The passing of Ron Dellums, leader in the global struggle against apartheid
By Peter Cole
Official Congressional portrait.
The American congressman, Ronald Vernie (Ron) Dellums, who represented Oakland, California in the U.S. Congress, has passed. As loving tributes pour in, many praise his long-standing commitment to and leader in the global struggle against apartheid. Others highlight his decades-long activism on behalf of civil rights and as a leader of the Congressional Black Caucus. Today, people might look at Dellums, with his coifed Afro, and wonder where black leaders like he are now. But to truly understand Dellums’ radicalism, one must appreciate his family’s commitment to both unions and racial equality.
Crucially, his father, Vernie, was an Oakland longshoreman and proud member of Local 10, the Bay Area branch of the International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU). The ILWU was perhaps the country’s most powerful, left-wing union. The West Coast dockworkers were led by Harry Bridges, an Australian immigrant, hated by conservatives and Cold War liberals because of his commitment to working-class power, unionism, racial equality, and socialism.
His uncle, C.L. Dellums, was the most important black unionist, indeed most influential civil rights leader, in California in the mid 1900s. C.L. led the West Coast locals of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. This union was co-founded by A. Philip Randolph, probably the most important black unionist in American history. It was Randolph’s idea to “March on Washington” at which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his most famous speech. That 1963 rally, don’t forget, was “for jobs and freedom.”
In a country like the United States, founded upon and still committed to racial capitalism, one always must fight two monsters, racism and capitalism. Indeed, the monstrous Hydra has many heads including sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and imperialism, as well.
Dellums understood these matters because he was raised by a longshoreman and railroader, each of whom belonged to powerful, anti-racist unions.
When elected to Congress in 1970, Dellums became its most radical member. (It is worth noting that, today, Representative Barbara Lee, who followed Dellums as U.S. representative for Oakland-Berkeley, likely holds that title.) He immediately joined the newly formed Congressional Black Caucus, which advocates for African-American issues in Congress. Shortly thereafter, he co-sponsored a bill (with John Conyers of Detroit) to sanction South Africa for its heinous treatment of its black majority; the racist system known as apartheid—fascist as well as white supremacist—increasingly drew the attention of the world for its odiousness. In his autobiography, “Lying Down with the Lions: A Public Life from the Streets of Oakland to the Halls of Power”,
Dellums understood that organizing demanded foot soldiers as well as policy proposals and he engaged in both.
Dellums wrote that it was radical black workers from the Polaroid Corporation who helped convince him to fight apartheid. They hated that Polaroid cameras were used by the apartheid regime in their notorious passbooks that tightly restricted black freedom of movement.
Also in the 1970s, black and white left radicals in his father’s union, ILWU Local 10, formed the first rank-and-file anti-apartheid committee of any US union. The Southern African Liberation Support Committee organized Local 10 and other ILWU members, starting in 1976, shortly after the Soweto uprising galvanized the struggle, inside South Africa and worldwide. This committee was led by the African American communist Leo Robinson with key support from an anti-imperialist New Left white, Larry Wright.
In October 1984, the Southern African Liberation Support Committee, along with support from a Trotskyist caucus, gained the unanimous support of Local 10 members to boycott apartheid cargo. The following month, just weeks after President Ronald Reagan’s landslide re-election, longshoremen refused to touch the South African cargo that had arrived aboard a Dutch ship. For the next eleven days, thousands of Bay Area residents, including Angela Davis, rallied in solidarity with the dockworkers at San Francisco Pier 80.
The same week, in Washington, DC, Dellums became one of the first protesters arrested for sitting-in at the South African embassy. His arrest was part of the strategy of the newly-created Free South Africa Movement.
Dellums understood that organizing demanded foot soldiers as well as policy proposals and he engaged in both. He marched (and got arrested) for challenging apartheid in South Africa and South African-controlled Southwest Africa (now Namibia). He also built a coalition in Congress that passed a bill that sanctioned South Africa and divesting from it, meaning that the United States would not engage in trade until apartheid ended.
Of course, Reagan vetoed the bill. However, in a stunning rebuke, a bipartisan group overrode Reagan’s veto. US sanctions, along with similar efforts in countries worldwide, gave support for the United Democratic Front, the social movement inside South Africa. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was freed from prison after 27 years, as were other political prisoners, and many organizations, including the African National Congress, were un-banned.
In 1990, Dellums flew to Lusaka, Zambia to meet Mandela and other ANC leaders. That was when he achieved the dream of many in the African diaspora, including his mother. He also visited South Africa.
That same year, Mandela first visited the United States, a ten-day tour to cities that had participated in the black freedom struggle. His last stop was Oakland, where he spoke to 60,000 adoring people. Dellums hosted the rally.
When Mandela finally came on, ten percent of his speech was devoted to thanking the longshoremen for their efforts. Dellums, the son of a Local 10 member, must had nodded knowingly.
Dellums was a black radical all right. But he also was a socialist though he had mellowed over the years. Yet he always understood—and centered—the struggle of working people, especially the African American, Asian, and Latino members of his district in Oakland and Berkeley.
Ron Dellums, the son of an Oakland longshoreman, fought the good fight. He appreciated the struggle against racism is permanently joined with those against sexism, militarism, and capitalism. He was intersectional before intersectionality was a thing. Presente!
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This post first appeared on Africa is a Country
All Out for the Mid-terms: Democrats Must Retake the House to Put the Brakes on Trump!
By Peter Olney and Rand Wilson
“L’estate sta finendo” (The summer is ending)
“E un anno se ne va” (And a year is going by)
“Sto diventando grande” (I am growing up)
“Lo sai che non mi va.” (You know I don’t like that)
The popular Italian hit captures all we need to say about the coming period. Before long the summer will be over and for many of us it’s time to get down to business on our most important political task: To flip the U.S. House of Representatives into the hands of the Democrats.
Not everyone on the left agrees. For example, Chris Hedges recently wrote, “The Democratic Party elites…are creations of the corporate state. The Democratic Party is as much to blame for Trump as the Republicans. It is a full partner in the perpetuation of our political system of legalized bribery, along with the deindustrialization of the country, austerity programs, social inequality, mass incarceration and the assault on basic civil liberties. It deregulates Wall Street. It prosecutes the endless and futile wars that are draining the federal budget. We must mount independent political movements and form our own parties to sweep the Democratic and Republican elites aside or be complicit in cementing into place a corporate tyranny.”(1)
We don’t disagree with much that Hedges says about the Democratic Party — except his last sentence. With the right wing rising, quixotic talk of “forming our own parties” or being “complicit with corporate tyranny” by supporting Democrats is pure fantasy. It completely misses the necessity of a building a united front against a dangerous far right nationalist movement led by Trump and his backers.
As the song says, we are getting older and hopefully a little more mature and we can understand the critical importance of putting the reins on the erratic, racist, misogynist, anti-labor monster who sits in the White House. For one of the best discussions of Democratic Party “lesser of two evils” dilemmas, we strongly suggest reading longtime DSA activist and former legislator Tom Gallagher’s “The Primary Route.”
Now is the time to hold our noses and elect Democrats – many of whom may not fit the progressive mold – in “swing districts.” That’s why we support “Swing Left,” an initiative coordinating this effort that helps people find — and commit to supporting — progressives in their closest Swing District to ensure that we take back the House in 2018.(2)
This is not to understate the importance of building a strong bench of progressive candidates at the municipal, county and state level. However, the importance of those contests, often in places where differences are minimal, pales in comparison to the job of putting the political brakes on Donald Trump. The country and the earth’s future will feel the impact if we fail in November.
So, we urge people to get ready to head to the “red” and “purple” districts where vulnerable House Republicans can be beat. These races are crying out for volunteers, donations and brio!
There are plenty of places to go for September and October to help organize on the ground. Make your travel plans now, because some of these districts may be crowded with folks who are setting out to do this important work.
If you can’t travel, there are many other ways to take action. You can donate or host a fundraiser for District Funds to give Swing District Democrats a boost the day they become the official nominee. You can host or attend a Voter Contact Event. Or start using new phone banking technology to talk to voters in a Swing District.(3)
The authors have already made their own plans:
Peter Olney plans to spend September and October in Southern California working on the 39th Congressional campaign of Democrat Gil Cisneros. He is running to flip this Eastern LA County/Orange County seat, which Hilary carried by 8.5% points in the 2016 election. The incumbent Republican Ed Royce has resigned, but his former aid, Young Kim is running to replace him. Peter has a strong personal interest in this project – his return to Italy is contingent on winning a Democratic majority.(4)
Rand Wilson is deciding between devoting his time to the contest for an open seat in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District that could easily go Republican or campaigning for Jared Golden, the Democrats’ nominee challenging Republican Rep. Bruce Poliquin in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District race.(5)
Regardless of the outcome of the U.S. elections in November, there is so much important grassroots organizing to do in the U.S. — and Italy. Avanti Popolo!
Notes:
1: Et Tu, Bernie? “Et “, Chris Hedges
2: Learn more at swingleft.org. According to Swing Left, there are 78 Swing Districts. These are places where the last election was won by 15% of the vote or less, where Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump, where a high concentration of volunteers could make certain districts winnable, or where other, specific circumstances make it a competitive district. Democrats need to flip at least 23 seats to take back the House in 2018. If they hold on to the vulnerable Democratic-held districts, they only need to flip 23 Republican-held House seats to take back the house in 2018.
3: Interested in learning more or questions about how to get involved? Contact Swing Left at host@swingleft.org.
4: Peter promised his Italian friends that he won’t return to Italy unless we flip the House, although a return to Italy is beset with such a similar government, the product of some of the same right-wing populist forces that elected Trump.
5: The 2nd district backed Barack Obama in the 2012 presidential election by a margin of 9 points, before flipping red in 2016 for Donald Trump (R), who won by 10 points.
A Call Center Coup: Ex-Teamster Boots Riley Tackles Telemarketing And its Discontents
By Steve Early
When I was a union rep, one of my most challenging assignments was assisting a Communications Workers of America (CWA) bargaining unit at a Boston-area telemarketing firm. Most CWA members in New England had call center jobs at the phone company, with good pensions, health insurance, and full-time salaries. As service reps, they fielded in-coming calls from customers with problems, questions, or new orders to place. In contrast, the telemarketing staff only interacted with the public, on behalf of various clients, via out-bound calling. Like the workers depicted in Boots Riley’s hilarious new film, Sorry to Bother You, they made cold calls to people who did not want to bothered, at dinner time or anytime, with a pitch for a new product, service, or donation to a political cause.
Even with a union contract, CWA’s telemarketing members in Somerville, Mass. were an unhappy lot—and for good reason. Their work was machined-paced by a “predictive dialer.” The quality of the lists they called, for fund-raising purposes, varied widely. Their base pay was low and earning more required navigating a byzantine bonus system. Benefit coverage was skimpy compared to the phone company. Yet, when we tried to negotiate improvements, a company whose clients included major environmental groups and Howard Dean’s presidential campaign hired Jackson, Lewis, a leading anti-union law firm to drag out bargaining for months and soak up money that could have been spent on its workers.
This particular call center was filled with “over-educated” part-timers, juggling other jobs or careers, because it did offer flexible hours. Nobody planned to stay long, however, because who wants to spend all day enduring rejection—hang-ups, name-calling, cursing, or long conversations with lonely people who end up giving or ordering nothing, because they are short on cash too.
Amid such shop-floor frustration and discontent, the telemarketing industry does produce stars–brilliant phone conversationalists who can charm almost anyone out of a few bucks for a magazine subscription, a charitable organization, political cause or candidate. Now 48 years old, Boots Riley was briefly one of those top performers when a mid-1990s downturn in his music career forced the founder of The Coup to seek employment in what is now a $24 billion industry. He had already done a stint, as a Teamster part-timer, loading packages for UPS in Oakland; this time, to pay the rent, he picked up a headset instead, at a call center in Berkeley. As Riley’s hometown alternative weekly, The East Bay Express revealed last week, he toiled under “a punk manager with an anarchy tattoo who enticed workers with cash bonuses to ‘make the grid,’ office parlance for raising money. “
A co-worker familiar with his rap albums recalls hearing Boots use “the same gravely, raspy voice, I knew from Genocide & Juice going, ‘Sorry to bother you, ma’am, but…’” Riley put his past experience as a door-to-door salesman to good use, carefully calibrating his pitch for each assigned fund-raising project. “It was me using my creativity for manipulative purposes,” he confessed to the EBE. “Like an artist who could make a cultural imprint instead figures out what font makes you buy cereal.”
Manic Energy
Fortunately, for millions of potential viewers of Sorry to Bother You, Riley has also found a way to turn his call center experience—shared by millions of other U.S. workers—into a rare Hollywood film dealing with race, class, and the tension between personal ambition and collective action in the workplace. The first-time director employs the manic energy of a Spike Lee movie, rather than the slow, last century pacing of Jon Sayles, to produce one of the best depictions of labor organizing since Matewan (or Norma Rae and Bread and Roses, for that matter).
The workers involved aren’t the usual blue-collar union suspects—i.e. mill workers, coal miners, or immigrant janitors. Instead, they’re Bay Area denizens of the “new economy,” multi-racial millennial office workers stuck on the lower rungs of a regional job market offering tantalizing riches (and even affordable housing) for some, but a far more precarious existence for many others.
In Riley’s film, which opened nationwide last week, his fictional alter-ego is Cassius (“Cash”) Green, a struggling young native of Oakland played by Lakeith Stanfield. Cash is behind on his rent and living with his artist girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) in the converted garage of his uncle, whose home is facing foreclosure. “I just really, really need a job,” he desperately informs his soon-to-be-boss at Regal View, an Oakland telemarketer. Instructed, as all new hires are, to “stick to the script,” Cash stumbles through his first days of toil in a grim, crowded room full of partitioned workstations. Before being sent to their cubbyholes to dial for dollars each morning, Cash and his fellow “team members’ are subjected to a pep rally, led by managers who range from the moronic to demonic. (One urges them to employ their “social currency” to better “bag and tag” customers.)
Cash does poorly, with his phone contacts, until an older African-American colleague (Danny Glover) offers him some elder wisdom. “Hey, young blood. Let me give you a tip. Use your ‘white voice.’” Once any hint of Cash’s race or class background is scrubbed clean from his delivery, he starts making powerful connections with his telemarketing targets, zooming quite literally into their living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and even bathrooms to make sales.
His reward, before long, is promotion to “power caller.” He becomes part of the Regal View elite, working many floors above the low-dollar calling room floor, in office splendor of the Silicon Valley corporate campus sort. Cash now wears a suit and tie to work, carries a brief case, and makes marketing calls to potential multi-million dollar clients of Worry Free. The latter is a global manpower agency led by Steve Lift, a tech industry titan with adoring fans and a new book entitled I’m On Top. Played by Arnie Hammer, the charismatic Lift is a cross between Steve Jobs and Hugh Hefner. Among Cash’s rewards for being a top “power caller” is the chance to party with Lift at his Playboy-style mansion; there he gets offered an even more lucrative but truly compromising position at Worry Free.
Revolt of the Precariat
Meanwhile, down in the lower depths of Regal View, a revolt of the precariat has been brewing—and before his personal ambition got the best of him Cash was part of it. Led by Squeeze, a young Asian-American caller (Steven Yeun), the “lowly regular telemarketers” are secretly planning to unionize. On an agreed upon day, all head sets are downed, fists get thrust into the air, and the telemarketers
stage a 20-minute work stoppage, chanting “Fuck you, pay me” (no messaging confusion there).
As this labor-management dispute escalates into a full-blown strike replete with mass picketing and police brutality reminiscent of Occupy Oakland, Cash crosses the picket-line, only to become increasingly distraught by the choice he has made and ambivalent about its material rewards (a fancy car and swank new downtown Oakland loft!). “I’m doing something I’m really good at,” he tells one striker. “I’ll root for you from the sidelines.” But that’s not good enough for his feisty and creative girlfriend who threatens to leave him.
In the end, faced with the loss of Detroit and permanent estrangement from his own community and former co-workers, Cash becomes a fellow rebel against the worldview represented by Regal View and Worry Free. He blows the whistle on the latter’s sci-fi scheme to bio-engineer greater labor productivity and enslave workers, under the guise of providing them with “lifetime housing and jobs.”
The movie has a happier ending for the employees of Regal View than Riley’s real life co-workers experienced several years after the director left Stephen Dunn & Associates, the telemarketing firm that employed him in Berkeley more than two decades ago. In 1999, the East Bay Express reports, staff members there began a four-year struggle for union recognition, aided by Local 6 of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). Their long legal battle, against blatant union-busting, only ended when management moved the whole call center to Los Angeles.
In Sorry to Bother You, Steve Lift, the evil CEO of Worry Free, ends up reaping what he sowed. If only more workers struggles had a similar denouement, we’d all be better off. In the meantime, Boots Riley—Oakland activist, musician, and now film-maker extraordinaire—has made labor organizing in an almost entirely non-union industry seem doable and definitely worth the bother.
5 July
By Robert Gumpert
Yesterday was July 4th and with “bombs bursting in air” the US celebrated its 242nd birthday mostly by eating, drinking and setting off bombs.
Today I want to mention a different birthday – The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) turns 70. I was going to write, if that is what I do, a piece about the NHS and asked two friends in London to send me a quote. What they sent is below, and so clearly states what I would have tried to say that I have decided to leave it at that but for one related story from the US.
Neil Burgess, book seller, photographer’s agent
“My mother lost her sister to TB in 1946, the year before the NHS started. Her three children were born under the care of the NHS and I remember her telling me about how before it existed the shame of working people who had to “go on the parish”, when children were born or they were sick. That meant asking for charity from the church. The NHS freed her from that indignity and in her later life it provided brilliant treatment and excellent palliative care as she reached the end of her years. I know nothing is perfect but I wish the principle of, free equally to all at point of need, practiced by the NHS could be applied as well to our education system.”
Christine Toomey, writer and journalist
“I have heard it said that the NHS is the nearest thing we have in the UK to a national religion – it’s something that we are brought up to believe in and trust and feel passionate about, which goes some way to explaining why there is such outcry and rage when it is slowly chipped away at and increasing parts of it are privatized.”
1992: London, England: An NHS midwife works with a new mother at her home in East London. From this estate the midwife moved on to work with another new mother, this time in one of the gentrified areas of the Docklands. Later she would be in the office examining an expecting mother.
Many years ago I found myself in the hills and hollers of eastern Kentucky documenting the strike in Harlan County and hanging with folks from the Black Lung Association. It was 1974, too late to see any of the once extensive health service the United Mineworkers had installed throughout the coalfields. But not too late to hear the stories of how it took care of the injured, the sick, the pregnant and the old. The union ran the program, owned the hospitals and employed the doctors. It made the union stronger, it made community stronger and healthier. Paid for by a tax on tonnage, the plan failed as coal production decreased.
Today the US still doesn’t have universal healthcare. What we have, the patchwork of state, fed and private insurance plans contracting with public and private hospitals, is under constant attack.
So really all I wanted to say on this the 70th anniversary of the NHS, is healthcare, like stable housing, makes a society stronger. It fosters community, and community – giving a damn about your fellows – is a sign of a healthy society physically and emotionally. Currently this country is having trouble with that concept and it is literally killing great numbers of us.
July 4th, 242 years ago and again today
By Garrett Brown
If I may, I want to share three articles (linked below) that were in NY Times, not that they indicate “magic bullets” for our situation, but I think they do point the way.
The victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortex in New York, as well as several young radical candidates (often women) in other parts of the US – including “red states” – are not necessarily “the turning point” either, but I think they indicate that there is a lot more going on under the mainstream media’s radar than what we read and see.
Most journalists are middle class professionals who are wed to reporting on the institutions and trappings of “normal” US politics, personalities and traditions. That’s the “only thing that matters” because this is the way that it has been for the last 50 years or so.
But under the surface, below what’s considered newsworthy and “balanced journalism,” I think there are many people in motion, drawing conclusions about the present non-normal times that usually lie outside the parameters of usual American politics. It has always been young people that lead revolts, reforms and revolutions, and there are many young people in motion these days, as well as many older people (especially women) who have been organizing on their own for 18 months now for something better than just the status quo ante.
Obviously there is a polarization going on where the right is also attracting and energizing its base, which is very helpful for the 1% that wants to use the Trump administration to impose numerous draconian policies that benefit them, and to divide, dispirit and demobilize the actual majority that opposes these policies.
There are no guarantees of anything, of course, but I think the articles below (just one day’s newspaper) show that there is a lot of ferment and activity below the surface that could – like the Hawaii volcano – break through the surface in unexpected ways and locations…
My 2 cents, Garrett Brown
Michelle Golberg: “The Millennial socialists are coming”
“The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them…They often seem less panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are, because they believe they know why our society of coming undone, and how it can be rebuilt…and socialists have been saying, this has actually been going on for a long time. It’s not just Trump. It’s not just who’s in office.”
Ginia Bellafante: “Lesson of the Blue Wave primaries? We’re all struggling now”
“If you live in a place where a master’s degree won’t permit you a lifestyle that looks much different from an office clerk’s – if, in fact, it means you moonlight in a cubicle doing something you despise and eating lentils for dinner in the Rubbermaid TakeAlongs you brought from home – it follows that you will be less likely to think of yourself as a member of the privileged elite to which you have been told you belong and more inclined to find affinity with the broadening numbers of the more obviously oppressed, and vote accordingly.”
Maureen Dowd: “Local girl makes good”
“She (Ocasio-Cortez) did not dwell on Trump in her campaign, preferring to offer a positive vision. ‘We get dragged onto his turf,’ she said. ‘I feel like we should be catching up to the dice game by now, the Twitter distractions, the cries for attention.’”
Photo copyright: Robert Gumpert 2018
Enough!
By Robert Gumpert
While Trump again played golf, isolating himself at taxpayers’ expense in the plush confines of his Florida retreat, all across the United States tens of thousands of people marched in support of “Families Belong Together” and called shame on the Trump administration and its actions.
Demonstrators called for the immediate return of children to their families and stressed the importance of the November elections if there is to be a change in the direction the country has taken.
All photos are from the June 30th San Francisco, CA. demonstration where thousands marched from Dolores Park to City Hall.
Voices from the demonstrators in SF
“I’m here today to represent all the immigrants that came before me, all the immigrants that have gone through this in the past and to say never again. What’s going on today is one of the most shameful and un-American displays governance in our country’s history and we must not stand for it. We must stand against it. At the end of the day it is our responsibility to right those wrongs. That’s why I’m out here today.”
Tim
“I’m here because I am against everything Trump is for.”
Charlotte
“It’s unfair and it’s soul crushing to know that America was founded on immigrants and for Trump to separate children from their families. We’re not going to standby and let him do whatever he wants with these children. (He’s) traumatizing the kids. We’re going to show him that we’re not going to standby let him do whatever he wants with these children.”
Adrianna
“I’m here to show support for all the organizations that are working endlessly to support the children and to learn how I can help”
Ella
“I’m here because we have to stand together to change America and make it great again. We’re losing it. We’re losing our democracy, we’re losing our freedoms. We have a person in the White House who ignores the Constitution. We just cannot be silent anymore.”
Judith
“I’m here because I just can’t watch and listen to this anymore. This (the demonstration) is what democracy looks like. We have experience, and the experience is we work together. We work to make America great. I’m sorry for the people who think they’re disenfranchised but we’re losing America to this guy.”
Mary
“Another important aspect of this march is we have to vote in people that are willing to compromise and work towards a common good. That means the Senate, the Congress; they have work towards a common good. Not just for work for reelection, but towards the common good for the American people and the global community.”
Mary
I’m here to support the many immigrants and also the countries that are affected by this ban.
Ammar
“YOU CAME HERE TO SUFFER” The H-2A Farm Worker Program creates a pipeline of cheap, disposable labor
By David Bacon
L) ROYAL CITY, WA- A sign on the gate restricting access to the barracks in central Washington housing contract workers brought to the U.S. by growers under the H2A visa program by the Green Acres company. R) YAKIMA, WA- Members of the Yakima Nation of Native Americans join farm workers and other immigrants and community and labor activists marching through Yakima to celebrate May Day. Photos copyright David Bacon
On August 6 of last year, Honesto Silva Ibarra died in a Seattle hospital. Silva was a guest worker-a Mexican farm worker brought to the United States under contract to pick blueberries. He worked first in Delano, California, and then in Sumas, Washington, next to the Canadian border. His death, and the political and legal firestorm it ignited, has unveiled a contract labor scheme reminiscent of the United States’ infamously exploitative mid-century Bracero Program.
In a suit filed January in the U.S. District Court in Washington State, the state’s rural legal aid group, Columbia Legal Services charges that Silva’s employer, Sarbanand Farms, “violated federal anti-trafficking laws through a pattern of threats and intimidation that caused its H-2A workforce to believe they would suffer serious harm unless they fully submitted to Sarbanand’s labor demands.”
Those demands, as described in the complaint, were extreme, and Silva’s coworkers believe he died as a result.
Sarbanand Farms belongs to Munger Brothers, a family corporation in Delano, California. Since 2006, the company has annually brought more than 600 workers from Mexico under the H-2A visa program to harvest 3,000 acres of blueberries in California and Washington. Munger, the largest blueberry grower in North America, is the driving force behind the growers’ cooperative that markets under the Naturipe label.
Companies using the H-2A program must apply to the U.S. Department of Labor, listing the work and living conditions and the wages workers will receive. The company must provide transportation, housing, and food. Workers are given contracts for less than one year, and must leave the country when their work is done. They can only work for the company that contracts them, and if they lose that job they must leave immediately.
According to the lawsuit complaint, workers were told that they had to pick two boxes of blueberries an hour or they’d be sent back to Mexico. In July and August, they were working twelve-hour shifts. The complaint says managers routinely threatened to send them home if they failed to meet the quota, and to blacklist them afterwards, preventing them from returning to the U.S. to work in subsequent years. One manager told them, “You came here to suffer, not for vacation.”
Laboring in the rows under the hot sun, breathing smoke in the air from wildfires, many workers complained of dizziness and headaches. Nidia Perez, a Munger supervisor, purportedly told workers that “unless they were on their death bed,” they could not miss work. Silva told a supervisor he was sick. The company, in a statement, said he had diabetes and “received the best medical care and attention possible as soon as his distress came to our attention.” But fellow worker Miguel Angel Ramirez Salazar, gave a different account: “They said if he didn’t keep working he’d be fired for ‘abandoning work,’ but after a while he couldn’t work at all.”
Silva collapsed, was taken to a local clinic, and then to the hospital where he died. CSI Visa Processing, the firm that recruited the workers in Mexico for Munger, later posted a statement on its website, saying “the compañero who is hospitalized, the cause was meningitis, an illness he suffered from before, and is not related to his work.” Nidia Perez was the liaison between Munger Farms and CSI.
While Silva was in the hospital, sixty of his coworkers decided to protest. On August 4, they stayed in the labor camp instead of leaving for work. In addition to the production quota, they were angry about the food. The complaint says they were being charged $12.07 a day for meals, but the food sometimes ran out. When workers were fed, a supervisor marked their hands with “X” so they couldn’t go back for more. They were forbidden to eat in the fields.
As the protestors sat in the camp, one worker called the Department of Labor, which sent out an inspector. The next day, when they tried to go back to work, company supervisors called out strikers by name and fired them for “insubordination.” Perez told them they had an hour to get out of the labor camp before the police and immigration authorities would be called. Supervisors stood in front of the barracks, periodically calling out how much time was left.
Workers set up an impromptu encampment nearby with the help of Washington State’s new farm worker union, Familias Unidas por la Justicia. After a few days, all eventually had to return to Mexico.
The death and firings at Sarbanand Farms highlight the explosive growth of this contract labor program. In 2006, U.S. employers were certified to recruit 59,112 workers under H-2A visas. Washington State certified only 814 H-2A positions that year. But by 2015, the numbers had mushroomed. Nationally, employers were certified to bring in 139,832 workers, including 12,081 in Washington State alone. Last year, Washington accounted for 18,535 workers out of 200,049 nationally.
Driving this growth are some very big operators. CSI (Consular Solutions Inc.), the recruiter for Munger Farms, is probably the largest single recruiter of H-2A workers from Mexico. The company, originally called Manpower of the Americas, was created to bring workers from Mexico for what is today the largest H-2A employer-the North Carolina Growers Association. The group was founded in 1989 by Stan Eury, who formerly worked for North Carolina’s unemployment office, which plays a role in H-2A certification. Eury also created the North Carolina Growers Association PAC, a political action committee that donates almost exclusively to Republicans.
Under pressure from Eury, courts have concluded that anti-discrimination laws don’t apply to H-2A workers. Employers are allowed to recruit men almost entirely. In 2001, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Age Discrimination in Employment Act does not cover workers recruited in other countries, leaving employers free to give preference to young workers able to meet high production quotas. In 2009, he challenged Obama Administration efforts to strengthen H-2A worker protections.
North Carolina Legal Aid battled Eury for years over complaints of wage theft, discrimination, and bad living and working conditions, until he signed a collective bargaining agreement with the Farm Labor Organizing Committee in 2004.
Despite his political clout, in 2015 Eury was forced to plead guilty to two counts of defrauding the U.S. government, fined $615,000 and was sentenced to thirteen months in prison. Nevertheless, the North Carolina Growers Association has been allowed to continue; last year, the Department of Labor approved its applications for 11,947 workers.
Meanwhile, CSI became a recruitment behemoth, supplying workers far beyond North Carolina. Its website boasts that it recruits more than 25,000 workers annually, through its network of offices in Mexico. A CSI handout for employers says “CSI has designed a system that is able to move thousands of workers through a very complicated U.S. Government program.”
Workers recruited through CSI must sign a form acknowledging that their employer can fire them for inadequate performance, in which case they will have to return to Mexico. “The boss must report me to the authorities,” it warns, “which can obviously affect my ability to return to the U.S. legally in the future.”
Joe Morrison, an attorney with Columbia Legal Services, notes that H-2A workers are inherently vulnerable for several reasons. “Virtually all have had to get loans to support their families until they can begin sending money home, as well as to cover the cost of visas and transportation,” he explains. “That basically makes them indentured servants. They have the least amount of legal protection, even less than undocumented immigrants.”
H-2A workers are also excluded from the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and beholden to one employer. “Even undocumented workers can vote with their feet if they don’t like the job,” Morrison says. “If H-2A workers complain, they get fired, lose their housing, and have to leave the country.”
Many H-2A workers feel conflicted about their situation.
“We have papers, so we don’t feel in danger,” said Jose Luis Sosa Sanchez in a recent interview, at in a camp belonging to Stemilt Growers near Royal City, Washington. But he and other workers can’t buy property and establish a sense of connection to the community.
“We just come to work. That’s all,” he says. And there is no time-and-a half for working more than eight hours. “We work six days, and sometimes seven. And the work here is hard. You’re really exhausted at the end of the day.”
Sosa expressed sadness over being separated from his family, including two young daughters. “It’s hard to be far away from them, but what can I do? To move ahead I have to do this. So I talk with them on the phone. What else can I do? Every three days or so, in the afternoon after work. My wife says she feels OK, but who knows?”
Sergio Alberto Ponce Ponce, staying in the same barracks, had similar feelings. “I miss my wife. I’ve never been apart from her before. We sleep in each other’s arms, but here, no. I call her every day. She’ll send me a text, and then I’ll call her the next chance I get-in a break at work or at lunch, and when I get back after work before it gets dark.”
Ponce looked forward to going home to Mexico, but plans to return. “I’m going to keep working like this for as long as I can,” he says. “I’d like to live here, but I have my family there.”
In 2013, representatives of the Washington Farm Labor Association, originally part of the Washington State Farm Bureau now called WAFLA, showed up at a large Washington State winery, Mercer Canyons. Garrett Benton, manager of the grape department and viticulturist, was then given a plan by the company owners for hiring workers for the following season.
“The plan separated out work to be done by the H-2A workers and work to be done by the local farm workers,” Benton recalled in a declaration for a suit filed by Columbia Legal Services. “It left very little work for the local farm workers. Based on the plan and the presentation by the WAFLA people, I believed it was a done deal that the company would be bringing in H-2A workers in 2013.”
The rules governing the H-2A program require employers to first advertise the jobs among local residents. Local workers must be offered jobs at the same pay the company plans to offer H-2A workers, and the H-2A workers must be paid at a rate that supposedly will not undermine the wages of local workers. That wage rate is set by the unemployment agency in each state, and is usually slightly above minimum wage.
But there is virtually no policing of the requirement that growers demonstrate a lack of local workers, or any efforts to hire them beyond a notice at the unemployment office.
Benton said many of Mercer Canyons’ longtime local workers were told there was no work available, or were referred to jobs paying $9.88/hour while H-2A workers were being hired at $12/hour. The company, he said, even reduced the hours of those local workers it did hire in order to get them to quit.
“Working conditions got so bad for the local workers that they eventually went on strike on May 1, 2013,” Benton stated. “They felt strongly that they were being given harder, less desirable work for less pay…. Mercer Canyons was doing everything it could to discourage local farm workers from gaining employment.” The class-action lawsuit involving more than 600 farmworkers was settled a year ago, and Mercer Canyons agreed to pay workers $545,000 plus attorneys’ fees, for a total of $1.2 million.
In central Washington, the barracks springing up for H-2A workers all look the same-dusty tan prefab buildings built around a common grass area. Billboards next to rural roads advertise the services of companies including “H-2A Construction Inc.” This is a product of WAFLA’s aggressive growth strategy.
“Our goal is to have 50,000 H-2A workers on the West Coast three years from now,” WAFLA’s director Dan Fazio told Michigan apple growers in 2015. In 2016, the group took in $7.7 million in fees for its panoply of H-2A services. It handles program application and compliance, provides transportation, recruits workers and gets their visas processed, and conducts on-site meetings with them.
The premise behind the H-2A program is that it allows recruitment of workers by an individual grower who demonstrates it can’t find people to hire locally. Workers are then bound to the grower, and don’t function as a general labor pool. But a labor pool is exactly what WAFLA advertises.
L) ROYAL CITY, WA- Barracks under construction in central Washington built to house contract workers brought to the U.S. by growers under the H2A visa program. R) YAKIMA, WA- The hands of Manuel Ortiz, who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a bracero in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and spent decades working as a farm worker in California and Washington, show a life of work. Photos copyright David Bacon
WAFLA’s “shared contract model” lets multiple growers share the same group of workers during the same harvest season. Workers might work for one grower one day, and another the next, at widely separated fields. The “sequential model” lets growers bring in workers for one harvest, and then pass them on to another grower for another harvest.
In its annual report for 2014, WAFLA boasted about helping block a proposed Department of Labor rule to make employers who use the H-2A program provide housing for family members of domestic workers. “Can you imagine a worker with a family of six demanding housing for his family a month after the start of the season when nearly all beds are full?” it asked.
WAFLA has a close relationship with the Washington State Employment Security Department. Craig Carroll, the agency’s agricultural program director overseeing H-2A certification, spoke at the group’s “H-2A Workforce Summit” in January 2017, sharing the stage with numerous WAFLA staff members and Roxana Macias, CSI’s director of compliance. Macias herself worked for the department for two years, and then for WAFLA for three years, before moving to CSI.
While the Employment Security Department is charged with enforcing the rules regarding H-2A contracts, its website states: “The agriculture employment and wage report will no longer be provided beginning with the May 2014 report due to a decline in funding.” The department did request an investigation by the state attorney general into charges by Columbia Legal Services that WAFLA had tried to fix wage rates at a low level. That investigation is still pending.
Washington State also helps WAFLA by allowing it to use state subsidies for low-income farm worker housing to build barracks. This includes the ninety-six-bed Ringold Seasonal Farmworker Housing in Mesa, Washington. Subsidies were used to build another grower association’s $6 million, 200-bed complex called Brender Creek in Cashmere, Washington.
Daniel Ford at Columbia Legal Aid complained about these handouts to the Washington Department of Commerce, noting that the state’s own surveys showed that 10 percent of Washington farm workers were living outdoors in a car or in a tent, and 20 percent were living in garages, shacks, or “places not intended to serve as bedrooms.” Corina Grigoras, the department’s Housing Finance Unit managing director, responded that she couldn’t “prohibit H-2A farmworkers residing in housing funded through the Housing Assistance Program,” or even “require that housing assistance program housing be rented to H-2A employers only at market rates.”
Rosalinda Guillen, executive director of Community2Community, a farm worker advocacy organization in Bellingham, Washington, says “the impact of this system on the ability of farm workers to organize is disastrous.”
In 2013, when Sakuma Brothers Farms’ longtime resident workers went on strike for at least $14 an hour, they were told that the company would not exceed the H-2A wage rate of $12.39. In effect, the guest worker rate was used as a ceiling to keep wages from going up. Familias Unidas por la Justicia was organized during that strike. Its president, Ramon Torres, met the H-2A workers Sakuma had hired, “they said that they’d been told that if they talked with us they’d be sent back to Mexico,” he remembered.
After the 2013 harvest, strikers received form letters telling them they’d been fired. Sakuma Brothers Farms then applied for 438 H-2A workers, enough to replace its entire workforce, saying it couldn’t find local labor. Familias Unidas collected letters from the strikers saying they were available to work, and turned them in to the Department of Labor. Sakuma Brothers Farms withdrew the H-2A application, and had to rehire the strikers. Because the workers saved their jobs, the union survived and finally signed its first contract last year.
After the events last year that led to Silva’s death, workers at Sarbanand Farms reached out to the new union and joined it during their protest. But Sarbanand insists that H-2A workers have no such organizing rights, saying in a statement: “Their H-2A employment contracts specifically state that they are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, and H-2A regulations do not otherwise allow for workers engaging in such concerted activity.” The statement added that when employees quit or are terminated, “the employer is not responsible for the worker’s return transportation or subsistence cost, and the worker is not entitled to any payment guarantees.”
In response to the organizing effort by Community2Community and Familias Unidas, growers launched a website to argue their case. It claims, “The guest worker program provides higher pay for guest and domestic workers, plus the highest level of protection for workers anywhere.” It features a photo of Guillen, accusing her of “outrageous lies against the Sumas farm.” It says Silva died of “untreated diabetes,” of which the company was “unaware.”
While the website conveys a certain desperate tone, most growers seem optimistic about the H2-A program’s future, due in part to the election of Donald Trump as President. While Trump has railed against some guest worker programs, especially the H-1B program used extensively by the high-tech industry, he has been conspicuously silent about H-2A. In fact, Trump’s family employs H-2A workers on its Virginia vineyard. And the H-2A program is popular among some of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, including Representative Kevin McCarthy, GOP House Majority Leader.
“We are very positive about the Trump Administration,” WAFLA head Dan Fazio said at a meeting of his group in early 2017. “I don’t think there is a person in this room who voted for President Trump who wouldn’t vote for him again tomorrow.”
Last fall, U.S. Representative Bob Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia, introduced a bill to expand the H-2A program. The bill, HR 4092, would create an H-2C visa category to replace H-2A, certifying the recruitment of 450,000 workers annually, a cap that would grow by 10 percent a year. Growers could employ workers year-round and re-enroll them for the following year while they are still in the country. Eventually up to 900,000 guest workers could be employed in the United States at any one time. Wages would be based at 115 percent of the federal or state minimum wage, or $8.34 an hour in states with the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
As the Trump Administration beefs up raids and enforcements, growers want to ensure a continued supply of cheap labor.
“ICE does audits and raids, and then growers demand changes that will make H2-A workers even cheaper by eliminating wage requirements, or the requirement that they provide housing,” charges United Farm Workers Vice-President Armando Elenes. “Reducing the available labor and the increased use of H2-A are definitely connected. Growers don’t want to look at how they can make the workplace better and attract more workers. They just want what’s cheaper.”
Published first in The Progressive, June 1, 2018
Populism in Charge in Italy
By Nicola Benvenuti
a prelude to a shift to the right of the European political axis …”
With the intervention of Italian Interior Minister Salvini to prevent the docking in Italian ports of the ship Acquarius loaded with African refugees, the Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S)-Lega government assumes a precise physiognomy. Salvini acts like the Prime Minister dictating the line to the entire government that can do nothing else but follow him (even if the transport minister denies that the ports have ever been closed to Acquarius or other mercy ships).
we must not hide …”
It is obvious for those who have the time and desire to study the affair that Salvini has acted in an irresponsible and improper manner from all points of view, but the shock message he wanted to send, of a change of course on the question of admitting immigrants, seems to have impacted the voters who have shown signs of appreciating his action. And this is also thanks to Spain which has offered to admit the refugees (which lets Salvini say something like “you have seen, if you are hard-nosed, the other countries which so far have denied any admittance, such as Spain, will yield “) French Presdient Macron has called Italian behavior, “repulsive” and has aroused the ire of all political forces in Italy because Macron makes this hard judgement from the pulpit of a country that has closed the borders with Italy to non-EU citizens in the town of Ventimiglia, creating inhumane situations. This is the France whose gendarmes in the Alps hunt down non-EU citizens – and the Italian volunteers who help them go to France. Volunteers whose actions are saving immigrants from certain death, given the freezing climatic conditions and their unpreparedness for such weather.
But we must not hide from the fact that Salvini’s position was welcomed by many voters, and not just on the Right. If the poll by Demos is accurate, 58% of Italians supported Salvini’s action. It should also be remembered that in the recent local elections in which almost 6 million voted, the Lega proved to be rapidly on the rise while the M5S appeared to be in difficulty. According to a recent poll, the Lega would get today 29.2% of the vote (it had 17% in the elections) while the M5S would fall to 29% (it had 32%). This should not be surprising to anyone. The League has been in government, has been administering cities and regions for years, and has solid links with local and national territories and powers. Moreover, having removed the mantle of right-wing leadership from Berlusconi, it is drying up his party, Forza Italia. The M5S is a protest movement, born of the activism of Comedian Beppe Grillo and the “Likes” obtained on social media. Its election victory was probably built by manipulating voters through profiling done by the Casaleggio company. In short, their electoral base is very volatile.
It is also clear that the government was formed with an absolutely contradictory program that assumes huge public spending. The main request of the League, in addition to the request for the expulsion of non-EU citizens, is a flat tax of 15% for companies, first, then for all citizens; while the M5S wants support for the unemployed in some form of citizen income. This proposal has garnered a very high percentages of votes in the southern regions. But the Minister of Finance, Giovanni Tria, almost literally reconfirmed the economic evaluations of the previous center-left government on the impossibility of loosening the public purse for increased public spending. Both Salvini and Di Maio, the parliamentary leader of M5S, have resized their respective positions on the program, but the contradiction remains, and it is very likely that sooner or later the government will suffer. Many observers expect the fall of the government after the next European elections, in May 2019, but if the racist proposals (as of yesterday the proposal to register the Roma – gypsies !!!) of Salvini find support in the population, the League will be moved to cash in on the consensus that could be gained through new elections, and therefore it is hard to imagine this government lasting beyond the autumn.
What is worrisome is the absence of effective opposition. The Partito Democratico (PD) will have to get out of its isolation imposed by Renzi, when he blocked any negotiation with the M5S for a government alliance. Even a completely symbolic discussion would have given the PD an opportunity to speak to the electorate about M5S. That policy of abstention instead has legitimized the embrace of Di Maio with Salvini. It gave up the possiblity of trying to insert a wedge between the two populisms (Right and Left), and to give the PD (whose traditional voters moved in part to the M5S) the image of a party that has passed the right measures laws and policies (A basic social income, containment of immigration, and credit in Europe) Such negotiations would have enabled the PD to position itself as a party that knows also how to engage in self-criticism.
Salvini uses his position as Minister of the Interior to campaign; the M5S, instead, both because of the poor quality of the management team and because of the onerous nature of its economic peoposals, has less visibility and effectiveness in the government. This is why the leaders of the M5S are increasingly restless in the face of the forceful actions of Salvini and fear like the plague any recourse to the polls that would electorally sanction their subordinate relationship in the balance of power with the Lega. The danger therefore is that the M5S becomes more and more under the sway of the Lega, already all powerful in the Center-Right coalition, giving life to a right-wing and authoritarian movement, completely unprecedented in scope in Italy since Liberation and, moreover, endowed with solid sympathies in the rest of Europe.
The formation of a populist government driven by La Lega is in fact strengthening a movement against Merkel and hostile to the Franco-German axis that has guided the European Community in recent years and which is charged with governing immigrant flows by increasing the political and financial engagement in North Africa and distributing that engagement among European countries. This movement, although still lacking a definite alternative platform, sees the Italian Lega-M5S government, populist Austria’s Sebastian Kurz and the Bavarian CSU of the German interior minister Seehofer, committed to a policy of closing borders – already requested by the countries of the so-called Visegrad group (Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary) – and as a prelude to a shift to the right of the European political axis.
Requiem for a Steelworker: Mon Valley Memories of “Oil Can” Eddie
By Steve Early
The Stansbury Forum is fortunate to have several contributors who worked on the Sadlowski campaign. The two following pieces, first by Steve Early and second by Garrett Brown, are from two of them.
Ed campaigning in Gary, Indiana. Photo copyright: Earl Dotter
In progressive circles in the upper mid-west today, if you’ve heard the name Sadlowski, it’s probably because you were involved in the Wisconsin labor uprising of 2011, where you might have linked arms with AFSCME organizer and state capitol occupier Edward A. Sadlowski. Or maybe you applauded the electoral victory of his sister, Susan Sadlowski Garza, when she won a Chicago city council seat four years later, as a standard bearer for her union, the Chicago Teachers.
Ed, Susie, and their union comrades were up against two would-be union busters, Republican Governor Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rahm Emanuel, the corporate Democrat who is mayor of Chicago. Now both Sadlowskis are mourning the death of 80-year old Edward Eugene Sadlowski, after what his son calls “a hard struggle” of a different sort. The cause of death, on June 10, was Lewy body dementia, a condition that drove Robin Williams to suicide.
Four decades ago, their father was a really big name in the United Steelworkers (then the USWA), well-known throughout organized labor, and a hero of the labor left. As director of USWA District 31, covering Chicago and Gary, Ed Sadlowski was the elected leader of 130,000 blue-collar workers, part of a USWA membership then totaling 1.4 million, about twice what it is today. In a challenge to authority rare among union officials of his rank, Sadlowski broke with top USWA leaders in Pittsburgh who were too cozy with management. Backed by a campaign network called Steelworkers Fight Back (SFB), he ran for international president on a controversial platform calling for greater union democracy, shop floor militancy, protection of black workers’ rights, and the right to strike.
In the mid-1970s, Mid-western cities were still ringed with the glowing hearths of steel mills instead of their post-industrial rubble (or, in the case of US Steel’s fabled Homestead (Pa.) Works, a shopping mall built on top of it). Donald Trump’s delusional aspirations for the coal industry today were a reality then; our nation had more than two hundred thousand underground miners. Unions like the United Mine Workers and the much larger USWA and Teamsters negotiated master contracts that were industry-wide. Owners of steel mills and trucking companies signed agreements covering half a million workers at the same time.
In the era before de-regulation, de-industrialization, and corporate globalization, such union density and bargaining clout produced good wages and benefits. But discontent, among blue-collar workers, over poor working conditions was too often ignored. Problems like compulsory over-time, job safety and health hazards, unfair discipline, and relentless management pressure for greater productivity spawned dissident activity, which took the form of unauthorized strikes or internal union election challenges.
Revolt From Below
At the local level, if union officials failed to provide proper representation, aggrieved members often took matters into their own hands. They by-passed grievance-arbitration procedures that were frustrating and overly legalistic. Risking injunctions, fines, and even jail time, they flouted the “no strike” clauses found in almost every U.S. labor agreement. In 1972, a slate of rank-and-file coal miners, with just that kind of wildcat strike experience, made U.S. labor history when they toppled the corrupt and thuggish national leadership of the UMWA. Inspired in part by these Miners for Democratic, restive truckers and warehouse workers formed Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) a few years later, with much help from socialists among them.
In an era when rank-and-file rebellion was the wave to ride, young Ed Sadlowski was a pretty good surfer. His father, known as “Load,” worked for Inland Steel in East Chicago, joined the Steel Workers Organizing Committee in the 1930’s and became a founding member of USWA Local 1010. Eddie’s own nickname—“Oil Can”—came from his job oiling equipment at US Steel’s South Works in 1956.
For a budding, second-generation union activist, this relatively low-status position proved to be an in-plant organizer’s dream. He was able to circulate widely and connect with disgruntled co-workers throughout a mill employing 14,000 members of USWA Local 65. In 1964, when Sadlowski was only 26, he led a local reform slate to victory, against much older incumbents, and became president of Local 65. (In today’s labor movement, local union presidents under the age of thirty are exceedingly rare.)
An Official Family
Less than a decade later, after a brief stint on the District 31 staff, Sadlowski found out how much his union (and others, in that period) welcomed promising new leaders. When he tried to run for District 31 director, the union’s “official family,” as it was called, rallied around his better-connected opponent. The election was stolen but the US Department of Labor ordered a re-run under federal-supervision. Backed by USWA pioneers like George Patterson, a picket captain who survived Republic Steel’s massacre of strikers in 1937, Sadlowski won that vote by a 2 to 1 margin. In 1975, he became a most unwelcome addition to an international executive board then headed by USWA President I.W. Abel, a 68-year old gent fond of black-tie dinner soirees with Big Steel management.
Abel’s strategy, as a “labor statesman” nearing retirement, involved not just discouraging grievance strikes, but also promising, in advance, that steelworkers wouldn’t strike when their national contract expired. This questionable approach, allegedly dictated by industry conditions, was dubbed the Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA). Sadlowski became the USWA’s leading critic of Abel’s experiment because ENA replaced the right to strike with binding arbitration and was negotiated, in secret, without any membership vote approving it. (When his deal was challenged in court, Abel claimed a bargaining black-out was necessary because, with any advance publicity, ENA “might have been rejected.”)
Sadlowski decided to take his case, against the ENA and other manifestations of “tuxedo unionism,” directly to the membership, in a February, 1977 election to choose Abel’s successor. Abel, his e-board colleagues, and USWA headquarters staff cobbled together an establishment ticket headed by Lloyd McBride, the union’s bland but loyal District 34 director from St. Louis. McBride strongly defended the ENA and accused Sadlowski of promoting an “impractical kind of pure democracy that would lead to chaos.”
A Civil Rights Struggle
Long before bumper stickers appeared on Volvos urging us to “Celebrate Diversity,” Sadlowski did just that when he assembled his own insurgent slate. In addition to himself, a Polish-American, the Fight Back slate included a Chicano, a Croatian-American, a Jew of Eastern European origin, and an African-American. (This rainbow coalition made for quite a mouthful on lunch-pail and helmet stickers—“Elect Sadlowski, Rodriques, Kmec, Weinstock, and Montgomery!”)
As of 1976, no African-American had ever made it to the top ranks of America’s second largest industrial, during the first four decades of its existence. In the 1960s, persistent racial discrimination in the mills and under-representation of black members in the USWA bureaucracy spawned a civil rights movement within the union. One of its leaders was Oliver Montgomery from Youngstown, who became Fight Back’s most articulate spokesman (out-shining even the presidential candidate himself on many occasions). To undercut Sadlowski’s appeal to minority workers, with a formidable ally like Montgomery, USWA headquarters created a new vice-presidency for “human rights.” The position was filled by an Abel Administration loyalist, whose main qualification was not being part of past civil rights agitation within the union.
On the ground, the Fight Back campaign swarmed with lefties, young and old. Most were “colonizers,” toiling in difficult and dirty steel mill jobs. This gave them essential shop-floor access to potential Sadlowski voters, most importantly in locals controlled by supporters of Lloyd McBride. Each competing political sect—from the old Communist Party to the Revolutionary Communist Party to the Socialist Workers Party and the International Socialists—had a different “line,” leading to much jockeying for position among their respective cadres. Only the Chairman Mao-inspired October League dismissed the USWA election as “a trick by the bourgeoisie to channel the revolutionary aspirations and strivings of the masses into reformism.”
Liberal Cult Figure?
Meanwhile, anti-communists were attacking Sadlowski with more impact than the October League. Anonymous plant gate flyers in the Mon Valley, where I was a SFB volunteer, claimed that our candidate favored a ban on all gun ownership—not exactly a popular position in (I)Deer Hunter country. Our many external critics included right-wing social democrats allied with conservative AFL-CIO president George Meany. Their aggressive red-baiting focused on Old Left friends and allies of Sadlowski in Chicago and former staffers of the United Mine Workers in Washington, DC. Under new UMW leadership, the latter had already ruined labor relations in the coalfields. Now, these same “outsiders” (of whom I was one) were trying to disrupt USWA functioning too.
In Pittsburgh, we sought to counter such smears by enlisting one of the nation’s premier labor priests (before that breed became nearly extinct). At his dark-paneled Pittsburgh office, Msgr. Charles Owen Rice expressed some pastoral regret about having been a red-baiter himself in the 1950s, doing much local damage to left-wing unions like the United Electrical Workers. Perhaps as an act of personal penance, Rice soon penned a column in the Pittsburgh Catholic that we quickly reprinted and distributed widely at shift change in the mills.
The old monsignor sadly observed that the USWA had become “stodgy and its leadership uninspired.” According to Rice, Ed Sadlowski was “a breath of fresh air for the whole labor movement…Workers like him and so do those who are not workers—students, writers, reformers, and idealists of all sorts. The man inspires loyalty as well as affection and thus represents a formidable threat to the old guard.”
As he barnstormed around the country, giving rousing speeches in every available working class meeting place, Sadlowski received some supportive media coverage. But business-oriented scribes like the young David Ignatius, then at the Wall Street Journal, found lots of reasons to prefer “the old guard.” According to Ignatius, Sadlowski was just “an engaging young union official unsullied by the experience of major responsibility…a momentary liberal cult figure…with a short and un-distinguished record.” Why, Ignatius wondered, should anyone be drawn to romantic invocation of past-industrial union glory when modern-day steel workers should be content with “actual organized power and stability, as evoked by Lloyd McBride.”
Inside the union, USWA headquarters deployed an army of appointed “staff men”—International Union reps who were then almost entirely male—to ensure McBride’s victory in February, 1977. Only four of these 800 full-time pay-rollers dared to endorse Sadlowski (and two of those were members of his own slate!) USWA field staff wielded much influence over elected officers and stewards in the thousands of smaller USWA shops they serviced. Many used their workplace visits—ostensibly for grievance handling or contract negotiations–to do heavy campaigning for McBride, a misappropriation of union resources often hard to document in post-election complaints.
After a grueling contest, with all the trappings of an electoral campaign for public office, about 580,000 USWA members trooped to the polls in hundreds of local union halls. Balloting on this scale made Sadlowski vs McBride the biggest direct election ever held by a U.S. union. Of course, competition in that category is virtually non-existent today. Only the Teamsters—as part of a court-approved racketeering case settlement—regularly hold contested referendum votes for top officers, after grassroots campaigning by incumbents and TDU-backed candidates every five years. Most national union leaders are chosen at more easily controlled conventions of several thousand delegates, or fewer.
Unfortunately, 57% of those voting on February 8, 1977, embraced Lloyd McBride, rather than the “breath of fresh air” represented by Sadlowski and SFB. The Association for Union Democracy, which organized and funded poll watching for Sadlowski, suspected that election fraud tainted the outcome. This time, the Department of Labor didn’t agree that the Landrum-Griffin Act had been violated.
A Changed Union Culture
After Sadlowski lost, he returned to his old District 31 staff job, kept his head down, and beavered away, for many years, as a servicing rep. He was shielded from headquarters retaliation, initially, by the fact that his elected successor, as district director, was Jim Balanoff, a longtime friend, ally, and SFB stalwart. Steelworkers Fight Back did not become a long-distance runner like TDU. But, even as it was disappearing as a formal oppositional network, Sadlowski campaign veterans in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Indiana put their organizing skills to use in the bitter plant-closing fights of the 1980s, when the steel industry cratered.
Left-leaning Sadlowski supporters like Dave Patterson and Dave Foster won district director elections in other parts of the union. Foster played a key role in getting the USWA involved in the Blue-Green Alliance, which tries to unite industrial workers and environmentalists. The Alliance continues to receive strong backing from current USW President Leo Girard, a socialist-minded Canadian who didn’t back Sadlowski in 1977 (or Bernie Sanders two years ago). As Sadlowski’s son noted on June 10, “the Steel Workers Fight Back movement, without question, changed the culture of the USW and the labor movement for the better.”
In two decades of retirement, “Oil Can” Eddie did not become a golfer, although Florida was a seasonal refuge from the Windy City for him and his wife Marlene, a pillar of their family for 58 years. Sadlowski remained active in many labor-related causes, including the Association for Union Democracy in New York. Just a few years ago, out here in California, I found myself on the same team with him again, during a National Union of Healthcare Workers campaign to help 45,000 Kaiser workers escape from a dysfunctional and undemocratic SEIU local. In his seventies, Sadlowski was still sharing advice, handing out leaflets, knocking on doors, and making phone calls to workers in what proved to be, for the time being, a lost cause.
Suffering an election setback, after a rancorous debate about labor-management partnering, was not a new experience for this NUHW volunteer. Better than anyone active in labor over the last half century, Ed Sadlowski knew that today’s “losers” can become tomorrow’s winners, if we stick together and keep organizing. If his failing body and mind hadn’t made that impossible, he would have been applauding the red state labor rebels responsible for recent public school walkouts. Whether it was steel workers, hospital workers, under-paid educators, or other public employees fighting back, you could count on Brother Sadlowski being there, in person or in spirit. His gruff, but caring, presence will be missed on many a picket line now.
An earlier version of this piece appeared in MROnline
Addendum to Early article: The legacy of the Sadlowski campaign was swamped by the tsunami of the 1980s steel industry crisis
By Garrett Brown
Officially, Ed Sadlowski lost the 1977 election for president of the United Steel Workers of America (USWA) by a margin of 43% to 57% to the candidate of the union’s officialdom, Lloyd McBride. Some Sadlowski supporters in his rank and file organization, Steelworkers Fight Back (SFB), believed that he actually won the contest, but voter fraud in Canada (more votes than local union members) led to the electoral loss. The SFB campaign in Canada was simply not strong enough to prevent that kind of fraud, if that’s what happened.
But Canadian irregularities may not have been necessary as the officialdom’s mobilization of its 800 appointed “international staff” to threaten local union officers and members that if they voted for Sadlowski, then the international’s staff at local, regional and national levels would turn its back on the local unions when it came to grievance hearings, local contract bargaining, or other support from the international union, was anything but an idle threat.
The fact that SFB was credited with 43% of a national union election was remarkable in documenting the ferment in the union and the openness to a new, more radical approach by working steelworkers.
But within a few short years this potential was swamped by the collapse of the steel industry, and the inability of the SFB leaders to generate an alternative program to the union officialdom’s complicity with management’s slow-motion suicide.
1986: Duquesne, PA.: The Duquesne Steel Works, closed and now gone. Photo: Robert Gumpert
Coming out of the Second World War, the U.S. steel industry was the industry world leader and steel towns around the country boasted some of the best jobs and most stable, well-resourced working class communities anywhere. Forty-five years later, the industry was in crisis and steel towns were well down the road of ruin and abandoned rubble, a la Bruce Springsteen’s Youngstown.
This happened because the owners and managers of American steel made two big decisions:
1) Instead of continuing the industry’s traditional reinvestment of a percentage of profits into renovation and technology, they opted to follow the siren call of Wall Street’s “go-go 1980s” sending nearly all profits to the “coupon-clipper” shareholders
2) Industry managers stubbornly refused to adopt new, more efficient technologies being installed by Europe’s steelmakers (rebuilding from the ashes of WWII) and new steelmakers like Korea and Brazil. Instead of investing in the basic oxygen process (“BOP shops”) and expanding electric arc furnaces to remelt and reuse recycled steel, the U.S. industry relied for way too long on the century-old open hearth, integrated steel process.
The result was that “foreign competition” ate the U.S. industry’s lunch over several decades, while management paid out millions to stockholders and invested in other industries by way of asset diversification, leaving the mills and steel towns in terminal decline, and gutting the pensions and lives of tens of thousands of steelworkers and their families.
The industry’s answer was the still ongoing campaign (30+ years later) against “unfair foreign competition,” often centered on China and frequently with racial overtones.
With the industry’s self-looting and union officials’ connivance, despite the Sadlowski campaign, USWA members were trapped on the Titanic headed into the iceberg fields. The response of the USWA officialdom – always following the lead of management – was to become the choir in the “church of trade sanctions against unfair foreign competition.”
Unfortunately, the activists of SFB and the Sadlowski campaign were not able to offer an alternative and credible alternative to steelworkers who became increasing desperate to save their jobs and their communities from the catastrophe looming ever larger on the horizon.
Sadlowski himself never again ran for elective office in the USWA – a lost opportunity in my view, but it was his decision to make. Rank and file activists in SFB were not able to follow the example of the long-term organizers of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) – a development itself worthy of more discussion about why. Steel towns around the country in the 1980s and 1990s became hollowed-out shells where young people had no future, and many left.
Given the many challenges facing the labor left in the 21st century, it is worth thinking about what would have been an accessible, attractive and “feasible” alternative plan to save the U.S. steel industry in the 1980-90s that could have galvanized and inspired the steelworkers who voted for Sadlowski.
Would nationalization of the steel industry – or worker-run cooperatives – or coops run by boards including environmentalists and community members as well as workers – won the hearts and minds of steelworkers and steel towns in the era of President Reagan – or now in the era of President Trump?
How can we turn the unrealized potential of the Sadlowski campaign and legacy of hard-working SFB activists for a democratic, member-run union with radical program into a reality in an economy and labor movement that is so seemingly different from the 1970s? Yet the underlying problems are basically the same.
It is another of the ironies of American labor history that the union and workers that almost elected Ed Sadlowski international president should (40 years later) still be the cheerleaders of trade sanctions against steelworkers in other countries, and, according to USW officials, that voted 40% for a billionaire con-man grifter in the 2016 election.
Garrett Brown wrote extensively about the Sadlowski campaign as a reporter for The Daily Calumet newspaper in South Chicago in 1976-77. He was also a not-so-secret supporter of Steelworkers Fight Back and the election campaign during his free time on nights and weekends.