This story was originally published by In These Times on Jan. 30, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

“Tom Homan said Chicago is very organized,” Margarita Klein, director of member organizing for Arise Chicago, proclaimed gleefully in Spanish to a room of 80 people at an immigrant rights training, many of whom laughed and clapped in response.

Klein was calling back to a CNN appearance two days earlier by Trump’s handpicked border czar.

“Sanctuary cities are making it very difficult,” Homan told anchor Kaitlan Collins of the administration’s immigration sweeps. ​“For instance, Chicago … they’ve been educated on how to defy ICE, how to hide from ICE.”

When Trump moved to make an example of Chicago, sending federal immigration authorities to the city on Sunday, Chicago’s immigrant rights community was braced for it. The city’s vast networks of workers’ centers, unions, and community organizations have spent months preparing, disbursing flyers and cards, and sending the message to residents: Don’t talk to ICE. The two-hour training at Arise Chicago’s offices yesterday night was the organization’s sixth in-house training that month, and just one of numerous actions taking place across the city to defend immigrant residents.

It’s one thing to know, intellectually, how to handle ICE, and another to have the muscle memory, so that you follow the plan in a stressful situation. To that end, Jorge Mújica, strategic campaigns organizer, did some boisterous role playing, in which he banged on the door and marched into the room pretending to be ICE. ​“Where are you from?” he shouted as he pointed at attendees, many of whom laughed at his lively presentation. Moises Zavala, workplace justice campaigns organizer for Arise Chicago, advised attendees to go home and practice with their families: ​“After dinner, do role playing: ​‘What’s your name, where are you from, what’s your address?” (The answer, as always, was: Don’t talk to ICE.)

Over the last week, the Trump administration has worked to turn its deportation agenda into a perverse Reality TV spectacle, inviting reporters to embed with ICE operations, instructing agents to be ​“camera-ready” and even livestreaming arrests. It has publicly touted an array of federal authorities that are participating in the sweeps, including the FBI, ATF, DEA, CBP and the U.S. Marshals Service.

Chicago, a sanctuary city where local laws restrict police collaboration with ICE, is a favorite Trump punching-bag, and the center of the media spectacle. Dr. Phil hosted an hours-long broadcast on his MeritTV network on Sunday dedicated to ICE operations in Chicago, repeating widely debunked talking points about the dangers posed by immigrants, and media outlets like Bloomberg embedded with immigration authorities during the raids. 

The full impact of the federal immigration actions is not yet known. Chicago police superintendent Larry Snelling said Tuesday that he believes approximately 100 people had been detained by federal officials, though he said he couldn’t give an exact figure. Immigrant rights groups in Chicago confirm that immigration authorities are in the city, but do not have a complete tally of detentions.

What is clear is that the PR push seems designed to incite fear. 

But at the Arise Chicago office in the West Town neighborhood, the mood was not one of defeat; all of the people who spoke with In These Times and Workday Magazine wanted to underscore that their community is trying to fight fear with preparation and organization. ​“Obviously there is nervousness,” Klein said, as Arise Chicago members ambled into the office and greeted friends with smiles and hugs. ​“But we don’t see our community being paralyzed.”

Chicago’s sanctuary status means that no city agency, including the police department, is supposed to work with ICE to deport residents. The 2006 Welcoming City Ordinance enshrining these policies was recently upheld at City Hall following a large public mobilization to defend it, despite an effort by some alders to water down its sanctuary provisions.

Since taking office, Trump has unleashed a bevy of anti-immigrant actions nationwide, including indefinitely suspending refugee admissions, deploying troops to the border, cancelling asylum appointments and attempting to limit birthright citizenship rights, though the latter has been temporarily halted by a federal district court judge. Trump declared on Wednesday that he plans to cancel the student visas of Palestine solidarity demonstrators and use the Guantánamo Bay military prison to hold up to 30,000 deported migrants.

Targeting sanctuary cities is key to the new administration’s strategy. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that ​“sanctuary jurisdictions” will be cut off from federal funds ​“to the maximum extent possible.” And his Justice Department is instructing its prosecutors to investigate and charge state and local officials for ​“failing to comply” with immigration actions. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said in response, ​“We are not going to be intimidated by those acts of terror to radically shift our way of living.” Johnson is one of four mayors who has been called to testify before a congressional committee about their cities’ sanctuary status.

On January 25, four Chicago-based organizations filed a lawsuit in federal court, charging that the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Chicago is a bid to crush the sanctuary movement and violates activists’ First Amendment rights.

Antonio Gutierrez is an organizer with Organized Communities Against Deportations, one of the groups that filed the lawsuit. ​“We urge other groups to potentially think about similar lawsuits in their own cities,” Gutierrez says.

“Don’t open the door, remain silent if you’re arrested, tell your children not to open the door, and don’t sign anything,” Zavala told the crowd, most of whom are members of Arise Chicago, which organizes primarily Polish and Latino immigrant workers in low-wage industries like food production, manufacturing, domestic labor and food service.

The same principles apply if ICE shows up to your workplace, he underscored, and employers should know that ICE can’t enter without a warrant signed by a judge — unless the employer or another authority lets them in.

Even if the worst happens, and ICE detains you, it is best to remain silent and speak to an immigration attorney, whose number you’ve hopefully memorized, the trainers explained. Klein drove this point home with some gallows humor. ​“I know that when we are afraid, sometimes when we are nervous, we start talking and babbling too much and start telling them about all sorts of things like how many pimples we have on our back,” she said, jabbing her finger at an imaginary blemish as the room laughed.

Arise Chicago isn’t the only worker organization mobilizing to defend immigrants.

The Chicago Teachers Union won sanctuary protections in its 2019 contract, which say that Chicago Public Schools are not supposed to ask about or document the immigration status of students or community members, and ICE can’t come into schools unless it provides credentials, a reason and a criminal judicial warrant signed by a federal judge (an administrative warrant or ICE detainer is not sufficient). This commitment takes on new meaning after Trump announced that he will allow immigration authorities to make arrests in schools, as well as hospitals and churches.

The Raise the Floor Alliance, which was founded by eight Chicago-area worker centers, held a know-your-rights training for a 200-strong member assembly on January 18. ​“We got people together across organizations, across sectors,” says Raise the Floor Alliance Executive Director Sophia Zaman, for a conversation that linked workplace justice campaigns with plans to keep workplaces safe from ICE.

Like many organizers in the city, Zaman responds to Homan’s recent gripes about Chicago with pride. ​“That’s evidence of our really robust system, networks of support,” she says. ​“An informed community and an organized community is the safest community.”

If the mood at the Arise Chicago training was jovial, at times, it also was serious; trainers and attendees talked through issues that ranged from the wonky to the personal. ICE has the right to examine a workplace’s I-9 forms, Zavala explained, which have workers’ social security numbers, immigration status, and other personal information, and then use this information to compel employers to fire workers who lack authorization. However, some employers might lie about being audited, Zavala said, and use this to justify firing workers. ​“Do not engage in any conversation with your employer about ​‘yes or no, I do or don’t have papers,’” he emphasized. ​“Immediately go to a worker center to ask how to handle the situation.”

During one of the more sober moments of the training, Klein announced an upcoming meeting to discuss how to talk to children about ICE without causing them stress or trauma.

There is no shortage of trauma to go around. However organized Chicago communities might be, they are also dealing with an intense crackdown from an administration that has Chicago in its crosshairs. If there is no way to guarantee safety, organizers hope that at least solidarity can provide a layer of protection. ​“In my country, we organized against a dictator,” Klein, whose parents were political refugees from Chile, told the room. ​“An organized people will never be defeated.”

This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a non-profit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.

This story originally appeared in Labor Notes on Jan. 16, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

The following language was compiled from a series of unions and labor activists. It is intended as a resource for workers looking to include pro-immigrant provisions in their collective bargaining agreements.

BARRING ICE FROM ENTERING THE WORKSITE

The Employer will require that any federal immigration agent, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agent, or State and Local law enforcement officials comply with legal requirements before they may be allowed to interrogate, search or seize the person or property of any worker.

Should an ICE or DHS agent request to enter the worksite or obtain or review personnel records, the Employer shall verify the immigration agent’s credentials, ask the agent why the agent is requesting access, and require a criminal judicial warrant signed by a federal judge. Staff shall not admit ICE agents based on administrative warrant, ICE detainer, or other document issued by an agency enforcing civil immigration law.

Should an ICE or DHS agent demand access to the premises or seek to interrogate, search, or seize any employee the employer shall immediately notify the union by telephone call to the union’s office. The foregoing shall not require the Employer to deny the DHS or Department of Labor access to the I-9 forms, as required by law.
If the Company is served with a validly executed search or arrest warrant, the Company shall arrange for questioning of workers to occur in as private a setting as possible.The Company will notify the Union if the Company learns of an immigration investigation regarding a worker within two (2) days.

PROTECTION OF RIGHTS DURING WORKPLACE IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT

If an immigration-related warrant, subpoena or other formal or informal request is issued by a governmental agency to the Employer, the Employer will inform affected employees as soon as possible and give them a copy of the request within three (3) calendar days. If the Employer provides the requested documents to the agency, or allows the agency to view them on-site, it will inform affected employees as soon as possible and give them copies of the provided documents within three calendar days.

The Employer will only comply with governmental requests, including requests to enter Employer-controlled workplaces, to the extent strictly required by law. The Employer will not comply with such requests if the Employer is not required to do so by law. All employees will be notified as soon as possible of the date and time a government agency is expected to enter a workplace. No employee will be required to work in the office that day if they reasonably believe doing so will put them at risk of governmental arrest or detainment.

ABSENCE FROM WORK DUE TO IMMIGRATION STATUS

The Employer agrees to work with all employees to provide an opportunity to gain extensions, continuations, or other status required by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service without taking a leave of absence. If a leave of absence is necessary, the Employer agrees to give permission for the employee to take an unpaid leave of absence for a period of up to ninety (90) calendar days and return the employee to work. No employee actively seeking work authorization will be terminated while on such leave.

The Employer will not discipline or discharge an employee who is prevented from working for 90 days or less due to arrest, detention, incarceration, or temporary national expulsion by law enforcement pursuant to the employee’s citizenship or immigration status. Such time away from work will be treated as paid leave. This paragraph will not apply if the law-enforcement action is based on or related to violent crimes, hate crimes, or other actions the Employer believes may jeopardize the safety of its staff or organizational integrity.

In cases where immigration status issues arise, the Employer will explore alternative employment options, including remote work from another country, in compliance with applicable laws.

Employees may choose to have a union representative present in all matters related to immigration status.

EMPLOYEE PRIVACY

Immigration status is confidential, and the Employer will not divulge personal immigration status information of employees to any parties except as required for the immigration sponsorship process, as requested by employees in question, as required by law, as required to defend the Employer or its employees in legal proceedings, or as expressly stipulated in this Agreement.

The Employer shall not disclose confidential information concerning employees to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or to its agents, except as required by law. To the extent permitted by law, confidential information includes name, address, and social security numbers. The Employer agrees to provide prompt written notice to the union if any government agency, including ICE, contacts the Employer for any purpose involving employees or if the Employer receives a search, arrest or administrative warrant, subpoena, or other request for documents. The Employer agrees to promptly provide the union with all information regarding these matters that the union requests.

NO-MATCH LETTERS

When and if ICE notifies the Employer that certain employees do not appear to be authorized to continue their employment, the Employer will notify such employees and provide them with two (2) weeks to present other documents, including those listed on the form I-9, to establish their work authorization. The employer shall not change the employee’s work status before such two (2) week period has passed.

The Employer agrees to promptly provide the union with all “no-match” information the Social Security Administration (SSA) provides the Employer. “No-match” information means employee names or social security numbers in the Employer’s records did not match those in SSA’s records. The Employer also agrees to promptly review all its records for any discrepancies and to update its records with all information it receives from the SSA or from affected employees.

STATUS VERIFICATION AND I-9 AUDITS

The Employer will not require or demand proof of immigration status, except as required by law. The Employer will not require an employee to re-verify their authorization to work except as required by law. In the event the Employer requires an employee to re-verify, it will provide them 120 days to do so unless a shorter period is necessary to avoid legal violations by the employee or the Employer.

The Employer will not participate in the E-Verify program unless the Employer’s participation in E-Verify is required by law. If The Company seeks to enroll in E-Verify or other comparable programs, it shall provide notice to the Union. The Union shall have the right to reject such enrollment unless the Company’s participation in E-Verify is required by law.

NON-RETALIATION POLICY

The Employer shall comply with all lawful requests of employees to change names and social security numbers (regarding immigration or otherwise) in the Employer’s records, without prejudice to their seniority or any other right under this agreement.
The Employer shall not request information or documents from employees or applicants for employment regarding their immigration status, except as required by law. No worker hired before November 6, 1986, shall be discharged due to their immigration status, nor shall any employee be asked to show authorization to work if they continue their employment after a temporary absence as defined in the immigration law and regulations.

The Employer shall not use an employee’s immigration status or sponsorship as leverage to negotiate or coerce them into specific employment terms and conditions. This includes, but is not limited to, requiring an employee to commit to a specific length
of employment, imposing economic conditions, withholding or threatening to withhold sponsorship for any reason, delaying or threatening to delay the immigration process, and using sponsorship to demand concessions from the employee. Any attempt to use
immigration sponsorship as a tool for negotiation or coercion will be a violation of this Agreement.

IMMIGRATION SPONSORSHIP

The Employer is committed to supporting every member of the bargaining unit, including foreign nationals, by ensuring that they have access to comprehensive immigration support and protection from deportation.

The Employer will contact every new bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national within two (2) weeks of their start date to inquire about their current work authorization and immigration status. In collaboration with the employee, the Employer will design a tailored plan to extend their work authorization, renew their visa, or apply for new immigration status as necessary.

The Employer shall commit to sponsoring work authorization and other immigration- related legal processes for every bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national as soon as they become eligible. The Employer’s immigration team will contact eligible employees within two (2) weeks of their eligibility date to begin the process with their Consent.

The Employer will initiate discussions with employees who hold temporary work authorization at least 12 months prior to the expiration of their work authorization. These discussions will outline available visa and work authorization options based on eligibility,
with a focus on aligning the process with the employee’s long-term goals, whether through temporary or permanent status. The Employer will prioritize the interests of the employee in this process.

The Employer will cover all fees related to an employee’s visa, green card, and other immigration sponsorship, including those required for work authorization renewals and premium processing services through USCIS.

LEGAL SUPPORT

The Employer shall assign an Immigration Liaison to each bargaining unit employee who is a foreign national. The Immigration Liaison will act as the primary contact for all immigration-related matters, ensuring that external counsel adheres to strict deadlines and providing the employee with updates throughout the process. Employees will be granted access to relevant information and resources as needed.

Supervisors overseeing foreign national employees will undergo mandatory immigration training, focusing on the legal nuances of immigration, cultural competency, and non-discrimination practices. Immigration Liaisons or HR Partners will also undergo
similar training, ensuring all involved personnel are equipped with the knowledge necessary to support employees effectively. Updated training materials will be shared with all employees and the Union.

Foreign national employees undergoing visa applications or renewals will be offered weekly check-ins with their Immigration Liaison and legal representatives from the Employer while working on immigration paperwork. During periods of inactivity in the immigration process, the Employer will offer monthly check-ins to ensure employees are supported.

The Employer, in collaboration with outside counsel, will ensure that bargaining unit members receive all necessary documentation with reasonable timeframes to complete the visa process. Employees will be kept informed of relevant deadlines, typical approval timelines, and any legal implications that may impact them or their families. In cases of delays or complications, the Employer will promptly inform the employee and work to resolve the issue.

The Employer shall develop and distribute a comprehensive guide for visa holders, outlining their rights and options. This guide will be provided during the onboarding process and updated regularly. Additionally, protocols will be in place to protect employee rights in the event of immigration enforcement actions, with clear communication to managers on how to respond.

The Employer will host periodic Know Your Rights training sessions during work hours, educating all staff on their legal rights when interacting with law enforcement or immigration authorities at home, in public spaces, or in the workplace.

LANGUAGE ACCESSIBILITY

The Employer agrees to translate all employment-related documents, including disciplinary notices, policies, handbooks, procedures, notices, and a copy of the union contract, into the language spoken at home of its employees using a mutually acceptable translator. The Employer agrees to pay for a mutually acceptable translator to translate during all meetings that employees whose language spoken at home is not English are required to attend.

While English is the primary language of the workplace, employees may use the language of their choice among themselves.

UNION PARTICIPATION IN RESOLVING IMMIGRATION ISSUES

In the event that an employee has a problem with their right to work in the United States, the Employer shall notify the Union in writing prior to taking any action. The Employer agrees to meet with the Union to discuss the nature of the problem to attempt to reach a resolution.

DISCLAIMERS

The Employer will comply with all immigration laws. If compliance with immigration laws requires development of new policies which change terms and conditions of employment after the enactment of this Agreement, the Employer will negotiate with the Union over the effects of such policies.

Nothing in this Article shall require the Employer to violate the law.

PROTECTION FROM EMPLOYER I-9 AUDITS

See this memorandum of understanding from UE Local 115 (Refresco workers), available in both Spanish and English. And see this side agreement from UE Local 155 (Chasen Fiber Technologies) which has even stronger language.

SANCTUARY UNIONS

Want to turn your union into a sanctuary union? You can access the Teamsters Joint Council 16 resolution here, and the National Union of Healthcare Workers’ resolution here. In addition, you can access Arise Chicago’s training guide on building sanctuary unions here.

ORGANIZING TOOLKIT

Arise Chicago has produced an immigrant worker toolkit that provides an overview of rights and tools.

This story originally appeared in In These Times on Sept. 11, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

CHICAGO – Wearing a red United Auto Workers (UAW) t-shirt, Anastasia Gibson, 48, is warm and polite, quick to flash a broad smile. But her anger rises when she talks about her sacrifices to Ford, which made $10.4 billion in profits in 2022. Gibson works 10-hour shifts and injured her back on the job in 2021. ​“They don’t value anything we do. They want us to get as many cars off the line as we can.” 

Such anger was palpable among the roughly 200 workers who gathered alongside Gibson in the late afternoon of September 6 outside the UAW Local 551 union hall in far southeastern Chicago, not far from the Indiana border. They were there to practice rallying and chanting for a picket line, in preparation for a possible strike as soon as midnight on September 14, when their union contract with Ford expires.

The golden sunshine slanted down on the crowd as it chanted, ​“Record profits equal record contracts!” Speakers addressed the crowd, among them Congressman Frank Mrvan (D-Ind.) and UAW Region 4 director Brandon Campbell, who proclaimed, ​“All they care about is their wealth and power. They’re too damn rich!”

Some of the union’s top demands are cost-of-living adjustments, an end to wage and benefit tiers based on hiring date, and an end to the mistreatment of temporary workers.

Those demands apply not just to Ford but to all the ​“Big Three” automakers — Ford, General Motors and Stellantis North America (the parent company of Chrysler and Jeep). UAW’s contracts with all three, covering some 146,000 workers, run out at the same time, a momentous opportunity for joint labor action across employers from a union that recently saw a big shift in leadership. Reform challenger Shawn Fain won the union presidency in March, calling for a new era of militancy, more democratic decision-making and new organizing. 

Fain has struck a confrontational stance towards the Big Three automakers — and the wealthy class overall—criticizing the greed of corporate executives and making bold demands, like a 32-hour work week with no reduced pay. Other demands Fain has presented to all of the Big Three include enhanced profit sharing, improved wages, more paid time off and the right to strike over plants closing.

And as the Biden administration subsidizes a boom in electric-vehicle manufacturing, the union also wants a just transition to ensure electric vehicle jobs are good jobs and do not drive down labor conditions.

Workers at the Local 551 rally underscored the key demand to cap the use of temporary workers, who make lower pay and are the lowest tier of workers, used by the company to suppress labor costs. UAW wants to temporary workers to become permanent workers after 90 days, with full benefits and profit sharing. 

Under the 2019 contracts that are about to expire, it takes two years for a temporary employee to convert. This feels like an eternity for Erron Hall, a temporary worker who started at the Chicago Assembly Plant in late November 2022, and is making just $16.67 an hour. This wage is difficult, he says, with the ​“cost of living going up.”

“This is my first time dealing with a strike,” Hall says, holding a sign that says ​“United for a Strong Contract,” and wearing one of many red shirts in the crowd. ​“It’s something new.”

Other picket signs read ​“End Tiers: No 2^nd Class Workers,” reflecting another top issue for workers. Those who were hired following the 2007 contract suffered lower wages and poorer benefits, including the complete loss of pensions, which were swapped out for 401(k) accounts. The union wants a full restoration of pensions, a big issue for picketer Karla Hayes, a metal finisher who has been working at Ford for 13 years, starting after they took pensions away. ​“I’m 58 with no pension,” she says.

“When I took this job, it was not a traditional job for women,” Hayes continues.” (Overhearing this, her coworker, 39-year-old Robert Desmond, chimes in to say, ​“She does one hell of a job!”)

“I love my job,” Hayes says. ​“I have pride. I want them to show they have respect.”

UAW is also calling for more holidays and paid time off, which would be huge for Gibson. In her 11 years at Ford, Gibson says she has missed ​“tons of things” with her six children — awards ceremonies, field trips. She’s hoarding days off in hopes of making her son’s high school graduation this spring.

Polling shows that UAW workers have the overwhelming support of the public. A Gallup poll released on August 30 found that ​“three in four Americans … side with the United Auto Workers in their negotiations with U.S. auto companies.” 

Ford worker Robert Kacher, 39, is a self-described ​“news junkie” who voted for Fain in the UAW presidential election. He read the poll online, but felt it viscerally when he marched in the Labor Day parade in Lowell, Ind. The crowd went wild when they saw the UAW contingent, he says. ​“They were very supportive of what we were going to do.”

Some of this community support is organized. The Chicago chapter of Democratic Socialists of America mobilized members to attend another ​“practice picket” on September 8. 

UAW Local 551 also attracted at least one international supporter. Helene Cavat, a teacher from France, happened to be visiting friends in Chicago the week of the practice picket, and decided to trek out to show her support. She is an active member of France’s General Confederation of Labour, and wanted to show her solidarity. ​“We need more international exchanges,” she tells me.

While the outcome of contract talks remains uncertain, the workers gathered outside of the Local 551 office are clearly preparing to strike if needed. After the rally, workers clustered together to talk logistics with a strike captain. Flyers announced where non-perishable food and toiletries can be dropped off, to help relieve hardship for striking families. The mood was urgent and friendly, a combination of getting serious business done and catching up with coworkers.

Numerous workers I talked to say they are ready to do what’s necessary, in a struggle that has profound implications for their lives. ​“This place works a number on your body and soul,” says Anthony Romero, a 32-year-old worker at the Chicago Assembly Plant and a veteran of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. ​“That’s why I’m here.”

Gibson describes herself as ​“injured for life” from her 2021 workplace back injury, and estimates that a majority of her coworkers are in a similar position. ​“People here have carpal tunnel, rotator cuff injuries, back injuries. The work is hard and strenuous. There is wear and tear.”

For all that, the money just isn’t enough, she says. ​“We are all really struggling. We’re in tough times. Prices are high. Going to the grocery store, you have to pick and choose what you eat.” Striking would make money even tighter, but she says she is ready. 

But Fain’s public call for a 32-hour work week, whether it’s won in this contract or in the future, is her north star. 

Right now she works 10-hour shifts, four days a week, some of them overnight. It takes her a full day of not working to unwind, she explains. 

“For me it would be amazing,” she says. ​“It would allow me to get some rest.”

This article is a joint publication of In These Times and Workday Magazine, a non-profit newsroom devoted to holding the powerful accountable through the perspective of workers.

Vincent Quiles, a 28-year-old father and union organizer in Philadelphia, is part of a fledgling labor effort to support the months-long protests against construction of the notorious Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, popularly known as “Cop City.”

For Quiles, this also means speaking out against his former employer: Home Depot.

When he was fired from a Home Depot store in northeastern Philadelphia in February, Quiles was already struggling to support his toddler son on his salary, which he says never felt like enough, given the meager benefits. He says he was forced to lean on his “very strong support system.” This was despite his demanding job as a receiving supervisor, he notes, in charge of tasks like tracking incoming merchandise and overseeing maintenance of machinery in the store.

Quiles had been with the company for almost six years and played a leading role in a unionization drive that sought better pay, staffing and training. The drive was inspired by the successful unionization of an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island. His store’s effort, he says, was met with a “vicious union-busting” campaign from Home Depot management and culminated in an unsuccessful union election in November. Quiles, who comes across as friendly and direct, is adamant that he was fired about three months later in retaliation for trying to organize what would have been the first union in a Home Depot store. He says he is currently pursuing a wrongful termination charge with the National Labor Relations Board. 

“The company would dispute this,” he says, “but I was fired for organizing.” Home Depot did not return requests for comment about Quiles’ claims or any of the other assertions about Home Depot in this article.

But Quiles is not only concerned with his own situation—he is deeply upset about how the company’s policies and priorities are playing out in a city 800 miles away. Tax returns show that the Home Depot Foundation is a funder of the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), the private entity driving the fiercely opposed plan to build a $90 million police training center in the South River Forest, which protesters refer to by its Muscogee name, the Weelaunee Forest. Cop City is slated to include a shooting range, a driving course, and a mock city to train police from across the country in urban warfare, as activists put it, and would raze an important ecosystem and carbon sink in a majority-Black part of the Atlanta metro area.

“So Home Depot has money to allocate toward things like this, things that many people in that community don’t want because of the harm to the environment,” says Quiles, “but you can’t pay people more for the measurable value they bring to your company?”

Approved by the Atlanta City Council in 2021, the plan has been met with months-long opposition from neighbors and protesters concerned with the destruction of the forest at a time of intensifying climate change and environmental racism. Protesters are also alarmed by the expansion of policing and its associated violence, and “Stop Cop City” has become a national rallying cry for environmental and racial justice movements. Law enforcement, in turn, has responded with a ferocious crackdown that has left one forest defender killed (Georgia state troopers riddled 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán with 57 bullets in January) and 42 charged with domestic terrorism. Three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, are now facing money laundering and charity fraud charges, following SWAT arrests at the end of May.

Quiles is not alone in expressing concern; his voice is part of an emerging labor effort publicly speaking out against police repression of the “Stop Cop City” protests. He is flanked by two unions—United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) and the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), a list that activists hope will grow—and quickly.

Quiles, meanwhile, is the president of Home Depot Workers United, an independent union which he says is in touch with workers at 25 stores around the country, some of which are actively planning union campaigns. He declined to disclose the exact number because he was concerned about retaliation and union busting tactics from the company. Home Depot Workers United released a statement in early April calling on Home Depot “to pull their support, both financial and otherwise, from the Atlanta Cop City project.” 

The Home Depot Foundation gave $25,000 to the APF in 2021, $35,000 in 2020, and $50,000 in 2019. When asked about these payments, Terrance Roper, a spokesperson for Home Depot, said over email, “I can tell you we haven’t donated to The Atlanta Police Foundation’s proposed training facility. We have specifically donated to The Atlanta Police Foundation’s veteran housing program.”

But Maurice BP-Weeks, a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization, says, “This doesn’t pass the smell test. A dollar is a dollar, and Home Depot’s dollars have helped enable APF’s programs. Cop City is the signature program of APF at the moment.”

The corporate relationship goes beyond funding: As LittleSis pointed out, Daniel Grider, Home Depot’s vice president of technology, sits on the APF’s board of trustees. (Grider is also on the leadership team of the Home Depot Foundation.)

“Corporations the size of Home Depot don’t have executives join boards like this by accident,” says Maurice BP-Weeks, a fellow at Interrupting Criminalization. “They are sophisticated political actors, and when you see someone on a board, it’s a sophisticated action. Home Depot clearly expects something out of the relationship.”

Grider isn’t the only connection. Arthur Blank, the co-founder of Home Depot, has a family foundation that pledged $3 million to the “Public Safety First Campaign,” which is the term the APF uses for the project. (In a statement to In These Times reporter and editor Joseph Bullington, the foundation sought to distance itself from the project by claiming the funding went to a different project of the APF.) Furthermore, Derek Bottoms, vice president of employment practices and associate relations for Home Depot, is the husband of Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former mayor of Atlanta who supported the construction of Cop City.

I spoke with a Home Depot worker and organizer who played a lead role in drafting the Home Depot Workers United statement—he requested anonymity to protect himself from retaliation. The worker said he was especially outraged to learn about these direct donations. “Home Depot’s profits come from my labor,” he says, “and we get a tiny fraction of that. The rest they get to decide what they do with. So often, what they do with that money is they enrich themselves or they give it to organizations or other things that don’t help the associates, and that actively harm workers.”

Some union leaders say the fight to stop Cop City has significant stakes for the labor movement as a whole. “Working people always have to be wary of any repression against protesters, because there is a history in our country that once it’s used against anyone protesting government policies, it can be turned against workers in their union,” Carl Rosen, the general president of UE, says over the phone from Erie, Pennsylvania, where 1,400 UE members who work for Wabtec Corp. could soon go out on strike.

This is especially concerning amid increasing enthusiasm about unions, even if density remains low. “At a time when workers across the country are increasingly willing to strike and use other militant tactics to oppose rampant corporate greed, working people must remain vigilant and united against any attacks on our right to peacefully protest against injustice,” UE officers, including Rosen, wrote in a June 2 statement. UE says it represents at least 30,000 workers.

The leadership of IUPAT was the first major union to weigh in, a significant development from a construction trades union that says it represents “over 100,000 workers across the United States, including across the Atlanta metro region.” A late March statement from general president Jimmy Williams Jr. emphasized racial justice issues at the heart of the matter. 

“The IUPAT was proud to stand in solidarity during the height of the pandemic with the Black Lives Matter protests in Washington D.C.,” according to the statement. “Today we stand in solidarity with the protesters in Atlanta who are facing egregious and unnecessary violence by the Atlanta Police force and others for simply disagreeing around matters of public policy.” 

When Williams became president in September 2021, he was hailed as a progressive new leader, unafraid to talk about tough issues like racism. 

The unions that have spoken out in defense of activists only represent a tiny fraction of the labor movement. But BP-Weeks says, “We are at the very beginning of reaching out, and the support we have is really exciting—good on them for getting out in front.” BP-Weeks is part of an effort to circulate a sign-on letter so that unions can show their solidarity.

“Larger institutions generally don’t move as quickly, so we are continuing to reach out to the rest of labor, and we expect more sign-ons in the future,” BP-Weeks continues. “And we also realize not all of labor is in the same place on that. This moment can be a tool to organize and do some political education with unions as well.” 

But even where union leaders—or their memberships as a whole—have not signed on, some workers and union members are involved in Stop Cop City organizing. Among them is Bill Aiman, a part-time United Parcel Service (UPS) worker who is a member of the Teamsters and is also involved in Teamsters for a Democratic Union, a rank-and-file movement for improved democracy and militancy. He is based in the Atlanta metro area and says over the phone that he has “been attending protests, and trying to organize where possible.”

“When I talk to coworkers,” he says, “the Cop City project is extremely unpopular.”

“Cops are the first line of defense for business owners and employers, so I think it makes sense for labor to be opposed to Cop City,” he says. “These cops are being trained at Cop City and will use the tactics they learn to crush our strike if we go out.” The UPS contract will expire on July 31, and around 350,000 Teamsters could go on strike. 

Some union leaders say, in addition to the immediate interests of labor, there are bigger principles at stake. In their statement, UE officers noted that, “In a democracy, decisions about the use of publicly-owned land and public funds should be driven by robust public debate, including the right of members of the public to peacefully protest. Instead, Atlanta has chosen repression.” 

Early Tuesday, Atlanta’s city council approved the allocation of $67 million in public funds for the project: around $31 million in public funds for the construction of Cop City, along with $1.2 million a year over 30 years for use of the facility. This was approved despite an outpouring of impassioned public opposition. The rest of the funding will be raised privately. The APF’s board is filled with a host of Georgia-headquartered corporate leaders, ranging from Delta Air Lines to Waffle House to UPS. Protesters say that the supporters of Cop City—in government, the corporate world, and police-aligned nonprofits—are ramming through the project without meaningful democratic input. Emory University conducted a survey in March which found that a plurality of Black Atlanta residents oppose Cop City. Many protesters say the funds should instead be invested in public programs that improve human and environmental wellbeing. 

Kerry Cannon, the interim vice president of Home Depot Workers United, says, “Home Depot has a set of core values they like to say they live by, and their financial and other support of Cop City is in complete contradiction of their values, from destroying a forest to ignoring the will of the people of that area.” The company advertises a wheel of “core values” on its website—these include “respect for all people” and “taking care of our people.”

Cop City is not the first time Home Depot has come under fire for the actual values it promotes. Another co-founder, billionaire Bernie Marcus, has donated to the campaigns of far-right politicians, including former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. In 2021, a coalition of Black faith leaders called for a boycott of the company, which is headquartered in Georgia, for its “indifference” to a sweeping law to curb voting rights, even as other corporations spoke out. Numerous Home Depot employees have also spoken out about a host of nightmarish working conditions, ranging from sexual harassment to timed bathroom breaks.

After losing his job, Quiles is organizing for Home Depot Workers United in a strictly volunteer capacity, and says he is having to “limit expenses in the household” and is “cutting it fairly close.” The “current corporate culture in the country” is what inspires him to keep organizing, he says, and speaking out about Home Depot’s links to Cop City is a critical part of that.

“The point of labor organizing,” he says, “is to improve society as a whole.”

This article is being co-published with Workday Magazine and The Real News.

This story originally appeared in Workday Magazine on Feb. 3, 2023. It is shared here with permission.

A Palestinian worker for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in the West Bank is accusing the agency of retaliating against him for leading a strike for better pay.

The strike of nearly 4,000 workers began on January 23, and is still ongoing. “We need an increase in our pay now. We are suffering a lot,” Jamal Abdullah, general president of the West Bank’s UNRWA staff union, told Workday Magazine over the phone. The strike has shut down some schools, medical facilities, and services, according to news reports.

Abdullah, who has been a prominent face of the strike, and quoted in press reports, tells Workday Magazine that he may now be facing discipline, or even termination, as a result of his role. “UNRWA took my ID and told me I am under investigation, and we might dismiss you,” he says. 

Abdullah was told of the investigation on January 18, he says, well after the union gave notice of a strike in mid-November, 2022.

When asked for comment, Juliette S. Touma, director of communications for UNRWA, told Workday Magazine, “One of the staff members was put on administrative leave while he goes under investigation. Until the results of the investigation come out, there’s no decision if he/she will be dismissed.”

“This decision came following and as a direct result of  the local staff union in the West Bank closing the UNRWA Premises in East Jerusalem for 10 days starting 15 January,” she said “Closing down a UN premises or any other UN installation or facility and banning  access to it by any party  is a violation of the UN staff rules.” Touma added, “The strike on the other hand started on 23 January, 8 days after the closure of the compound.”

But Abdullah says these remarks are “misleading.” The union “only protested at the office in Jerusalem, and that is within our rights as union representatives and staff,” he said, adding: “I assure you that the unions did not block access to anyone, including the director of office in the West Bank, who stopped reporting to the office only after being instructed by the executive office in an attempt to pressure us.”

Furthermore, Abdullah says that he was not present at the UN premises in East Jerusalem. “I haven’t had a permit to enter Jerusalem in over a year,” he says.

When asked if Abdullah is being investigated for actions that he wasn’t present at, because of his leadership role in the union, Touma said, “Our colleague Jamal is currently under investigation and administrative leave. UNRWA  cannot provide any more information until the end of the investigation also to protect the privacy of our staff member and in respect to the process.”

Abdullah says he is certain that the investigation is retaliation for his role in the strike. But, he argues, the problem predates the current work action.

 “Long before the calling for an open strike, UNRWA management started harassing me and my colleagues at the staff union, who were all democratically elected by UNRWA national staff, simply because we are representing staff interests and because we disagreed with management’s unjust decisions,” he said.

Abdullah says “there is a constant fear of retaliation, especially for Palestinian staff. This management is selective and discriminates between national and international non-Arab staff.”

The union is composed of Palestinians in the West Bank who work as teachers, engineers, laborers, sanitation workers, doctors, and more, explains Abdullah, who is a school principal in Ramallah. He says that workers are being hit hard by soaring prices, but that URWA is using its funding crisis to justify the suppression of wages.

UNRWA says it is “mandated by the UN General Assembly to serve ‘Palestine refugees.’” It is 93 percent funded by UN member states, and also partners with businesses and foundations, according to the agency’s website.

UNRWA aggressively criticized the strike in a public statement. “As the UNRWA Director in the West Bank, I call on the union to end the strike and resume activities for the benefit of Palestine refugees, including to reopen the schools so that more than 45,000 girls and boys are afforded a safe space,” UNRWA Director of West Bank Affairs, Adam Bouloukos, said on January 30. “The last place we would want these children to be is on the streets, unsupervised, during heightened violence.”

It is common practice for employers to accuse workers of putting the public in danger by going on strike. As up to half a million British teachers, rail workers, and civil servants stage mass walkouts, conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is accusing them of not caring about children’s schooling, even though the workers say they are waging strikes to save public institutions, like schools. Late last year, President Joe Biden said “a rail shutdown would devastate our economy” when justifying his denial of rail workers’ right to strike, even as rail workers warned it was corporate greed that was devastating the workforce. Nurses are routinely accused of putting patients in danger by going on strike, even though it is nurses’ willingness to withhold their labor that has improved patient safety by, for example, winning better nurse-to-patient ratios. 

But UNRWA’s statement is notable because it indicates that the oppressive conditions Palestinians face are a reason why it is morally inexcusable for them to exercise their basic right to strike.

Israel is occupying the West Bank. It controls borders, air, security, and movement of people and products, and maintains ​​complete administrative control of Area C, which makes up 60% of the West Bank. Israel even has control over identity cards for Palestinians, who are officially considered stateless. Settlement expansion, with government support, upholds an apartheid system, in which West Bank towns are separated from each other, and Palestinians are forced to travel on Palestinian-only roads. Ethnic exclusion is overt state policy; Israel’s 2018 constitutional law declared it is solely the “nation state of the Jewish people.” This system is enforced with tremendous violence from the Israeli military, which receives $3.8 billion from the United States every year.

These conditions are intensifying as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu consolidates the most far-right government in Israeli history.

Lara Kiswani, executive director of the U.S.-based Arab Resource and Organizing Center, says, “It is important for Palestinians in diaspora and for the international solidarity movement to support all workers under apartheid and occupation. The struggles of working people in Palestine to organize unions, to collectively bargain, to be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace, and to take collective action, are critical to our movement.”

“Divide-and-conquer tactics that pit workers against their communities are not helpful, especially in this moment of increased Israeli colonial violence,” she adds. “If UNRWA directors in the West Bank want to prioritize the health and wellbeing of Palestinian refugees and children, then I believe they should respect the actions and voice of Palestinian and UNRWA workers and proceed with good-faith urgency to accommodate their demands.”

According to Abdullah, “I know the strike is very hard, but there is no choice for us.”

This story was originally jointly published by Workday Magazine and The American Prospect on Oct. 28, 2022. © The American Prospect, Inc., Prospect.org, 2022. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

Honduran President Xiomara Castro, who took office in January, promised on the campaign trail to abolish special economic zones known as ZEDEs (“Economic Development and Employment Zones” in English), where private investors have outsized power to shape labor laws, judicial systems, and local governance. These zones have garnered fierce opposition in Honduras for undermining the basic tenets of democracy.

In April, she achieved a major win when the Congress of Honduras unanimously voted to repeal the law that allows for ZEDEs, and to abolish the current ones, though the latter has to be ratified next year. But the forces who want to keep ZEDEs in operation are retaliating, and they’ve found allies on Capitol Hill.

Earlier this month, Sens. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) and Ben Cardin (D-MD) called on U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to act against the Honduran government for moving to get rid of ZEDEs. In doing so, the senators are citing the findings of an influential think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which has received direct support from a U.S.-based company that is invested in one of the ZEDEs.

The senators are not the first federal players to rebuke the Honduran government. In July, the State Department issued its own condemnation of Castro’s move to eliminate ZEDEs, and intimated that the government could be violating two trade agreements, the Dominican Republic–Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) and a U.S.-Honduras bilateral investment treaty (BIT). “The government has exposed itself to potentially significant liability and fueled concerns about the government’s commitment to commercial rule of law,” the State Department’s “investment climate statement” asserts.

This comes despite the Biden administration’s overtures of cooperation toward the new left-wing Honduran president, after years of U.S. support for right-wing leaders in the country, and the apparent backing of a coup in 2009.

But Sens. Hagerty and Cardin have asked the State Department to go further. In their October 13 letter, they say the State Department must press the Honduran government to respect ZEDEs and encourage “good faith consultations and negotiations with U.S. investors in ZEDEs.” And they warn that they are considering legislative enhancements to an existing law that would “address any threats of expropriation or actions of the Honduran government relative to U.S. investments.” In 1962, in response to Cuba’s nationalization of U.S.-owned businesses, the Hickenlooper Amendment (named after Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper, a Republican from Iowa, not current Democratic senator from Colorado John Hickenlooper) halts U.S. aid to countries that nationalize U.S. property without compensation.

The senators—who both serve on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—quote, at length, from recent commentary by Dr. Ryan C. Berg and Dr. Evan Ellis, published by CSIS. The commentary claims that ZEDEs “can serve as an accelerator of nearshoring and friendshoring” because they “contribut[e] to greater rule of law,” which will attract more private-sector investment, produce political stability in the country, and strengthen the bonds between Honduras and the U.S., warding off investment from the People’s Republic of China.

Critics say that the reality of ZEDEs is much different. The 2013 law establishing ZEDEs gave investors broad latitude to design local regulations and legal systems, granting them “functional and administrative autonomy over the powers of the state,” albeit with some limitations. The ZEDEs are a more extreme version of “special economic zones,” which are characterized by having different labor and trade regulations than the country that hosts them, in order to attract investment. From Mexico to Cambodia, such zones have come under fire for their loosening of labor protections and environmental regulations.

Carlos H. Reyes, a longtime labor leader in Honduras and president of the Beverage and Bottling Industry Union, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect through a translator, “In the ZEDEs, the Honduran labor code will not apply and neither would Honduran international agreements with the International Labor Organization. Labor conflicts would be resolved inside the ZEDEs’ structures, not in Honduran courts. They are a state within another state.”

CSIS calls itself “a bipartisan, nonprofit policy research organization dedicated to advancing practical ideas to address the world’s greatest challenges.” Yet there are signs that it may not be a neutral observer.

According to its own statements, CSIS has received direct support from the U.S.-based NeWay Capital LLC, an investor in Honduras Próspera, Inc., the Delaware-based company operating a ZEDE on the Honduran island of Roatán. “NeWay Capital LLC is an affiliate of Honduras Próspera Inc. with a significant minority interest in the corporation,” a spokesperson for Honduras Próspera, Inc., told Workday Magazine and the Prospect. Erick A. Brimen, the CEO and chairman of the board for Honduras Próspera, Inc., according to the company’s website, is also listed as CEO and chairman of the board on the website of NeWay Capital.

CSIS is open about receiving direct assistance from NeWay Capital LLC. On its YouTube channel, CSIS hosts a video, dated August 17, in which Berg discusses the ambitious model of ZEDEs in Honduras, and touts the jobs created by the Roatán ZEDE operated by Honduras Próspera, Inc. Berg argues that, instead of elimination, the Honduran government should work with ZEDE operators to “identify reasonable reforms.” The video description states, “This project was made possible with support from NeWay Capital LLC.”

On May 16, Berg hosted a discussion titled “What Lies Ahead for the Zones for Employment and Economic Development in Honduras?” whose panelists included Welby Leaman, senior director for global government affairs for Walmart. Berg’s points mirror those made in the August 17 video. The event description on the CSIS website states, “This event was made possible through generous support from NeWay Capital LLC.” This is a typical construction you hear when a grant has been made.

A report by Berg and Matthew Carusi released last week, entitled “Engines of Prosperity: The Promise of ZEDEs in Honduras,” also says it “was made possible through generous support from NeWay Capital LLC,” and even contains a photo of a Honduran worker, with credit for the photo going to NeWay Capital LLC.

CSIS has not responded to a request for comment. The think tank’s website states that 30 percent of its operating revenue comes from “Corporate Grants & Contributions.”

“It’s really disturbing to see that U.S. senators are relying on information from a think tank that receives money from those behind the Próspera project in order to defend the interests of Próspera, and to interfere in Honduras’ internal policies in which ZEDEs have been declared unconstitutional,” Victoria Cervantes, co-coordinator of the Honduras Solidarity Network, an advocacy network based in the United States and Canada, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect. (While the company’s official name is Honduras Próspera, Inc., the company and the ZEDE it operates are broadly referred to as Próspera.)

A spokesperson for Sen. Cardin told Workday Magazine and the Prospect that “Senator Cardin has no relationship with Próspera, which runs one of the ZEDEs in Honduras.” The spokesperson recommended reaching out to Sen. Hagerty’s office, which “did the drafting” of the letter. That office did not respond to a request for comment.

When asked whether the company had been in touch with the senators or the State Department about ZEDEs policy, Trey Goff, chief of staff for Honduras Próspera, Inc., replied, “We speak to audiences around the world to share our vision of how Próspera can empower Honduras and strengthen freedom and opportunity throughout the region. We are delighted to receive support from people with a diverse range of views.”

Not everyone in Congress echoes the senators’ message. “When I visited Honduras with my colleagues in March, we heard directly from President Castro about her anti-corruption agenda and her efforts to roll back the policies of the post-coup dictatorship,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) told Workday Magazine and the Prospect over email. “We also heard directly from indigenous communities that have been harassed, displaced, and in the worst cases disappeared and murdered because of their opposition to the ZEDEs and other similar projects. President Castro has not only the right but the obligation to defend those communities, and the United States should support her efforts.”

A Honduras Próspera, Inc., statement released eight days before the senators’ letter has striking similarities to the Cardin-Hagerty letter, including repeated reference to what Honduras Próspera, Inc., says is a 50-year legal stability guarantee from the Honduran government that is protecting the investment. The senators argue that any violation of this legal stability agreement would thereby violate the provisions of CAFTA-DR, including the provision ensuring “fair and equitable treatment and full protection and security.”

But according to Melinda St. Louis, the director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, a watchdog organization, “It is quite ironic that ZEDE investors are now claiming the right to maintain a ‘50-year legal stability agreement’ when the ZEDEs themselves had been granted the ability to operate outside Honduran legal and judicial processes, undermining the legal stability of Honduran citizens.”

“It would be outrageous,” St. Louis continued, “for the U.S. government to side itself with the creative legal argument of large multinational corporations that a government’s decision to end highly controversial extreme investor rights is a violation of the already overly expansive ‘fair and equitable treatment’ standard in the CAFTA-DR.”

There are signs, meanwhile, that other U.S. officials are meeting with ZEDEs operators. On September 29, the U.S. embassy in Honduras tweeted that its deputy chief of mission, Roy Perrin, “met today with Honduras Próspera to talk about the climate for investment in Honduras, the legal guarantees that will permit those businesses to create jobs, and how sustainable development can create economic opportunities for all Hondurans.”

This spurred a harsh rebuke from the Honduran Foreign Minister Enrique Reina: “To create jobs and investment is important, but within a clear legal framework. The ZEDEs are the biggest legal aberration that arose from a narco-state that came to power through fraud.”

According to Próspera’s Goff, workers at the ZEDE have “the right to form unions as easily as entrepreneurs can form corporations, and personal ownership of employer-funded labor benefits, which are portable from employer to employer and capable of being used for a wide array of social benefits.”

Goff said that at the ZEDE, workers make above the Honduran minimum wage, but Workday Magazine and the Prospect were unable to independently verify this claim.

When asked for verification, the company pointed to the ZEDE’s labor statute. But labor rules on paper are not evidence of paid wages.

Advocates and experts say it is bad policy to simply trust a company to voluntarily grant rights in perpetuity.

According to Cervantes, “Próspera can promise all kinds of things, but the way the ZEDE economic model gives the Próspera governing body power over all civil law in its territory, Próspera can give and take away wages, benefits, working conditions, and limit in practice the right to unionize or strike, leaving the workers with no guarantees.”

Beth Geglia, an anthropologist who has studied the ZEDEs since 2014, told Workday Magazine and the Prospect, “This is largely about being able to experiment with new legal systems, very flexible regulatory systems, and this kind of privatized government.”

In a September 2020 podcast interview, Brimen championed the ZEDE operated by Honduras Próspera, Inc., on the island of Roatán, which uses Bitcoin as currency, as a “charter city,” proclaiming: “Now what’s unique in our case, it’s that it’s not just a new city scale project. It’s a whole new legal system.” The CEO of the Free Cities Foundation, which has invested in the ZEDE, said in a 2019 interview that the private government of the ZEDE reserves “the right not to accept serious criminals, communists and Islamists,” as Brett Heinz and Geglia pointed out for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank.

The concept of a charter city was pioneered by economist Paul Romer, who wrote of the model in 2010, “A host country would provide land; a source country would provide residents; and a guarantor country would provide the assurance that the new city’s charter would be respected and enforced.” (Romer has argued it’s not colonialism because “choice” is involved.)

Some company leaders are active in charter city circles. Goff was among the presenters featured at a “Liberty in Our Lifetime” conference held October 21–23 in Prague. That conference is organized by the Free Cities Foundation, which says it “works with small territories that are adopting liberty-oriented policies to give citizens more choice in the rules that govern their lives.”

The company also has at least one high-ranking official with Republican affiliations. Joel Bomgar, the president of Honduras Próspera, Inc., is also a Republican state representative in the Mississippi legislature. In January, he was one of just five House representatives who voted against a bill protecting gender pay equity, with 111 bipartisan House representatives voting in favor. And in March, he was one of just four representatives in the House who voted against a pay raise for Mississippi K-12 teachers, with 118 bipartisan House representatives voting in favor.

Honduras Próspera, Inc., declined to provide a full list of its investors, with Goff stating, “Some investors prefer to remain behind the scenes.” When asked whether the company has libertarian leanings, Goff said, “Our backers defy easy categorization because we work hard to identify the best ideas in good faith based on what actually works regardless of ideology, and that creates some unusual alliances. We have backers from the left, right and center, as well as apolitical backers—but all believe that Próspera is helping empower Hondurans and building a future of prosperity and opportunity.”

But some residents say they do not feel empowered. The creation of the ZEDE operated by Honduras Próspera, Inc., on Roatán spurred protest among residents of a nearby fishing village, Crawfish Rock, who say they were not fully aware of what the project would entail. Meanwhile, as Heinz and Geglia note, even the State Department acknowledged that the ZEDEs “were broadly unpopular, including with much of the private sector, and viewed as a vector for corruption,” in the same document where it rebukes Castro’s attempt to eliminate the zones.

According to Cervantes, “The Honduran people and their labor movement, the indigenous organizations, the small farmer organizations, their national Congress, and their president, recently elected by a very large majority, have all made it very clear that they do not want the ZEDE project in the country.”

“They don’t believe the promises,” she added, “and they are not willing to accept any constraints on their national sovereignty and control over their own territory.”

Joshua Mei contributed research to this article.

This story originally appeared in In These Times on April 14, 2022. It is shared here with permission.

The stunning vote by Amazon warehouse workers earlier this month to form a union at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, has invited fresh scrutiny of the e‑commerce giant’s for-hire union busters, as well as the groups and politicians that do business with them.

But there is another category of organization that has largely evaded such negative publicity: groups that help launder the image of Amazon, by presenting the company as a fair and enlightened employer. Perhaps the worst offender in this category is Human Rights Campaign (HRC), which describes itself as ​“the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBTQ+) civil rights organization.” 

HRC has been criticized in the past for taking pro-corporate positions and undermining social justice causes—for example, supporting a version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act in 2007 that would have excluded key workplace protections for transgender people. More recently, the organization has fallen under scrutiny for its close ties to the disgraced administration of former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

In its ​“Corporate Equality Index 2022,” released in January, HRC said that Amazon is among the ​“Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality.” HRC gave Amazon a score of 100%, alongside other major companies like Walmart and Chevron. This marks the fifth year in a row that the company has received a flawless equality score.

HRC’s report gives few details about why, exactly, Amazon received this rating, but the organization said in a statement, ​“To earn top ratings, these employers took concrete steps to establish and implement comprehensive policies, benefits and practices that ensure greater equity for LGBTQ+ workers and their families.”

Amazon, it turns out, is a donor to HRC. The e‑commerce giant is listed as a ​“platinum partner” on HRC’s website, and is among those companies thanked for their ​“generous support of the work of the Human Rights Campaign.” It is not immediately clear how much money platinum partners donate to HRC, but platinum is the highest level of donor listed on the organization’s website. HRC did not return a request for comment about whether Amazon’s donations influenced the company’s rating.

Amazon has used its ​“perfect score” for promotional purposes. A company statement released in January is titled, ​“Amazon earns perfect score for LGBTQ-supportive workplaces,” and vaunts the company’s supposed pro-LGBTQ credentials. 

In the statement, Amazon highlights its ​“affinity group,” which is called ​“glamazon.” It states, ​“There are now 60 active glamazon chapters around the world that work with Amazon’s People Experience and Technology Solutions and business teams to create an inclusive workplace, host hundreds of community events, and celebrate Pride annually.” (This is not the first time Amazon has advertised its HRC score in promotional materials.)

But Justine Medina, a queer worker at the JFK8 warehouse, says the company’s vicious union busting tactics, including holding captive audience meetings and arresting organizers, are ​“absolutely incompatible with LGBTQ protections and a good work environment and safety.” 

“Unions are one of the only ways workers can stand up and get their rights,” says Medina, an active organizer in the successful union campaign that was led by Amazon Labor Union (ALU). ​“Union busting hinders the rights of the most oppressed, because unions are how oppressed workers come together and secure their rights.”

There is evidence to back this up. In 2020, the UCLA Labor Center published the results of a survey of 1,004 United Food and Commercial Workers members in the United States and Canada. The study found that ​“three-quarters of survey participants said their local union takes concrete actions to support LGBTQ workers and 70% said LGBTQ workers are protected by their union contracts,” according to a summary.

Amazon workers say LGBTQ employees need a union for a reason: The company has faced a range of allegations of discrimination and poor working conditions from its LGBTQ workers. A May 2021 survey from Glassdoor, which allows for anonymous reviews of employers, found that LGBTQ employees are ​“less satisfied” at Amazon than their non-LGBTQ coworkers. Among the major companies named in the report, Amazon was one of the lower-ranked.

In 2017, a transgender woman and her husband sued Amazon, alleging a climate of harassment, slurs, discrimination and physical threats at a Kentucky warehouse. When they complained to management, the couple charged, they faced retaliation instead of support. (Amazon settled the case in 2019, and the details of the agreement were not disclosed, while the company denied wrongdoing.)

And in 2020, a transgender man at a warehouse in New Jersey filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against Amazon, charging that, after telling his boss that he was pregnant, he was denied a promotion, placed on leave and denied pregnancy accommodations. (The case is still pending.)

Complaints extend up the chain of command, with LGBTQ managers and corporate employees also saying they’ve faced a climate of anti-LGBTQ discrimination, from New York to Washington. A former executive in Amazon’s web services cloud-computing business says she was fired in retaliation for pursuing a lawsuit against a manager for homophobic comments he allegedly made. The list goes on.

The general workplace conditions that pushed employees to unionize Amazon in the first place—low wages, inadequate breaks, surveillance, and lack of safety protections—also, of course, impact LGBTQ workers. The best way to achieve equality, workers have argued, is to build the collective power of workers to oppose workplace injustice. ​“Amazon doesn’t treat us like real human beings; we’re treated just like machines,” Brima Sylla, a worker and organizer in the union campaign at the JFK8 warehouse, told Jacobin in a recent interview.

LGBTQ people comprise part of the workforce demanding better conditions. Michael Aguilar used to work at JFK8, and now is at the neighboring LDJ5 warehouse, where ALU is slated to hold a union election later this month. According to Aguilar, anti-queer discrimination is a problem at both warehouses—a charge Medina corroborates. ​“This building [LDJ5] has a higher percentage of queer people. There are a lot of trans people and a lot of lesbians and gays. The stories I’ve heard already are disgusting.”

Thanks to the extraordinary effort of Amazon workers to name and expose the actions of union busters, they’ve helped make association with them politically toxic, and even forced one, the research and public relations firm Global Strategy Group, to issue an apology on April 11, which states: ​“While there have been factual inaccuracies in recent reports about our work for Amazon, being involved in any way was a mistake. We are deeply sorry, and we have resigned that work.”

According to Medina, HRC’s ​“absurd” flattery of Amazon also deserves attention. ​“It’s indicative of the way these major corporations buy themselves publicity through back channels to make themselves look more legitimate.”

Update: After publication of this article, Kelly Nantel, a spokesperson for Amazon, sent the following statement to In These Times: ​“At Amazon, we believe that the rights of LGBTQ+ people must be protected. We stand together with the LGBTQ+ community, were early and strong supporters of marriage equality, and are working at the U.S. federal and state level on legislation, including supporting passage of the Equality Act. We also work hard to foster an inclusive work environment, including providing resources and benefits for LGBTQ+ employees.”

Maggie Duffy contributed research to this article.

This story was originally published by In These Times on Sept. 7, 2021, and is shared here with permission.

Twenty years into a nebulous ​“War on Terror,” the United States is in the grips of a full-fledged climate crisis. Hurricane Ida, whose severity is a direct result of human-made climate change, flooded cities, cut off power to hundreds of thousands, killed at least 60 people, and left elderly people dying in their homes and in squalid evacuation facilities. This followed a summer of heat waves, wildfires and droughts—all forms of extreme weather that the Global South has borne the brunt of, but are now, undeniably, the new ​“normal” in the United States.

The US government has turned the whole globe into a potential battlefield, chasing some ill-defined danger ​“out there,” when, in reality, the danger is right here—and is partially of the US government’s own creation. Plotting out the connections between this open-ended war and the climate crisis is a grim exercise, but an important one. It’s critical to examine how the War on Terror not only took up all of the oxygen when we should have been engaged in all-out effort to curb emissions, but also made the climate crisis far worse, by foreclosing on other potential frameworks under which the United States could relate with the rest of the world. Such bitter lessons are not academic: There is still time to stave off the worst climate scenarios, a goal that, if attained, would likely save hundreds of millions of lives, and prevent entire countries from being swallowed into the sea.

One of the most obvious lessons is financial: We should have been putting every resource toward stopping climate disaster, rather than pouring public goods into the war effort. According to a recent report by the ​​National Priorities Project, which provides research about the federal budget, the United States has spent $21 trillion over the last 20 years on ​“foreign and domestic militarization.” Of that amount, $16 trillion went directly to the US military—including $7.2 trillion that went directly to military contracts. This figure also includes $732 billion for federal law enforcement, ​“because counterterrorism and border security are part of their core mission, and because the militarization of police and the proliferation of mass incarceration both owe much to the activities and influences of federal law enforcement.”

Of course, big government spending can be a very good thing if it goes toward genuine social goods. The price tag of the War on Terror is especially tragic when one considers what could have been done with this money instead, note the report’s authors, Lindsay Koshgarian, Ashik Siddique and Lorah Steichen. A sum of $1.7 trillion could eliminate all student debt, $200 billion could cover 10 years of free preschool for all three and four year olds in the country. And, crucially, $4.5 trillion could cover the full cost of decarbonizing the U.S. electric grid.

But huge military budgets are not only bad when they contrast with poor domestic spending on social goods—our bloated Pentagon should, first and foremost, be opposed because of the harm it does around the world, where it has roughly 800 military bases, and almost a quarter of a million troops permanently stationed in other countries. A new report from Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that between 897,000 and 929,000 people have been killed ​“directly in the violence of the US post‑9/​11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere.” This number could be even higher. One estimate found that the US war on Iraq alone killed one million Iraqis.

Still, the financial cost of war is worth examining because it reveals something about the moral priorities of our society. Any genuine effort to curb the climate crisis will require a tremendous mobilization of resources—a public works program on a scale that, in the United States, is typically only reserved for war. Now, discussions of such expenditures can be a bit misleading, since the cost of doing nothing to curb climate change is limitless: When the entirety of our social fabric is at stake, it seems silly to debate dollars here or there. But this is exactly what proponents of climate action are forced to do in our political climate. As I reported in March 2020, presidential candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary were grilled about how they would pay for social programs, like a Green New Deal, but not about how they would pay for wars.

In June 2019, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D‑NY) estimated that the Green New Deal would cost $10 trillion. Her critics on the Right came up with their own number of up to $93 trillion, a figure that was then used as a talking point to bludgeon any hopes of the proposal’s passage. But let’s suppose for a moment that this number, calculated by American Action Forum, were correct, and the price of a Green New Deal came to 4.43 times the cost of 20 years of the War on Terror? So what? Shouldn’t we be willing to devote far more resources to protecting life than to taking it? What could be more valuable than safeguarding humanity against an existential threat?

The reality is that warding off the worst-case scenario of climate change, which the latest IPCC report says is still possible, will require massive amounts of spending upfront. Not only do we have to stop fossil fuel extraction and shift to decarbonized energy, but we have to do so in a way that does not leave an entire generation of workers destitute. Several proposals for how to achieve this have been floated: a just transition for workers; a revamping of public transit and public housing; public ownership of energy industries for the purpose of immediately decarbonizing them; global reparations for the harm the United States has done. Any way you look at it, meaningful climate legislation will require a huge mobilization of public resources—one that beats back the power of capital. And of course, dismantling the carbon-intensive US military apparatus must be part of the equation. 

In our society, it’s a given that we spend massive amounts of these public resources on military expansion year after year, with the National Defense Authorization Act regularly accounting for more than half of all discretionary federal spending (this year being no exception, despite President Biden’s promise to end ​“forever wars”). Over the past 20 years, the mobilization behind the War on Terror has been enabled by a massive propaganda effort. Think tanks financed by weapons contractors have filled cable and print media with ​“expert” commentators on the importance of open-ended war. Longstanding civilian suffering as a result post‑9/​11 US wars has been ignored. From abetting the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to the demonization of anti-war protesters as ​“terrorist” sympathizers, the organs of mass communication in this country have roundly fallen on the side of supporting the War on Terror, a dynamic that is in full evidence as media outlets move to discipline President Biden for actually ending the Afghanistan war.

What if a similar effort had been undertaken to educate the public about the need for dramatic climate action? Instead of falsehoods and selective moral outrage, we could have had sound, scientifically-based political education about the climate dangers that Exxon has known of for more than 40 years. We could have spent 20 years building the political will for social transformation. It may seem ridiculous to suggest that the war propaganda effort could have gone toward progressive ends: After all, the institutions responsible—corporate America, major media outlets, and bipartisan lawmakers—were incentivized against such a public service, and would never have undertaken similar efforts for progressive ends. 

But this gets at something crucial—if difficult to quantify—about the harm done by 20 years of the War on Terror. The push for militarization has been used to shut down exactly the left-wing political ideas that are vitally needed to curb the climate crisis. As I argued in February 2020, US wars have repeatedly been used to justify a crackdown on left-wing movements. World War I saw passage of the Espionage Act, which was used to crack down on anti-war protesters and radical labor organizers. The Cold War was used as pretext for crackdowns on a whole host of domestic movements, from communist to socialist to Black Freedom, alongside US support for vicious anti-communist massacres around the world. The War on Terror was no different, used to justify passage of the PATRIOT Act, which was used to police and surveil countless protesters, including environmentalists. The Global Justice Movement was sounding the alarm about the climate crisis in the late 1990s, and was not only subjected to post‑9/​11 government repression, but was then forced to refocus on opposing George W. Bush’s global war effort.

The War on Terror also makes it nearly impossible to attain the kinds of global cooperation we need to address the climate crisis. It is difficult for countries to focus on making the transformations needed to curb climate change when they are focused on trying to survive U.S. bombings, invasions, meddling and sanctions. And it’s difficult to force the United States to reverse its disproportionate climate harms when perpetual war and confrontation is the primary American orientation toward much of the world, and the vast majority of US global cooperation is aimed at maintaining this footing.

Such grim reflections on the climate harms wrought by 20 years of the War on Terror do not amount to a nihilistic ​“I told you so.” We vitally need to apply these grisly lessons now, as the nebulous ​“War on Terror” is still being waged, from drone wars in Somalia to the bombing campaign against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Meanwhile, while Biden claims to be ​“ending an era of major military operations to remake other countries,” he is overseeing an increasingly confrontational posture toward China, an approach championed by members of Congress in both parties. As dozens of environmental and social justice organizations noted in July, it is inconceivable that the world can curb the climate crisis without the cooperation of the United States (the biggest per-capita greenhouse gas emitter) and China (the biggest overall greenhouse gas emitter). Instead of militarizing the Asia-Pacific region to hedge against China, the United States could acknowledge this stark reality and launch an unprecedented effort for climate cooperation with China. 

The possibilities for an alternative global orientation are both vast and difficult to know. What we do know is that the status quo of the War on Terror is not working. In addition to the hospitals the United States has bombed, the homes it has destroyed, the factories it has obliterated, and the people it has terrorized, the American military project has deeply worsened the climate crisis. And that crisis is now, undeniably, on our shores.

Mammoth deal an even greater boon to corporate power than previously known, warn analysts

Civil Liberties picket is a rare show of dissent from a Democratic party that has rallied behind Obama’s warrantless spying

Protests against NSA spying have reached all the way to the home of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi’s big campaign fundraiser.From left, Renay Davis of San Francisco, Janine Boneparth of Sausalito, and Suzanne Cowan of San Francisco stand along Eucalyptus Road in Belvedere, Calif. on Saturday, July 13, 2013. They were among some 70 people demonstrating against House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s support of the NSA’s surveillance of U.S. citizens. (Photo: Alan Dep/Marin Independent Journal)

And this time, the protests are coming from a group that includes professed Democrats—a notable departure from the silence and inaction of the Democratic machine as the Obama Administration’s NSA spying scandal ripples across the globe.

Over 70 people picketed Saturday afternoon outside of the Belvedere, California home where congressman Jared Huffman was throwing a big fundraising bash for Pelosi.

The fundraiser took place just weeks after Pelosi forcefully defended the NSA’s warrantless spying programs and denounced NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a ‘criminal’ at a NetRoots Nation conference in San Jose, California. Her statement at the conference was met with loud boos and heckles from the crowd.

The boisterous picket in this wealthy neighborhood—organized by the Coalition for Grassroots Progress, an organization for ‘progressive change’—featured colorful signs that declared “One nation under surveillance” and denounced ‘Big Brother.’

“The question I think we need to ask ourselves, in light of these new revelations, is how much longer can we afford to bankrupt ourselves morally and financially in the name of security?” Caroline Banuelos—president of the Sonoma County Latino Democratic Club—told the Marin Independent Journal. “Do we really feel safer by allowing our representatives to take away our civil liberties?”

“I’m pleased there is this groundswell,” declared former congressional candidate Norman Solomon. “We’re just getting started and we’re not going to let this subside.”

Civil liberties advocates have blasted the Democratic party for standing idly by as the NSA spying scandal stokes ire and grassroots opposition across the world. Criticism also extends to Democratic party-tied organizations like MoveOn.org that do not have much to say about a scandal seizing international headlines.

A recent poll by Pew Research Center shows that Democrats have flipped on civil liberties violations under Obama: while a majority of Democrats declared NSA spying unacceptable under former President George Bush, a majority of democrats now think Obama’s NSA is acceptable.