (most public officials), you are on the other side. They would gladly eliminate your union if they could, so stop with the corporate impersonation. It is easy to see where “value on display”, and business unionism has gotten the building trades over the last 40 years – at record low membership, and weak political clout.
What to do?
First and foremost, focus on organizing nonunion craftworkers and real political education. Take every dollar that was spent litigating your trade’s encroachment on others, and spend it on organizers, organizer training, organizer education, labor history training and internal organizing. Notice that I did not tell the other trades to stop spending money on litigating your encroachment into their already organized workforce. They will not need to spend any if you stop. Problem solved.
Now, if someone wants to talk about unifying trades under an umbrella to click together for political power, that should be music to everyone’s ears. This would not require an abandonment of trade autonomy, but it would require more cooperation than there is now. There would no doubt be difficulties in transitioning from many different construction unions into a few, but it is not impossible. Combined organize labor happens in many other countries, and they are stronger for it. As I was told when I first got into union politics “let’s not let the 2% of things we disagree with tear apart the 98% on which we agree.” It is time to stop letting our enemies divide us up based upon that 2%.
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Liberating Public Library Content
By Lincoln Cushing
The poster digitization project at the Oakland Public Library César Chávez Branch
On September 18, 1966, the Oakland Tribune headlined the dedication of the Latin-American Library, the first permanent library of its kind in the US. Located at 1457 Fruitvale Avenue, the library had received a $300,000 federal grant to convert the former branch library into a demonstration project, a bilingual facility with 4,000 titles for a Spanish-speaking community of the same number.
In 1972, the library moved to the underutilized Ina D. Coolbrith branch library 1449 Miller Avenue. That same year the National Commission on Libraries and Information Services held a meeting in San Francisco to explore the emerging impact of digitized content in libraries. Among those attending was LAL director Keith Revelle, who urged that Spanish-language collections and services get support as well.
Fast forward to 2019, when my San Francisco Public Library friend Laura Lent told me about a colleague of hers, Elissa Miller. Elissa worked at what is now called the César E. Chávez Branch (now at 3301 E. 12th St.), but had also been a branch manager when the library was called the Biblioteca Latinoamericana in the 1980s and early 90s. Laura knew that I was a poster scholar, and Elissa had some posters at their library, and maybe we should talk? So, we did.
My field trip there confirmed my basic thesis of independent community collections – they all have value.
Further meetings with Elissa and Branch manager Pete Villaseñor resulted in a collaborative project that would have made librarian Revelle proud.
I offered to shoot all their posters as high-resolution digital files. I benefit by adding images to my extensive digital research catalog, and they benefit by breathing new life into uncataloged stacks of paper in folders. I shot almost 250 posters during the early days of the pandemic, and we are now building the catalog record (year of publication, artist, medium, all the good stuff). Inexpensive digital prints can be displayed instead of original and images can be posted on their website.
The library has been a bilingual beacon of hope and resilience for a broad community. Poet/artist Jose Antonio Burciaga read from his new book Drink Cultura Chicanismo there in 1993, as did author Piri Thomas in 1999. The library hosted celebrations of Day of the Dead and Cinco de Mayo.
As do most public libraries these days, OPL-CCB supports a host of programs and services well beyond just books. One of these posters promotes free COVID testing, they distribute free food twice a week, and they are hosting a Mam Cultural Festival which celebrates the growing Mayan presence in Bay Area.
The posters are mostly local (Oakland and the broader San Francisco Bay Area), and cover a range of subjects including health care, the arts, labor, police violence, cultural pride, solidarity with Latin American struggles, and literacy. As the collection becomes fully cataloged, these treasures will be shared with the public.
[Language note: What’s the proper punctuation for César Chávez? Rules of Spanish require diacritics (accents), but the labor leader himself did not use them. Both are acceptable.]
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A Call to Arenas! Defend the right to Vote! Defeat Trump!
By Peter Olney
In the aftermath of the August 23rd police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team shut down their playoff game with the Orlando Magic in protest. This triggered shutdowns of other NBA games and negotiations with the owners on practical steps that could be taken to deal with systemic racism. Superstar LeBron James has long been leading a campaign to promote voting. The NBA players got the owners to agree to use their arenas as giant polling places. THIS IS BRILLIANT! In the center of mostly urban areas there will be giant public polling places that can be sanctuaries for unimpeded and unintimidated voting, in buildings designed to handle large crowds quickly and efficiently. Imagine NBA Stars outside as poll watchers insuring that urban voters, Black and brown folks, file in unsuppressed by armed Para fascists.
This is crucial to winning the swing states where enthusiasm for Trump is still riding high, and that he carried in the 2016 election. The margins in each of those states would have been overcome if Black people had voted. Here are the margins for Trump and the numbers of blacks who did not vote:
Trump won Wisconsin by
23,000 votes
… but in Milwaukee,
93,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Florida by
113,000 votes
… but in Miami,
379,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Michigan by
11,000 votes
… but in Detroit,
277,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Pennsylvania by
44,000 votes
… but in Philadelphia,
238,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won North Carolina by
173,000 votes
… but in Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro and Durham,
233,000 blacks didn’t vote
Trump won Georgia by
211,000 votes
… but in Atlanta 530,000 blacks didn’t vote
(By The New York Times | Source: analysis of black citizen population estimates (2016 American Community Survey) and black citizen non-voting rates by state (2016 Voting and Registration Supplement to the Census Current Population Survey) by Karthik Balasubramanian, Howard University)
Now imagine if football players and their union follow suit and liberate their giant stadiums as poling places monitored by hulking offensive linemen. Seems far-fetched in a league that did not back Colin Kaepernick in his protest for Black Lives Matter in 2016. But the times they are a changing and swiftly. Check out Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll’s moving interview calling out systemic racism.
And what could be the role of the rest of the US labor movement? The pro athletes have 100% membership in their associations (unions). The rest of organized labor – public and private sector combined, is at 10%. There is talk about national strikes and those should not be ruled out, but a more plausible course of action in every major American urban center would be to join with NBA stars and provide a cordon sanitaire of safety for voting at arenas. This plays to labor’s continuing urban presence in many of these urban centers and to the fact that a large part of its public sector urban membership is people of color. How can labor play a role in fighting voter suppression? Labor can mobilize its ranks to provide massive security squadrons for urban arenas and maybe even some football stadia on November 3!
Call to Arenas and Dump Trump!
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