The Need for Labor to Push Beyond
By Kurt Stand
“What we won’t allow is for anyone to strip us of our value, our dignity, our worth.”
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka died suddenly last month at age 72. At this moment of transition — marked by the election of Liz Shuler, the first woman to serve as the head of the AFL-CIO — it is important to keep in mind how Trumka’s legacy can inform efforts underway to continue labor’s revival. Below are some reflections on the connection he made to building worker’s political strength while fighting for democratic rights that is relevant to work of DSA.
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In 1986, I was working for the National Association of Letter Carriers, covering the NALC’s Convention in Minneapolis/St. Paul as part of the union’s publications department. Amongst the invited speakers was Richard Trumka, elected president of the United Mine Workers only four years prior. Trumka’s election was the culmination of the work of Miners for Democracy, a rank-and-file movement formed in 1970 in response to the assassination of coal mine reformer Jock Yablonski, who was murdered along with his wife and daughter. Trumka’s invitation reflected a kinship borne from the fact that NALC’s leadership also emerged from a rank-and-file movement, growing out of the postal workers 1970 illegal wildcat strike. Vince Sombrotto — who had been a working letter carrier for over 20 years — was elected NALC President in the union’s first all-membership direct vote in 1978. Perhaps acknowledgement of that shared background was behind the enthusiastic applause for Trumka as he spoke, especially when he made explicit his call for labor to organize its own political party, independent of Democrats and Republicans, to represent working people, not the bosses.
Representative Bill Gray, a Democratic Congressman from Philadelphia, also spoke at the Convention. Gray had been elected Chair of the House Budget Committee in 1985, the first African American to hold that position. His speech focused on the importance for letter carriers specifically, and for federal workers overall, to have Congressional allies in leadership roles as then President Ronald Reagan used attacks on government employees as the nexus for attacks on unionism and social insurance programs. Following the 1970 strike, postal workers had gained, for the first time, collective bargaining rights through the creation of the United States Postal Service as a hybrid public service/private corporation. In consequence, the role of Congress in regulating, rate setting, and budgets had grown. Gray stressed that this made Democratic control of Congress even more important, arguing that even a weak Democrat was better than a good Republican if it meant maintaining that majority. The NALC had developed a powerful political action program involving rank-and-file members and locals across the country. Convention delegates rightly saw Gray’s speech as vindication of their hard work and they gave him applause every bit as rousing, every bit as sincere, as the applause given to Trumka.
At the time, I viewed the contradiction between the two audience responses as reflecting the difference between workers’ aspirations and workers’ need for a practical approach to real-world problems. But that was a superficial way of thinking; aspirations and hopes for what could be are part and parcel of practical decisions we make every day of our lives — union politics neither can nor should divide the two. Trumka’s leadership of the then ongoing Pittston strike in western Pennsylvania demonstrated a grasp of the needs of the moment that never lost sight of the larger issues at stake. So while he and Gray each spoke to Convention delegates’ desire for a degree of real power over forces impacting on their lives, Trumka’s perspective was deeper, pointing to the need for labor to push beyond the limits imposed by our political system.
Although fairly soon thereafter Trumka stepped back from advocating a new labor party, he never retreated from a notion of workers using politics rather than being used by politicians. During his years as president of the AFL-CIO he developed an approach toward defining what independent working-class politics can be, leaving a legacy from which we all can learn and build.
I. Working with Enemies Without Forgetting They’re Enemies
For many years most unions have supported Democrats. Although in the past some labor leaders demonstrated “independence” by supporting Republicans, the room to do so has virtually vanished as the extreme right-wing of Republican politics becomes more pronounced. The 2016 election brought this to a head — the danger Trump posed to working people, to labor rights and to civil liberties was so great that every layer of union leadership (other than a few police unions) pulled out all stops in an effort to elect Hillary Clinton, notwithstanding hesitations or questions about her stance on trade and other policies. As we know, that opposition was not successful — Trump was elected president, not least because many union members (not a majority, but indeed, a very large minority) disregarded their respective leaders’ admonitions and voted for him.
It is now well understood that an underlying or explicit racism lay behind that, as did a more general sense of dislocation which led many to embrace or disregard Trump’s similarly contemptuous attitude towards women, immigrants, Muslims, the disabled and society’s “losers.” The vain hope was that somehow a strong authoritative voice could crack through elite power and set the United States on a course of stability and improved living standards that have not been seen for decades. Into the general mix of incoherent and contradictory ideas Trump put forth, he signaled willingness to act on two particular issues of concern to trade unionists: pushing through infrastructure spending to create good paying jobs; and pulling out of the North American Free Trade Agreement. NAFTA, initiated by the Bush Sr. administration and completed by the Clinton administration, stood as a prime example of politician’s indifference to popular need. The so-called free trade pact between the US, Mexico and Canada contributed to loss of jobs, loss of wages and environmental destruction, providing working people no favors in any of the three countries.
So Trumka, without retracting any of his anti-Trump statements, without any promise of political or electoral support, committed to supporting any infrastructure bill that the Trump administration proposed if it included genuine job guarantees and labor protections. Rather than relying on denunciation without content, Trumka recognized divisions amongst working people and focused on those areas where a shared agenda could be advanced. A shared agenda not with Trump but with fellow workers. In taking this position, Trumka helped to expose the administration’s lies; as, with so many of Trump’s promises, nothing materialized.
For unionists the point was made: Labor’s program must address worker needs, no matter who is in office. Working-class interests, however, would not be sacrificed in the name of “access” to the powerful; there would be no pretense that something was gained when the table was, in fact, bare.
Following that logic, Trumka supported the Trump administration’s renegotiation of NAFTA. The AFL-CIO took part in those talks, rejecting an initial draft, while supporting the subsequent United States-Mexico-Canada (USMCA) Agreement only when greater labor rights were included within it. Trumka called for a “yes” vote when it was brought before the Senate; though he made clear that while it was a step forward, the agreement was not a final solution to run-away jobs, environmental destruction, and inequality. Labor seized an opening created by the Trump administration, but there was never a pretense of a shared agenda, and there were no words of praise for the administration. Instead, Trumka’s praise was for “working people [who] are responsible for a deal that is a vast improvement over both the original NAFTA and the flawed proposal brought forward in 2017.”
II. Disagreements Among Friends That Don’t Create Enemies
Meanwhile in New York, for self-defined pragmatic reasons, many union leaders supported former Governor Andrew Cuomo against more progressive Democratic challengers during primaries in 2014 and 2018. The abject loss of independence by those union leaders lay not so much in the calculated decision to support him — but in demanding that others do so as well, attacking organizations they had worked with in the past rather than respect disagreement. Numerous other union leaders have taken a similar parochial view of political activity – demanding that supporters march in lockstep over a candidate endorsement or a legislative campaign. The implication of doing so is that debate is a weakness because members are incapable of understanding nuance or complexity.
However, Trumka pointed to a different way of engaging in politics that treated working people and broader social movement advocates with the respect democracy demands.
By way of example, many people active in progressive and union circles believed that the flaws in the USMCA outweighed any of its virtues and therefore opposed the agreement. Prominent among them was Bernie Sanders, who voted against the USMCA in the Senate despite the AFL-CIO’s call for support. But opposition to the positioning of the Federation did not lead Trumka to accuse a longtime allies as being anti-labor. Independent working-class politics means nothing if it doesn’t allow space for friends, allies and members to differ, even sharply.
Perhaps the clearest expressions of that approach was evident in one of Trumka’s last public statements. He had developed a close, positive working relation with Joe Biden and publicly declared that Biden had a deeper appreciation for working people and respect and understanding of unions than any of his Democratic predecessors. But that support was not unconditional. When Representative Cori Bush criticized Biden for his failure to extend anti-eviction protections in place for renters because of the impact of Covid-19, Trumka didn’t react with fear that this might damage labor’s relationship with a friend in the White House — that it might jeopardize “access”. Rather, he stated in the AFL-CIO’s Daily Brief: “I especially want to recognize the leadership of Rep. Cori Bush, who organized lawmakers and activists for five days on the steps of the Capitol. She pushed Congress and the nation to see the struggle of people who are currently unhoused or facing eviction. In her words, Today, our movement moved mountains.”
Cori Bush had experienced homelessness, a reality many working people have faced one time or another — including many from Trumka’s western Pennsylvania hometown. To allow a relation with an elected official to outweigh solidarity with those who are or may be forced to experience living without a roof over their head would mean sacrificing workers’ trust for a momentary gain.
III. Drawing a Line
Trumka’s sudden death just at the moment when Rep. Bush and other progressive House members are showing real power in crafting budget and infrastructure bills is a significant loss. Yet his legacy points a way forward. To the end, Trumka’s focus remained on the realities of the lives working people face and their need for answers that have direct and immediate impact. It is a way of maintaining a substantive political independence that works within the reality of our electoral system but is not trapped by it.
Of necessity, that political independence must work within our trade union movement as it is presently structured. The AFL-CIO is an organization composed of affiliates (rather than of individual members), each equal and independent, each with its particular strengths and weaknesses, histories and internal culture, all confronting an ever-changing workplace, social and political environment. The Federation itself is only one part (albeit the largest part) of the trade union movements, while union members remain a minority within the working class.
The challenge for Trumka was to find a path that would acknowledge the result of diversity — multiple competing understandings — in order to forge a degree of unity through which working-class power can be expressed. Although some critics of union leadership imagine that there can be shortcuts — that challenging existing corporate power can be proclaimed absent meaningful support and engagement built through patient organizing — the reality is that no such short cut has ever been found. Working-class political independence will only be made a reality when a common bond is built that recognizes and respects the various conclusions union members come to as to how best to defend their immediate interests and create a more secure life built upon respect as the basis of a genuine freedom.
Noting this, however, is not to say that all points of view are equally acceptable. A scab may be a worker, but a scab’s opinion is due no respect, unlike the opinion of unionists arguing over a more-or-less confrontational course of action, arguing over the merits or demerits of a particular contract or endorsement. By definition, a scab is a force for working-class disunity and subservience. And, as Trumka repeatedly made clear, the same can be said of those who wear their racism on their sleeve. The logic that led him to support the USMCA or to support a sit-in to preserve a moratorium on evictions, the same logic he expressed in the strikes he led as Mine Workers president and those he supported at home and abroad led by other unionists, led him to unequivocally oppose anyone or any idea that denigrated or attacked the humanity of a fellow worker, of a fellow human being.
That translated into a clear, stated, uncompromising opposition to racism, not as an abstraction, but in the concrete meaning of opposition to police brutality and mass incarceration. He called out those whose fear and hatred of people with a different skin color led them to cut off their nose to spite their face – those who voted for Bush, Trump or any of the state and local candidates who similarly rise to office by a politics of division. Trumka took an equally clear stance in support for immigrants and immigrant rights, and in recognizing that sexual harassment has no place in the workplace or in the labor movement.
Of course, just saying that racism, sexism, and fear-mongering have no place doesn’t make inequity go away, doesn’t erase overnight an outlook that took root in a society built on the premise that some people are less human than others. But calling it out publicly is a necessary part of defining working-class perspective and building a genuine working-class unity that is the only path toward independent working-class politics.
A speech Trumka gave (alongside Poor People’s Campaign leader Rev. William Barber) at a memorial in Alabama honoring four children killed in a bomb detonated during a Sunday Service in 1963 — the murder of Black children worshipping being the Klan’s answer to the March on Washington only a few weeks earlier — gives a sense of the principles that underlay his vision of unionism:
Every time a union leader calls for equal pay, every time a shop steward says to the boss ‘you can’t do that, it’s discrimination,’ every time we cast a vote, we honor the memory of Addie Mae, Cynthia, Carole and Denise [the four martyred children].
But our debt as a labor movement to this community is greater than that. On the day the Ku Klux Klan set off the bomb, parts of the labor movement were racially segregated including in Birmingham. The divisions and hatred that landowners and employers had been sowing since the founding of this country infected our own movement.
And so, when the AFL-CIO fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we were fighting to end discrimination and racism not just by employers, but by our own unions, our own institutions. We were fighting to change ourselves. We believe that people can change and grow and overcome so that history can be made right. We believe that people — and we, the people — don’t stay in the same place forever. We can be moved forward. After all, that is why it is called a movement.
America’s labor movement stands with every union member and every person in this country who is demanding justice and striving for the end of racism.
IV. A Connecting Link
Knowing what policies to advocate, what forms of political action to engage in, how to build a labor movement that is true to itself and true to the larger movement for social justice of which it is a part, requires understanding who or what stands in the way of worker rights. After a strike is over, win or lose, unions must bring those scabs back into the fold or else remained permanently divided.
Similarly, those workers blinded by racism still have to be represented when an employer violates their contractual rights, still deserve health care and pensions. Abhorrent views must be rejected without losing sight of the need for universal rights and protections for all working people. Moreover, being the tools of the wealthy and powerful doesn’t change the fact that tools remain the tools of others.
Particular employers are often the direct source of workers’ grievances, as those striking Nabisco or trying to organize Amazon are currently experiencing, as workers anywhere asserting rights against a recalcitrant employer know all too well. Those fights, however, generally take place apart from each other and though solidarity does have meaning in a practical sense, Nabisco workers can’t organize Amazon, Amazon workers can’t win Nabisco workers’ strike. Unions often engage such foes of human rights piecemeal because that is how the conflict manifests itself — and is the basis for horse-trading politics or even the kind of politics that Bill Gray spoke to at that NALC Convention, in which electing Democrats was more important than holding them accountable, apart from narrowly defined aims.
Our political system is structured so as to undermine the power of working people and reinforce divides among them. Thus, while the need for political independence — meaning the ability of working people and their organizations to advance their interests and the goal of popular rights and genuine equality over and against corporate interests — is evident, the pathway forward is murky and requires identifying where barriers are placed by those who profit from worker divides.
Trumka used his legal training to develop a systemic critique of the way our institutions are failing us. His analysis of the direction of the Supreme Court over the past decades hinged on demonstrating how even the fig leaf of precedent is removed in the way rulings have attacked one labor right after another. Far from isolated attacks, these rulings are itself part and parcel of a broader attack on democracy. And that is the territory on which he staked out a framework for building workers’ political independence — by organizing on behalf of a genuine democracy in the face of a legal system that is serving to entrench an ever more oligarchical economic and political system. A speech Trumka gave to law students at Yale when arguing against Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s fitness to serve on the Supreme Court can serve as an example:
“Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” Those are lyrics from a song about a bitter struggle between my union, the United Mine Workers of America, and mine owners in southeastern Kentucky. The song continues, “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.”
Unfortunately, today those lyrics could serve as the fight song for the Supreme Court’s pro-corporate, activist wing of justices who wax poetic about precedent and judicial restraint, yet regularly bend over backwards to serve the interests of the wealthy, the powerful and the privileged. There are no neutrals there. …
The [Supreme] Court has used its authority to entrench economic and political power in the hands of the elites against a growing number of Americans and increasingly to foster division on racial, religious and ethnic lines. It is impossible to read the Court’s decisions in major cases over the past two decades without coming to the conclusion that they amount to deck stacking … an effort by the Court in tandem with reactionary political forces to ensure that justice is only available to the wealthy and well-connected.
V. Building on a Legacy
This kind of understanding is shared by the House Progressive Caucus. To an extent not seen in decades, the caucus is taking shape as a cohesive force forging a progressive agenda distinct from — and when need be, in opposition to — mainstream liberalism without ever losing sight of the greater danger to democracy and human rights posed by right-wing Republican policies. The strength the caucus has demonstrated, and the popular movement that led to the election of so many principled progressives to federal, state and municipal offices across the country, is the reason the Biden administration has taken the steps it has to date to advance working people’s interests. As the Congressional battle over voting rights and labor law reform (and the continued fight to protect renters from eviction) indicate, so much more can be done. In that respect, we see the shape of a genuine political independence that Trumka advocated his entire life. And that potential can be further realized if organized labor as a whole builds on the perspective Trumka put forward.
We should remember that the wildcat 1970 postal workers strike and the subsequent rank-and-file movement that brought new leadership to a transformed NALC and created the American Postal Workers not only led to improved pay and benefits; it created powerful vehicles that have resisted every effort of the Postal Service to use technological change and changes in communication technology to destroy or privatize the postal system itself. The victory of Miners for Democracy gave miners back their union, which has consistently fought for better wages, stronger safety protocols and pensions, even as the industry has gone into freefall. The current months-long strike of over 1,000 miners in Alabama is testament to that continued determination.
Yet it would be hard to deny that the hopes of those renewed rank-and-file movements have not been realized, that postal workers, miners, all working people, have been locked in a defensive fight for over four decades. For all the heroism and power demonstrated in workplace struggles, progress requires the political strength of a united movement. By the same token, only through a united labor movement rooted in membership engagement and ideas, such as those postal workers and miners expressed and acted upon decades ago, will political action have the power to be and remain genuinely independent of corporate wealth and blandishments. This returns us to the connection between responding to practical needs and deeply held aspirations as the core of unionism at the workplace and in society.
With that in mind, it is fitting to remember the values which underscore our engagement. So we close with remarks provided by Trumka in a speech memorializing Joe Rauh, who represented rank-and-file miners seeking justice for Yablonski:
“You see, workers are willing to endure hardship. We are the most resilient group of people the world has ever known. But what we won’t accept is the feeling of being unnecessary. What we won’t allow is for anyone to strip us of our value, our dignity, our worth.”
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Joe Manchin, the Republican’s Trojan Horse
By Stewart Acuff
Joe Manchin fights hard against what the Democratic Party most needs to do: show Americans that government can improve the lives and futures of average working families, that an empowered Democratic Party can take on corporate masters of greed for economic justice, higher living standards and quality of life for our working class.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s September 1 speech to the Chamber of Commerce reaffirmed the truth that he won’t help pass any legislation his corporate masters oppose. In that speech and in an op-ed in the next day’s Wall Street Journal he announced his opposition to President Biden’s $3.5 trillion human infrastructure reconciliation plan.
For labor, progressives and all Democrats fighting for economic justice, Joe Manchin is worse than a Republican. He will never support viable legislation for economic justice, and he prevents the Democratic Party from achieving it.
“Inside the Democratic Party Manchin does much more harm than any Republican could. He both weakens and kills Democratic priorities for everyday Americans, thus stopping Democrats from the change voters crave, locking in top-down failed policies and politics.”
Manchin is proud of his support for the smaller steel and concrete infrastructure that was supported by all corporate America. All those 1.2 trillion dollars of concrete and steel work are critical as are the good paying, family sustaining union jobs.
But the bigger, broader $3.5 trillion Biden and Democratic plan is about shoring up human infrastructure for working families. It would enact and fund policies to strengthen working families including childcare, home care, green energy investment, expanded healthcare, free community college, DACA, Native Nation health and well-being, upgrades to Veterans Affairs facilities.
In other words, Biden’s full plan would begin to shift resources allocated from the top down for 40 years for massive corporate welfare and tax giveaways to the rich for the health and well-being of working families. The package would strengthen our country and our economy from the ground up.
This $3.5 trillion human infrastructure plan is, of course, anathema to the masters of Joe Manchin who’ve been the masters of misery and a failed American economy for four decades.
Manchin does this on issue after issue, legislation after legislation: minimum wage, Covid relief, voting rights, infrastructure.
He bargains Democrats down in the legislative process, opposes any and all measures to address economic inequality and justice. Then he pleads and wheedles Democrats with the theme of his career: he is the best you can get, like a particularly cruel abuser.
Inside the Democratic Party Manchin does much more harm than any Republican could. He both weakens and kills Democratic priorities for everyday Americans, thus stopping Democrats from the change voters crave, locking in top-down failed policies and politics.
Long ago, back in 1994 Joe Manchin made his bed with the oligarchy. He became the West Virginia State Chairman of ALEC, the Koch brothers’ vehicle to take over state legislatures. Manchin still appears on the ALEC website. It’s no wonder as governor he refused union recognition and collective bargaining with AFSCME for state employees. His career long symbiotic relationships with coal colonialists and all fossil fuel corporations have made him the enemy of the future. He is the most powerful defender and friend of fossil fuels in Congress.
The only reliable predictor of Manchin’s legislative decisions is his own most naked and immediate financial well-being. For Joe Manchin, government is just another way to make money. He and his family have lived well off the largesse of a senator’s contacts and payoffs.
Tragically, Joe Manchin fights hard against what the Democratic Party most needs to do: show Americans that government can improve the lives and futures of average working families, that an empowered Democratic Party can take on corporate masters of greed for economic justice, higher living standards and quality of life for our working class.
By refusing to act in the interests of working people in this historic moment of possibility, Joe Manchin assures us nothing can change, nothing will get better, the status quo is the most we can hope for.
That’s enough damage to Democrats and our agenda, but there is more.
Joe Manchin controls the West Virginia Democratic Party, ensuring all decisions are based on what is best for him, making the entire state apparatus a vehicle for only one man who doesn’t even share Democratic values.
Finally, Joe Manchin has convinced too many Democrats that he is the best we can do, that we could never win that Senate seat with any Democrat except Joe Manchin.
That is the worst effect of Joe Manchin.
By killing our agenda, Joe Manchin condemns us to lose.
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Alan Fisher
By Len Shindel
Remembrances of Alan Fisher
February 7, 1947 – September 16, 2021
I met Alan Fisher so many years ago, in the 1970s, after we both began working at Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point Plant in Maryland. For a few years, we weren’t close personally or politically. Chance, greater maturity and a well-respected common friend, Paul Revell, brought us to the realization that we had always been fighting the same battle.
The three of us worked together with a group of co-workers to develop a more united union in our corner of the immense mill as challenges facing steelworkers grew ever more acute. Paul died of pancreatic cancer a decade ago. And now, Alan is gone, too.
Alan was a great writer. He edited the ’09 Express, our local union’s newspaper and squeezed inconvenient truths into its pages. He invited my contributions as he established constructive relationships across the local union. I’m so grateful that Alan also opened a door for me to submit copy, as he did, to the Baltimore Evening Sun. We were both encouraged andmentored by a great editor, Mike Bowler, yet another victim of cancer.
For many years, Alan and I exchanged phone calls. We met a few times when his work with the California Reinvestment Coalition brought him to Washington. I was proud of my buddy and the relationships he was building with such skilled and talented people who were dedicating their lives to empowering poor and working people.
A few years before he died, Alan came for a visit to my cabin in the mountains of Western Maryland. It was just the two of us. We played our memories like on a board game, taking pieces and giving pieces of our formative days, trading stories of inspirational souls, opportunities seized and opportunities squandered. We drove to Thomas, the old West Virginia coal and coke town, now gentrified, then walked among the bee-hive ovens, talking the whole way, pondering how we came to work in a steel mill together—two sons of relative privilege. What did it all mean for us? Better still for those in our union, those in our family, those in our movement? Alan was my big brother at some big moments, always the wiser, more conscious actor in the play.
Later on, we met in New Orleans at the Jazz and Blues Festival. We took in all we could of the food, music and pathos, honing an aging friendship.
Alan offered great support and encouragement to me in my post-retirement work. And, as my wife, Maxine, continued to struggle with metastatic cancer, Alan was always there to listen and care on our long, rambling conversations. A cure for this horrific disease cannot come too soon.
I loved the guy. I will think of him often as my own time wears thinner, as our mutual hopes for the future are both affirmed and dashed on the voyage I was so fortunate to travel, with him and Paul and so many others, through a steel mill that is no more.
Thanks to my friend, Peter Olney, for standing by Alan and for inviting our remembrances.
Sharon, David, Ben and Lisa, you and your families are in my thoughts. I’m wishing you great strength at this difficult time.
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9/11 + 20 Years – Worker Safety and Health Today
By Earl Dotter and Scott Schneider
One year after the attack on the Twin Towers, I was invited by Phil Landrigan, M.D. and Steven M. Levin, M.D. to photograph the new Mount Sinai 9/11 Emergency Responder Medical Monitoring Program. By 2002, the Program had begun evaluating the health of the Responders. They included construction workers who had been lifted by baskets into the still smoking pile and rebuilt the damaged infrastructure there, fire fighters who had recovered human remains, truck divers who hauled away the mountain of debris, city employees who had cleared the dust laden wreckage from the streets, and police officers who secured the site. All needed medical attention for toxic dust exposures and related respiratory issues, cancers, and post-traumatic stress disorders.
Years of political pressure resulted in the enactment of the Federal World Trade Center Health Program in 2011. The Act expired in 2015, and only after the well-known TV personality Jon Stewart advocated in a sustained campaign, was the coverage reauthorized by Congress for 75 years. That program now provides treatment for certified WTC-related health conditions that responders not only sustained in NYC, but also at the Pentagon and in Shanksville, PA.
Earl Dotter, Occupational and Enviromental Health Photojournalist
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Twenty years ago, close to 3,000 people died from the terrorist attacks on 9/11. There are memorials in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and many commemorations will occur of this tragic event. What has been and will likely continue to be ignored are the thousands of others who didn’t die in the attack but died or suffered as an aftermath of the attack. According to NIOSH there are over 105,000 people enrolled in the 9/11 health surveillance system, 79,000 of who were rescue workers, who are being treated for respiratory illnesses, reflux, asthma, cancer, PTSD and other illnesses.
In sum, 35 times as many people are suffering from the incident as were killed on that day. Yet their stories will likely be ignored because worker safety is often relegated to the back burner in this country. Many people assume that the government guarantees a safe place of work (at least since the OSHA Act was passed 50 years ago) and that workers who get hurt on the job were careless or at fault. Even though the OSHA Act makes it the employer’s responsibility to provide a safe workplace, each year about 5,300 workers are killed on the job. Things have improved over the past 50 years, but it’s not enough. Sadly, those 5,300 deaths are just the tip of the iceberg.
“We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites.”
An estimated 10 times as many workers die each year as those who perished on 9-11 from occupational diseases which are often not counted (in part because the long latency often makes it hard to associate the disease with a particular workplace and in part because the workers compensation system was never designed to count and compensate such illnesses). The system set up by the OSHA Act 50 years ago is largely intact and hasn’t changed much. We still have a disturbingly insufficient number of inspectors — less than 2,000 — to cover over 10 million workplaces. The AFL-CIO estimates that it would take 162 years to just inspect every workplace once.
New hazards such as COVID-19 have emerged for which OSHA has promulgated no enforceable standards (except in 3-4 states that have issued emergency rules this year). The federal OSHA standard that has been issued only applies to health-care workers. New OSHA standards take 7-20 years to issue because of all the regulatory hurdles Congress and the White House impose. The Permissible Exposure Limits (PEL) that OSHA set for toxic chemicals mostly haven’t changed in 50 years and have been disavowed by the agency. States are now struggling to issue new standards to protect workers from heat on the job as the climate crisis has caused the hottest summer on record.
The system is antiquated and broken. We need to dramatically reimagine how we approach worker safety and health by giving more power to workers to stop and correct unsafe conditions at their jobsites. Other places, like the UK, require full time worker health and safety representatives on each jobsite, paid for by the company. Ontario workers have a much stronger right to refuse unsafe work and require joint health and safety committees.
Now, 50 years after the founding of OSHA and 20 years after 9/11, we need a much more robust approach to protecting workers from both injuries and illnesses at work.
Scott Schneider
Former Director for Occupational Safety and Health for the
Laborers Health & Safety Fund of North America (LHSFNA)
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UNITE HERE, THE 2020 ELECTIONS AND BEYOND
By Marty Bennett
Many weeks after Democrats swept the Georgia Senate runoff elections, the right-wing extremists’ January 6th assault on Congress saturated the news cycle. The Capitol insurrection and the debate about an independent and nonpartisan investigation overshadowed the compelling story of how Democrats prevailed in both the November 2020 election and the Georgia runoffs. The lessons of the elections are most relevant for the 2022 mid-terms-–notably, the impact of UNITE HERE’s “safe and contactless” door-to-door canvassing to turn out Democratic voters.
UNITE HERE is a union representing 300,000 North American hotel, gaming, food service, airport, and sports arena workers. UNITE HERE members are predominantly immigrants, youth, women, and people of color. The union played an outsized role in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania–critical swing states for the Biden-Harris Electoral College victory.Building the union’s electoral capacity has taken many years. It is a model other unions, progressive organizations, and the Democratic Party can replicate in 2022 and beyond.
The UNITE HERE Electoral Strategy: Lost Timers and the Ground Game
Four pillars anchor UNITE HERE’s electoral achievements:
- Aggressive organizing in the private sector, which exceeded all other unions by adding more than 63,000 new members between 2014-2019;
- Encouraging new union members to register and turn out to vote during each election cycle;
- Negotiating with employers to permit members to leave the workplace during the election cycle, and work as paid precinct walkers (aka “lost timers”). After an election, lost timers can return to work and retain their same job and seniority.
- Recruiting and mobilizing workers to take union leaves-of-absence. To recruit sufficient lost-timers the union taps into many workers’ commitments to urge voters at the door to make change for a better world by participating in the electoral process.
The union is strongly committed to precinct organizing and door-to-door canvassing. D. Taylor, President of UNITE HERE international claims: “I don’t think there is any replacement for it.”
Over the last two decades, field experiments by researchers at Yale University’s Center for the Study of American Politicshave demonstrated that face-to-face contact at the door is the best way to turn out voters. Their research shows that voters identified and mobilized by canvassers can often provide the needed margin of victory in close elections.
The union provides lost timers extensive training to become effective canvassers and to develop their leadership skills. When they return to the workplace, many serve as shop stewards, on contract bargaining teams, and in other leadership positions.
Max Bell Alper, former Organizing Director with UNITE HERE International Union and current Executive Director with North Bay Jobs with Justice, is an experienced canvasser who served as a trainer in Reno for the November elections. Alper stated, “Our goal for the campaign was not only to deliver Nevada for the Biden-Harris ticket but also to ensure that rank and file canvassers become stronger leaders and organizers after the elections.”
The union’s ground game has become more sophisticated over time, using massive databases, tablets and smartphones to identify, track, and turn out voters. In addition, lost timers and union volunteers supplement walkers by phoning and texting most voters who receive a knock at the door.
Nevada as Laboratory for the Ground Game
By the late 1990s, after two decades of bottom-up organizing, most of the large Las Vegas casinos and hotels were organized by the union. The 60,000 UNITE HERE members of Culinary 226 in Las Vegas and Reno are the union’s political backbone in the Silver State. Nevada has been a laboratory for the union’s ground game: the state has flipped from red to blue since Barack Obama carried Nevada in 2008 and 2012; Hillary Clinton won Nevada in 2016, followed by Joe Biden in 2020. Presently the Governor, both Senators, and three of the four Congressional Representatives are Democrats, and Democrats control both chambers of the Nevada legislature.
Preparations for the 2020 Presidential Elections
According to a report by the union, How UNITE HERE Delivered for Biden, the union began to prepare for the 2020 elections in 2016 by building coalitions and electoral infrastructure in such crucial swing states as Arizona. In response to Arizona’s infamous anti-immigrant law SB1070, passed in 2010, UNITE HERE Local 11, based in Los Angeles and Phoenix, was one of the founders of One Arizona, a coalition of twenty-eight labor, faith-based, environmental justice, civil, and immigrant rights organizations. One Arizona focused on voter registration and engagement of youth, Latinx, African-American, Native American, and immigrant voters, particularly in Maricopa County that includes Phoenix and surrounding suburbs home to 60 percent of the state’s population. In 2016 the coalition registered more than 100,000 new voters.
That fall, UNITE HERE Local 11 and its sister economic justice organization, CASE Action (Central Arizonians for A Sustainable Economy), joined with a broad coalition of labor, environmental justice, immigrant and civil rights organizations to launch the most extensive canvassing effort in the state’s history to defeat racist sheriff Joe Arpaio, who for decades had terrorized and violated the legal and human rights of Maricopa County immigrants and black and brown residents. The coalition also supported a successful statewide ballot initiative that lifted Arizona’s minimum wage to $12 an hour and provided five paid sick days for all residents.
These victories marked the coming of age of a progressive electoral coalition that in 2018 became “Mi AZ” and helped elect Democrat Krysten Sinema to a Senate seat long held by Republicans by a slender 2.3 percent margin. According to a report by the Latino Voter Project, 75 percent of Arizona Latinos voted Democratic in 2018, up 22 percent from 2014.
In 2019, UNITE HERE Local 11 also worked to elect former housekeeper and UNITE HERE Organizing Director Betty Guardado to the Phoenix City Council. Progressive Democrats now comprise a majority on the Phoenix City Council.
In June 2019, hundreds of delegates to the UNITE HERE convention in Las Vegas pledged to walk precincts for Democrats in 2020. Even though 98 percent of members were laid off or furloughed after COVID-19 began in March 2020, ultimately 1700 rank and file members, many still unemployed, would participate in the ground game. Daily socially distanced canvassing began in Phoenix in July, Reno and Las Vegas in August, Miami and Orlando in September. In Philadelphia, the fifty who began canvassing on October 1st grew to 500 by Election Day.
The Democratic Party and other unions had abandoned door-to-door campaigning when the COVID-19 public health emergency began, relying instead on the phone and digital outreach to voters. UNITE HERE was the first union to organize a canvas in these swing states for the November general election and UNITE HERE had the biggest union canvassing operation in these four states.
COVID-19 and Safe, ‘Contactless’ Canvassing
All UNITE HERE precinct walkers participated in a one-day training, and lead canvassers—who had completed a comprehensive one-week training—supervised both paid and volunteer canvassers. Precinct walkers were required to strictly adhere to epidemiologists’ safety protocols at all times—both at the door and off-hours, when they could not go to bars, restaurants, health clubs, malls, or restaurants. Lost timers and canvassers far away from home were housed at extended-stay motels and prepared meals in their rooms.
Having a conversation at the door required that voters were willing to wear masks (that canvassers provided), handing them to the voter using tongs. Canvassers took daily temperature checks, wore masks (or masks and visors), remained six feet from voters at all times, and participated in meetings held outdoors or on Zoom. No canvassers contracted Covid-19 as a result of their participation in the ground game.
The field operation focused on Democratic, independent, black and brown, low-income, and infrequent voters. Canvassers were expected to hit 70-80 doors each eight-hour shift and have extended conversations with at least 15-20 voters, asking them at the door to publicly commit to voting for Biden-Harris and also making a voting plan with each voter. The union estimates that one in four door knocks yielded a conversation with a voter.
Most voters at the door were receptive to the union’s message. However, some were not. In open carry states like Nevada and Arizona, residents could answer a knock on the door with a gun holstered on their hip. Canvassers also experienced racist and sexist taunts, aggressive dogs let loose and some physical assaults. Despite fears about contracting the disease and confrontations with hostile residents, canvassers did not give up.
At the end of each shift, rank and file members checked in with their supervisors to discuss their tallies, challenges in the field, and how they could improve the next shift.
Phone Banks and Social Media to Targeted Voters
Simultaneously, UNITE HERE mobilized members and community allies to phone voters in those swing states. The union claims that one in five calls led to a brief conversation with a voter. Bilingual callers spoke to voters in their native languages, including Spanish, Tagalog, Mandarin, Cantonese, Amharic (Ethiopia), and Hausa (Nigeria).
Callers used the “ThruTalk” phone bank system that automatically dials landline and cell phone numbers (via a computer or another device) and can ‘call through’ disconnected numbers and answering machines until a live body answers the phone.
The phone banks grew to 1000 participants a day by late October. Callers identified Biden voters, made a voting plan with each, and encouraged voters to vote by mail or vote early. Callers also provided voters information about hours and locations for early voting, Election Day voting, and mail-in drop boxes. The information obtained on the phone was then transmitted to tablets that canvassers carried in the field and was invaluable during the pre-election GOTV days. UNITE HERE GOTV phone bankers conducted targeted calls in all of the above languages as well.
Beyond voter outreach by canvassing and phone banks the union designed and implemented a paid digital media program directed at unlikely or infrequent voters in these swing states that included 15 second video ads in English and Spanish viewed more than 38 million times.
UNITE HERE and the November 2020 Presidential Victory
In the November 2020 Nevada election, 41 percent of voters cast their vote early, and 48 percent voted by mail, electing Biden-Harris by just under 33,596 votes (2.4%). The UNITE HERE ground campaign had canvassed the doors of 745,000 voters and turned out more than 61,000 Biden voters through face-to-face conversations. Nevada retained a blue and female majority in the state legislature.
In Arizona, the ground game also delivered: Biden-Harris won Maricopa County by more than forty-five thousand votes, and bested Trump statewide by just under 10,457 votes (0.3%). The union delivered not only for Biden-Harris but also campaigned for Democrat Mark Kelly who won a Senate seat. Canvassers also helped to flip one Arizona House seat and another State Senate seat to bring Democrats within one seat of a majority in both chambers. Predominantly Latino and African-American precincts in Maricopa County supported Democrats by a three-to-one margin.
In July UNITE HERE Local 11 and CASE Action formed the federal Worker Power super-PAC that coordinated the Maricopa ground game. By election day the union’s canvassers knocked on 800,000 doors and made 2.5 million phone calls, boosting overall turnout in the primary and general election record levels. Their ranks of 500 canvassers included more than 100 volunteers from the national organization Seed the Vote, as well as other small groups of volunteers from across the United States who wanted to make history as part of Local 11’s electoral effort. The union estimates that its canvassers turned out 48,364 Arizona residents at the door who did not vote in 2016.
In Pennsylvania, 200 canvassers hit the streets on October 1st, joined by 300 more for the GOTV during the final week of the election. The union’s precinct walkers knocked on 575,000 doors in Philadelphia, and 67,000 voters pledged to support Biden and Harris—including 34,863 who did not vote in 2016. According to UNITE HERE, it was the largest union-based GOTV operation in the state’s history. Turnout from Philadelphia voters ultimately pushed Biden over the top by an 80,555 margin (1.1%).
“We believe we made a critical difference in Pennsylvania by focusing our efforts in the disenfranchised Black and Brown communities where most of our members live,” said UNITE HERE Local 274 President Rosslyn Wuchinich. “And despite a pandemic that has devastated our industries and our communities we did just that. That is a testament to how our union brings together those from all walks of life to harness our collective power and win for working people.”
All together during the November 2020 Presidential election UNITE HERE precinct walkers in the key swing states of Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Florida knocked on 3 million doors while hundreds of phone bankers made 10 million phone calls to voters. The union contacted 440,000 infrequent voters in Nevada, Arizona, and Pennsylvania, of whom 125,000 had not voted in 2016 but pledged to vote for Biden and Harris in 2020—two-thirds were voters of color.
UNITE HERE and the Georgia Run-Offs
Just after the Thanksgiving holidays five hundred UNITE HERE canvassers started to walk precincts in three counties in metro Atlanta just to support Democratic Senate candidates Rafael Warnock and Jon Ossoff.
Canvassers included three-dozen African-born union members and community allies from such nations as Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Cameroon, Liberia, and Nigeria. These workers, part of the union’s ‘Get Out the African Vote Initiative,’ knocked on doors in suburban Atlanta’s DeKalb County—home to most of Georgia’s 40,000 African immigrants who are naturalized citizens and are eligible to vote.
In Georgia, the union collaborated with Stacey Abrams, who had lost Georgia’s 2018 gubernatorial race by a razor-thin margin. Abrams founded both the nonpartisan New Georgia Majority, focused on voter registration and engagement, targeting youth, immigrant voters, and voters of color, and Fair Fight, which monitors election practices and organizes to thwart voter suppression.
The Georgia runoff partnership, coordinated by the national America Votes coalition, also included Black Voters Matter, Black PAC, the Poor People’s Campaign, Peoples Action, Georgia Stand-Up, Georgia AFL-CIO, Mijente, and SEIU. Many of these organizations had already established a robust socially-distanced ground game in Georgia, which was essential to flipping the state for Democrats by 12,670 votes (0.25%) in the November Presidential election.
By Election Day on January 5th, UNITE HERE locals had deployed more than a thousand union housekeepers, cooks, and airport concession workers to canvass low-income and black and brown precincts in the Atlanta metro region and the City of Columbus (GA). UNITE HERE canvassers knocked on 1.6 million doors, and two-thirds were black and brown voters. Altogether, the America Votes coalition knocked on the doors of over 10 million Georgia voters.
Historically voter turnout in Georgia runoffs had been 40-60 percent of previous November general elections. But in the January 2021 runoff, turnout soared to 90 percent of the total November election turnout, fueled by opposition to the racist Trump’s administration policies, popular demands for massive federal assistance to address the Covid-19 and economic crisis, and the largest ground operation in Georgia history, to give the Democrats a narrow victory.
Tony Evans, a member of UNITE HERE 2850 in Oakland who canvassed African-American voters in both Reno and Atlanta said, “We made this happen ‘on the doors’, we’re the people in the background who did the heavy lifting.”
Black voters, energized by black women like Felicia Davis, convener of the Clayton County (GA) Black Woman’s Roundtable, comprised one-third of the Georgia electorate and were decisive in the Georgia run-off; 93 percent of Black voters cast their ballots for Warnock and Ossoff.
Davis told the New York Times, “I am unapologetically Black, my agenda is Black, my community is Black, my county is Black. So, what I do is Black. And for 20 years we’ve been trying to tell people what was possible.”
Towards the 2022 Mid-terms and a New Democratic Majority
UNITE HERE’s experience in the 2020 election cycle points to several critical takeaways if Democrats are to increase their majorities in both the U.S. Senate and the House in 2022.
First, the ground game is essential to prevailing in close elections, even during a public health crisis like COVID-19. Democrats and labor unions must make year-round investments to build training and organizational infrastructures as UNITE HERE and allied community based-organizations have done. Ongoing digital organizing is vital as well but should not be substituted for the knock on the door and phone calls by volunteers.
Democrats must begin immediately to prepare for the 2022 ground game to win Senate seats in swing states, such as North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Ohio where incumbent Republican Senators are retiring. In Wisconsin, incumbent Republican Ron Johnson is up for re-election, but Democrats could flip that seat. Georgia US Senator Raphael Warnock and Arizona Senator Mark Kelly will run for full terms in 2022, and the Democrats must retain these two seats.
Second, by large margins, voters of color, women, youth, labor, LGBTQ, poor, low-income, and infrequent voters in major metro regions supported Biden-Harris and Warnock-Ossoff. It is also essential to continue making inroads into the ever more diverse suburbs where Democrats prevailed, such as in the Phoenix and Philadelphia metro regions—with an emphasis on voter registration, engagement, and turnout of these core Democratic constituencies in both the inner city and suburbs. To forge an enduring Democratic new majority, the electorate must be continuously expanded and lower propensity voters within these constituencies must become likely voters.
A progressive electoral organizational infrastructure must become permanent in every state but independent of the Democratic Party and anchored in the constituencies comprising the new Democratic majority.
Moreover, it is crucial to combat voter suppression at the state level by passing the “For the People Act”, HR 1, in the House and S1 in the Senate to consolidate the new Democratic majority. Blocking voter suppression in Texas and North Carolina could enable Democrats to flip those states.
Third, the labor movement must hold Democrats accountable for implementing the party’s most progressive platform for any Presidential candidate—which is in large part a byproduct of Bernie Sander’s 2016 and 2020 Presidential campaigns and the progressive resistance to the Trump regime after 2016. The recently enacted $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package is a historic step forward, as the two pending infrastructure bills totaling $4.5 trillion could also be—but much more must be done.
To win the loyalty of core constituencies and to build an enduring new majority, Democrats must implement a progressive agenda that includes: a $15 minimum wage; canceling student debt; creating good green jobs and a just transition to a clean energy economy; approving the Protect the Right to Organize Act; winning comprehensive immigration reform (including a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented); legislating paid sick and family leave; expanding access to the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid, and curbing police violence and transforming the racist criminal justice system.
Such a progressive agenda is now moving from the margins to the mainstream within the Democratic Party. The approval of Proposition 208 in Arizona in November 2020 that raised taxes on the wealthy to fund public education and Florida voters’ approval of $15 minimum wage by 60 percent of the vote indicates the popularity, in red and blue states alike, of a multi-racial economic populist agenda.
Moreover, this progressive agenda will enable Democrats to make further inroads with non-college educated white voters who decisively supported Trump. Many of these voters deserted the Democratic Party due to NAFTA, job loss, and deindustrialization, the stagnation of their wages and household incomes, the shredding of the social safety net, and never-ending wars in the Middle East.
According to UNITE HERE Secretary-Treasurer Gwen Mills, “The key takeaway from the election is that workers saved our democracy—workers did the essential door-to-door canvassing and everyday working voters turned out. With their votes comes a mandate for change to help working and low-wealth people.”
There is no guarantee that the current Democratic coalition is stable. The path to victory in 2022 runs through the ground game as demonstrated by UNITE HERE, broadening the electorate, and achieving concrete policy victories that directly address the needs of the emerging Democratic majority.
UNITE HERE is now meeting with other unions and community-based organizations to develop an even more robust ground game for the critical 2022 mid-term elections. As union President D.Taylor told the American Prospect, “I need to urge all labor unions to get on the doors.”
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For UNITE HERE 2020 elections data references, please go here
This piece originally ran in Beyond Chron
Two Poems
By Stewart Acuff
Freedom
Freedom ain’t fruit pie to slice in slender pieces stretched for too many mouths
Or biscuits split in half covered with thin gravy to fill hungry bellies needing eggs, going without
Freedom refuses to be a scarcity available only to the most powerful
Fake freedom, freedom for the few dries on its vines shrinking in hot sun withering to husks
Full freedom must be watered and guarded so it flourishes stretching to cover everyone
Real freedom is as big and bright as the West Texas sky even at night shining in star light
Those who spend lives fighting freedom for others lose the little liberty of their tiny lives
Fighting freedom begins the end of humanity and its promise of harmony
Fighting freedom is the start of all atrocities
Freedom squeezed by the white men of Texas dries to seeds ready to rise.
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Hunger
What is hunger?
Is it three days of peanut butter?
And saltine crackers?
A steady diet of ramen noodles?
No money for fresh vegetables
Or is it only children of war and famine?
Stomachs stuck out from malnutrition’s sickness
What about the kids of only one parent?
Working two part time jobs no benefits
A caregiver, cashier, hotel maid
Starvation and poverty pay
Never paid a living wage
Kids at home subsisting on cereal
Hunger now as American as corporate power
And greed great enough to destroy us and earth.
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96.7% of Ballpark Concessions Workers Vote to Strike for COVID Safety, Health Care, and Hazard Pay“ Don’t be a Giant Idiot” Workers Demand Better COVID Safety at Ballpark
By Marc Norton
Update #2: Local 2’s strike vote press release
96.7% of Ballpark Concessions Workers Vote to Strike for COVID Safety, Health Care, and Hazard Pay
YES Vote Means Oracle Park Food Service Workers Could Walk Out at Any Time
San Francisco, Calif.—An overwhelming 96.7% of food service workers at the SF Giants’ Oracle Park voted to strike as negotiations over COVID safety, health care, and hazard pay stalled between hospitality workers union’ UNITE HERE Local 2 and the Giants’ food service contractor, Bon Appetit. Turnout was approximately 86% of active stadium workers. At least 20 concessions workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the stadium reopened. Concessions workers’ overwhelming “yes” vote means a strike could be called at any time.
Photos and video of voting and ballot-counting are available for download here: https://unitehere.box.com/s/dgf87rs04cfg7cjkq60z73aetv1d6ah6
“Oracle Park workers are like a big family, and we’re ready to go on strike to keep ourselves safe from COVID and for our health care and wages,” said Aurora Rodriguez, a cook at Oracle Park for 20 years. “I’m a single mom, and one of my children has a chronic medical condition that puts him at high risk if he’s infected with COVID. That’s why we need better protection at work. I’m ready to do what it takes to protect his health and make sure my family has the health insurance we need.”
At least 20 concessions workers have been infected with COVID-19 since the stadium reopened. The Giants have failed to mandate and/or enforce masks and social distancing at concourse concessions stands, private suites, and more, and food service workers often have to deal with unmasked guests who are under the influence of alcohol.
Ballpark workers have struggled during the lockdown without secure health care and with little support from Bon Appetit or the Giants. Eligibility for health insurance is currently set at ten events per month, but some of the coming months have only nine events scheduled. Workers are asking to lower the eligibility threshold to nine events per month.
In negotiations on reopening, Bon Appetit promised workers that hazard pay wasn’t warranted because working conditions would be safe. Workers are demanding hazard pay of $3 per hour.
“I voted yes to strike for our health and welfare. Some month’s there’s only nine events, and then we don’t get health insurance,” said Deborah Torrano, a suite attendant at Oracle Park. “Last night I must’ve told 200 people to put a mask on, and it’s stressful because a lot of them just make fun of you and give you attitude. I’ve worked at Oracle Park for 22 years and at Candlestick for 10 before that. We deserve better after all these years.”
“Bon Appetit and the Giants’ approach to workers and fans’ safety during this latest surge of COVID-19 is completely inadequate and dangerously irresponsible,” said Anand Singh, President of UNITE HERE Local 2. “Our members have carried on through this pandemic without fair compensation and security in our health insurance, while the Giants have continued to reap profits. We are ready to fight for our health, our safety, and for justice at the ballpark.”
UNITE HERE Local 2 Marriott workers won a two-month strike in 2018. Ballpark workers won their last contract after a one-day strike in 2013.
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UNITE HERE Local 2 is the hospitality workers’ union in San Francisco and San Mateo representing 14,000 workers in hotels, restaurants, food services, and at SFO.
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Update #1:
Local 2 has scheduled a vote on Saturday, Sept. 4,
to authorize a STRIKE at the ballpark
if our demands are not met
While the rock band Green Day was blasting out their hit number “American Idiot” at the San Francisco Giantsballpark on Friday, August 27 to a huge crowd, UNITE HERE Local 2 workers and staff inside and outside the park were handing out “Don’t be a Giant Idiot!” flyers. Local 2 represents hundreds of food service workers at the ballpark.
Thousands of Green Day fans — some masked, many not — were gathered for the concert, in the midst of the surging COVID-19 pandemic propelled by the Delta mutation. The Giants were doing little, if anything, to protect workers in the park from the ravages of the coronavirus. That is the way it is at the ballpark these days.
The Giants website boasts that there are “NO COVID-19 ENTRY REQUIREMENTS,” but warns fans that they can’t bring backpacks or alcohol into the park. A little COVID, however, well, apparently that is okay.
According to the Local 2 leaflet “Over 20 occurrences of COVID have been reported since the start of the baseball season among Ballpark Food Service staff.”
Linger, for a few moments, over that word “reported.” There is a state law, AB685, that requires employers to provide “written notice” to workers of any “potential exposure to COVID-19… within one business day.” Yet, it was not until August 11 that food service workers were given any kind of written notice about COVID-19 in the ballpark — for a season that began in April — and that notice reported only one potential exposure.
A few days later food service workers got a written confession that there had been many more “positive tests” — one in April, 11 in July, and seven in August (through August 12).
Of course, much of this was really not news to ballpark workers, who have been hearing about infections and workers getting sick since the beginning of the season. Reportedly there were workers in the warehouse who have been infected, and warehouse workers travel all over the ballpark delivering supplies. There is also a story about an area supervisor getting infected. Supervisors also are in and out of many concession stands during their work day.
Yeah, “over 20 occurrences of COVID have been reported…” Sure, boss.
As of Tuesday, August 31: Three Giants ballplayers are now on the COVID-19 injury list: starting pitchersJohnny Cueto and Alex Wood, and infielder Donovan Solano. Wood and Solano tested positive for the coronavirus. Cueto is “not well.”
I emailed the Giants on Saturday, August 28, and asked if they could provide me, a journalist writing about COVID-19 at the ballpark, with a full list of COVID-19 incidents in which workers at the ballpark have tested positive or have been diagnosed with COVID-19 during the current baseball season, and what they have done about it. I haven’t heard a thing.
I made a public records request to the authorities in San Francisco last April, asking for written documents between the City and the Giants regarding COVID-19 safety protocols at the ballpark. I haven’t gotten a single document yet, over four months later. Apparently the city’s safety protocols at the ballpark are a state secret.
Meanwhile food service workers are now attending to thousands of fans every game, basically playing a game of Russian roulette with our lives, the lives of our families, and the lives of our communities.
Back in April, some readers may recall, the Giants food service subcontractor, Bon Appetit, demanded that workers sign a release of liability for COVID-19 infection at the ballpark. Fortunately, Local 2 officials put a stop to that. But the fact that such a release was even created speaks volumes about the contempt with which the Giants treat ballpark workers.
Not that the Giants are unique employers. For example, hotel workers in San Francisco, and indeed around the country and the world, are facing severe cutbacks that threaten our safety and our livelihood. The same with other hospitality workers in restaurants, airline caterers, clubs and other sports stadiums — both union and non-union. Bosses rarely miss a trick to jack up the bottom line, even if it means taking advantage of a worldwide crisis.
According to Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta, “The work we’re doing right now in every one of our brands is about making them higher margin businesses and creating more labor efficiencies, particularly in the areas of housekeeping, food and beverage and other areas.”
Kick those workers while their down, Mr. Nassetta?
“Don’t wanna be an American Idiot,” sings Green Day. Workers everywhere are facing a health crisis which seems to have no end in sight, not even that proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
The number in the US of workers and other groups who have died from COVID is fast approaching the number of those who died in the Civil War — 655,000 — and looks to blow right past that number and keep going.
This is a country that doesn’t know how to get people vaccinated. A country that can’t do serious mass testing, contact tracing and isolation. More than 1,200 people are dying every day in the US from COVID-19. More than 100 are dying every day in California. There are more than a thousand people with COVID-19 in Bay Area hospitals, besting the numbers at the height of every previous surge, excepting only last winter’s mega-surge.
Nor can the American idiots running our country deal in any real way with the economic devastation — including the impending eviction crisis — that the pandemic and our greedy corporate masters have wreaked on us poor working-class folks.
The Local 2 “Don’t be a GIANT IDIOT” flyer noted that the last wage increase food service workers got was in “April… of 2018.” The Giants never lifted a finger to help provide health care to laid-off ballpark food service workers during 2020, although the pandemic was raging.
Local 2 has demanded a $3 per hour retroactive hazard-type pay increase, and even that demand is incredibly modest compared to what we have suffered. Especially considering that the fortune of Charles Johnson, the controversial chief owner of the Giants, increased by $815 million from March 2020 to January 2021, commanding a fortune of something north of $5 billion.
While I was passing out the Local 2 flyer at the Green Day concert, I was approached by a security guard who told me that I was on Giants property and had to move. I was actually at the Lefty O’Doul Gate on the walkway behind the stadium next to McCovey Cove. Hundreds of people were streaming past me going into the concert or strolling along the cove, but somehow I was picked out as an intruder.
When I told the security guard that the law permitted me to do exactly what I was doing, he went off in a huff. I was soon confronted with one of San Francisco’s finest, who informed me that the Giants had called and complained about me. I must have been doing something right, I guess. I effected a tactical retreat, moved back a few feet, and passed out flyers for another couple of hours.
Anand Singh, the President of Local 2, told me he sums up the situation at the ballpark this way:
“Although Bon Appetit/Compass [the Giants food service subcontractor] have taken some steps to address our members’ health and safety concerns, the overall approach adopted by the Giants to keep both workers and fans safe during this latest surge is completely inadequate, and dangerously irresponsible. Our members have carried on through this pandemic without fair compensation and security in our health insurance, while the powers that be have continued to reap profits. We are ready to fight for our health, our safety, and for justice at the ballpark.”
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Straight Off Willow Street
By Robert Gumpert
Next month, the 14th of September to be exact, California’s Governor Newsom faces a recall election. A loss will mean a Republican governor with consequences for the state, the nation, and the Democratic Party, including but not limited to: a Senate appointment if Senator Feinstein takes early retirement, or dies, in turn affecting any possible Supreme Court opening.
As always, the outcome will depend on turnout.
But today’s post presents three voices from the unhoused because those living on the streets of our cities, towns and roadways have been made a an issue Republicans hope to ride to victory, bringing their form of limited government for the rich to the country’s most populated state.
So instead of talking about those living on the street as the enemy in a domestic war, today take a moment to read what they have to say about their situations dealing with forms of the problems anyone without unlimited resources faces.
And remember, if you are a registered voter in California Vote No on the recall, for the your future you, the future of your kids and the type of community you want to live in.
All three folks were living on Willow Street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district on the 25th of August when the city conducted a homeless “resolution” operation – meaning people would be offered “places”. If they refused what was offered, they would have to move on. No surprise to anyone involved with housing issues there were only five spaces, all shelter beds for women. There were more than 20 men and women living on the two blocks being worked and the operation was changed to a “cleaning”, people move all their belonging out of the way and public works come through and sweep and wash the street and sidewalks before people move back.
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“Any type of services I’ve had to debate whether or not I’d take it or not. The people who are coming to see us, they’re asking us to leave. They’re coming with the police. They’re coming with garbage trucks telling us we got to go, tents aren’t going to be allowed up, and then they say but we’ll send you to tent city. Ok, so I can’t sleep on the streets in a tent but you’re going to put me somewhere where I can be in the street, in a tent. Then I find one of the places where they do this tent city and it’s gated in. It’s covered so no one can see in, nor out. It’s locked doors, and I have to sign in and sign out. All that reminds me of jail! And it also takes me to a point where it was the Chinese, they did that to, concentration camp. Why would I want to put myself back in a situation where I feel like I’m back in jail but I’m on the street? Why would the city want me to stay off the street in a tent but pitch me in a place where there are tents but no one can see me? Are they helping me? Or are they helping themselves? They’re helping themselves. They don’t have to see us, then they don’t have to think about us. But for some people you get out here it’s just much easier not to have to pay rent. Not to have to have the nut. Not to have to do these things.”
“I’m out here and I don’t particularly like it but my addiction say if you want to beat me you have to be about me, but know what you want to be. I’m not trying to stay in too long. I have friends out here 13, 14, 15 years, finally got a place to stay. I’m happy for them. I would like to get my own place, haven’t achieved it though I’m trying.”
“If I give in to my addiction but not give up on life, that’s the difference.”
“I can give up just living life on life’s terms and go into my addiction, and let my addiction do it’s run because it’s only a run. They always talk about “this was my bottom”, but even bottoms have bottoms. So you might stop for a moment, get it right, then find out there’s another floor to my bottom. I got to go through it because in order to understand it I got to get there. If I don’t then I keep lying to myself and putting myself in situations where everything is destroyed. If I give in to my addiction but not give up on life, that’s the difference. A lot of people are giving up on life. You talk to some people, and they say they’re dead. They’re spiritually dead. I’m not giving up because I do have things I want to live for, and I want to live. I want a better situation for myself. I know I can have a better situation for myself, but I need to go through what I need to go through. I just have to get through this the best way that I can.”
“Some things I just need around me and that keeps me human”
“Accepting help is alright when the help comes that’s really helping and not just trying to shove me out of the way. You (the city) send somebody in here to talk to us about going someplace. You ask, “them where can you go?”, and they tell you. You ask them where it is and they say, “Oh I need to call my boss to find out.”
What kind of information are you bringing me? If you ain’t got it right, what makes you think I’m going to go someplace you’re telling me to go? I’d rather stay where I’m at. At least I know what’s ahead of me. I don’t know what’s ahead of me, going where you telling me to go, cause you don’t have the information telling me how to even get there. I’m not going to something that’s half told to me. When you’re in this life you don’t want to wait. I ain’t got time to sign no paper. I need to go get mine, my drug of choice. I need to start my day even before I can even think about what you’re telling me.”
“I’ve left and came back and they’ve thrown away everything I own including my ID, Social Security card, Medicare card. Everything that you need to collect services, which takes time to get back.”
“You get thrown in this pet camp. You got people on the door telling you what you can and cannot do. They give you a place to sleep, eat, but you can only take certain items. You telling me get rid of all that and sleep on a palette, in my tent, and everything I own must be in my tent, or I can’t have it. But somethings you get attached to. Some things I just need around me and that keeps me human. Now you want me to be inhuman. I got to live in this tent, most of them are 6×9, same size as a jail cell. You can’t move around. Once you’re in, you got to stay in and stay still. That’s all jail to me. It brings it all back.”
“I’m going to get better. My run’s just about over because I’m tired. They say you got to be tired of being sick and tired, but it’s just something that they say. But if you’re tired, once you rested up you have the energy to go do it differently. That’s what happens when you relapse. It’s got to be more than being tired of being sick and tired. You got to be through with going through the door you been going through. It takes time. Everybody can’t do it the first time, you might have to do it multiple, multiple times. I’ve been called a recovery junkie because I relapse. I don’t relapse right away, I’ll be a year here, six years there, it’s all a constant fight.”
“The people that you’re (the city) sending out here, they’re not offering services, they’re just offering us to be out of the way. It’s not fair to those that really want some help, you have to wait for so many things.”
“My belongings are all I have. They’re how I survive. My clothing and you know, my knife, pepper sprays, and things like that. I use them for everything including protecting myself from weirdos. Without my cloths I couldn’t protect myself from weirdos either, and I’d be walking around naked.”
“At this point I’m desperate just to be safe and have somewhere I can go and be safe and warm, and not have my things be stolen from me everyday.”
“My belongings is like my wife. You know it’s what I have to live for, what I work for. I put a lot of effort into doing things that I need to do to keep myself going and that’s what my things are. My things aren’t just like materialistic things, they’re something that actually means something and gets me going throughout the days.”
[When they come through and take it all] “I wouldn’t say (I’m) angry, I’d probably say hurtful because people don’t know how it is for people that stay on the streets without nothin’. People don’t see or realize how much hard work we have to do to get what we need. It’s like a waste of time, that’s why it’s so hurtful because we work for what we get.”
“My dog. He’s a puppy. It’s the first time I’ve actually raised a dog with like my bare hands. You know what I mean? He’s well trained. He’s well listened and he’s someone I love. He’s not just an ordinary dog, he’s like a human. He means a lot.”
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The political right is growing in Italy because there is no Workers Party for Socialism in the 21st century
By Maurizio Brotini and Lepoldo Tartaglia
The Stansbury Forum is proud to publish an analysis of the rise of the right in Italy by two leaders of the CGIL, the largest national Italian labor federation. This article is translated from the Italian original.
I.
From the international point of view we have been witnessing for years a crisis of US hegemony. We have gone from the inability to form a coherent Western coalition to address the so-called war on terror imposed by the Bush Administration, to the financial crash of 2008, to the election of Trump as President: all unequivocal signs of a triple crisis, of international hegemony, of the financial system’s fragility, of the legitimacy of the traditional ruling classes. China, on the other hand, presents itself as a credible international competitor, despite continuing to suffer from a deficit in the attractiveness of its model of societal organization; a deficit that the effective management of the pandemic could – the conditional is a must – at least partially satisfy.
What remains unclear is the outcome of the transition, in particular a) the willingness of the current hegemonic power (USA) to “undergo” the transition without resorting to all the weapons, even the most destructive, at its disposal and b) the capacity of the emerging power (China) to escape in turn from the temptation of unilateralism and to remain, as it has in truth done up to now, on the terrain of multilateralism. This will be the subject of the political battle by all governments and all peoples in the immediate future.
II.
From a continental point of view, the process of European construction has never really recovered from the crisis of 2008 – 2012. In recent years we have entered a phase of relative stabilization, which, however, has not been able to stop Brexit (for the first time since the 60s integration loses pieces instead of adding them) and the widening of the cracks in the mercantilist and the basically hegemonic model imposed by Germany on other European nations. Even before the outbreak of the epidemic in Germany there was an alarming slump in investment, which threatened to drag down the weaker national economies, which were subordinate to the German-driven continental value chain. Also on this front, the pandemic had an acceleration effect on an already creaking mechanism.
If in 2008 – 2012 what held the EU together was the fear of the leap into the void and the loss of security, it is possible that in the 2020s, once the epidemic is over, there will be nothing left to lose, and not even the fear card can be played to hold together what remains of the dream of continental integration.
III.
Italy has never substantially emerged from the 2012 recession. Of the top 10 Italian companies measured in annual sales, 7 are publicly run. Big industry has outsourced to pursue favorable profits and taxation. Small and medium-sized enterprises, developed since the end of the 1970s as a response to the centrality assumed by labor conflict in the large factories and to the pressure exerted by the State on profits to finance the welfare system, has been exposed to the currents of a uncontrolled global market. Luxury and tourism industries are saved, while there is a low rate of value added in production. While the phenomenon of uneven territorial (“island”) development of the country is accentuated on a national basis, the question of underdevelopment in southern Italy is re-exploding in an even more pronounced and dramatic fashion. The pandemic has played the role of accelerator of dynamics already underway.
IV.
For more than a decade now we have been in a further phase of capitalist crisis. A crisis that concentrates wealth and centralizes command, which has redistributed the productive forces on a world basis and destroyed an important slice of the industrial framework in the West (and in particular in Italy), which has led to a substantial reorganization of work: diffusion of precarious forms of work and impoverishment of subordinate work and large segments of self-employment. The institutions have unloaded the 2007-2008 crisis onto society: they had managed – at the cost of draconian measures – to save themselves, a certain unity of the European political space, discharging tensions into the depths of society. By widening the income gaps in the working class, forming areas of underemployment as a safety valve for chunks of national capitalism that needed to reduce wages in order to stay afloat. This has happened a little everywhere, in Italy even more, for many reasons. Today this crisis rises from society to institutions, puts state apparatuses in crisis, reveals the real national interests behind the rhetoric of Europeanism as a salvation from nationalisms and opportunities for growth and solidarity, especially of those countries that basically have always used Europe for what they needed: a value chain functional to their own economy. In the crisis, the materiality of the power relations literally blows up the rhetoric that has concealed their disruptive scope.
V.
“Redemption” and “work” are two central concepts in a workers’ hymn written by Italian socialist Filippo Turati in 1886. Yet they are extremely current elements, perhaps because in many ways the present situation of work, its exploitation, its problems of inadequate representation, especially the lack of political representation are similar to the nineteenth century. For too long there has been no party in Italy that adequately represents Labor – in its concrete and contemporary articulations – starting from its material needs and interests.
VI.
Up to now, the work has been divided into two major segments: 1. the people of the Abyss, the Hell of precarious, poor, black market work and the gig economy and 2. “stable and guaranteed” work, incorporated and subsumed in the regressive company-territory block, that of hierarchical participation, of workers’ self- activation, of the factory-community (where conflict and autonomous representation of work is excluded), where the principle of collaboration, loyalty, sharing the values of the company and the market is in force.
How to reunite the people of the Abyss with the workers employed within the first circle of companies, that of permanent employment contracts, company benefits and welfare? How to reunite socially, as a union and politically those who live immersed in digital neo-Taylorism and those who live entangled in the pervasive Toyotism? This is the greatest political, anthropological and values challenge that a Left of radical transformation faces. An already complex and diversified reality that will have to deal now with scenarios further opened by the impact of the pandemic.
VII.
It is widely believed that the coronavirus pandemic will have significant repercussions on global economic scenarios. It will accelerate trends already underway such as the shortening of world production chains, will deeply question the cultural-tourist consumption sector as a driving force for capitalist accumulation, and will put at the center the role of the State as a lender and employer of last resort. The virus will impact the ways of organizing work. Among the many and sometimes unprecedented issues that the Covi19 emergency is posing for workers is the problem of remote work. Smart working would allow a more harmonious combination of work and private life, and, consequently, an increase in productivity. If a more or less imminent horizon of “governance” of the workforce focuses on the evaluation of results beyond the working time, very disturbing scenarios open up, which question both the “measure” of work and the keeping of the traditional division between working time and life time (already compromised or in fact made more fluid in many professions). Smart working, instead of agile and intelligent work, could in fact result in endless work. We are probably close to a paradigm shift, which must be dealt with, from a trade union and political point of view, by updating slogans – such as reducing working hours with equal wages – and tools.
VIII.
The discussion and confrontation with the Italian government on containment measures with respect to the spread of the coronavirus have revealed the fundamental importance of manual factory work in the production of wealth. The veil of propaganda on the “disappearance of the working class” deriving from the robotization and digitization of the economy collapses in the face of the same declarations by Confindustria (the main Italian Association of entrepreneurs), which claims the loss of 100 billion euros because manufacturing activities have been restricted to solely strictly necessary services. All this is the product of remote work and the productive decentralization of value chains and logistics itself, understood as an essential segment of the production cycle. In reality we already knew that worker labor (and non-factory manual labor) had not at all disappeared quantitatively even in post-Fordist economies, but now we have proof of how central and irreplaceable it is in the creation of value. There is always living labor at the bottom of the capitalist model of social production and reproduction It is necessary to start over from a new neo-laboristic representation of Work, its needs and interests, from its factory and artisan dimension, passing from manual non-factory labor, widening the perimeter to forms of juridically autonomous but economically dependent work: a social block that is in the field not only as trade union organization but also politically, as a guarantee of the founding value that the Italian Constitution recognizes as Work.
IX.
It is necessary to develop a point of view that contrasts the ideology of the end of history, reaffirming the historicity and therefore transformability of socio-economic formations; a point of view that reaffirms the usefulness also for the social and political initiative of an idea of different and better society, as it is in the tradition of the Italian workers’ movement, communism, socialism, environmentalism, feminism and the emancipatory policies implemented by the movements in recent years. As the tradition of socialism teaches, it is necessary to reactivate millennial aspirations for redemption at the level of organization, struggles, demonstrations, widespread acculturation, emancipation from degradation and physical and moral brutalization. Because, if the perimeter that you allow yourself is only that of the varieties of possible capitalism, only the purest capitalism in its brutality will always appear on your watch.
X.
There is a lack of a political project that puts work at the center of any reconstruction’s hypothesis, and that counts on workers, young women and men, the precarious and widespread intellectuality as new recruits for the creation of new leadership groups that are up to the challenge. The Italian Left, in all its versions, has revealed itself in the course of the crisis not ready for the challenge. Both from the point of view of analysis and tools.
XI.
The moderate Left has failed because the framework within which its project was built, that of neoliberal governance, has failed. The constitutionalisation of the idea that within finally pacified societies there are no conflicts, but “problems” to which to give “technical” answers. The era is over of thinking that “real globalization” was – and would continue to be – a factor of progress for the society as a whole, and above all for a middle class that was seen as the expression of the creative sectors of finance and culture, which were regarded as the pivot of national life and as structurally capable of profiting from the opportunities of an increasingly open world market. The PD (Italian Democratic Party), therefore, presented itself to the citizens as a post-ideological, post-national and post-class party, which would have effectively guided the inclusion of Italy in the global village, while at the same time ensuring the maintenance of acceptable welfare levels for the working classes to resist the growing insecurity of their jobs.
XII.
The political and social forces defined in various ways as the radical Left, despite having immediately criticized the regressive traits of globalization, have failed to represent at the mass and popular level either a credible alternative or a useful accumulation of forces in a phase of long resistance. The mantra of autonomy (from the moderate Left) has been elevated to dogma, while every hegemonic tension and every push for social and institutional change has disappeared.
XIII.
Basic processes such as those above described are the basis of the strength and popular roots of xenophobic forces with traits directly dating back to fascism such as those of the Lega (Matteo Salvini) and Fratelli d’Italia (Giorgia Meloni). The latest opinion polls, for the first time give a plurality to a political force (Fratelli d’Italia) that has claimed roots in the experience of Italian fascism. The immediate cause of this right wing surge can be attributed to the crisis of the second Giuseppe Conte government which united together PD, Movimento 5 Stelle (5 Stars Movement), part of the left and Italia Viva, personal party of the former Prime Minister and former Secretary of the Democratic Party Matteo Renzi.
The crisis caused by Renzi for that government (Conte 2), the most advanced possible, given the political and institutional situation, has led to a government of broad agreements chaired by the former President of the European Union Bank, Mario Draghi, with only the opposition of the right-wing party of Giorgia Meloni and left fringe groups. The wear and tear of the 5 Star Movement and the PD have produced three forces that, according to the voting polls, each amount to 20%, two of these are right-wingers (Fratelli d’Italia and Lega), who with the current electoral law could alone have the majority of seats in the Lower Chamber and in the Senate.
Despite Matteo Renzi’s split, with the secretariat of Zingaretti of the PD, coming from the experience of the PCI (Italian Communist Party), much less with that of Enrico Letta, coming from the DC (Christian Democratic Party) and former Prime Minister, the PD failed to reconnect itself with the world of work and with the popular classes, assuming the trait of a substantially liberal/neoliberal force on the economic-social level defining itself positively, albeit with many contradictions, on the level of civil rights. A polarity that does not affect the consensus of the Right on the world of work and that gives it, albeit in words, the identity claim of the defense of the national interest.
This is the opposite of what appears to be Biden’s orientation. Biden is aggressive in foreign policy, shows greater attention on the domestic level to give concrete answers to the world of work, especially with respect to the demand for social protection that has grown with the pandemic.
In Italy, the lack of a significant experience on a mass level such as that represented by Bernie Sanders, capable of putting back into circulation the word socialism and the classic themes of social democratic experiences in northern Europe, consigns the political life of the country to an alternative/alternation between xenophobic and fascist Right and liberal center that completely cuts out the material needs of millions of male and female workers, handing them over to electoral abstention or voting on the Right.
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Living With Climate Change in Farmworker Communities
By David Bacon
According to Dr. Jessica Hernandez, a Zapotec scholar and board member of Sustainable Seattle, “indigenous peoples are the first impacted by climate change.” She points to the fate of the small municipality of San Pablo Tijaltepec, high in the Sierra Mixteca of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico: “Accelerated changes to our climate due to urbanization, fossil fuel industry, etc. continues to result in devastating impacts. The heavy rains that have recently taken place in Oaxaca, Mexico, have destroyed many of the harvests Indigenous peoples depend on. For the pueblo San Pablo Tijaltepec, their milpas [corn fields] were completely destroyed. This leaves 800 Mixtec families without the communal harvest they all depend on.”
Losing the milpas and harvest is a blow that falls on people already having a hard time surviving. The Mexican government says family income in the municipality averages about $500/month, leaving half its residents in extreme poverty. In 2020 only an eighth of San Pablo Tijaltepec had access to a sewage system, and over a tenth had no electricity. The region’s Mixteco-speaking people have been leaving and searching for work for decades as a result, joining the 400,000 who leave Oaxaca for northern Mexico and the U.S. every year.
In California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, the most productive agricultural region of the world, people from San Pablo Tijaltepec have created a new home, an extension of their Oaxacan community, in the small town of Taft. For over two decades they’ve worked as farmworkers in the surrounding fields. Here, instead of torrential rains, they face another environmental danger – the summer’s heat, which can rise to over 110 degrees in July and August.
The connection between climate change and increasing summer temperatures has been dramatized by the “heat dome” that covered the Pacific Northwest in July, leading to similar temperatures in a region accustomed to lesser heat. Portland had a high of 116 degrees. In the nearby Willamette Valley one farmworker, Sebastian Francisco Perez, died as he continued to work in the heat, moving irrigation pipes, in order to pay a debt to a “coyote” who’d smuggled him across the border. Scientists, and even President Biden, attributed the heat dome to climate change and its associated drought.
In the southern San Joaquin Valley town of Poplar, extreme heat in the summer is the normal condition in which people live and work. It is one of the poorest communities in the state. Air conditioning in trailer homes or crowded houses normally consists of old swamp coolers, which hardly lower temperatures. At work people bundle up, using layers of clothing to insulate against heat and dust.
Poplar’s families are almost all immigrants or their children, who have traveled here from other parts of Mexico, or have crossed the Pacific Ocean from the Philippines. Many now are older people, long accustomed to the heat. Yet for them the danger is greater as they get older. Some already have health conditions springing from poverty and the hard conditions in the fields. “In extreme heat, the body must work extra hard to maintain a healthy temperature,” cautions health journalist Liz Seegert. “Older adults are at higher risk for heat stroke, heat cramps, heat exhaustion and other serious health issues due to poorer circulation and less effective sweating that comes with aging.”
This rural poverty of the southern San Joaquin stands in stark contrast to the enormous wealth the labor of its people produce. Poplar’s Tulare County produced $7.2 billion in fruit, nuts and vegetables last year. Yet the average income of a county resident is $17,888 per year, compared to a U.S. average of $28,555, and 123,000 of Tulare’s 453,000 residents live below the poverty line. Poverty forced farmworkers to continue working during the pandemic. Tulare County’s COVID-19 infection rate was much greater, per capita, than large cities. A year ago Tulare had 7,603 confirmed cases, and 168 deaths. Heavily urban Alameda County had 9,411 confirmed cases and 167 deaths. But Alameda County’s population is 1.67 million, over three times that of Tulare County.
Photo Home and communities #6-10
These farmworker communities have fewer resources, but they are creative and resilient. Poplar’s Larry Itliong Resource Center holds vaccination clinics and campaigns for a park where people can find shade in the heat. Legal aid workers in Taft provide counseling about labor and tenant rights in indigenous languages like Mixteco. A history of farm labor activism in the San Joaquin Valley stretches back to the great grape strike of 1965, led by Larry Itliong, for whom the Poplar center is named, as well as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta and others.
Rosalinda Guillen, director of the women-led farmworker organization Community to Community in Washington State, condemns the system of corporate agriculture for treating farm workers as disposable. “The nation’s farmworkers,” she says, “should be recognized as a valuable skilled workforce, able to use their knowledge to innovate sustainable practices. Most are indigenous immigrants and have the right to maintain cultural traditions and languages, and to participate with their multicultural neighbors in building a better America.”
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