The violence is symbolic and psychological – The film ROMA
By Myrna Santiago
“Roma” represents Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón′s loving gaze at his mixteca nanny, “Cleo” in the film, Liboria Rodríguez in real life, as played by first-time actress Yalitzia Aparicio. But the movie is also about something else: a critique of the multiple facets of patriarchal violence in Mexico. Cuarón gives us a glimpse of personal, family, intimate violence and its mirror image in the state-sponsored violence of the 1970s, personified by the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters carried out by Luis Echeverría’s government.
Following Cleo’s every move as the indigenous maid of a middle class family at the point of its dissolution, the film shows the apparent ease with which the male head of household, a doctor, leaves his family, which includes a wife, four children, a mother-in-law, Cleo, and a young mixteca cook. Cuarón shows his father as annoyed with the messiness of the house and the amount of excrement the dog leaves in the driveway—a not-so-subtle jab by the father at the women of the family: a wife who can’t manage her maids and the maids who can’t seem to do their jobs properly. Later on in the film, Cuarón shows the father coming out of a movie-theatre joyously laughing with a new girlfriend, to the point of not noticing that one of his sons has seen him. All the while the father is pretending that he is on a work trip to Canada in the few missives he sends to the children. Child support is not on his agenda. Although the father does not beat his wife or his kids, his selfishness causes them enormous pain. The violence is symbolic and psychological, but certainly no less hurtful. Even in middle class families, the patriarch’s own desires come first, and to hell with the needs of everyone else.
Cleo meets violence closer in the face, as befitting her class and ethnicity. She is at the bottom of the social pecking order in the family, and no matter how much the mother in the house, Sofia, truly cares for her, she becomes the target of the latter’s frustration with her husband. In flashes of anger because her husband has left the family, Sofia lashes out at the teenage Cleo for failing to control the dog or a precocious kid who overhears a conversation that reveals the true nature of the father’s absence. Psychologists may have scientific terms to talk about the displacement of Sofia’s anger, but her behavior also shows that under patriarchy, all the females share the duty of keeping the man at the top of the hierarchy happy. Sofia, as the female head of household, has the additional responsibility of enforcing that idea among women of lesser status. Thus women uphold patriarchal values themselves, without the men getting their hands dirty.
In a moment of recognition and “sisterhood” fueled by apparent drunkenness, Sofia does tell Cleo that women have something in common: they are always alone. Class and ethnicity might separate them, but patriarchy brings them together. Under Mexican patriarchy, women can never trust the men in their lives will remain faithful in any sense of the word. Women will end up on their own, at the mercy of the shifting desires of the patriarch.
What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence.”
Cleo finds that out soon enough. Her first boyfriend, Fermín, impregnates her and abandons her right at the movie theatre when she tells him she’s pregnant. When she seeks him out in that squalid slum of one million people that is Nezahualcoyotl–far removed from the respectability of la Roma–to remind him that she is carrying his child, Fermín promptly threatens her. He tells her he will hurt her and “her” child if she doesn’t leave him alone. Cleo knows he is not joking: he is a martial arts expert, a young man of the lower classes who has seen his share of violence and experienced it from birth. His way out of the structural violence that poverty forces upon him, in fact, is to escalate the violence. He trains his body and transforms it into a tool for further violence.
Eventually the patriarchal drama taking place in the intimacy of the family becomes reflected in the violence perpetrated by the Mexican state. Cleo and the grandmother are shopping for a crib when los halcones, a paramilitary group in civilian clothes, attacks a student demonstration going on outside the store. Fermín, Cleo’s ex-boyfriend, rushes into the store chasing a demonstrator who is trying to hide. He shoots the young man and kills him. Aiming his gun at everything that moves, Fermín turns around and his gun points at Cleo. Fermín is one of the halcones, a thug hired by the Mexican government to repress the students who would protest against poverty, injustice, and the broken promises of the Mexican revolution. The government resents the youth calling it out; they are spoiled children who need discipline. The patriarchal state is happy to oblige. It uses one poor man, Fermín, to wreak violence on middle class youngsters his own age, manipulating a type of class warfare to protect itself. Cleo looks at Fermín with eyes wide open in recognition and fear. He embodies power and violence, cocooned by the impunity guaranteed by the state he now represents. Fermín sees her and hesitates, then runs out onto the street.
Cleo has one last encounter with the family patriarch, at the hospital where she is going to give birth to her baby. He is a doctor there and rushes to reassure her she will be fine and show how much he cares. He would love to be in the birthing room with her, but he says he’s not allowed in there. His fine performance collapses when Cleo’s female ob-gyn tells him he’s welcomed to join her in attending to Cleo. The father of the family is momentarily flustered as he is caught lying, mutters some excuse and like, Fermín, turns around and leaves. The parallel leaves no doubt about the representation of patriarchy. What these men are really good at is abandonment or violence. That’s all.
The end of the film, when Cleo saves the children from drowning despite the fact that she herself can’t swim has generated a lot of commentary. I will only add that Cuarón leaves us with one more thought about patriarchy and female solidarity. In her pain, Sofia might have been correct that women always end up alone. But what she failed to realize in that moment was that women can also end up together, united because of, and in spite of, the viciousness of patriarchy. And they can raise a family together. And bring up a great filmmaker.
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Jeff Adachi, Public Defender
By Pete Brook
An editor’s note: Both Jeff Adachi and Pete Brook are my friends, people I know through my photo work in the criminal justice system. Pete Brook has been concerned with the use and power of images in conjunction with the criminal justice system for many years. I meet Jeff sometime in 1995 when he was a deputy public defender working a murder case. I spent 18 months and we remained friends.
Jeff Adachi was a public servant for over 30 years. From 2002 until his unexpected death on February 22nd, 2019, Adachi served as the head of the San Francisco Public Defenders Office. San Francisco is the only county in California that has an elected Public Defender. Adachi won re-election five times. Such was his suitability, leadership, fierce advocacy and approval in the role, he ran unopposed four times.
In 2015, in association with the photography exhibition Status Update about the changing San Francisco Bay Area, Adachi spoke with curator Pete Brook about images, society and justice. This is a full transcript of the interview published for the first time.
How do images play into the work of the public defender’s office?
The work of defense attorneys is very visual in the sense that we tell stories through images, through pictures. Often those pictures are conjured in the minds of jurors or judges, but more often than not, we use photographs to tell the story of our clients and what happened.
The Black Lives Matter movement and this discussion of race and criminal law that we’re having across the country would not be possible without images. The videos taken of Eric Garner and Tamir Rice are indelibly seared into the brains of millions of Americans. [Videos] caused Americans to take action and it changed their perspective.
Is the practice of law easier or harder in an era of total image saturation?
Clarence Darrow would hold court for nine hours in closing argument. Reporters would sit there and hang on his every word, reported verbatim in the newspapers. At trials in the 1930s and 40s! Daily coverage. You don’t see that anymore. Print media doesn’t have the resources for that type of coverage — we have very truncated versions. As a result, the media that comes out about criminal cases is very biased. You only hear about a person who’s arrested and when they’re convicted. We’ve tried to change that.
The Public Defenders Office is active in using media to tell clients’ stories. When they are acquitted, we put out a press release. It’s rare for public defenders to do that. If we have a photograph that captures the essence of a client who’s been wrongfully convicted, or of an officer breaking the law, we’ll use it.
Your office released a video of a public defender being arrested for advising her client in the halls of a courthouse?
Yes, two of my deputies filmed it, so we released the video on YouTube together along with some stills. We had a million-and-a-half hits within a week. The next day we had 1,700 emails of support that came in for her.
What sort of images do you use in court?
The courtroom it’s a very sanitized environment. You have jurors who may or may not be familiar with your client’s neighborhood or lifestyle. So photographs allow us to give the jury a mental picture. Also, if you’re trying to describe the scene of the incident or crime, or if you’re trying to show the importance of DNA evidence, or if you’re showing an eye witness identification, pictures are critical.
There are very emotionally-charged pictures. When you see a picture of somebody who’s dead or someone who was seriously injured, it has an impact on you. Similarly, when you see a picture of a person in jail, a person locked up, a person deprived of their dignity, that’s impactful.
Justice Kennedy used three photographs in the appendix to his majority ruling in when the Supreme Court heard Brown v Coleman/Plata. That caused a lot of consternation because some legal boffins don’t think photographs have a place in any Supreme Court ruling. There also an accusation that photography is emotive and not rigorous or reliable enough.
Anytime you’re stimulating visual senses, you’re going to be accused of manipulation, but the only way that we can completely perceive something is to be able to see it. And even though they justice is blind, jurors and judges are not.
How often have you argued with the prosecution about the inclusion of an image in case proceedings?
One of the things that we often show are photographs of our clients and families. We get an objection to that because the prosecution doesn’t want the jury to see that our clients have a family.
And what do you which to exclude as defense attorneys?
We will typically move to exclude photographs that we find, or believe, are prejudicial — grizzly photos or ones that show a grizzly injury, photos that would inflame the jury.
What are your thoughts on the economic gap between the rich and the poor?
The gap has grown more in favor of rich people. The number of San Franciscans living at the poverty level is at about 13% which is commensurate with other urban areas.
But better than the Bay Area as a whole, in which 20% live at or below the poverty line.
San Francisco is very much a tale of two cities where you have on one hand, very wealthy people who have been living here or who are moving here and can afford the high rents and the multi-million-dollar homes. And on the other hand, you have people that are very poor, living in housing projects, barely scraping by.
Does this inequality have a measurable effect in San Francisco and in the Public Defenders’ work?
Right now, there’s a huge debate about increased incidence of property theft in the city. What’s the reason for this? Is it because Proposition 47 reduced theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors? What accounts for the increase in auto break-ins and cell phone theft?’ It’s need. And it’s an easy way for people to make money. It’s pretty much a supply and demand society. If you’re walking down the street carrying your cell phone on your open palm and somebody comes up and takes it from you is that really that much of a surprise? Well, you know, most people believe that society is safe and that they’re able to do whatever they can but, unfortunately, our country’s not that way.
Do you have any ideas, either a citizen or as a professional on how you deliver economic justice?
They’ve always said that it’s about jobs. Provide more jobs, then people aren’t going to be involved in crime. That’s partially true. We also have to work, particularly with young people, at changing value systems. If somebody becomes pre-programmed that selling drugs or stealing is the best way for them to survive, then they’re going to continue to do that. Even if you’re getting them a minimum wage paying job.
We have to get people to substitute in new values — hard work or cost-benefit analysis: “Should I do this or do that? If I get arrested, I could be in jail for six months and be out of operation. You know what, I’m going to choose this instead.” Getting people to make better choices based on evolving value systems is a much harder thing to do.
How do you think San Francisco is doing with its allocation of resources? Many compare education and incarceration budgets for example. How are we doing allotting our money and our energies?
Will we define happiness by how much money we have? What can I do with the money? What kind of clothes can I buy? What kind of car can I have? What kind of bicycle can I have? Particularly in an urban city like San Francisco where we’re obsessed with food, about status, about sex. We’re obsessed about entertainment. We have become, in many ways, disenfranchised with who we are as human beings. Many of us don’t relate to the struggles of everyday people
Often, the people who can be on juries are middle class or upper class, and not like our clients who have been convicted of crimes. How do you get them to understand what it’s like to struggle as a poor person in San Francisco? There are a lot of people who live in San Francisco who have nothing and they wind up sometimes in the criminal justice system. We wonder how they got there. Yet, it’s very predictable when you look at the lack of education, or the fact that many haven’t had opportunities to work, or that many live in a situation where racism and discrimination is an expected part of life. As public defenders, we help judges and jurors who have power over a client’s life to exercise that power in a way that’s going to help and support them as opposed to simply bringing them back into the system.
Do we know one another enough in the Bay Area?
We have a social justice programs at our office called the Magic Program. It’s a literacy program but we have a 2-month program where kids from the Western Addition are taken around San Francisco and exposed to different experiences. Some kids had never been to Japantown, the neighborhood next door, and didn’t know its history or the culture. We need to get children experiencing and learning new things. We have to spend more time on gaining cultural, racial and social equity — if we begin to look at our brothers’ or sisters’ problems or our neighbors’ problems as our own then we can collectively solve them.
Of course, in a city like San Francisco a lot of people are new arrivals. Many, as you’ve said, wealthy by comparison and can afford to move here. Solutions can come from the wallet as well as from being open with your neighbors, yes?
The idea that people should give back, in terms of giving hard dollars, to support various (things), whether it’s arts enterprise or something else that you want to see in your community, you just don’t see that as much. I’ve been involved with philanthropy for a long time, and I find that the people who are most giving are San Franciscans who have been here and that have that connection to the city. If I don’t have a connection to my school, I’m not going to help at the school reunion. We want to encourage people to take more of an active role in our communities. That doesn’t just mean volunteering or tutoring but, you know, really putting some dollars behind it.
Do jails work?
No.
Do the jails of San Francisco county work?
Incarceration generally doesn’t work.
If your objective is just to lock somebody up to keep them separated from society, then, sure, that works. Does it make them less violent? No. Because we’re locking them up with other people who may be even more violent. Does it teach them how to get a job when they get out? No. Does it help them evolve as people? No. There’s got to be a rehabilitation part of it. What they found as most effective in deterring bad behavior is when a person knows a penalty is coming and it is executed within a certain period of time and very quickly. So if I tell you, ‘If I see you in this neighborhood again, I’m going to give you two days in jail.’ It works.
A clearly stated and immediate response to an action?
Social science has taught us, yes. Now, does that mean that’s the best use of resources? It depends. If you’re going to lock somebody for using drugs, no, I don’t think so. If you’re going to lock somebody up for stealing a cell phone, maybe.
San Francisco has had some public profile cases of deputy misconduct in the jails and SFPD officer misconduct on the streets. Why?
We need better vetting of officers. Better use of the implicit bias testing to determine whether an officer suffers from bias and help them address that both when they’re hired and when they become police officers. By vetting I mean really looking at their record, talking to people. Just like you would if you worked for the FBI. That doesn’t occur now. You just need a high school diploma. I think officers should be required to publicly disclose when they’ve used force, excessive force and why.
Most cities have officer accountability boards. But what do they really do? In San Francisco, we have the Police Commission that oversees a lot of the day-to-day policy setting, but we’ve never had the police commissioner expose a scandal involving officer. And yet, we’ve had scandals left and right in San Francisco. We had officers who were breaking into people’s rooms and stealing things without warrants, and the Police Commissioner was silent.
As a public defender, our mission is to expose police misconduct. I’d like to see officers who have multiple complaints against them for certain types of misconduct to be terminated earlier. Accountability includes collecting better statistics. One of the things that we worked on was some legislation that requires a police department to report not only the gender and race of people they arrest but also the reason why they stopped them.
And what about law enforcement officers under investigation?
Law enforcement officers are held to a different standard. If you ever see a cop who’s brought into court for some charge, they’re released the same day. They often don’t even have to surrender. How does that happen? Are they part of a royal class? No. They’re treated differently. Why is that a police officer gets in trouble — boom — he’s able to meet bail? How is that law enforcement officers usually get their charges dismissed? I’m not saying that in every case there’s a determination based on money, but I’m just saying that that plays into it. Wealth, privilege, and race effect how people are treated in the system.
The SF Public Defenders office is in favor of body cameras?
I think body cameras are going to be important part of reform. We’re a part of the community that’s determining that policy. We think they will reduce the complaints against police officers, and definitely reduce the use of excessive force and violence.
How do you assess the health, not only of San Francisco and the Bay Area region?
We have to do more to keep families in San Francisco, to address the lack of housing. It’s probably the biggest issue that people are facing here right now.
I don’t know that we need to grow as a city. They’re talking about having a million people living here by 2025. I don’t know what that’s going to look like. I see it changing and I think we have to look at conserving part of who we are. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t modernize with the times, but if we become the kind of city that only tolerates people at a certain income level and housing at a certain price, it’s not going to be a place that I want to live.
Finally, it’s important that we support the arts in San Francisco. Art is a big part of our humanity. It’s really tragic to see a lot of our arts organizations go. Art is the cultural health of the city. That’s one area I’m really worried about because I see a lot of groups either disappearing or moving.
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My View of the Film Roma: The neighborhood too expensive for me to live in
By Joel Ochoa
In his latest film Mexican Director Alfonso Cuarón creates a time: 1970 – 1971, and a space: Mexico City’s upscale neighborhood Colonia Roma were Mexicans of all ages can relate; or in most cases they pretend to relate. The older generation, the ones who in the city during those tumultuous years, are overcome with a sense of nostalgia, the new are filled with curiosity. For the most part, euphoria permeates the national pride for the film, although some negative reaction has emerged both in Mexico and Spain.
The film portrays an upper-middle-class family as their lives unravel through the perspective of their servant, a Zapotec woman from Oaxaca, named Cleodegaria Gutierrez (or “Cleo,” as she is affectionately called). In this context, and using a sense of magical realism, Director Cuarón tells his own childhood story. The movie manages to be autobiographical, while simultaneously presenting an authentic depiction of Cleo’s socioeconomic conditions. On the one hand, he presents a family adapting to the realities of life amid divorce. The father leaves for a new romance and the mother stays behind, not entirely by choice, to pick up the pieces and rearrange her own life. On the other hand, bravely enough, Cuarón accurately depicts the ugliness of the many forms of racism in Mexican society against its indigenous population. The film reveals the conflict between class and ethnicity, that still plagues Mexican society, through exploitation of poor people who come to the city to escape extreme poverty. This exploitation has created a class of people, mostly female, working within a system rooted in slavery and indentured servitude.
This bifurcated story is masterly portrayed in the film. There is a balance in the way two very different realities intertwine. The film’s target audience is mostly urban and semi-professional. As such, the movie is being celebrated for depicting Mexican urban life in the early 1970’s. Ironically, Cuarón is being showered with accolades for depicting a reality that for many never existed. Let’s keep in mind that most Mexicans are not middle-class and never had a chance to live in Colonia Roma or in the type of house where the story develops. Perhaps this is a case of unintended “The Way We Never Were.”
In my view the movie has a much deeper side, one that goes beyond the feel-good vibe created by Cuarón’s own childhood memories: music, the beat of The City, romantic rendezvouses, and even political events (like the June 10th, 1971, massacre depicted in the film where I lost two very close friends). Cuarón challenges the viewer by not dwelling on the tragedies of his own dysfunctional family, and centering the story on the strength of an unlikely hero Cleo, the servant of the house; who in any other narrative might be a totally peripheral character. And here is where things get funky because Cuarón’s “poison pills” in the storyline aimed at short minded viewers who reacted negatively to the fact that the main protagonist is an indigenous woman. And sure enough, right at the time when Yalitza Aparicio has received nominations for her haunting performance of Cleo, some “parochial” critics, as Cuarón gently calls them, dissented because she doesn’t look like a “real Mexican.” In Mexico someone called the actress, who is an indigenous person, “cardboard colored person,” and in Spain the movie was presented with Spanish subtitles in response to Cuarón’s use of Mixtec and Mexican subtitles.
For a brief moment, Cleo is elevated to the status of family savior. But once back home, although celebrated, she resumes her daily life as a domestic worker.
To add insult to injury, Cuarón demonstrates that women don’t need to look like Lynda Carter or Gal Gadot, to name just two, to be an everyday, real-life Wonder Woman. Our real hero here, Cleo, does everything and more to fulfill her role. She takes care of the daily necessities of a family of three adults, four children, and a dog. Domestic work, ranging from cooking, cleaning, caring for the kids, and taking on the emotional labor of the adults are part of her everyday routine. She is the keeper of family secrets and does what she can to absorb the brunt of all traumatic impact for the children. Again, all this while she deals with the top down racism within the house where she is a servant and with her lover, by whom she is pregnant.
There are three instances, or moments, were Cuarón exalts Cleo’s extraordinary virtues and portrays her as the real hero of the movie:
In the first moment, during a hospital visit to find out about her own pregnancy, Cleo finds herself in the maternity ward separated by a glass window from a group of newly born babies. Suddenly an earthquake starts rattling the building, cracking down windows and dropping plaster on the baby’s incubators. As is usual in these cases everybody panics and runs in different directions, except Cleo whom calmly keeps an ever-observant eye on the newly born.
During the second moment, Cleo’s lover, a thug and member of the paramilitary group known as “Halcones,” undergoes training to attack students and other social groups critical of the government. She travels to a remote location in the outskirts of the city where a whole squadron of Halcones are being led by Dr. Zovek (a shadowy real-life character who specialized in martial arts technique). In a moment of levity, the trainer dares the whole squadron of Halcones to mimic him in a mind over body experiment. He also dares the public, among them Cleo, to try to replicate the complicated move he is about to do. Dr. Zovek announces that not even the most qualified athlete was able to master it. He then covers his eyes, strikes a Zen pose and dares everyone to do the same. The group struggles to maintain their balance as they attempt to raise their arms and stand on one leg. Cleo, with tremendous grace and fortitude, calmly maintains the pose.
Finally in the third, and perhaps most heroic, moment, the mother of the house takes the family on a trip to give the father time to retrieve some belongings from the house. She takes the family to the beach in Tuxpan Veracruz, where she plans to officially announce their divorce to the children. Cleo, who coping with the physical and emotional trauma of losing her child at birth, is invited to join the trip. She sits at the beach, not knowing how to swim, and struggles to cope with the pain of her loss. Cleo appears absent minded, distant, and overwhelmed by her thoughts. But suddenly all that stops when Cleo must be Cleo again, and against all odds, she charges into the enormous waves to save the two children who are drowning. All of this, once again, after being terrified by the water because she doesn’t know how to swim.
For a brief moment, Cleo is elevated to the status of family savior. But once back home, although celebrated, she resumes her daily life as a domestic worker. And here is the rub: the movie ends with no expectation of improving Cleo’s condition or socioeconomic status. After a moment that can be categorized as therapeutic on all sides, Cleo regains the old spark in her eyes. She returns to the old Roma house, resumes her life as the servant, and to some degree, the backbone of a family that considers her, out of necessity, part of their own. Cleo will remain part of the family conversation; at least the part when she literally saves the lives of the children, and therefore will remain a Wonder Woman. But having said that, as it happens with thousands of other Wonder Women in Colonia Roma, Colonia Beverly Hills, Colonia Embarcadero, Colonia Little Village and the innumerable other Colonias in the world, she will never sleep in the house (her room is on the roof), never share the same table (Cleo eats in the kitchen), and never share some of the many privileges exclusive of the real members of the family.
Book Review: From Coors to California: David Sickler and the New Working Class
By Peter Olney
From Coors to California: David Sickler and the New Working ClassEdited by Kent Wong, Julie Monroe, Peter Olney and Jaime Regalado – 2019 UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education
25 years ago in the fall of 1994, the California election season was in full swing and Republican Governor Pete Wilson faced a serious challenge from Democrat Kathleen Brown. He weaponized his campaign with racism and xenophobia by pushing for the statewide passage of the vicious anti-immigrant Proposition 187. Its draconian features makes Trump’s “Wall” look relatively tame. Wilson figured Proposition 187 would drive turnout for him, and he was right in that he won reelection but the courts ultimately struck down Prop 187. This was a seminal moment in California history; many political pundits say that the Republicans permanently alienated the Latino community and painted the electoral map a bright and lasting blue!
It isn’t always inevitable that the mistakes our enemies make become positives for us. Organizing and winning requires people of courage and vision. Such a man is labor leader David Sickler. The battle against 187 was a moment that tested the fortitude of labor leaders. Many of the big national unions argued that it was politically perilous to march against 187 with Mexicans and their flags and sombreros and mariachis. This spectacle would be damaging to the effort to mobilize “Encino man” (Reagan Democrats) to support the California Democratic ticket. AFL-CIO Regional Director Sickler vociferously argued that if the labor movement did not march publically against 187 that it would lose a whole generation of workers. Sickler’s leadership carried the day, and 10,000 union members marched with banners and standards on Sunday, October 16, 1994 with over 100,000 marchers from the Latino community.
Coors to California, a new book from UCLA, chronicles Dave Sickler’s life and work in the labor movement. There is a chapter on “Immigrant Worker Organizing” that chronicles the battle against 187. Other chapters tell of his work winning the Coors boycott, defeating the anti-labor Prop 226 in California and organizing construction workers. This attractive volume of 112 pages is very readable and accessible and beautifully illustrated with photos from the trenches and all the battles that Dave fought in his 50 year career as a Brewery workers union rank and filer, labor official and City of Los Angeles Commissioner and labor representative.
The subtitle of the book is “David Sickler and the New Working Class”. “New” means new to this country or in the case of women and people of color “New” to the ranks of organized labor because of years of exclusion. The genius of Sickler is that he was a bridge from the old to the new. He was able to move the “good old boys” (often white boys!) to embrace particularly the new immigrants as the key to the future of labor in California. He more than any other labor leader in my experience was able to sit in on a construction trades union meeting and convince the members to embrace new immigrants often using the earthly homespun language of one of his “Sicklerisms”.
I need to disclose that I collaborated closely with Dave over the last thirty plus years from my arrival in California from Boston in 1983, and I have co-authored with Tom Gallagher a chapter in the book about the LA Orange County Organizing Committee (LAOCOC) and the LA Manufacturing Action Project (LAMAP) that grew out of the work of LAOCOC. When we were launching LAMAP, a very ambitious organizing program to target the half a million Latino manufacturing workers in LA County, the only person who had the credibility to put 20 unions in a room to hear our pitch was David Sickler, then Regional Director of the AFL-CIO.
Dave established that “cred” because of his own working class roots, his deep experience and his fundamental respect for the members, elected leaders and the institutions of organized labor. When it was time to fight the “Paycheck Protection” Proposition 226, Sickler discarded the professional focus group message shaping approach and took the campaign right to the members of the building trades in their union meetings and worksites. He held a total of 111 meetings with most of the AFL-CIO affiliated unions, community groups, colleges, Latino, African American and Jewish organizations. Dave more than some of the organizing hot shots from inside the Washington beltway understood that without the support and commitment of elected leaders and the members of existing unions no external initiatives or political campaigns would be successful for long. As hard it is to slog through the institutions it is a necessary part of moving labor.
Dave’s friends and colleagues write the chapters describing his work that they are most familiar with. The book tells the story of Dave’s leadership of the Coors Boycott rising out of his employment and organizing at the Coors brewery in his home state of Colorado. And always at his side since their marriage in 1980 is the intrepid Carole Chiazza Sickler, a compelling and important figure in her own right and Dave’s soul mate thru all the twists and turns of his career.
The book should be must reading for young labor organizers whether on staff, elected or starting out as industrial salts by entering the work force to organize from within. The only deficiency is the failure to include a list of “Sicklerisms” sayings from Dave that have endeared him to his friends and colleagues and fellow labor combatants. Here is a sampling and maybe the whole list can be incorporated into the second printing:
About Friends: “I’ve got ties older than you” or “She’s as pretty as a brand new pair of bowling shoes.”
About enemies: “I wouldn’t trust him if his tongue was notarized.” “On a hot day he can keep an ice cream next to his heart”
About himself: “I would rather tear tape off a wildcat’s ass than handle that”
General wisdom: “They want everyone to develop their individual healthcare accounts, and now they are passing laws that every worker has to create his own job”
Dave has been an inspiration to a whole generation of organizers because of his humanity, grit, wisdom and vision. Que Viva Dave Sickler!!
There are two book parties:
For Los Angeles on Thursday, the 21st of February, register here for tickets.
For San Francisco on the 28th of February, register here for tickets.
Both events are free.
Pictures that Speak
By Earl Dotter
In his film BlackkKlansman, Spike Lee paired effective dramatization of the KKK in Colorado in the mid-1970’s with traditional film photojournalism of the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville in 2017. By doing this, Lee brought the currency of that recent live Charlottesville footage to inspire a film that speaks in the most immediate of ways about the long and ever-present history of racist hate in America. The film effectively employs photojournalism to point directly to the visceral bigotry that President Trump has enabled today within the U.S.
As a photojournalist of working people in the United States since 1968, I am aware that the lives of my subjects are often far harsher and more painful than those of my viewers. To bridge the gap, I look for common ground that workers I photograph, share with those who gaze upon them. Often I need only to capture, with a clear photojournalistic view, my subject’s desire for dignity and self-respect. My goal is not just to touch those viewers who are already sympathetic, but to command the attention of those who might just pass them by. My photo form follows its function.
Elizabeth Griffith, pregnant with her first child at the time, leaves the gravesite of her husband. Robert Griffith survived Vietnam only to die in the Scotia Mine Disaster when two methane explosions claimed 26 coal miner’s lives in 1976. Oven Fork Kentucky, located in Letcher County
A Lesson From My Time
In 1968, I was an advertising design student at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan heading toward a career with the “Mad Men” on Madison Avenue of that era. But real world events intervened. The upstart students in my advertising design course arranged a class where we reversed roles with these ad men/our instructors. We assigned them to visually respond to the Bob Dylan song, “Something is happening but you do not know what it is, do you Mr. Jones?”
On the evening of April 4, 1968, we SVA students patiently waited on the top floor of the Young & Rubicam Advertising Agency, as the Carousel projector hummed, for our instructors to make their illustrated presentations about Bob Dylan’s song. After a delay, an instructor reported, “I have sad news, Martin Luther King has been killed.” Hardly a word was said as students and instructors alike quickly packed up. I headed to my Lower East Side 6th floor walkup apartment on the Lexington Avenue subway line at 14th St. Scrawled is still wet red letters on the grimy white tiles as I exited the station was this statement, “The Last of the Nonviolent Men are Gone, Arise and Kill Whitey, The Eternal Target.”
At SVA I had the good fortune to take a photography class designed to prepare future art directors to thoughtfully advise professional photographers to competently execute an ad concept we conceived,
photographically. The core of this instruction, in one word assignments, from our instructor, Paul Elfenbein, required each of us in the class to tap into our personal point of view while exposing one roll of 35mm Kodachrome slide film for each weekly assignment. One other key instruction was we were only allowed use a 55mm normal lens, requiring us to usually photograph our subjects at close range. For me, a very shy individual, this requirement opened my world. The camera gave me the best excuse to engage with subjects I found to be worthwhile. I had to introduce myself, let them know why I wanted to take their picture, and if I was lucky the favor would be exchanged with a collaborative photo session. But it took a lot of photo classes for me and my classmates to learn how to translate what we felt about our subjects into photographs that also expressed who we were as individuals behind the camera.
In the days and weeks after Martin Luther King’s and then Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, I continued to photograph for my class in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I lived. Soon, my photo instructor put me in touch with Milton Glazer, the Art Director at New York Magazine and boom, my first published image was on the cover of its May 1968 issue. On November 20th, the Farmington Mine exploded, killing 78 coal miners. About to finish at
SVA, it was then I applied to become a VISTA Volunteer, seeking in this way an opportunity to rub shoulders with coal miners, who then worked at the most dangerous job in the United States.
By 1969, I was located in the Cumberland Plateau region of Tennessee, mostly meeting miners sidelined by black lung disease as Richard Nixon signed the Mine Safety & Health Act (MSHA) and the Occupational Health & Safety Act (OSHA) into law with the EPA formed by 1970. But it was the murder of Jock Yablonski, a United Mine Workers leader, along with his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pennsylvania home on December 31st, 1969 that resulted in five years of creatively formative work for me. First as the graphic designer and photographer for Miners for Democracy (MFD) and later when that successful campaign to unseat the corrupt UMWA leader, Tony Boyle from the presidency of that union, opened the door to becoming the photographer for the United Mine Workers Journal, a position I held until 1977. By then, the foundation for my 50 year path as a photographer of dangerous occupations had been laid, first as an SVA student; as Vista Worker photographer; Miners for Democracy activist with camera; and then as the photographer for the UMWA. My path forward has always required me to seize new photo assignment opportunities in the midst of political resistance.
In 1977, Gene Thornton, in a New York Times review of my exhibit, In Our Blood, Coal Miners in the 1970s, at Gallery 1199 of the Hospital Workers Union in NYC, said I was one of the most important emerging photographers in the United States then. But one year later he called me an agitprop artist in a review of my Rise Gonna Rise, A Portrait of Southern Textile Workers exhibit. The impact of Ronald Reagan’s presidency had quickly shifted this nation’s political ground. Then Thorne Auchter, Reagan’s first appointee to OSHA recalled 50,000 Cotton Dust Standard brochures, destined for cotton mill workers, illustrated with my photographs. Auchter
said, the photo of an already dead cotton mill worker, Lewis Harrell, on the cover, was too inflammatory. Auchter republished the Cotton Dust brochure without any photos.
By 1998, I was invited by the American Industrial Hygiene Association’s (AIHA) Social Concerns Committee to create an exhibit documenting my first twenty years of photography. An exhibit titled, THE QUIET SICKNESS, A Photographic Chronicle of Hazardous Work in America was presented at AIHA’s annual meeting of 10,000 industrial hygienists in Washington DC in 1997. These occupational health professionals said to me numerous times that the exhibit reconnected them with their original motivations for entering the industrial hygiene profession. The book of the same name, published by AIHA PRESS came out a year later. By that time, the exhibit
and book were hosted at the Harvard School of Public Health, including touring the exhibit throughout all the New England States.
In the twenty years since, I continue to be a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health (HSPH) with my photo projects benefitting from the scientific training of fellow Visiting Scholars and their networks that have offered collaborative projects in New England such as my exhibit: THE PRICE OF FISH, Commercial Fishermen Loose Life and Limb in New England (funded by an Alicia Patterson Fellowship). That exhibit was already to tour when the 9/11 attacks occurred in Manhattan and Washington, DC.
With THE PRICE OF FISH on hold, I traveled to Lower Manhattan on the first day the general public was allowed to return to Lower Manhattan and the perimeter of Ground Zero. Up to that point in my career I had done little work related to the hazardous occupation of firefighting and now 443 had died in and around the collapse of the Twin Towers. With no special access, I was limited to taking pictures of the can do attitude of the emergency responders, an inspiring sight I choose to shoot in color. But for my firehouse memorial tribute visits, black and white film was a far more appropriate choice to record this profound tragedy.
I found the citizens of New York City erecting memorials to the 443 brothers and sisters lost on September 1st, 2001 in rituals of unfathomable sadness. The motto of the fire company in Manhattan’s Theater District, that lost 15, was, “We Never Miss a Performance.” In Red Hook, Brooklyn I saw the turn-out gear of those still missing from the fire company and at the station house in Park Slope, retired fire fighters had returned to duty, looking through the New York Times double page spread to confirm for the first time their lost and missing brethren as residents paid their respects. “Because of You, I Lived,” wrote a neighbor who had been rescued.
While a very important and somber mission to document the loss of fire fighters throughout the city, upon returning to my home in Silver Spring, Maryland, I immediately began to formulate a strategy to photograph on Ground Zero itself.
I learned the Health and Safety Department of the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE), who were running the heavy equipment to open up “The Pile,” had become quite concerned about the air quality on Ground Zero, not only outside the cabs of their heavy machinery, but inside where the operators controlled this vital rescue recovery equipment.
I was granted an assignment with access from the IUOE to accompany Aron Ondu, who was an Industrial Hygienist and a member of that union as he made these critical air quality tests. For the better part of a day I photographed Ondu making those tests but also allowing me to aim my camera wherever emergency responders were working on the site as it still continued to burn. Those air quality tests contradicted the earlier pronouncements of EPA Director, Christy Todd Whitman, that the air and smoke being emitted from Ground Zero was safe.
The exhibit that resulted was called: WHEN DUTY CALLS, A Memorial Tribute to 9/11 Emergency Responders. THE FARMWORKER FEEDS US ALL, The Labor and Health of Migrants in Maine, was an exhibit I created in 2007 after documenting all of Maine’s hand-harvests. I photographed Salvadorian tree planters and broccoli cutters working right next to the
Canadian border, over half of which had legal documentation and were quite proud to show it. I made pictures of Mexican and Native Americans harvesting wild low bush blueberries at the coast in Washington County. In the Fall I photographed Jamaican apple pickers and cranberry harvesters in Madison County bogs. These migrants were farmers back in Jamaica during Maine’s Winters. I shot this exhibit with digital equipment for the first time, allowing me to show my subjects how they looked in my camera as I was photographing them. This exhibit returned a year later to most of
these same workers, presented at local libraries or community centers. I also began to request farmworker’s cell phone numbers or email addresses enabling me to thank them by providing them my digital photos in
exchange for granting permission to take their picture. This exhibit also showed the work of the Maine Migrant Health Program (MMHP) that provided free or low cost health care services to farmworkers from mobile clinics that arrived at harvest sites or labor camps. The trusting relationship the MMHP developed over many years transferred to me, allowing me to photograph the provision of health care services, but also to later follow these same workers to their work sites or camps after work.
In addition, to my current retrospective exhibit: LIFE’S WORK, A Fifty Year Photographic Chronicle of Working in the U.S.A. and book of the same name my exhibit, BADGES: A Memorial Tribute to Asbestos Workers represents an ongoing collaboration with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization.
ADAO advocates for the 15,000 victims that succumb to asbestos related diseases every year, including 9/11 emergency responders and the public exposed by asbestos released into our environment in the U.S. ADAO also seeks enactment of a total U.S. ban on asbestos manufacturing and product use. The workplace photo ID Badges included in the exhibit and poster below personalize asbestos victims, naming the companies that harmed them while employed mining, manufacturing or using asbestos at work.
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A review of Suzanne Gordon’s “WOUNDS OF WAR”
By Denny Riley
Suzanne Gordon’s latest book “Wounds of War” is about the Veterans Healthcare Administration, the healthcare plan under attack by conservative politicians and commentators, the two fabulously wealthy Koch brothers, and Veterans For America, a sham veterans organization financed by the Kochs. They all malign the VHA (often simply called the VA) on the flimsiest of anecdotal facts. Many of us have been convinced by this attack that the Veterans Health Administration is in worse shape than are the men and women who turn to it for care. Many people, even veterans who qualify for VHA care, put their health in the hands of hope. They hope the HMO or private healthcare plan they’re signed up with offers them healthcare professionals who are good. Whether they are good – whether they’ve had malpractice suits settled against them or had their licenses suspended at some time, can be difficult to discover. For-profit healthcare companies and the medical associations keep their disciplinary procedures as far from the public eye as possible. The assumption is HMOs and private healthcare employ good people. They say so in their advertisements. Certainly better than the Veterans Healthcare Administration, one would think.
Gordon swings our attention to a different view of healthcare in America. The RAND Corporation and the MITRE Corporation “confirmed, in great detail, that the quality of the VHA’s frontline care was equal to or superior to that delivered in private sector… wait times for appointments with primary care providers or medical specialists at the VHA were actually shorter than those experienced by patients using private doctors or hospitals.”
Those might be sufficient words to convince a person if discussing the matter over dinner or a glass of wine, but the force amassed in the mission to turn the VHA’s budget ($77 billion annually) over to the private sector has tremendous clout. So Gordon did the work, and with “Wounds of War” the facts are known. They are here in black and white.
Full disclosure compels me to say I am a military veteran who receives healthcare at a Veterans Health Administration facility Suzanne Gordon writes about in “Wounds of War,” and I am satisfied with the care I get, generally pleased. Compared to my friends who are enrolled in private healthcare, I may be the only one pleased with his care.
Gordon hasn’t written “Wounds of War,” however, as a champion of the VHA. She is an award-winning journalist whose eighteen published books are about healthcare, patient safety, nursing, and teamwork, and she goes at this thorough book about the VHA with the mastery she has applied to all of her chosen subjects.
Subtitled “How the VA Delivers, Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans,” the book covers all of those issues and more. Written in seventeen topical chapters with an introduction, a conclusion, and an epilogue, “Wounds of War” tells it all. The evolution of many VHA programs is explained, usually in the words of the physicians and clinicians who developed them, with brief biographies of veterans who participated. I won’t share the title of every chapter but some of the more expressive names are “Promises Broken and Kept,” “When Wounded Warriors Are Women,” “Mental Health the Way It Should Be,” “Suicide Prevention,” “Transcending Trauma,” “Off the Streets: Reducing Veteran Homelessness,” “Better Care Where?” There is more detail in these chapters than some readers might need but for those with a particular interest in a particular subject, a great deal will be gained. Let’s take the chapter on mental health, a subject everyone is interested in, either for yourself or for a friend or your boss. Gordon approached the VHA not through interviews either in person or in emails or on the phone. No, she visited a VHA facility and spent days with caregivers, in their offices, in staff meetings, and with patients. She visited the psychiatrist Lanier Summerall at a VHA Medical Center in South Carolina and also at a VHA Medical Center in Vermont. Doctor Summerall has been with the VHA several decades. From a mental health point of view Doctor Summerall describes the integrated healthcare unique in the United States to the VHA.
“70% of the United States’ medical residents and 40% of all other healthcare professionals receive some or all of their training at a VHA facility.”
“We have a breadth of psychological services under one roof that is unequaled even in the most well-resourced private-sector environment,” Gordon quotes her. “If a person is homeless, they can get help with a variety of agencies to get housing. If they are having trouble getting a job, we have supportive employment and compensated work therapy. We have residential programs for PTSD and substance abuse and for chronic, hard-to-treat psychiatric illnesses like bipolar or schizophrenia.” Summerville goes on, “Our patients have lifestyle problems, relationship problems, work problems.” She says many of the patients cannot possibly coordinate their own care or take responsibility for self-care. “The paramount thing for these people is that everybody here [the VHA facility] knows each other. We are all on the same team in the same place.” Continuing, Dr. Summerville says, “We have the only system of integrated mental health and primary care in the country.”
As Gordon reveals, the VHA functions very differently from the way it is depicted in most mainstream media coverage. The Veterans Healthcare System has 150 hospitals, 819 clinics, and 300 mental health centers, which employs 250,000 people (a third of whom are veterans themselves) and sees 230,000 patients a day. Among the many VHA innovations and inventions are the implantable cardiac pacemaker, CAT scans, the nicotine patch, the first successful liver transplant, the use of low dose aspirin regimen to prevent heart attacks, and prosthetic technology to help restore the sense of touch for those who have lost an upper limb or use an artificial hand. All of this was done on the Veteran Healthcare Administration research budget where there is no profit incentive, no patents to file, and all discoveries are made available to all Americans.
Then why are problems the VHA may have not simply fixed? Why is there a movement toward privatization rather than getting it operating at the level our veterans deserve? After all aren’t these the people we’ve been told to thank for their service, people often referred to as heroes? Well, first of all there is that $200 billion budget the Koch brothers and their allies would like shifted to the private sector. And to a lesser degree the VHA is in a different light than private healthcare. It is a public institution with the mission to fulfill President Lincoln’s promise “To care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s Veterans. As a public institution supported by taxpayers, its books are open. We can look behind the curtain and see how it is run. So those with their eye on the big budget can poke and point with ease.
Private sector healthcare has no equivalent damning light. For instance the Cleveland Clinic, a highly regarded general medical and surgery system with eleven hospitals and eighteen health centers, was fined $650,000 for serious lab violations in 2015, paid $1.6 million to the Justice Department to settle “accusations that it implanted cardiac devices in patients too soon after a heart attack or surgery,” in 2016, while the CEO received huge salary increases. The Cleveland Clinic averaged more than $730,000 on lobbying between 2014 and 2018. No one clamored for the CEO’s dismissal or the closing of any of the Cleveland Clinic facilities.
Of course money is the issue, it always is. But 70% of the United States’ medical residents and 40% of all other healthcare professionals receive some or all of their training at a VHA facility. The VHA is the spine of American healthcare. Gordon clearly and extensively makes that point. And the VHA is looking at a stream of disabled veterans for at least the next fifty years (an estimate based on disarmament happening some time soon.) Who among us will be the one to tell the returning soldier we do not care? Anyone who wants the VHA dismantled does not know the facts. Suzanne Gordon delivers the facts in “Wounds of War.”
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“WOUNDS OF WAR: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans”, Cornell University Press can be ordered here
¡Sí se pudo!: Nos enterraron pero no sabían que éramos semillas. (Yes we did!: They tried to bury us but they didn’t know we were seeds.)
By Kristin Ingram-Worthman
When I went on strike with thousands of other teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) on January 14, 2019, I had no idea how long the strike was going to last, especially because Austin Beutner, the District superintendent, seemed to have no interest in negotiating with United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) in the days leading up to the strike. Beutner’s unwillingness to negotiate during the year and a half of contract negotiations before the strike as well as his support of charter schools made it appear that he wanted to destroy public education.
The teachers’ strike ended Tuesday, January 22, lasting six days, in what the Los Angeles Times called a “decisive political victory.” Another Los Angeles Times article says the effects of the teachers’ strike has created a ripple effect across California and beyond. This new contract is an amazing victory for teachers, students, and their families. Here are the highlights of what striking teachers won.
Class size reduction: Before the strike, principals were allowed to override the rules about class size in an emergency. As a result, classes were huge. The new contract eliminates the part of the contract that allowed principals to do that. Now the rules about the maximum number of students are enforceable. For example, the maximum class size for kindergarten in non-magnet schools is twenty-seven. If there are three kindergarten classes and two of them have twenty-seven students and one of them has twenty-eight, the principal must hire another teacher.
Special education: The new contract gives special education teachers more time to assess and meet the needs of their students. It also has improved language on caseload caps.
Itinerant teachers: Itinerant teachers are teachers who travel to different schools to teach their subject matter. There are many elementary teachers who teach art, music, theater, dance, and physical education at a different elementary school each week. The contract provides a reasonable workspace for itinerant teachers. It also creates a task force that addresses the concerns of itinerant teachers.
A nurse in every school every day: Before the strike, the District paid for a nurse at every school only one day a week. Schools had the option of using their own money to pay for additional nurse days or hiring a nurse’s aide. At some schools, office personnel were used in place of a nurse. The new contract provides for a nurse at every school every school day. At a school where I worked, I remember hearing an announcement over the intercom asking anyone who knew CPR to come to the office because a student may have needed it. All of us teachers were scared, but the child turned out to be okay and did not need CPR after all. We were grateful, but teachers are even more grateful that we will have a nurse at school all the time to take care of our students.
Librarians: The new contract provides a teacher librarian in every secondary school.
Counselors: The new contract decreases the counselor student ratio from 1 per 1,000 to 1 per 500.
Support for immigrant students and their families: The District agreed to create an immigrant defense fund and will provide a dedicated attorney and hotline for immigrant families and collaborate with UTLA.
Less testing: Teachers in LAUSD spend a large amount of instructional time testing their students in reading, writing, math, and science. The new contract includes the creation of a task force that includes representatives from the District and United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and has been charged with lowering testing by fifty percent.
Charter schools: With this new contract, schools will be notified in advance of the threat of co-location. A UTLA co-location coordinator will be elected to help facilitate the development of the shared use agreement. Charter schools are schools run by private corporations that get money from LAUSD. They cause problems because as students leave public schools to enroll in these independently run charter schools, the public schools lose teachers. Some independently run charter schools also co-locate, which means they occupy empty classrooms and other space on public school campuses. Additionally, at the most recent LAUSD board meeting, the District kept the promise it made during negotiations and passed a resolution to encourage the state of California to put a moratorium on the expansion of charter schools.
Community Schools: The new contract mandates the creation of thirty community schools, which are schools with parent engagement and wrap-around services.
Green space: UTLA and the District agreed to remove asphalt and bungalows at schools to create more green space.
Six percent raise: In the new contract, the District agreed to give teachers a six percent pay raise. UTLA’s original request was a six and a half percent pay raise.
This contract win is amazing! Most of the past negotiations between LAUSD and UTLA have resulted in 50-50 compromises. UTLA won these negotiations on most of the contract issues, and as a result, so did students and their families. During the year and a half of contract negotiations, UTLA had a contract campaign that generated an unprecedented amount of public support, without which I do not believe we would have won. Parents and community members understood that this strike was not about the money. They knew teachers were fighting for better schools for their students.
When the teachers of Los Angeles won this strike, we didn’t just win a great contract; we became part of a national movement to improve students’ learning conditions and teachers’ working conditions. Now that the teachers’ strike in Los Angeles is over, it’s time to stand in solidarity with teachers in Oakland and Denver who are preparing to strike. ¡La lucha continua! (The struggle continues!)
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It’s Not Too Soon for a Labor Movement 2020 Election Strategy
By Rand Wilson and Peter Olney
First published in Organizing Upgrade
Organized labor has an opportunity to play an important role in the upcoming selection of a presidential candidate in the Democratic Party’s primaries and the eventual November 3, 2020 U.S. presidential election. The stakes couldn’t be higher, not only for the future of the labor movement but for the entire U.S. working class.
The Iowa, New Hampshire and California Democratic primaries are more than a year away.[1] But the volume of commentary and speculation regarding the selection of a candidate is already at a high level. Perhaps because of the general panic about Trump and the obvious mandate to defeat him, many union leaders appear to have lost their class perspective on the election. Very few comments we’ve seen reflect the importance of taking a strategic approach to the 2020 political process and using the primaries as an arena for struggle with the corporate Democrats.
Regardless of whom the Democrats pick, the primaries should be viewed as an opportunity for the labor movement to gain strength. That’s why it’s imperative for labor to define and advance working class values and priorities before making any union endorsements.
Well before the primaries begin, our
objective should be to unite around a forward-looking political program and
provide members and elected union officials as much time as possible to
evaluate the candidates based on these positions. Absent a bold,
well-articulated working-class program, labor’s agenda risks being crushed by
the Democratic Party’s traditional pro-corporate and discredited neo-liberal ideology.
DRAMATIC LABOR MOVEMENT SUCCESSES
The labor movement has been the subject of oft-written obituaries over the last thirty plus years. But our organizations soldier on as the largest force for positive change not funded by billionaire – and millionaire – backed philanthropic foundations.
Despite historic low union density (private sector membership is now down to 6.5% of the workforce), labor and our allies are continuing to have great successes. For example, through its innovative “Fight for $15” campaign, SEIU has succeeded in winning significant raises in the minimum wage at the state and municipal level for millions of low-wage American workers. The hotel workers union just conducted a multi-city strike against corporate giant, Marriott. Workers won a resounding victory with sizable wage increases, no cuts in health care, new protections against sexual harassment and innovative policies to deal with workload and scheduling.
The wave of teacher strikes in states like West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and beyond with workers wearing “Red for Ed,” demonstrated the power of organized workers in states that are thought of as conservative and where Trump carried the popular vote in 2016. On January 14, Los Angeles teachers followed in their footsteps by striking and waging a heroic battle for the future of public education. Finally, labor helped power the recent Blue Wave that flipped 40 House seats and gained a record setting 9 percent margin in the aggregate Congressional popular vote nationwide. Labor’s money, ground troops and organizing expertise were crucial to winning these victories.
2020 IS NOT 2016
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the anointed choice of the corporate elites. Many labor unions also rushed to endorse her because they saw no alternative. But when Bernie Sanders announced in May of 2015, there was a groundswell of support for him in the ranks and disgruntlement with union leadership’s early endorsements of Clinton. Thankfully, six national unions and over 100 local unions had the courage to endorse Sanders. That labor support and nearly 50,000 union members who were part of the Labor for Bernie network helped propel Sanders to win over 13 million votes in the Democratic primaries. The Sanders’ candidacy and his continuing activism (along with Our Revolution and other grassroots insurgencies) have pushed an anti-corporate, populist agenda that has now made issues like Medicare for All and free college tuition mainstream. Their work has also bolstered the fight for immigrant rights and is contributing to rebuilding a vibrant movement against militarism and war.
Partly because of Sanders’ success and the revulsion against Trump, several candidates will emerge in 2019-20 carrying part or most of his progressive platform. Inevitability, labor unions won’t coalesce behind one candidate. Given the disastrous results of the early Clinton endorsements, there should be no rush to judgment this time in the endorsement process.
STAND ON PROGRAM, NOT PERSONALITIES
If labor is to gain strength while weathering the onslaught of candidates and confusion, union leaders will need to:
- Begin maximum consultation with — and the involvement of — union members in shaping a broadly appealing working-class platform; and
- Use that broad platform as a key threshold that candidates seeking labor’s support must meet.
And while labor unions may have to “agree to disagree” on particular parochial planks, they should strive for broad unity along these lines:
- Strengthening labor laws and the right to organize;
- An array of economic demands like $15 per hour minimum wage, expanded Social Security and retirement security
- A “Green New Deal” with a Just Transition program for displaced workers
- Civil Rights, Immigrant Rights and Women’s Rights
- Support Medicare for All, not military budgets and endless war
UNITE THE WORKING CLASS; BUILD POWER IN THE PRIMARIES
Armed with a program — and the support of the members — unions can enter the primary election fray and winnow-out genuine pro-labor candidates from the corporate Democrats.[2] Candidate forums and endorsement questionnaires are essential tools in this process. Unequivocal support for labor’s strikes, contract and organizing campaigns should also be used by unions as a key benchmark for earning an endorsement.
Our experience in the 2016 Democratic primaries showed how these tools provide an important route to genuinely building working class electoral power.[3] For instance, last time around Bernie Sanders’ support for the Verizon strike proved to CWA members and many other workers his sincerity and credibility as a candidate. The eventual effort in the Democratic Party to defeat Donald Trump in a “united front” with others is not diminished by this engagement but is, in fact strengthened. Look how far the Medicare for All campaign has penetrated the political discourse because of Sanders’ candidacy in 2016. Similarly look how the newly elected, anti-corporate House members are setting the agenda in the House of Representatives now run by Democrats.
LABOR CAN PLAY A UNIQUE ROLE IN WINNING BACK TRUMP VOTERS
Labor unions are membership run, democratic institutions with their leaders subject to votes of the membership. As such, union leaders must succeed in uniting a broad array of member viewpoints. That makes labor organizations an important force to challenge the Trump phenomenon with our members and especially with white male working class voters. Labor will be more credible in so-called “red states” if our leaders are armed with a program that speaks directly to the needs and interests of the multi-racial working class.
The natural diversity in union workplaces provides union members a golden opportunity to contend with their fellow workers who supported Trump. Often those eventual Trump supporters were originally Bernie backers in the primaries. Political scientists estimate that 12% of Sanders supporters in the primaries then voted for Trump in the 2016 general election. In a close election to be decided in a small number of swing states, the opportunity to win back Trump supporters should not be overlooked.
National People’s Action is organizing in some “red” states with grassroots door-to-door organizing in rural areas.[4] Labor unions can have the same positive conversations about race and class and the same possible effect with our members – but only if union leaders focus on issues and commit to having a genuine consultation with members. Early endorsement of a corporate candidate only because of “electability” will undermine the credibility of our message and spoil the opportunity for membership engagement. Nothing could be more instructive than our unions’ experience with the botched 2016 primaries and the disastrous election of Trump. Let’s not jump the gun that way again in 2020!
[1] The Iowa contest is February 3, 2020 and early voting in California will begin that day; New Hampshire is set for February 11.
[2] A perfect opportunity will be to hound and challenge any candidates who support charter schools and education privatization.
[3] The authors are indebted to Tom Gallagher’s insightful political analysis in The Primary Route: How the 99% Takes on the Military Industrial Complex, Read Peter Olney’s review on the Stansbury Forum here; the book can be purchased here
[4] See “Winning in Trump Country” here.
Reviewed: “Where We Go from Here” by Bernie Sanders
By Tom Gallagher
The 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign made its mark with laser-like focus on the mounting wealth and power inequities of twenty-first century America. At the same time, as Sanders notes in his new book, “Where We Go from Here,” he was “criticized for not speaking enough on foreign policy.” And the truth is he probably would have come in for sharper criticism, were it not for the fact that most of his supporters on the left held their tongues because they were otherwise generally flat out thrilled with his campaign, despite this perceived shortcoming. Thrilled that a self-described democratic socialist had succeeded in talking plain talk to the American people about taking control of our institutions back from the billionaires and corporate elite whose wealth and power grows seemingly by the day. But if this new book is any indication, should Sanders opt to run again in 2020, he could well distinguish himself from the rest of the primary pack more clearly with his foreign policy ideas that than his economic proposals, given that so many of those have already been adopted by other potential contenders.
Given the newly found interest in causes brought to the fore by the Sanders campaign – single payer health insurance, a $15 dollar-an-hour minimum wage, tuition-free public higher education, etc. – now demonstrated by others who would also wish to be president, it seems clear that while Sanders did not win the 2016 nomination, his campaign did win the debate – hands down. But even this substantial shift on these major issues may ultimately not prove to be the campaign’s most dramatic impact upon the American political scene. By now many, if not most Americans realize that we are the only advanced industrialized nation without some form of a universal health care system, but fewer appreciate the fact that historically the U.S. has also been an outlier in its absence of a broad-based socialist movement, to the point where some political scientists have characterized it as a permanent feature of “American exceptionalism.”
That is, it seemed a permanent feature until the Sanders
campaign introduced “democratic socialism” to mainstream political discussion.
And going beyond even that, nothing demonstrated the viability of the
“political revolution” Sanders advocated more clearly than the simple fact that
he effectively advocated a government free from corporate domination in a
campaign free from corporate fundraising. With its more than two million
individual donors making over eight million donations averaging $27, the 2016
Sanders campaign achieved the previously unthinkable. His campaign didn’t
just advocate change – it was the change “we’ve been waiting for … the change
that we seek,” to a degree far beyond what Barack Obama ever attempted.
It turned out that you could actually play in the big arena, without the
big guys’ money.
“… these wars have significantly impacted Europe, which has seen the rise of right-wing extremist movements in response to the mass migration of refugees into those countries.”
There’s no mistaking the fact that “Where We Go from Here” is the sort of book that prospective presidential candidates produce to keep their names out there and hopefully advance their positions in the discussion. Sanders writes that “On domestic policy … there are major differences between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. On foreign policy, not so much. In fact, a number of observers have correctly pointed out that, to a very great degree, we have a ‘one-party foreign policy.’” To stake his claim to being the one to change that, the book contains the entirety of his September 21, 2017 foreign policy address at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, a speech one writer described as bringing “regime change to the liberal interventionism of the Democratic establishment.” Harkening back to the campaign debate when he called Henry Kissinger “a terrible secretary of state” and “a war criminal” (after Hillary Clinton had cited him as “a friend and mentor”), and then proceeded to a level of truth telling unprecedented in that arena when he talked about the U.S.-orchestrated overthrows of the democratically elected governments of Iran’s Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 and Guatemala’s Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, the Fulton speech went on to argue that the U.S.-supported installation of “the Shah, a brutal dictator … led to the Islamic Revolution, the rise of the Ayatollah Khomeni, the taking of hostages at the U.S embassy, and our current hostile relationship with Iran.”
Given the general truism that Americans seldom remember the damage our government has done to other nations while the populations of those countries will never forget – the mere suggestion that there might be a rational explanation for Iranian hostility towards us qualifies as a bold step outside the narrow confines of our “one-party foreign policy.” But then the book goes much deeper, noting that in addition to the fact that the “war on terror in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Yemen has cost the United States thousands of lives and trillions of dollars. These wars have caused massive destabilization in the region, the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people there, and the displacement of millions who were driven from their homelands. Further, these wars have significantly impacted Europe, which has seen the rise of right-wing extremist movements in response to the mass migration of refugees into those countries.”
The idea that our mendacious Iraq invasion fiasco, our failed seventeen-year Afghanistan War, or our ally Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Yemen (utilizing American-made military equipment and guidance systems) might have something to do with the mysterious rise of Europe’s “right wing populism” is utterly beyond the pale of the usual narrow range of American foreign policy discussion. As Sanders writes, despite its being “a despotic autocracy controlled by an extremely wealthy family that treats women as third-class citizens, jails dissidents, ruthlessly exploits the foreign labor that keeps its economy going, and has exported the extremist Islamic doctrine of Wahabism around the world,” there is “almost no debate as to why we have installed Saudi Arabia as the ‘good guy’” in the Middle East “ while Iran is the ‘bad guy’ … the position of the 2016 Democratic candidate for president, Hillary Clinton” and of “the Republican president, Donald Trump.”
As Sanders sums it up: “the global war on terror has been a disaster for the American people and for American leadership. Ongoing U.S. national security strategy essentially allowed a few thousand violent extremists to dictate policy for the most powerful nation on earth. It responds to terrorists by giving them exactly what they want.” Should Sanders go again in 2020 it seems unlikely there will be too many other candidates competing with him to be the first to deliver that message.
“One of my goals over the last several years has been to help create a fifty-state Democratic Party. It is beyond comprehension that Democrats have essentially conceded half the states in this country to Republicans.”
On another front, if you’re one of those wondering how it is that the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history came to mount one of the greatest grassroots efforts ever seen, in pursuit of the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party, and then returned to independent status, you’ll find some background here. Many readers may still be a bit unclear on the concept afterwards, but the book does give a thorough run through of this unique aspect of a unique career, beginning in 1971 with the first of Sanders’s four statewide runs as a candidate of the Liberty Union Party – during which he never received better than 6 percent of the vote. His breakthrough was his 1981 upset election as mayor of Burlington, Vermont’s largest city, which he achieved as an independent, a status he would maintain throughout his subsequent career – with the exception of the presidential run. In 1986, he returned to statewide races – and to losing, first for governor and then for the state’s lone U.S. House seat, a defeat he would reverse in 1990, when he became the first independent elected to the body in forty years. After sixteen years, he won a U.S. Senate seat. He writes that in Vermont, running as an independent “is what I have always done, and what Vermonters expect me to do, and what I will always do. Meanwhile, in Washington, I have been a member of the Democratic Caucus in the House for the sixteen years that I served there and a member of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate for the last twelve years.” At the same time, he explains that he has supported numerous Vermont Democratic candidates and state Democrats have supported him. And there’s more: “to complicate matters further, we have the strongest progressive third party in the country, the Vermont Progressive Party” and he has “done my best to see that Democrats and Progressives work together as closely as possible and do not act in a way that benefits Republicans.” So far as his own campaigns go, “For my last two Senate races, I have run in the Democratic primary, won it, and respectfully declined the nomination, and appeared on the ballot as an Independent.”
There will likely be some non-Vermont Democrats – and a few Vermonters as well, no doubt – who’ll have a hard time accepting this “mixed marriage” sort of relationship, though. Past Hillary Clinton supporters known to complain, “he’s not even a Democrat” are likely to gag over statements like, “One of my goals over the last several years has been to help create a fifty-state Democratic Party. It is beyond comprehension that Democrats have essentially conceded half the states in this country to Republicans.” But, as Sanders tells us, the doubters do not include “Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senate leader,” who, after the 2016 election, “asked me to be part of the ten-member Senate Democratic Leadership team … My position is chairman of outreach.” The New York Senator was undoubtedly influenced by Sanders’s participation in 39 Clinton rallies in 13 states during her race against Donald Trump. For his part, Sanders says, “During the presidential campaign, I received more than 13 million votes, and it was more than appropriate that those supporters, and the policies they believe in, had a strong voice at the highest level of the Democratic Party.” To back that up he lists the sixteen red states he has visited since the 2016 election. (The sixteen blue states he visited in that period are not enumerated.)
Prominent among the issues sets the book addresses are those concerning the situation of black America, and civil rights in general. Given the fact that Vermont’s African-American population percentage ranks fourth-lowest among the states, Sanders understandably entered the 2016 campaign with a low national profile on these issues. And given that he faced a candidate married to a man occasionally referred to as “America’s first black president” – before the real thing came along -– it was not surprising that he initially trailed way behind her in the black vote, a deficit her campaign attempted to parlay into a perception that he didn’t care about “black issues” and the suggestion that liberal voters who did care about such things shouldn’t care about him. Although this effort might charitably be construed as campaign staff simply doing their job of trying to win the nomination for their candidate, it had to be a particularly galling experience for Sanders, given that he had been arrested for participating in a Chicago civil rights demonstration in 1963 – when Clinton was still a Young Republican. (He did at least have the satisfaction of reaching near-parity among younger black voters by the end of the primary season.)
Here again, Sanders’s efforts did not cease on the day of the last 2016 primary; he describes sharing the stage with both Rev. William Barber II, organizer of North Carolina’s “Moral Monday” rallies, and with recently elected Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who, one writer has noted, has reminded his prosecutors that “The annual cost of incarceration … was currently more per year than the beginning salaries of teachers, police officers, firefighters, social workers, addiction counselors, and even prosecutors in his office.” And these days, if you still go to book stores, you might even notice a Sanders blurb on NFL star Michael Bennett’s new memoir and call to action, “Things That Make White People Uncomfortable.”
Could anything turn out different if Sanders were to run again? Certainly the big money interests would absolutely flip out if he should win and will presumably spare no effort to prevent him from taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And this time around, they will not be caught by surprise by the fact that a considerable portion of the hoi polloi relish the idea of stripping them of their disproportionate wealth and political power. Their efforts to blunt such threats to their status are already evident.
One thing that has turned in Sanders’s favor, however, is the downgrading of the role of superdelegates. In 2016, he writes, “The DNC, in its wisdom, had designated 716 political insiders as superdelegates – delegates to the national convention who could support any candidate they wanted, regardless of how the people of their state had voted in their primaries or caucuses.
“In other words, the Dem leadership had created the absurd and undemocratic situation that allowed 30 percent of the votes needed for the Democratic nomination to come from the party elite. In 2016, this grossly unfair situation became very apparent when Secretary Clinton received the support of some 500 superdelegates before the first popular vote was cast in the Iowa caucuses.”
The close observer of the race may point out that Clinton actually won a majority of the elected delegates, but the fact that she won 95 percent of the superdelegates – and had so many of them in hand so early– was a major component in her campaign’s ability to create a sense of the inevitability of her nomination. Her supporters’ sense of entitlement ran so deep that former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank published an article calling for Sanders to drop his candidacy in the interest of allowing Clinton, whose right to the nomination was unquestioned, to get about the business of confronting the Republicans – and this was mid-2015! That messy internal democracy stuff needed to jettisoned in the interest of voters unifying around the candidate who had already been chosen for them.
While the Sanders campaign upset the apple cart on that type of thinking, the fact remains that Clinton did ultimately pull the nomination out, with no small boost from the national news media that did a far better job in reporting her overwhelming early delegate lead than in explaining the source and meaning of that lead. Elected delegates? Superdelegates? Whatever – a lead was a lead, as far as much of the media pack was concerned. While superdelegate Frank’s reasoning may now look quite absurd, there’s no denying that his underlying argument – that criticism of the “inevitable” nominee was a form of disloyalty that could only help the Republicans – played a significant role in Clinton’s ultimately successful quest for the nomination.
Due to a subsequent unprecedented degree of grassroots engagement in the inner workings of the Democratic Party, however, next time around superdelegates will not be allowed to vote unless there is a second ballot – something that hasn’t happened since 1952, before binding primaries and caucuses became the norm.
Although Sanders lost in 2016, he altered the American political scene more profoundly than all but a few winning candidates ever have. But as his new book makes clear, even that would likely be reduced to a footnote, if he were to actually win in 2020.
…
“Las maestras luchando también están enseñando!” (Teachers struggling are also teaching.)
By Kristin Ingram-Worthman
On Monday, January 14, I and thousands of other teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District went on strike. I am grateful, humbled, and incredibly moved to see the massive amount of support we have gotten.
When I was growing up, my dad worked for several different unions; AFSCME, SEIU, the California Faculty Association, and AFTRA, to name a few. There were many times I walked with him on picket lines to demand better working conditions or support striking workers. I learned that labor solidarity is very important because it strengthens the demands of the picketers.
I have been a teacher for twenty-three years, and this is the first time I have been on strike. I saw a sign at one of the rallies that said, “Las maestras luchando también están enseñando!” (Teachers struggling are also teaching.) I would also say “Las maestras luchando también están aprendiendo.” (Teachers struggling are also learning.) I have learned another reason that labor solidarity is important. Solidarity helps those of us on strike feel stronger and more confident.
During this last week, I have seen Facebook posts from the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, other unions, and parents showing their support for teachers. People have created Facebook groups to support teachers such as Strike Ready with Tacos and Parents Supporting Teachers to coordinate and show support for striking teachers. Parents and others have brought food, coffee, and hot chocolate to the picket lines. Parents and students have marched on picket lines and attended rallies alongside their teachers. A student wrote a song in support of teachers which she posted on Facebook.
As I was driving to work on the first day of the strike, I was pretty anxious. I have no idea how long the strike will last. I knew it would be hard to face the students as they walked past me to go to school, and it would be hard to be away from them during the school day. But the solidarity that I experienced helped make those feelings disappear.
At my school last week, there were parents and students as young as transitional kindergarten picketing with the teachers. Parents brought food and coffee. SEIU Local 99, the union that represents the teachers’ assistants and the cafeteria workers had a one-day sympathy strike to support us. On other days, some local 99 members also picketed with the teachers before and after their assignments.
Last week was rainy and cold, and our picketing schedule was pretty demanding. We picketed for two hours at our school, took the Metrorail downtown for rallies in downtown Los Angeles, then rode the Metrorail back to school to picket again for another two hours at the end of the school day. It was wonderful and uplifting to be on the subway and at the rallies with so many other teachers and supporters. We chanted and sang songs, when we got back to school in the afternoons, we listened to music and danced as we waited for the students to be dismissed so we could picket again. This solidarity with each other was also so uplifting.
Last week I and several teachers had a conversation with a parent who tearfully apologized for sending her child to school and not walking with teachers on the picket line. She explained that she had to go to work and kept saying she didn’t understand how the school board could cause teachers to go on strike. We thanked her for her support and asked her to keep sending her child to school.
When this strike is over, and the teachers have won a fair contract, it will not just be a victory for the teachers and students. This victory will belong to everyone who has posted something on social media in support of teachers, everyone who has brought coffee or food to a school site, everyone who has honked their horn while driving by striking teachers, and everyone who has gone out of their way to support us.
Links:
Tacos For Teachers on Twitter
Taco For Teachers (GoFundMe)