The River, The Workers and The Wall: Las Cruces, NM and El Paso, TX
By David Bacon
The Rio Bravo is the border between Mexico and the U.S. from El Paso and Juarez to Brownsville and Matamoros. Just upriver from El Paso it passes through New Mexico, or it would if there were water in it. Today, though, the mighty river is dry.
There are eight major dams on the Rio Bravo. The big one at Elephant Butte, near Truth or Consequences, controls the flow down through Las Cruces and El Paso. Welcoming the release of the water from Elephant Butte used to be an occasion, when people would come to greet the river as it came alive, submerging dry sand and brush under the new flow.
That flow, fed by the runoff from rains and snow in the Rockies, would begin in February and finally run dry in October. But climate change alters everything. In 2020 water began to course down the riverbed in March and petered out in September. This past year the river only flowed from June through July – two months instead of nine.
The dry river is the watercourse along Route 28, the old two-lane road that follows it through the Mesilla Valley from Las Cruces south to El Paso, marking the border between New Mexico and Texas. It is pecan country, where rundown buildings line the highway as it runs through old farmworker towns.
Its people may be poor, but pecans are New Mexico’s most profitable crop, worth over $220 million each year. Today Doña Ana County harvests more of the nuts than any other in the country.
From late December through early January alligator-like machines snake through the orchards, grabbing each tree between rubber-coated jaws, shaking the pecans off the branches. Another machine follows behind, sweeping the nuts into long rows.
Then the workers arrive. They clean out branches and debris that would otherwise choke the final set of machines in the groves – the giant vacuum cleaners that suck up the nuts, spit out the leaves, and haul the crop down to the sheds.
Pecan workers were some of the Southwest’s first labor activists. Emma Tenayuca, a young Communist organizer trained at the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City, led twelve thousand young Mexican and Chicana women out on strike in San Antonio in 1938.
This generation of pecan workers, however, may be the last. The trees yield big profits for growers, but they need water, and the river is drying up. The aquifer below the valley depends on river flow, so pumping water is a solution that will only work for a while longer.
According to Kevin Bixby, director of the Southwest Environmental Center, “it’s only a matter of time until people understand that growing pecans in the desert is not sustainable. Water is a resource of public trust, which means that the government has the duty as an administrator to manage this resource for the benefit of all, including future generations.”
Below the Mesilla Valley, just before the riverbed becomes the border between Mexico and the U.S., the new barrier wall stretches through chamisa and sagebrush, across the desert west of El Paso.
In El Paso itself, the city of Juarez is visible through an older section of the wall and its network of wire mesh. Elevated roadways hug the borderline, while underneath it lies an abandoned landscape of empty lots and abandoned buildings from an earlier era.
People arriving from the south produced the pecan industry and its profits. But the wall remains a potent symbol of the hostility of Texas and U.S. authorities towards migrants, wanting their labor but denying their human dignity.
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“REQUIEM FOR THE WARRIORS”
By Ernest DiStefano
In 2015, after thirty years of experience as a criminal justice professional, of which I spent seventeen years working in a prison, I founded the Comeback Athletes & Artists Network, (CAAN, Inc.), a non-profit organization with the mission of using athletics and the arts to assist at-risk and impoverished communities. My previous work with combat athletes as a co-manager and mental training coach convinced me that these athletes are the most vulnerable and at-risk athletes in the sports world. In this essay, I will use the cause and effect process and medical research to defend this belief. I will also discuss the solutions put forth by others, and our organization’s own solution, for helping to eradicate the oppressive plight of professional combat athletes.
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PART I: CAUSE & EFFECT
Cause: Poverty
Writer Walter Mosley said, “Poor men box, because it’s the only choice they have. A poor man, of any color, is fighting for his life in the ring. And the only reason they’re fighting for their lives in the ring, is because it’s a little bit safer than fighting for your life on the streets of America.”
Effect: A willingness to risk one’s own life to alleviate those circumstances
In the specific case of boxers and other combat athletes, the risk involved is potential brain injury and/or death from the violent nature of their chosen professions.
Effect: Combat Sports-Related Deaths
In the past 131 years, 1,878 boxers have died as a direct result of injuries sustained in the ring. This is an average of more than fourteen deaths per year and more than one death each month. Prior to that, from 1740 to 1889, when boxers fought bare-knuckled (a sport which is currently growing in popularity), there were 266 documented deaths (“Death in the Boxing,” by Rupert Taylor, April 29, 2021). Since MMA’s inception in the mid-1990’s there have been sixteen reported deaths among MMA fighters directly related to injuries sustained in the Octagon (“How Many Fighters Have Died in the Ring: Boxing and MMA,” by Ross Canning).
A 2014 study by Eastern Michigan University, which examined professional wrestlers who were under the age of sixty-five and active between 1985 and 2011, found that the mortality rates for professional wrestlers were up to 2.9 times higher than the mortality rate for men in the wider United States Population. A separate report in 2014 by John Moriarty of the University of Manchester and Benjamin Morris of FiveThirtyEight found that the mortality rate for professional wrestlers is higher than that of athletes in other sports. It is suggested among experts that a combination of the physical nature of the professional wrestling industry, no off-season, and the drug culture of the 1970’s and 1980’s contributes to the aforementioned high mortality rates for professional wrestlers. The former two factors of the physical nature of their sports and no off-season also applies to other combat sports. Another study credits the higher death rate among professional wrestlers to cardiovascular disease.
Effect: Head and Brian Injuries
A 2015 research study, “Epidemiology of Injuries in Full-Contact Combat,” written by Reider P. Lystad of Central Queensland University, Sydney Australia, found that the proportion of neck and head injuries for the sport of boxing was 84%; 74% for karate; and 64% for MMA. This research also showed that Karate had a concussion rate of 19%, Boxing had a concussion rate of 14%, and MMA had a concussion rate of 4%. It also showed that MMA had the vast majority of life-threatening, or life-changing injuries, coming as a result of head trauma, while also revealing that that professional boxers were: 1) more likely to experience loss of consciousness, 2) more likely to suffer eye injuries (detached retina), and twice as likely to sustain a concussion that involved a loss of consciousness. Further this research showed that medical suspensions for boxers were a minimum of twenty-six days, compared to medical suspensions for MMA fighters, which are for an average of twenty days.
“because it’s all I know.” Brian “The Bull’ Barbosa
The life of former professional boxing champion, Brian “The Bull’ Barbosa, is an illustration of this cause and effect dynamic. Through my personal involvement in assisting Brian, I have come to learn his life story. Brian endured poverty and abuse as a child, which drove him to the boxing gym, which in turn resulted in a professional fight career. Although Brian was rewarded for his efforts in the ring with a world championship, he also sustained serious brain trauma and injury along the way. This, combined with his life experiences, affected his decision-making abilities and left him vulnerable to the less than honorable elements in the fight game. When I first spoke with Brian, he expressed a desire to resume his fight career. When I asked him why, Brian said, “because it’s all I know.”
On September 21, 2021, Brian courageously shared his story on the Dr. Phil Show. Brian continues to battle the inner demons created by his physical and personal trauma, and is currently receiving treatment to exorcise those demons.
PART II: SOLUTIONS
There have been several possible solutions put forth to address the aforementioned issues. Those I have heard expressed most often are these:
- Outlaw Combat Sports. The frequency of brain injuries and death in the sport of boxing has motivated some to call for making it illegal. I firmly believe, however, that if combat sports are outlawed, it will drive those sports “underground” and make it even more dangerous for combat athletes. Instead of outlawing boxing, we should work harder to remove illegal and unethical behavior from the combat sport industry.
- Do Nothing. There are many who, in fact, believe that the sport of boxing should remain unchanged, that the brutality and violence of the sport is what makes it appealing to the public. They also cite the concussion issues in other sports like football and soccer. Those points are undeniable; however, we must also remember that professional football is structured under one central governing authority, The National Football League (NFL). Soccer is governed internationally by the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), which is comprised of 211 national associations worldwide. The central governance paradigm allowed American football and soccer, and other sports with the same structure, to address the issue of concussions and head injuries and eventually establish one unified set of concussion and head injury protocols.
Our Solution
Based on my work with Brian Barbosa and other combat athletes, we believe that the solution to the current predicament faced by professional combat athletes should include their access to information, services and assistance that enable them to make independent career decisions driven not by desperate life circumstances, but in the best interests of themselves and their families. In other words, we believe combat athletes should not fight to survive, but fight to thrive. Our organization provides access to assistance, and is currently developing additional avenues of access, that promote the aforementioned objective, such as:
- Banking, Financial Investment, and Financial Planning Assistance:
Such assistance can provide combat athletes with a pathway for ensuring financial stability and security for themselves and their families, as well as a happy and secure retirement. I recently established a partnership with the Del-One Credit Union and our organization to provide combat athletes with access to savings and checking accounts, financial management assistance, financial investment assistance and opportunities (including retirement accounts), and insurance. We hope to be able to expand these services upon acquiring sufficient funding to do so.
- Independent Contractual Review/Consultation:
Combat athletes should have access to affordable legal assistance on issues relevant to the fight game and their professional fight careers; specifically, promoter contract review and consultation. Combat Athletes should also educate on the Muhammad Ali Act, a federal law that was passed in 2000 to provide boxers with legal protections against unlawful practices within the boxing industry (at the time of this writing, the Ali Act pertained to the sport boxing and bouts of ten rounds or longer). Our organization has reached out to licensed attorneys to request their pro bono assistance to combat athletes, when requested by the fighter(s), with contract review and consultation assistance. I ask any licensed attorneys to contact us who are reading this essay and are interested in offering such services to combat athletes.
NOTE: CAAN, Inc. does not provide legal services of any kind, as we are not a licensed law firm, but merely provide referrals to combat athletes for outside legal consultation and assistance, upon the combat athlete’s request. Any additional professional arrangements made between the combat athletes and the attorneys are strictly between said combat athletes and attorneys. CAAN, Inc. serves no role in said arrangements whatsoever.
- Educational/Vocational Training: Combat athletes should have access to educational programming and vocational training that will give them the opportunity to establish additional revenue streams for themselves and their families. This will, in turn, provide combat athletes with leverage to make better decisions with respect to their professional fight careers.
- Clinical Treatment: Combat athletes should have access to affordable treatment interventions to address any physical, neurological, psychological, emotional, or substance abuse issues.I recently brokered a partnership between GoodRx and our organization to provide prescription discount cards to professional combat athletes. We hope to expand the available GoodRx discount services offered to combat athletes upon acquiring sufficient funding to do so.
Our organization is so committed to our mission that we offer our time and efforts as volunteers, receiving no financial compensation of any kind. We have established a CAAN, Inc. Facebook Group through which we are gaining momentum and support for our cause. One such supporter is well-known and well-respected boxing promoter, Roy Foreman, who is also the brother of former world heavyweight champion George Foreman. Mr. Former agreed to partner with our organization and allow his fighters access to our services. I call on professional combat athletes, and other professionals of the fight game, to join our cause and help us move it forward. You can go on Facebook and send a request to join our CAAN, Inc. Group. You can also email us at happyathlete24@gmail.com or visit our website at www.caangroup.org. We are happy to answer any questions. Thank you.
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Olney Odyssey # 19 California, Christina and Beyond
By Peter Olney
While I had traveled to England and Italy in my early twenties, I was basically a Massachusetts guy. Worcester – 60 miles from Boston- was the West for me. An occasional trip south to New York City or north to Maine and New Hampshire were the limits of my domestic adventures. California was Hollywood and the telecast of the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day. Imagine going to a football game on January 1 wearing shorts and a T-shirt and basking in the sun while denizens of the Northeast froze.
My dear friend and Boston City Hospital co-worker, Steve Eurenius, had visited California and had New Hampshire friends in Lake Tahoe so he was down for a road trip to the West Coast. Neither of us had cars that would make the trek so we decided to do a “drive away”. My old buddy from the Lewd Moose Commune Buck Bagot had relocated to California a few years back and was living in San Francisco so that was determined to be our final destination.
A “drive away” car was not a new concept. My father had driven some wealthy businessman’s wife and daughter across country from New York to California when he got back from WW II. My Dad had memories of visiting the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles and going up the coast to Santa Maria and visiting the Norwegian parents of his brother-in-law, Winston Johnson. He then drove Winston’s car Back East.
“We were hungry but not takers!”
Steve and I found an Italian American retiree from Framingham, Massachusetts who was relocating to the “warmer” climes of Scottsdale Arizona, at the time the Spring Training home of the Boston Red Sox and the city where the BoSox slugger Ted Williams’ brain has been cryogenically frozen and preserved. We drove out to Framingham and encountered Angelo Fosco sitting on his shaded porch surrounded by grapevines and wearing a classic sleeveless T-shirt, known in some circles as a Guinea T. Angelo seemed very happy in Framingham, but his children had encouraged him to retire to Arizona to avoid the New England winters. We found Angelo through a service that paired up soon to be Sun Belt retirees with drivers desiring to get somewhere without the expense of air or bus or the wear and tear on your own car.
The “Captain” and I packed our bags into Angelo’s car and headed off to Maricopa County, Arizona to deliver the car in Scottsdale where he would be flying to shortly. We left Boston in mid-August and the trip across country was pretty uneventful. There was a stop in Nashville to visit some friends and hear my cousin David Olney play music. Before arriving in Arizona we stopped in Amarillo Texas and had a meal at the Big Texan restaurant. This is the home of the Famous 72 oz. steak. The way this works is you just tell your wait staff person that you want to take the 72 oz. steak challenge. They escort you to a table on a small stage at the front of the humongous main dining room. Beside you on the table is a large digital count down clock. If you consume the 72 oz. steak and all the trimmings that go with it in 60 minutes (one hour) the steak is free. If you fail, you pay $70.00. We were hungry but not takers!
We arrived in Scottsdale in the scorching summer 100 plus degree heat of the Arizona desert. This was travel before GPS so we needed help finding Angelo’s new residence. There was no one on the street to ask directions so we found a fire station and rang the call button, and a fireman came out to point us on the way. We were not in Boston any more! I’ll never forget finding Angelo sitting in his air conditioned living room looking miserable –confined to the indoors and without his community of friends in Framingham. He was physically altered and ruing the move to Arizona. It probably hastened his passing.
While I have since come to appreciate Arizona and particularly Maricopa County and the greater Phoenix area – I spent two weeks there helping to get out the vote for Biden/Harris in 2020, we were not interested in spending any more time in the air conditioned desert. Even liquor stores or “packies” as we called them in Massachusetts had drive thru windows so that customers did not have to get out of their cars and face the extreme heat. We got on a Greyhound bus bound for San Diego and California. Most of our trip was on Interstate 8, which in the California section hugs the Mexican border. At one point the bus was stopped by the Immigration and Naturalization Service border patrol, and we were boarded by their agents asking everyone on the bus for their papers.
“… it was a Friday evening September 3rd encounter that would be life changing”
Greyhound left us at their downtown San Diego terminal on National Boulevard. At that time downtown San Diego was a gritty entertainment center for the Marines and Navy. We stayed at a fleabag motel and the next morning we got ourselves a car from “Rent a Wreck” and started our drive north to San Francisco. We traveled north on Interstate 5 and just south of downtown Los Angeles we encountered a stretch of highway enclosed by high concrete walls and a citadel like building in the style of an Assyrian palace. This was an empty factory building that had been closed by Uniroyal in 1978. This stretch of concrete was very intimidating and suggested to me that Los Angeles was not worth stopping to see so we kept on trucking until we got over the Grapevine into the San Joaquin valley. We steamed northward on the 5 freeway and then crossed over westward on Lost Hills Road to Paso Robles where we encountered a huge gathering of cowboys on horseback participating in the San Luis Obispo County fair. Then it was further west to Pacific Coast Highway (Highway 1) which took us up to Big Sur traveling north and finally arriving in the picturesque resort town of Carmel where in 1986 actor Clint Eastwood was elected mayor on a no growth platform, serving one term. The Italian Communist party in Rome celebrated Eastwood’s no growth stand when they did battle against the siting of a McDonald’s fast food restaurant. Strange bedfellows!
From Carmel it is a short 121 mile hop – in California terms – to San Francisco our ultimate destination. I was at the wheel when we crossed the Bay Bridge from Oakland to The City. I can still remember being dead tired but transfixed by the iconic view of the San Francisco skyline as we crossed the span from Yerba Buena Island to the Embarcadero. We had arrived, and I found my friend Buck Bagot and his house on 400 Gates Street in the Bernal Heights neighborhood on Wednesday, September 1, 1982. Buck caught me up on his community organizing exploits and led me around the neighborhood introducing me to some of his close friends and allies. We visited Jean Hamer at San Francisco General Hospital. She was on oxygen and suffering from emphysema, but still outspoken and a dynamic community force. She was Native American and married to a 300 lb. Tongan. She was the first Board President of the Bernal Heights Community Foundation, which Buck helped to found. We also connected with Sharon Johnson on Clayton Street. Sharon was a long time aide to the legendary State Senator John Burton, and was a single Mom raising three challenging teen-agers. All of these encounters were interesting and stimulating, but it was a Friday evening September 3rdencounter that would be life changing.
That afternoon Buck and I went out jogging in the neighborhood and were relaxing in our shorts in the basement apartment in advance of his departure for Cleveland on the red eye that evening. There was a knock on the door and Buck yelled, “Come in Christina!” In walked the most stunning looking woman I had ever seen. She had jet back hair, brown skin and high cheekbones and indigenous features. I wasn’t in Boston any more! Buck later told us that the “mutual attraction was scaldingly obvious.” The moment calls to mind the wonderful Sinatra tune, “Strangers in the Night”. While many can critique “Ole Blue Eyes” for his rightward political drift in old age, it is important to remember his early stands on civil rights and the fact that he almost alone among the Italian American crooners kept his original Italian name at a time when the assimilation bias changed the names of such notables as Tony Bennett and Bobby Darin. This about sums up our meeting on September 3, 1982 one night before I was scheduled to return to Boston and my job at Boston City Hospital:
“Strangers in the night exchanging glances
Wond’ring in the night what were the chances
We’d be sharing love before the night was through
Something in your eyes was so inviting
Something in your smile was so exciting
Something in my heart told me I must have you
and
Ever since that night we’ve been together
Lovers at first sight, in love forever
It turned out so right for strangers in the night”
That chance encounter, Christina Perez just happened to be visiting Buck on the same weekend, completely changed the course of my life. Do opposites attract? Can a New England Yankee blue blood find love and happiness with a Southern California Mexican American with Chichimec indigenous blood? Stay tuned as a transcontinental romance blossoms in Olney Odyssey # 20.
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An Injury to One is an Injury to All
By Jay Youngdahl
Editor’s Note from Peter Olney: In early December 2021 I was invited to do a training for the Industrial Division of the Central South Regional Council of Carpenters. The Council is headquartered in New Orleans and has over seven thousand working construction carpenters in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas. The Council also has an industrial division of over a thousand members at paper products manufacturers like Boise Cascade. This was the quarterly meeting of the Council and delegates were present from all five states and all industrial facilities. My friend Jay Youngdahl is the attorney for the Council. For the last post of the year, The Forum has elected to run a very inspiring portion of his remarks from his speech of December 11th, 2021 to the Council delegates. We think it speaks of where we come from, who we are and where we can go, of possibilities for the labor movement, and the country.
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Jay Youngdahl
Now, when I speak with you at our meeting, I always like to just take a couple minutes and talk a little philosophically about our union movement. I’m passionate – to use an overused word now – about what we do in our union.
I got some of this at birth. I’ve got two middle names. My name is Jay Thomas Armstrong Youngdahl, and that’s kind of a long thing. The only time I ever used it all was when I was in the Army. Armstrong is after Louie Armstrong because my parents were jazz fans. But Thomas, you know there’re a lot of people named Thomas. But I’m named after this guy named Norman Thomas, who was a politician in the thirties and forties. In fact, he ran for President one time, though he did not get many votes. The reason my parents named me after him was that he came to Arkansas to try to help out the farm workers who worked on tractors and in the fields. He spoke to them in East Arkansas outside of Memphis, at a meeting of the Southern Tenant Farmworkers Union. When the sheriff and all the growers heard he was coming they told Thomas, “You can’t have this rally. We’re not allowing labor unions in Eastern Arkansas.” And Norman Thomas said, “Wait a minute. You know, this is the law,” we have rights. And they said, “Mr. Thomas, you don’t understand what we’re talking about.” So, the sheriff and all the people got him and rode him out of the county, even though that was an illegal thing to do under the law. Norman Thomas talked about this incident, which happened in our Council area, for years. My dad and mom were so impressed. They said, “One of the middle names for our first child is going to be named after Mr. Thomas.”
Today the main point I want to make is about what it means to be in a union. We live in a country today where we can’t even agree on what it means to be American. Of course, we all want America to be great but what’s it means to be great? You know, we have differences of opinion. We think about the history in all kinds of unusual ways, I think. So, how do we respond if we care about each other? How do we decide what’s great? How do we decide which of the stories told about our history we should believe?
You know, I was a teenager during the Vietnam war period, and grew up in Little Rock during the struggles for civil rights at Central High School there. How do I think about American greatness or this history when I grew up then? It’s tough and I’m not here to say that it is going to be easy to get to a better place in this country. But I believe that in the union movement we’ve got an answer and a place to start. Because what we do in unionism is we work for the group. We work by the slogan, “an injury to one is an injury to all.” You have heard me say before, I worked as a machinist some between high school and the time I was drafted. I was a terrible machinist, but I was trying, and the union helped me. I was going to get suspended for bad work, but the union representative went to the boss and said, “Well wait a minute. He didn’t grow up with machines that much in his life, but he is trying.” Of course, some of us have skills in one area and don’t have skills in other areas. The union works to protect all who are honestly trying.
And so, from unionism there’s a philosophy. A philosophy of community, even for those of us who aren’t good with machines. And we understand the larger community. We care about our community because you can make a big ol’ salary. You can have good benefits. But if the schools are terrible or if your community’s terrible, it’s terrible for your family. Because the idea of unionism is to think about everybody as a whole, we’re ready when there are threats to individuals and to the community. We’ve got an answer.
Let’s talk about another issue in our country. As we know, relationships among different ethnic groups and nationalities and colors do not seem very good today. But look around this room. What group do you participate in which is as diverse as the people in this room? I mean, maybe Wal-Mart stores in some places but – I have been thinking about this as I look around the room. Think about ages. We have older and younger, and I am the oldest. We have a significant number of women, especially for a union whose members are in construction and manufacturing. Let’s give a round of applause to our union sisters. And, we’ve got people from downtown Houston, one of the third biggest cities in the United States, and we’ve got people from some of the most rural parts of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. We’ve got African American people; we’ve got Hispanic people. We’re starting to put more and more material into Spanish. We’ve got our Asian brother who’s here, and we’ve got white people like me.
And we’re all about the same thing and nobody is better than anybody else. We’re putting up that drywall. We’re standing side by side. We’re taking that big ol’ tree, whittling it down to a little tree by cutting it into boards. We’re all doing the same thing. And there just are very, very few places in the United States today where you have this kind of thing where people work together like this. And for me, that’s what America’s about.
That’s what – you know, we called it a melting pot at one point, and that’s what we’re about. But you’ve got to have an initial seed to make the tree grow, and our seed is “an injury to one is an injury to all.” We work together for the common good.
So, thank you very much, brothers and sisters. It’s an honor to work with you. It’s the most prideful thing I do. Talk with you all later.
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ROOTED IN EXCLUSION, TOWNS FIGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO WATER
By David Bacon
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SAN JOAQUIN VALLEY, CALIFORNIA — Alberto Sanchez came to the United States without papers in the 1950s. After working for two decades, he found a home in Lanare, a tiny unincorporated community in the San Joaquin Valley, where he has lived ever since. “All the people living here then were Black, except for one Mexican family,” he remembers.
Lanare is one of the many unincorporated communities in rural California that lack the most basic infrastructure. According to PolicyLink, a foundation promoting economic and social equity, there are thousands of unincorporated communities throughout the U.S., mostly Black and Latino, and frequently poor, excluded from city maps – and services.
PolicyLink’s 2013 study “California Unincorporated: Mapping Disadvantaged Communities in the San Joaquin Valley” found that 310,000 people live in these communities scattered across the valley.
They are home to some of the valley’s poorest residents in one of the richest, most productive agricultural areas in the world. Today, their history of being excluded from incorporated cities affects their survival around the most critical issue facing them: access to water.
Lanare: A History of Racial Exclusion
Lanare has its origin in land theft and racial exclusion, like many similar colonias. The land on which it sits was originally the home of the Tachi band of the Yokut people. It was taken from them and given by Mexican governor Pío Pico of California as a land grant to Manuel Castro, two years before California was seized from Mexico in 1848. Castro’s Rancho Laguna de Tache was then fought over by a succession of owners until an English speculator, L.A. Nares, established a town and gave it his own name. From 1912 to 1925 Lanare had a post office and a station on the Laton and Western Railway.
One such covenant, written in 1952, said, “This property is sold on condition it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese.”
Lanare drew its water from the Kings River. The larger town up the road even changed its name to Riverdale to advertise its proximity to the watercourse. But big farmers tapped the Kings in the Sierras to irrigate San Joaquin Valley’s vineyards and cotton fields. Instead of flowing past Lanare and Riverdale, in most years it became a dry riverbed. By the 1950s Tulare Lake, the river’s terminus, had disappeared.
With no river, people left. The families who stayed in Lanare, or moved there, were those who couldn’t live elsewhere. Paul Dictos, Fresno County assessor-recorder, has identified thousands of racially restrictive covenants he calls “the mechanism that enabled the people in authority to maintain residential segregation that effectively deprived people of color from achieving home ownership.” One such covenant, written in 1952, said, “This property is sold on condition it is not resold to or occupied by the following races: Armenian, Mexican, Japanese, Korean, Syrian, Negros, Filipinos or Chinese.”
Excluded from Fresno, 30 miles away, as well as from Hanford, 23 miles away, and even from Riverdale, a stone’s throw down the highway, Black families found homes in Lanare. For farm laborers, truck drivers and poor rural working families, living in Lanare was cheaper. By 2000 Lanare had 540 residents. A decade later, 589. Most people moved into trailers and today are farmworkers in the surrounding fields. A third live under the poverty line, with half the men making less than $22,000 per year, and half the women less than $16,000.
With no river, Lanare had to get its water from a well. And in the late 1990s residents discovered that chemicals, especially arsenic, were concentrated in the aquifer below this low-lying area of the San Joaquin Valley. They organized Community United in Lanare and got a $1.3 million federal grant for a plant to remove the arsenic. When the plant failed, the water district they’d formed went into receivership, leaving families paying over $50 a month for water they couldn’t use.
Community United in Lanare banded together with many of those unincorporated settlements suffering the same problem, and began to push the state to take responsibility for supplying water. California Rural Legal Assistance (CRLA) filed suit on their behalf, saying California’s Safe Drinking Water Act required the state to formulate a Safe Drinking Water Plan. Then former CRLA attorneys set up a new organization, the Leadership Counsel for Justice and Accountability, which filed more suits.
“We organized to make the state respond,” says community activist Isabel Solorio. “We got stories in the media and took delegations to Sacramento many times.” State Sen. Bill Monning, who gained firsthand knowledge of California’s rural poverty as a lawyer for the United Farm Workers, wrote a bill to provide funding for towns like Lanare. SB 200, the Safe and Affordable Funding for Equity and Resilience (SAFER) Act, finally passed in 2019, providing $1.4 billion over a decade to fund drinking water projects, consolidate unsustainable systems and subsidize water delivery in low-income communities.
Matheny Tract: Fighting for Water and Basic Services
For many unincorporated towns, however, funding for water service alone is not a complete solution. A history of exclusion has left them without other services, near the towns and cities that excluded them. One is the Matheny Tract, just outside Tulare city limits. Vance McKinney, a truck driver who grew up there, recalls that his parents, whom he called “black Okies,” couldn’t get a loan for a home when they came up from the South in 1955. They bought a lot from developer Edwin Matheny, who’d subdivided land just outside the city limits and sold lots to Black families.
Four decades ago, Tulare County’s General Plan even proposed tearing down the community. Matheny Tract, the plan said, had “little or no authentic future.” After the Matheny Tract Committee organized to pressure the state, in 2011 the city and county of Tulare agreed to connect city water lines with Matheny’s Pratt Mutual Water Company. The city then backpedaled, claiming it had no water during the drought. At the same time, however, it was providing water to its own, higher-income subdivisions and industrial developments.
Finally, the state Water Resources Control Board issued an order for the voluntary consolidation of Tulare and Matheny’s water systems. When the city still dragged its feet, the state issued a mandatory order, and the systems were connected in 2016.
But Matheny Tract also has no sewage system, and discharges from septic tanks sometimes even bubble up in the yards of families like McKinney’s. Tulare’s wastewater plant is a stone’s throw away, but Matheny residents can’t hook up to it. According to activist Javier Medina, “On some days it smells really bad here. I went to a city council meeting once, and one of their experts said it was probably because they were using the waste to irrigate the pistachio grove next to it.”
Medina says he invited Tulare Supervisor Pete Vander Poel to come to Matheny to experience it. “He said he’d only meet with us in the cafeteria in the Target store in Tulare, because Matheny was very dangerous,” he recalls. For Reinalda Palma, another committee member, the reason for Tulare’s reluctance is simple. “There’s a lot of discrimination against Mexicans,” she charges. “We have to mobilize if we want anything to change.” Finally, a threat to sue from the Leadership Counsel got the city to agree to begin planning a sewer consolidation as well.
Tooleville: “They Think We’re Nothing”
Even less cooperation has been forthcoming in Tooleville, less than a mile from the Tulare County city of Exeter. In 2001 residents of this unincorporated community began asking Exeter to extend its water lines to provide service. The city refused, thus beginning one of the longest fights for drinking water in the valley’s history.
Ironically, Tooleville’s two dirt streets end at the base of the Sierra foothills, where the Friant-Kern Canal carries millions of gallons of water from the Friant Dam on the San Joaquin River to fields at the valley’s south end. The canal was built with taxpayer funding by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the 1940s, as part of the Central Valley Project. It diverts so much water that the San Joaquin River disappears in areas below the Friant Dam during dry seasons. With no river water, farmers in the river basin pump water from the aquifer below, leading to land subsidence in many areas of the San Joaquin Valley. Even the canal itself has lost up to 60% of its delivery capacity because the land is sinking under it.
While Tooleville residents can watch the water flow by on the other side of a chain-link fence, they can’t touch it, much less drink it. The community gets its water from two wells. One has already gone dry. “We only have water in the morning,” says Maria Paz Olivera, secretary of the Tooleville Mutual Nonprofit Water Association. “When workers come home from the fields in the afternoon there’s no water, and they have to wait until late before they can shower.”
The state has discovered hexavalent chromium in the water as well, and people fear drinking and cooking with it. It currently supplies bottled water to residents.
Tooleville is surrounded by grape vineyards and citrus groves. “The growers beside us have sunk 400-foot wells, while our wells only go down 200 feet,” Paz Olivera says. “Growers run Exeter, and they’re all Trump people. When they look at us, all they see are poor Mexicans. They think we’re nothing.”
Roughly 80% of the water used by all California businesses and homes is taken by growers to irrigate 9 million acres of farmland.
Blanca Escobedo, a Leadership Counsel organizer working with the Tooleville community, agrees. “The Exeter City Council members are all white, while half of Exeter is Latino,” she says. “You see this in their comments. One councilmember said they wouldn’t connect with Tooleville because people there wouldn’t pay their bills. When the community invited the Exeter mayor and council to tour, they wouldn’t talk with residents. In one meeting the mayor said consolidation was a waste of money and he wished Santa Claus was real.” When Tooleville residents attended a meeting in 2019, Escobedo says councilmembers asked to be escorted to their cars by security.
After negotiating for a year and a half with Michael Claiborne, the Leadership Counsel attorney representing Tooleville, the Exeter City Council adopted a water master plan in 2019 with no consolidation. Mayor Mary Waterman-Philpot said, “We have to take care of Exeter first,” and was “not interested” in Tooleville.
Under previous laws the state water board could only request a voluntary consolidation in a case like Tooleville’s. But this year the legislature passed SB 403, authorizing mandated consolidation where a water system is at risk of failure. The water board has told Exeter that it is prepared to issue an order, and according to Leadership Counsel co-director Veronica Garibay, the city has agreed to begin planning a consolidation.
Canaries in the Coal Mines?
Perhaps these small communities, vulnerable due to their history of exclusion, are like canaries in the coal mines. Even the large cities of the San Joaquin Valley now have burgeoning problems finding water. Roughly 80% of the water used by all California businesses and homes is taken by growers to irrigate 9 million acres of farmland.
While state legislation has given unincorporated communities more power to negotiate for their tiny portion, the system is structured to serve the needs of agriculture. And as the land sinks in many areas, and wells go even deeper, the aquifer itself is in danger.
For African Americans who began many of the valley’s unincorporated settlements, state legislation comes late. Ten years ago, Vance McKinney showed me the place where sewage welled up in front of his house. Now he has moved his family into Tulare and just comes for visits to the place where he grew up.
In another colonia, Monterey Park Tract, the community finally won a water connection to the nearby city of Ceres (itself facing rising water contamination), but the Black families who settled here are mostly gone. Betty Yelder, still on the local water board, remembers that her father came from Biloxi, Miss., in the 1930s, “when we couldn’t live in most parts of Modesto. But I’m retired now, and the rest of our family doesn’t live here anymore.”
Mary Broad, one of the last Black residents of Lanare, died a few years ago.
In the middle of the Matheny Tract, a dry canal bisects the community. It’s empty except for a few windblown papers and dead tumbleweeds. Javier Medina says residents still pay $50 a year for the privilege of having it run through town. “We have better water now,” he admits, “but I wonder if the canal is also a warning of what’s in store.”
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Supply Chain Pain
By Molly Martin
With poverty on the rise, a dearth of affordable housing, climbing infant mortality, and a pandemic crisis that our failing healthcare system struggles to confront, it’s starting to seem like the U.S. is sliding into the status of a “Third World”country. Now comes the specter of economic hardship as we face unprecedented shortages and price increases amid a perfect storm of events, including COVID-related labor issues, extreme weather and surging consumer demand.
At the center of this expanding debacle is the bottleneck at two major container ports in California. Some ships have been forced to wait up to a month to unload their goods, leaving everything from food and household products to toys, electronics, clothing, and cars sitting in limbo. The delays have been compounded by a trucker shortage, leading to an enormous and growing backlog of containers.
When I read about supply problems that are emptying store shelves all over the U.S., I confess that I hoped Americans might connect a few dots, might get a taste of the misery we have imposed on the country of Cuba for six decades.
Do Americans even know that our government prevents trade with Cuba, the most enduring trade embargo in modern history?
Do Americans know that this year 184 countries voted in favor of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with only the U.S. and Israel voting against?
Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, present during the vote in the UN General Assembly Hall, said that the blockade is a “massive, flagrant and unacceptable violation of the human rights of the Cuban people.”
He added that the embargo is about “an economic war of extraterritorial scope against a small country already affected in the recent period by the economic crisis derived from the pandemic.” Mr. Rodriguez estimated 2020 losses to be $9.1 million. He said that the sanctions have made it harder for his country to acquire the medical equipment needed to develop COVID-19 vaccines as well as equipment for food production.
I am horrified and embarrassed that my own government seems to revel in overthrowing governments that fail to put U.S. interests at heart. That many of these were democratically elected has not saved them.
The U.S. has been trying to overthrow the Cuban government since it first formed in 1959 and we are still at it. The blockade is meant to economically squeeze the island and create enough discontent within Cuba to force the ruling Communist Party to step down.
Following historic protests in Cuba where thousands took to the streets, Cuban officials have repeatedly blamed the six-decade U.S. embargo for Cuba’s food, fuel and medicine shortages.
Our problems are First World problems, but of course the poor in the U.S. will be affected disproportionately as prices rise. That Apple watch and that 65-inch TV might still be sitting at the port on Christmas but we will survive. I just hope our continuing supply chain mess might impress upon Americans the ways our economic embargoes affect actual people (and not just governments) around the world.
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What Can Amazon Organizers Learn From Walmart?: Dialogue moderated by Alex Han
By Alex Han
This 3 Part dialogue is being published jointly by the Stansbury Forum and Organizing Upgrade.
“Amazon is the epoch-defining corporation of the moment in a way that Walmart was two decades ago,” said Howard W, an Amazon warehouse worker and organizer with Amazonians United, a grassroots movement of Amazon workers building shop-floor power. What can organizers at Amazon learn from the Walmart campaigns in the 2000s? And what can these two efforts teach us about organizing at scale? Unions haven’t successfully organized an employer with more than 10,000 workers in decades, so getting to scale is one of the most pressing challenges for the social justice movements.
To explore these questions, Howard was joined by Wade Rathke, who, as chief organizer of ACORN in the U.S. from 1970 – 2008, anchored a collaboration among ACORN, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) that aimed to organize Walmart. Since 1980, Rathke has also served as Head Organizer for Local 100 of the United Labor Union, which represents service workers in Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. Organizing Upgrade Executive Editor Alex Han facilitated the conversation, with participation from International Longshore and Warehouse Union Organizing Director Emeritus Peter Olney (co-editor of the Stansbury Forum). The 90-minute conversation ranged from the philosophical to the granular. We’re bringing it to you in three parts. Part 1 focused on worker organizing, Part 2 on relations with existing unions. Here we look at building broader community campaigns.
Part 3: Engaging the Community, Building a Movement
Alex: I’m actually really struck, Howard, in hearing you lay this out after Wade’s talking about his history and some of that Walmart work. I’m a little bit more struck in a deeper connection to the kind of community organizing that ACORN and a host of other organizations do, working in neighborhoods, working in different locations to build power sometimes in a symmetrical way, sometimes in an asymmetrical way. I’m just really struck by some of those parallels.
We have two employers that were the primary employer in a lot of places. I think of Amazon right now as the default employer like in my neighborhood, in Humboldt Park on the West Side of Chicago. Amazon is a default employer and they’re building a distribution facility about a mile from my house, which will strengthen that. So I just wanted to ask the two of you what you think are keys to building community support around Amazon workers, and how do we link some common interest there?
Wade: The community support was directly aligned to their ability to see their workers leading that fight. And without it, I mean, we just couldn’t make much happen.
We did geo-targeting that we learned from some folks at Gainesville at the University of Florida. We would guess where big box operators wanted to go, and every week we would have a researcher calling all the Planning Departments in those 21 counties to see if there was any activity on those corners so that we could then come up with a preemptive strike against their expansion. In that way, we were able to stop 32 straight stores from being built. Now sometimes they were putting them in wetlands and sometimes—I mean, you know, they were pretty greasy about the whole thing. They were in a hurry but so is Amazon in a hurry.
It was an open campaign compared to Amazonians United. As I said, we surfaced the leaders early. They were able then to be involved publicly in the site fights and in the public hearings with city councils, planning commissions and allies about why we needed them to put the arm on Walmart to give us more protection and authority in the workplace.
If Amazon keeps going the way it goes, in five years probably, 10 certainly, you’re going to have an Amazon location in virtually every community in the country of any size. To get that same-day delivery or next-day delivery, there are just going to be so many locations, and that could be a way to look at a different geographical plan.
Looking at geography allows you to get more density where you have active committees or people who are coming together, and to then build a bridge to real community support, which I think is very possible to move at this point. Amazon has not had good press the last couple of years. There’s a reason Bezos is trying to go to the moon, I think. At the point we were organizing Walmart, Walmart was public enemy number one on the corporate side, and they look good now compared to Amazon. Who would’ve believed that was possible? But yeah, I would try to narrow the focus in order to get more pressure on them. I think it’s hard for a fly to be noticed by the elephant.
Howard: We are aware of the need to also build strength geographically as well. As they try to build out this next-day delivery, same-day delivery promise, they have to locate in the major metropolitan areas, right? They cannot run away there. They have to then concentrate in that way, and their network becomes shaped by the ways that people live, because they are a retailer. So that’s the next horizon that we have to be looking at, and that we are looking at and figuring out how to work on. How do you build that strength on a metro scale to be working as Amazon workers, you know, in New York City or in Chicago and not just in DBK1 or DCH1, which are the codes for the warehouses.
The scale is difficult, and it is something that we think of a lot. What we’ve managed to do so far is very exciting. The power that we’ve been able to build, particularly in a company that a lot of people say is an impossible place to organize at, is very encouraging. But then every now and again you step back and you realize the true scale of Amazon and you think okay, this is a good start, and it’s going to have to pick up and it’s going to have to expand. We are going to need to find allies, we’re going to have to find ways to reach more people, to bring in more folks in order to transform this company that has such sway over so much of our lives.
But there’s another thing that we think about, which is that in the epic struggle between labor and capital, the whole point is that one of the sides has the money and the other side has the people. One of the things that we think about is that if we’re going to make really big, epochal change in this world, not just for workers at Amazon, but for the whole working class, for working people in the U.S. and around the world, Amazon is a huge chunk of that. And right now, it is a chunk that has incredible power and incredible reach and incredible stature, right?
And I think that’s what makes it a particularly important place to make change. But if we’re going to make those sorts of big changes, we have to figure out how ordinary people and extraordinary people are going to make time in their lives and become that movement and become the organizers and pull themselves together. And that is something that drives us fundamentally: thinking of this as building a movement.
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If you’d like to learn more about Amazonians United, check out their website at
amazoniansunited.org/. If you’re interested in joining the movement inside Amazon, you can submit an inquiry here: https://airtable.com/shr5Bq5sTeMweqJ7f.
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Part 2: What Can Amazon Organizers Learn From Walmart? Dialogue moderated by Alex Han
By Alex Han
“Amazon is the epoch-defining corporation of the moment in a way that Walmart was two decades ago,” said Howard W, an Amazon warehouse worker and organizer with Amazonians United, a grassroots movement of Amazon workers building shop-floor power. What can organizers at Amazon learn from the Walmart campaigns in the 2000s? And what can these two efforts teach us about organizing at scale? Unions haven’t successfully organized an employer with more than 10,000 workers in decades, so getting to scale is one of the most pressing challenges for the social justice movements.
To explore these questions, Howard was joined by Wade Rathke, who, as chief organizer of ACORN in the U.S. from 1970 – 2008, anchored a collaboration among ACORN, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) that aimed to organize Walmart. Since 1980, Rathke has also served as Head Organizer for Local 100 of the United Labor Union, which represents service workers in Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. Organizing Upgrade Executive Editor Alex Han facilitated the conversation, with participation from International Longshore and Warehouse Union Organizing Director Emeritus Peter Olney (and co-editor of the Stansbury Forum). The 90-minute conversation ranged from the philosophical to the granular. We’re bringing it to you in three parts. Part 1 focused on worker organizing. Here in Part 2 we turn to relations with existing unions. Part 3 will look at building broader community campaigns.
This 3-Part dialogue is being published jointly by the Stansbury Forum and Organizing Upgrade.
Part 2: Acting Like a Union—With or Without One?
Alex: Can you talk about the responses from Amazon and Walmart—not just how they responded to you on the issues, but whether they responded with efforts to blunt the organizing?
Howard: A lot of people working today don’t have an experience of being in a union, and even if they do, they don’t necessarily have an experience of taking collective action and changing their circumstances. And so I think that the biggest effect for Amazon workers of the work that we are doing is beginning to write new stories that we can tell each other.
I know that when I started organizing at my warehouse, it was absolutely invaluable to have stories from New York and Chicago and Sacramento, so that as things came up in the warehouse, issues that people complained about, that people felt bad about but that people often felt hopeless about, I could say, ‘Hey, you know what, this really grinds my gears too. But you know, I heard about these folks at this other warehouse…’ and begin to get those stories circulating and people beginning to think, ‘Okay, we can do something. There’s something I can do besides either quit or try to by force of will pressure my boss to treat me better than everybody else.’ And I think that’s something that we’re building and we’re building and we’re building.
A lot of what we’ve done is these warehouse-by-warehouse fights, and there’s been a lot of them with a lot of victories, often very local victories. But one of our campaigns was actually for paid time off, which Amazon had been denying to all of its part-time workers. For a long time, all of its delivery station workers, which are the folks who load the vans, do the final sort, were all part-time workers. So, no healthcare. Just enough hours to not get healthcare, right? And their own policy said that folks in those situations should get paid time off, but they weren’t offering the paid time off.
Folks in Sacramento noticed that in a campaign to get a couple of their coworkers reinstated from an unjust firing—”Where’s our paid time off?” Up until that point, Amazon had been offering only the incredible benefit of unpaid time off, a certain number of hours that you were allowed to not come to work without getting paid but not getting fired.
Sacramento started that campaign. They had petitions and a button that everybody was wearing, and they marched on the boss. Chicago picked it up, then New York. Folks in other warehouses in the Philly area got wind of this and began pressuring their management about it. Pretty soon after that, Amazon came out and announced that it was going to extend paid time off to all of its part-time workers.
Management Caught Flat-Footed
Alex: Wow. And so that was a decision that reverberated nationally?
Howard: Yeah. Thousands and thousands of workers were suddenly granted paid time off. And—how have we seen Amazon respond? They are still to this day, three years later, quick to meet demands that are brought on a local level, and I think managers are still regularly being caught completely flat-footed.
We look at how Amazon has responded to us and how Amazon responded to the RWDSU [Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union] drive in Bessemer, Alabama. Folks in the labor movement sometimes complain that it seems like the labor movement has become hidebound, sclerotic or sort of stuck in a rut. But I think if that’s the case, it’s probably the case that unionbusting has gotten hidebound and sclerotic and stuck in a rut. And I think that when Amazon heard that there was a union filing for an election, they called up the anti-union people and said, “Yes, we’d like one anti-union campaign, please, whatever it costs.” And they showed up and did it.
But when workers come together and assert their fundamental strength as the people who run the place, I don’t think they have anyone to call, and I think they still don’t really know what to do about that when they can’t run the third-party thing. They can’t point to all the cars that we’re paying for or whatever, ’cause we’re not.
We have seen some retaliation by them. Some of our folks that they’ve fingered I think as workplace leaders, they’ve interrogated them, they’ve pressured them. We’ve seen times when management has tried various things to divide folks in the warehouse. So far all of those times, through organizing and our solidarity with each other and then sometimes through using the unfair labor practice mechanism with the National Labor Relations Board, we’ve been able to resist it every time.
Wade: The truth is we never filed a single 8(a)1 or 8(a)3 [charge of violations of these sections of the National Labor Relations Act] throughout the whole campaign over three or four years because in fact, after all the months of them dealing directly with the workers, once they realized we weren’t filing for an election—I mean, it’s your point exactly about there’s one playbook they’re working with, just like there’s one traditional union playbook now.
So when they figured out we weren’t filing for an election, they would bend very quickly. We were able to win reinstatements, some wage differences, changes in schedules, largely because they got themselves caught in their own lies.
We knew they were doing the scheduling out of computers in Bentonville Arkansas, but they wanted to pretend that the local managers were. So when we’d have a schedule thing, we walked in with five, 10, 20 people and there’d be people on the outside as well, and they wouldn’t touch us. And it was easier for them to let us win because they still had us within a store. They knew they didn’t have an election coming. They wanted us to get tired or maybe they understood more about the institutional labor movement than I did, so they knew they could outwait us, as essentially and they did.
Peter: There’s the question of these major working-class institutions that we still have like the Teamsters Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), who, in the case of the Teamsters, really do see Amazon as an existential threat. Every day their trucks from UPS are being blocked by Amazon trucks on every urban causeway in America. The question becomes how we envision a collaboration between our trade unions and some of their skills, their resources, and this kind of brilliant bottom-up organizing that the Amazonians United network is doing. I really think it’s a confluence of the two which is going to bring us home.
I am choosing to devote my energy and efforts towards supporting AU in their work because I think no matter what union gets involved, no union’s going to be successful without a strong base in the warehouses and the work that Howard and his people do. So I’m interested in Howard and Wade reflecting on that dynamic, because I know it’s a political tension too. Some of our AU folks are not particularly interested in connecting with what they call business unions, and I’m very respectful of that position and I believe in working with those folks and engaging in comradely discussion about how we go forward. But I’m really interested in both Wade with his 40-something-plus years of experience dealing with these institutions but with his fundamental orientation, and Howard, too, because I know Howard is also challenged by the same question.
Wade: I don’t have a good story. I went to brother Hansen, Joe Hansen, the head of UFCW, and I said, “Look, I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is a thousand people have signed up in a little over six months. The response has been great. There’s some level of organization in 32 stores, but we have gone as far as we can expanding the list and you have to decide. I think this could work if you were willing to make a commitment to get up to a hundred thousand, two hundred thousand members on this kind of strategy and to spend some money to do it.”
And his response was pretty much, “Wade, you’ve done a good job. Really interesting what you’ve done,” and that was the last time he signed a check for the campaign.
So the problem of jurisdiction and the problem of institutional union politics is very difficult to navigate.
I try to read between the lines of what the Teamsters’ organizing director is saying, and I’m not encouraged that they’re ready to do what really needs to be done, like reaching out to Amazonians United, finding out where your network is, identifying an area and really writing the checks and saying, “We’re here for 10, 15, 20 years.” I tried to see how small you could make the unit, what was the real fulfillment warehouse unit as opposed to the drivers, as opposed to—and even so, you’re talking about 100,00, 200,000 workers, and we haven’t organized in the labor movement any employer with even 10,000 workers since I’ve been an organizer for labor unions. I mean, I’m ashamed to say that, but it’s just true.
Now in the public sector, yes, home care, we’ve got some successes, but not with a private sector company like an Amazon or anybody else that’s come forward over the last number of years. And damned if we learn anything. But I agree, Peter, we’ve got to somehow, before unions bankrupt themselves, we’ve got to find somebody who’s willing to actually organize some people, and I just don’t know right today who that is.
Howard: It’s a complicated situation and there is a diversity of opinion within the Amazonians United network about how we should relate to the existing unions, what they have to offer, what we risk getting more involved with them. Wade, your experience with Walmart in Florida is something that is very heavily on our minds. And I think the easiest thing to point to when looking at the existing unions is oh, they’ve got staff, right? But there is a worry about becoming dependent upon somebody else’s money and somebody else’s resources. And there’s wanting to build not just something that is independent in a way that it can be really democratic and of, by, and for Amazon workers, but also something that is sustainable and not driven by the other concerns that whatever union that might want to throw their support behind us might have.
These are questions that we are all wrestling with and experimenting with as we speak, trying to figure out first and foremost what strength we can build, and who will join the struggle with us, but also what sort of allies can be brought into this work. You know, be they a labor movement, be they community institutions, be they whatever it might be. And I think for me, that’s something that I’ve found really intriguing and inspiring about reading your piece about this Florida campaign. There are such obvious parallels between Walmart in the early oughts, and Amazon now and trying to think through that question of—you know, we’re working on building up our power as workers, so what does it look like as workers to be reaching out and working with community institutions? What does it look like to be reaching out and working with labor unions? What does it look like to be building those linkages and not just with each of us pursuing our own little agendas, but how do we really become part of this organized fight that can become as organized as Amazon is?
A lot of people, when they look at Amazon and they see the size and they see the scope and they see the tentacles everywhere, they say it’s so huge it can never be done. But we also know that those tentacles mean there’s a lot of surface area. It means that there are a lot of people impacted and there are a lot of potential people who can come into this fight. Amazon is very well organized around this. How can we gather all of the people that are impacted by Amazon and get as organized as them in order to be able to bring some democracy to this economy, and be able to figure out how we want this institution to be running the world?
If you’d like to learn more about Amazonians United, check out their website at
amazoniansunited.org/. If you’re interested in joining the movement inside Amazon, you can submit an inquiry here: https://airtable.com/shr5Bq5sTeMweqJ7f.
Monday Part 3: Engaging the Community, Building a Movement
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What Can Amazon Organizers Learn From Walmart? Dialogue moderated by Alex Han
By Alex Han
“Amazon is the epoch-defining corporation of the moment in a way that Walmart was two decades ago,” said Howard W, an Amazon warehouse worker and organizer with Amazonians United, a grassroots movement of Amazon workers building shop-floor power. What can organizers at Amazon learn from the Walmart campaigns in the 2000s? And what can these two efforts teach us about organizing at scale? Unions haven’t successfully organized an employer with more than 10,000 workers in decades, so getting to scale is one of the most pressing challenges for the social justice movements.
To explore these questions, Howard was joined by Wade Rathke, who, as chief organizer of ACORN in the U.S. from 1970 – 2008, anchored a collaboration among ACORN, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) that aimed to organize Walmart. Since 1980, Rathke has also served as Head Organizer for Local 100 of the United Labor Union, which represents service workers in Arkansas, Texas and Louisiana. Organizing Upgrade Executive Editor Alex Han facilitated the conversation, with participation from International Longshore and Warehouse Union Organizing Director Emeritus Peter Olney. The 90-minute conversation ranged from the philosophical to the granular. We’re bringing it to you in three parts, beginning with a look at worker organizing. Part 2 focuses on relations with existing unions, and Part 3 on building broader community campaigns.
This 3 Part dialogue is being published jointly by the Stansbury Forum and Organizing Upgrade.
Part 1: One Shop at a Time
Alex: Wade, you worked on a project that approached organizing Walmart from a lot of different angles. Can you tell us a little about that?
Wade: We were trying to determine whether Walmart workers were willing to join a union and whether—just as importantly—they were willing to join a union that was very deliberately not going to file for an NLRB election, and made no promises of collective bargaining. We wanted to go directly to workers in the same way that ACORN would go directly to people in the community and ask them to join the organization to take action on the issues they saw in the community. We would go directly to Walmart workers and ask them if they wanted to take action on issues they saw in the workplace, whether that was hours, scheduling, wages, etc., etc., much in terms of shop-level action.
At that particular time—you’re talking about early 2005—4% of Walmart’s gross came from Florida, so it was one of the strongest states. We chose the I-4 corridor running between Orlando and Tampa-St. Pete, about 21 counties, a whole bunch of stores that they had already planted, but also a serious piece of expansion that they had proposed there. We built an organizing staff. ACORN already had an office in Orlando as well as in the Tampa area. One of my key associates and brothers was based in St. Petersburg so we knew people. We knew the turf. We were able to get established very quickly.
Obviously, we didn’t have a list of Walmart workers. We got the Florida voter list, and then we did a query to pull out all the addresses. At that time, it was populated with addresses and phone numbers, and we pulled out all the ones for families making less than $50,000. We did a simple robo-dialed prompt system where we called people who we thought were likely Walmart workers asking if they had worked for Walmart or had people in their family who worked for Walmart. There might be rights and benefits. If they were eligible, press 2, if they were interested, press 1. They’d press 1, give us their address and we’d come visit with them.
We had about 20 organizers so every night we would collect all the yesses, put people on the doors. The organizers in that piece of turf drove hundreds of miles sometimes to do three or four visits, and sometimes were lucky to actually complete any visit. For all of the union drives I’ve ever done, and there are many, we had the highest percentage of sign-ups on visits that we’d ever had, somewhere near 63% of the people who were Walmart workers who we actually got to visit would immediately sign up, and they were willing to join and pay dues. They signed up for the Walmart Workers Association. It was a membership card much like the ACORN membership card. They agreed to pay $10 US in dues per month, in an open-ended bank draft.
And that was surprising to me, how much interest and heat there was in the workforce about wanting to join this. And, once again, we were saying we’re not going to file for election. There is no collective bargaining. We’re not promising a damn thing other than you come together with your fellow workers. You can take action on the grievances and issues you have.
‘We Run The Place’
Alex: Howard, can you tell us about the concept around Amazonians United, the kind of organizing that you’re doing, and what’s happened as a result of that organizing?
Howard: The concept behind Amazonians United is that building collective power on the shop floor is foundational to changing the circumstances of workers at Amazon. Our power in making Amazon run is the thing that is needed to make any big change. We realize that Amazon is known for its huge size but also its far reach, so to make the biggest and most fundamental changes in it, the work will have to be more complex and involve more people that are touched by Amazon in more ways. But without Amazon workers forming that base, a lot of the rest of that work probably won’t go anywhere because we have the strongest position, because we run the place.
We’ve been organizing Amazonians United for about three years now. There are workers involved in Amazonians United that have been there longer than that, but we’ve been working as Amazonians United for about three years. In that time, Amazon has had a lot of press about its working conditions, its safety record, the intensity of the work, the inhumanity of a lot of the working conditions, and not a lot has changed. But when we in our warehouses have come together and done actions even as simple as a petition, and getting the super-majority of our coworkers to sign on to a list of demands, we’ve seen local management—which pretty consistently across the whole Amazon network is aloof, condescending, treats us like robots half the time and children the other half of the time—immediately sit up and, for the most part, rush to meet our demands, especially when they are demands that are within the warehouse. We’ve found it more difficult to make progress on bigger demands, like demands for a raise or demands for things that are really happening at a corporate level. Our work has been mostly warehouse by warehouse.
One of our very early victories that says a lot about Amazon was a fight for clean drinking water at the Chicago warehouse, where Amazon management had not been providing bottled water. They’d been providing those five-gallon bottled water fountains, but there was visible scum floating in the water. Workers had been demanding fresh water—this is in the middle of a hot summer, working intense shifts. Management had kept putting people off. “Oh, yeah, yeah, we’re working on it, we’re working on it, we’re working on it.”
And so then finally our folks started coming together and forming up as a crew, passed around a petition, got a super-majority of coworkers signed on, and confronted management with it at one of those standup meetings that started a shift. The manager became visibly scared, immediately got on the phone to his supervisor, immediately left to the store to get bottled water. Within the next week, clean water lines were being run throughout the warehouse and fresh water was being provided. In a lot of ways, it’s depressing that we had to fight for it, but it shows the power of workers to turn circumstances around in the warehouse very quickly in these cases.
Safety Walkouts
The New York warehouse that’s organized into Amazonians United was actually the first warehouse where there was an acknowledged case of the coronavirus in Amazon’s network. And the reason it was the first acknowledged case of the coronavirus is not that Amazon came out and said it. Workers there were organized and when one person got the news that they had tested positive on a very thinly staffed afternoon shift, they told a couple of their coworkers as they were leaving. Those coworkers passed it around to the rest of the organized crew, and the night shift that was coming in a few hours later.
A few of our folks showed up early, stopped everyone from coming in, told them what had happened. This was back when we didn’t know how the virus was passed. There was an impromptu rally in the parking lot. Workers refused to go in until serious cleaning had been done. Amazon agreed to shut the place down for two days, do cleaning and pay everybody. And that then began Amazon’s actual serious response to COVID. I can tell you from working in the warehouse that there was a real switch that was thrown at some point, in that Amazon was very clearly pretending it was not a problem and then all of a sudden, they started really taking it seriously.
In Chicago, the crew actually walked out for several days, demanding a serious response to the coronavirus. And that was one of the times a worker organization has been paired with community support, because when workers were walking out and were picketing the workplace, community members organized a car caravan to come by and show support and also create a bit of a jam for all the delivery vans trying to get in and out.
When we start organizing, we build up our organizing committees, we take action, we start changing the narrative in our warehouse. I think a lot of folks in warehouses assume that the problems that we have are unique to us and that everybody else has it better. And that clearly Amazon, leading light of the modern economy, the whole thing couldn’t be run as poorly and be constantly broken and duck-taped together as our warehouse, right?
Building Community
One of the things that we’re able to do as a network is meet each other as organizing committees and bring each other together as workers—not just as the organizers who are talking to each other a lot more, but as everybody who is in some way involved in the organizing in the warehouse. And they come and you can just talk shop.
We’re trying to figure out other things. We have a closed Facebook group for members of Amazonians United and people interested in Amazonians United who work at Amazon. We’re publishing newsletters, we’re trying to figure out ways that we can bring each other these stories in order to forge these connections.
Part of our work is building a meaningful community at work and a meaningful project for people to help them stick around. ‘Cause yeah, like the warehouses are very alienated places, a lot of them, right? People cycle through a lot. A lot of times the work is very isolated. People get ground down so much by the work that when you go on break everyone’s on their phone, talking to the people they really care about. In some cases, there is community there; in some cases, it takes people very intentionally being friendly, sharing food with each other, inviting people to cookouts and organizing potlucks and whatnot. Yeah, and building that community that then can be the basis for fighting for our lives.
If you’d like to learn more about Amazonians United, check out their website at amazoniansunited.org/. If you’re interested in joining the movement inside Amazon, you can submit an inquiry here: https://airtable.com/shr5Bq5sTeMweqJ7f.
End Part 1
In Part 2: What Can Amazon Organizers Learn From Walmart?
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The Harder They Fall – Ruminations on its antecedents
By Gary Phillips
After viewing Jeymes Samuel’s The Harder They Fall stylized western, I got to thinking about when I was a kid watching Have Gun, Will Travel with my dad. This was in the days of a few local channels on television and three network ones. The weekly half hour show was on CBS and in black and white. I really only remember from then the show’s opening sequence. It’s a sideview shot of a black-clad thigh, a silver bishop’s chess head, also called a paladin, on the holster of the Shakespeare quoting gunman who goes by Paladin. He would draw the gun and aim it toward the audience. You’d also hear his voice over, a snippet of tense dialogue from the upcoming episode.
Having years later seen those episodes on the likes of Starz Encore Westers you can’t ignore the racist stereotypes of Hey Boy and later Hey Girl, the immigrant Chinese bellhops working at the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco where Paladin lived. Though to some extent theshow’s creative forces, including the star Richard Boone who had script approval and directed several episodes, were seemingly aware of the cultural landmine they treaded. There was a Paladin outing where he helps Hey Boy avenge his brother who was killed by a racist. While in another episode a character notes, “I have no contempt for the Army, exterminating the Indian nation is a dirty job, and they do it as well as the next.”
There was even an episode with a black outlaw hunted by Paladin, a wanted man with a $5,000 bounty on his head. This Rufus Buck/Deadwood Dick stand-in, played by Ivan Dixon,was called Isham Spruce in the “Long Way Home.” Like several real-world black cowboys including first Black deputy marshal Bass Reeves, Spruce is an ex-slave. He turned to outlawing as his perspective was that was the only viable means of making a living, a way of being free it might be interpreted these days. Initially he tells Paladin he’s no better than a slave catcher. The two develop a rapport even as four other greedy white bounty hunters dog them. But this was early sixties network TV. There was to be no team up of the two, no images of a defiant black man taking up arms against his would-be jailers. Essentially the milk toast ending has Ishamsacrificing his life to save a rattlesnake bitten Paladin. Good grief.
It would be in the late sixties ABC show The Outcasts, premiering in the fall of 1968, where a fully dimensional Black cowboy would finally ride across the small screen. A character owing more to the socio-political climate of the time than Sidney Portier’s well-dressed gunfighter in the 1965 film, Duel at Diablo or jazz singer Herb Jeffries’ Bob Blake, the Bronze Buckaroo in several “B” films made in the late 1930s.
At any rate, the following description from the getTV blog best describes The Outcasts:“Don Murray stars as Earl Corey, a former Confederate soldier – and slave owner – from a once-wealthy, now-destitute Virginia family. Otis Young is his reluctant partner Jemal David, an educated former slave [and ex-Union soldier]. Together, the two men navigate the West, and their own prejudices, as bounty hunters.”
The “My Name is Jemal” episode opens on a familiar scene, men drinking booze and playing poker, one of them sassing a good-looking saloon gal. Only the trope is subverted, the guys playing poker are mostly black, some in their Army uniforms, and the woman is black as well. In the “Night Riders,” the partners’ trust is tested when Corey is recruited to lead a Klan-like group out to terrorize and murder people of color and those who support them.
Otis Young was an unknown actor at the time who brought a freshness to the role. His Jemal David was a man with an edge for good reasons. Yet the relationship between his character and Murray’s deepens over the ensuing episodes. The show only lasted the one season. The claim was the program was canceled for being too violent. Don Murray quoted on the getTV site differed. “Murray told the L.A. Times that the political climate of the times hurt the show. “[A] lot of the audience felt very uncomfortable turning it on and seeing these two guys so hostile to each other,” he said, “even when saving each other’s lives.”
The Outcasts gave way to 1972’s The Legend of Nigger Charley on the big screen. As I noted in a previous piece this film stars ex-pro football player turned grindhouse auteur Fred Williamson. The movie was about escaped slaves becoming gunfighters, spawning the sequels the Soul of Nigger Charley and Boss Nigger. In several ways the Django Unchained of its day.Samuel’s effort is not only in a lineage with these aforementioned films, but also nods to Leone’s and Carbucci’s spaghetti westerns as well as Mario Van Peeble’s revisionist Posse of nearly three decades ago. In that film another western trope is sent sideways when a group of black soldiers, led by Van Peeble’s Jesse Lee, tired of being shot at during the so-called Spanish-American war in Cuba, steal a trove of gold. Pursued, they escape to New Orleans, trying to make it to a place called Freemanville, an all-black enclave started by Jesse Lee’s dad who was murdered by the Klan.
Another pro football player turned actor, Woody Strode is telling us the audience the story in the beginning of the film. Van Peeble’s understood his status in his reconstruction of the West from a Black perspective. In 1962’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Strode had the ignominious role of Pompey, manservant to John Wayne’s gunslinger turned rancher. But he would go on to play better roles such as a bow-and-arrow toting bounty hunter in The Professionals, and an outlaw in the spaghetti western, The Unholy Four.
Yet as The Harder They Fall indicated, Black women such as Mary Fields, known as Stagecoach Mary, were not exactly shrinking violets in those times. No knock on how Mary was depicted in Fall, but the real woman’s story was so much more. Six foot and able with a rifle, she hauled freight for nuns, faced down bad hombres in shootouts and was the first Black woman to have a mail route in rugged Montana terrain in her sixties. Her life and times is a miniseries waiting to happen. The expansion of the Wild West mythos is long overdue, from John Horse and the Black Seminoles to Chinese and Japanese settlers have yet to be reframed on screens big and small.
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Mostly a crime fiction writer, nonetheless Gary Phillips has written several western short stories including one in the Bass Reeves: Frontier Marshal anthology.